India Black (5 page)

At the end of the alley, I paused to reconnoiter the street before dashing across to the other side. The pavement was shrouded in darkness; there was no sound or movement. Several minutes ticked by as I waited for the telltale flame to appear again, but my patience was not rewarded. I scanned the street once more, then lifted my skirts and flitted across the road, finding sanctuary in the shelter of a doorway. Staying close to the buildings, I crept up the sidewalk, gingerly placing one foot in front of the other and praying that I wouldn’t take a header over a decaying apple or an empty ale bottle. Lotus House came into view across the street, looking forlorn and deserted, a pale wisp of smoke eddying from the fireplace in my study.

I carried my revolver with me, and now I took a firm grip on it and leveled it waist high in front of me as I sidled along. I was thirty paces from where I’d seen the match spurt into flame, and I covered that distance at the speed of an arthritic snail, with my fingers locked around my weapon and my nerves screaming in anticipation. Likely, the match-wielder was a vagrant dossing down for the night, smoking the end of a gasper he’d picked up in the street. This part of London was full of beggars and transients, sleeping rough in doorways and begging the price of a drink from passersby. The scrape of shoe leather in another alley some hours ago haunted me, though, and I wouldn’t rest easy until I’d discovered who was enjoying a smoke across the street from the Lotus House in the wee hours of the morning.

I didn’t fancy playing cat and mouse much longer, so when I got within spitting distance of the doorway where I’d seen the figure, I took a deep breath and leapt the rest of the way, brandishing my pistol and saying something infernally idiotic, like “Hands up,” or some such novelistic trash. At any rate, it was ineffective, as there was no one there to hear such a trite command (much to my relief). I was alone, though I made a rapid circuit up and down the sidewalk just to be sure, and I was turning for home when a harness jingled and the clop of horse’s hooves echoed down the empty street. I put on speed and caught Vincent as he was turning into the alleyway behind Lotus House, scaring him half to death as I hissed his name from the shadows. The horse, a dirty white raw-boned nag, shied violently, and the cart rattled like thunder.

“I was hoping to do this without waking the neighborhood,” I said as I crawled up beside Vincent.

“’Twill be your own fault, then, for jumpin’ up at me like a bloody Pathan. What the blazes are you doin’ roamin’ around out ’ere?”

I told him about the figure across the street. “Whoever it was, he’s gone now,” I said.

“P’raps I’ll slip round and have a look meself,” Vincent said.

“Suit yourself, but don’t be long.”

Vincent tied the horse to the post behind the back garden and glided stealthily away into the darkness.

Mrs. Drinkwater’s grey plaits had come undone and she was burbling away contentedly with her head still on the kitchen table. I touched her shoulder and she bolted upright, hair and spittle flying, fingers clutching her chest, and gasping like a harpooned seal. “Sweet Mother of Jesus,” she cried.

“Bloody hell,” I whispered ferociously. “Get hold of yourself, woman.”

Mrs. Drinkwater recognized my face, and her eyes rolled back into her head. She smoothed her hair and wiped the drool from her cheek, glaring balefully at me.

“You scared me half out of my wits, you did,” she said. I refrained from commenting that such an event must have left her devoid of any. On occasion, I do the admirable thing.

Mrs. Drinkwater remained indignant. “It’s bad enough I have to sit here all day and night with a corpse in the house, and then you come in creeping about like a murdering Fenian. I almost had a heart attack, I did, and it would have been your fault if I had. I wonder who’d make your tea and cook your meals and carry your dead bodies then?”

Well, she had a point. I made soothing noises and despite her brush with death, she eventually (although grudgingly) staggered upright and followed me upstairs to Arabella’s room, where we dragged the carpet containing Bowser’s body out from under the four-poster and into the hall, keeping one eye open for stray bints. Bowser’s head bounced vigorously on the stairs as Mrs. Drinkwater and I hauled him down the steps by his feet. The carpet displayed a distressing tendency to unroll as we tugged on it, and I sent Mrs. Drinkwater to the kitchen for a rope. She returned bearing a length of twine and with Vincent in tow. He shook his head in response to my unasked question.

“Looks like fair sailin’,” he said, “provided we get the cargo loaded soon.”

We trussed Bowser like a birthday present, wrapped our arms around the awkward package, lurched to our feet and wobbled through the hall into the kitchen and out the door, down the garden path and through the gate to the cart, where we deposited our bundle with oaths and groans. I’m not ashamed to say that we dumped Bowser into the cart with all the tender consideration we’d have given a side of beef, for I was heartily sick of the old goat by then.

I issued my last instructions to Vincent. “Bring back the carpet when you’ve finished. You can have whatever you find in his pockets. Mind you don’t flog what you find where it’ll be easy to trace.”

He gave me a scornful look, as though such tutoring was strictly superfluous for a talented fingersmith like himself, and climbed into the cart.

He’d raised his hands to flick the reins over the horse’s back, when someone coughed ominously.

“I say, isn’t that a body in that rug?”

N
ow when you’re caught red-handed, with your skirts up (or your trousers down, as the case may be) and all your cards showing, the best thing to do is run a bluff, for it’s a known fact that the more you bluster and blather, the less likely someone is to ignore what’s staring him in the face and accept the fact that you weren’t lifting the old girl’s purse, just helping her across the street. It’s amazing what you can accomplish if you’re brazen enough and can adopt the appropriate tone of outraged dignity, or dignified outrage, as the case may be. Yes, indeed, I probably could have bamboozled the gentleman that now stood facing us, if only my petticoats had been showing and not Bowser’s shiny black boots.

The first thought that came to mind was to tell this cove that what he saw here was none of his business and to be on about his own; an argument that generally worked in this neighborhood as any knowledge was likely to be guilty knowledge, and the less one knew, the less likely one was to spend any time in gaol as an accomplice. But our visitor seemed inordinately interested in our little scene in the alley, regarding us with the intensity of a theatre critic on first night. I half expected to read about us in tomorrow’s paper: “The scene in which the criminals dispose of the body is crippled by the amateurish acting of Miss India Black, and the inauthentic accent and costume of the young man who plays the urchin.”

My next thought was to concoct a story about a brutal fight in my parlor last night, with blood spilled on my fine carpet, ruining it beyond repair and thus necessitating its removal, which would have been a fine story since there was a dead body to lend verisimilitude to the tale. However, that meant I could no longer deny the existence of the corpse swaddled in the rug.

I was hanged either way, it appeared, so I decided on the frontal attack. “Shove off, mate. This is no concern of yours.”

“On the contrary, India. This affair is most definitely of concern to me.”

The fact that the bloke knew my name brought me up short. I tried to make out his features in the swirling mist, but all I could see was a tall, slim gent in a top hat and overcoat, and the pale gleam of what might have been a smile, or perhaps the bared teeth of a predator moving in for the kill.

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure of your acquaintance,” I said.

He gave a throaty laugh. “I can assure you, there will little pleasure involved.”

I suppose he thought he’d intimidate with that line, but it only served to start my blood boiling. You don’t survive long in my line of work if you’re cowed by bullying and threats. I rapped on the cart with my knuckles. “Drive on, Vincent,” I said.

The stranger took three quick steps, and his hand shot out with lightning speed and grasped the horse’s harness. “Ever seen the inside of St. Bartholomew’s Poor House, boy? Not a pretty sight.”

A thin grey light was beginning to ebb through the fog, heralding the arrival of dawn. Time was running out; I needed to get Vincent on his way. The Bulldog was tucked into the waistband of my skirt. I pulled it out and pointed it at my uninvited guest. “This is your last chance to leave on your own two feet.”

The stranger chuckled. “Two murders in one night? You’ll surely hang, India.”

“I didn’t kill Bowser.”

“Who?”

“The cove in the carpet.”

“Oh. You mean Sir Archibald Latham.”

Sir
Archibald Latham? Oh, hell.

The nag tossed his head, and the man tightened his grip on the halter. “Expired naturally, did he?”

“If you could call a senior civil servant dying in a whorehouse while dressed in a black bombazine gown, brandishing a whip and covered in rouge, ‘expiring naturally.’”

This chuckle sounded genuinely amused. “Is that what the old boy got up to? Well, well. I would have never believed that about him. He was always such a stick at the office.”

“Do you think you could reminisce about the gay old times at a later date? I’ve a body to dispose of.”

The stranger relinquished his hold on the harness and patted the horse’s muzzle, as if to say there were no hard feelings. “You needn’t worry about that.”

“Oh?”

“I’m going to do it for you.”

Vincent had been sitting silently, listening to the conversational exchange, and, I’d no doubt, calculating how best to remove himself from the scene without attracting too much attention. The man’s offer stirred him to speech. “Oi, that’ll cost you, India.”

I’d already reached the same conclusion. Perhaps it was my natural cynicism, or a lifetime spent negotiating exchanges of goods and services, but I knew there was nothing altruistic about the stranger’s offer. It was also damned odd.

“And whatever would induce you to offer such assistance?” I asked, waving the Webley Bulldog for emphasis.

“We’ve no more interest than you in having Sir Archibald’s body found in a whorehouse.”

I didn’t ask who “we” might be; I didn’t want to contemplate the idea that there were any more like this cool, arrogant fellow keeping an eye on India Black.

“Where is Latham’s wallet?” he asked.

Vincent uttered a sharp cry. “Here, you said that ’twas mine, India.”

There are times when you stand on principle, but I personally haven’t experienced any such moments in my life. “Give the wallet to the gentleman, Vincent. I’ll see that you’re compensated.” A rash offer on my part. For all I knew, Bowser might have been flush with cash, but daylight was upon us and I needed Bowser’s corpse off my premises as quickly as possible.

With Vincent’s help (delivered somewhat churlishly and with a great deal of grumbling), the man pulled the body from the cart, broke open the twine and unrolled the carpet in a twinkling. Then he conducted a thorough search through Bowser’s pockets with such skill and rapidity that even Vincent, still sulking slightly, watched in silent admiration.

The stranger found Bowser’s wallet, opened it, extracted the bank notes from it and passed them to Vincent, whose eyes widened at the largesse. “Blimey, that’s a’andful.”

I felt it best to establish my own position after the stranger’s generosity. “That’s that, then, Vincent. Don’t expect anything additional from me.”

“Don’t spend it all at the George and Dragon,” said his benefactor. He unclipped Bowser’s hunter and chain from his vest. “You might as well take the watch, too. Someone will help themselves down by the river, if you don’t.” He flipped the watch to Vincent, who caught it expertly and tucked it into a trouser pocket.

When he’d finished rifling through Bowser’s pockets, he and Vincent (who’d suddenly switched allegiance and now scrambled eagerly to help) rolled the carpet round the body once more and secured it with the twine.

“There you are, boy. Do you know the old Hartley and Speke warehouse at the jute docks? The one that closed last year?”

“I do.”

“There’s a shed round the back. Leave him on the ground outside.”

Vincent touched his cap (a sign of deference I thought might have been overdone), flicked the reins across the horse’s back and jogged off, the cart rumbling and squeaking, with Bowser’s body bouncing in the back. The sky had turned progressively lighter while we’d been having our confab in the alley, and I could begin to make out the features of the stranger. He was immaculately attired and twirled a malacca cane in his hand, with a fancy silver handle in the shape of a griffin. He was a handsome devil, if you cared for cold grey eyes, swarthy skin, blue black hair, and an aristocratic mien, though good looks and hereditary holdings never have impressed me much. All men look the same with their trousers down; there’s no mystery at all to the lads then. This fellow, though, struck me as something altogether different than your run-of-the-mill public school Adonis.

There was something almost feral about the man, in his silent and undetected approach down the alley, his quick and efficient movements, and his cold and appraising eye. He scrutinized me thoroughly, and I stared boldly back at him, but I must confess that I averted my gaze first, feeling rather like a mouse in a python’s cage. That deadly gaze was unnerving enough, without anticipating the squeeze to follow. And I was sure the stranger hadn’t yet obtained everything he wanted from India Black.

We stood silently and watched the cart disappear around the corner into the street, then he dusted his hands together and said: “Quite a night’s work, eh? Now I’ll have the case and be off.”