Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (23 page)

“And were manuscripts taken?” I asked quickly.

“No, no. Father was quite deluded.” She turned again to the butler. “Perkins, what the deuce are you fretting about?”

Perkins was a man whose features seemed carved in stone. “Miss Dickens, I would suggest that such matters should wait till your father is available.”

“Perkins, father has expressly stated that in mother’s absence I am the lady of the house. Kindly comply with his wishes.” She gave me a sweet little smile as if to assure me that, despite her severity with the servant, she was a sweet young thing.

“Miss Dickens,” I went on. I was becoming irritated. “Have you noticed any suspicious behaviour on the part of any servants?”

“Suspicious?” She inclined her head, eyes narrowed in deliberation. “Perhaps I have. Perkins, wouldn’t you say Agnes has been out of sorts?”

A certain stiffness of the lip gave the impression that Perkins had just swallowed something unpalatable. “Agnes, Miss Dickens?”

“Come, Perkins. I have seen her slipping out after dinner, in fancy new frocks.”

“Is there a crime in that, Miss Dickens?”

“Don’t hedge so, Perkins. You know something. I do believe you are blushing.”

“Not at all, Miss Dickens.” He coughed as if the topic were distasteful to him. “I am given to understand that she is courting. With a Frenchman.”

“A Frenchman? Heavens!” Miss Dickens shot me an amused look. “That hardly explains her new clothes, though. How does she afford them? Perkins, you look furtive. You are not lending her money, are you?”

“By no means, Miss Dickens.”

“Sergeant?”

It was exactly the kind of thing Wardle watched for. I sighed. “Can we speak with this Agnes?”

“Perkins, call Agnes, will you?”

The man hesitated. “The girl is not fit to speak with the police.”

“Fetch her, Perkins. And you are dismissed.”

The butler bristled with indignation, then departed.

Miss Dickens looked troubled. “You will be kind, I hope? Agnes is no thief, Sergeant. She will die of anxiety if she thinks herself suspected.”

“I’m afraid you will have to trust me. I will try not to scare the girl.”

“Oh, Sergeant. I humbly request that you do not dismiss me, now the thing looks interesting, just because I am of the distaff side. You see, we are devotees of Mr Wilkie Collins, who declares no mysteries are more enthralling than those that lie at our own doors.”

I was fool enough to allow her to stay. Despite my suggestion that she leave the questioning to me, Miss Dickens plunged in and asked Agnes how she could afford her new clothes. I cringed, thinking we would learn nothing. To my amazement, the poor girl started chattering about resignation and her shame and what would become of her. It was all we could do to calm her down enough to explain.

The crime to which Agnes confessed came as a surprise. A few years back, she had let out space in the cellar to a family of indigent relatives, newcomers to town. They insisted on paying her the few shillings they could afford for her troubles. These she had saved up, until this fellow came along. Her relatives had avoided notice by coming in through the servants’ entrance after dark and leaving before morning, of which deception she was sorely ashamed. Yet she assured us that her cousins were the most honest souls in Christendom. Besides, they had left three years ago, well before the theft I was investigating.

“She’s a good girl, and methodical,” said Miss Dickens when we dismissed the maid, “but I am afraid what father will say.”

We recalled Perkins.

“Did you know about our subterranean tenants, Perkins?”

Perkins’ stony features betrayed nothing. Only in a certain hesitation in his voice did his embarrassment show. I began to think he might be the one, the inside contact of Wardle’s theories.

“Come on, man,” I said. “We have no ill intentions against you. But you are responsible for the household. Do you not see that access to the cellar means access to the house?”

Seeing himself suspected, Perkins finally yielded. He had known about Agnes’ relatives. But that was not all. Such goings-on, he claimed, were prevalent throughout London. It was nigh on standard practice. He couldn’t claim he was proud of it, but he made no practice of taking a percentage, as many butlers did. The girl had asked him most properly and most piteously, thrown herself on his mercy, in fact, when her cousins had been freezing down by the docks. Though Agnes had dealt with the minutiae, he felt that no breach of trust had occurred. “Of course,” he said, marshalling his dismay, “I am prepared to take full responsibility, should it come to that.”

“Leave that for now,” I said, gripped by a strange excitement. I must inspect the cellar. This could be the key. “Perkins, tell me. Was there anything unusual found after the theft?”

“There may have been.”

“Good God, man, there either was or there wasn’t.”

“It’s the household, you see, sir. We’ve been in such disarray. But, yes, I admit it. I myself discovered it, some time after the theft.”

“What, man? What?”

“It was behind the mantelpiece clock, you see, tucked away, where nobody could see. You could fault the staff, under normal circumstances, but I shouldn’t want anyone taken to task in this case.”

“For heaven’s sake, it is not my concern to cause you embarrassment over household chores. What did you find?”

“Why, sir.” He looked pained. “An old bone.”

I descended the narrow stairs with my mind whirling. Could all the houses have had invisible lodgers? If a whole family could come in and out of a house without the master’s knowing, what other scallywag or mountebank might enter likewise?

Perkins gave me a lamp. “If you must inspect the cellar, sir, of course you may, but you should remember that it is not only the coal vault but a former cesspit. Since all the new sewerage work, I do not know what is attached where, nor how any of it functions.”

The stairs were strong, though a broken handrail almost saw me pitched in among the musty old barrels and boxes. I ducked under a stone arch, my nose clogging with coal dust. God Almighty, it broke your heart to think of humans condemned to live in this dim prison.

I stooped under the next vaulted arch and peered under into the darkness. The stink all but made me retch. Besides my lamp, weak light filtered through glass bricks high above. I must be under the street already.

I stiffened at a noise, drawing back the lamp so suddenly that it went out. The noise had seemed unmistakably human, like someone licking their chops. Were there new residents since Agnes’ cousins? Covering my mouth, I hunched down and waited. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw straw spread over the floor and a wealth of thick clay pipes disappearing into a dark corner.

A sudden movement caught my eye, darting into the blackness. There was a small splash. I sprang forward, raising my hand to protect myself from the low vaulted arches. But the intruder had vanished, swiftly and silently. In the furthest corner, where several pipes disappeared into the ground, I felt metal beneath my feet. I dropped to my haunches and ran my fingers over a grate. I braced myself against the wall and tugged at the metal. To my surprise, the thing opened with barely a squeak. I squeezed through, feet first.

I dropped down into low, foul-smelling conduit, inclining downwards. I was certain I could hear movement ahead. The only way to move was on all fours. I splashed down towards a dim light. The base of the conduit was curved, and I found I could avoid the worst of the watery sludge beneath me by crawling with hands and knees wide apart.

Soon enough, I reached the end of the passageway and the source of the light: a second metal grate, stout and vertical like a portcullis. I peered through it, keenly hoping for a sight of my quarry. What I saw amazed me. Stretching into the distance in either direction was a great brick tunnel, oval-shaped, perhaps nine feet by six. Lit at intervals, it carried a steady flow of dark liquid. The cellar dweller must have already outpaced me. I cursed myself for coming so close and failing. Then the noise came again, further along the tunnel. I could see no one, but it sounded only yards away. They must have climbed through to hide out of view.

I tugged at the grate. It was fixed in place and much heavier than the first. Again I tugged, then pushed, but to no avail. Convinced that my quarry would hear these exertions and flee, I gave way to a desperate energy, reaching through the gaps in the metal to try and find a catch to release it. Finding a sort of latch, I pulled the thing back with such force that I fell backwards with a splash. My fingers twisted painfully as the grate swung open. As I lay there in the filth, shocked, it began to swing shut once more. I threw out my foot to intercept it. It closed upon my knee with a fearful momentum, and I could not help but cry out. Forgetting my twisted fingers, I pulled at it with both hands. The metal rasped over my knee. I wriggled through the gap, my leg smarting fearfully. The portal was set high up in the great tunnel’s wall, and I did not jump down. Instead I sat there, looking up and down and cursing my clumsiness. Insulted in my nostrils and sullied with filth, I was dumbstruck. I pictured a network of passageways, like an invisible city beneath our feet. And if someone could escape Dickens’ cellar this way, where else could they gain access?

Waves of pain seared through my knee. I felt myself on the point of swooning, as numbness spread up over me. Then I heard the noise again. That same slobbering sound, just below me in the tunnel. There, beside the dark flow, looking up at me with an insolent confidence, was my quarry: a large rat.

“Sit still,” Miss Kate enjoined me, dabbing at my injuries with a hot compress of poppies. “Lie back, now. This is quite the most excitement we have had for years. At least since the archbishop knocked the chancellor flat.”

“Since what, Miss Dickens?” I said, wincing. I could still move my fingers, and the gash on my leg did not look too serious. Yet the kneecap had swollen monstrously, and I felt ungainly as the elephant in the Royal Menagerie.

“Oh, call me Kate, please. It will cost you less effort.” Miss Kate had taken to her job of nurse with gusto. The trivialities she spouted were perhaps intended to divert attention from my injuries. All I wanted was to be left in peace. “At leapfrog, you know. After-dinner disportment.”

My return to the surface had taken some time. I had come to my senses to the sound of a voice above me. Somehow I had crawled back up towards the house, and there was Perkins, thank God, to pull me back up. How I came to be lying on a dog blanket upon the drawing room ottoman with my bandaged leg raised on silk pillows, I had no idea.

Miss Kate lost no time filling me in on what I had missed. Far from sacking Agnes, her father had applauded the girl’s ingenuity. If she had taken a liberty, she had done it out of kindness. “But then,” she rattled on, “father always felt tender towards the downtrodden, and harder towards his own. A case in point: our annual drama. We perform it ourselves, you see. Family and friends, in the Smallest Theatre in the World, that is, right here in this room. The thing has turned serious now. Not that father was ever anything but serious. He is a harsher director than the moustachioed generals at the Charge of the Light Brigade. That, however, is not my grievance. Our presentations began to draw wider notice. What did he do? He ingloriously curtailed his daughters’ careers. Yes! He threw us out with barely an apology and stooped to casting in our stead professional actresses.” Miss Kate pronounced these words with the utmost disdain. “He claimed that he did not want us presented to Her Majesty in the light of such a trade as acting. Poppycock. Our latest extravaganza is to be presented to the Queen in a few months. Despite my memorable performance in the Christmas version, I am now relegated to the department of stage properties and make-up. What an insult!”

I was trying to think clearly. All the houses that had been robbed, could they all have cellar dwellers? Or simpler, could they all be accessed by the new sewer? But Miss Kate’s prattling put a new thought in my mind. I struggled on to my elbows. “Miss Kate, tell me. How did your father engage these actresses?”

“Oh, he goes on little jaunts, you know. Mr Collins likes to scandalise me with tales of frequenting the louchest nooks and crannies of the West End theatres.”

“Did he engage the services of an actress called Nellie?”

“Sergeant, all actresses are called Nellie. Can you add a distinguishing feature?”

I laughed, but I sensed something serious in her manner. “All right. She had a friend, a fiancé, I think, called Skelton. Berwick Skelton.” The pressure on my knee increased and I looked at her keenly. “Might you know the fellow?”

“I might.”

“I do ask you to think carefully.”

“I should like,” she said, pursing her lips coyly, “to consult my diary, Sergeant.”

She was playing games, damn it, trying to keep my interest.

“So as not to furnish you with incomplete information,” she went on, more eagerly. “Are you in a hurry for details? I shall do some detecting and report post haste.”

I nodded and lay back down, irritated. I had no place there, with this silly girl fluttering her eyelids. She didn’t know Skelton, not with anything more than a passing acquaintance. Still, it was another coincidence. She babbled on and I stopped listening to the words themselves.