Phantom of Blood Alley (10 page)

T
he mansions of Monrovia Walk and Batavia Park, with their ivy-clad loggias, glass-roofed ateliers and ornate studios, were as distinctive and decorative as the grand society painters and sculptors who lived and worked in them. Classical villas and Mesopotamian follies nestled beside Byzantine palaces and miniature Bavarian castles, as each artist attempted to outdo his neighbours with his superior taste and artistic vision.

A brass plaque bolted to the wall of number 16 Batavia Park, a mosaic-encrusted mansion built in the Moorish style, confirmed that I’d
reached the grand residence of the first name on the list I’d made of Clarissa Oliphant’s prime suspects.

Sir Crispin St John Blears, FRSA

I pulled the bell rope. No sooner had the bell begun to jangle than the carved sandalwood door opened, and I was confronted by a richly clad figure.

‘Well, you’re certainly not Lady Lavinia,’ proclaimed a bored, foppish voice with a hint of disdain.

Sir Crispin Blears was a tall, aristocratic-looking man with a long face and an aquiline nose beneath a black mane of studiously ruffled hair, which had a single, distinctive white streak at its centre. Dressed in the long, flowing robes of an eastern potentate, anywhere else, Sir Crispin would have cut an absurdly comic figure. Yet here, in the doorway of this eccentric mansion, he seemed perfectly in keeping.

‘Excuse the intrusion, sir,’ I said. ‘My
name’s Grimes, Barnaby Grimes, and I’ve been commissioned, in a private capacity, to look into the affairs of the late Laurence Oliphant …’

‘A swag-hound, eh?’ snorted Sir Crispin.

It was a term used to describe private investigators who looked into unsolved crimes in the hope of reward money, or ‘swag’. They were a disreputable bunch, little more than petty swindlers and blackmailers themselves, often implicated in the very crimes they claimed to be investigating.

‘No, I assure you,’ I protested, ‘I’m a tick-tock lad by profession, and I’m looking into this as a favour to a client of mine.’

‘The
late
Laurence Oliphant, you say?’ said Sir Crispin, his eyes narrowing. ‘A gifted fellow if, ultimately, a misguided one. Fortunately for you, Mr Grimes, my client is delayed,’ he said, pulling a gold fob-watch from beneath his silken robes. ‘You’ve got five minutes. Follow me.’

He took me up a sweeping staircase, the tiled walls lined with gold-framed portraits of various sizes. At the first-floor landing, he strode through an arched doorway and into a high-ceilinged studio.

It was cluttered with the tools of his trade – exotic rugs, animal skins and tapestries in one corner provided the backdrops to his portraits, while the tables and cabinets around the walls groaned beneath a bewildering array of props. There were tooled breastplates, plumed helmets, muskets, swords and shields for those of his clients who saw themselves as men of action or warriors from a bygone age; musical instruments, astronomical tools and ancient vases and urns for the artistic. There was even a stuffed polar bear and a lion skin for intrepid explorers to pose beside. In the centre of the studio, beneath a north-facing skylight, was a raised dais, upon which a gilded throne had been placed, with several tiger skins draped over its gilded arms.
And opposite it, on an immense easel, was a large canvas with an unfinished portrait of a breathtakingly beautiful woman.

‘How can I help you, Mr Grimes?’ said Sir Crispin distractedly, gazing at the portrait. ‘I haven’t seen poor Laurence for months,’ he went on. ‘Not since our little falling out …’

‘Falling out?’ I said.

He picked up a brush from the table beside the easel and dabbed at the painting.

‘Eighteen months ago, Laurence Oliphant came to me with an invention that he claimed would revolutionize portraiture – a process of photogravure, or “painting with light,” as I have heard it called, that he’d named oliphantography. I admit I was intrigued. I knew how the old masters had used mirrors and lenses to create projections on their canvases, and thought this new process might prove helpful. I became his backer, financing his experiments to the tune of ten guineas a month.’

He picked up a brush from the table beside the easel and dabbed at the painting
.

I nodded, impressed. It was a sizable sum.

‘Of course, I knew that there was no real artistic merit in Laurence’s work. The man was little more than a chemist, but he didn’t seem to see it that way …’ Sir Crispin’s voice trailed away as he scrutinized his painting. ‘Dear Laurence began to get ideas above his station. Started claiming that his “oliphantypes” were a new art form and would make painting obsolete! It was the talk of a madman.’

Sir Crispin turned to me, his eyes blazing.

‘I have dedicated myself to my art. I studied at the best conservatoires in Europe. I learned from the great Reynaldo Bottacini to produce my own palette of colours, using cinnabar and cochineal for red, cadmium for yellow, arsenic for emerald green. Many was the long night I spent grinding lapis lazuli and azurite gems with a mortar and pestle to produce ultramarine of such vibrancy … Then this … this …
pharmacist,’
he said,
spitting out the word, ‘with his glass plates and chemicals, tells me that he will replace the unique perspective of an artist’s eye with a mechanical lens …’

He shook his head, and put the back of his clenched fist dramatically to his brow.

‘I wanted nothing more to do with him,’ he said. ‘I stopped his monthly stipend two months ago in order to put an end to his outlandish boasts once and for all.’ He turned back to the painting and dabbed at it angrily with his brush. ‘Laurence didn’t take it too well. Stormed out, muttering that I’d be sorry.’

I remembered the oliphantype of Clarissa Oliphant. It might have been produced with chemicals, but it had managed to capture something of the essence of the person; some internal truth. I suspected Crispin Blears, when he’d seen Laurence’s work, had noticed it too.

‘And that was the last time you saw him?’ I said.

Sir Crispin turned. ‘Well, yes, I suppose so …’ he said uncertainly. ‘Although there was the incident at the summer show at the Academy.’ He paused, then laughed uneasily. ‘Perhaps you read about it, Mr Grimes. I was showing my portrait of Lady Sarah Poultney as Diana, goddess of the hunt, to quite considerable acclaim, when …’

‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.

‘The painting was damaged,’ he said, his face colouring. ‘Nobody saw it happen, although the gallery was well attended and the paintings watched at all times. But I suspected Laurence Oliphant was behind it.’

‘Damaged?’ I said. ‘How?’

‘The canvas was slashed, Mr Grimes,’ he said hotly. ‘With the point of a fencing sword by the look of it.’

Just then, I heard the doorbell jangle in the hallway below, followed by the low mumble of voices.

‘That will be Lady Lavinia,’ said Sir
Crispin, composing his face and returning the paintbrush to a jar on the table. ‘I’m in my studio, Carruthers,’ he called out, then turned to me. ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you can tell me something, Mr Grimes. How exactly did poor Laurence die?’

I returned Sir Crispin’s gaze levelly. ‘He was murdered,’ I told him, ‘run through by a fencing sword.’

A.G. Hoskins Industrial Chemists was situated on Coldbath Road, a grubby back street not far from the wharves of Riverhythe, and a short walk from Laurence Oliphant’s lock-up in Blood Alley. As I stepped through a low door situated next to a much larger set of double doors, a spring-loaded bell clanged above my head, announcing my arrival.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ said a thin, stooped-looking man with greasy hair and a grubby apron. Perched on top of his head was a tall
stovepipe hat, to which were pinned scraps of crumpled paper – chits, dockets and formulae of various kinds by the look of them.

‘Mr Albert Hoskins?’ I asked, and received a nod in reply.

His brown eyes had a look of disappointment about them, an impression made stronger by his moustache, which drooped at the ends. It was as though fate had dealt him a bad hand, and he knew it.

‘I’m enquiring into the affairs of the late Laurence Oliphant …’ I began, only for the chemist to stagger back from the low counter that separated us, like a head-butted bruiser in a bar-room brawl.

Albert Hoskins sank back onto a sack of desiccated phosphate granules, his head in his hands. Around us in the dismal light of the large warehouse were crates, sacks and huge jars of chemicals in powdered and liquid form, carefully stored and labelled on row upon row of wooden shelves.

‘Mr Oliphant … dead?’ groaned the chemist. ‘Well, I’ll be blamed, no doubt about it. Old Albert’s collar will be fingered, regardless of the facts of the case …’

He gripped the brim of his stovepipe hat with both hands and pulled it down hard on his head, as if trying to take refuge inside it.

‘So the explosion killed Mr Oliphant in the end, did it?’ Albert peered up at me from beneath the brim of the hat with those disappointed eyes of his.

I was about to answer him, when the chemist continued, the words spilling out of his mouth in a spontaneous confession.

‘Yes, I supplied Mr Oliphant with the chemicals he needed for his trade – and a strange mixture of powders and tinctures they turned out to be. Nitrates, iodides, naphtha and the like. Dangerous substances. Deadly substances if casually handled or mistakenly mixed. And I warned him, oh, how I warned him, but he took no notice. No,
not him. He knew better, you see. He had a vision, a grand experiment; one day he and those precious “oliphantypes” of his would be famous … And he paid, in cash of course, up front for everything, until the explosion …’

The chemist paused, then rose from the sack, and came back to face me across the counter.

‘Horribly burned, he was, when he came round after it happened. He accused me of adulterating my stock, mixing sawdust in my powders, vinegar in my tinctures … As if I’d do such a thing! Told me I’d be sorry, before he stormed off.

‘Then I started noticing things going missing, stock running short, and just the same chemicals that I’d supplied Mr Oliphant with, though he was nowhere to be seen. So I took precautions, armed myself in case I caught him at it … Now he’s gone and died of his burns!’ he added mournfully. ‘And I’ll be blamed. Oh, yes, I’ll be blamed!’

‘Laurence Oliphant didn’t die of his wounds,’ I said, noticing the pair of pistols and an old cavalry rapier propped up against the chemist’s side of the counter. ‘He was murdered. Stabbed to death by a fencing sword.’

Miles Morgenstern was the next name on my list and, unlike Sir Crispin Blears in his flamboyant mansion and Albert Hoskins in his commercial premises, much harder to track down. Clarissa Oliphant had described him as Laurence’s assistant, though when, with the aid of a local poultry merchant, I finally traced him to a small garret in a thin, rundown, six-storey house a few streets away from Blood Alley, Miles Morgenstern seemed to have set up in business for himself.

His name and title –
M. Morgenstern, Photo-Gravurist and Albumen Printer –
were etched onto one of a dozen small copper plaques screwed to the side of the front
entrance. His business was on the top floor. I knocked on the chipped garret door, which was opened by a young man with curly red hair and round steel-rimmed spectacles which made his pale blue eyes appear to bulge.

‘Miles Morgenstern?’ I said. He nodded. ‘Former assistant to Laurence Oliphant?’

The bulging pale blue eyes blinked twice. ‘This is about Laurence’s murder, isn’t it?’

It was my turn to nod.

‘The streets around here are awash with it,’ he said. ‘Every back-yard gossip is talking about it over the washing lines. I believe they’ve arrested his sister.’ He paused and peered closely. ‘But who are you?’

I told him that I was looking into the circumstances of her brother’s murder on Clarissa Oliphant’s behalf, which seemed to satisfy him, because he nodded.

‘You’d better come in,’ he said.

I followed him into a small, dark room with bare boards and sloping ceilings. It made my
own modest rooms on Caged Lark Lane seem like a palace. Everything was crammed together, and seemed to have more than one use.