The Devil's Acre (21 page)

The sales agent, Mr Dennett, was a small, fine-featured creature with an oily sheen to his skin. His voice was shrill, with a New York accent anglicised somewhat by a number of years’ residence in London. He turned to Edward in an accusatory manner, all but twitching with agitation.

‘At last, thank God – get him out, Mr Lowry, this minute! There’s an evening crowd that comes in between half-seven and nine, don’t y’know, and he must be gone by then – long gone!’

Making the appropriate assurances, Edward walked around the counter to the door that led to the rear room. It was sparsely furnished, in contrast to the front, with pistol cases and ammunition crates piled upon bare floorboards. The Colt Company’s English press agent lay behind a desk in its far corner. His long legs stuck out across the floor at right angles, as if he’d been frozen in the act of running and pushed onto his side. He’d removed his jacket and waistcoat at some point to serve as a pillow but both were now bunched up against the wall, caked with dust. He was snoring softly; the clammy, boozy smell of unwashed drunkard hung in the air.

‘Richards,’ Edward said, taking a couple of steps towards him, ‘wake up.’

Nothing happened. Edward repeated the press agent’s
name more loudly, this time eliciting a drawn-out groan. Richards pulled up his legs and rolled over. He was cradling an empty bottle of spirit in his arms. A charred cigar-end, cracked and crumbling apart, was stuck to his chin.

‘Mabel would have no more,’ he croaked, keeping his eyes firmly shut.

Mabel, Edward knew, was the unfortunate Mrs Richards. Every so often she’d grow so tired of her husband’s exploits that she’d shut him out of their home up in Marylebone. For some mysterious reason Richards possessed a key to the sales office; and in these times of domestic ruction the shop occasionally served the press agent as a convenient sanctuary.

There were new, unfamiliar voices out in the front. Edward looked over his shoulder. A pair of plump, middle-aged gentlemen were approaching the marble counter, making a jovial enquiry. Dennett went to remove a pistol from a display case, casting a nervous glance in the secretary’s direction as he did so.

They had to leave. A chair lay on its back in the middle of the room. Edward stood it up and then bent down to take hold of the press agent.

The noise was loud and very close, wood glancing against wood; the impact jarred along Edward’s flank. The stock of his Navy had struck against the desk. Richards’s eyes flickered open, the pupils sliding to the side. He looked up at Edward. The pistol was clearly visible inside the secretary’s jacket.

‘Why, Mr Lowry,’ he murmured, ‘you appear to be armed.’

Ignoring him, Edward heaved Richards off the floor and into the chair; the bottle dropped from his embrace and span away under the desk. The press agent’s hat and boots were standing on the desktop. Edward passed them to him, plucking the cigar from his chin and then retrieving his jacket and waistcoat.

‘A most sensible precaution in this city,’ Richards continued, ‘as I believe you’ve already discovered, what with that ghastly garrotting of yours. Samuel presented me with a firearm of my own after the Great Exhibition.’ He paused
to fumble with a boot. ‘And I’d be carrying the thing right now if a pressing financial circumstance hadn’t compelled me to part with it.’

Edward took a steadying breath. Richards was still rather the worse for drink. It had plainly been an epic debauch that had deposited the fellow in Spring Gardens. They could not wait for him to tie his boots; it could take hours. Grabbing one of his spindly arms, the secretary pulled him up from the chair and led him swiftly through the front of the sales office. Dennett’s potential customers – both well-heeled clergymen, Edward noticed – were holding up revolvers as if eager to put them to use. They fixed the passing Colt men with suspicious stares, visibly alarmed by Richards’s stained shirt, disordered hair and vagrant’s pallor. The sales agent, meanwhile, closed his eyes as if reciting a short prayer for patience.

‘Good day to you, Mr Dennett!’ Richards called as he was rushed out into the street. ‘An
exceedingly
good day to you, sir!’

The sun had disappeared behind the city skyline, sinking Charing Cross in the cool grey of a late summer’s evening. There was a faint chill in the air, along with the usual smells of dust and manure. A great cheer sounded over at the base of Nelson’s Column, where a troupe of acrobats in multicoloured leotards were somersaulting above the heads of a growing audience. Edward marched Richards through the traffic, across the western edge of Trafalgar Square towards the main pediment of the National Gallery; shut for the day, its steps would offer some refuge from the crowds. Richards sat down heavily and started to lace up one of his boots.

Edward threw the press agent’s jacket and waistcoat onto the steps. ‘You cannot keep on goading Dennett in that manner, Richards,’ he said curtly. ‘He will start requesting your dismissal, and I wouldn’t put it past our Jamie to oblige him.’

Richards met this with a contemptuous snort and a couple of acerbic remarks about the sales agent’s parentage. The walk from Spring Gardens had clearly awakened a whole host of
pains within him, though, and he was struggling to sustain his usual flippancy.

‘God Almighty, Lowry,’ he sighed, giving up on the boot and putting a hand over his face. ‘It’s all gone a bit too bloody far this time. Mabel Richards has shown herself to be a
viper,
my friend. A Goneril. A Medusa.’ He sighed again. ‘Why do we let these inexplicable females sink their hooks into us so deeply, eh?’

Edward blinked, his irritation struck out of him at once. His own thoughts had often strayed in this same direction over the past few weeks. In the wake of his ill-fated expedition into the Devil’s Acre, he’d resolved to give up Caroline Knox completely – to turn away from her for good. It had been proving astonishingly difficult.

There could be no doubt that she was involved in a scheme of some kind with Martin Rea and the other Irishmen. Rea was plainly a plotter embedded within the works for an unknown criminal purpose, most probably the theft of the Colonel’s pistols for distribution in London’s most insalubrious regions. Edward knew that it was his professional duty as an employee of the Colt Company to tell Walter Noone what he had discovered. He couldn’t do it, though; he couldn’t deliver Caroline to the watchman’s brutal justice, and the gaol term that would probably follow. He refused to believe that she would freely join the Irishmen in their nefarious schemes. She was being subjected to some kind of pressure by Rea and his cohorts, he was certain of it. He’d looked out for the two of them around the factory, trying to discover exactly what they were up to in the hope that he could somehow extricate her from the plan. Both seemed blameless, however – industrious and punctual.

On a couple of occasions, spotting Caroline out in the yard, Edward had almost rushed over to intercept her – to offer to help her escape the Irishmen in any way he could – but had stopped himself. She didn’t want anything more to do with him. That had been made very clear, and had to be respected. Caroline Knox must be driven from his mind. She does not care for me, he thought; very well then, I will care nothing for her in return. This is how it must be.

Such a pledge, Edward soon learnt, was a good deal easier to make than to uphold. He tried to attend to his work with redoubled diligence, but was dogged by a dismal aimlessness that sapped his concentration and his energy. Unanswered questions came back frequently to torment him; he grew quite sick with worry about what Miss Knox and her coconspirators might be poised to do. As he paced out endless circuits of the factory office, he could only repeat once again that he did not care for her.
He did not.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied.

Richards studied him for a moment, seeming to conclude that the two of them carried a similar sorrow. ‘Come, Mr Lowry,’ he said, working an arm into his dirty jacket, ‘let’s find ourselves a bloody drink. I know a place not far from here.’

Rather to his surprise, Edward found that this proposal held a strong appeal, and five minutes later the Colt men were climbing a narrow wooden staircase just off St Martin’s Lane. It led up to a high-ceilinged room set out with small square tables, slim serving girls slipping between them. Plainly a coffee house by day, stronger drinks were now in circulation, and playing cards slapped down upon the tabletops. The patrons were almost exclusively male, drawn from the class that might own an inauspicious printing works, operate a modest photographic studio or pen features for a cheap newspaper. Proper hats and half-decent jackets were on display, but most were a good way past their best. Disappointment speckled the room like rust on an old, neglected blade; these were not men who’d attained what they wanted from life.

Their arrival prompted a stirring of nudges and sidelong glances. Edward realised that Richards was well known in there, and not entirely popular. Oblivious to this, the press agent selected a table by one of the four front windows – a dozen pieces of discoloured stained glass set in a lead frame, left slightly ajar to bleed away some of the tobacco smoke. Balking at spirits after his excesses of the previous night, Richards ordered them a bottle of claret. The smooth, berry-scented wine made Edward feel significantly better, and for
perhaps the first time since the attack in the Devil’s Acre he was almost at ease. They began to talk of women in general terms, drinking steadily as they did so. Richards was soon holding forth on their unpredictability, their capriciousness, and the fundamental lack of reason or candour that lay beneath their thinking.

‘Surely,’ Edward interrupted after a few minutes, ‘you do not seriously apply this to
all
women?’

‘Every one, Mr Lowry,’ the press agent answered, emptying the last of the bottle into the secretary’s glass and then signalling for another. ‘Every blasted one. But Mabel Richards is first among them. She is their queen – the lying bitch before all lying bitches.’

The claret was rapidly restoring Richards’s self-possession, topping up both his inebriation and his mordancy. One of Edward’s fine Havana cigars smoking in his mouth, he made a slow survey of their fellow customers. Then, quite casually, he revealed that he suspected his much-maligned wife of having taken a lover.

Edward’s glass paused on its way to his lips.

‘There’s this cockney blackguard from the Imperial Gas Company, y’see,’ Richards went on, his voice louder now and unmistakably confrontational. ‘Five times now in the past fortnight I’ve returned from my labours to find him in my home. Five bloody times, Lowry! The scoundrel claims he’s testing pipes, but that’s piffle, ain’t it? Purest poppycock.’ He hit the table with his palm. ‘I ask you, how many blasted times do gas pipes need to be tested?’

‘I really couldn’t say.’

The secretary took a sip of wine. It now seemed thick and bitter; he set down his glass, his face growing hot. The press agent’s words were plainly directed at someone in that room. Richards was trying to stir up trouble. A nearby card game had come to a distinctly tense halt. Four men had been playing; three of them were now watching the fourth closely. Dressed in faded grey with a patchy brown beard, he’d laid his cards face down on the table and was looking at the fan of red rectangles with an expression of fierce attention.

‘Blasted cockneys,’ Richards continued, blowing out smoke,
‘they are so damned
wily.
They see an opening and they go for it, like rats diving into a tub of grain. They’d pimp out their wives for tuppence, wouldn’t they – sell their own children to the bloody butcher.’

And then the grey-clad card player was on his feet. More exasperated than angry, he addressed the press agent in a broad cockney accent. ‘What the devil is your meanin’, Mr Richards? This was over and done with, wasn’t it? Why go haggravatin’ the sitiwation?’

Richards sat back, smoking his cigar, ignoring the card player completely. ‘Show me an honest cockney, Lowry,’ he proclaimed, ‘and I’ll show you a dog that can walk on its hind legs and mimic the ways of man.’

Edward swore that he heard the press agent laugh as he was hauled from his chair. The room erupted with shouts, furniture scraping against the floorboards as people stood up to get a better view. The card player shoved Richards’s lanky form against their table, knocking over bottle and glasses.

‘I’ll show you cockney honesty, cock,’ he spat, ‘don’t you bleedin’ worry!’

Leaving his seat, Edward found himself pressed against the stained glass window, all but dangling out above St Martin’s Lane. Richards weathered his opponent’s first couple of blows as if taking a beating was a terrible bore; then he struggled free and rolled off the table, stumbling to Edward and wrapping him in a long-limbed, clumsy embrace. Their spectators heaved with mirth, someone letting out a sharp wolf-whistle.

‘My apologies, old boy,’ Richards muttered, turning shakily towards the cockney card player.

Something was different. The weight that had been pulling at Edward’s shoulder all day, sending great pulsing aches down his left arm, was suddenly gone. He felt a half-second’s relief before he registered what had just happened. His Navy revolver was missing – pickpocketed by the press agent.

The three shots obliterated every other sound in the room and left only a stark silence behind them. A rush of gunpowder smoke spiralled away between the tables, adding
to the turbid atmosphere. Those around the pistol-toting Richards were arranged like a petrified tableau; some even had grins still stuck on their faces. Edward could see no obvious signs that any of the press agent’s bullets had hit home, and for a moment he dared to hope that Richards had fired harmlessly into the ceiling or walls. But then, close to the floor, he noticed a rich streak of colour – a long crimson splash flicked out across a serving girl’s pale cotton slippers. It had come from the card player’s left leg. He’d been shot through the calf.

All at once this scene collapsed into noisy chaos. There was a massed scramble for the staircase leading down to the street; trays of glasses were dropped, and a table kicked over; a woman somewhere at the back of the room belted out a mighty, fog-horn scream. Richards’s victim fell back into the arms of his companions, his hat sliding off, gasping and grabbing out for support as the colour melted from his skin. They settled him on a chair as gently as they could. The wound was pumping out blood at a startling rate; it drenched his trouser-leg and trickled viscously over the worn boot at its base.