The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) (11 page)

‘I have heard much tonight about the nature of crime and criminals, and I believe I have a challenge for some of those present, if detectives they truly are.’

‘Let us hear your challenge,’ called Sir Richard from the other side of the stage. ‘Whatever it is, I am sure the Metropolitan Police’s Detective Force is more than
adequate to your purposes.’

‘Yes, share your question that a
true
investigator might solve it,’ added Eldritch Batchem, looking at the boxes either side of him in turn.

The auditorium was once again as silent as a midnight altar.

‘Very well,’ said the wealthy-looking gentleman. My name is Josiah Timbs. I am a merchant and ship-owner of this city who recently suffered a substantial loss. I know not who is
responsible, or any of the circumstances, but here, tonight, I offer the sum of one thousand pounds to him who will solve this crime and return my property to me.’

‘
I
will do it!’ shouted the drunken man who had asked the first question that evening. Laughter briefly filled the place.

‘That is a generous sum, Mr Timbs,’ said Eldritch Batchem, once more stroking his beard. ‘What manner of a loss would account for a reward so significant?’

‘Mr Batchem, Sir Richard . . . you other investigators present . . .’ began the ship-owner, ‘I hardly know how to say it, so incredible is it to me that this crime has occurred
in the modern city of London. Gentlemen – my ship, the brigantine
Aurora
, has been stolen.’

A hubbub immediately animated the crowd and the theatre manager did his best to restore calm.

‘Excuse me, Mr Timbs,’ said Eldritch Batchem, when he could make himself heard. ‘Did you say your
ship
? An entire vessel?’

‘Quite so. The
Aurora
is my four-masted brig. It has vanished utterly from the Port of London with half of its seamen aboard and with a full cargo. It might not be a murder, but it
is certainly an outrage. What do you make of
that
, you detectives? What will you do about
that
?’

A pandemonium of speculation and wonder now quite seized the audience. Eldritch Batchem looked up to see Sir Richard staring glacially down at him and the former seemed to smile with those dark
glass eyes.

If Eldritch Batchem had been a minor public figure before that performance, he was a greater one thereafter – not least because a number of newspapermen had been in the
audience to hear his comments about the Metropolitan Police and the challenge from Mr Josiah Timbs. The following day’s papers seemed to mention little else.

A recurrent theme in all of them was the provenance of the strange investigator himself, who, barely six months previously, might never have existed. The first recorded instance of his
investigative work, of course, had been that scandalous case of the infant cut in pieces and left in a package on Blackfriars-bridge. Then there had been the lesser-known case of the banker’s
clerk who absconded with cash left in his care. It had been around that time that people started to speak his name more widely.

It need hardly be said that any mystery about his identity vanished when he was said to have investigated that notorious case of theft from the Green Drawing Room (anteroom to the very throne
room itself) at Buckingham Palace. Whether it was the Queen herself who requested his involvement, or whether he was engaged by an attendant to Her Majesty remains somewhat ambiguous, but the man
had ostentatiously used his ‘By Royal Appointment’ appellation since that occasion.

One thing was certain: the Green Drawing Room case made the title of ‘detective’ suddenly fashionable in London. For the first time, one began to see examples in the personal
advertisements of
the Times
for investigators with ‘Private Enquiry Addresses’ who would, for a fee, trace one’s missing jewellery, recover one’s absconded husband,
or observe one’s wife unbeknown to her. Nothing, it seemed, was quite as exciting as the life of the detective. Indeed, for a month or so, one might have seen a notice on the first page of
the Times
for:

Yet the man who seemed to have stirred the interest remained an enigma. Nobody knew him. Nobody could remember hearing the name previously. He attended no club and had been to university with
not a single person who could recall him. It was rumoured that he lived not in a house or apartment, but alone at Mivart’s Hotel. In fact, had he not spoken English with such unaccented
fluency, one might have suspected him of being a foreigner.

At least, this was the common interpretation of events. There is, in truth, always someone who knows the bigger story – always one man who is able to burrow beneath popular perception and
the obfuscations of rumour to strike at the facts with unerring accuracy. And, inevitably, there was one who knew.

It was I.

To some, I am a penny-a-liner: a self-supporting newspaperman who measures the size of his next meal in column inches. To others – notably those old men of Paternoster-row and Haymarket
– I am an occasional producer of popular broadsheets, arcane encyclopaedia entries, sundry poetry (or, rather, doggerel) for all occasions, and dramas that play too often to an unappreciative
audience of one. Speaking for myself, I am a novelist well accustomed to the rigour of the nib, the ceaseless scraping upon paper and the oil-lamp blindness of extended lucubration.

Perhaps the reader has read a copy of my book on an earlier illustrious case of George Williamson (the copyright of which I was obliged to sign away to avoid another penal spell). Or perchance
my more recent volume on another case of that investigator has found favour . . . before the copyright of that one also was taken from me on account of my non-payment of printing fees. Alas, I had
been somewhat less prolific following those works on account of my being imprisoned at Horsemonger-street gaol in Lambeth.

It was not, as some malicious wags may have implied, for plagiarism that I found myself incarcerated thus. Nor was it for the penning of false begging letters, fraudulent inquest reports or
defamatory satire – some of which accusations might have been previously levelled at me. No – I was resident in the debtors’ wing of that gaol thanks largely to the personal
impoverishment occasioned by my latter
opus
and the incomplete repayment of printing costs thereof. Such are the results of publishing at one’s own risk.

So it was that, while another great case had begun to play out on the streets of the city, I was confined between dusk and seven each morning to a room with four iron bedsteads (alas, no pillows
or sheets), a cruelly chilling stone-flagged floor, a reeking privy emptied but once a day, and three other dolorous gentlemen similarly abused by Fortune.

Nevertheless, one should not think that I was isolated from events. As befits a fellow of infinite resource, I had rather set about establishing that mildewed cell as the centre of a web to trap
every fruit fly of gossip, every moth of rumour and every fat buzzer of news floating above those London streets. Each newspaper left behind by a visiter was a
reservoir
of information for
me to absorb. And, of course, I was not idle in my writing, producing regular scandal sheets for the presses that I might better peck away at my debt (like a sparrow at the dome of St
Paul’s).

In short, even in my confinement, I scented the story and used the flavour of it to build a feast in my mind to sustain me where the oatmeal gruel and pulpy vegetable stews of Horsemonger-lane
could not. It was also within those imprisoning walls that I happened to learn more of Mr Eldritch Batchem . . . or at least of a possible previous incarnation.

On the day after that notable theatrical address, I was reading
the Times
for possible further news of the Waterloo-bridge case or of the body dragged recently from the river.
Unaccustomed as I was to receiving visiters of my own, I instead used the broad pages of that esteemed organ to hide myself as I eavesdropped on the conversations of those who came daily to see my
cell-fellows.

Burley was one such inmate: a tailor by trade, but a failure by inclination, he was a faded and worn wisp of a man who had spent much of the previous decade in one or other of the city’s
debtors’ gaols. Grey of skin, hair and suit, he did some occasional stitching work during the days with the futile aim of mitigating his debt – but his chief value to me was in his
brother-in-law Charles: a loquacious sort who would visit each day but Sunday to tattle and chatter like a maid of all work.

‘I declare, I had a capital evening yesterday,’ twittered this Charles the day after that eventful show.

‘O yes?’ said Burley, with gibbet enthusiasm for another tale of unknowable pleasure.

‘Yes indeed! I went to the Queen’s Theatre to hear that fellow Eldritch Batchem – you know: the investigator chap.’

‘O yes?’

‘He spoke about murderers: Greenacre, Good, Lucius Boyle . . . all the best ones. And there was a terrific episode before the interval when some merchant chappy said his brig had been
stolen entire. And Sir Richard Mayne – the police commissioner himself – was there in a box, and he said he would investigate, and—’

‘O yes?’

‘. . . and, well, I had the strangest impression I had seen this Batchem before.’

(At this point, I fear there was a crepitant convulsion of my newspaper as I reached for a pencil to scribble details over the police notices.)

‘O yes?’

‘Indeed. He has a strange sort of pointed beard, this Batchem. That, combined with a rather peculiar russet cap he wears, does rather tend to hide his face but for the eyes. However, it
was something in the cast of his eyes, combined perhaps with the inflection of his voice, that struck me.’

‘O yes?’

‘Do you remember when you were in Whitecross-street gaol, just after you lost your premises?’

‘O. Yes.’ Burley now rather had the look of the medieval martyr hewn in lichened limestone.

‘Well, I would swear before any judge that this Batchem was at Whitecross-street at the same time you were. He was not called by the same name then. Nor did he have a beard or wear a red
cap. No – he was called something quite different: “Crawford” or “Cowley” or “Crowell” or some such. But he did seem to wear leather gloves, as I recall.
But I tell you: the voice and the eyes were highly suggestive.’

‘O yes?’

‘Indeed. The voice . . . you know? It seems rather odd, does it not, that two years past, he seems to be a debtor with a different name and now he is an illustrious investigator addressing
thousands at the theatre? Somebody should investigate
that
, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose so, Charles. In truth, I cannot recall the man you refer to.’ (A rare conversational gambit from the threadbare tailor.)

‘What? Well, I have a distinct recollection of him. Most curious. Ah, did I also tell you about the young lady I have been calling upon?’

‘O yes?’

By this point, however, my keen journalistic mind was working phrenziedly at the potential story I had just overheard. Were there even a shred of truth in it, it was the sort of thing that might
earn me a juicy commission to cover my debts and free me from that place.

Accordingly, I left old Burley to the garrulous tortures of his brother and walked out towards the yard, cogitating upon how I might extend my reach beyond the walls to learn more. Then I
remembered with a flash of excitement: had not a turnkey of my acquaintance at Horsemonger-lane previously held a position at Whitecross-street? I immediately sought him out.

As usual, he could be found in the warder’s lodge with a mug of tea and a newspaper. He was an affable sort, and what I learned from him, though exiguous enough, was intriguing. There had
indeed been a ‘Crawford’ or ‘Cowley’ or ‘Crowell’ at Whitecross-street, and my turnkey recalled the fellow in question with some clarity on account of his being
allowed the rare privilege of a private room. The debtor’s stay there had been brief, but what had struck the warder more than anything was the general eccentricity of the gentleman combined
with a mania for privacy.

So fastidious was he (said the turnkey) that his every limited possession was stored with almost geometric precision: his razor and other bathroom articles laid out perpendicularly parallel to
the eighth of an inch; his clothing brushed and folded with the greatest care; his few books kept always in strict alphabetical order (by author), and his newspapers catalogued by date. And, while
many freshly incarcerated insolvents will initially spurn the company of other debtors through humiliation or low spirits, this fellow never settled into his ward.