Belle’s face stung, it felt as if it was swelling up, and she wanted to cry, but she was determined not to give him that satisfaction.
‘Don’t be so sure,’ she said.
He moved to hit her again, but Sly leapt forward and stopped him. ‘Don’t damage the merchandise,’ he said.
That word ‘merchandise’ told Belle everything. She was just a commodity to these men, like a bale of cloth, a crate of whisky or a joint of meat, to be sold on to someone else. What’s more, she could guess who they would be selling her to. She might have only recently worked out what brothels were really about, but she knew with utter certainty she was going to one. She wanted to believe that she would just be a maid to the girls, as Mog was, but no one would smuggle someone on a ship and drive them so far just for that. So the reality was that she was being sold to be a whore!
She wanted to scream out her terror and to lash out at the two men, but she knew that would only antagonize Kent further and he might even throttle her if he was mad enough.
Mog had always claimed she had more tricks up her sleeve than a magician, so she took a deep breath to calm herself. She wasn’t going to be killed, and she didn’t think anyone would beat her, not if they wanted her to look good. All she had to do was use her wits to find a way to escape. Not protesting or making a fuss would be a start – maybe then they’d give up watching her constantly.
Only a few minutes later the carriage stopped. Kent got out first and reached up to lift Belle down, holding her arm very tightly so she couldn’t run off. Sly followed immediately. They were in a gloomy, gaslit terrace of tall houses, but around fifty yards away down the street light spilled out on to the cobbled street from the windows of a bar. The place was almost pulsating with music, dancing feet and laughter.
‘No one sleeps here, it seems,’ Sly said, and he sounded relieved.
Kent said something to the driver. Belle presumed he was speaking French because she didn’t understand a word. Then, with Kent still holding her right arm and Sly her left, they led her down a narrow alley and into a small square. Belle looked questioningly at Sly, but he turned his face away.
Another small bar in the square was still open, golden light spilling out from the small windows, but all the other shops were closed and there was no one around except a couple of men staggering drunkenly across the square. Simultaneously both men tightened their grip on Belle’s arms and Kent slapped his other hand over her mouth.
The house the men led her to was in the corner of the square and set back from its neighbours. The square was dimly lit by just a couple of gaslights but even so Belle could see the house well enough to feel chilled. It was larger than most of its neighbours, with four floors and pointed, gothic-looking eaves. The windows were long and narrow and most of them appeared to be shuttered. Sitting on the two posts which flanked the five or six steps up to the front porch were stone griffins. A dim red light shone above the front door in the gothic-style porch. It reminded Belle of a witch’s house she had seen in a picture book when she was small.
The door was opened immediately they rang by a big man in evening clothes. He looked down at Belle in some surprise, but Kent spoke in rapid French and the man indicated they were to come in.
Belle could hear music, chatter and laughter coming from the room on their left, but as the door was closed she couldn’t see who was in there. The man who had let them in disappeared into the room on her right; Belle got the briefest glimpse of a dark blue patterned carpet, but nothing else.
Waiting in the wide hall with an ornately carved staircase straight ahead of her, Belle noticed that the hall and stair carpet was threadbare, and that the dark wallpaper was stained with age. Only a chandelier above her was impressive; it was twice the size of the one back home, and the crystals were quivering and twinkling in the draught from the front door, but no one had bothered to fill all the holders with candles. Belle found the paintings on the walls very odd; they were all of naked women, but the artist had given them animal faces.
The doorman came out again and said something to the men, and still holding Belle’s arm in a vicelike grip, Kent led her into the room, with Sly taking up the rear.
Mog would have described the woman at a large, highly polished desk as ‘hatchet-faced’. No smile of welcome broke her long, thin face. She was tall, slender and very elegantly dressed in a midnight-blue taffeta dress, her dark hair elaborately curled and piled up on top of her head, but the eyes studying Belle were dead, like those of a fish on a marble slab at the fishmonger’s.
She spoke quickly, using her hands to express herself. Belle couldn’t understand a word, and she didn’t think Kent understood it all either, for every now and then he would stop the woman who would sigh deeply and roll her eyes, then repeat what she’d said more slowly. He whispered something to Sly a couple of times too, but Belle had a feeling this was so she wouldn’t hear, rather than him hiding something from the woman.
They eventually appeared to come to some sort of agreement, for the woman came round her desk to shake their hands. She then came closer to Belle, who was still standing between the two men, put her hand under her chin and lifted it to study her face more closely. ‘
Très jolie
,’ she said, and Belle guessed that was a compliment for both the men smiled.
There was a little more talking, and the woman poured the two men a brandy each, then she rang a little bell on her desk.
An older woman with greying hair in a plain black dress came in; Belle felt she must be a maid or housekeeper.
The woman at the desk rattled out some instructions and the older woman turned to Belle, smiled and held out her hand. Belle ignored her, even though the woman reminded her a little of Mog.
‘Madame Sondheim wants you to go with her housekeeper who is called Delphine,’ Kent translated. ‘She will give you some supper and put you to bed. She expects that you are very tired and hungry. Madame will speak to you later today when you are rested.’
‘You are leaving me here then?’ Belle directed her question at Sly. She hated Kent, but Sly didn’t seem anywhere near as cruel and ruthless, and he was at least English and her last contact with home.
‘Yes, Belle.’ As Sly spoke, his voice sounded a bit odd, as though he had something in his throat. ‘Do as you are told and you’ll be all right.’
‘Please could you get a message to my mother that I’m well?’ she begged him. ‘Only she and Mog will worry.’
Even as she made that plea, she knew how absurd it was. Two men who could snatch a young girl and sell her to a brothel weren’t going to lose any sleep about her mother’s anxiety. Tomorrow, though, when it was light, she’d find some way to escape.
But as Delphine caught firmly hold of her wrist and pulled her towards the door, Belle saw Sly’s sorrowful expression. ‘Please, Sly?’ she called out. ‘Just a note through the door, anything so they know I’m alive!’
Chapter Nine
After his talk with Jimmy and Garth, Noah Bayliss spent the rest of the day in their neighbourhood talking to people. The girls at Annie’s were disappointing; they knew nothing personal about Kent, they couldn’t even agree in their descriptions of him. But they were all unanimous in that he was a cold, hard man who thought nothing of knocking women around.
Elsewhere Noah had been told that the man mostly known as the Falcon managed properties near Bethnal Green, and the tenements here in Seven Dials known as the Core. Everyone looked nervous even saying that much about him and several people told Noah he shouldn’t go looking for trouble.
Later, at five in the evening, Noah called into the
Herald
offices in Fleet Street and had a word with the sub-editor, Ernie Greensleeve. He had always admired the wild-haired, skeletally thin man for his enthusiasm for investigative journalism. Ernie liked nothing better than digging out sordid truth, and the more gruesome or tragic that truth was, or the better-known those involved were, the more excited he became.
Noah told him the gist of the story about Millie’s murder and Belle’s disappearance and asked Ernie where he could go next for information about Kent.
‘I’ve heard rumours about the man,’ Ernie said, scratching his head and making his wild hair even wilder. ‘A couple of years ago there was a whisper that he was involved in trafficking girls. But I drew a blank in every line of enquiry. That could’ve meant the whisper wasn’t true, or that he had friends in high places, or even that he’s just smart enough to leave no trail. But I’ll ask around again and see if there’s any change.’
‘Have you got any way of finding out if the police are investigating properly?’ Noah asked. ‘After all it is a murder, and now an abduction which may lead to a second murder. Surely a serious crime can’t just be brushed under the carpet, not even if the murder victim was a prostitute?’
‘One of the biggest problems this country needs to face is the incompetence of the police force,’ Ernie said with a sigh. ‘It makes it so easy for corruption to flourish. We’ve got fingerprinting now, which should have doubled the number of convictions a year, but so far it’s not happening. I’ll see what I can do though, and you carry on trying to get folk to talk around Seven Dials.’
When Noah came into the Ram’s Head at seven in the evening, Jimmy thought he looked tired and dejected.
‘No luck then?’ he said.
‘Well, I did discover he’s involved in some slum housing in Bethnal Green and the Core. As both places are hell come to earth, that’s at least evidence he’s got no scruples about human suffering.’
The Core was the name given to the terrible tenement building here in Seven Dials. Jimmy had a kind of horrified fascination with the place. It was said there were as many as twelve people sleeping in many of the rooms and the sanitation consisted of a tap in each yard and a latrine which was a health hazard. He had always wondered why the place was known by such an odd name, but no one seemed to know. Uncle Garth had said he thought someone had just said it was ‘rotten to the core’ and the name had stuck.
Jimmy couldn’t imagine how anyone could bear to live in such a dreadful place. They might be the destitute, the old, the drunks, the sick and the feeble-minded who lived there, plus a fair proportion of criminals and children who had either run away or been turned out of their homes, but no one should have to live that way. They begged on the streets, scavenged or picked pockets and the place was a hotbed of disease.
‘What d’you mean he’s involved?’ Jimmy asked. ‘Is he the landlord, or just a rent collector?’
‘That I don’t know,’ Noah said. ‘But I’ve got someone at the paper looking into it.’
Noah stayed in the bar talking until around half past nine, and after he’d gone home, Jimmy went to help Peg Leg Alf as he washed up some glasses. Alf had lost his leg in the Crimea War back in the 1850s, when he was little more than a boy, and was then invalided out of the army. He had spent the rest of his adult life as a beggar and doing odd jobs for anyone who would take him on.
Alf lived in the Core. The man was around seventy and he shared a room with several others in a similar plight to himself. If it wasn’t for the kindness of inn keepers like Garth who let him wash a few glasses and sweep the floor in return for a hot meal and a shilling or two, he wouldn’t be able to survive.
‘Do you know this man they call the Falcon?’ Jimmy asked as he dried some glasses for Alf.
‘Aye, and a nasty piece of work he is too,’ Alf said, then looked over his shoulder as if the man might be there. ‘You don’t want no truck with him, son.’
‘Why are you scared of him?’ Jimmy asked.
Alf pulled a face. ‘When you’re my age and a man can throw you out on to the street because he doesn’t like the look of you, it’s as well to be scared of him.’
‘He’s your landlord?’ Jimmy asked, hoping Alf would tell him more.
‘I don’t know if he actually owns the place, but he certainly sends out the slimy bastard who comes to collect the rent. He’s got his spies everywhere, anyone gets in another person to help with the rent, and next thing you know you’ve got to pay more. I didn’t have the rent one night and he said if I didn’t take it to the office the next day I’d find myself out on the street.’
‘Did you get it by then?’ Jimmy asked. Alf was so thin and frail that he looked as though a gust of wind would blow him over. He usually smelled bad, but he couldn’t help that when he lived in such an awful place. And Alf was a good man, honest as the day.
‘Yeah, I got it to him.’ Alf rolled his eyes. ‘He was sitting there with his feet up on the desk, lording it over me. Bet he’s never done a real day’s work in his life.’
‘So where is his office?’ Jimmy asked.
Jimmy could hardly contain his joy at finding out that Kent’s office was in Mulberry Buildings in Long Acre. Knowing his uncle wouldn’t approve of him breaking and entering, not even the office of a murderer, Jimmy waited until the bar was closed for the night and Garth gone to bed, then he crept out the back way.
Long Acre was near Covent Garden market, a street which was mainly offices and small businesses rather than homes. Because the market was at its busiest during the night, and there were many young lads working there, Jimmy felt confident he wouldn’t look suspicious being around that area. He found Mulberry Buildings easily, and when he looked at the signboard outside it, he noted that most of the tenants were printers and allied tradesmen. Hoping this meant the security would be lax as the premises were hardly likely to be attractive to burglars, he went round to the back alley to try to find a way in.
He couldn’t believe his luck when he found a window open just a crack on the ground floor. But sadly, once he was inside the printer’s, he found the internal door that led to the rest of the building was locked. He had taken the precaution of bringing his uncle’s spare bunch of keys with him, but although he tried them all, none would open the door, so he had to climb back out through the window and try elsewhere.
When he reached the second floor by shinning up the drainpipe he saw a small transom window open within easy reach. He climbed over on to the sill, put his hand in the small window and opened the larger one beneath it.
He found himself in what seemed to be a storeroom. When he lit the candle he’d brought in his pocket he saw hundreds of boxes of printing paper stacked in piles all around the room. He wriggled through them to the door, and to his delight this wasn’t locked.
The storeroom led on to a narrow landing on which there were five other doors and as he walked along the landing he saw a small sign on the one at the end to the front of the building. Holding his candle closer, he read, ‘Kent Management’.
The door was locked and he had to put his candle down to try the keys on his bunch. To his disappointment, again none of them worked. But as he bent down to pick up the candle, intending to give up and leave the building, he noticed the doormat. Remembering this was where his mother always left the key for him, he pulled it back, and there to his surprise and excitement was a key.
Once in the office he felt very scared. There were no blinds at the window and a policeman out on his beat would immediately be suspicious of a small light in a closed office. But on the other hand there wasn’t much to search – the room held only a large desk, two chairs and a wooden filing cabinet almost identical to the one his uncle kept all the paperwork in at the pub.
The drawers in the desk revealed nothing more than pens, pencils, a receipt book and various other notebooks which, although written in, had no meaning to Jimmy. He turned his attentions to the filing cabinet.
There was little in these, just a couple of folders with some papers in them, a bottle of whisky and what could only be a knuckleduster, as it had four holes to slot fingers through. He tried the spiky iron thing on his hand and realized it was clearly made for a grown man with big hands. It made him shudder, for the damage it could do to someone’s face was too horrible to contemplate.
He lifted out the folders and taking them to the candle on the desk quickly flicked through them. In the main they were letters of complaint from various sources about the state of the Core buildings, some of them dating back twenty and thirty years and addressed to a Mr F. Waldegrave. He assumed this was the actual owner of the building, although there were some similar in tone with recent dates, and addressed to Kent. There were substantial numbers of letters relating to various properties in Bethnal Green too, again complaints, mostly about rat infestation, sanitation and overcrowding.
But then he found a letter from a solicitor’s in Chancery Lane, dated just a year ago, which was nothing to do with the Core, but about the purchase of a house in Charing in Kent. This was addressed to Mr F. J. Waldegrave.
Jimmy pocketed this letter. It wasn’t recent enough to be missed and he needed to study it more carefully. As there appeared to be nothing more of interest in the office he decided to get home.
He didn’t leave the same way as he came in, but walked down the stairs and out through the front door which conveniently had one of the new types of lock, which needed no key to get out, and locked it again behind him.
At eight the following morning Jimmy slipped out of the pub, despite not getting to bed until nearly three. His uncle rarely surfaced before ten and Jimmy hoped to get to see Noah Bayliss and be back home long before that.
It was very cold and he ran most of the way to keep warm. Mrs Dumas, Noah’s landlady, seemed rather surprised at her lodger having a visitor so early, but said Noah was having his breakfast and asked if Jimmy would like to sit with him over a cup of tea.
‘I broke into the Falcon’s lair last night,’ Jimmy whispered to Noah the minute he had been shown into the breakfast room and Mrs Dumas had gone off to the kitchen. ‘I found this,’ he said, passing the solicitor’s letter to him.
‘But it’s addressed to a Mr Waldegrave,’ Noah said as he scanned the contents.
‘I think that’s Kent’s real name,’ Jimmy said excitedly, keeping his voice down as there was another lodger sitting at the far end of the table. ‘You see, I found really old letters of complaint about the Core addressed to a Mr F. J. Waldegrave, and then more recent ones to Kent. So I reckon Waldegrave is his real name, not Kent at all, and the earlier letters of complaint were addressed to his father, or another relative. But he don’t have much imagination in picking an alias, do he?’ The boy sniggered. ‘Not if he lives in Kent! I wonder why he needs to have a false name?’
Noah smiled. ‘To do dark deeds under. Maybe I should call myself Warren Street because I live near there.’
‘Or I could be Mr Ramshead,’ Jimmy laughed. ‘But look, we’ve got his address – Pear Tree Cottage, High Street, Charing. He might be holding Belle there.’
‘I can’t somehow imagine it being that easy,’ Noah said slowly and thoughtfully. ‘He wouldn’t take her to a place he knew people could find out about.’
‘Maybe not, but we can tell the police that’s where he lives. They could check it out.’
Noah looked at young Jimmy’s excited, hopeful face and wished he could assure him that the police would act to find Belle. But Noah’s experience in calling at Bow Street had not been encouraging, in fact he’d encountered total disinterest in the girl’s disappearance. The truth of the matter was that the police didn’t see a whore’s daughter as being of any importance.
But that wasn’t all. When Noah insisted Belle had been taken by the man dubbed the Falcon, the police sergeant pretended that name meant nothing to him. He wasn’t a convincing liar, for he couldn’t meet Noah’s eyes, and he became quite belligerent in the way men did when covering up something. As almost every adult in Seven Dials had heard of the Falcon, even if they’d never met him, it was inconceivable that a policeman wouldn’t know something about him.
Under the circumstances, to go back to the police station with evidence of where the man had a house was likely to be self-defeating. If this sergeant was in Kent’s pay, as Noah suspected, he would tip the man off, and that could result in Jimmy and his uncle being targeted by hired thugs.
‘I think we need to talk to your uncle first and get him on our side,’ Noah said, giving himself time to think this through. ‘But we won’t tell him you broke into those offices. We’d better say it was me.’
‘Could you come to the pub today?’ Jimmy begged.
‘Not now,’ Noah said, then nodded at Mrs Dumas who was coming in with a fresh pot of tea and toast for them. ‘I could come around six if Garth could speak to me then.’
‘I’ll make sure he does,’ Jimmy said. He grabbed a slice of toast and buttered it while Mrs Dumas poured his tea. He didn’t give the tea a chance to cool down, but drank it eagerly, then got up to go, the toast in his hand. ‘I’ve got to get back. But what if he’s already killed her, Noah?’
The stricken expression on the boy’s face made Noah’s heart swell with sympathy.
‘I still think he would’ve killed her in a back alley here if that was his intention,’ he replied with as much conviction as he could muster. ‘You did well to get this letter, Jimmy, it was very brave of you.’