Blackstone and the Heart of Darkness (18 page)

‘I would have thought my question was simple enough to understand. I asked you if you knew much about diamonds. You certainly look to me like a man who’d know his jewellery.’

‘Perhaps if I’d married I would have known about it—the ladies like their men to take an interest in things they’re interested in themselves—but since I’ve always been a bachelor, I’ve never really felt the need to acquaint myself with the subject.’

‘Do you still keep in contact with any of the people you met on your travels?’

‘No, I’m afraid I’ve lost touch with them all. How about you, Inspector? Do
you
still keep in contact?’

‘I did hear from
one
of my old comrades,’ Blackstone said. ‘A bloke called Tom Yardley.’

Bickersdale blinked. ‘Was that the same Tom Yardley who blew himself up at one of my mines, just a few days ago?’

‘Well, it was certainly the same Tom Yardley who
got
blown up,’ Blackstone replied.

Bickersdale took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and made some display of consulting it.

‘It has been most entertaining to talk to you, Inspector,’ he said, ‘but, as I’m sure you must appreciate yourself, a man who has a business to run can only afford to spend so much time on idle chit-chat, so I think it’s the right moment to bring this conversation to a close.’

Blackstone stood up. ‘Of course, sir. And thank you so much for sparing me the time.’

‘It was my pleasure,’ Bickersdale said, unconvincingly.

Seven

It was late afternoon when Archie Patterson paid his first visit to Marlin Street in what had been a long time. The street was at its quietest at that time of day, as Patterson had known it would be. In fact, he had deliberately chosen to make his visit
when
it was quiet—because when a man is doing something that might well cost him his job, he wants to be observed by as few people as possible.

As he passed the pawnbroker’s establishment—a depressing place, in which the pledges were household effects scarcely worth redeeming even had the pledgers had the money to do it—he found he was asking himself if he was doing the right thing in following this plan of his.

As he reached a small corner shop—dirty windows, and only a few battered tins of stew in evidence on the shelves—he had almost persuaded himself that he should abandon the whole crazy idea. But then he reached his destination—a place that had once been a printer’s shop, but had long ceased to function as such—and he found his resolve returning to him.

He knocked on the door, and his knock was answered by a bent old man wearing very thick spectacles. The man peered up at him, and when he saw who it was standing there, his jaw began to quiver.

‘I ain’t done nuffink wrong, Mr Patterson,’ he said.

‘Did I
say
you had done anything wrong, Gabriel?’ Patterson inquired.

‘I served my time without complaint, an’ when I come out, I’d learned my lesson. You know that.’

‘You’re not in trouble,’ Patterson said. ‘I’m here because I’ve got some business for you.’

The old man looked really frightened now.

‘Business?’ he said. ‘What kind of business?’

‘Shall we go inside?’ Patterson asked—and it was more of an order than a request.

*

Lizzie had lost track of the amount of time she had spent in the cell. She missed Cathy. The other girl had horrified her with her willingness to embrace prostitution, but she had been a cheerful soul—full of life—and this bleak prison seemed even harder to bear now she had gone.

Lizzie wondered where Cathy was
now
. Probably in some house of ill-repute, spreading her legs—as Cathy had so crudely put it herself—for any man with a little money to spend. She hoped that the other girl’s new life was equal to her rosy expectations—that she really didn’t mind what was being done to her, hour after hour, night after night—but she knew that as far as she herself was concerned, she would absolutely hate it when her own turn came.

She heard footsteps in the corridor, and immediately feared it was the man who had tried to rape her, returning. But when the door swung open, she saw that it was only the boss, and that he had brought with him another man—a thin, middle-aged one—who really looked quite harmless.

‘Hello, Lizzie,’ the boss said cheerfully. ‘Are you being looked after properly?’

‘Yes, thank you, sir,’ Lizzie replied, because that was what she had been taught to say in answer to such questions in the workhouse—however bad things
really
were.

‘They’ve been feeding you well, and letting you have nice warm baths every day?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And no one’s tried to take advantage of you?’

‘Not since that first time.’

The boss nodded. ‘Excellent. Now be a good girl and sit quietly on your stool while this gentleman does your hair.’

‘What do you mean—“while he does my hair”?’ Lizzie asked, gripped by a sudden panic. ‘He’s not goin’ to cut it all off, is he? Like they do in the workhouse, when you have nits.’

The boss laughed. ‘No, of course he’s not going to cut it all off. Far from it, in fact.’

‘Then what
is
he goin’ to do?’

‘He’s just going to give it a little more shape.’

‘An’ why would he want to do that?’

‘To make you look even prettier than you already are. You want to look prettier, don’t you?’

‘Yes, sir,’ Lizzie said obediently.

*

Gabriel Moore’s home would have made the average hovel almost anywhere else look like a miniature palace, but on Marlin Street it was probably no better and no worse than most of the houses.

‘Would you like to sit down, Mr Patterson?’ Moore asked.

Patterson looked at the chair he was being offered and decided not to take the risk of catching something.

‘I won’t be here long, so I’ll stand,’ he said. ‘The purpose of my visit is very simple. As I intimated when we were outside, I want you to do a little job for me, Gabriel.’

‘What kind of job? Like the ones I used to do?’

‘That’s right.’

Moore spread out his hands in gesture of hopelessness. ‘I can’t do it, Mr Patterson.’

‘Didn’t your old mother ever tell you it wasn’t a good idea to turn down a request for help—especially when that request came from the Filth?’ Patterson wondered.

‘Honest, I can’t. I ain’t got the equipment no more.’

Patterson laughed, disbelievingly. ‘An artist like you doesn’t just throw his equipment away,’ he said. ‘Even if he knows he may never use it again, he just can’t bear to get rid of it.’

‘Even if I’d got the equipment—an’ I ain’t sayin’ I have—I couldn’t do the job,’ Moore protested.

‘Of course you could,’ Patterson assured him. ‘It’s a bit like riding a bike—once you’ve learned how to do it, you never forget.’

‘Look at me, Mr Patterson,’ Moore implored him. He held up his hands for the sergeant to inspect. ‘Can’t you see how they’re shakin?’

Patterson nodded. ‘Yes, they certainly do seem to have a bit of a tremble about them, don’t they? With hands like those, any work I asked you to do for me now would be vastly inferior to what you’ve produced in the past.’

‘That’s what I’m sayin’, Mr Patterson. It wouldn’t pass muster. It wouldn’t fool a blind man.’

‘Ah, but you see, that’s the point,’ Patterson said. ‘I don’t
want
it to fool a blind man.’

*

Blackstone and Drayman had agreed earlier to meet in the Townshend Arms. Their plan had been that the local inspector would outline the progress that had been made in the investigation, and his more experienced colleague from London would analyse what he’d been told and suggest further lines of approach based on that.

It would have been a good plan, if there’d
been
any progress to analyse. But there hadn’t.

‘It’s just as you predicted it would be, Sam,’ Drayman lamented. ‘Margie Thomas’s murder was nothing more than a crime of opportunity, and we’re never going to find the bastard who did it.’

Blackstone wasn’t really listening. Instead he was thinking of the meeting he had had with Bickersdale.

The man had seemed so calm and in control—friendly enough, in a cold, amused sort of way—but even if he hadn’t let it slip that he knew exactly how much Mick Huggins’s bail had cost, Blackstone would have had his card marked anyway, because he knew a villain when he saw one.

‘
The
problem
is
that
any
man
in
town
between
the
ages
of
sixteen
and
sixty
could
have
done
it,
’ he heard Inspector Drayman’s voice echo dreamily in the back of his mind.

But why had a smart bloke like Bickersdale ever allowed himself to be saddled with a white elephant like the Melbourne Mine, Blackstone wondered—a mine in which the drift was irregular, and the seepage continual; a mine that was never going to show a profit, whatever he did?

‘
I
can’t
question
the
whole
town,
’ Inspector Drayman was saying, somewhere in the far distance.
‘I
simply
haven’t
got
the
manpower
available
for
that.
’

The trick to understanding any man was to see the world as he saw it through his own eyes, Blackstone told himself. So how
did
the world look through Bickersdale’s?

The mine-owner had been abroad for a number of years, probably working in places where advancement was less dependent on a man’s ability than on the colour of his skin. And that—as Blackstone knew from his own observation of English merchants in India—led to arrogance.

So Bickersdale returns to England with a pocketful of money and an almost overpowering belief in his own infallibility. He has already decided that he wants to buy himself a business that will give him both an income and a certain standing in the community, and he decides that owning salt mines will answer both his needs. He doesn’t ask anyone else’s advice. Why should he, when he already knows it all? And it is only when he has actually purchased the Melbourne Mine—and been running it for a while—that he comes to see that he might just as well have taken his fortune and thrown it straight down the mine shaft.

‘
Besides
,
who’s
to
say
that
the
killer’s
from
this
town
at
all?
He
could
be
a
visitor.
’

There were many men who would simply admit their mistake and write it off to experience, Blackstone reasoned. There were many others who would be crushed by what had happened and spend the rest of their lives haunted by bitter regret. But Bickersdale did not strike him as falling into either of these camps.

Bickersdale was quite a different breed altogether. For him, being cheated by one man would seem exactly the same as being cheated by life in general. And he would not tolerate that. He would want his wealth returned to him, and if the only way to achieve that objective was to embark on a life of crime, then it wouldn’t bother him at all.

Inspector Drayman, having reached the end of his litany of woes, had now fallen silent and was obviously waiting for some sympathetic response from his listener.

‘What do you know about a man called Lawrence Bickersdale?’ Blackstone asked.

‘Bickersdale?’ Drayman replied, clearly knocked completely off balance by the unexpected question. ‘I...I believe he owns a couple of the salt mines in Marston.’

‘That much I already knew,’ Blackstone said. ‘What else can you tell me about him?’

‘Not a great deal, I’m afraid. He seems to keep himself pretty much to himself.’

‘You haven’t heard any whispers about him?’

‘Whispers?’

‘Rumours that he’s not quite as respectable as he appears—that he might perhaps be involved in something a little shady?’

‘Look here, Sam, I don’t really see how any of this fits in with the investigation into Margie’s Thomas’s tragic death,’ Drayman said.

‘It doesn’t,’ Blackstone admitted.

‘In that case, it must have something to do with this diamond-smuggling theory of yours, and I’m sorry, but I’ve got much more important matters to deal with at the moment than your pet obsession.
I
have a murderer to catch.’

‘I appreciate that,’ Blackstone told him. ‘But if you could just take five minutes to fill me in on—’

‘Five minutes or five hours, it makes no difference,’ Drayman said, with growing irritation. ‘My mind’s focused—as it should be—on Margie’s murder. I simply can’t deal with anything else.’

Archie Patterson could, Blackstone thought. Patterson could be right up to his elbows in a serious crime, yet still find a moment or two to admire the latest piece of technical gadgetry or make a new contact who might just be useful during a future investigation. If Patterson were sitting opposite him now, he would dismantle his boss’s theory, examine every small part of it individually, and then see if it still fitted together. If Patterson was sitting there, there’d already be at least five or six other theories lying on the table by now.

But Patterson
wasn’t
there—and Blackstone found himself missing the chubby sergeant more than he’d ever thought he would.