Read Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper Online
Authors: David Barnett
Walsingham shook his head. “I am very sorry, Mr. Bent. Britain is built upon the rule of law, and Miss Fanshawe is as bound by it as anyone. There is nothing I can do to interfere with the judicial process.”
“Effing bollocks.” Bent snorted. “You only have to fart and you could call off this kangaroo court. After all she’s done for you, for the Empire, it’s the least you could do.”
Walsingham leaned back and considered Bent for a long moment. “Miss Fanshawe is what my department would term a “deniable asset,” Mr. Bent. Any involvement she has had in official Crown business has been through subcontracted commissions from Mr. Gideon Smith, and Reed and Trigger before him. She is not, has never been, and—sad to say, it seems—will never be an employee of the Crown. It may seem harsh, Mr. Bent, but she is nothing to us. Especially if she is convicted of a capital offense.”
“The Queen gave her an effing medal!” said Bent.
Walsingham nodded. “And if you look at the charge sheet at the Old Bailey tomorrow, it will read
Regina v Fanshawe
. It is the Crown that brings prosecutions, Mr. Bent. I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do.”
Bent knew he was right. “I’ll see myself out,” he said.
Out on Whitehall Street, he lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply. He was damned if he was going to let Rowena face this charge with some court-appointed lawyer who didn’t give a shit for her. It was time to call in a debt.
* * *
“Shine a light, Bent! It’s bloody Sunday!”
The tall man with unruly hair and a beak of a nose glared with wild eyes at Bent from the doorway of the ramshackle property in Holborn, before peering around the courtyard at the windows where his fellow practitioners of the law lived when they were not working at the city’s courts or the chamber offices that dominated the oppressive little square.
Bent glanced at the towel the man had wrapped around his scrawny middle. “Get some clothes on, Siddell. I’m here to collect.”
“Ah,” said Siddell, glancing back up the dark staircase and scratching at the mustache that flapped under his impressive nose. “Yes. I owe you ten guineas, don’t I? Thing is…”
“Willy?” drifted a voice down the stairs. “Willy, come back to bed.…”
“Thing is, you’ve spent the money you owe me wining and dining some doxie,” said Bent. “But there are other ways you can pay me back.”
William Siddell’s quarters comprised a bedroom, on which he hastily shut the door, a tiny living-room-cum-study, and a washroom in which a cat would have had trouble swinging a mouse. As Siddell climbed into his trousers, he said, “What’s to do, Aloysius?”
“Got a job for you. Tomorrow morning. Old Bailey at ten.”
Siddell stared at him. “Old Bailey? Shine a light! What is it?”
“Rowena Fanshawe. You heard of her?”
“Of course I have,” said Siddell, shoving his shirt into his trousers. “Belle of the Airways and all that. I heard you was running around with that mob now, heroes and pilots and whatnot. What’s up with her?”
“Got herself on an effing charge. I want you to defend her.”
Siddell paused, his eyes narrowing. “Well, then … you see, that sort of representation don’t come cheap, Aloysius. I’ll have to shuffle cases around and—”
“You’ll be paid,” cut in Bent. “And I’ll wipe out the debt. You’ll be there tomorrow, yes?”
Siddell shrugged. “I suppose. What’s she up for? Flying too high? Smuggling?”
Bent picked up a wrinkled pear from a dusty bowl in the living room, rubbed off the mold, and bit into it. As good a time as any to start eating more healthily.
“Murder,” he said.
* * *
He knew he was in London. He knew Queen Victoria was on the throne. He knew it was the year 1890, that the shapes that steamed overhead in the thick cloud were dirigibles, that Britannia ruled the waves and the air, that New York and Boston were British, and Nyu Edo on the West Coast of America was Japanese. He knew it was a Sunday, and he knew that the couples who walked arm in arm were lovers.
He knew all this. He wasn’t an idiot.
But he had no idea who he was, or his name, or why he was walking the streets of the East End. He had no wallet, no identification, not a penny in his pockets.
He also knew he was cold, and scared, and tired, and hungry.
Above all, he was hungry.
He’d walked all night and all morning, knowing he was somewhere in Whitechapel, surrounded by soot-blackened slums and filth washing through the streets. There was a young man with a small barrow selling fruit and fish. He sidled up to it with the flow of the shabby, dirty folk who populated the thoroughfare, his stomach rumbling at the sight of the food.
Stealing was wrong; he knew that. It was the law of the land.
But starving was worse. And surely there was a rule of law that was higher than the law of the land, a rule of law that said a man was entitled to have clothes on his back and food in his belly. That counted more than the profit the barrow boy would put in his pocket, surely?
Life and death versus profit and loss.
To his mind there was no contest. He strolled past the barrow, snatched two apples in each hand, and began to pelt through the slush and mud with the barrow boy’s cries of “Thief! Thief!” ringing in his ears.
* * *
He wolfed down the apples in the shadows of an alleyway in the stews of Whitechapel. The tenements reared up all around him, blocking out what thin light penetrated the oppressive white clouds now darkening with the late afternoon. The snow had stopped falling, for which he was grateful, but he shivered in his overcoat, and the slush had soaked his boots and chilled his feet.
The narrow street he found himself on seemed almost supernaturally quiet. The windows of the cramped, tumbledown buildings were shuttered against the harsh winter, no pedestrians fought their way along the filthy track between the rotten rows, no steam-cabs lumbered through nor horse-drawn carriages clattered by.
It was as if the world had ended, somehow, and he was the last man on Earth. Across from where he lurked, stamping his feet and rubbing his frozen hands, there was a closed hardware store, bars running down the windows. Above there was a sign in peeling paint. A
LBERT
S
MITH &
S
ONS
.
Smith.
It was as though a dim sunbeam penetrated the clouds above. Smith.
He blinked and caught a fluttering black shape on the periphery of his vision. Walking down the street was a woman in dirty, ragged skirts and a shawl pulled about her shoulders. She wore no bonnet and her blond hair hung about her shoulders, framing the most beautiful face he had ever seen.
Smith,
he thought to himself.
I know that name.
And I know
her
.
He extracted himself from the shadows to get a better look, and she paused as she saw him, putting her hands on her hips and giving him a long stare.
Eventually she said, “Well? You just going to look or do you want to spend some money?”
He stepped into the muddy track. “Spend some money? Who are you?”
She smiled. “Name’s Lottie, dear. It’s cold. Want to share some body heat down that alley of yours?”
He felt a lurch in his trousers as the wanton woman began to stride purposefully across the road. Lottie. That didn’t seem right. But with every step she took her beauty captivated him more and more, and by the time she reached him, winding her body sinuously against his like a cat, he could think of nothing other than—
“Oi!”
The shout rang out from the streets that had been empty before, but now funneled toward them a group of men—half a dozen, maybe more—who marched with purpose and malice. They carried sticks, and knives, and exuded menace in their stony faces.
The girl—Lottie? Though that still didn’t feel right—seemed to melt away, and he was alone, dithering, not knowing whether to run or protest his innocence of whatever crime he was sure the men suspected of him. But it was too late; they closed the gap and grabbed him roughly, one of them with a bald head and stinking breath putting his meaty face against his and sliding a smooth stick under his chin.
“Name?” demanded the man.
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“A likely fucking story. You’re not from Whitechapel, that’s for sure.”
“Is it him, Henry?” asked another as they began to haul him through the slush and dirt, gripping his arms and dragging him along the street until it opened out into a tight square lit by gas lamps.
“Are you him?” said Henry.
“Who?”
“Jack the fucking Ripper, that’s who.”
Then he noticed the lampposts, and what was hanging from them. At first he thought they were sacks, or tangled rags. It was only when he felt a rough ring of rope slid over his head that he recognized them for what they were: bodies, suspended from the arched iron.
“I’m not … I’m not…,” he began, but Henry slapped him, hard.
“Don’t fucking matter. You’re on the street when you’ve no right to be.” Gideon grinned savagely as they began to lead him toward the nearest post, and he finally began to fight. “Better safe than sorry, eh?”
Lizzie Strutter’s boardinghouse was situated in Walden Street, a well-appointed Whitechapel slum. Well-appointed because it was a stone’s throw from the Lord Clyde public house on one side and the Wycliffe Congregational Chapel on the other—one a source of customers and the other a supply of girls, fallen women who threw themselves upon the mercy of the church and, when God was found wanting for the provision of clothing, money, and food, made their way down to Lizzie Strutter’s to seek gainful employment.
Not that there was much in the normal way of work occurring this grim Sunday afternoon, though Lizzie Strutter reflected that she had no one to blame but herself. Still, a stand was a stand; she’d organized a strike of all the whores in Whitechapel, and that meant no business for her girls, whether on their backs or on their knees. They were in quite jolly spirits about it at the moment—after all, which of them actually
wanted
those sweating, stinking, rotten-toothed hulks thrusting and grinding on top of them?—but the strike was only a day old. When the novelty wore off, and the money stopped coming in, then she might have a problem keeping them reined in, especially the streetwalkers and the other madams who had tacitly agreed to the action.
By then, though, they might have caught Jack the Ripper. And Lizzie Strutter would be the toast of the East End. And the girls could get back to work, earning some honest coin.
Lizzie considered her reflection in the cracked mirror in her boudoir. There were those—like that rat-faced inspector at the Commercial Road police station—who would laugh at that, honest coin. But was there a purer and more honest transaction than that which occurred between her girls and their johns? A fixed price for a fuck. Everybody knew what they were getting; no one was disappointed. Could the costermongers on Tottenham Court Road or the fancy shops in Oxford Street say the same?
She called it a boudoir, but that was just her little joke, of course. Lizzie’s room was as dark and damp and cockroach infested as the rest of them, her best sheets gray and tattered, her worst ones grimy-black and torn. But she had a lock on the door, a pot to piss in, and the fearful regard of half of the East End. And, underneath her bed, by the chamber pot, a loose floorboard beneath which was hidden the immoral earnings of her girls. Lizzie Strutter’s escape route. Because one day she was going to make enough to leave this behind, raise her situation, and have a proper boudoir, with red silk sheets and thick drapes, a mirror that wasn’t mottled and spiderwebbed with cracks, and gas lamps rather than candles—perhaps even electrification!
Lizzie Strutter stared at herself in the mirror as she tied her dry hair up in a bun. She was past her best; that was true. Four babies—all dead now—and more abortions than she could count, thanks to old Mrs. Weatherbottom’s hot baths, gin, and knitting needles, had taken their toll on her body. Her titties were heading toward her belly and her cunt’d had more pricks than the round board they liked to throw iron darts at in that new game at the Lord Clyde. She didn’t turn tricks anymore—well, only for her favorites. She was thirty-eight, but she reckoned she could scrub up nicely, once her ship came in and she made it good up west.
There was a cautious tap at her door, and Lizzie shouted for whoever it was to come in. It was Rachel, a pretty little thing, save for that nasty scar down her left cheek. They liked that, some of the johns. Liked a girl who looked like she’d been in the wars. Got excited by some strange things, did some men.
“Mum?” asked Rachel, loitering in the doorway. Lizzie liked all her girls to call her that. One big, happy family at Lizzie Strutter’s bawdy house.
“What is it, girl?” she asked, turning away from the mirror, hefting up her drooping breasts in the tatty corset.
“Me and the girls, Mum, we was getting hungry. Wondered if we might go and get some pie and mash or something.”
Lizzie dug into her little purse and tossed a couple of coins at the girl. “Go over to Frank on Fordham Street,” she said. “And don’t go alone. I don’t want you getting attacked by some sex-crazed lunatic.”
Rachel nodded but didn’t leave. Lizzie said, “What’s up with you? I thought you was all starving down there.”
“Me and some of the other girls, Mum, we saw a girl down round Holly Street. Working.”
Lizzie frowned. She’d gotten the agreement of all the other madams on this. “One of Lushing Loo’s?” If anybody was going to break the accord, it was that gin-soaked old tart.
Rachel shook her head. “Don’t think so, Mum. Never seen her before. And she’s awful pretty. Like, really, really pretty. And she looks well fed and—”
Lizzie shot her a look. “You saying you ain’t?”
“Not that, Mum. It’s just … she’s
clean,
Mum. Got all her own teeth.”
Lizzie scratched her head, nipping a flea between the cracked nails of her thumb and forefinger. She’d threatened that she was going to get the rich sluts up west and north of the river involved in the strike, but hadn’t made any inroads yet. Why was some doxie slumming it in Whitechapel? If anything, she thought the johns would be pooling their pennies and heading out to the richer areas, where they wouldn’t even be able to afford the price of a wank.