The Darkest Walk of Crime (24 page)

His meagre education had taught
Mendick that women were not intended for the harsh existence of a policeman or
a soldier. Women were to be kept secure, worshipped from afar and, while
eminently capable of running a household and caring for any number of children,
did not possess a man’s capability to deal with life’s more severe tasks.
Experience, however, had shown him that this perception was untrue. Emma had
been his equal in life, and more recently he had seen Rachel Scott intrigue
with the best of them, become involved with the nastier side of politics and
even participate in the murder of Ogden and his own attempted demise. Mendick
realised that Jennifer Ogden had continued to stare directly at him.

“What are you going to do about
these Chartists, Mr Mendick?”

The change of tack took him by
surprise, but he answered with the truth.

“Tell Scotland Yard all that I
know,” he said.

“I will help,” Mrs Ogden told
him. “These people killed my husband, such as he was, and now you say they are
planning to kill more husbands, sons, daughters, wives.” She stopped and
swallowed hard before continuing. “Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” Mendick
agreed.

“But if you get your
intelligence to Scotland Yard, they might stop that from happening?”

“That’s right,” he nodded.

“So you get yourself down to
that telegraph office right away, Mr Mendick, and send off your information.”
Mrs Ogden folded her arms, seemingly pleased that she had solved his problem so
easily.

“I can’t use the telegraph,”
Mendick told her quietly. “The Chartists have infiltrated the system, and it
was Mr Ogden himself who told me they were also in the local police force.”

“I see,” Mrs Ogden nodded. “So
what
do
you intend to do?”

“I must travel to London and
deliver the information in person.”

“I’m coming with you,” Mrs Ogden
told him. “When do we leave?”

Mendick stared at her. He had
not anticipated this turn of events and certainly did not want her slowing him
down.

“I’ll leave as soon as I can . .
.”

“Good. We can catch the train.”
She spoke as if the decision had already been made.

“All my money is in
Chartertown.”

“I’ve got some money,” Mrs Ogden
said at once. “I’ll pay for both tickets. Ogden would approve.”

“Mrs Ogden.” Mendick wondered
how he could dissuade her painlessly. “I would be faster on my own. This
information must get through.”

“Nonsense.” Mrs Ogden dismissed
his argument with a single word. “The train travels at the same speed however
many passengers are on board, and I have the money. Either we go together, or
you find some other method of transport.”

Looking at those brittle eyes
above a face so determined, Mendick knew he had only one card left to play.

“It might be dangerous,” he said
weakly.

“So was living with Ogden,” Mrs
Ogden told him, unsmiling. “Let’s leave as soon as we can. I hate this place
and all that it stands for. I want a new life with no ties to the past. Now. I
want to go now.” She stood up, and for the first time Mendick saw there were
tears in her eyes.

“All right, Mrs Ogden. Let’s go
together.”

He remembered how he had felt
when Emma died and how he had thrown himself into his job, working every hour
he could and not caring about time or anything at all. Mrs Ogden was
unfortunate—she did not have such an avenue of escape.

“We’ll do that.” Mrs Ogden put
her hand on his arm, shaking her head. “But call me Jennifer and I will call
you James. I don’t ever want to be known as Mrs Ogden again.”

“As you wish,” he said and
looked away when Jennifer made no effort to stop the tears sliding down her
cheeks.

“There’s Ogden’s second best
frock coat,” Mrs Ogden said, “and his top hat. You’ll look most respectable in
that.”

As they stood at the front door
of the cottage, with Jennifer in a green coat long enough to hide her ankles
and with a pretty feathered bonnet on her head, she looked back inside.

“And there we have it,” she
said. “A house full of memories, the grave of my dog and the physical remains
of ten years of marriage and shared existence.” When she looked at him, her
eyes were bitter. “Do you understand what that means, James? Ten years of your
life? Ten years . . . and now it is gone.”

Mendick said nothing. He put his
hand on her shoulder, but she shook it away.

“I don’t want sympathy, James.”
Her voice was as edged as he had ever heard. “Look inside my home, James. Can
you see anything missing?”

“Missing?” He shook his head.
“I’m sorry Jennifer, but I don’t understand the question.”

“No? Then you certainly don’t
understand, James, do you?” For a second he thought she was about to break into
tears again, but she recovered. “Step back, please.”

He did so, wondering, as she lit
a candle and allowed the flame to play on the curtains by the window.

“Careful!”

“No!” She pushed him back. “Let
it burn. Let it all burn down.” Her voice was acid but the tears on her cheeks
soft and round. “I am burning my bridges. This is ended now, and I won’t be
back. Take me away, James; take me far, far away.”

As they walked down the lane,
smoke was coiling from the cottage and orange flames lit up the sky, but
Jennifer squared her shoulders and did not look back.

*

“There is no direct train to London,” Mendick said. “We’ll have to travel to Birmingham first and change at the station there. Wrap up well; there's no glass in the third class windows.”

“I’m not travelling third class
with all the riff-raff.” There was finality in Jennifer’s tone. “It is far too
long a journey to bounce around on a hard seat in a filthy coach like a cow or
a sheep going to market, and I’m not wasting money on foolish profligacy by
travelling first, so second it will be.” Her smile took him by surprise. “It’s
all right, James, I have a capital head for figures.”

“I’m sure that you have,” he
agreed, moving closer, but Jennifer stepped back.

“And James,” she fixed him with
a stern look, “I’m quite sure we'll be travelling through tunnels, and I warn
you I am wearing my longest hat pin, so I want no shenanigans in the dark, if
you please.”

“There will be no shenanigans,”
Mendick promised. He wondered if she was joking until he saw the pin thrust
through her hat. “You are quite safe with me.”

“Oh yes,” she told him,
thrusting forwards her chin. “I am quite safe.”

Manchester London Road Station
had opened only six years before and was the main departure point for London
and all other points south. The station was busy, with crowds of businessmen in
frock coats and tall hats pulling at their whiskers as they discussed the
latest downturn in trade, a few prosperous-looking gentlemen looking for the
first class compartments and a mass of obviously third class passengers talking
in hopeless optimism of the jobs they would find in the next town or maybe the
one after that.

It still seemed a marvel to
Mendick that within the last decade these railways had spread across the country,
slicing the time it took to travel from one end to the other. In his youth it
had been quicker to travel by steamboat rather than use even the fastest of the
stagecoaches, and far cheaper. Now iron rails linked the whole country together
and new branch lines and stations were being opened every year.  The thought of
all this progress jeopardised by revolution and Britain dragged down to the
level of some petty European state did not bear thinking about.

“Well, now we are on our way.”
He had purchased their tickets from a clerk who studied his face suspiciously
before accepting his money. He edged close to Jennifer, who moved aside so that
not even their clothes touched. Sighing at his inability to understand this
woman, he watched the crowd instead.

“Let’s hope this train is on
time.” Jennifer seemed intent on keeping her distance. “I want to see this
Inspector Field of yours.”

Mendick frowned. “I’m not sure
if Inspector Field will actually see you.”

“He’d better . . .” Jennifer
stopped, grabbing hold of his arm. “James! Look at that! On the wall.”

The poster was neatly made: an
accurate sketch of his face and a short but bold caption beneath:

This man is James
Mendick, and he is an enemy of the Charter.
 
He is dedicated to
destroying the hopes of the working classes of this country. If you see him,
ensure that you shout out his name.

“God in heaven!”

Mendick stared for a second,
wondering at the ingenuity of the Chartists, and then he remembered the
notebook with the picture of each Scotland Yard detective. There was obviously
a talented artist within the Chartist ranks, and once the picture had been
drawn, it would be a simple matter to print off a poster, possibly on the same
press that produced their
Morning Star
newspaper. He cursed; no wonder
the ticket clerk had stared at him.

“And there’s more.” Jennifer
dropped her hand from his arm. “See?”

There were other posters
scattered around the station. On walls, on pillars, even on the outside of the
ticket booth – each poster showing Mendick’s face, and each portraying him as
an enemy of the Charter.

“Keep your head down,” Jennifer
advised, “and pull down that hat. Thank God that it’s too big for you.”

He did so, immediately feeling
that every eye in London Road Station was fixed exclusively on him.

“Maybe there are no Chartists
here,” Jennifer said hopefully, “and we can just slip on to the train and keep
quiet until we leave Manchester.”

“Please God that you are right,”
Mendick said, glancing around him. He shook his head and rammed the top hat
even further down as he felt his stomach heave. “There’s Josiah Armstrong
himself, in the red cap, and the monster at his side is his guard dog.”

Armstrong leaned against a
pillar at the entrance to their platform, with his revolutionary red cap on his
head, a stubby pipe in his mouth and his arms folded across his scrawny chest.
He was surveying the crowds much in the fashion of a police officer at a
fairground, checking and identifying each person before passing on to the next.
Beside him Peter looked like some circus exhibit—the strong man of Manchester—more
than a head taller than Armstrong, twice as broad in the shoulder and with the
lowering expression of a stag in the rutting season.

“They must have guessed I’d go
straight for the train,” Mendick said, hating himself for underestimating the
Chartists’ intelligence. “And they’ll probably have people at every station in
the area too.”

He imagined Monaghan alerting
the entire Chartist network; there could be men, some of whom he may even have
trained himself, standing beneath posters all across the North. The thought was
frightening, a private army within the nation, scores, maybe hundreds of
potential revolutionaries looking for him.

“We’ll have to think of
something else.”

“So that’s Armstrong.” Jennifer
stepped clear for a better view until Mendick pulled her back. “Let me go. I
want to see the man who murdered Nathaniel.”

“It’s not safe,” Mendick
protested as she shook him off irritably, and he could only watch as she walked
forward, her eyes never leaving Armstrong’s face.

“God, Jennifer, don’t do
anything foolish,” he muttered, torn between the need to leave the station as
quickly as he could and the desire to follow her to ensure she was not hurt.

Jennifer stopped a yard short of
Armstrong and spoke a few words. Trying to merge into the anonymity of the
crowd, Mendick watched as they spoke for a few moments, and then Jennifer
nodded and walked slowly back to him. She was shaking, and he saw that all the
colour had fled from her face.

“I wanted to speak to him, just
once,” she said, with a tremble in her voice.

Mendick nodded; he could
empathise with her feelings. After the death of Emma he had wanted to hurt
people, anybody, just to express his bitterness.

“That was hard for you,” he
said.

She nodded. “Take me away from
here.” Her voice was taut, and she could not hold his eyes. “Ogden could be
brutal, James, but I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to pure evil as I was
just now.”

Mendick agreed although he could
not have put his feelings into words. Before Armstrong had been transported he
had been known as a vociferous supporter of the Charter, a noted orator and a
firebrand, but his experiences in Van Diemen’s Land had embittered him. Genuine
concern for his fellow workers had warped into a crusade against every factory
owner, and he was prepared to use any method to achieve his objective.  In a
sense, the authorities had created Armstrong from their brutality, and
Armstrong intended to unleash the whirlwind of his revenge on London.

“We’ll have to stop him,”
Jennifer said quietly.

“We will,” Mendick agreed. “But
not by catching a train at this station.”

Several men were reading the
posters when Mendick hurried from the station and back into the bustle of Manchester’s
streets. He saw the same pinched faces as before, but now they seemed sinister,
as if every eye was watching him and every man’s hand was turned against him. Manchester
had appeared a place of languishing industry, hectic anticipation and desperate
poverty, but now it seemed to host a nest of watchful Radicals, a fermenting
broth of revolution and physical Chartism; he had to leave as quickly as he
could.

“Where can we go?” Jennifer
clung to his arm. Speaking with Armstrong had drained her more than Mendick had
realised. “Could we catch the stage coach?” She raised her eyebrows. “We’d be
in London in a day or so.”

“I doubt they’ll have forgotten
about that,” he said. “I suspect there will be Chartists all over the damned
place.”