City of Light (City of Mystery) (38 page)

“We’ll need a map,”
Tom said.  “Are any of the properties by chance by the river?”

9:38 AM

Rayley sat utterly
immobile, watching the rat from the corner of his eye.  It sidled up to the bit
of black potato he had left by the foot of his cot and ventured a nibble.  When
the first bite went down unchallenged, the beast seemed to gain a bit of
confidence. It began to eat more steadily, gradually losing any regard for his
surroundings.

A few minutes
earlier Rayley had overturned his mattress and used a fingernail to scrape a
few flecks of the dried regurgitation off the bottom.  These he had stirred
into the inch of water remaining in his tin cup.  Chloroform was both colorless
and odorless so there was no way of ascertaining if the flecks had managed to
transfer any lingering traces of the drug into the water.  Nonetheless, Rayley
gamely dipped a corner of his torn knickerbockers in the mixture and set back
on the bed to wait for the bit of potato to tempt one of his cellmates.  It had
not taken long. 

Rayley had timed his
attack to be swift and definitive – much like the movement which had so effectively
captured him.  With the rat absorbed in his meal, Rayley dropped the chloroform
soaked piece of his knickerbockers over him.   He thrashed wildly for a moment,
possibly because he was caught in the cloth.  But within seconds, all movement
stopped.

Aware that he was
holding his breath, Rayley reached down and pulled at the cloth.  The rat
rolled out, falling to the floor with a gentle thud where it remained,
glassy-eyed, paws toward the sky.

As an extra precaution,
he stomped it.  Then he scooped up the body, using his underwear as a
protective mitt.  As he did so he saw the label in the band of his
knickerbockers.  Morgan and Taylor, it read, the name of a men’s shop in London,
one located not far from the gates of the Yard.  Excellent.  A sign that the
sender of this particular message was English, not French.  Another clue. 

Rayley ripped the
label from the knickerbockers, bringing a bit of the waistband along with it.   He
removed his eyeglasses and paused for a moment, debating within himself if this
part was entirely necessary.  We was nearly blind without his spectacles and
had attempted no task without their assistance for years, not even a chore as
mild as a nighttime trip to the chamber pot in his rented room.  But a rat stuffed
in a glove then wrapped in London-bought knickers was in truth a rather obscure
message.  The addition of a piece of Rayley’s thick eyeglasses, no doubt the
aspect of his persona most people who knew him would mention first, would seal
the deal.

He took off the
eyeglasses and carefully pressed the lens on the left side.  It slipped from
the frame with a little pop and Rayley placed it in the glove first, where it
came to rest in the part where the fingers met the palm.  The rat was inserted
next and then the glove was tied closed with the strip of cloth bearing the
name Morgan and Taylor.  

He did not know how
many times he threw the bundle.  He had never been a good cricket player as a
lad and he was further hampered by the fact that, with one lens missing from
his spectacles, the whole world seemed to have slanted on its axis, leaving him
as strangely off balance as if he were standing on the deck of a ship.  His
first tosses fell embarrassingly short of the window and he was sure the lens
in the base of the glove must have shattered in one of these opening volleys. 
But he kept throwing, strangely energized by the fact he had a task, even one
as unlikely to meet with success as this one.  In time his aim improved.  The
ridiculous glove, bearing the perhaps even more ridiculous message, sailed
between the bars of the window, presumably to land somewhere on the river bank.
 

Rayley replaced his
mattress on the bed and settled down.  The sustained effort had exhausted him. 
He closed his eyes.  He may have dozed.  He would not have hazarded a guess to
how much time might have passed before the cell door opened and Gerard entered,
carrying the same things that Gerard’s presence always brought:  Water, food,
pain, and the assurance that somewhere in Paris, Isabel Blout was still alive.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

London

9:16 AM

Since Trevor and the
others were in Paris, Davy was no longer expected to take his midday meals in a
pub with the rest of the team.  Which also meant that he didn’t have to worry
about being called a mummy’s boy if he did not.  So for the last three days he
had been able to do what he would have preferred to do every working day - return
to his own house at noon to eat lunch with his mother.  She worried about the
late nights he’d been keeping lately and at breakfast this morning she had
promised to bake a kidney pie for lunch.  It was Davy’s favorite of her
customary dishes and one that she believed had an almost supernatural ability
to “boost the blood,” thereby returning the ill to robust health, or,  in this
case, at least compensating for  several missed nights of sleep.

She was a bit taken
aback to see him coming into the kitchen so early but, just as he’d expected,
the pie was already made and was warming in the oven.  Sitting down at the
scarred kitchen table where he had been spent so many happy hours, Davy found
himself doing what he had never done before, the very thing he had sworn to
never do.  He found himself telling his mother about his work.  He spared the
woman the details of the boy- girls, a world she likely would not have grasped
and which only could have the effect of upsetting her if she had, but when he
told her of the circumstances he’d found at 229 Cleveland Street, her wide brown
eyes had grown even wider.  Evelyn Mabrey was a kind-hearted woman, who had
raised four sons of her own, and the very thought of boys going without a
proper luncheon was enough to wound her to the core.

“You must bring
those lads some food,” she said.  “The pie is almost finished and there will be
apples in the bin.”

This was exactly the
response Davy had hoped for.  Ever since he had dispatched the courier with the
fingerprint, he had been thinking of ways to get more information about Henry
Newlove from Mickey and his fellow musketeers. Mickey had predicted that Charles
Hammond  had run to Paris with Tommy, but the news that Henry had crossed the
channel as well was an unexplored piece of the puzzle.

“Yes, please mum, pack
up a basket with whatever you can spare,” Davy said. “I need these boys to talk
and boys talk best on a full stomach, but don’t they?”

The woman nodded
decisively and within minutes Davy was on his way across town lugging a woven
basket crammed full of not only a kidney pie, but also jam, bread, apples, and
a rather illogical jar of pickles.   

When he arrived, the
place looked much the same, indicating that the bobbies had not yet arrived for
their own bit of tramping about.  The door was still nailed shut, with the same
warnings about the Queen and Scotland Yard posted proudly in the center, albeit
a bit faded with rain and time.  Despite the fact that boys were being employed
instead of girls, the Cleveland Street case was apparently being treated like
any other prostitution raid – a workaday and essentially victimless crime.  Davy
was relieved.  Over the last two days, his thoughts had returned several times
to Mickey and the other boys.  It was good to know that they had not been
tossed out of the only home they had. 

He walked to the
back yard and looked up at the roof. Still the cracked window, the webbing of
ropes across the roofline. “It’s Davy Mabrey,” he called out.  “Mickey, lad,
are you there?”

No response.  Davy
didn’t relish the idea of scaling the roof with a kidney pie in his hand.

Davy scrounged
around the scruffy yard until he found a pebble and sent it flying toward the
window.  He missed, but came close enough to ding the frame and then he yelled
again.   After a moment, a face cautiously came to the glass.   Not Mickey, but
Charlie Swinscow.

Their last meeting
had not been a pleasant one and when he spied Davy in the yard below him,
Charlie pulled back in alarm.

“I’m not here as
Scotland Yard,” Davy called up, a remark that wasn’t entirely true, but which
was true enough in the sense he meant no harm to the boys.  “I know you’re
living here and I don’t care,” he called again.  “Ask Mickey if you don’t
believe me.  I promise that no one is going to arrest any of you.”

A deafening silence.

“I have a kidney
pie,” Davy yelled.

Charlie’s face was
back with a comic swiftness, with the additional shapes of two more boys
visible behind him.

“Put it on the
stoop,” Charlie called back.

“Come on, boy,” Davy
said, his voice gone softer. “You know the world.  No one gets a kidney pie for
free.”

A consultation among
the shapes.

“What do you want?”
Charlie called down.

“Just information,”
Davy said.  “I want you to tell me everything you know about Henry Newlove.”

Within a few minutes
the window raised further and Charlie ventured out, followed in turn by two
more boys who crawled down the rope webbing, dropped to the roof of the back
stoop with practiced ease, and then one at a time swung down to the ground,
where Davy stood with the basket at his feet.

“Where’s Mickey?” he
asked.

Charlie shrugged.
“Working.”

“All right,” said
Davy.  “We’ll eat a bit and talk a bit.”  He uncovered the basket and gestured
for the boys to assume a circle, then plunked the pie in the middle and stood
back.

Within a minute, it
was gone.

“I have other things
too,” Davy said, when the three of them had downed the last piece of crust. 

“Mickey said you
gave him ale,” ventured one boy, looking out from an explosion of frizzled dark
hair.

“Well, I don’t have
ale with me now.  This basket comes from my mum, not from some tavern on the
corner.”

“I like ale,” the
boy said and the others nodded.

“Do you like bread
and jam?”

“What kind?”

Davy almost laughed.
They were an evasive and ill-mannered lot, but he rather admired the boy’s
efforts to negotiate, even in a situation where he clearly did not have the
advantage.

“Strawberry.  But I
need information about Newlove first.”

“I done told you,”
Charlie said, not with arrogance, but with a matter-of-fact quality.  “’e was
our teacher after the master wouldn’t let him work no more.”

“Why couldn’t he
work no more?  I mean anymore?” Davy asked.

“Got too old,”
Charlie said. “The other boy-girls stopped when they-“

“Wait a minute,”
Davy broke in.  “Henry Newlove started out as one of the boy-girls?”  Nods all
around. “When did Henry stop serving as a boy-girl and become your procurer and
your teacher?”

“Two years, Sir? 
Maybe three?”

 “Did Henry like
being in management or did he feel he was being passed over?”

The question seemed
to confuse Charlie, which wasn’t surprising.  Newlove had been his superior
both in the postal service and at Cleveland Street and likely wasn’t in the
habit of confiding any hurts or disappointments he may have felt to the younger
boys.

But ale boy caught
his meaning at once.  “No, Sir,” he said firmly.   “Master told him his
boy-girl days were up and he was chaffed about it.  Master said he was sixteen
and that’s too old and ‘Enry said to wait a minute, that Ian had been older
than sixteen. Older than….real old.”  He mutely appealed to his fellows for
support, raising his palms with a shrug.

“Ian stayed a boy-girl,”
said the third lad, whose freckles and coppery hair betrayed his Irish roots. 
“Ne’er switched over.  Ne’er started to show like Henry did.”

“Show?” Davy
asked.  

The boy raised a
fingertip to his top lip, as if to indicate a hint of a mustache and then
looked down at his hands.

“So you’re saying
that Henry became too masculine but this boy named Ian never did,” Davy
confirmed.

Nods all around the
circle.

“So,” Davy said,
“Henry was mad at Ian because Ian was able to stay a boy-girl longer than he
was?”

Charlie and the ale
boy exchanged a look and Charlie tried to explain.

“Wasn’t mad,
exactly, Sir, ‘e just kept complaining to the master that it wasn’t fair.”

“Did Henry hate
Ian?”

Now Charlie looked
genuinely shocked and Davy noted that his working class accent, like those of
the others, was getting stronger with each sentence.  Whatever middle class
patina the brothel had managed to cast over the boys had begun to wear off
during their weeks without supervision.  If they were left on their own in
Cleveland Street much longer, they would soon be down on all fours baying at
the moon.  “They were brothers, weren’t they?” Charlie said.  “Old ‘Enry might
have been mad and said that Ian got the better part but ‘e wouldn’t of hated
‘im.”

“Where is Ian now?”

“Gone,” Irish said
firmly.

“Gone where?” Davy
asked, flipping open the top of the basket as he asked the question.  The boys
looked on eagerly as he pulled out the loaf of bread and jar of jam.

“’e got married,”
Charlie said. “Years ago.  Proper posh.  That’s what ‘Enry wanted too, didn’t
he?”

Davy hesitated,
bread in hand.  It was the last thing he had expected to hear. “Married? To a
woman?”

The boys looked at
him in pure puzzlement. 

“No money in that,
Sir, is there?” ale boy finally asked, his hand reaching toward the bread,
which Davy relinquished.  “No money for the master in that.”

“I see,” said Davy.
“And let me guess.  Before they came to London, Ian and Henry lived in
Manchester.”

The boys had begun
ripping apart the bread, their small grimy hands darting, curved fingers
scooping into the jam jar, nudging each other in their haste.  Davy upended the
basket and let the apples roll out onto the lawn, the lone jar of pickles toppling
out last.  Charlie paused and looked up, his face smeared with red jam, and
gave a quick nod.

Paris

10:02 AM

It is more taxing to
count to 7250 than one might guess.  In the four years she had known her, this
was also the longest Emma had ever known Geraldine to go without speaking.  The
older woman’s face was twisted in determination and the two of them walked
stoically down the riverbank arm in arm.  Emma knew that for a dedicated social
volunteer like Geraldine the sight of so much poverty – dwelling literally in
the shadows of a middle class neighborhood – would in itself be distracting,
but Geraldine stuck to her task.  They had agreed to count separately and to stop
when they got to 5000.  It had taken them nearly thirty minutes to reach this
milestone.  After looking about a bit, they found a small stone wall where
Geraldine might rest.

“How are you holding
up?” Emma asked, hoping she sounded casual, although she was actually quite
concerned.  Walking the sloping bank, with its mud and ruts, was an entirely
different matter than strolling down a sidewalk and Geraldine was flushed and
breathless from the effort.  Emma was beginning to think she truly should have
waited for Tom.  “Perhaps we might go back up to the street.  Look for a tea
room or some place you can properly rest before we resume.”

Geraldine shook her
head. “I’ll be fine, dear, just give me a minute.  It certainly reeks, doesn’t
it?”

She was right.  The
entire area around the river was musty and brackish but the air in this
particular point was overwhelmingly sour. 

“It smells like a
sewer,” Geraldine said.

“Probably because it
is one,” Emma said, peering over the stone wall where Geraldine was sitting. 
“Look, there’s a grate down there just behind you, releasing into the river. 
Careful,” she said, when Geraldine twisted to look over her shoulder.  “Heaven
knows, you don’t want to topple back.” 

Emma and Tom had not
seen it while floating in darkness the night before, but they must have passed
this point in the river, where a series of stone walls such as the one where
Geraldine rested outlined the entrance into the sewer.  The concrete mouth
gaped, large enough for a man to enter without stooping, and a steady trickle
of refuse washed from the tunnel into the river. Tom had said that city rivers
were fed by sewers rather than springs, but Emma hadn’t really understood what
he meant at the time.

“Horrid to consider
that they’ve built their little… houses, I suppose you’d say, that press right
up against it,” Geraldine murmured.  “I can’t imagine what it must smell like
in the summer.”

“The sewer is a
wall,” Emma said. “A strong one, made of concrete.  So thus they have a fair
start on their houses before they pick up the first hammer.”

“Yes, of course, but
the sanitation…and there are children.”

Emma nodded, but for
once she wasn’t thinking about the downtrodden, about children living in filth
or women turning to prostitution in an effort to feed those children, or even the
drunken, violent men who preyed on both.  “It’s dreadful, yes, but also the
perfect place to hide someone. This particular drain is too close to where the
bodies were found, but my guess is that there are several more places where
sewers empty into the Seine, and that one of them is about 2500 paces further
up the river.  Have you rested enough?  Shall we count down the final bit?”

But Geraldine was
staring at a woman passing before them, a woman who was evidently returning
from a hard night’s work and who managed to have a bit of both a stagger and a
swagger in her step.

“Emma,” Geraldine
said, her voice so low that Emma had to bend to hear her. “Do you find anything
odd in that girl?  Look at how she’s dressed.”

Emma considered the
woman.  She was well past forty and would only be called a girl by someone the
age of Geraldine.  Notably dirty, her hair arranged in an attempt at a chignon,
perhaps a style she had seen on a passing lady in the street and tried to copy,
with limited success.  But her clothes, just as Geraldine had suggested, did
not fit the picture at all.  They were dirty, true, but not nearly so much as
the rest of her, and her dress was lovely, or at least might have been in a
different context.  It was topped with a smartly-cut jacket, very much like one
Emma had seen in the dress shop the day before.

“Where did a street
woman get such clothing?”  Emma said aloud.

“Note the colors of her
outfit,” Geraldine said gently.

“Plum, purple,
pink.  Odd all together, but they do combine unlikely hues in Paris couture.  We
saw as much on the Rue de Monge yesterday, did we not?”   

Geraldine’s eyes
never left the woman, who had now stopped to talk to a man who appeared as
shaky on his feet as she was on hers.  “You’re missing the point, dear.  Aren’t
those the colors Rayley said Isabel was wearing on the morning they climbed the
tower?”      

“Yes.  Yes, you’re
right.  He described her outfit most specifically.  But that can’t be Isabel
Blout.”  Emma could think of no circumstances, including the most thorough of
scrubs, under which the woman standing before them might have ever been
declared the greatest beauty in London.

“Of course not,”
said Geraldine. “We haven’t found Isabel, but we may have found her clothes.”

“All that we’ve
found are clothes in the same colors that Rayley described,” Emma said quickly,
for if Trevor had been here, he would never have allowed them to get away with
such vaulting leaps of logic.  “There must be hundreds of such outfits walking
the streets of Paris.”

“Hundreds?”

“All right, not
hundreds. But more than one.  We must not jump to conclusions.”

“I’m not jumping to
conclusions,” Geraldine said patiently, as the woman in plum took the man’s arm
and began to walk with him toward the opening to the sewer. “I’m not coming to
any conclusion at all.  I’m merely pointing out that Isabel Blout is missing,
and now clothing that matches the description of one of her outfits has turned
up on a street woman.  What would Trevor say about that if he was here?  What
are the most logical of all possible explanations?”

“That Isabel has
been killed and someone has taken -“ Emma stopped herself.  “Oh, no, that’s not
it.  I quite see what you mean.  It’s just as it happened with me and Tom last
night.  Isabel escaped wearing beautiful and expensive clothing, which she knew
would make her stand out in this setting like a diamond in the mud.  So she has
traded them for another woman’s clothes.”  Emma was growing quite agitated with
optimism. “Oh Gerry, do you think she’ll talk to us?”

“Certainly. If she’s
paid to do so.”

“Of course, of course. 
I’m being nonsensical.” Emma leaned over the stone wall and peered into the
entrance to the sewer. “Dear God, they’ve totally disappeared.  How long do you
think they’ll be gone?”

“Not long, I should
think.”

“But it seems
they’ve actually walked into the mouth of the…good heavens, it’s ankle deep in
muck down there, how can they manage to…”

“I doubt they’re
lying down, dear.”

Emma slumped to the
stone wall beside Geraldine. “I’m such a dunce about these things.  No wonder
Trevor and Tom treat me like a child.”

“We must be logical,
not despairing,” Geraldine said, raising a crooked index finger in mimicry of a
stern schoolmarm.  “Let us concoct a plan.  First we shall wait for the girl to
conclude her business and then pay her for information.  Let me do this, dear,
and I shall start with offering just a franc or two.  It will do us no good to
flash about great wads of money in this distressing part of town.  We shall ask
her to tell us everything she can remember about the woman who gave her these
clothes and we shall ask her to describe, in infinite detail, what she herself
was wearing before the swap.  Thus we will be able to give Trevor not only the
news that Isabel is most likely hiding somewhere in the river district, but
what she might be wearing.”  Geraldine paused for breath.  “And, while the men
are rounding up Isabel, you and I shall walk the final 2500 steps and free dear
Rayley.  And then we shall all have tea.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR