Death at Hungerford Stairs

PRAISE FOR

THE MURDER OF PATIENCE BROOKE:
CHARLES DICKENS & SUPERINTENDENT JONES INVESTIGATE

‘This is a well-written and engaging novel …The pages keep turning, and the evocation of foggy Victorian London is excellent'

The Historical Novel Society

‘[An] aspect of this novel that adds to its enjoyability is the fact that it feels very much like a traditional gaslight mystery, with footsteps in the fog, an unseen person with sinister voice singing a well-known tune … Put all these elements together and it creates just the right amount of suspense'

5
-Star Review, Crime Fiction Lover

‘From the first few pages you are captured by this fast paced, descriptively brilliant yarn, which sweeps its reader away into the tangible world of dark, damp, foul-smelling Victorian London'

5
-Star Review, Dickens the Sleuth, Amazon

For Tom

‘Tom was the idol of her life … always to be believed in, and
done homage to with the whole faith of her heart.'

David Copperfield

‘… he had quite exceptionally bright and active eyes that were always darting about like brilliant birds to pick up all the tiny things of which he made more, perhaps, than any other novelist has done; for he was a sort of poetical Sherlock Holmes.'

Charles Dickens
by G.K. Chesterton

Do ye hear the children weeping, O my brothers,

Ere the sorrow comes with years? …

And may well the children weep before you!

They are weary ere they run;

They have never seen the sunshine, nor the glory

Which is brighter than the sun.

They know the grief of man, without its wisdom;

They sink in man's despair, without its calm, –

Are slaves without the liberty in Christdom, –

Are martyrs, by the pang without the palm, –

Are worn as if with age, yet unretrievingly

The harvest of its memories cannot reap, –

Are orphans of the earthly love and heavenly.

Let them weep! let them weep!

From
The Cry of the Children
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

He remembered the rats. And how they had swarmed in the cellars of the crazy, tumbledown warehouse; sometimes in the grey shadows he had seen hundreds of eyes glittering like little red lamps, and then there would be a skittering of claws as they vanished down holes and into corners. Mary Weller, a servant at his childhood home in Chatham, had scared him half to death with the tale of Chips, a sailor and his talking rat which had gnawed at the seaman's ship and Chips, too. He had been haunted by them, imagining them curled up on his pillow, nestling in his blankets, darting across his counterpane. When he worked at the blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, he had hurried up the rotten staircase, trembling, in case they pursued him. He was twelve then, at work, pasting the labels on to the bottles of blacking, twelve hours a day for six shillings a week. He had never forgotten the dark, wainscoted room, the damp, rotting floors, the dirt and decay, and the heave and slap of the river at the walls when the black tide was in.

Now, Charles Dickens stood outside for the first time in twenty-five years. He had avoided the place as if it were plague-stricken. He could hardly believe it was still standing. The ancient wooden balcony had almost slipped into the thick mud into which his feet were sinking and the poles that had once held up the balcony leaned at drunken angles. The upper storeys tottered over the lower and half the roof had fallen in, though there was still a casement window open in the part that remained. It looked like a wrecked ship, though, he wagered, the rats would not have deserted it. The door had gone but rotting planks had been put in its place. They had been pushed aside to make an entrance. By this, a police constable stood waiting for them.

Dickens and Superintendent Sam Jones had received the message from Inspector Harker of Scotland Yard. From Bow Street they had hurried along the Strand, turning through the market which stank of rotting fish. A few traders still lingered, but by this time of a late, cold afternoon in November most business had been done, and the boats which had brought the sprats, the herrings and the oysters, packed close in their barrels, had sailed away. The two men had gone down Hungerford Stairs to the bank where the brown river formed scummy pools in the muddy sludge, and from where Brunel's pedestrian bridge crossed to the south bank. They had not spoken. The message had been about a dead boy found in the old blacking factory. And Dickens and Jones were looking for a boy – a boy gone missing. And a dog. Inspector Harker had known of their search which was why he had sent word. A dog had barked, and a man, alerted by the noise, had gone into the old warehouse where he had found the boy. That was all they knew.

Superintendent Jones looked at Dickens's strained face, knowing what he was thinking. He saw his lips moving and knew that he was saying, ‘Let it not be Scrap. Let it not be Poll.' The same desperate words fluttered on his own lips. Dickens glanced at him as if he had heard them though Sam had not spoken. Each man's fearful eyes told the same story.

As they turned at the bottom of the steps, Dickens was face to face with the detested place. He would not have come here were it not for Scrap, the boy they knew. Inspector Harker, thickset and full of purpose, came through the black hole and crossed to meet them.

‘The dog,' said Dickens. His urgency was so intense that he could not even greet the inspector. ‘Is the dog here?'

‘No,' said Inspector Harker. ‘It had disappeared when the man who found the body came out.'

It could not be Poll then. Poll would not leave Scrap. She would have stayed with him. Dickens thought this, but Sam Jones had to ask.

‘Did he say anything about it?'

‘Just a dog – a little thing, he said.' Dickens looked at Sam. Poll was a little dog. He looked along the bank. Was she there? Cowering and afraid. But there was no dog to be seen.

Inspector Harker followed his gaze and turned back to Sam. ‘I'm sorry. The man heard it barking by the hole there and thought someone might be trapped inside the building – what's left of it – so he went to have a look. The body is just inside – dumped there, I think.'

‘We'll have a look then. Charles, do you want to stay outside?' Jones thought it might be too much for him – if it were Scrap, perhaps it was better that he did not see.

Dickens shook his head. ‘I'll come.' He had to go in and see for himself. He could not wait here in the bleak November afternoon. He followed Inspector Harker and the superintendent, their boots squelching in the ooze. He felt a leaden dread lodged in his stomach. Sam Jones glanced back at him, his grey eyes troubled, but he said nothing.

They pushed through the old doorway to find themselves standing on wet, sticky earth in the murky light of the old room. The floor had rotted away, but Dickens saw in the gloom that the staircase still went up to the room where he had laboured over his pots of blacking. There was a scuttling on the stairs and an old grey-headed rat, as large as a cat, sat and stared at him as if to say, ‘I know you – what do you do here?' It was gone in a second, the gristly tail vanishing through a crack.

Inspector Harker held up his bull's-eye lamp to show the boy lying face down in the dirt. He was encased in grey mud which had dried, almost set round the corpse as if he were in his coffin already. The face was buried in the mud; you could see how the hair had stiffened into spikes, and how the clothes had crumpled into dried ripples, not fabric but moulded clay. The arms were stretched above the head, the fingers splayed out, sculpted from mud. He did not look real. The impression was that he had been thrown there, so much waste from the river. Flotsam, thought Dickens, a piece of cargo from the wrecked ship. Let it not be Scrap.

The constable turned him over and the mud flaked away, revealing the thin lad who was real, had been alive, had been a boy, had played with his dog, perhaps, on the oozing shore, had grinned at its antics, had wondered at the passing ships, had dreamed, had longed for something. And now he was dead, here in this place that still smelt of the grave. They stared at the poor, gaunt corpse with its dirty, mud-encrusted face, as yet unrecognisable. Sam's lips moved – a prayer for the dead. He always did that. His faith was quiet and private yet, whenever a corpse was found, he murmured his prayer, this tall, strong man in the face of whose authority hardened wretches quailed.

The constable wiped the boy's face with surprising tenderness, using the handkerchief which the superintendent had handed him for the purpose. Dickens, who did not know that he had been holding his breath, exhaled, and felt as if his heart had restarted. It was not Scrap.

‘No,' said Sam. ‘He is not the boy we are looking for. We'll leave him to you, but let us know, will you, what you find out. He might belong to someone – someone, somewhere might be waiting for news of their boy.'

‘I will,' said Inspector Harker. ‘It looks as though he might have drowned – see the mud and weed round his mouth. The clothes are dried out, but they look to be stained with water. I wonder if someone found him on the bank, couldn't be bothered to report it, and just dumped him in here. It happens – too often. Apart from you looking for a boy, I've had no reports of another one missing. But then, he might not belong to anyone. The man who found him didn't know him. There are always boys about, mudlarks, scraping a living here. Who knows?'

‘Aye,' said the superintendent, ‘I know – too many lost boys, and girls, too.'

Dickens and Jones turned to go. The superintendent began to push his way through the hole. Dickens made to follow but his attention was caught by some chalk markings on the wall.

‘Sam, look here.'

The superintendent backed in again and, raising his lamp, regarded the marks. They formed a picture, the figure of a man, the face of which seemed to be a mask of some sort. He was reminded of a childhood horror – a figure chalked upon a door with a great long mouth and hands like two bunches of carrots. This was not the same at all, but he felt a similar revulsion, remembering how he had run from that figure. The mask here seemed so curiously out of place. Dickens thought there was something sinister about it – what was it doing here, and who had scrawled it? Was it, he wondered, some kind of message connected to the dead boy?

‘It might be worth noting this,' Sam said to Inspector Harker, ‘though of course, it might mean nothing at all.'