The Solitary House (37 page)

By now the girl had started shivering uncontrollably. “State I were in by then, I didn’t care what ’e took as long as ’e left and didn’t come back. I burned everything ’e made me wear soon as I shut the door. Bastard pays well though, I’ll give ’im that. Coupl’a sovs if you’re lucky—but then again ’e ain’t got much choice. I couldn’t work for a week after. God knows what state that six-year-old was in when he’d done wiv ’er. Poor little cow.”

She lifted her head, defiant. “So now you know—who ’e is and what ’e done. So my question is—Will it ’elp? ’Elp find whoever it was did them terrible things to Liz?”

Her eyes were huge now in the half-light. Huge with fear and pleading.

“Men as high as him are hard to bring low,” answered Charles. “But if I can make him pay, I will, I promise you that. Lizzie was my friend too. I’m going to miss her.”

There must have been something in his voice at this, because the girl looked at him for a moment, then nodded and took a step back. Charles turned to go, but she wasn’t finished. Not quite.

“One more thing. It ain’t just what ’appened to Liz. One of the pimps was found in the street wiv ’is throat cut after a run-in wiv Cremorne, if that really is ’is name. ’E ain’t ’ad no trouble since—everyone’s too scared. So if it’s ’im you’re getting tangled up wiv, then watch yer back.”

Charles held up his bandaged hand. “I know. To my cost. But it’s not me you should be concerning yourself about.”

He slid a coin into her hand. It was gold, and he saw her eyes widen.

“Think again about that holiday, will you? And you know where to find me if—well, if you need to.”

Back out on the street Charles took a deep breath and let it out in raw gasps. There was a pain in his chest like a dead-weight. He knew—anyone in the police knew—that there were literally thousands of young girls being prostituted in London every night, as often as not by their own families, and in their own homes. And most of what Sir Julius Cremorne was doing was—in the strict sense of the term—perfectly legal, since the age of consent in 1850 was twelve, not sixteen, and as Maddox had already observed, the girls were doing it, most of them, of their own free will. All the same, even to someone as case-hardened as Charles, there was something particularly perverted, something pitilessly brutal, about a man who set his sights on children as young as six. And who did so in a way that could terrify even such a girl as this. Charles couldn’t imagine what Cremorne must have done to her, and yet he knew that her word alone was nowhere near enough to bring a viable case against the man, and none of it—yet—explained Tulkinghorn, or Boscawen, or Abigail Cass. But there
was
a link, somewhere, of that he was quite sure. He had only to find the flaw in the fabric, the treacherous loose thread, and wind it slowly backwards to its grim and hidden source.

So now perhaps you understand why, when we saw him at Jo’s funeral, there was a new hardness in his face that we have not seen before. And why, as even Bucket has now perceived, a flint and arid rage has settled on his soul.

And now we watch as he is taken up the stairs and through the Bow Street station-house, Wheeler at his side and a constable at his heels, and it is obvious that this seething anger has not abated one
jot. But once at the front desk, the sergeant seems rather more concerned to be ordering Bucket a carriage than finding the key to the cuffs on Charles’s wrists.

“You there,” the sergeant calls to Percy Walsh, who is nervously avoiding Charles’s eye and making it quite obvious thereby, to anyone who cares to look, that the two of them have met before. “Get your sorry arse outside and hail a hansom. Inspector Bucket has another appointment in Belgravia, and he won’t want to be kept waiting.”

Wheeler grins as Walsh shuffles unwillingly out into the freezing air. The weather has turned cold again, and the evening clouds are yellowish with unfallen snow.

“Poor old Walsh. He’s spent half his shift the last couple of days out in the street looking for cabs. Seems to me Bucket might just as well move in with bloody Sir Leicester Dedlock,
Baronet
, if he’s going to spend so much time there—”

The rather premature end to this sentence can be accounted for by the abrupt appearance of one of the persons referred to in it; in fact, the aforesaid Bucket rather prides himself on his ability to appear and disappear at will, in an almost supernatural manner. It may, indeed, be at the root of the Inspector’s otherwise unaccountable ability to know facts to which he has no right, and no other conceivable access. Wheeler’s face is red to the ears with embarrassment but Bucket affects not to notice, merely scouts about in his plethora of pockets for the key to the handcuffs. But when Charles turns to the desk sergeant to retrieve his coat and gun he finds the latter, at least, is not forthcoming. Seeing the look on his face, Bucket takes him aside.

“I’ve been mulling over what you said earlier, my lad. On the subject of bullets and such like, and whether or not the shot was fired up close. My interest has been piqued, that’s the truth of it, and when a man in my line of business finds himself in such a position it’s as well for him to follow his nose, that’s
my
view. And seeing as that’s the
case, I would like, with your agreement, to undertake a few little experiments of my own.”

There is a moment’s hesitation on Charles’s part, but Bucket reads the thought in his usual unerring and unsettling fashion. “Don’t you be afraid that this might turn back upon you. It’s all right as far as you’re concerned. It ain’t your gun I’m interested in, in so far as it belongs to
you
. Only as a comparison, if you take my meaning. I promise you, as a man and as a Detective, that you shall have the gun back in your hands tomorrow, and no more said about it. Now, that seems perfectly fair and reasonable to me, in the interests of justice and the solving of a crime. Don’t you see?”

What Charles sees, like so many before him, is that Bucket has inveigled him into an impossible position. He’s on the point of saying as much, when a movement by the door catches his eye and he looks up to see two other officers bringing in the trooper, just as he himself was brought in only a few short hours before. He’s about to start forwards when Bucket takes him by the arm and whispers softly in his ear.

“Now, my lad, just you be remembering your promise, and don’t be doing anything rash.”

“But—”

“Like I said, you will have to trust me. I knows what I’m doing, whether you believe that or not. So you pretend not to have seen the trooper there and come quietly along with me to the back door, there’s a good lad. And remember—as I said to you before, things may not always be as they first appear.”

Left to himself on the back steps, Charles reflects on those last words and on the number of times in the last few days he’s heard—or read—something similar. As a proposition, the idea that appearances can be deceptive is hardly radical, so why does it strike him so forcibly now? Why is he so convinced, suddenly, that there’s something
he’s missing? That for all his scientific theory and practical experience there’s a connexion somewhere that he’s overlooked? But as we already know, he thinks better when he’s walking, so it’s no surprise to see him turn up his collar and head purposefully down towards the Strand. It’s such a short step to Buckingham Street that he has little time to collect his thoughts, which are at best rather ragged after so little sleep. So much so that it’s only the swift intervention of two passers-by that saves him from being knocked down, as a large carriage careers to a halt outside the grand stucco-fronted town house that hosts one of London’s most exclusive gambling clubs. Charles is about to thank the two men who stepped forward to help him—one of them with a high forehead and slightly wild dark hair under his tall silk hat, the other plumper, bookish-looking, with small metal-rimmed glasses—when he realises he’s seen the carriage before. It’s the one he saw in Lincoln’s Inn Fields—the one that bears the arms of the black swan. He watches as a man comes out of the club and stands for a moment, gathering his cloak about him. It’s the man with the scarred hand—the same man Jacky Jackson described drinking and gambling with Cremorne at the Argyll Rooms, the same man Charles might have seen that day some two weeks ago, going into Tulkinghorn’s house, had he been looking—or lucky. But if chance deserted him then it’s on his side this time, for the man is suddenly seized with a dry hacking cough that forces him to stop under the gas-lights at the door, and when he puts his hand to his mouth you can see the red scar as clearly as if it were broad day. But in the time it takes Charles to register this—to make the link, and realise what it means—the man has moved swiftly down the steps and into his carriage, and the coachman is spurring the horses away. Charles looks back at the building. He knows the place well enough to be sure he will gain neither entry nor assistance there, but there is a source of information this man cannot conceal—one that, on the contrary, he is flaunting even now for all to see. Because even though the carriage has already turned into the Strand, Charles looked at it more closely this time, and has seen something he did not notice before. The arms
on the panelled door bear a small but unmistakable badge on the canton of the shield. And while he may not know the name of the man whose equipage this is, he knows exactly what is signified by such a
sinister hand appaumy Gules
. It’s the red hand of Ulster. The man is a baronet.

A
baronet
.

And while the ‘Sir’ of a baronet may look the same, and sound the same, as the ‘Sir’ of a knight, they are as dissimilar, as species, as a mythical unicorn and a Common Eland. Indeed why else should Bucket keep repeating the
Baronet
in Sir Leicester’s name, if not to emphasise the immeasurable distance between that great county family and those who may use the same designation before their name, but can lay claim to neither the same ancestral lands nor the same ancient lineage? And what was it Mrs O’Driscoll overheard Abigail Cass say? That a girl had been
cruelly used, and cruelly wronged
, and
all the noble rank and money in London would not be enough to conceal it
. Now as Charles is well aware, a mere baronet does not—on the most scrupulous technicality—actually qualify for the ranks of the nobility, but a woman like Abigail Cass is unlikely to have known that. What she
would
most definitely have known, on the other hand, is that despite the enormous fortune amassed by the Cremornes—rumoured to exceed even the Dedlocks’—there is an invisible but adamantine barrier impeding Sir Julius that not even an alliance with an earl will ever entirely do away: Unlike Sir Leicester, who owes the title before his name to nothing more than accident of birth, Sir Julius has earned his money in trade, and achieved his knighthood by dint of his own toil.

Charles is furious with himself for not realising it sooner but he sees it all too clearly now: The man Abigail Cass was talking about can’t have been Cremorne at all, but
someone else entirely
. Someone, it now seems clear, who not only knows Cremorne, but in all probability has the same tastes as Cremorne, the same secrets as Cremorne, and the same reasons as Cremorne to have those secrets silenced and suppressed. And who better to do so than that dusty old mausoleum
of all that is treacherous and compromising, Edward Tulkinghorn? Did Abigail Cass discover what they were so concerned to conceal and threaten to expose them? Was
that
why she had to die? And who are
they
anyway? Charles remembers—not before time—those four men he glimpsed in Tulkinghorn’s ante-chamber and realises with a jolt that it is quite possible Cremorne was among them. One of them certainly fitted the description Jacky Jackson gave of the stiff old man with grey hair seen in Sir Julius’s company at the Argyll Rooms. So does the same dark conspiracy envelop them all? And if that’s the case, who else is involved, and how long has it been going on? A host of questions suddenly, but for a man like Charles it may not be as difficult as it first appears to start unearthing some answers.

He covers the last few yards to Buckingham Street at a run, leaving his two good Samaritans looking down the road after him, denouncing his discourtesy and wondering at such an uncommon incident. But both of them being writers of some note, as well as friends, I would not be at all surprised to find one of them making good literary use of it one day or another.

As he races up the steps to the house Charles has only one thing on his mind. He knows exactly which case it’s in—exactly where he saw it last—so when he throws open the front door and starts clattering up the staircase he’s momentarily irritated to hear a sudden commotion coming from the kitchen. He stops, tempted to pretend he didn’t hear, but then Abel’s voice rises above the noise. Charles can’t remember the last time the old man lost his temper, and that alone makes him pause, turn, and go back down. When he gets to the kitchen, the first thing he sees is Molly standing at the stoneware sink, her back to him, and her head down; the next is Abel, who has Billy hard against the wall on the other side of the room, and one of his old gnarled fingers in the lad’s face.

“You should a known better, after all that Mr Charles said—”

“What’s going on here?” says Charles, rather more gruffly than perhaps he realises, because Abel starts and turns towards him, his face red.

“There’s nothing to concern ye ’sen about, Mr Charles,” he says quickly. “Nothing I cannae handle.”

Charles frowns. “What in God’s name does that mean? And where’s Mr Maddox?”

“He’s asleep in the drawing-room, Mr Charles,” says Abel. “He don’t know anything about it, and best we keep it that way.”

Charles looks at Abel, and then at the girl, who has not yet turned or raised her head. “Has something happened to Molly?” Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Billy shift and rounds on the lad in his turn, seizing him by his thin arm. “Did you touch her again, you little bastard? Don’t you remember what I told you last time—”