The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner (14 page)

“You might at least try to sound sincere, you dog!” she scolded. “And grateful. I sent Miss Hamilton your way. Where are my thanks for that?”

“I have just made a small remittance,” Morton replied, “with more to follow.”

“Oh, I see. Your favours have worth, but what of mine?”

“They are beyond price.”

Arabella smiled, fixing a bemused gaze on him. “It is lucky that you are a handsome rogue, Henry Morton, for otherwise I should never have taken up with anyone so common as a Bow Street Runner.”

Morton laughed. Their eyes met over the raised rims of their wineglasses, and Arabella's were dancing with amusement and affection. Yes, it did seem tonight was going to end more pleasantly.

Arabella's face turned suddenly serious. “She is an odd woman,” she said.

“Miss Hamilton?”

Arabella nodded distractedly. “Arthur said he thought her a person whom tragedy would visit again and again.”

“Yes,” Morton said, surprised by the rightness of this. “I had that sense. As though she is aware of it herself and only struggles on. She is so joyless. I thought it merely the recent events, but perhaps it is more.”

Arabella looked up at him. “Now, Henry, don't you go to rescuing her. You know where that leads….”

Morton grimaced and sipped his wine.

“Find out what you can of Glendinning's death, and then leave well enough alone.”

Morton nodded, only half listening. “Do you think she was wrong about him?—Glendinning? Was he dissolute? You know how well these London men hide such things from polite society. And from their families.”

She held out her glass and Morton poured more wine. “Yes, I suppose it's quite possible. One of the several things you shall have to find out. Who was Halbert Glendinning… and why did Louisa call him Richard?”

“Do you remember that verse I found in his pocket?”

Arabella shook her head. “It was not memorable.”

Morton went to his coat and dug out the scrap of paper. Returning to his chair, he read:

“ ‘It will find you soon enough,

The empty night after the day.

Brief and filled with sorrow,

Love will rise and slip away.’”

“‘
It
’?” Arabella said.

“Death, one might infer: ‘The empty night after the day.’ Does it not sound like a love affair gone bad?”

Arabella took the paper from his hand and pondered it a moment. “It is most certainly about the loss of love. ‘The empty night’ alludes to that as well.” She looked up at Morton. “I wonder if Arthur was wrong. He thought them about to announce their engagement. But what if the opposite was true?” She glanced at the verse again. “Did Louisa know how Glendinning felt?”

Morton shook his head. “I wonder. It is terribly despairing, isn't it? And think of what then occurred: He challenged the most feared duelist in London. It does look a bit suspicious, especially when you consider that Glendinning apparently had no skill with a pistol.”

Arabella put her glass down and gazed gravely at Morton. “Self-murder. That's what you're suggesting?”

Morton shrugged. “I don't know. But what if his love affair with Miss Hamilton had come to an end, or he felt it was about to?”

“But why was he in the Otter?”

“When dying to defend her honour failed—and remember he is of a romantic disposition—perhaps he'd learned he could procure poison at the Otter. Or meet someone there who could procure it for him.”

“Miss Hamilton is not paying you to learn this.”

Morton nodded. He left his chair and went to the open window where the slight breeze touched him. The street was very quiet. He felt a tension in the city, now, with Bonaparte returned to the continent. All of England seemed to be holding its breath. He thought of Wellington, and had a sudden image of the Duke bent over a map by lamplight. What a terrible weight of responsibility on one man's shoulders.

Arabella came and stood beside him.

“I have need of some assistance in this matter, I now see,” Morton said.

“Hmm.”

“There are a few people in proper society who might be more forthcoming if they were approached by someone with more subtlety than I could ever manage. Someone they greatly esteem and have no doubt long wished to meet.”

“Such a person would be difficult to find. And what
would such a helper's share of the four hundred pounds be, I wonder?”

“Madam!” Morton said. “The sort of person with access to the circles I speak of cares nothing for gain.”

A voice cried out in the darkened distance and they both leaned out, listening intently, but it was only a domestic dispute, not someone shouting news from France. A familiar male uneasiness stirred in Morton, as it had so many times before. Should he not be there, with the others? Facing what had to be faced? Yet here he lingered. Fine wine, fine food, a beautiful mistress. Comfort. Safety.

Perhaps Arabella sensed his mood, for she laid an arm gently over his shoulders, which few women were tall enough to do. For a few quiet moments they stood gazing out together. Then they turned and faced each other, slipping into the more familiar male-female embrace, Arabella's arms sliding luxuriously around his neck as his own encircled her shapely waist.

He started to speak. “I should be—”

But she silenced him with a kiss. Her breath was warm, faintly redolent of wine. “No,” she murmured, brushing her lips across his cheek and down over his bare throat. “You have your duties here. It comes for us all, as the poet said, and soon enough. We needn't go seeking it.” She pressed her face close to him a moment. “Soon enough,” she whispered.

N
ext morning Morton rose early and made
his way to Cartwright Square. Enquiries around the shabby neighbourhood led him to a ruinous rookery in a narrow passageway on the east side, just as Acton, the hackney driver, had said. Stepping gingerly to avoid the sewage that trickled in the gutter running down the center of the alley, Morton picked his way through the crowd of staring urchins and hollow-looking women who inhabited this miserable warren.

Here and there a figure sat on a stone step, head bent, lost entirely to the world, while others leaned out of the low windows, gazing at him with empty curiosity, staring blankly at the baton of office he carried in clear view in his hand, so that he needn't guard his pockets at every step.

Whenever Morton entered these parts of the city, he felt uneasy, almost at odds with himself. Part of him stiffened in resistance, as if against some kind of contagion, the contagion of poverty and social oblivion. He
felt a kind of anger at these people, with their silent misery, their fecklessness, their lack of hope. The criminals, who tried to seize what they wanted from life, were almost better. But he also couldn't help feeling a certain sympathy for the gutter-folk, even pity, and a sense of bafflement. Morton, too, had been born without fortune, but he had made something of his life.

“Here but for fortune,” he whispered.

He asked for the jarvey by name.

“Oh, aye, yer worship, Raff Akin dwelt here, he did. But he's off now, an' his wife and kinchins gone wif him.”

A little crowd had gathered round and was staring up at Morton. Their spokesman was an almost inconceivably dirty little male person with the face of a grotesque dwarf and an indeterminate age somewhere between six and sixty.

Morton wondered if Acton had really left or if this was a lie—merely the common suspicion of police. “Unfortunate; I had a small reward for him,” Morton said. “But he's gone, you tell me?”

“Oh, aye, yer worship; yesternight.”

“Where to?”

“Didn't say, yer worship” was the listless reply.

“Back to Yorkshire,” someone else volunteered. “That's where he hailed from, Raff did.”

Morton tapped his baton on his gloved palm, perplexed, hardly noticing that the ragged people around him watched this little movement as if fascinated.

“Why?” he mused, as much to himself as to them.

“Hardly any wonder, yer worship, what with horneys coming about for him,” suggested someone at the back of the crowd, and everyone nodded.

Morton reached into his pocket and took out a coin—
a silver one. “I mean no harm to Ralph Acton,” he told them. “I will give this to anyone who can lead me to him.”

He was offering enough for anyone hereabouts to give up a neighbour, but no one stepped forward. Acton, Morton guessed, was really gone.

He exchanged the coin for a few coppers, which he distributed randomly. The jarvey had not told all that he knew, but even so, it was a surprise to find the man had fled. Something had happened at the Otter—or Ralph Acton believed so. And whoever had been involved frightened Acton enough that he vacated the city, or at least Cartwright Square—not that it would likely have taken much to frighten the little driver. Whatever the truth, it made Glendinning's death more peculiar.

Nan had provided him with the temporary address of Halbert Glendinning's valet. The man, whose name was William Reddick, was staying at a cousin's tenement in Whitechapel as he searched for a new situation. In a cramped and stuffy little parlour also occupied by a toothless grandmother and several crawling children, he and Morton sat and talked.

“I am commissioned by a friend of Mr. Glendinning to look into his death,” Morton explained.

Reddick nodded expectantly.

“Can you tell me what happened with Mr. Glendinning that day? Did he speak of the duel?”

“No, sir. He said only that he would go out to an affair of honour in the morning—this was the night before—and he gave me orders as to what clothes he would wear.”

“Did he say why he would fight this duel?”

“No, sir, only what I said, and I didn't ask more. He was not one for explaining himself, Mr. Morton. He was a bit dark, was Mr. Glendinning.”

“And the day of the duel?”

“He had me wake him earlier than usual—much earlier—though I don't think he had slept much the night before. I'd heard him up pacing late into the night and then in the morning he were very pale, sir. I brought him his usual breakfast but he barely touched it. Drank his coffee, dressed very neat, and went out. Gave me five pound when he left and said I'd always been a good gentleman's gentleman. It were most affecting, sir. Most affecting…” Reddick paused to brush at his eyes with the back of his hand.

Henry Morton murmured that he was sure it was. And thought, did men with vile appetites awaken this kind of affection in their servants?

Reddick continued. “I fretted the morning away, sir, as you may imagine. Mr. Glendinning had not seemed at all confident when he left, you see. But at half eleven he returned. He were not at all happy looking, though, even if he were still alive. Indeed, sir, he looked more melancholy than when he had left. He gave me orders that he was not to be disturbed, and went directly up to his study. And he were very quiet up there, Mr. Morton. I thought he might have fallen asleep on the divan, as sometimes he did.

“Mr. Hamilton called in the early afternoon, but I told him my master was asleep and not to be disturbed. He asked after him, and then went on his way, saying only that he'd meet up with him at Lord Arthur's that evening. A little later I heard Mr. Glendinning up, pacing the floor. There were certain floorboards that
creaked tellingly. But he never came down, nor did he ring.

“Just shy of five, a boy appeared with a note. I took it up to my master and found him awake at his desk. He took the paper and I saw nothing more of him until he rang and had me draw a bath and lay out his clothes for Portman House later that night. He went out about nine or a little past, and that was all I ever knew until one of the servants from Lord Arthur's came by to say that… he was gone.” The man drew his hand over his face.

“Do you know whom the note was from? Did you see its contents?” Morton asked.

Reddick sighed deeply and shook his head.

“I don't suppose this note was left in his study?”

“I wouldn't know, sir. His family took all of his effects, so you must ask Sir William.”