The Hellfire Conspiracy bal-4 Read online

  I looked at Barker, knowing some connection had just occurred in his brain.

  “Blast!” he bellowed, shocking everyone in the room. He pulled a letter out of his pocket and opened it so quickly it ripped. It was Miacca’s last poem.

  “What is it?”

  “He’s toying with us.”

  “Sir!” the manager said, coming to our table. “I must ask you to modulate your voice or leave.”

  “Pay the man, lad,” my employer said, rising. “We’ve stayed here too long as it is.”

  I paid him and followed the Guv outside. “What is it?” I asked. “Show me.”

  “Look here,” he said. “‘I’m going on a killing spree.’ Do you see how the ‘a’ is out of place here. It’s too close to the word ‘on.’ Miacca is speaking of Ona Bellovich.”

  23

  “Ona Bellovich,” I repeated in horror. “But she’s a good child. Everyone at the charity says so.”

  “Not by Miacca’s standards, lad. She helped Gwendolyn DeVere escape and then sold her clothes. That would be enough to merit punishment in his book. We must go now. I just pray we are not too late.”

  We squeezed our way through the narrow alleys until we came into Green Street. There were few cabs in Bethnal Green at this hour, but neither was there any decorum to uphold. Barker turned and began to run. I could do no more than follow as best I could.

  We made our way to the tenement in Cheshire Street and plunged into it. The corridors were filled with loungers, most of them smoking or talking. Barker pushed his way through like a whaling ship breaking through Arctic ice. The Belloviches’ door was open. If I had any doubts the child was really gone, they fled now.

  Svetlana Bellovich was seated at the table with a look of stark tragedy on her face. Her kerchief was off, her black hair wild and uncombed. Within a few hours fear and grief had etched circles under her eyes, and yet there was a grace to her grief that I believe Hypatia DeVere had not possessed. Tears poured down her face, but she sat rigid in her chair with her hands in her lap.

  She looked up as Barker came toward her, and I wondered what he would do. He was not a comforting sort and always avoided emotion in others. He bent down and spoke quietly in her ear. After a moment, she rose from her chair and reached for him, clutching his lapels. In a shrill voice, she responded vehemently, and then my employer nodded and gently removed her hands. Then he turned, and the two of us quitted the room. I had misgivings about what had just occurred, but waited until we were in the street again before I voiced them.

  “You promised her, didn’t you, sir?” I asked. “You promised you would bring her daughter back alive.”

  “Aye,” came the impassive response.

  “But you’ve warned me about making promises I was not sure I could keep.”

  “I know, lad,” he said.

  “You cannot guarantee the girl’s safety,” I pointed out.

  “No,” he replied, swinging his cane as he walked. “I can only pledge that I will give my life, if necessary, to stop that monster from harming her. I have but one assurance.”

  “What is that?”

  “His pattern. At one point, he keeps his victims drugged. It’s likely they undergo some sort of ceremony or ritual. Then I suspect almost immediately afterward, his lusts become uncontrollable and he violates and murders them. Finally, sated, he clips off an extremity as a souvenir and discards the bodies, probably in a different place each time. He might even carry them in a sack. A young woman is generally small and light. Since the bodies have always been found on a Saturday or Sunday, the ceremony is probably held on a Friday, and this is but Thursday.”

  “Are we going anywhere in particular, sir?” I asked.

  “Of course. We’re not walking for our health. I am looking for the last place Miacca was seen. The child, Esme, said she met him in Collingwood Street.”

  We headed south in the direction of the Jew’s burial ground. Slowly, we inspected each alley. Most were doorless or featured lodgings that were too well lit or cheerful for Miacca’s purposes, that is, until we came to the foot of the street, not far from Mile End Road, and found one that was narrow, dark, and crooked, perfect for the archfiend’s purposes. We passed into it and walked until we came to a heavily shadowed doorway with an overhanging eave. Barker stepped forward and seized a few boards that had been fastened across the door, rending them off the frame.

  “They were screwed in,” he said, lighting a vesta, “and the brass heads are still new.”

  “No tarnish on them,” I noted, shaking my head.

  He blew out the match and dug in his waistcoat pocket. He generally kept a skeleton key there.

  “Keep an eye out,” he ordered, going to work on the lock.

  “You’re sure this is his lair?” I asked.

  “It’s either his, or it’s deserted, if these boards are any indication.”

  He worked on the lock for a few minutes before the door opened soundlessly in his hands.

  “The hinges have been oiled,” my employer pointed out. “People don’t generally oil doors in the East End, unless they don’t want something to be heard.” The Guv pushed the door open with his arm against it, while I leaned over his shoulder. I got a glimpse of a dingy room with faded wallpaper and a few pieces of furniture. Then there was a loud pop, and suddenly my hat was knocked from my head.

  “Damn and blast,” Barker growled. “You’re bleeding.”

  My knees started to quiver, and the top of my head suddenly went cold. I could feel the blood seeping through my hair.

  “Who-” I began, but Barker held up his hand.

  “Nobody. It is a device, set to go off when the door was opened. Come here.”

  Barker pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and laid it atop my head. “Hold it there,” he told me. “’Tis but a scratch. It is fortunate you’re such a wee lad, but then the bullet wasn’t meant for you, but Swanson or me. It would have caught either of us square in the face.”

  I was only half listening, because I was staring at the engine that had tried to part my hair. It stood in the middle of the room, a vertical mass of planks and rusty gears, which cradled an old hunting rifle, still smoking and filling the room with the scent of gunpowder. There was a long dowel of wood projecting from it, with a tennis ball at the end. When the edge of the door struck the ball, it set off the mechanism that pulled the trigger. Miacca had planned to blow off the head of whoever first walked in here, and it was very nearly my own.

  “My hat,” I said, bending down with one hand while clamping the Guv’s handkerchief to my head. I picked up my ruined bowler. There was a neat hole almost dead center in the front and back. I didn’t know if it was training or providence that had told Barker to push the door open while standing at the side of the doorway, but I felt a perfect donkey standing there in the middle like a target. Had I been five foot six instead of five foot four, I’d have been lying half out in the alleyway, on my way to the hereafter.

  “Bolted,” Barker said, looking about. The room contained a metal bedstead with rumpled sheets, a table and two chairs, the infernal contraption, and a fireplace. There was a layer of fine soot over everything, not much, just enough to say Miacca had not been here in days. Naturally, our eyes were on the mechanism.

  “Ingenious,” Barker said, moving the dowel back and forth. It had a metal cup at the end of a rod, with a piston-like piece attached to the trigger. They looked like manufactured parts, the kind one could find at an ironmonger’s. It was clever, in an evil, malignant sort of way.

  “Sir,” I said. Something had caught my eye. A meerschaum pipe lay upon the table. Not Barker’s traveling pipe, which was now wrapped in the sealskin pouch in his pocket, but the new one from his office smoking cabinet, carved into a likeness of General Gordon. The only other item on the table was a box of vestas. Miacca was telling us he could go wherever he wished and that the instrument that just blew off my hat could as easily have blown off the head of our clerk, J
enkins. Barker snatched the pipe from the desk and thrust it into his pocket.

  While Barker inspected the room, I dared lift his handkerchief from the top of my head. There is always something horrifying about looking at one’s own blood, scarlet against the white of a handkerchief. The Guv was right, however; I had merely been nicked and the blood had already begun to coagulate. I had cheated death once more.

  “Here’s where the jar lay,” my employer said, pointing toward a spot on the mantel. Then he crossed to the bed and drew back the sheets. “A child has been kept here, by the looks of it. I assume it was Miss DeVere.”

  “Was she sensible at any time, do you suppose, sir?” I asked. “She was drugged with chloroform or laudanum.”

  “It cannot be easy to regulate drugs in an unwilling child. I am afraid she must have been awake for part of her time here.”

  “Poor girl,” I said. There are times when words are so feeble as to be meaningless.

  Barker lifted the mattress and began to look under it.

  “What are you doing, sir?”

  “I’m looking for a note. It is not like Miacca to be silent.”

  He crossed to the door and closed it. As he predicted, there was the message, written in chalk across the back.

  The man who ducks my ventilation

  Deserves to read this small notation,

  Whichever bloodhound he might be.

  But I still say you can’t catch me.

  The girl I trussed up on this bed

  Is surely now long gone and dead.

  And you, the brave and valiant tracker,

  Are far too late.

  Mr. Miacca.

  Barker fished in his waistcoat pocket and retrieved a small whistle with the word “Metropolitan” engraved across it and handed it to me.

  “Lad, step into Collingwood Street and blow this until a constable arrives.”

  I did and was almost dizzy by the time a constable finally pushed his way through the gathering crowd. Nothing attracts attention like the screech of a policeman’s whistle: the street was choked with people asking me questions about my head. The Guv had to bar the door with his arm, or the room would have filled with the curious and the bored, looking for something to excite their interest.

  It took about half an hour for Inspector Swanson to arrive. He posted two constables outside to keep the rabble at bay and closed the door behind him.

  Donald Swanson was a smart fellow, a “canny” sort, in Barker’s terms, and not a talkative man. He silently inspected the contraption in the center of the room, the message left by the killer, and the bed where Miacca’s victims once lay. He even noticed the ring of dust on the mantelpiece. Then, he examined the table, without touching the vestas. Finally, he looked at the layer of soot on the table. “What was here?” he asked.

  The Guv pulled the pipe from his pocket and showed it to him.

  “Gordon,” the inspector noted. “I would wash that in spirits if I were you. I wonder if it’s possible to poison a pipe.” He got down on his knees and very gently opened the box of matches, as if it would explode or contained a deadly spider, but no. It was only vestas.

  “Shall we compare notes now?” my employer asked.

  Swanson shook his head. “No, but if you wish, when this is all over, I’ll buy you a dram at the Red Lion and tell you as much as I dare.”

  “I couldn’t live with the conditions you work under, Donald,” Barker said, “not for all the tea in Canton.”

  “That’s all right,” Swanson said with a grim smile. “We would not have you.”

  Barker grinned as well.

  “Clear out, now,” the inspector said, pointing his thumb over his shoulder toward the door. “I’d ask you how you came to find this wretched lair, but you’d only want to trade it for a glimpse of the cards in my hand. We’ll talk later.”

  “It’s just as well,” came the reply. “We have an urgent appointment.”

  We left Swanson in charge of the room and headed back toward Green Street, pushing our way through the crowded alleyway.

  “What urgent appointment do we have?” I asked, wondering if he had made it up to make us sound more professional.

  “That bullet must have rattled you worse than I thought,” Barker said. “Have you forgotten you shall be stepping into the ring with Palmister Clay in an hour?”

  24

  We arrived in Cheney street in scarce enough time to begin the match. I was still anxious to conclude my personal matter against Clay, but the combination of Ona Bellovich’s disappearance and the bullet that had grazed me was giving me a headache. I wanted to get the fight over with once and for all, even if I took a drubbing.

  The German Gymnasium in King’s Cross was the cleanest athletic building I had ever seen. Where was that stale odor of male perspiration, wet towels, and old leather one always found in such establishments? Leave it to the Germans to replace it with bleach and carbolic.

  Our fight, I would even say our feud, was not publicized; but a number of men had come to see the match anyway, perhaps a result of Clay’s bragging. Though this was an establishment for amateurs and betting was forbidden, it was not difficult to spot the bet takers in the audience.

  In the dressing room, I found that Barker had provided an outfit for me: a pair of silk drawers in black, a white cotton singlet, and a pair of rubber gymnasium shoes. Only the gloves were old.

  “The softer they are, the harder they’ll feel against Clay’s face when you put them there,” Barker explained.

  “I-I don’t know what to say. Thank you, sir.”

  Barker shrugged it off. Being thanked always made him uncomfortable. “We can’t have you in shabby togs. It makes the agency look second-rate.”

  I felt more confident once I’d changed. Looking at myself in a full-length mirror, I could say I looked like a boxer, if only a bantamweight. I was clean-limbed, with no fat on my frame; and almost two years of training under Barker had packed a layer of muscle across my arms and chest. I was in the best physical condition I had ever been, and I prayed it would be enough.

  Stepping into the ring, I began to warm up, trying to project an air of confidence. I wanted the anonymous men standing about to think I was a serious fighter, because if they were confident, perhaps it might rub off on me. Though it was far too late to say it, particularly after I’d wished so hard for this fight, I was beginning to have my doubts.

  Clay came in just then, looking as superior as ever. I noticed he’d put on a stone or two since I’d known him at university, and he showed signs of dissipation. Too many rich meals, late-night drinking bouts, and keeping up with the needs of two women told in his somewhat baggy eyes and slight paunch. I’d like to say we were evenly matched, but his arms were still much longer than mine, and his many supporters in the audience told me that he still boxed here.

  This was no prizefight and there was little fanfare once we entered the ring. The referee-a short, pugnacious-looking older man with side-whiskers and a truculent manner-called us together brusquely. He looked familiar, and then I realized why. Our referee was the Marquis of Queensberry himself, creator of the famous rules of boxing. He had to be a crony of Lord Hesketh, I wagered. I looked through the crowd and saw his lordship smoking a cigar at the back, speaking with a haughty fellow with curling hair and a patrician nose. The marquis told us he expected a fair fight, and we agreed and went to our corners. Cyrus Barker was in mine, I was glad to see, with a stool, a towel, and a bottle of water. He stood behind the post in his shirtsleeves, though he still looked dapper in his waistcoat. When I reached him, he turned me and whispered last-minute instructions.

  “Remember, lad, let him come to you. Change positions often, left to right. Stay on the balls of your feet, and when you hit, hit cleanly and put your shoulder behind it. Throw off any clinches. Go, and Godspeed.”

  At the bell, I dashed out of my corner. Clay took advantage of his longer reach early, jabbing first and following up with solid punche
s. I danced out of the way of most and caught him a jab once or twice. He gave me one full in the stomach; but in the next clinch, I caught him a good one in the ribs. We began to sweat though we were scarcely a minute into the fight.

  “I’ll see you in the gutter yet,” he muttered under his breath.

  “Only if you’re looking up,” I told him.

  At that moment, I would have given even odds, but I was being optimistic. He hooked me suddenly, catching me on the side of the chin, and I felt something give in the back of my head. I still battled it out, but I felt wobbly and there was a ringing in my ears.

  I switched positions, leading with my right fist, but I couldn’t remember all the things Barker had told me. I couldn’t possibly lose, I told myself as we pummeled each other with a flurry of ineffectual blows. It wouldn’t be fair or just. But as Barker has told me on numerous occasions, don’t expect fairness or justice on this side of the grave; that is what the other side is for.

  Clay kept poking me with his long stinging left, but it was slowing. I batted it out of the way several times; but whenever I stepped under it for a volley of my own, there was his right, quicker and more lethal, a coiled serpent waiting to strike.

  The bell sounded, and Barker shoved the stool between the ropes. I could hardly believe that only three minutes had sped by. I’d gotten in only one really clean punch, yet I had fared well enough. However, when I moved my head, I felt as if there were gravel in the base of my skull. All the while, Barker was issuing more instructions in my ear.

  “Don’t telegraph your punches, lad. He can see them coming. Fire them off cleanly. When you get under his guard, hook him or give him the uppercut.”

  “His right, sir,” I said, gasping for air. “It’s good.”

  “Redirect it, then. Take it on the shoulder or the elbow. Then go for his stomach. Keep dancing; you’ll soon wear him out. You’re in better condition than he. Don’t swallow this.”