The Hellfire Conspiracy Read online

  There was nothing green in Green Street where the Charity Organization Society stood, and no birds twittered overhead, though underfoot thin and molting pigeons pecked in vain among the rubble of shattered paving stones for sustenance. All the people I saw here had what Shakespeare called a lean and hungry look. It was a natural place for charity work but not one I would have let a wife of mine go into, and certainly not a child. The Charity Organization was housed in an old mansion that must have seen many guises over the years. Now a hoarding stood over the door that announced its name to those who could read. There were a handful of idlers in front of the building, reminding me of a Doré illustration I’d seen of the East End, all charcoal-gray beggars and rubbish-strewn streets.

  Once inside, we passed through a hall containing more idlers, into what had once been a ballroom but which now contained several desks. There was an attempt at gentility here, with a recent coat of paint on the old walls and vases of flowers here and there, but the atmosphere was depressing all the same. A pair of young women listened to a litany of troubles from a stout applicant for aid, while a doctor investigated the state of a few juveniles’ throats.

  “I beg your pardon,” Barker said, stepping up to the two young women. “Might we see Mrs. DeVere?”

  “Are you the police?” one of them asked sharply. She was an attractive girl with black hair, dark eyes, and olive skin. Her companion, I noted, was equally pretty.

  “We are private enquiry agents engaged by Major DeVere,” my employer supplied, doffing his hat.

  Both women were small, and Barker towered over them. He is a capital fellow and one cannot fault his tailor, but though he was doing his best to diminish himself in this largely feminine environment, his appearance was formidable.

  “I will take you to the director,” the girl said. “Please come this way.”

  It seemed natural to me that the organization must have a man at the helm to steer it, but as is often the case, I was wrong. The director, it turned out, was also a woman.

  “Thank you, Miss Levy,” she said, after our guide had entered and explained our appearance. “I am Octavia Hill. Won’t you gentlemen come in?”

  “Cyrus Barker at your service, madam. This is my assistant, Thomas Llewelyn.”

  Miss Hill was a handsome woman in her late thirties, who might have sat for a Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary. There was nothing at all about her in the way of artifice, and I doubted that anything could ruffle her air of solemn grace and caring. She seemed capable of attracting idealistic young maidens to her work.

  “I am glad you have come,” she said. “I have been trying to comfort Mrs. DeVere.”

  Hypatia DeVere was in great distress, as one would expect. She sat in a chair in front of Miss Hill’s desk, bowed down. Much of her blond hair had escaped its chignon, her eyelids had swollen from much weeping, and her slender neck had given up all effort to hold her head erect. There is a point beyond which one cares nothing about one’s appearance before strangers, and she had flown past it earlier that day.

  “Hypatia, these gentlemen have come to speak to you.”

  “Police?” the woman asked huskily, wiping a tear from the end of her sharp nose with a handkerchief and pushing a strand of hair out of her face before giving up on it.

  “We are private enquiry agents, madam, hired by your husband.”

  “Trevor hired you,” she murmured almost to herself. She cleared her throat and then looked at us through pale, watery eyes. “Was he…well? He was agitated when he left.”

  Barker must have thought it best to reassure her. “He was quite well, yes. He explained the situation to us, secured our services, and returned to his duties.”

  “Good,” she said, hiccupping into her handkerchief. “I’m sorry. This has been rather a strain. But surely Gwendolyn has just wandered off, and this fear of white slavers is merely a f-fantasy.”

  “It is imperative that we start searching immediately,” Barker said. “Does anyone recall young Miss DeVere speaking to anyone today, either a girl or boy her own age or an adult?”

  “No, sir,” Miss Hill stated firmly. “Gwendolyn preferred to read or amuse herself than to play with the local children.”

  “Has she ever wandered off by herself?”

  “Once with a girl named Ona,” her mother said shakily.

  “Can you tell me what Miss DeVere was wearing?”

  “A blue sailor dress with a white collar. It has a stripe around it, very pretty. She was wearing black hose today and high boots of brown patent leather. I wanted her to wear the black boots, but she said they pinched.”

  “Thank you, ladies. We must not tarry any further.” Barker looked over at the distraught woman. “Do you have a photograph of your daughter that I might borrow, Mrs. DeVere?”

  “Not here, I’m afraid.”

  “What about Mrs. Carrick?” Miss Hill asked. She turned to my employer. “We have a volunteer whose husband is a photographer. I believe Gwendolyn was in the photograph he took of us all just weeks ago.”

  “It would be most helpful to see what she looks like,” Barker said.

  Octavia Hill came around her desk and opened the door. “Rose!” she called.

  I hoped it was Miss Levy’s attractive friend, and felt a jolt of disappointment when a plain-looking, dowdily dressed woman answered the summons.

  “Rose, these gentlemen are detectives searching for Miss DeVere. Do you recall if Gwendolyn was in the photograph that your husband took a few weeks ago?”

  I looked at Barker. It was on the tip of his tongue to correct her, preferring to be called a private enquiry agent. He swallowed it back.

  “I believe she was, miss. I developed it myself.”

  “Would it be possible for you to take Mr. Barker and his assistant to the emporium to get the photograph? It would aid them in their search.”

  “Certainly, Miss Hill. Come this way, gentlemen.”

  The woman turned and led us between the rows of desks in the outer room. She had narrow shoulders and, though she was in her twenties, already had the look of a matron. I passed some of the more winning young ladies on my way out and suppressed a sigh.

  “Do you really think the girl has been taken?” she asked as we stepped outside.

  “Don’t you?” Barker countered.

  “I couldn’t say. To tell the truth, I don’t know her very well. I’m in and out all day. I heard she run—er, ran away once or twice.”

  “Mrs. DeVere said she had merely gone exploring.”

  “Did she?” Mrs. Carrick asked. Her dark brows gave the remark a skeptical look. “She dotes on the girl. Turn here, gentlemen.”

  We turned north on Cambridge Road, passing the Bethnal Green Church.

  “You think she might have run away?” Barker pursued.

  “I didn’t say that, did I?”

  Rose Carrick was of average height for a woman, five foot one or two, but she kept both Barker and myself working hard to keep up with her. Barker let out those long limbs of his, while I bobbed along behind.

  “What exactly do you do at the organization, Mrs. Carrick?”

  “I deliver charity cases to their destination. It’s not easy work. Sometimes it is old men that are going barmy to the lunatic asylum or boys and girls to orphanages. I’ve been kicked so many times I have permanent bruises on my ankles. But I get them there every time.” She stopped abruptly. “The emporium is up near Victoria Park. Come!”

  She doubled her speed again, if such a thing were possible. I began to feel sorry for the barmy old men she escorted. Finally, in the Old Ford Road, she turned and led us to her husband’s shop.

  CARRICK’S FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHIC EMPORIUM was stated on the placard above a set of bow windows. The windows advertised PORTRAITS, POSTAL CARDS, AND CARTES DE VISITE on one side and REASONABLE RATES upon the other. It was a cut above the other shops in the street and looked relatively new. Mrs. Carrick opened the door for us and stepped inside, the bell on the
door ringing as we entered.

  “Stephen!” she called.

  From within the next room a baby cried. I thought perhaps it was their child, but a harried-looking man in his shirtsleeves stepped out from behind a beaded curtain.

  “Hallo, darling. I’ve got a real wailer this time. Can’t get the little chap to calm down.” He raised his brows when he saw us. “Who are these gentlemen?”

  “They are detectives. You remember Mrs. DeVere? Her daughter, Gwendolyn, has gone missing.”

  “Good heavens. Is it…slavers?”

  “We don’t know, Mr. Carrick,” my employer answered. “We have only just been hired. Cyrus Barker, at your service.”

  “Stephen,” his wife said, “was the girl in the picture you took of the C.O.S.?”

  “I think so. It should be in the display book there.”

  There was a large counter in the middle of the room, and Mrs. Carrick moved behind it and began flipping through an album of photographs.

  The wailing in the next room reached a crescendo.

  Carrick and his wife looked through the photographs, leaving me to form impressions. I had seldom seen a more mismatched couple than the Carricks. Next to her plainness, her husband was a regular Apollo. He could have been a stage actor, so well built and favored as he was, while his wife looked like a charwoman beside him. Yet they genuinely seemed to care for each other. It left me wondering over the vagaries of love and attraction.

  “Here it is!” Rose Carrick cried triumphantly, pulling a photograph from the fittings of the album. “And she’s right there, as I said she was.”

  Gwendolyn DeVere was at the end of a large group of people standing formally in front of the Charity Organization Society. Miss Hill was in the center, flanked by Miss Levy and her friend on one side, and Mrs. DeVere and Mrs. Carrick on the other. They were accompanied by wealthy-looking men and women whom I took to be donors. There, at the far right end, looking forlorn and out of place, was the missing girl, Gwendolyn DeVere.

  She was a pretty little thing. Her father had described her hair as blond, and she was Nordic looking, like her mother. Her shoulders were slumped and her face solemn, leaving me to hope that the parents had better photographs of the girl at home. I myself would have hated to leave this one image to posterity.

  “How well do you gentlemen know Bethnal Green?” Carrick asked.

  “I have had several cases that brought me here but none that centered in the area. I don’t believe my assistant has been here at all.”

  “Perhaps I could give you a brief tour of the area.”

  “But you’re photographing a child,” Mrs. Carrick objected.

  “Why don’t you take him, dear? I’m afraid I can’t do a thing with him. You know you’re much better with babies than I.” Carrick kissed her on the cheek and reached for a bowler hat and a stick on the stand by the door. “Thanks, love. Won’t be a tick.”

  He herded us out the front door and lit a cigarette once he was in the street, sucking in the smoke like it was fresh air. The child inside was still in full cry.

  “Liberation,” Carrick pronounced. “Come this way, gentlemen.”

  3

  “SHALL WE HEAD NORTH, SIRS? BETHNAL GREEN is roughly triangular, bordered on the north by Victoria Park, on the south by the Mile End Workhouse, and on the west by the old Jewish burial ground. The gasworks is only a few streets away from here.”

  Carrick led us up Cambridge Road. “This district was in its heyday at the end of the last century, when the famous boxer Daniel Mendoza lived here,” he said between puffs. “This used to be the center of the silk-weaving trade. Things went to seed after trade with China opened up, and the old place has become rather run-down. Land is cheap here, and plenty of young families have moved to the Green. The Tower Hamlets Council is making an attempt at renovation. It seemed the perfect place to open a photographic emporium.”

  “You strike me as an educated man, Mr. Carrick,” Barker noted. “You’ve had some time at university.”

  “Not much gets by you, does it, Mr. Barker? Yes, I had a year or two at Christ Church in the seventies, under Dodgson. It was he that awakened my interest in photography. My father thought it all a waste of time, however, and cut me off. I’ve been fending for myself ever since.”

  I could understand Carrick’s tale of woe. If anything, my own was even worse. Oxford could be an uncommonly hard place if one does not conform to its standards.

  Carrick pointed out the market gardens, the Jewish cemetery, and other sites around the area. Finally, we made our way back up to the Old Ford Road and the emporium.

  “How shall you gentlemen proceed?” Carrick asked. “I mean, if Miss DeVere really has been taken by someone.”

  “For now,” Barker said, “we are like spies in the land of Canaan, getting the lay of the land.”

  “Then I hope, sirs, for both your sakes, that you do not encounter any giants. Best of luck finding little Miss DeVere.”

  “Impressions?” Barker asked, after Carrick had returned to his emporium.

  “They’re an unusual couple,” I stated, “but then, Bethnal Green probably doesn’t have the sort of standards Kensington does. His story is not much different from my own.”

  “Who is Dodgson?”

  “He’s a mathematician and an author. I’ve heard he has an interest in photography.”

  “What sort of thing has he written?”

  “You’re jesting, aren’t you? He writes as Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland?”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a book for children.”

  “There you are, then. I haven’t any.”

  “What shall we do now, sir?” I asked, hoping he would suggest a café or tearoom. I needed a restorative and a good rest before venturing out again.

  “We’ve searched the perimeter, now we must search all the streets in between.”

  “That will take hours,” I said.

  “Yes, it will. We’d best not dawdle.”

  “What are we looking for, sir?” I dared ask. “She’s not going to suddenly appear in the street; and if she’s been taken by someone, they’ve got her drugged or tied up and hidden away somewhere.”

  “I’ll admit that walking these streets tonight is more for the DeVeres’ benefit than my own. It lets them see that we are working. I can as easily think and plan while I am walking as I can in my office, so no harm is being done.”

  “But harm is being done. I’m sorry sir. This is just so maddening. I can’t believe someone would actually take and sell a child into slavery. There has to be a special place in hell for such people.”

  “There is,” Barker said. “Matthew eighteen-six says, ‘But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea.’”

  “How do you know she hasn’t been spirited out of the area already?”

  “I don’t,” he admitted. “It is an arbitrary boundary, but one must look somewhere.”

  “For all we know, she could be on her way to Brighton or Dover.”

  Barker frowned and then thumped me soundly on the shoulder. “Ha! Good lad. Come.”

  He led me into Brady Street, where he stopped in front of a telegraph office.

  “I’m going to send a telegram or two. You stay outside and keep your eyes open for a street arab. If you find one, tell him I want Soho Vic in the Green. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He went in, and I leaned against the doorframe, out of sight of passersby. I’d never caught a street boy before, but it couldn’t be too different from catching trout barehanded as I had as a child in the rivers of Gwent. All one had to do was be inconspicuous, pounce at the last moment, and hold on for dear life.

  It took ten minutes before I spotted one. I saw him running along, watching citizens for a bulging pocket or a hanging chain. He passed me unknowingly, and I stepped out and s
eized him fast by the back of his oversized waistcoat.

  “Take your bleedin’ mitts off, you toff,” he demanded, struggling in my grip.

  “Barker sent me,” I said, letting him go. He ran around the corner, but a moment later he came back again.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” he asked.

  He was a villainous-looking tyke, malnourished as they all were, his hair untouched by any brush.

  “The Guv wants Soho Vic. He’ll be in the Green all night. A girl’s gone missing.”

  “’E’s in the West End. Gimme cab fare and I’ll get ’im ’ere that much sooner.”

  “No cabman would give you a ride, and if he would, you’d still pocket it and hop one from the back for free. The district might be green, but I’m not.”

  He muttered a string of foul words before catching the coin I tossed.

  “There’s a bob for your troubles. Now off with you. You’re wasting daylight.”

  Five minutes later, we were walking down Whitechapel Road, heading toward the heart of the quarter. Barker stepped into a doorway, filled and lit his pipe, and then we pressed on.

  “Bethnal Green,” he explained as we walked, “is the factory of the East End. The product of that factory is children. You’ll seldom find a family here that does not have more than three of them. The average age of marriage here is sixteen, and young girls are not encouraged to live at home after that and drain the family’s resources. After marriage, the new husband goes off to grind his life away in one of the local factories, while his bride stays in their new flat and scrimps every penny. A child is expected once a year for the next five years. For the successful families, the young boys grow up and learn a trade or help support the family and the next generation of girls are out the door at sixteen. All members of the family shall work together for one another’s benefit, so that the parents can enjoy some degree of comfort in their later years. As for the unsuccessful, which includes the majority, there are coal-and-blanket charities like the C.O.S. and the Salvation Army. These families shatter and each goes his own way. The average age of death here is the lowest in London.”