“You mean you
“It’s that lead pipe that commands my attention, sir. Newgate Prison or a lead pipe – Morton’s Fork, and no doubt about it. It would be the end of Miles Slocumb, with Jenny and the little ones faring for themselves.”
“You have my word that they’ll be cared for and given every opportunity, Mr. Slocumb. They’ll never in life have to fare for themselves unless they choose to.”
Slocumb nodded his head slowly, contemplating this. “Right enough,” he said finally. “Something like a month back Merton did a bit of business with the Doctor – conveyance of foreign contraband – I don’t know what, and don’t want to know. Merton wasn’t keen on any of this because of that lead pipe, if you see what I mean. But he agreed, for it was the Doctor asking it of him, which was persuasive. And there was the chance of profit in it, come to that. It was me who hired a steam launch to bring the goods into Gravesend, although it never arrived, and it was me who hired the crew. Merton arranged the rest.”
“You say that the launch never returned with its cargo? Did Narbondo complain to Merton?”
“He wanted recompense. He had paid a quarter of what was due for the product in advance, but he asked for double his money back, for the trouble invested and the time wasted. The launch was a dead loss pending the insurance. But a claim against the insurance would mean Merton’s revealing details of the cargo, including a bill of lading, which he couldn’t provide. Merton will pay up in both directions if he don’t want trouble.”
“And the crew? How many men?”
“Six altogether, including the lighterman and the ship’s boy, so to call him – fireman, really.”
“
“Two corpses were found, sir, the pilot and one of the crew, pulled out of the river near the Old Steps by dredgers. I was told they’d come up with the tide, three or four days dead. Both of them shot dead, not drowned.”
“Betrayed by the others, perhaps, who stole the cargo?”
“That don’t seem likely, sir. They put into Margate on the return, and it seems strange that they’d cut this sort of caper so close to home instead of the middle of the Channel at midnight. It’s a rough patch of river along the marshes, pirates still being common enough. The long and the short of it is that Harry Merton should have chosen a longer spoon, if you take my meaning. Now the Doctor has him backed into a corner, as does the owner of the launch, and no way out except to empty his purse. Wisdom often comes at a price. Better pounds sterling than pounds of flesh, though.”
“Indeed,” said St. Ives, the entire story resonating in his mind, although it suggested nothing specific. “I’ll just ask you for the Doctor’s whereabouts now, as close as is sensible, and then I’ll leave you to your hats.”
“Spitalfields, below Flower and Dean,” Slocumb said without hesitation. “Do you know the area?”
“Nothing aside from its reputation.”
“It’s worse than that, sir. Take my word. It’s tolerably close quarters, with the houses packed together, and each crowded with thieves and cutthroats. I didn’t meet the Doctor at his lodgings, but near enough, in Angel Alley, above Whitechapel Road. We struck a bargain and he disappeared for a nonce while I stood waiting, although I had my eyes wide open for villainy. There was a courtyard with a broad stone wall across it, with an open arch and another courtyard beyond. I’m main certain that he went into a shabby-looking entryway under that arch, although when he found me again he came from farther off, out of George Yard, I’d warrant, which confounded me. I advise you to take several stalwart friends with you when you seek him out. By midnight, mark my words, the populace will be far gone in drink, and won’t scruple to murder you, no matter how many of you there are. They’ll set the dogs on you, which don’t care a fig about a bullet. And as for the Doctor, he won’t be found unless he wants to be found, and by then you’ll be in it up to the withers, and no way out.”
SEVENTEEN
Merton’s Rarities, Thames Street, near London Bridge, was empty of trade and at first appeared to be closed for the evening except for a lamp glowing in the back of the shop, in what would be Merton’s workroom. Merton had been a purchasing clerk in the British Museum in his youth, and had established connections to various purveyors of antiquities and curiosities that were out of the regular line. Hence the clientele of Rarities was an eccentric lot. The shop, standing near the London Docks, was much frequented by sailors returning to port from exotic lands, looking to sell rather than buy, knowing that Merton would pay ready money for a well-preserved whale’s eyeball or stuffed ape, or better yet for something particularly out of the ordinary – clean human skeletons, well assembled, fetching upwards of sixty pounds these days and worth half that at wholesale.
St. Ives had heard that Merton did a fair trade in severed heads bought dearly from Paris, fresh from the guillotine and preserved in double-refined spirits. He rapped on the door now, loudly, peering inside past the skeleton of some variety of great ape – almost certainly an orangutan. To St. Ives’s certain knowledge, Merton was a cartographer, a forger, and a dealer in rare books as well as curiosities – in short, a good man to know under the right circumstances. A year ago Merton had passed on a valuable map to St. Ives, who had profited from it, and St. Ives was loathe to do him an injury now, or to confront him with anything having the odor of extortion. But time was short. Within the shop, all was silent and still. Behind them, a fog rose from the Thames, drifting inland.
If Merton weren’t in, then it was even odds he was either at home with Mrs. Merton eating an early supper, or else in his second shop open only to “the trade” – several subterranean rooms accessible from the back of a haberdashery on Threadneedle Street, where he kept certain species of merchandise well hidden. It was there that he was visited by hangman’s assistants trundling Saratoga trunks. St. Ives was determined to run him to ground tonight, and time was ticking away. He and Hasbro were meeting with two “stalwart friends” in a little over an hour at Billson’s Half Toad Inn in Smithfield, for supper and a council of war. The business at Slocumb’s had taken longer than he had hoped, but it had borne fruit, although whether pears or apples he couldn’t yet say.
Merton didn’t travel; he had told St. Ives proudly that he had never in his life been out of Greater London, except on occasion to visit various aunts and uncles in the Midlands, which scarcely counted as travel. The world came to
No sooner than he conceived the idea, however, than a shadow passed in front of the lamp in the workroom and remained there. St. Ives could just make out the half circle of Merton’s round face, looking out at them. The rest of him stood mostly hidden by the edge of the door. St. Ives waved at him, and after another moment Merton apparently identified them. He hurried forward, unlocked the door, and ushered them in, wiping his hands on a piece of towel and gesturing toward a little grouping of stuffed chairs and deal tables in an alcove in the front of the shop. His sparse hair stood up nearly straight on his head, a slump-shouldered man of perhaps fifty years. He wore thick spectacles, his eyesight the victim of the close work he did as a sometimes forger. His lab coat had once been white, but was a palette of colors now, and despite the towel his hands were stained from whatever task he had been up to in his workroom.
“Sorry to keep you gentlemen waiting,” he said. “A man can’t be too careful once the sun sets. Glass of something?”
“Nothing for me, thank you,” St. Ives said. “I don’t mean to turn down a pleasant offer, but we’re rather in a hurry, I’m afraid, and I for one need my sensibilities intact. We’ve urgent business to transact before we have the luxury of rest.”
Hasbro waved the offer away as well, at which Merton said that perhaps they wouldn’t mind if he took a dram. He poured a measure of whisky into a cut glass snifter, tipped a bit of water into it from a nearby bottle, and took an appreciative swallow and sat down. “I needed an excuse to be quits with the day,” he said, heaving a sigh.
