Lawless and The Devil of Euston Square (25 page)

I poured her a draught of beer from a pitcher on the bedside table, beside a framed drawing of a little girl, and sat down by her. As she drank, I studied the drawing. “Berwick’s sister?” I asked.

“Yes.” She wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her gown. “You have siblings?”

“None. Does she live here too?”

“The cholera took her, in ’42. Before you were born,” she smiled.

“I was a boy,” I nodded. “It took my mother the same year.”

She reached out and squeezed my hand.

She took the notion that I was one of her son’s acolytes. It soon became clear that nothing delighted her more than talking of her family. She folded back the top of her coverlet, an old-fashioned tapestry showing gentlemen and damsels cavorting on quaint stone bridges, and proceeded to unfold before me the fabric of her past. In another place, I might have been impatient. But after my sickness, the whole scene was permeated with a feverish reality, and I sat mute with wonder as she spoke lyrically of her family.

Her husband was an enterprising Irishman, who rose through the ranks of Brunel’s engineering team, and became an important draughtsman. The great projects he worked on took him the length and breadth of the country, culminating with the Great Thames Tunnel. That brought him back to London and to her, the daughter of refugees from the French Revolution.

“Can you imagine the astonishment with which the Tunnel was greeted?” she exclaimed. “They had to invent twelve new techniques of the tunnelling! Ah, short memories people have. There were celebrations across the city, I tell you. Your Queen commissioned a special train for to ride through it.”

“You must be proud.”

“He is gone now.” She gestured towards an engraving hung above the bedside. “It finished him.”

In the dim light, I examined a cheap print of an underground feast. It bore the legend
Opening Banquet, Thames Tunnel, 1843
.

“Was he killed in the tunnel?”

“Injured. A small compensation they paid, despite that he innovated in the tunnelling. Times were not easy, but he was a good man was Mr Skelton. Even in his illness he made charitable visits to Poor Houses, you see. It was there occurred the infernal explosion of gas that robbed him from us.”

She fiddled with her pendant. I glanced around the room, realising that every piece of paraphernalia was likely imbued with family recollections. Next to the engraving hung a certificate so faded, I could only make out a florid signature, the words “Red Lion Club”, and an extravagant wax seal.

“Little Berwick, he suffered without his father. Nevertheless, he was a great comfort to me. Well behaved, studied sincerely, was diligent and useful.” She glanced fondly at a desk beneath the window, as if her son was sitting there now. After the husband’s death, they were unable to keep their house – their apartments, she called them – and they had gone from bad to worse until the slum clearances of the Fifties left them quite homeless. It was Berwick who arranged this room, for he knew the landlord. “Since then I should have been happy. I could have resigned myself to our fall, if only my Berwick had not gone – how do you say – off the rails?”

She fell into a coughing fit, raising her hand to indicate I need not worry. I walked over to the desk to give her a moment’s privacy, hoping that she would tell more. On the desk stood a fine clock, engraved: “John Skelton, from Isambard Kingdom Brunel”. I recalled Josiah Bent’s tales of how, for a small fee, a clocky will rechristen jack, that is inscribe a stolen clock with a new engraving; though what reason had I to doubt that the great engineer had thus commended her husband? There was an ink bottle and quill, ready to use, as if Berwick had just gone out of the room. Shivering to feel myself so close to him, I put out my hand to lift the desk lid.

“Go ahead,” she said. “There are some of his
pensées
.”

At her invitation I drew out a finely bound tome. Inside were pages and pages of densely inscribed writing, but I could make nothing out, except for the odd phrase. One page was entitled “The Shameful Slums of the East End”. The rest seemed at first illegible, then I began to wonder if it were in some code.

“You are puzzling, are you not?” she laughed. “His father taught him all kinds of secret writing. Go ahead, look below.”

Though I was chafing to study the book more, fascinated by that dense vision of code, I slipped it back into the desk. Beneath lay a box of toys, Noah’s Ark with animal figurines; a toy train; a miniature theatre complete with tragedians and comedians glued to the stage, their melodramatic poses filled with love, anger or anguish. Was it then that I felt the first stirrings of admiration – of affection – for this man I had never met? Seeing his childhood squeezed into a single piece of furniture. Thinking of the happy child turned forlorn, growing up with tireless efforts to make himself someone his mother could be proud of.

“That theatre,” Madame Skelton hissed, a shadow falling over her features. “That was the ruin of him. He was doing so well. The writing. The meetings. Such fine ideas he had. The finest of minds. He could have been a Member of Parliament. He would have got for us some sort of justice. She gestured at the mess around her, tired now, or a little drunk. Enthralled by all she had told me, I repented of having tricked her.

“Where is he now?” I asked.

“Ask the little vixen,” she retorted. She drank down her beer and poured herself another draught. “She blinded him to all that was best. I told him, I said she was just one of those Haymarket tarts, but he had high-up ideas of her good breeding, just because she put on airs, and had aspirations, and acquaintances in high places.”

“But where is he?” I repeated gently.

She pulled the edge of the coverlet towards her. “He was a good boy, always interested in fine things. Lofty things. Everyone loved him so, he could have chosen any girl.” She laughed emptily. “I lost my house and my husband to progress, my health to consumption, and my son to a trollop. We are a benighted clan, officer, are we not?”

I smiled ruefully, thinking for a moment of my father, still in our Edinburgh flat, marking the passing of the seasons alone. I sat back down at her bedside. “When did he leave this place?”

“When? Does it matter? Long ago.”

“How long?” I insisted.

“Too long. One year and a half, perhaps.”

Soon after the spout. “And you don’t know where he is?”

“They tell me he has gone.” She turned to me fiercely. “It is untrue, I tell you. I see him. Sometimes, in the early mornings–”

The door burst open and in strode the weasel of a man from that day in the tavern. I stood back, disconcerted, as he went to her bedside and most gently took her hand. “Ma Skelton, it’s me. It’s John. Is the man tiring you? It’s time for you to rest.”

She looked at him uncertainly, and there were tears in her voice. “He simply was asking about Berwick.”

“Oh, ma, he’s gone. I told you he’s gone,” he comforted her. He eyed me belligerently. “Get out, will you? Putting false hope in the old woman’s head. Clear off, I said.”

A wave of light-headedness washed over me as I emerged onto the street. I stretched my leg uncertainly, caught in two minds whether I could manage the ascent straight home or should I take the longer but less taxing route via King’s Cross. I heard a call behind me and turned to see the weasel approaching me.

“No need for alarm, copper,” he said, stretching out his hand. “I’m John Fairfoul.”

I was not about to shake his hand. I walked away, but he fell in beside me.

“I was only protecting the old lady.” His amenable tone took me aback.

“No doubt. And that other day, did you not lie to me?”

He laughed pleasantly. “Come off it.”

“You told me you didn’t know Skelton.”

“You know the score. I wouldn’t snitch on my worst enemy to you lot.”

“Nor your brother, apparently.”

“Stepbrother. Ma Skelton took me in when my folks passed on.”

“All right,” I said, taken with feverish optimism, “let’s assume you won’t talk. Let me tell you, I am concerned for him. I have no wish to harm him. I fear for what he may do. If you have any affection for him, I implore you–”

“Affection?” He laughed. “The devil take him.”

I looked at him closely. “Then tell me where he is.”

“Haven’t the foggiest, copper.”

I recognised that look from that day in the tavern. I knew with sudden certainty he was lying. Taken with impatience, I grabbed him by the shoulders and hoisted him against the wall. “Good God, man, you will tell me what you know or I will make not only your life a misery, but hers, which will pain me, for she seems a noble soul.”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“And you wouldn’t tell me if you did.”

“There’s rules about these things.”

“Rules? Are you in some organisation?”

“What’s that?”

“Some league for reform?” When he gave no answer, I shook him against the wall with all my force. “You know where he is.”

“He’s gone,” he burst out. He tried to remain composed by his eyes showed that he was startled. “He’s went away.”

“Away? From London?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last winter. Good riddance to him.”

I slackened my grip a little, but held him pinned against the wall. “She said she’s seen him.”

“She’s past her three score and ten. She sees things.”

I was saddened to think of her as a fanciful old woman, conjuring up ghosts of her past to keep her company. I hesitated. “Why did he go?”

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

“Where, then?”

“Some said Canada, some the Cape. I heard Australia. Wouldn’t surprise me. People like him, no place for them in this country.”

“Meaning what?”

He shrugged again. “Always in some kind of trouble. Nobody wants that, do they? Look, copper, I need to be getting back to mother.”

With that he wriggled free and was gone. I stood there, my heart stilled, the trail struck dead.

A cock was crowing up at Mount Pleasant. I walked away in a turmoil, filled with a kind of reckless indignation. Once back at the Yard, there would be little time for extra-curricular enquiries, what with the theft inquiries and my injury. If I could just get to Nellie, though. If I could only persuade someone to talk.

The day I went back to work, a man tugged my sleeve as I stepped out for lunch.

“Lawless, is it?” He was an odd-looking midget of a man, with an egg-shaped head and an effeminate air that sat ill with his deep mumble of a voice. “Jackman.”

It took me a moment to place the name.

“Sergeant of the Yard, retired,” he explained, discomfited. “Inspector Wardle may have spoke of me.”

“Of course. Yes.”

“I’ve been waiting a week for you. We must talk.”

“I was sick.” I suggested my usual lunch haunt, but Jackman preferred to stroll down to the Thames and along the splendid new esplanade that now overhung the river’s north bank. Great edifices were springing up where before had been broken ground punctuated with the rickety dens of iniquity, ever on the point of tumbling into the stinking mud. I had always feared to see in that mud, amongst the discarded cartwheels and anchors, ill-fated mudlarks sinking into the sluggish loam, grasping at the coarse grass to save themselves from sinking. Now the mud was gone, and the river flowed along, washing appealingly against its new limits.

I strode along, amazed. “What became of the families who lived along the banks?”

“Bazalgette’s built houses,” Jackman wheezed, struggling to keep up. “Thousands of them. Trusts. Housing associations. Around the Crystal Palace hill.”

“Sounds idyllic,” I replied. “I never saw the Palace myself.”

“A long way to go to see a greenhouse,” he sniffed. “Especially as they’re building a new one in Kensington.”

I laughed uncertainly. “Still, it seems a healthy measure. The houses, I mean.”

“Politic manoeuvre,” he demurred. “Pacify the masses. One day soon, they’ll have the vote. Where will our masters be then? Out on their ear, and we’ll have some greengrocer’s daughter for a prime minister. Can’t have that. So they pay out a pittance to please the workers. Divide up the communities in the process, else you get a lot of troublemakers living together, and what will they do but make trouble?”

I chose not to comment on his negative view of humanity.

“The Dickens job,” he said, licking his lips. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

I nodded reluctantly.

He started mumbling to himself, “He should never have got rid of me, he knew where he was with me.”

“Mr Jackman. Kindly get to your point. I am soon due back.”

He recovered himself, and stood looking out across the water, stroking his chin. “These skellington jobs, tell me. Is Wardle truly wasting his time with petty theft?”

“Petty?” I wanted to give the impression that there was a hidden story he knew nothing of.

“Don’t tell me that the man who cracked the Sadleir suicide now occupies himself chasing pickpockets for tuppeny ha’penny personalities.”