Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.

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СКАЧАТЬ of the London Underworld and waiting to strike again; the beast in human form who deliberately mutilated his victim; and the river thefts in which large quantities of valuable merchandise was stolen without leaving a trace.

      It was too early to say what Lady Sara intended to do about the missing giant or whether she would leave the Shadwell murder to Chief Inspector Mewer. As for the river thefts, we had hardly begun our investigation. We were still attempting to understand the problem. The one thing we knew for certain was that solving them would not be easy.

      “If it were, the shippers and importers would handle it themselves,” Lady Sara said.

      A hundred years earlier, thievery in the old Port of London had become a national scandal. Ships’ crews were bribed routinely; waterside workers regularly joined the thieves in pilfering cargos. More than half a million pounds worth of goods was stolen annually, most notably from West Indian ships loaded with rum, sugar, and tobacco. Part of the problem was London’s ancient restrictions on imports, which required that all ships be unloaded between London Bridge and the Tower.

      The modern dock system, with docks built like fortresses, was the result. Ships could be unloaded quickly, and large-scale theft was practically eliminated. Obviously someone had found chinks in the system, though as far as we knew, the major docks had not yet been victimized.

      None of those chinks had been visible from a police steam-launch. On the morrow, I would find out whether there was more to be seen from a slow-moving, oared galley.

      The storm faded, finally, and I dozed off still futilely puzzling over the mysteriously vanished merchandise from the river warehouses.

      CHAPTER 3

      I rose at the dawn, accompanied by a twittering of sparrows. There was no point in my waking another of Lady Sara’s employees just to drive me to the river, so I walked to Bayswater Road, marvelling that the city was still intact after such a furious storm, and whistled up a four wheeler, the famous London cab sometimes called a growler because of its creaking noises, or its driver’s grumbling, or both. The route we followed was similar to the one Old John had taken the night before. Wapping Police Station was a short distance upstream from Shadwell Market.

      The Wet Bobs, the water constables, were sterling fellows with a nautical air—they were recruited wholly from the ranks of expert seamen and boatmen. They were bronzed and hardened by their constant exposure to the weather and by long hours of labour at the heavy police oars. On their caps and coat-collars they wore nickel anchors, the badge of their office. In severe weather they donned watermen’s shining straw hats, and on the river they always had their “toe bags” at hand—waterproof sacks with a warm inner lining, which they wore over their legs when they were rowing.

      They did a six-hour tour of duty. Then they were off for twelve hours before their next tour. They regarded night-work as their worst ordeal, and snowstorms, fog, and piercing head winds as well as rain-swollen tides could make the Thames a place of torment for them. To row for six hours under such conditions was trying even for these hardy individuals.

      They patrolled the Thames continuously, day and night, year in and year out, from Fulham to Crayford Creek. Two duty boats left Wapping police stairs every two hours. One proceeded “up along,” where it was met by a boat from the Waterloo Police Station; the other made its way “down along” to meet the boat from the lowermost station at Blackwall. There were in addition supervision boats commanded by senior inspectors, the steam-launches, and the disguised boats of their detective staff. The river thieves somehow managed to elude all of this diligent attention.

      That morning I joined a regular duty boat headed downstream. There was an inspector in command; he sat in the stern to steer. There were two constables at the oars, and I took the bow seat as surplus ballast. Shadwell Market, as we passed it, seemed bustling with its usual morning business, apparently untouched by the previous night’s tragedy. My companions had already heard about the murder, and all four of us scrutinized the wharves and warehouses from time to time for some sign of a large, ferocious animal, but there was too much traffic to attend to on the thronged river for us to devote much attention to the shore.

      We pulled in and out among the crowded shipping, now skirting the wharves, now rounding the stem of a deserted schooner to make certain thieves weren’t at work in it, racing to overhaul a suspiciously evasive wherry, checking flotsam, capturing a derelict skiff, searching a barge for contraband goods. We passed row after row of moored black hulls with their riding lights still burning brightly. Steamers slipped past us, their sirens and hooters hoarsely warning river craft to make way. There were dapper passenger ships; grimy colliers; fish trawlers whose reeking cargo advertised their presence even when we passed them upwind; blunt-nosed coasters; Dutch eel scoops; sailing ships carrying timber from Norwegian pine forests; barges from the Medway, hay-laden halfway up their stubby masts.

      A brig had caught fire and run aground, but fire floats had that problem in hand before we reached it. Several times we narrowly missed being run down by faster vessels.

      My mates kept reminding me to watch for floating bodies, for—the night’s storm excepted—the weather had been lovely for a number of days, and lovely weather is drowning weather along the Thames. Not all of these deaths are accidental. Suicides happen far more frequently in nice weather.

      “But not very often in winter,” one of my mates said. “The cold water puts ‘em off, seemingly.”

      At mid-morning, I had them land me at a convenient wharf, and I took a cab back to Connaught Mews. I now had seen the Thames from a steam-launch and from an oared duty boat, studying the crowded river traffic and pondering ways in which thieves might make off with goods by the boatload. I had no answer to the problem, but Lady Sara wouldn’t expect one at this early stage.

      I reached Connaught Mews in time to change my clothes and make myself presentable for Lady Sara’s coffee hour. She held this at eleven o’clock in her drawing room whenever anyone from her own social class asked to discuss a personal problem with her. Her friends would have been offended if she had received them in her study and positively insulted if she refused to waste her valuable time on their trivialities. The coffee hour answered both objections.

      Lady Sara liked to have me present to take notes—and also, I suspected, so I could practise conducting myself with propriety under her severely critical gaze, for despite my many years as a member of her household, I was still attempting to acquire social ease in the presence of lords and ladies.

      On this day, the annual social Season being over and most of Lady Sara’s friends having left town, there were only three guests. The first to arrive was the elderly Lady Cowlan, Viscountess of Durgess. She was a remote cousin of Lady Sara’s on both sides of her family. Her face was a mass of wrinkles, and she wore a heavy, fur-trimmed gown on that pleasant autumn day.

      She was escorted in by Charles Tupper, one of Lady Sara’s two footmen. Except for his small stature, he looked the part perfectly. His uniform, demeanor, deferential expression, and humble politeness in the presence of such a dazzling noblewoman were impeccable. He also was poised to perform any necessary service, which he demonstrated by deftly recovering the scarf the Viscountess dropped and returning it to her with a bow. There was nothing unusual about this except that his performance in other capacities, including that of an investigator, was equally polished. Both of Lady Sara’s footmen were trained to act any part required of them—as were her other employees. In those days even a small domestic establishment like Lady Sara’s required a large staff of servants, and her housekeeper, cook, maids, footmen, coachmen, grooms, stable-boys, and such supernumeraries as she retained from time to time, all had to become adept at following a suspect, watching a suspicious address, or making enquiries in situations where their special talents could be useful.

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