Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.
to find or fake,” Lady Sara agreed, “but giants in sideshows are rarely very gigantic. The French and Chinese giants I saw were genuinely huge. So is or was Hob Hagan—however he was sketched. There is more of a problem here than a disappearing birthmark or a newly grown mole. The reports indicate a remarkable personality change. I noticed it long before he killed three people and was caught with the bloody axe in his hands. What transformed the gentle, repentant giant of York, whose only offence was coming to the aid of a helpless animal, into the vicious murderer who emerged later?”
Neither of the artists said anything.
Lady Sarah smiled at me. “Chief Inspector Mewer will be along shortly. I wonder what he’ll have to say about this.”
“Something profane,” I suggested.
She laughed appreciatively. “No doubt, but he’ll keep that to himself. I wonder what he’ll have to say to me. I am amazed that such a capable police officer can function with so little imagination. When I invited him to meet us here, he said, ‘Waxworks? Waxworks? What’s that got to do with the police?’ Sometimes the questions I ask him, or the objections I raise, or the way I interpret evidence, almost makes him forget I am a lady. His own deductions make me want to forget it myself. We’ll find out shortly.”
But the Chief Inspector never arrived. After waiting for an hour, we went back through the Dungeon of Horrors and climbed the stairs to the office on the ground floor, where Lady Sara telephoned Chief Inspector Mewer’s home and had a brief conversation with his wife.
“He was called away by an emergency,” she told the artists. “He won’t be available tonight. Mrs. Mewer conveys his apologies. Because the waxworks isn’t open yet, it didn’t occur to him to let us know by telephone. If I have a chance to talk with him, I’ll try to arrange for him to see your sketches tomorrow.
We left the artists to continue their discussion of moles and birthmarks.
“I intend to look into this,” Lady Sara told me on the way out. “I consider it a certainty that there were two giants. Their careers have been confused not only by press and public but also by the police. Our legal system has called one of them Hob Hagan and hanged him for murder. The other may be just as vicious, and we must find out what happened to him before there are more victims.” She added, “This may be a case for the board.”
“A case for the board” was a crime or a mystery that merited an exceptionally thorough investigation. It was her standard of measurement. Cases for the board came along but rarely. If she considered the problem of the two giants worthy of a place there, it meant that the issues involved were either extremely serious, or they offered a fascinating perplexity—or both.
One of the workmen unlocked the door for us, and Old John Quick, Lady Sara’s congenial coachman and my foster-father, urged his horses forward when he saw us emerge from the building.
She paused on the step as I was handing her into the carriage. “Sorry, John. We have a long ride and perhaps work to do. Shadwell Market.”
He turned quickly and stared at her, and so did I. The crime had to be an extremely serious one to cause her to drive half-way across London at that time of night. I leaped aboard and closed the door, Old John flipped his whip, and the horses started off. We clattered our way down Tottenham Court Road to Oxford street and turned east, from which point the route to Shadwell was considerably more direct than those between most distant points in London.
Lady Sara kept her eyes on the countless dramas being enacted in the patches of illumination we passed. She loved to travel about at night, but she much preferred to do the driving herself. She would disguise herself in men’s clothing, take her place on the box beside Old John, and terrify him with the pace she set. Because such conduct while dressed as a woman would have scandalized London, on this night she had to confine herself to the carriage.
The streets had a restless, anticipatory air about them—a “between happenings” atmosphere. The early night crowd was tucked away in theatres or restaurants; the late night crowd, which would include much of the early crowd when it finally emerged, had not yet arrived. Because it was mid-week, traffic was light. Little knots of people stood gathered about food vendors, and sometimes they sent guarded, apprehensive looks at us as we passed. Such indications of guilt were seldom without justification, and I suspected these casual bystanders of all sorts of stratagems and treasons.
Here and there the dim presence of a solitary vendor could be glimpsed—a baked-potato man; a peanut seller; a shawl-muffled woman with a pipe in her mouth and a basket of unsold vegetables at her feet. They were desperate for custom and determinedly sticking to their posts long after all hope had vanished and their competitors gone home. They were the failures of their profession, a few of the many for whom costering provided not a living but only another way of starving. Lady Sara gave employment and survival to many such. She made them her agents, and if they sold little, they observed much, repaying her with information that was well worth the weekly shilling or two she gave them.
While we rattled our way toward Shadwell, Lady Sara told me what she had been able to learn from Mrs. Mewer about the emergency that forced the Chief Inspector to break his appointment. “She was reluctant to discuss it, but the little I was able to coax out of her suggested another Jack-the-Ripper is on the loose—this time with a male victim.”
“Do you mean the victim was deliberately mutilated?” I asked.
“That is the impression I got. Mrs. Mewer wouldn’t or couldn’t supply any details. London has never got over Jack-the-Ripper. It would stand this city on its head if he started operating again. The official view is that he drowned himself shortly after his last murder back in 1888, but the evidence wasn’t as clear as the police would have liked. The authorities may have been guilty of wishful thinking.”
Huddled into a corner of the carriage, I thought about the horror I was about to see and the horrors I had seen earlier—among them, the waxworks monster with an axe. Was his brutal twin at that moment stalking another victim?
By the year 1900, the East End, at least in its main thoroughfares, had become so regularized and sanitized that visitors to London sometimes made daring forays along Whitechapel or Commercial Road on Saturday night just to see the sights, which included enormous crowds of people, flaring naphtha lights on stalls and barrows, confused surges of passers-by, and the noisy bellowings of vendors. The crowds were much smaller on week nights, and the show was more restrained, but it was still worth seeing. Even St. George Street, which once was the notorious Ratcliff Highway, offered nothing that visitors to London would find offensive. The side streets were another matter entirely. A stranger venturing into them could quickly encounter more curiosities than he cared for.
Compared with the brightness of central London, St. George Street was dark and rather quiet. It was named for St. George’s in the East, one of the great churches of London. Establishments like the Seamen’s Mission Hall and the Seamen’s Chapel indicated how close we were to the docks. There also was Jamrack’s, where you could place an order for any living creature that interested you, from a humming-bird to an elephant, and eventually get it. At that hour of the night, long stretches of the street were deserted except for scattered groups of people talking or sitting in front of open doors. Perhaps they were already discussing the horror that had occurred at Shadwell Market.
In neighbourhoods near the docks, an apparently deserted street conveyed no impression of emptiness. Every second or third house was a pub, and all of their patrons were seamen with wives or sweethearts. From the open doors came strains of robust sailors’ songs, sung with an excess of enthusiasm and a marked absence of musical talent.
When we reached the turning to the market, we found the street blocked. Three constables were directing traffic away—not that there was much to direct. Shadwell Market had been established as a fish market to compete with Billingsgate. It did not seem to be thriving, but it tenuously survived. It did its business in the morning, however, opening at five o’clock. During the early hours of the night, the area should have been all but deserted, but police milled about with flares and bull’s-eye lanterns. Points of light flitted here and there as though someone had mobilized