Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.
all, wasn’t it? We mustn’t forget the dog. I’m afraid it has a broken leg, but something might be done for it. Bring it along.”
We drove directly to the Harley Street surgery of Thomas Tallmage, who was one of London’s most prominent young physicians. Once Lady Sara made up her mind to succour a mongrel dog, it wouldn’t have occurred to her to offer it anything but the best medical care available. As Dr. Tallmage himself said, laughing, when he learned what our errand was, “Lady Sara never does anything by halves!” He expertly reduced the dog’s fracture, and Lady Sara took it and me home with her. At that time she was still living in Connaught Place, so the street urchin and the mongrel joined the household of Earl of Ranisford, to the consternation of the Countess, her mother.
But it was quickly evident that I could not be comfortable in such a fashionable residence. I was removed to Connaught Mews to the home of Lady Sara’s coachman, John Quick, who even then was known as Old John. He and his wife were wonderful people, and their own children were grown-up. Old John was almost as vain about his surname as he was about being Lady Sara’s coachman. He claimed to be descended from Robert le Quic, of Cornwall, a thirteenth century notable and the first of a long line of nimble ancestors. At Lady Sara’s suggestion, he formally adopted me, and I proudly became Colin Quick.
Old John and his wife looked after me like a father and mother, but Lady Sara took the responsibility for my education and employment. She began by giving me menial chores to perform in her workrooms. When I demonstrated some potential, she began to trust me with more complicated tasks. The dog and I became known all over London. Much of my education developed out of the errands she gave me. She also took me with her when she travelled about the city, pointing out things and questioning my reactions.
The errands were odder than I realized, and as I grew older, I gradually began to grasp the strangeness of this profession she had invented for herself. At the same time, there were large quantities of book learning for me to catch up with, and in this, as with everything else, she was a stern taskmaster. For one thing, I had to master different accents and dialects. My native cockney was invaluable but only when I was supposed to be one. Anywhere in the West End, or in fashionable society, or even in a middle-class suburb, it marked me disastrously. My struggles with English grammar, which I learned from a book by a Mr. Meiklejohn, will haunt me all my life. Pitman’s Shorthand Dictionary became my support in matters of pronunciation, a useful connection because as soon as I had the rudiments of reading and writing, Lady Sara set me to learning Pitman’s shorthand. As my skills improved, she began calling me her secretary when she needed one, and she kept drilling me intensely at shorthand until I had attained a speed somewhat better than a hundred and fifty words a minute. She was not about to lose valuable testimony because her secretary couldn’t keep pace with a witness.
I was indebted to the Countess, Lady Sara’s mother, for another important aspect of my education. The Countess frequently asked me to accompany her on shopping expeditions, ostensibly to run errands but actually to receive instruction in matters she suspected Lady Sara was neglecting.
She knew the city as few people knew it, but the attractions of London that interested her most were not listed in an ordinary visitors’ guide. They were places known and cherished only by connoisseurs such as herself: the dwelling celebrated for its strange assortment of ghosts; the public house outside which, ten years previously, the dead body of a man had been found in the gutter, his throat cut and a half-guinea piece clenched between his teeth; the place where the poisoner Neill Cream met one of his victims; the theatre where, concealed at the back of a closet, a skeleton had been found with a knife between its ribs; the square in Highgate haunted by the ghost of the chicken Sir Francis Bacon had beheaded and used for his famous experiment to prove that stuffing a carcass with snow would preserve it. The Countess had an amazing repertoire of such tales, and she knew where each had occurred.
Lady Sara drove me to master an entire curriculum of skills and disciplines until I became a capable investigator myself though certainly not on her level. She had invented the profession; she invented me because she needed an assistant. She solved crime after crime—some highly public and some in the highest degree confidential; some of utmost importance and many trivial—and for most of these triumphs she received no credit or acknowledgement of any kind. Only a few of her closest friends and associates were aware of her achievements. Whether a mystery concerned missing jewellery or a fortune in stolen goods, it posed a question mark and a challenge. Lady Sara made a career of removing such question marks, and her success was the only reward she required.
Now she had three unusually sinister problems to consider: the missing giant, who might be rusticating in a peaceful rural surrounding where his unusual size was accepted or who might be hiding somewhere in the depths 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