Blackstone and the Endgame (7 page)

But that was just the point! He wasn't the old Sam any longer.

He turned to face his enemies – and even before he'd turned, he was sure that was
exactly
what they were.

There were two of them – young thugs with bad teeth and twisted expressions. They had not volunteered for the army like all the decent lads from the area had. They had stayed behind, like jackals – free, now that the lions had gone, to feed on whatever looked weak and helpless.

‘We saw that toff give you some money,' one of them snarled. ‘Why would he go and do that?'

‘He'd fainted,' Blackstone said wearily, knowing that this was nothing more than a ritual leading to a demand, but going along with it anyway. ‘I helped him back to his carriage.'

‘Dropped your trousers and let him have his way with you, more like,' the young thug said. ‘Anyway, we saw him hand you money – and now we're going to take it off you.'

What good was a guinea to a man who was planning to drown himself? Blackstone wondered.

Why not simply hand it over to them?

And yet, he was surprised to discover, he did not
want
to hand it over – in fact, he was willing to fight to the last drop of his blood to keep it.

‘Come on, you old bastard,' one of the thugs said impatiently. ‘Give us the money.'

He was the leader, Blackstone decided. He was the one who would make the first move.

‘Make us work for it, and we'll have to hurt you,' the second thug said. He turned to the other boy. ‘Ain't that right, Sid?'

‘That's right,' Sid agreed.

Sid was
definitely
the leader – the plan was only the plan when he'd confirmed it.

‘Well?' Sid demanded.

Blackstone shrugged. ‘I'm not giving you the money. Do what you have to do.'

‘Oh, I will,' Sid said. ‘Believe me, I will.'

One moment, his open hand was empty, the next it was closed and gripping a knife.

‘Get him, Bill!' the young thug shouted.

But Blackstone knew it wouldn't be like that, and that though he was supposed to turn to defend himself against Bill, it was Sid who would want to draw the first blood.

He turned for a split second – as Sid had been expecting him to – then swung round again.

Sid was rushing at him, the knife held high in his hand, ready for a downward stab.

‘Amateur!' Blackstone thought in disgust.

Didn't the thug know that, in a knife attack, the blade should go in upwards? Whatever
were
they teaching young criminals these days?

Sid feinted to the right and then switched quickly to the left.

It was his genitals that first learned the plan had gone wrong, though the message quickly spread to the rest of his body, and he screamed and then sank to his knees.

Blackstone's right foot, which had only just returned to the ground, lashed out again and caught him in the chest.

That would hurt – but not as much as if the boot had struck its intended target, which was Sid's face.

He had less than a second in which to deal with Bill, Blackstone told himself, but even before he felt the blackjack strike his skull, he knew that he was not going to make it.

His legs buckled beneath him, and he fell to the ground. He would have to move quickly if he was to survive, but he was already accepting that that would be almost impossible.

Bill was on him, straddling him and pinning him down. Sid was struggling to his feet and looking around for his knife. Blackstone tried to break free, and realized just how hopeless it was.

Sid had found his knife on the ground, and was now kneeling next to Blackstone and Bill.

‘I'm not goin' to kill yer,' he said, in a cracked voice. ‘That'd be too quick. What I'm goin' to do instead is cut yer eyes out.'

He could find his way to the river with no eyes, Blackstone told himself – and a blind man can drown just as easily as a seeing man.

‘If you're going to do it, then get on with it,' he said.

‘You'd like that, wouldn't yer?' Sid taunted. ‘You'd like it to be over as quick as possible? But I'm goin' to make yer wait. I'm goin' to give yer time to
think
about it.'

‘If this is an example of the much-vaunted British sense of fair play, then it is a rather bad one,' said a voice behind them.

They all turned. The speaker was a stocky man of about Blackstone's age. He was wearing an opera cloak which had not been in fashion for at least a decade, and was leaning heavily on a walking stick with a silver handle.

‘Are you a foreigner or somefink?' asked Sid.

Oh yes, he was a foreigner all right, thought Blackstone.

Only a few days earlier, he had assumed that Vladimir was dead, but now, hearing the man's voice for the first time in nearly twenty years, he recognized it immediately.

‘Yes, I am a foreigner – I would have thought that was obvious when I spoke of your
British
attitude to fair play,' the newcomer said calmly. ‘And now that I have made my point, I will leave you to your unpleasant – and, if I may say so, somewhat cowardly – business, and be on my way.'

‘Hang on a minute,' Sid said, ‘before you go, I want that walking stick and whatever yer've got in yer pocket.'

‘I am afraid that will not be possible,' Vladimir told him.

‘Give me your stuff, or we'll cut out
your
eyes, as well,' Sid said.

The man in the cloak frowned. ‘You should not have threatened me,' he said, with a new, harder edge to his voice. ‘I do not like being threatened.'

Sid stood up, waving his knife in front of him. The new arrival lifted his walking stick up, as if he hoped to defend himself with it.

‘That won't save you, grandad,' Sid sneered.

‘No, that won't save yer,' echoed Bill, still astride Blackstone.

Sid should have been paying more attention, Blackstone thought. He should have noted that Vladimir was standing perfectly comfortably without the support of his stick – and he should have drawn a very worrying conclusion from that.

But he didn't.

‘I'll slice you up, you dirty foreign bugger,' Sid boasted. ‘First, I'll cut your heart out, and then I'll …'

He stopped speaking as the casing of the stick clattered to the ground and the thin naked sword it had held glittered in the moonlight.

‘OK, take it easy, mister, none of us wants any trouble,' Sid said.

But he did not sound half as frightened as he should have, because he still thought he could control the situation.

Vladimir took one step forward, the sword flashed, and Sid sank to the ground.

Blackstone felt Bill go rigid on top of him.

‘Listen,' the young thug said, in a panic, ‘this wasn't never part—'

The sword whistled through the air, slashing across Bill's throat. The young man gurgled, and his blood began to gush from the wound like a fountain.

Blackstone pushed the dying thug off him.

‘His lungs will fill in seconds, and he will drown in his own blood,' Vladimir said easily. ‘Why do I do these things?' he continued, and now – though he was still speaking in English – he was addressing himself. ‘In Russia, I'm a serious man – perhaps even a grave one – but the moment I set foot on these shores, I feel an almost irrepressible urge to behave exactly like a cheap music-hall comedian. And what does that result in? It results in me having to kill two young hooligans
who didn't even get the joke
!'

There was no regret in his voice, Blackstone noted – merely a hint of annoyance at the inconvenience he had caused himself.

Bill was thrashing around on the ground, trying to scream and finding it impossible.

Blackstone raised himself on one elbow but did not feel strong enough yet to struggle back to his feet.

‘I have a little business to conduct at the end of this lane, and then I intend to leave the area as quickly as possible,' Vladimir said, leaning forward and wiping the blood off his sword on the dead Sid's jacket, ‘and if you are in any state to do so, I would advise you to follow the same course of action yourself.'

Blackstone made no reply. He was ashamed of his present condition – deeply ashamed – and of all the people in the world from whom he might wish to hide his fall, the Russian was at the top of the list.

How could he let this man, above all others – the man who had worked with him to prevent the assassination of Queen Victoria; who, in Russia, had partnered him in solving the case of the missing Fabergé egg – see what he had become?

Bill had stopped writhing, and – with a final desperate gurgle – he died.

‘I have probably just saved some young woman from a life of domestic drudgery and violence,' Vladimir said, picking up the sheath of his sword and sliding the sword back into it. ‘But, then again, this hypothetical young woman will probably end up married to someone just as bad as this brute.'

Then he turned and began to walk towards the river.

He had to get away before the police arrived, Blackstone told himself. If he didn't, they would probably add these two murders to the list of crimes they were pinning on him. He put both hands on the ground, palms down, and attempted to lever himself up.

And then his brain decided it was all too much of an effort and shut itself down.

Blackstone had no idea how long he had been unconscious, but when he came to again, he was aware of the sound of someone approaching him from the river.

‘I was supposed to meet my contact at the foot of the steps, but he was obviously alarmed by my little contretemps with your friends and has rowed away into the night,' Vladimir said. He took a flashlight from his pocket and shone it over Blackstone's trunk. ‘Your clothes are covered with blood, but that is hardly surprising,' he continued. ‘You need to change out of them, or it will not take even your slow British coppers long to work out that you were involved in all this.'

Go away,
Blackstone prayed silently.
Please just go away.

‘We all have to pay for our little idiosyncrasies in the end,' Vladimir said, ‘and while it is true, on the one hand, that I undoubtedly saved your life tonight, it could also be argued that I am indirectly the cause of the present state of your ward- robe –' he gave a small sigh – ‘so I suppose I had better give you the money for a new outfit.'

He had to speak now, Blackstone told himself. There was simply no choice in the matter.

‘I have money,' he croaked.

Vladimir shrugged. ‘If you wish to cling to your tattered pride – to your pathetic sense of dignity – then that is up to you.'

He turned away, took a few short steps towards Tooley Street, then spun around again.

‘I know you,' he said.

‘You're mistaken,' Blackstone told him.

‘I am sure I know you,' Vladimir said, squatting down and shining his torch into Blackstone's face. ‘Is it … could it be you, Sam?' he gasped.

‘Please go away,' Blackstone said weakly. ‘You're endangering my investigation.'

‘Your investigation?' Vladimir repeated, disbelievingly.

‘I'm in disguise.'

Vladimir shook his head slowly. ‘Of course you are,' he agreed.

He stripped off his cloak and held his hand out to Blackstone. ‘Let me help you to your feet,' he suggested.

T
he Hansom cabs which were lined up at the rank on Tooley Street had a defeated air about them that was detectable even from a distance. It had not always been thus – when Blackstone had first started working at New Scotland Yard, the Hansoms had been undisputed kings of the streets, and the clip-clop sound of their horses' hooves had seemed as much a part of London life as the yells of the newspaper vendors.

But their glory days were over, and the petrol-driven ‘taxis' – so called because they had taximeters which measured the mileage – had been eating away at their business for years. Now, there were only a couple of hundred Hansoms left in the whole of London, and even though they were cheaper than the taxis – six pence a mile in the Hansoms, eight pence a mile in the taxis – the cabmen were finding it harder and harder to make a decent living.

‘They're like me,' Blackstone thought, with a bitter whimsy born of hunger and exhaustion. ‘They're desperate to keep on going – but they're doomed.'

Vladimir helped Blackstone into the Hansom at the front of line, then looked up at the driver, who was sitting on his box behind the cab.

‘The East India Dock Road, cabbie,' he said. ‘I'll bang my stick on the roof when I want you to stop.'

‘The East India Dock Road,' Blackstone repeated softly to himself. ‘Little Russia.'

He knew it well. It was home to countless Russian revolutionaries and members of the tsarist court who had fallen out of favour. Former peasants from the Ukraine lived there, and rubbed shoulders with horse traders from Siberia and tailors from Minsk. And, for the moment at least, it appeared to be where Vladimir had established his base.

As the cab pulled away from the curb, the Russian said, ‘So tell me, Sam, however did you come to be in this pitiful condition?'

‘It's quite a long story,' Blackstone said.

‘It's quite a long way to our destination,' Vladimir replied.

And there was a commanding edge to his voice that said he would have the story, one way or the other.

Despite his exhaustion and his pain, a grin came to Blackstone's face. It was typical of Vladimir to want to know the full story, he thought, because the Russian had a thirst for information –
any
information.

It was always possible that, one day, some of that information might come in useful – just as a collector of string might, one day, suddenly need to wrap a large and complex parcel that required miles of the stuff. But that was not why the string collector collected string, nor why Vladimir collected information.