The Humbug Murders (17 page)

The boys scattered to chimneys and open windows in all directions. As the Dodger vanished up an alleyway, he turned and gave me the slightest wink.

Fagin was about to leave when he eyed Adelaide once more. With a grunt, he reached out to fasten his claw-like hand on her arm. “With me, my dear. I will show you the way of things!”

Before I might even react, she ducked low, kicked Fagin in the shins, and ran for it. Her scarf billowed behind her as she darted down an alley, peals of laughter echoing in her wake.

I tossed a final coin on the groaning Fagin, who was now lying on his side in the snow, clutching at himself.

“For your trouble,” I said.

Through gritted teeth he smiled—and thanked me.

“I almost admire his tenacity and focus,” I reported to Dickens as he walked briskly from the Quarter. “A man of business, through and through.”

“The business of misery,” Dickens said darkly. “See that you never fall so far, Scrooge.”

“Or what?”

“Or I'll be waiting for you. And your story shall flow from my pen in such a way it will live on for centuries after you are dust—and your very name will become synonymous with tight-fisted greed and a lack of compassion for your fellow man.”

Wednesday, December 21st, 1833

Four Days to Christmas

I WOKE THE
next morning with a start. Someone stood by my window, a silhouetted man peering out at the street.

Roger Colley, surely!

Grabbing up my cane from beside my bed, I sprang at him—

And froze as Dickens turned from the window and lit a thinly rolled cigarette. “What are you going to do with that?” Dickens asked, snatching my cane from me with his free hand. “Get dressed. We have an appointment, you and I.”

“Shall we have breakfast first?” I asked, turning away, my cheeks hot from embarrassment. I didn't even ask how Dickens had gained access to my rooms. Surely, all it took was a smile and a kind word to Mrs. Doors.

“No, Mr. Scrooge,” said the reporter. “I strongly suggest that, considering where we are bound, the less either of us has in our stomachs, the better.”

Grunting with effort, I raced to keep up with Dickens' ridiculously long strides as we were guided through a damp, water-logged tunnel just off the docks. The raggedy man before us held his amber lantern high and grinned back. He had more scabs and sores on his leathery, weather-worn face than teeth in his head. His ancient clothing was a patchwork quilt of repairs.

“Who's this, then, Mr. Dickens?” he asked in a voice thick with a Scottish accent. “Cannae recall seeing this fine young man here in the deep dark boggin' 'afore.”

“Nor will you again,” I vowed. “Dickens, what is this place?”

“You'll see,” the reporter said grimly.

“Aye, ye will!” cried the raggedy man. “Then ye'll wish ye had not!”

The tunnels leading from the docks had twisted many times, leaving any trace of bright sunlight behind. Amber light flickered in the shattered puddles at our feet. The familiar stench of the Thames rose, and I clamped my handkerchief over my face to save myself from catching the diseases suspended in the putrid air.

“These tunnels don't flood, do they?” I asked.

The raggedy man shrugged. Dickens strode on purposefully.

“Dickens,” I said, “whatever's eating you must be suffering horribly!”

An echo of voices drifted from the next turn. We made it and a high cavern rose about us, a vault-like grotto with smaller tunnels of moist limestone creeping out in all directions like the bony, twig-like legs of a spider. A desk sat just ahead, manned by a thin-lipped police officer. A woman's horrible, grievous wailing assaulted us from one of the tunnels beyond.

“This the one?” the officer asked Dickens.

He nodded.

“This way. Keep that silk over your face,” the officer said, nodding my way. “The smell doesn't get any better the deeper you go. That I promise you.”

The raggedy man stepped back and began to inspect notices nailed to the walls. More of the missing women.

I followed Dickens down a narrow tunnel. As promised, a horrid smell rushed out at us. I coughed, spun, but Dickens grabbed my arm and dragged me through the dank and narrow passage. The distant wails of a woman in grief, punctuated by hollow drips echoing off the walls above and beyond, became a ghostly symphony of dread. Soon we found ourselves in a wide circular chamber lit by torches. Stone slabs divided the dark space into aisles.

Bodies covered in white cloths waited on at least half the slabs. Some full grown; others not.

“Why are we here?” I demanded, my voice muffled through the handkerchief.

“To make a point,” Dickens said grimly. “That actions have consequences.”

“That is the cornerstone of my business.” I trembled at the sight of the feet and hands protruding out from under the white shrouds. Porcelain pale flesh, with green and blue veins. Bites taken out of many of them: some larger and more egregious than others.

“You wanted to find Irene and her friend, Miss Annie Piper,” Dickens said. “We rushed unprepared into a place we knew next to nothing about, into the Quarter, and in our arrogance . . .”

I looked down at a pair of slabs where the shrouded corpses of two women waited. A shock of ginger hair poked out from the closest. I jumped back and accidentally brushed the hand of another corpse. Cold as ice. Impossible to believe it had ever been animate. Had that Miss Shelley visited a place like this when writing her
Modern Prometheus
? Though I would admit it to no one, I much admired the novel.

Dickens whipped the covering back—and I peered down at the naked form of a much older woman whose black and crusty innards had been chewed upon by something in the river's deepest murk.

“Cover her up! Cover it!” I demanded, holding back my most sincere urge to vomit, though I had nothing but a spot of tea in me.

Startled, the anger I'd seen in Dickens' eyes faded and he did as he was bid. He looked at the face of the other woman on the adjoining slab, then went round the room checking each body. He recoiled at a particularly disfigured brute. Half the man's face had been eaten away. Or had it?

“Did a fire do that?” Dickens asked, absently. “Or was he attacked with a knife? Old wounds, not new . . .” He shuddered and covered the body up. “It doesn't matter. They're not here,” he said with relief. “Irene and Annie are not here. Oh, Ebenezer, I thought our inquiries had led to these poor women's deaths. But they are not here!”

“Then let's follow their example and be gone from this place as well!”

“One day, I shall use my pen to pull back the coverings off all this poverty and degradation for all of London to see,” Dickens said with determination.

“No one will thank you for revealing this ugliness.”

Dickens grabbed my arm and pointed at all the slabs of concealed corpses. “Do you think that the Humbug Killer is the only murderer in this city who walks free?”

I tried to shake free of his grasp, but the young reporter was stronger than he appeared.

“I'm not interested in just stopping one murderer or reporting on one injustice,” said Dickens, still holding my arm. “I shall bring the light of truth to all the ugliness of this ‘civilized' society—I will show all the ignorance and want that remains hidden behind our robes of prosperity.”

“You're a fool,” I said as I finally pulled myself free from his grip.

“Be careful, Mr. Scrooge, I could easily sketch you as such a villain that parents would tell stories about you to scare their children into being good at this festive season.”

It did amuse me, the thought of children being afraid of me every yuletide season. At least it might keep the little brats from caroling outside my door every December. We marched back into the “fresh” air of London without another word passing between us.

Above, in the clean, fresh warming light of early morning, we walked together along the docks. Silence had passed between us long enough, so at last I said, “That is where the police take the bodies dragged from the river?”

“Limestone, I believe,” he said, commenting on the cold, yellow tunnels we had left behind and their sour-milk smell. “Keeps them fresher longer.”

“How very educational, Mr. Dickens. Are you having second thoughts about our arrangement?”

“I was,” he admitted, “but seeing the glassy eyes of so many who have come to such a grim and sorry fate . . . No, if that note you received spoke true, Fezziwig was just the first. I would spare others the fate we just glimpsed. Present company included. I say only that we must be careful moving forward. Agreed?”

“Absolutely. Now, have your inquiries borne any other fruit?”

They had, it turned out. Though we had not yet heard from Fagin's boys about an engagement with Annie Piper, and Miss Nellie Pearl had been “too busy” to be interviewed by Mr. Dickens, those who worked in more menial positions at the theatre were happy to oblige. He spoke with some who had been at the place for decades, and from them he had gleaned the connection between Nellie and Fezziwig.

“Young Nellie had worked for Fezziwig as a spinner upstairs in the very room where he met his horrible fate,” Dickens revealed. “She had often told him how much she adored the theatre. They went together many times, she said. He introduced her to the director at Garrick Theatre in Whitechapel, and she worked her way up to the Adelphi from there. She owed her career to Fezziwig, you know. So when he sent for her, she came. And unchaperoned, I might add, through this heaving cesspool of a London borough!”

I thought of the actress. A pretty thing. Soft, pink lips wobbling slightly, she'd been struggling to control her shock. Yet I had registered something else, too. A nervousness, something unsettling about the way she kept tapping her foot. She was hiding something, of course. They all were.

“Clearly, Fezziwig stumbled on to information concerning Sunderland and Rutledge,” I ventured. “Shen and Miss Pearl, too, I would imagine, considering they were all summoned to meet him at the same time and place. The question is, what? I will never believe that my friend would stoop to base blackmail to line his pockets. Yet his offices were ransacked. No one seemed to know precisely what Mr. Fezziwig was involved in at the time of his death. It's all very puzzling.”

Dickens lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. I steadied it for him, until it crackled into flame. “What about this ‘Chimera,' whatever that is?” he said, exhaling with a relieved sigh. “That word put the fear of the almighty in the Colleys, and Roger and Jack clearly had some tie to Sunderland. And Jack is within our reach, at least for questioning.”

“I doubt that Jack would say much,” I told Dickens. “And there is that matter of actions having consequences. I would do nothing to have the Colleys think of me further. I regret mentioning their names last night when we spoke with those boys.”