Byways to Evil. Lloyd Biggle, jr.

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      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      Copyright © 2013 by Kenneth Lloyd Biggle and Donna Biggle Emerson. All rights reserved.

      *

      Published by Wildside Press LLC.

      www.wildsidebooks.com

      DEDICATION

      WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO DAVID DATTA

      AND STEPHEN LUCCHETTI

      FOR THEIR VALUABLE ASSISTANCE

      *

      Edited by

      KENNETH LLOYD BIGGLE

      &

      DONNA BIGGLE EMERSON

      CHAPTER 1

      The year was 1900, the place was London, and the night, an unusually warm one for September, began and ended with horrors. I was caught up in them almost without warning as I turned into a narrow, poorly lit, cobbled lane and instinctively slowed my pace. Ahead of me, where the passage took a sudden bend to the right, a small gas lamp glowed feebly, and its uncertain, wavering light produced oddly distorted shadows.

      A man loomed up suddenly on my left—instantly recognizable despite the eerie dimness. It was John Thurtell, the notorious murderer. At one time his likeness—with clean-shaven, pock-marked face, closely cropped hair, and affectedly informal dress—had stared out of thousands of newspapers, posters and broadsheets. He had a fine, athletic figure, and had it not been for the diabolical sneer on his face, he might have been taken for a gentleman down on his luck. The sneer revealed his true character. Probably it was the last thing his victim saw when Thurtell, after firing two pistols into William Weare’s face, made the gun shots more emphatic by cutting his throat.

      On the other side of the lane, standing with the dark silhouette of a barn behind him, was William Corder. In better light I might have been able to pick out, through the open door, the exact spot where he had just buried the mangled body of Maria Marten.

      A few paces ahead of me were two sinister, shadowy forms, one short and stout, the other tall and thin—Burke and Hare, the “resurrectionists,” heavily burdened with a large tea chest in which they were conveying the corpse of their latest victim to Doctor Knox’s School of Anatomy.

      A ghastly phantasm was at work in the shadows behind them: Jack the Ripper, bent over a victim to perform his perverted mutilations.

      Under the dim lamp, the most fearsome figure of all stood quietly conversing with a neatly-dressed young woman. This was James Canham Read, the Royal Albert Dock cashier. Father of eight children, holder of a responsible business position, trusted and respected by all who knew him, he was horrifying because he was so eminently respectable both in reputation and appearance. He had made a sordid pastime of seducing young women until, only a few years earlier, he murdered one of them and was hanged for it. His career tainted every decent man’s reputation. It made respectability suspect.

      Probably worse horrors lurked around the corner, but a quite ordinary door opened abruptly at the end of the lane, and light flooded the waxworks’s Dungeon of Horrors. The figures shrank to mere sculpted images, grotesque but harmless. Lady Sara Varnley called, “Is that you, Colin? We’ve been waiting for you.”

      I entered a bright workroom where I found Lady Sara; Stephen Lynes, a young sculptor and protégé of Lady Sara’s whom I already knew well; and a second man—tall, middle-aged, wearing a frock coat—whom I had never met. He looked like a tired tradesman dressed for a night on the town. Lady Sara introduced us. He was Evan Vaughan, an artist from Leeds. She introduced me as Colin Quick, her secretary.

      I was at most twenty years of age—my exact birth date had been lost in the mists of an East End childhood—but despite my youth, she never hesitated to confer on me whatever title or function a situation required. I was sometimes her assistant, sometimes her chief investigator, sometimes her secretary, sometimes a visiting official or technical consultant. Needless to say, I had to devote considerable effort and ingenuity to appearing and acting older than I was. Lady Sara’s own mentor, a retired actor, had coached me in applying quick touches of make-up and making minute changes in dress and manner in order to alter my appearance completely.

      Lynes affected a beard, a cape, and a beret in the manner of young artists. Like beginning artists everywhere, he had to take any work he could get until he made a name for himself. “Any work he could get” had been extremely difficult to find, so he was attempting to earn money with a waxworks and at the same time set new standards in the realism and artistic representation of wax effigies.

      Lady Sara was, as always, Lady Sara. The daughter of the deceased Burke Varnley, Earl of Ranisford, she was about forty years old at this time. Men her own age often told me how beautiful she had been as a girl. I thought she was still beautiful. She was unusually tall, for a woman, and she wore a simple gown of some rich, dark blue material. There were no flounces or frills of any kind. She wore no jewellery. Her straight black hair was arranged with the same simple directness—parted in the centre and gathered into a soft cluster behind her. She not only eschewed elaborate coiffures and curls, but she also disdained the Royal, or Alexandra, fringe across the forehead made so popular by the Princess of Wales.

      Her oval face was capable of an astonishing range of expression. Many of her friends thought she might have been a great actress if she had come from a different social background, but it simply was not done for the daughter of an earl to choose a theatrical career. I thought her face the most expressive when she was simply being herself. No one walking into that room could have had the slightest doubt that she was the person with authority. That was true of any room and of any company. Lord Salisbury once took her to a cabinet meeting to discuss police problems in Britain. I had no doubt that she instantly took charge of that group, also.

      An artist meeting her for the first time was certain to want to paint her. Any stranger knew at once that she was a woman of high distinction, but only her intimates had an inkling of her true métier. She was the foremost private investigator in England.

      She took me aside for a moment, scrutinized my face briefly, and then remarked, “The steam-launch wasn’t the answer, I see. Never mind. Sooner or later we’ll find an opening.”

      This was the most disconcerting thing about her. She didn’t have to ask what I had been doing or how my day had gone. One glance, and she knew.

      Rampant thievery from London’s riverside warehouses had been going on for several years. Although the thefts actually took place along the shore, newspapers and even the police were calling the perpetrators “river thieves.” Goods under lock and key and close watch were disappearing by the boatload or waggon-load, and Lady Sara was asked to look into the situation. She arranged with the Thames police for me to observe their procedures, and I had spent the day on one of their steam-launches.

      I hadn’t told her I intended to do that. I hadn’t known it myself until I arrived at Wapping Police Station, the river police headquarters. How could she possibly have known it? Not until I chanced to see myself in a mirror did I understand. There were smears of soot on my face. She knew I was going on the river, and, on a bright September day, where would I have exposed myself to soot if not on a steam-launch? Probably my frustrated air told her I hadn’t learned anything. In this fumbling fashion, I sometimes succeeded in making my own reconstruction of a deduction she arrived at instantaneously—but only one slow step at a time and with considerable effort.

      “A launch is too conspicuous,” I told her. She was impatient of anything that wasted time, and years before she had ordered me to stop addressing her as “my lady” in private conversations. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll leave early and spend a few hours in one of the oared police galleys. They should have an advantage, especially at night. Unfortunately, they follow set schedules.”

      She nodded. “The thieves will know those schedules at least as well as the constables do. Have a look, and then we will plan our next move.”

      She turned to Lynes. “We are