An Act of Mercy: A gripping historical mystery set in Victorian London. J. Durham J.
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out the wick of the lamp. Blackness swallowed him: a solid thing. He beat down his anxiety by concentrating on the feel of the metal rungs under his hands. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Hand over hand; he pulled himself upwards, until his head bumped against the manhole cover. He lifted it, and slid it to one side. He blinked.
Moonlight painted the lane as bright as midday in Margate. He made a hasty calculation of direction and distance, and decided he was probably somewhere to the west of St James’ Square. Behind Curzon Street, perhaps. Or Half Moon Street. A wealthy area, that wouldn’t take kindly to detectives popping up out of the sewer, even at that hour. He levered himself up out of the hole, glad that most of the worthy citizens of Mayfair would be tucked up in their beds.
After a moment’s hesitation, he left the cover partly off the hole, considering it worth risking an accident in the hope that the moonlight would guide Wainwright, Williamson, and the other constables to him.
He straightened up and listened. His suspect had to be long gone: the manhole was at the junction of three lanes, and he could have fled in any direction. But he willed himself, with a discipline forged from experience, to stand still. To listen and to look. A shadow detached itself from the larger shadow of a nearby wall, and wound itself around his legs. He resisted the urge to kick it, and peered instead at the surrounding buildings. Several stable blocks lined the converging lanes, overshadowed by the houses behind them. The houses were all in darkness.
Except one. One with lights shining in several windows on the upper floors. Pilgrim headed for it. The gate that gave onto the lane was closed, but not locked. The hinges were well oiled, and it swung open without a sound.
As he picked his way towards the house, he paused, his eye caught by something gleaming on the path. Water. He suppressed a thrill of triumph. His man had come this way: given the recent dearth of rain, there was no other way for the path to be wet. There didn’t seem to be a back door, but there was a side entrance, in the shadows of the neighbouring building. It was too gloomy to see the doorway properly, so he bent to touch the step, a parody of genuflection. It was also wet.
He hesitated. He couldn’t go crashing into a wealthy household on his own, although he wouldn’t have had the same scruples in one of the poorer parts of the city. If Wainwright had gone back to the barracks as instructed, if he had then roused Dolly and the other constables and taken them to the manhole in Cockspur Court, then Pilgrim was looking at a wait of at least forty minutes. Providing, of course, that Dolly had spotted the scarf he had left to mark the left-hand tunnel in the sewer. If not …
With a feeling that the situation was slipping out of his grasp, he worked his way around to the front of the house. And there his anxiety deepened: a Hackney carriage was waiting at the kerb. The nag between the traces had a dejected air, looking no happier to be out in the middle of the night than Pilgrim was himself. Pilgrim guessed it had been there for some time.
He crept into a gap in the shrubbery, just yards from the cab. He had no sooner settled into his chosen spot, however, when a gust of night air found a crack in the glass of one of the carriage lamps, and extinguished the flame. The driver’s shoulders slumped, and he slid off the box. Pilgrim heard a flint strike.
‘Come on, you tokey bugger.’ The driver jabbed at the wick, and the lamp flared.
Pilgrim drew back into the shadows so that the driver wouldn’t see him, pulling his collar over the lower half of his scarred face. The carriage lamp died again, plunging Pilgrim back into gloom.
‘Stay like that, then, you bugger.’ The driver continued berating the lamp until he resumed his seat on the box, where he lapsed once more into silence.
Pilgrim’s eyelids drooped, and he wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing there. It was one of his golden rules never, ever, to act on tip-offs from the public. In his experience, anonymous leads were unreliable at best, if not downright mischievous. But there had been something about the note he had received that evening, the use of red ink, perhaps? It had been addressed to him, care of ‘Mr Charles Dickens, at the offices of Household Words’. Pilgrim was not a man given to fancies – far from it – but he had had the strangest sensation when Dickens put the envelope into his hand.
He settled further into his hiding place, pondering the nature of anonymous informants, the use of red ink, and the usefulness of having golden rules if you were in the habit of breaking them. His eyes drifted shut …
He jerked awake again as the carriage door slammed. Had someone climbed inside? The driver shook his reins and urged the horse into motion. Pilgrim resisted the impulse to shout at him to stop; he didn’t want to lose the element of surprise. He had no choice but to spur his reluctant limbs into action. Luckily, the horse was no more enthusiastic for the exercise than he was, and barely accelerated above an amble to the end of the street. It slowed down still further to turn the corner, and Pilgrim seized his chance. He put on a burst of speed, and grabbed for the door handle, using his own forward momentum to open the door and swing himself up into the cab.
‘What the … ?’ The startled passenger, a young man with mutton chop whiskers, leapt off the seat. Pilgrim swung his fist lazily, almost casually, and felt it connect with the man’s chin. He slid to the floor, like a puppet with its strings cut.
The driver sawed the cab to a halt. ‘What in hellfire … ?’
Pilgrim ignored him, and turned his attention to the packages on the floor. There were six in total, all swathed in brown canvas. The largest was about the same size as a hatbox. Pilgrim knelt beside it, and started to tear at the wrappings. It was indeed a hatbox. He fumbled with the strap. As he did, the box slipped from his grasp and it sprung open, dumping the contents. A roughly spherical object bounced away across the floor of the cab, trailing wet strips of rag behind it. It came to rest under the seat.
He stared at it. It stared back. It took him a long, shocked moment to realize what it was.
‘Can’t beat a splendid piece of beef. And the bloodier the better, eh? Builds up the constitution.’
The chunk of flesh quivered so rare on the silver platter that it looked as if it had trotted to the table straight from Smithfield, without detouring to a kitchen.
‘So I understand, Mr Phillips.’ The Guest of Honour, who much preferred his beef brown, masked his dismay with a smile. Charles Dickens was nothing if not a social creature, and prided himself on his manners.
‘Don’t mind if I carve it meself, do you?’ asked Phillips. ‘The servants always make a bloody hash of it.’
‘Language, John.’ The rebuke from Mrs Phillips was mild, for the guests of her late supper party were used to her husband’s eccentricities. She nodded as the footman replenished her wine glass.
The dining room was panelled from floor to ceiling: a surfeit of mahogany and scagliola columns. The gentlemen, wearing white waistcoats, uniformly red-faced and bewhiskered, were indistinguishable from each other. The women, on the other hand, had gone out of their way to be as individual as possible, resulting in a visual cacophony of multicoloured silks, feathers, and paisley shawls. Lady Harcourt-Brown rustled as she leaned towards Dickens, offering a generous view of crepey bosom.
‘We have been reading in Household Words, Mr Dickens, about the new detective police who have been appointed.’
He kept his eyes fixed on the beef that was yielding to the enthusiasm of his host’s carving knife. But the Lady was not to be similarly distracted.
‘Do you think they will put an end to the lawlessness on our streets?’ she prompted.
‘Ha!’ It was not Dickens, but her husband, Sir Harold, who responded.
‘You do not think so, sir?’ They’d caught his attention at last.
‘Indeed I do not. In my experience, these so-called detectives