Will Thomas - Fatal Enquiry

Cyrus Barker wrote a cheque while I surveyed the room. We crossed to a long counter manned by tellers, hard-faced men with most of the color drained out of them, who looked as if they had not smiled once in their entire lives. The Guv set the paper down in front of one of them, a man so desiccated he would not have been out of place among the mummies in the British Museum. He scrutinized the slip of paper distastefully, but then I expected that. Barker’s handwriting is nearly illegible.

“I’ll be right back, sir,” the teller said. “I must get this amount approved.” He turned and passed into the room behind.

The Guv’s hand opened on the counter, as if to tap on it, and then closed again, willing patience. I cleared my throat and looked about. Everything appeared normal. People walked about sedately, discussing loans and rates. Men filled out forms, and conferred in corners. Money was accruing, and an empire was being financed.

The Guv grunted something in a low voice that I could not understand.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, a knot suddenly forming in my stomach.

“I said, run!”

I turned and dashed toward the door just as two burly men came around the far end of the desk and gave chase. As we ran, Barker pulled a handful of sharpened coins from his pocket, which he uses to stop anything short of a bull elephant. There was a clang as he banked them off the hard marble floor behind us. One man took a coin in the shoulder. The other one received a deep cut in the cheek. The last I heard before breaking out into Threadneedle Street again was the sound of one of them falling with a groan.

From there it was only a short distance to London Bridge and the relative safety of Lambeth on the other side. Barker and I first attempted a straight line to the bridge via Gracechurch Street, but at one point, he diverted me into Lombard. It was none too soon, as a squad of constables trotted by, heading north toward the bank. The Guv pulled me into a shop that sold general sundries, looking about momentarily at domestic items that had no meaning in our lives: hairpins, bolts of fabric, and combs. After a minute or two, he pulled me out again, and we skirted a tailor’s shop. The third business along the row was a coffeehouse, and as he opened the door, I was momentarily treated to the aroma of freshly brewing beans. However, it was all I was treated to, as we crossed the main room and passed through the kitchen, whose help stared at us without even so much as a protest. We exited into a sooty alley which led into King William’s Street before finally coming to ground in an evil-smelling barber shop.

“We need our hair cut,” Barker stated.

“Not my hair!” I protested.

“Especially your hair, lad. It distinguishes you.”

The shop was worlds apart from Truefitt’s of Old Bond Street, our customary barbers. It looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since the Worshipful Company of Barbers was first organized in 1308. The shaving mugs were cracked, the floor filthy, and the barbers little better than inebriants, with but a single set of proper teeth between the three of them. It came as no surprise that the shop was empty. We settled uneasily into two ancient chairs and unwashed sheets were tucked around our throats.

“What’ll it be, then?” the barber leered, brandishing his scissors.

I sighed. “Cut it short.”

“Righto.”

As the first lock tumbled down the sheet, I felt like a sheep being shorn. It reminded me exactly of my first haircut in Oxford Prison prior to my employment with Barker. It never occurred to me that such a humiliation could happen twice in one lifetime.

I was so concerned with the state of my own head that I hadn’t noticed the Guv’s.

When I finally looked his way, his face was being patted with a towel. Gone was the heavy black mustache that reached to his chin. His face looked naked without it, his upper lip pale against his swarthy chin. My hair was short, the familiar curls gone, but the barber had reduced his to mere stubble.

It was demeaning to pay these fellows for the butchery they had done to us, but I did so, clapping my bowler on my head, where it promptly slid down over my ears. Stepping out into the sunshine I had so admired that morning, I turned back and bowled the hat back inside, where it kicked up layers of dust and hair on the dirty floor.

“This gets better and better. We should have had them pull a few teeth, as well. No one would recognize us then.”

“Step in there a moment, Thomas,” the Guv said, pointing to a villainous-looking alley, black with soot.

I obeyed, wondering what further indignity I was about to endure. Immediately, the April sunshine disappeared and the temperature dropped sharply. Barker reached into the pocket of his coat and took out an eye patch.

“Where did you get that?” I asked.

“From the millinery shop we were in earlier.”

“I don’t recall paying for it.”

“You didn’t. I stole it,” he said.

“You stole it?” I asked. Barker’s integrity is so exaggerated that he would walk a mile to pay back tuppence. “Why didn’t you simply pay for it?”

“Scotland Yard will trace the cabman who brought us to the City. They will track down the barber and find out how we’ve changed our hair. I needed something else to alter my appearance that they couldn’t possibly know about.”

Looking away from me, he removed his spectacles and put them in his pocket before tying the patch over his right eye, the one bisected by the scar. Then he turned back to face me.

I had never seen Barker’s eyes before. Either from a habitual squint or heredity, his left eye was little more than a horizontal slit in his face. The iris looked black as coal.

“Well?” he asked.

“Excellent,” I replied. “No one would recognize you.”

My employer stepped out into the street again and regarded his reflection critically in the window of a pawnshop, running a hand over his stubbled head. Whatever he saw didn’t fully satisfy him, because he pushed me back into the alleyway again.

“We still look too much like ourselves. I’m afraid we must lose our collars and ties.”

“But this is my favorite tie, sir!”

“It can’t be helped, Thomas.”

“Blast!” I cried, and ripped off the collar. Somewhere, perhaps even now, some down-and-outer is wearing my best tie.

“Satisfactory,” he growled. “Now, we must get out of the City, but we do not dare use a cab. I’m afraid we will be walking the rest of the day.”

“Where should we go? Ho’s restaurant? Reverend McClain’s?”

The Guv shook his head. “Terry knows them both. He also has Fu Ying’s address in Three Colt Lane.” Bok Fu Ying was Barker’s ward, who also cared for his prized Pekingese, Harm. She lived in Limehouse in the middle of the Chinese district, a few streets from the tearoom of Ho, my employer’s closest friend.

“Would Poole give that information to his superiors?”

“Of course. He would have to. You know he is CID through and through. He was walking a beat when you were in short pants.”

“Then why did he warn us, if he bleeds Metropolitan blue?”

“Because we are friends. He felt it his duty to warn me, but he would not go so far as to obstruct an investigation.”

“Then where can we go?” I asked. “We certainly can’t check into a respectable hotel anymore, dressed like this.”

“I know a place, but it will mean several miles’ walk. Be glad that it isn’t pouring rain.”

“Not yet, anyway,” I remarked.

“There’s that Welsh pessimism.”

“I don’t believe you know anything at all about Wales, actually.”

We put our heads down and walked. When we finally reached the bridge, there were half a dozen policemen there, attempting to set up a cordon to capture a certain pair of desperate enquiry agents, but it was proving a challenge due to the high volume of traffic that fills the bridge at all hours. Barker strode ahead and engaged a perfect stranger in conversation, a slatternly looking man who already appeared drunk before noon. I fell back, searching the crowd for a traveling companion of my own, but found none. Instead, I followed along closely behind a family, trying to look like a wayward brother, until we had crossed the bridge. It worked well enough. I was scrutinized, but passed over unmolested.