Alex Grecian - The Yard

“That’s-”

“’Tis what it is. An’ yer in no position to go castin’ stones.”

The coachman was silent, but Pizer knew he had him.

“Done,” the coachman said.

“Good. Bring ’im round here tomorrow mornin’, this time.”

Without another word, the coachman sprang to the top of his hansom cab and flicked the reins. The cab lurched forward and rolled down the alley, turned left at the mouth, and was gone. Pizer fished the remains of the old cigar from his pocket and lit it from the dying embers of his cigarette. He took a drag of the stale cigar and leaned back against the alley wall.

Two pounds eleven was still a lot to pay for a new climber, but the coachman had been right. Sam couldn’t do his own scouting when there was Blackleg to think about. All things considered, he was getting off lucky. No question about it, things were looking up for Sam Pizer.

The bald man, Cinderhouse, hadn’t stayed to watch his work being discovered this time. He wasn’t stupid. And he didn’t want to be caught. He had derived some satisfaction from watching the detectives find Little’s body, but if he had been noticed then and was noticed again when Pringle’s body was discovered, there would be suspicion. He would have liked to experience that final step in the process, but it wasn’t essential. He could guess what was happening this morning as the Metropolitan Police Force was mobilized, as the panicky prey huddled together, knowing that the hunter was out there somewhere in the night beyond the fire.

He knew now that he would kill again. It was only a matter of time. He’d had no idea how right it would feel to strike back at the universe, at the city, at the police, for everything they’d taken from him. He’d played the good citizen for most of his adult life and it hadn’t worked out for him. That was all, it just hadn’t worked out and it was time to move on. The city had taken his family and the police had done nothing to find them and now the scales would be balanced.

For all Cinderhouse knew, his family was still alive somewhere. They had left the house one day and they had not come back. No bodies had been found. So perhaps they were in a different city, with new names. Perhaps they thought of him sometimes and wondered how he was doing. The idea was disturbing, but sometimes it comforted him to imagine his wife and son living a separate life far away.

That fantasy never lasted long. He knew they must be dead. The city swallowed nearly ten thousand people every year. Ten thousand people simply disappeared, Cinderhouse’s family among them. There was nothing the police could do. He’d gone to them and they had listened to him and taken notes and done nothing.

But here he was, finally taking matters into his own hands. Killing the police wouldn’t bring his family back, he knew that, but it quieted the angry voices in his head. It wasn’t quite closure, but it felt good just the same. Maybe he would kill Sir Edward Bradford, the commissioner of police himself, the very embodiment of the useless Metropolitan Police Force.

But one thing at a time. Cinderhouse was letting himself grow angry again and it would be all too easy to take that anger out on the wrong person. He needed to be calm. He had family matters to deal with.

He made his way across the back lawn in the pale dawn light. The old carriage house loomed up before him, and he found the latch on the side door. He hadn’t been back here in months, but he still knew the place. He stepped inside and smelled the damp and the rot and the musky animal scent that tickled the back of his throat. He tried not to think about the cause of that odor. Three empty horse stalls were directly ahead of him and he felt along the wall until he came to a set of brackets hung at eye level. Something small scurried across his foot and he kicked at it. His hand closed on the thing in the brackets and he pulled it up and away. He felt along the length of it and held it to his nose. The leather hadn’t rotted away and the animals had left it intact.

He cracked it against his leg and felt the familiar sting, the tingle that traveled down to his toes and back up to his loins. He cracked it again and groaned. His breath quickened and the old memories of discipline returned at once.

He exited the way he had come and relatched the side door. Back across the lawn and into the house. He set the riding crop on the table while he fetched an extra lantern from a cupboard in the kitchen and lit it. With the crop in his right hand and the lantern in his left, he moved through the back hall to the storage closets near the pantry.

The boy had stopped banging on the walls and kicking at the door of his closet. Cinderhouse hoped that Fenn had managed to get some rest. He still had a long day ahead of him.

A boy must be taught to respect his father.

Phillipa Dick hated Claire Day.

She hated her so much that she had taught her the wrong way to sew buttons on a blouse, the wrong way to clean an oven, the wrong way to boil a sheep’s head … She had done everything she could to foul Mrs Day’s marriage.

Her tactics had not, of course, made even the slightest dent in the Days’ marriage.

The husband, Mr Day, was an uncommonly handsome man, Mrs Dick thought. His broad shoulders, dark eyes, and kindly manner never failed to quicken Mrs Dick’s heart. Her own husband had been a small ratty tortoise vendor who had spent most of his life walking up and down Oxford Street calling after passing housewives to come and take a look at the best tortoises in London. Upon selling one of the slow-moving beasts, Mr Dick had hied himself to the nearest pub for the remainder of each day, until money was once more tight. He had spent the entirety of their married life shuttling back and forth, from street to saloon, leaving his wife to keep a roof above their heads with the meager profits she earned by cleaning houses.

She had never, strictly speaking, been a full-time servant, which would have required her to keep a room in her employer’s house, but instead had returned to her own home every evening after tea. Upon her husband’s death, Mrs Dick had received fifty pounds from his life insurance policy and had paid off the mortgage on her house. She had the relative luxury now of working only a few hours a day for food money.

Perhaps surprisingly, her opinion of other women’s husbands had not been curdled by personal experience. Mr Dick could not have fallen further in her esteem, but other husbands were judged on their own merits, and Mr Day was considered too good for the pampered likes of Claire Day.

Claire spent the majority of her time that was not taken up with household responsibilities curled by the hearth reading novels. And not just novels, but mystery novels replete with scandal and murder and intrigue, all subjects a good wife ought to avoid at any cost. She never dressed for company until her husband was expected to arrive home, and she was clearly unable to budget the weekly stipend her husband set aside for the household.

She was fortunate that Mrs Dick had so much experience with parsimonious budgeting. Phillipa Dick still bought soap by the pound, soft and gritty and sliced from the end of a long bar by the grocer. It was more fashionable these days to buy individual paper-wrapped soaps, but Mrs Dick’s old ways saved the Day family two pennies a week. There were countless other ways that Mrs Dick scrimped and saved, and the total savings to her employers amounted to nearly a crown a month, but Claire Day seldom spared Mrs Dick a kind word. The younger woman avoided contact with her housekeeper unless there was some special skill she wished to learn so as to impress the master of the house.