T.F. Banks - The Emperor's assassin

It was seven in the evening when Henry Morton and Jimmy Presley descended from their hackneycab at the west end of Maiden Lane, and bells were clanging in the steeples of the nearby churches of Saint Anne and Saint Botolph. The street in this coaching district was loud with the rattle of heavy vehicles and their teams, and a bustling, noisy traffic of barrows and drays and shouting drivers flowed steadily by the two Bow Street men as they conferred.

“Go gently, Jimmy,” Morton told him over the racket. “We don't want him bolting on us.”

“Your peacher said there were a parcel of Frenchies in the neighbourhood, didn't he?”

“Aye, so try not to beard any of them, lest they fly and give him warning.”

Presley nodded and stepped with a born Londoner's confidence into the busy flood and made his way across. They began to move separately down either side of the lane, ducking here and there into the maze of neighbouring byways. As discreetly as possible, sometimes cupping their hands to make themselves heard, they enquired at doorways, or from people on the street-at least people who looked English. A cove with a raspberry patch on his crown? Did they know him? His place of residence? Frencher, named Boulot?

To Henry Morton, Jean Boulot had somehow seemed a better bet than Gilles Niceron. If Morton had had to explain why he was here, he might have had some trouble. Largely it was a hunch-it seemed too great a coincidence that Boulot would visit the count and that same night d'Auvraye would fly into a rage and order his mistress cast out of her house. Morton was also a little sceptical whenever he sensed another was trying to direct the course of his investigation-as Rolles had done with his list of suspects-some of whom were dead! At any rate, he had let John Townsend be the one to ride out to Walthamstow to look up Niceron.

A diminutive child with a massive topper appeared in Morton's path, surrounded by a gang of smaller children, all equally shabbily dressed, though without the impressive headgear.

“Oy, yer lookin' for a Frenchy lives hereabout?”

“Indeed I am. Do you know him?”

“Might do,” the child said, spitting lazily onto the cobbles.

Morton reached into his pocket as though he might find a coin. “A man with a raspberry mark on his bald pate. Where might I find him?”

The child nodded to Morton's hand in his pocket. “Tip us the blunt first. D'ye take us for simkins?”

Morton tossed a couple of copper coins, and the boy snatched them nimbly out of the air.

“The bilker dwells round the corner. Number two, Paul's Court.”

The din of the street faded as the two Runners turned into Huggin's Lane, and died away almost entirely as they entered the dark little close called Paul's Court. They paused a moment in the centre, looking about themselves. It was quiet here, and still, the city's commotion now like a distant rushing of water beyond the gaunt-eyed walls. Number 2 was a shabby brick building, wedged in tightly amongst a row of others like it, each seeming to lean against its neighbour for support. Indeed, they all looked to be typical poor men's lodgings, almost indistinguishable from thousands of others like them in the metropolis: decrepit, black with soot, windows unglazed. But to Morton's carefully assessing eye, they seemed far from the worst of the “netherskens.” They hadn't a patch on that lowest and most dangerous species of doss house, the sort that filled the criminal “holy land” of St. Giles or lined the back of the Ratcliff Highway. No, these were nigh on respectable, by comparison.

About the police men the usual little knot of onlookers, mostly children, had started to materialise, seeping silently out of the doorways and cellar traps and alleys. It was hard to conceal the arrival of the “horneys” long in a place like this. Morton and Presley bore no visible badge of office and wore no distinctive clothing, but the denizens knew them instantly for what they were.

“Who's the proprietor in there?” Morton demanded, without turning. He pointed to number 2.

“No pr'priet'r, yer honour,” piped a sickly looking man. “There's but a deputy, Mr. Wi'm'sun.”

“Any Frenchies living in there?”

“Uh-uh, aye, yer honour. And in t'other kens, too.”

“Let's at it, then,” said Morton to Presley, ignoring the shrill pleas to “tip us a farden, oy!”

Mr. Williamson was to be found in the kitchen at the back of the house, a low room whose blackened beams hung down almost to eye level. The landlord's deputy sat smoking beside the unlit hearth, his elbows resting on a scarred tabletop, a bar of dim light from the single small window at the end of the room passing slantwise across his face. Otherwise the kitchen was deserted except for one slatternly woman who shuffled amongst the clutter of empty benches, gathering up scraps and utensils. There would presumably not be another meal served for hours, but a penetrating smell of cooked fish still hung in the air from the last.

“ 'E's been bousing,” wheezed the old man. “He's not come out of his room in days. Poxy Frenchman. He's mad. Let 'im die of barrel fever if 'e likes, say I.”

“He abides up there by himself?”

“Uh, aye. Except from time to time a buttockwoman, or some of his Frenchy friends.”

“Does he pay up regular?” Jimmy Presley wanted to know.

The deputy coughed, richly and long, and then hawked and spat on his stone floor. He shrugged. “I'd not 'ave 'im there if he didn't. All me tenants pay up.”

“How long has he been on this binge? Was he in his room three nights ago?”

“Do you traps think I spend all me time spying out what folk do? 'E can come and go as 'e pleases. Tenants have their own doors. I don't lock up. I just know 'e 'asn't been down 'ere to sup or break his fast for a time-days. I 'ear 'im raving up there, and then I 'ear 'im singing, and then I hear 'im laughing or squalling like a baby. 'E's daft. Take him away if it pleases ye. I can get another for his room in an hour. People like this 'ouse. They like I gives them privacy.”

“We'll speak with the cove. Take us to him.”

“Be on the top floor, at the end, on the left. You can find it for yerselves,” he added, his tone openly hostile. “Me tenants don't like traps, and I don't make 'em welcome.”

Jimmy Presley thrust his baton close to the old man's crooked nose.

“Someday you'll need this,” he said, “and that'll be a sorry day for you, as we don't care for old farts neither.”

“You lot don't care for none but yerselves,” Williamson muttered, but averted his eyes.

Morton and Presley climbed four stories up a narrow, creaking wooden staircase. The air at the top was close and warm and strongly pungent with the sour fumes of urine, as if people had relieved themselves in the hall or in the stairwell, or the place were full of unemptied chamber pots. Outside the room at the end of the cramped corridor, Morton called out Boulot's name and told him in French to open. There was no response. Impatiently, Presley hammered hard on the flimsy door.

The faintest clicking sound alerted Morton, and he thrust Jimmy Presley violently aside. At almost the same instant the foot of the door was shattered and there was a loud report, stunning their ears in the narrow space. Startled, the two Runners gazed at each other for an instant. Morton looked down and saw in the floor a hole the size of a man's eye.

“Cor!” shouted Jimmy Presley, anger quickly replacing alarm. Both men hurriedly pulled out their batons.

Before they could attack, however, another voice could be heard crying out, on the other side of the door. Morton put a restraining hand on his young partner's arm and gestured to him to hold his peace.