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Will Thomas: The Hellfire Conspiracy

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Will Thomas The Hellfire Conspiracy

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“You think she might have run away?” Barker pursued.

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

Rose Carrick was of average height for a woman, five foot one or two, but she kept both Barker and myself working hard to keep up with her. Barker let out those long limbs of his, while I bobbed along behind.

“What exactly do you do at the organization, Mrs. Carrick?”

“I deliver charity cases to their destination. It’s not easy work. Sometimes it is old men that are going barmy to the lunatic asylum or boys and girls to orphanages. I’ve been kicked so many times I have permanent bruises on my ankles. But I get them there every time.” She stopped abruptly. “The emporium is up near Victoria Park. Come!”

She doubled her speed again, if such a thing were possible. I began to feel sorry for the barmy old men she escorted. Finally, in the Old Ford Road, she turned and led us to her husband’s shop.

CARRICK’S FAMILY PHOTOGRAPHIC EMPORIUM was stated on the placard above a set of bow windows. The windows advertised PORTRAITS, POSTAL CARDS, AND CARTES DE VISITE on one side and REASONABLE RATES upon the other. It was a cut above the other shops in the street and looked relatively new. Mrs. Carrick opened the door for us and stepped inside, the bell on the door ringing as we entered.

“Stephen!” she called.

From within the next room a baby cried. I thought perhaps it was their child, but a harried-looking man in his shirtsleeves stepped out from behind a beaded curtain.

“Hallo, darling. I’ve got a real wailer this time. Can’t get the little chap to calm down.” He raised his brows when he saw us. “Who are these gentlemen?”

“They are detectives. You remember Mrs. DeVere? Her daughter, Gwendolyn, has gone missing.”

“Good heavens. Is it…slavers?”

“We don’t know, Mr. Carrick,” my employer answered. “We have only just been hired. Cyrus Barker, at your service.”

“Stephen,” his wife said, “was the girl in the picture you took of the C.O.S.?”

“I think so. It should be in the display book there.”

There was a large counter in the middle of the room, and Mrs. Carrick moved behind it and began flipping through an album of photographs.

The wailing in the next room reached a crescendo.

Carrick and his wife looked through the photographs, leaving me to form impressions. I had seldom seen a more mismatched couple than the Carricks. Next to her plainness, her husband was a regular Apollo. He could have been a stage actor, so well built and favored as he was, while his wife looked like a charwoman beside him. Yet they genuinely seemed to care for each other. It left me wondering over the vagaries of love and attraction.

“Here it is!” Rose Carrick cried triumphantly, pulling a photograph from the fittings of the album. “And she’s right there, as I said she was.”

Gwendolyn DeVere was at the end of a large group of people standing formally in front of the Charity Organization Society. Miss Hill was in the center, flanked by Miss Levy and her friend on one side, and Mrs. DeVere and Mrs. Carrick on the other. They were accompanied by wealthy-looking men and women whom I took to be donors. There, at the far right end, looking forlorn and out of place, was the missing girl, Gwendolyn DeVere.

She was a pretty little thing. Her father had described her hair as blond, and she was Nordic looking, like her mother. Her shoulders were slumped and her face solemn, leaving me to hope that the parents had better photographs of the girl at home. I myself would have hated to leave this one image to posterity.

“How well do you gentlemen know Bethnal Green?” Carrick asked.

“I have had several cases that brought me here but none that centered in the area. I don’t believe my assistant has been here at all.”

“Perhaps I could give you a brief tour of the area.”

“But you’re photographing a child,” Mrs. Carrick objected.

“Why don’t you take him, dear? I’m afraid I can’t do a thing with him. You know you’re much better with babies than I.” Carrick kissed her on the cheek and reached for a bowler hat and a stick on the stand by the door. “Thanks, love. Won’t be a tick.”

He herded us out the front door and lit a cigarette once he was in the street, sucking in the smoke like it was fresh air. The child inside was still in full cry.

“Liberation,” Carrick pronounced. “Come this way, gentlemen.”

3

“Shall we head north, sirs? Bethnal Green is roughly triangular, bordered on the north by Victoria Park, on the south by the Mile End Workhouse, and on the west by the old Jewish burial ground. The gasworks is only a few streets away from here.”

Carrick led us up Cambridge Road. “This district was in its heyday at the end of the last century, when the famous boxer Daniel Mendoza lived here,” he said between puffs. “This used to be the center of the silk-weaving trade. Things went to seed after trade with China opened up, and the old place has become rather run-down. Land is cheap here, and plenty of young families have moved to the Green. The Tower Hamlets Council is making an attempt at renovation. It seemed the perfect place to open a photographic emporium.”

“You strike me as an educated man, Mr. Carrick,” Barker noted. “You’ve had some time at university.”

“Not much gets by you, does it, Mr. Barker? Yes, I had a year or two at Christ Church in the seventies, under Dodgson. It was he that awakened my interest in photography. My father thought it all a waste of time, however, and cut me off. I’ve been fending for myself ever since.”

I could understand Carrick’s tale of woe. If anything, my own was even worse. Oxford could be an uncommonly hard place if one does not conform to its standards.

Carrick pointed out the market gardens, the Jewish cemetery, and other sites around the area. Finally, we made our way back up to the Old Ford Road and the emporium.

“How shall you gentlemen proceed?” Carrick asked. “I mean, if Miss DeVere really has been taken by someone.”

“For now,” Barker said, “we are like spies in the land of Canaan, getting the lay of the land.”

“Then I hope, sirs, for both your sakes, that you do not encounter any giants. Best of luck finding little Miss DeVere.”

“Impressions?” Barker asked, after Carrick had returned to his emporium.

“They’re an unusual couple,” I stated, “but then, Bethnal Green probably doesn’t have the sort of standards Kensington does. His story is not much different from my own.”

“Who is Dodgson?”

“He’s a mathematician and an author. I’ve heard he has an interest in photography.”

“What sort of thing has he written?”

“You’re jesting, aren’t you? He writes as Lewis Carroll. Alice in Wonderland?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s a book for children.”

“There you are, then. I haven’t any.”

“What shall we do now, sir?” I asked, hoping he would suggest a cafe or tearoom. I needed a restorative and a good rest before venturing out again.

“We’ve searched the perimeter, now we must search all the streets in between.”

“That will take hours,” I said.

“Yes, it will. We’d best not dawdle.”

“What are we looking for, sir?” I dared ask. “She’s not going to suddenly appear in the street; and if she’s been taken by someone, they’ve got her drugged or tied up and hidden away somewhere.”

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