Convicted Innocent(29)

“And now he’s dead.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Cause of death?”

“The coroner says it’s the same manner and method used by Nicholas Harker to kill Milo Gervais: a throat cut by a heavy knife.”

While that methodology itself wasn’t particularly unique, the style of the knife stroke had been. On account of it (and with the help of a mortician who kept extensive notes), Horace had been able to link Gervais’s murder with several others, all of which formed the foundation of his case against Nicholas Harker and the Harker empire as a whole.

Before he voiced what he found so glaringly problematic about Mr. O’Malley’s death, Horace asked, “Where was the body?”

“Constable Little interrupted a group of men attempting to dump it in the river off Nightingale, sir,” a plainclothes detective sergeant, Eustace Bradtree, chimed in. Missing one of his front teeth, Bradtree whistled a bit when he said his S’s. “They fled as soon as they heard his shout, but they hadn’t finished their work.”

“Little is one of Sergeant Todd’s men?” Horace asked, almost absently, as he turned to the large, detailed map of the East End tacked to the wall behind him.

“Yes, sir. He helped Lewis put that folio together, so he recognized O’Malley and asked the coroner to speed his work,” Bradtree whistled. “Only brought the body in a few hours ago. Seems to have been dead about a day. Also, the abandoned cart was found in a nameless alley near Sheridan Street.”

“We’re certain that cart is linked to the case?” The inspector half-turned back toward his men.

“As we can be, sir.” Bradtree nodded to a mud-smudged police helmet sitting on the table amid the paperwork and other odds-and-ends. “That was stashed in the back. Has Sergeant Todd’s name inked in the lining.”

Horace nodded and turned back to the map. He located Nightingale Lane where it brushed the Thames on the map and chewed his lip in thought.

The Harkers had holdings throughout the East End (if primarily in Whitechapel): they were highlighted on this map, as was the trail of the false police wagon in which Nicholas Harker had escaped from Holloway Prison, and the side street where the abandoned cart had been found an hour or two before. The alley where Lewis Todd had presumably disappeared and the Clerkenwell police station were also marked.

Holloway, Clerkenwell, and the Old Bailey were a few miles to the northwest of Whitechapel on the other side of the Old City. The police wagon’s path had been traced as far as central Whitechapel before it petered to nothing somewhere between Turner Street and Raven near London Hospital.

The five points were nowhere near each other and bore no noticeable relationship to any of the Harker properties.

Not allowing the map’s inconclusiveness to drive him to frustration, Horace turned back to his men. “Are all the Harkers’ holdings on this map? Current and past?”

Sergeant Nolan thought for a moment in his plodding, steady way. “Current, yes sir, and we have as many men as possible keeping an eye on them with assistance from J, N, and K divisions. We didn’t mark some of the Harkers’ old premises – which we’re also not watching – such as that burned out factory in Bethnal Green, the warehouses in St. George’s they sold to MacDermott Incorporated last autumn, or the abandoned tunnels some fool of a Harker dug in the sixties to meet up with the West End Underground.”

“Why not the last? Seems an excellent place in which to hole-up.”

Detective Sergeant Bradtree chimed in again. “Most of that was taken over by developing sewer lines, bricked in, or absorbed as lower levels of existing street-level structures and walled off from the rest of the tunnel system. I’ve heard what’s left in the Harkers’ asset portfolio is a series of isolated labyrinths, numbering perhaps a dozen or more. Very difficult to access discreetly, though doable with aid. Also, problematic for us to monitor.”