Constable Higginson was patrolling the park and cursing his luck that he should be on night duty, tonight of all nights. If it wasn’t raining it was blowing a gale and rendering the cape he wore useless. His wife of less than a year was tucked up in bed with that firm tempting body wrapped round itself rather than him. He could spit.
He was about to hide himself behind a bush near the duck pond and light up a cigarette – there was no one around at this time of night, surely? – when he heard something a few yards away.
What is it? A man groaning?
If some fool were tomming a prossy under cover of bushes then he was about to get a bloody big shock and a shameful day in court under the charge of gross indecency. Following the direction of the sounds, he literally stumbled over a man curled up in agony and making a low moaning cry. Higginson bent low and leant over him, taking out a match and striking it to get a better look.
What he saw shocked him.
The man had been stabbed in his lower back, the blood already congealing and forming a thick and sticky mess. But it wasn’t that that revolted him. It was the sight of the man’s member protruding from his flies and lying limp across his thigh.
‘Don’t need no detective to find out what you’ve been up to, pal,’ said Higginson in a low whisper. ‘Looks like you got what was comin’ to ye. Dirty bastard.’
‘And where exactly is Elm Lodge?’
Jane Rodley sighed. ‘It’s in Seaforth, Liverpool. It’s run by the Waifs and Strays’ Society, under the auspices of the Church of England. I was present last year at the dedication service conducted by the Bishop of Liverpool. His daughter performed the official opening.’ She held her hands steady, palms down, on the table. ‘I’ve been very concerned about young Billy Kelly, Sergeant, for a long time. The poor soul comes regularly to school underfed, bruised and wearing not much more than rags. You’ve met both of his parents. Hardly shining examples of virtue and parenthood, are they?’
Brennan said nothing. He knew very well the sort of life young Kelly would be living.
She went on. ‘At Elm Lodge they run lessons to teach the boys a trade. But that wasn’t what we have in mind for young Kelly. One of the ways in which the society offers practical help – help that changes lives, literally – is the existence of the emigration system.’
‘Emigration?’ It was a word close to Brennan’s heart, for his parents were both emigrants from Ireland, escaping abject poverty for a better life in Wigan.
‘Many of the children are found homes abroad – Canada, mostly – and there they are given a life and a set of opportunities they couldn’t even dream of here.’
‘So you’ve been planning this for a while?’
She nodded. ‘We’d discussed it even before the events of last week. Billy’s life was being stunted and brutalised in that place they laughingly called home. When he went missing we feared the worst. Not that he might be the witness to a crime but the victim of one. It wouldn’t have surprised us if that harridan of a mother had done for him. It really wouldn’t.’
Brennan frowned, trying to arrange things in his mind. ‘So, once you’d discovered he was in the infirmary, you and the good reverend persuaded his parents to remove him and place him in your hands on the pretext of sanctuary? You took him from his home. In effect, you stole him.’
‘That isn’t the word I would use, Sergeant, but yes. In a nutshell.’
‘And in so doing you removed a vital witness. One who could identify his jailer.’
She looked up. ‘The boy is still very weak, Sergeant Brennan. I took him to Seaforth on the train and he slept most of the way. We were the object of much speculation and concern, I can tell you. One woman passenger in the carriage even whispered the word “typhus”. He spoke very little, and he seemed to grow even weaker as we neared our destination.’
‘Well he would, wouldn’t he? Removed prematurely from his hospital bed?’
She looked down, her face growing warm and flushed. ‘As soon as we arrived on Seaforth Road the superintendent there sent for a doctor, who gave him a strong sedative and ordered that he be confined to bed.’
She let her words drift into the cold air of the kitchen.
Brennan spoke firmly. He needed to deal in facts, and certainties. ‘Did the boy say anything at all about the one who kept him in that cellar?’
She shook her head. ‘He said only two words the entire time I was with him.’
‘What were they?’ he asked with a sliver of hope in his voice.
‘He kept saying “bacon butty” … “bacon butty” … but when I bought him a sandwich at the railway station, he ate a few mouthfuls and was then sick.’ She paused then said, ‘You will now let my fiancé go? He has spiritual strength, Sergeant, not physical.’
‘I’ll consider it,’ he said, standing up. Inside he was seething and sorely tempted to let rip and blast her for the stupidity of what she’d done. If the boy failed to recover, he’d see to it that the good vicar and his fiancée would spend some time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. As for now, he would have to travel to Seaforth and hope against hope that the boy would somehow undergo a miraculous recovery and give him a name.
He needed a bloody name.
The following morning, he was forced to put his travel plans on hold when he received a report of a stabbing in Mesnes Park. When he saw the name of the victim, he felt the veins in his head pulsate violently.
Nathaniel Edgar.
Another victim linked this time directly to the school. The sound of angry footsteps clacking down the corridor, and the way his door swung open without the courtesy of a knock, told him that the chief constable shared his feelings of outrage.
‘Another one?’ was Captain Bell’s manner of greeting him. ‘Another one?’
‘Well, not quite, sir,’ said Brennan in his best straw-clutching voice.
‘What do you mean by that?’ Bell snapped, at least having the decency now to slam the door shut. ‘Are you saying the assault was a coincidence? That the perpetrator was a one-legged rag-and-bone man? Or maybe Jack the Ripper on tour?’
‘No, sir. What I meant was, well, according to this report, Mr Nathaniel Edgar is still alive.’
‘Oh hallelujah and rejoice!’
‘I’ll go immediately to the infirmary and see if he is well enough to be interviewed.’
‘This has to stop. Do you hear me, man? Whatever demons are swirling around that godforsaken hellhole in George Street must be caught forthwith. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yes, sir. I think things are heading in that direction.’
Captain Bell gave him a long, hard look. ‘They had better be.’
Brennan stood up to show his sense of urgency and single-mindedness. The chief constable opened the door and stood to one side, a gesture not so much of common courtesy but of impatience.
‘Oh, and by the way, Sergeant,’ he said as Brennan reached for his hat behind the door.
‘Yes, sir?’
‘You might also, in the course of your interview, enquire as to why Mr Edgar had his manhood dangling from his trousers for all the world and his dog to see.’
Richard Weston had no choice but to send a child to the vicarage at Lorne Street with an urgent message. In the first place, Reverend Pearl was the school manager, and as such he had to shoulder much of the burden arising from the situation the school now faced: with Nathaniel Edgar having failed once again to show up for his lessons this morning, the position was critical. In the second place, the good reverend would be able to furnish him with some sort of reason why his fiancée chose the previous day to resign with no notice given. And in the third place, it might well galvanise the man into some sort of action – perhaps sending word to Miss Rodley that things were at a desperate state here at George Street, and an appeal to her sense of duty and loyalty might well bring her back, at least on a temporary basis.
And things were desperate.
Nathaniel Edgar’s class – Standard 5 – were squeezed into Standard 4’s classroom, much to the outrage of Miss Ryan, who was heard to mutter, as they filed out of the staffroom that morning, that ‘this ship is sinking fast.’ And he himself was taking Jane Rodley’s Standard 6.
As he walked down the corridor to the classroom, he had cause to thank the frosty-featured Miss Ryan, for she had given him the idea for the core of the lesson he would teach in the first hour: he would have them recite A Greyport Legend, one of his personal favourites, wherein a rotting hulk filled with children at play is parted from its moorings in thick fog and they disappear, often to be heard in fogs playing in ghostly ignorance on their phantom ship. He even felt buoyed by the irony of the poem, and when he passed Emily Mason’s classroom, its door not yet closed, she was surprised to hear him reciting a fragment from the poem:
For the voices of children, still at play
In a phantom hulk that drifts alway
Through channels whose waters never fail.
She marvelled at the indomitability of his spirit as he moved past her classroom. She had felt so sorry for him this morning. It had seemed that everything was conspiring against him, but she felt sure he would come through this trial. His strength had certainly helped her these last weeks. She turned to Standard 1 and clapped her hands loudly. They all immediately stood to attention.
Half an hour later, she thought she heard a yell of anguish from along the corridor. That couldn’t have been Mr Weston’s voice, surely? It had sounded wild and unrestrained. Every child in Standard 1 looked up from their copybooks and their struggle to write the alphabet neatly, and a few of them began to whimper.
‘Carry on with your work!’ Emily Mason snapped, but she was as disturbed and worried as they were. Still, ten years separated her from the pupils sitting in front of her, and, despite her histrionics of the previous day, she was learning to keep her emotions under some sort of control.
Then, after a few minutes of tense silence, she heard footsteps along the corridor. Through the glass partition in her door she saw the headmaster walk briskly past, his face ashen. Alongside him, Reverend Pearl and the large police constable who had been here with Detective Sergeant Brennan. All three of them had grim expressions on their faces.
‘Miss?’ one of the children asked.
‘Yes, Vera, what is it?’
‘Bin what? I mean, been what?’
‘’Rested, miss. By that fat bobby.’
Emily shook her head. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, Vera. Now get on with your letters. You haven’t got to haitch yet.’
Brennan had been at the bedside of Nathaniel Edgar for hours now, waiting for him to recover from the surgery he’d undergone earlier that morning. He knew, according to the surgeon, that the knife had penetrated his spinal cord in the lumbar region, and that it was highly likely that he would suffer paralysis and impairment of sensation below the injury.
‘In plain words, Sergeant, the poor chap might well never walk again. Still, from another point of view, he was lucky that your constable found him. If he’d been left there, he wouldn’t be here.’
Brennan hadn’t challenged his definition of lucky, even though he could think of nothing worse for a single man like Nathaniel Edgar than to be housebound and totally dependent on others. For a while, he gave thanks for his own health, and more so for that of Ellen and Barry.
He’d asked Captain Bell to send a telegram to the Seaforth police, requesting their assistance by despatching an officer to the Waifs and Strays’ Home at Elm Lodge on Seaforth Road to check on the boy’s welfare until Brennan could make the journey to Merseyside. He’d also sent Jaggery down to the school to let the headmaster know of what had happened. He realised the man couldn’t be expected to drop everything and come up to the infirmary. He had a school to run, and now, with Edgar totally incapacitated, Weston had a huge problem on his hands.
He heard a groaning from the bed. Nathaniel Edgar opened his eyes slowly, then closed them again as the light from the ward disturbed him.
‘Mr Edgar?’ Brennan said quietly. ‘Mr Edgar?’
Edgar licked his lips. They looked cracked and dry. ‘Water,’ he said in a weak voice.
The contrast between the man now and the last time they spoke was marked. As he stood up and walked to the small cabinet by the bed where a jug of water had been placed, Brennan wondered how Nathaniel Edgar would find the strength to cope with the devastating news he would soon be given. He filled a small glass with water and held it to the man’s lips. He tried to raise his head but found the effort too much, so Brennan held the glass there, pouring the soothing water into his mouth little by little until he shook his head.
‘Do you feel like answering a few questions?’ Brennan asked as he sat back down.
Edgar gave a feeble smile. ‘Not going anywhere.’
‘Do you remember what happened?’
A pause while he screwed up his face in an effort to recollect the dark events of the previous night.
‘Wanted to piss.’
Brennan nodded. That, at least, gave him the answer to one question. He’d make a point of haranguing Constable Higginson back at the station for the lurid image he’d painted of the man getting his just deserts for flashing his old man at all and sundry.
‘Did you see who did this?’
Another pause. Another contortion of the face. ‘Too dark.’
‘Did you hear anything? Something that might give us some inkling as to who did it?’
Slowly, with great effort, Edgar turned his head to face Brennan. His eyes were open now, and there was a tearful intensity in them.
‘Nothing … But I may know …’
Brennan caught his breath. ‘What?’
The man’s eyes closed tightly, as if a wave of pain was sweeping through him. Then, after a few moments, he said drowsily, ‘I may know someone … who’d want me to disappear.’