In London Grace was blissfully ignorant of all the carryon. She found herself hankering after Jack, having laid low in an upstairs room at the Frying Pan for the last couple of days. Trixie had seen him at the Commercial tavern and said he had asked after her, though Grace did not know if this was true.
Unknown to Grace, Jack the Lad was in St Giles, away from his East London haunts and the usual crowd, constructing his own plan for that night. Since Trixie had proposed the Shoreditch robbery, he had been wondering what the catch might be. No one in East London was honest: if they were, they wouldn’t survive. Deceit was a way of life from Aldgate to Mile End, and no one held it much against their fellows. Surely there was something more to be had from this venture, he thought. This might be considered greedy or enterprising on Jack’s part, according to one’s point of view: the safe would certainly contain a tidy pile of cash on a Thursday evening.
Jack was going out to do the job, as intended, except that he had decided to leave an hour early. He had not consulted Trixie and he did not mean to share the proceeds. In fact, he planned to get out of town himself for a day or two, before she had a chance to catch up with him. He arrived at the house in Shoreditch and scaled the wall behind the magnolia tree.
After a quiet moment, listening, sheltered from view in the bushes, he crept out and crossed the lawn. Crouching below the level of the windows he sneaked a look inside, round the edge of the curtain, to see the darkened study, light from the hall leaking in through the chink in the doorway. He crept round to the garden door, taking a crowbar from his belt. To his surprise it was already open.
The clock had just struck nine when Mirabel Trotter heard the first creak on the stair. She had drunk half a bottle of cognac and fallen asleep in front of the fire in her drawing room some three hours ago. It sobered her immediately, as if a bucket of cold water had been thrown over her head. She gripped the poker that was still in her hand and turned towards the door. Someone was creeping very quietly up the stairs.
She rose from her chair slowly, crossed the room, graceful as a prima ballerina, and positioned herself behind the door. The footsteps reached the landing and paused. Not a sound but the clock. Then a tiny creak, directly outside, which made her jump. Seconds passed as the intruder listened at the door. Mrs Trotter held her breath. Then the handle turned slowly as somebody tried it, rattling softly.
Mrs Trotter gripped the poker ever tighter as a key turned in the lock and the door opened. A dark furtive figure sniffed his way over the threshold and was met by an iron bar, glancing across his head, followed by a small hatchet that she ever kept upon her person. She was not one to mess about and she realised immediately that she had never seen this person in her life before and was ready to swear to it. Her sons were downstairs, smoking and playing cards, but she hardly needed them. She laid about the intruder until he stopped moving. Then she wiped her face with the back of her butcher’s arms and stood panting and sweating in the darkness.
The cries had brought the Trotter men forth from the kitchen and hurled them up the stairs. They found their ma dripping with sweat and gore. She put down the poker. ‘We’d best tidy up,’ she said.
It took Mirabel Trotter, one of her burly sons (the other was faint at the sight of blood) and two men from the yard to clear up the terrible scene and restore order to the room. They took up the carpet and burned it in a brazier outside, an expensive silk carpet with an elephant-foot pattern, in deep red and black, that had come all the way from Afghanland. They took the dead man downstairs in a sack, with a cloth round his oozing head, and dumped him by the back door. Then they returned with a horse and cart and dragged him off to Canning Town, where they chopped him into several pieces with a bandsaw. Mrs Trotter rewarded them all with a handsome bonus.
The first London heard of the violent demise of Horatio Blunt was the baying of dogs as his remains were dispatched to the swine and the canine fraternity in Mrs Trotter’s Mile End yard the next morning.
Jack had crept in through the open garden door and, finding the drawing room opposite, had ventured inside. He found the bureau without trouble and set to searching the tiny drawers. He found everything as Trixie had said it would be.
He had the key and was congratulating himself, before turning his attention to the safe, when the door swung open silently and in came Miss Craven, who was not afraid of bumps in the night. She held up a rifle as he swung round and pointed it at his head. He dropped the crowbar and put his hands in the air.
Miss Craven was the type who would kill an intruder without losing sleep at night. She would have shot this stranger without hesitation if not for the fact that the trigger had jammed. She braved it out, advancing towards him slowly with the barrel aimed between his eyes, while he wondered why she did not shoot and then concluded, quite correctly–though not in the way he thought–that she couldn’t. In a second he was across the floor and had grabbed the gun by the barrel, swinging it round and down on her skull like a thundercrack. She fell to her knees and Jack hit her again, so violently that her glass eye popped out of its socket and rolled under the bureau, where it stared indignantly at his boots.
With his heart bursting in his mouth, he fumbled with the key, twisting it into the lock. A thick pool was forming around Miss Craven’s head, stretching across the floor to his feet. His hands shook. He opened the safe door to see great wads of notes, rolled round with black rubber bands. At that moment he heard a dreadful wailing shout that shook the house and came so suddenly that he almost jumped out of his skin, heart pounding as if he was winning the Derby. It frightened him even more than murdering Miss Craven. He looked down at her–the blood had reached his boots, and the screaming had stopped upstairs. There was just a whimpering, like someone’s last breath. Footsteps came hurrying up from below. Jack took to his heels and ran.
Rumours spread round the district of a double murder, but died as quickly as they had begun. There was no mention of such an event in any newspaper, no front pages with lurid scenes and sketches of the house with the murder sites marked, not even in the Daily News. The Trotter fiend had tidied her mess well away. Jack held his breath for a day or two, hiding out in Shad Thames. The company was gruff and evil: hyena people congregating in dens below the street to watch dog-fights, drink meths. Jack fitted into this scene well, much better than his mother would have liked. He took to smoking opium, played cards, started to lose his mind. After a week he had become the colour of Limehouse itself, forgetting a little more each day about the world above.
Trixie, of course, true to her name, was nowhere about while all of this was going on. She breezed into town a day or two later, as if she knew nothing of it. She was, of course, privately furious at Jack’s betrayal but decided to bide her time, for she was sure he was stupid enough to turn up again when he had spent the money, having underestimated her regard for loyalty. One benefit of this unplanned turn of events was that Miss Craven was out of the way for good. Trixie sent word to Grace that the deed was done, then ordered rack of lamb and more champagne.
Grace went home to set it straight. She picked up the scattered papers and books, threw away the broken plates; it was dusk by the time she had scrubbed everything. She waved at Mrs Jacob behind her twitching curtain as she tipped her dirty bucket down the gully.
‘Grace,’ came that voice down the street, like a ghost. A cocky dark shape in the shadow, and there he was, like the King of Arabia himself–unbelievable!–coming through the rain as if he had heard her thoughts calling. He walked up to her, dripping, with his ragged grin, and she let him in. In the morning he was gone. Perhaps it was best. She left with a spring in her step to collect the children.
Some fifty-two miles away, in the picturesque seaside town of Whitstable, Miss Rosalind Pinch was toasting her success. She peeped inside the carpet bag again, just to see that the money was still there. She giggled girlishly, exactly as she had the last time she looked, then lifted the brandy to her lips, thanking the good Lord once again for her heavenly luck. She set down the glass and perused the map, planning her agenda for tomorrow. Perhaps she would take a carriage and ride down the coast to Brighton, or maybe see a show. She put her feet on the table before her, sighed contentedly and lit a large Havana cigar.