The Albino escaped, leaving no clue behind. His men fought like tigers and died, to a man, ensuring he evaded capture, and though the Old Bailey guards searched the bodies, they found nothing useful. Boggs himself, of course, was gone; I stood carefully at the edge of the manhole and lowered a lamp down but the darkness beneath swallowed the feeble light and all I could make out were shades of brown and black. The smell, too, was enough to overwhelm the senses. I stepped back before dizziness made me over-balance and join Boggs in his hellish grave.
Holmes meanwhile was arguing with Inspector Lestrade, who had arrived in the wake of the battle, looking for the Albino. Holmes had a cut on his forehead, which was bleeding into his eyes, and Lestrade was insisting he have it seen to before doing anything else.
Holmes had other ideas. ‘It is imperative that we speak with Mrs Boggs immediately, Inspector! We have already been delayed for almost two hours by your cretinous colleagues!’
‘In due course, Mr Holmes, in due course. I’ve sent a constable to the address you provided, with instructions to stay with the lady until we arrive. As soon as we get your head bandaged you can speak to her.’
‘That will be too late!’ Holmes was furious, his grey eyes wide with anger, his jaw rigid as he strove to control his temper. ‘It may have been too late before you even arrived here, Lestrade, but it will certainly be so if we delay any longer. Do you imagine that a man capable of ordering one of his men thrown into that—’ he pointed towards two constables who were carefully lowering the manhole cover back into place, ‘—would baulk for a second at killing a defenceless woman? If she yet lives, then a few coins may loosen her lips a little, especially now that her husband is dead, but any further delay will certainly render the possibility moot, in which case we may as well stay here.’
I had long since learned not to be shocked by Holmes’s occasional descent into callousness, recognising that in every case what seemed cold-blooded disregard was simply pragmatism. Holmes, I knew, was not without compassion, but he rarely allowed it to hinder an investigation. Lestrade, too, knew Holmes’s moods of old.
‘Very well, Mr Holmes,’ he said. ‘Press this handkerchief to the cut, at least, and we’ll be on our way, though I’m sure Mrs Boggs will already be enjoying a cup of tea in police custody.’
* * *
As soon as we reached the street, it was obvious that something was amiss. Crowds of people milled about in front of the Boggses’ home, held back by a single harassed constable.
‘Frost! Constable Frost!’ Lestrade jumped to the ground while the vehicle was still moving and pushed his way through the crowd, all the while shouting to his subordinate. We followed in the wake he created, until we stood before the front door, which spun on a single hinge. I was reminded of Miss Marr’s door sitting open in the rain, and felt a heaviness build in the pit of my stomach. I was suddenly sure that an already bloody day was about to become even bloodier.
By contrast, Constable Frost’s relief was palpable as he quickly but concisely gave his report to Lestrade. ‘There’s a woman’s body inside, first door on the right, sir. Looks like she’s been attacked by a madman, sir. The kid is with a neighbour. Place is a bit of a mess, sir, but it’s impossible to tell if it was always that way, or if there was a robbery.’
‘It’s unlikely Mrs Boggs had much worth stealing, Constable,’ Lestrade said wearily, as we pushed past Frost.
Inside, what had been tattered but clean had been transformed into filthy wreckage. What little furniture the Boggses had owned had been turned over and smashed to splinters, mattresses ripped apart, a cupboard turned to kindling, the door to the box room destroyed and even the baby’s cot stove in on one side. Mrs Boggs had been savagely beaten until her face was all but unrecognisable. She sat propped against a wall as though still living, but there was no chance of that. I found a rough blanket in a corner and pulled it over her body.
‘The death blow was struck with a heavy, rounded object, directly to the back of the head, possibly while she was on her hands and knees,’ I said sorrowfully.
‘Like the cane you said you saw the Albino holding, Doctor?’ asked Lestrade.
‘Perhaps. It’s definitely a possibility, but I would need to examine the head of the cane more closely before I could say for sure. You think that the Albino got here before us, and killed Mrs Boggs to silence her?’
‘Then why destroy the room?’ Holmes interrupted flatly. ‘Mr Boggs worked for the Albino, that much was made clear at the Bailey. His job was to retrieve the miniature from its purchaser and bring it to his master, but for whatever reason he muddled the job and the lady in question ended up dead. Even so, Boggs must have given the miniature to the Albino. So I ask again, why destroy the room?’
Lestrade was hesitant. ‘He believed Boggs had further information?’
‘Or he has a terrible temper when angered?’ Though the Albino had been outwardly calm when ordering the execution of Mr Boggs under the Bailey, I had known cases of similarly emotionally controlled individuals who, under certain unfortunate stimuli, were capable of the most terrible feats of violence and cruelty.
Holmes shrugged at the suggestion but I, who knew him better than anyone, could tell that he considered the idea to have little merit. ‘That is not unknown,’ he said eventually. ‘Jack Vincent, who robbed the Bank of England in seventy-four, for instance, was such an individual, and he was not unique.’ He turned to Lestrade. ‘Even more reason to exercise caution when dealing with this man, Inspector. His cold-blooded ruthlessness was amply demonstrated by the manner in which he disposed of Mr Boggs, but the murder of Mrs Boggs argues for a great inner rage. A combination of the two could prove very dangerous indeed.’
In response, Lestrade called over Constable Frost and gave him a series of instructions. ‘Frost will remain at the front of the building for the moment, Mr Holmes, while we wait for more officers to arrive, but in the meantime, will you be wanting to look at anything in the room?’
He need not have bothered to ask, for Holmes was already crouched down on the floor, raking through the grate of the fireplace. He reached inside and pulled out a handful of partially burned scraps of paper, each of which he examined, before discarding. ‘Bits of bills and inconsequential scribbles only,’ he complained, ‘burned recently and with no great regard for their complete destruction. I wonder—’
He picked up one of the larger scraps and looked at it again. ‘The same word copied over and over, Watson, do you see? In block capitals too. Our man was practising.’
‘Were we in any doubt that Boggs wrote the letter to Miss Marr, Holmes?’ I asked, with some irritation. It occasionally seemed to me that Holmes liked to flaunt his abilities when anyone from Scotland Yard was present, and I – painfully aware that the trail of bodies we had followed that day had led us into a dead end – had no patience for such frivolities.
I should have had more faith.
‘Yes, yes, Watson, that much is a given!’ Holmes was impatient too, and made no effort to hide the fact. ‘But who’s to say that Boggs had but one correspondent? There is a large quantity of ash here, far greater than one would expect from these few pages. Other, more interesting, correspondence has been destroyed here. Replies, perhaps.’
‘Which is all very well, Mr Holmes,’ Lestrade interjected, ‘but what good does that do us? Without the destroyed letters, have you any suggestions regarding our next course of action?’
‘No,’ admitted Holmes ruefully. He straightened up and cast an analytical eye over the ruin of the room. ‘If we do not discover something here, then we may find ourselves in difficulties in future.’ He glanced down at the scraps in his hand. ‘But no man can think of everything and it may be that…’
His voice trailed off as he paced around the room, tapping on walls and running his fingers along the gaps between floorboards. This continued for several minutes, until every possible hiding place must surely have been exhausted, and he stood once more in the centre of the room, his face a mask of frustration. I had seen that look many times before and knew the black mood it presaged. Sherlock Holmes did not react positively to failure, even temporary failure, and as I watched his eyes flicker across the room, I hoped for my friend’s sake that some connection could be made which would move us forward.
As though he could read my thoughts, Holmes slowly smiled. He walked over to the little box room where the baby’s crib lay and pulled the tiny bed into the main living area. Reaching past the shattered side he slipped his fingers beneath the thin mattress – in reality just a worn and much folded blanket – and flipped it out onto the floor. Then, with a cry of triumph, he emerged grasping a sheaf of crumpled paper.
‘Never waste anything; that is the invariable rule of the industrious poor! What may not satisfy as a letter intended for a genteel lady will do well as insulation for a baby’s bed, Lestrade!’
Propping the cot against the wall, he unfolded the papers. There were three in total. The first was a reply from a Mr Howard Smith of Bayswater, regretting that he had no interest in selling ‘the item described’. The others were letters of approximately the same construction as that sent to Eugenie Marr, though addressed to what were presumably other collectors. The nearest – that of Colonel Andrew de la Mare – was not too far distant.
‘Can you take us to this address at once, Lestrade?’ asked Holmes, his mood changing in an instant. ‘With some luck, the Albino does not know that Colonel de la Mare of Mayfair is in possession of—’ he consulted the letter, ‘—an oil painting of Sir James Hamilton of Finnart, nor that a Mr Sebastian Rudge is the current owner of a portrait of Anne Boleyn in a gilt-edged frame. For the first time, we may manage to get ahead of our quarry!’