Lawless and the House of Electricity Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Also Available from William Sutton and Titan Books

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Book I: Bodies Impolitic

  Book II: Reports and Repercussions

  Book III: Mollification

  Book IV: North and South

  Book V: Into the Secret Chapel

  Book VI: Shining Hours

  Book VII: A Lady’s Diary

  Book VIII: To Bring Her Back

  Book IX: The Cost

  Dramatis Personae

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Sources

  About the Author

  ALSO AVAILABLE FROM WILLIAM SUTTON AND TITAN BOOKS

  Lawless and the Devil of Euston Square

  Lawless and the Flowers of Sin

  Lawless and the House of Electricity

  Print edition ISBN: 9781785650130

  E-book ISBN: 9781785650147

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  First Titan edition: August 2017

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  William Sutton asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  © 2017 by William Sutton

  Map illustrations by William Sutton.

  Map design by Rebecca Lea Williams.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  BOOK I

  BODIES IMPOLITIC

  EAST END PROLOGUE: BODIES & SECRETS, PART THE FIRST [SERGEANT CAMPBELL LAWLESS]

  Knife in the heart, knife in the throat. Each holding the weapon that did for the other. On the table, money, in two piles.

  I shook my head. “Gambling men, were they?”

  “Some folk can’t resist a bet,” said Molly, “even if it kills ’em.”

  “What happened?”

  “Ain’t it plain enough?”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “You’re the sleuthhound. Earn your crust, why don’t you?”

  I sighed. I checked the men were both dead.

  Molly was huddled on the bed in the corner. Nowhere near the two bodies. At first, she’d said not a word, which was unlike her, though she gave me a look to make my soul shiver. Both men were dead, and she was glad. They may not have recognised her, but she knew them. And so did I.

  They had killed a friend of ours, a little star of Molly’s Oddbody Theatricals theatre troupe. They had done it maliciously and cruelly. They were under orders, true, employed by a distant paymaster who remained unpunished; yet they were culpable. I would find it hard to mourn them.

  Blood soaked into my trousers as I knelt beside them. Credible enough that they had killed each other. Still, I would need Dr Simpson to examine the wounds, so he could corroborate whatever tale Moll was about to tell me. Whatever our history, I could not let her go free if she had any part in their death. It is a dictum of police work—and my personal belief—that every man deserves equal treatment in the eyes of the law, and every woman too. Even these blackguards deserved justice, in life and in death.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m alive. They’re dead. Preferable to the other way around.” She was curled up against the bedpost. Her bottom lip jutted out from a face like brooding thunder. Was this what Molly looked like, afraid? Her clothes were ruffled, but not torn; there was a spatter of blood on her face, but it was their blood, not hers.

  I’d been afraid for her since the final days of my previous case, during which Molly made inspired contributions—and formidable enemies. I had worried enough to seek out an escape from London for her. I’d persuaded Molly to accept lessons in polite manners from our friend Ruth Villiers. Over recent weeks, they’d worked on everything from her accent to her underwear in order to transform her from East End urchin into a well-mannered young woman. Maybe not transform: her natural style was irrepressible. Miss Villiers was at least equipping Molly to pass as a decent citizen. I’d been seeking a position for her as a drawing mistress in the further reaches of the kingdom, far from recriminations such as this. I’d finally found one that would serve well, and had all but sealed her employment; but—foolish girl!—too late.

  Or was it?

  * * *

  Her hands were behind her back. Only now, as I drew nearer, did I see that she was trussed to the bedstead.

  “Well, I never.” I clapped in wonderment; inappropriate, I know, but I was so relieved. “All this is nothing to do with you, eh, Moll?”

  “I was talking to the gentlemen, I admit.” She sniffed. “The gentlemen as is now deceased. I invited them back for a drink. I suggested a wager or two. Is that a crime?”

  “You didn’t kill anyone?”

  She looked at me, lips pressed together in indignation, and tugged at the ropes.

  “Yes, Moll, but I’m asking what you did.”

  “You police.” She rolled her eyes. “Always the woman’s fault, ain’t it?”

  “Did you incite them to violence?”

  “No incitements needed, with these two. As you yourself can testify from their previous crimes.”

  “And I shall have to testify,” I said, “when the coroner is puzzling over these deaths.”

  I looked at her. If she had done no wrong, nothing legally culpable, I might still spirit her away to safety. Her sniffs were eloquent of distress, rather than prevarication. Molly was a liar, but she wasn’t lying now. At least, she’d better not be. Nor was her clothing of her usual fashion. She had the look of an apprentice tart. Not the style Miss Villiers had counselled, it was apt enough for this threadbare backroom in Madam Jo Black’s tuppenny brothel off the Ratcliffe Highway, but far from her yobbish garb as impresario of the theatrical urchins.

  I gestured for her to lean forward and let me at the ropes. “I see why you haven’t scarpered.”

  “Sent for Lilly Law because I preferred you see for yourself, Watchman.”

  Her friend Numpty had roused me from my bed in Scotland Yard in the dead of night. It was not the first time Molly had requested help; but I owed her, and I had come at once.

  “Lest you drew unfortunate conclusions.” She coughed. “Lest you heard reports that I’d been consorting with these gents, now deceased.”

  “Consorting? Ha!” I looked back at the men. Now that I thought about it, she must have sent Numpty to fetch me before the fatal blows were dealt.

  “Besides, Numpty ain’t so good with knots. Summon the old crocus, will you?” She gave me a look, tugging at the ropes. “I’d like to see ’em certified dead, then be on my way.”

  “Keep your drawers on, young lady.” I puzzled at the knots on her wrists. “By the time we remove these bodies, you’ll be far from this hovel and on a train from King’s Cross, bound for the shires, where Miss Villiers and I have secured you a position.”

  “Exile?” She sniffed. “To the frozen north?”

  “You wee southern jessie.” I laughed. Coming from Edinburgh, as I do, Roxbury House hardly seemed the north. “Questions will be asked at the inquest. If
you are telling the truth, these two oafs have slain each other. If their injuries are consistent with that narrative, according to the doctors, I shall state that they were quarrelling over a bet in a brothel. Over whom they quarrelled will be inconsequential.”

  One whore is as faithless as another, to the coroner. But Molly was no harlot: her guileful answers were as like to incriminate as exonerate her.

  I had no doubt that her wit unsheathed the weapons. She wished them dead, but so did I, and wishes are not forbidden.

  “No harm in quitting London a while, I suppose.” She wriggled against her bonds. “Lean pickings in the countryside, though.”

  “Where I’m sending you, young Molly, you’ll survive.” My recent induction into the Home Office had set me a challenge. Molly was a liar, it’s true, but I trusted her. I needed an ally for a mission of surveillance. Could I trust her with such a task, and kill two birds with one jagged rock? I screwed up my eyes. This was not the send-off I had imagined. I tapped on her wrists, to give her the all clear. “Besides, this is work.”

  “Ta kindly, Watchman.” She shrugged off the ropes, all melodrama and sniffles, as she rubbed at her wrists. “But no thanks. I’ll find my own hidey-hole, and my own employ.”

  “It’s not a request, Moll. I have a task for you. You’d be wise to accept.”

  “Or else what?” She raised an eyebrow, and her laughter faltered as I held up the ropes, which had slipped off her wrists with suspicious ease.

  “Or the coroner may find it odd that I didn’t need to undo these knots.”

  PILLS FOR THE PALE AND PARALYSED

  Dr Williams’ Pink Pills for Pale People. They cure:

  paralysis

  weakness

  locomotor ataxy

  scrofula

  anaemia

  sundry ailments.

  2s/3d per box. Beware of imitations.

  BODIES & SECRETS, PART THE SECOND [LAWLESS]

  Bodies are found at the London docks all the time. Jeffcoat thought this one different, but then we rarely agreed on anything.

  I handed Molly over to Miss Villiers, by good fortune in town early. Ruth would pack Molly on to the train to the north, give her a talking to, and send her out of danger. I wired Roxbury House, to request we bring forward Molly’s employment somewhat abruptly. I received forthwith a short but friendly reply in the affirmative. I was barely arrived back at Scotland Yard, when Numpty appeared again. He delivered the note into my hands before I had time to worry further over Molly’s departure. A summons back to the East End. It was terse, typical of my friend, Sergeant Solomon Jeffcoat. Solly and I had worked closely through the spring on the Brodie case, so closely I often felt he knew what I was thinking before I thought it, and I wasted no time in setting off.

  He had something he wanted me to see: a corpse secreted in a lifeboat.

  * * *

  Secrets will out, my father told me daily. “All your filthy secrets, laddie, are seen by God and, in the end, by man.” Five years at Scotland Yard has taught me otherwise—at least as far as man is concerned—but my father meant that I must tell him everything. Punishment would be swifter and juster if I confessed, before I was found out. For example, when I botched the mainspring of the procurator fiscal, grandmaster of father’s guild of watchmakers. (I was apprenticed to my father, hence Molly’s moniker for me of Watchman.)

  “All your secrets are visible to Him, you wee devil, and shall be to me.”

  As every honest parent knows, chastising a child for lying will not teach him to tell the truth, but to lie brilliantly. The best liars I’ve known share one thing, beyond their differences social and temperamental. All had a childhood where discovery meant punishment. I therefore thank my father for my talent in dissembling, useful in my profession, essential to this case in particular. Yet I wonder if it was not just in reaction to my old man that I learned to lie, but in imitation of him. When he died, I stowed his papers away; now that I have the courage to leaf through them, I have found hints of father’s own lies and inclinations that make my wrongdoings look angelic.

  * * *

  Lies lay striated through the House of Roxbury—or must I style it the House of Electricity, as the newspapers did? The house was built on a lodestone of lies, though none could discern them. Nor could I have guessed what lay in its deeper foundations: love. Reckless love, ready to sacrifice anything. Money. Integrity. Souls. Oh, it was on a bloodstained altar this love was sanctified; and there was no ghost, holy or otherwise, to offer a sacrificial reprieve.

  Am I harsh? Judge for yourself. Or, rather, judge from the reports and correspondence of that articulate guide, my friend Molly, the urchin, or rather erstwhile urchin, whom I sent into this lions’ den, from the frying pan into a furnace where souls were smelted in the service of… well, in whose service such harms were done, you must judge for yourself.

  * * *

  Molly won our hearts long ago. She fell ill, when just a little tyke among her urchin brothers. I was reassessing my naive notions of London, of the rich, the poor, and the malevolent. When Molly took ill, the Hospital for Sick Children had saved her; but it was Ruth nursed her back to health. Since then, I daresay, we have looked out for each other. Her clandestine networks saved my bacon more than once: solving the insoluble, finding the unfindable. She and her brother even saved my life once or twice. Thus bound to them, I could overlook certain illicit activities.

  These murders were different, though. I took the decision gravely: I would pack her off to safety. She was doubly beholden to me, and she knew it.

  I was charged to find out what was wrong in the House of Roxbury. I was just starting my investigations in the south. I could not waste time in unproductive visits, when they might easily hide any irregularities. Better to place a spy in the north, and an unimpeachable one at that.

  To learn what she discovered, let us turn to her own accounts, both the brief reports she encoded for me and the hyperbolic letters to Miss Villiers which betray a richer story of her fears and hopes and successes.

  TO FORGET [MOLLY]

  MY DEAR BLUE-BELLIED CAPTAIN CLOCKY, SERGEANT LAWLESS, THAT IS, WATCHMAN, OLD FRIEND,

  SAFELY ARRIVED.

  NOTHING TO REPORT.

  MOLLY

  Dear Miss Villiers,

  Sometimes a girl wants to forget. And we all know the best way to forget. I am the kind of person who seeks love in all the wrong places. Blame my upbringing if you will, or lack of it, among the Euston Square Worms; though I rather think I benefited from such a particular education.

  “Miss Molly, is it?” hollered the lad, a bronzed Adonis.

  I’ve never been met by a private carriage at a railway station before. The statuesque farm hand stood tall at the end of the platform. He gestured to our sturdy carriage. “You’ll be the new drawing mistress, if I han’t bin much mistook.”

  Quite a trip. Speedily packed off, after my East End contretemps. Final confab with your good self, Miss Villiers. Changed into suitable attire. The luxurious train. The branch line. Out I stepped to find the air chilled, despite the sunshine. It may have been the second-best phaeton, and driven by the stable boy, but I took no snub from that; besides, Jem was not hard on the eye. Belgravia drawing mistresses may expect better; but this wilderness is not Belgravia, and I am no drawing mistress, if truth be told.

  I should be more disciplined: I shall not write such incriminating things.

  I stood on the platform, gawping at the thickets and copses as far as the eye could see. As if Hampstead Heath had grown monstrously overnight, obscuring all civilisation, but for stone walls and flocks across the hillsides, the horizon altogether unfamiliar, what with no St Paul’s dome, no fog, no stink, nothing to make one feel at home.

  “Kindly step up, ma’am.”

  I recalled your stern injunctions that a lady drawing mistress must not heft her own luggage. Up I stepped into his chariot of the sun.

  Jem Stables loaded on my bags and my new dra
wing case, with its stencil declaring it FRAGILE. He stroked the mare’s mane, leapt up, checked I was ready, with a guttural utterance, and set out into the wilds. Of his bare arms directing the reins, I took little note: the loose shirt, the waistcoat a nod to propriety, flaxen locks strewn beneath his cap, smile on his lips. I am no stranger to stares, yet something in the glance of this rustic unnerved me. It was these fine clothes you coaxed me into: his glance bore through my crinoline to these lacy unmentionables. I blushed. Could he see through me? Could he see me for the street Arab I am? I was angry with myself, though you always say blushes flatter my Boadicean skin. Yet it was the first time I’ve felt a man was looking at me not lest I swindle him, but because I was beautiful.

  Damnable nonsense.

  Start again.

  Roxbury’s towers loomed over the valley. Cobbled streets gave way to dirt tracks. An avenue of trees. Fervid stream, placid lake. Surmounting the bend we saw it. Jem chuckled to hear me gasp. Nothing like the forbidding manors engraved in those gothic phantasies you lend me. This was a mansion of the gods, where I was unworthy to set foot. As safe as the Tower of London, as buttressed as Westminster Abbey. Bumpy, lumpy and broad-shouldered, stretching its elbows up the hillside, and gazing down at the glasshouses shimmering by the Burnfoot Stream, where a melancholic orange monkey sat nibbling the nettles in company with its friend, a strange- looking hare.

  Roxbury House.

  Dash it all. I promised I wouldn’t write such overblown nonsense.

  Start again, and keep it simple.

  REPORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE [LAWLESS]

  Such was Molly’s first impression. Yet of the above lines, all that Molly sent to me was the abrupt message at the beginning. This she inscribed on a card, then re-used the paper of her melodramatic letter (so as not to be wasteful) for the letter to Miss Villiers that follows. The overblown drama of the scenes above remained, lightly scored out, on the reverse of the pages. Whether Ruth was meant to read them or not, who can tell?

  Molly’s reports to me were always businesslike and brief. But the generous letters to Ruth in which she wrapped them were uneven, discursive as her speech, pocked with exclamations, derailed by tangents, and sparkling with injudicious revelations (often encoded, which I reproduce here deciphered).