Death at the Diogenes Club: a Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mystery (The Sherlock Holmes and Lucy James Mysteries Book 6), page 19
I lowered my voice, so that he would have to strain to make out my words. Forcing him to be aware of his own weakness would serve to push him further off balance and drive home his current helpless position.
“I have poisons here.” I picked up one of the small, dark vials from the table. “Extremely deadly ones.”
Flint bared his teeth. “You want to poison me? Go ahead. I’ve looked death in the face before. Come to that, you’d better kill me, because otherwise I’ll track you to the ends of the earth and—”
I brought the scalpel up, this time just touching the point to the skin of his throat.
I had been where Flint was now, almost exactly: a prisoner, shackled and helpless. I wasn’t letting those memories surface now. But I also knew from experience how it felt and what would make the horror greater still.
“Threats, Mr. Flint,” I snapped. “Tedious. I am not proposing to kill you with these poisons. One or two drops in each of your eyes and you will be blinded. Permanently. I’m sure a man in your position has enemies. How long do you think you will last out there on the London streets if I turn you out of here, blind and helpless, unable to see an opponent coming?”
Flint swallowed again and, for the first time, I saw genuine fear flicker at the back of his gaze. A man like Flint feared humiliation and weakness far more than he did death or physical pain. The scenario I had just outlined was probably close to his worst nightmare. Which of course was exactly why I’d chosen it.
“Now.” I held up the small vial between my thumb and forefinger. “I wish to know the name of the person who hired you to steal crates of weapons from the Cannon Street warehouse.”
My heart quickened as I spoke the words.
This was the reason that we hadn’t just handed Flint over to Inspector Lestrade and allowed him to carry out the interrogation.
Even as I stood here, fighting to break Flint’s will, Holmes was engaged in transferring the crates of weapons from Flint’s hidden storage location to the basement of the coffee house, where they would be found a few hours from now, after the police received an anonymous tip that they should search the place.
As Holmes had pointed out, Flint might not own the warehouse building where the weapons had been stored. He might have gotten one of his subordinates to rent or buy the place for him, or he might have bullied or bribed someone into letting him use the place for storage purposes.
We needed the case against him to be iron clad, without any hope that he would wriggle out for lack of evidence.
But we also needed the name of the person behind all of this.
That was why I was here.
Flint does not fear the police, Holmes had said. Neither does he fear imprisonment or even the hangman’s noose, which are the worst our system of justice can offer.
Lestrade will never be able to force answers out of him. That is our job.
Now Flint’s eyes were focused on the vial in my hand. Sweat beaded his upper lip and brow, but his jaw remained clamped shut.
I sighed. “Very well.” I turned to where Uncle John stood by the door. “Hold his head for me, please.”
Flint jolted in place, his head swiveling to Uncle John. He clearly hadn’t noticed him before.
Without a word, Watson strode forward and took up a position behind Flint’s chair, locking one arm around Flint’s head and dragging his chin up, holding him in place.
“Now, Mr. Flint, do you wish to begin with the right eye or the left?” I used my thumb to nudge the cork out of the bottle’s mouth. “I am perfectly willing to be flexible if you have a preference.”
“I don’t know!” The words burst out of Flint in a ragged shout.
I raised my eyebrows. “You don’t know?”
“I never got a name.” Flint dragged in air, his chest heaving like a bellows. “Men like him—they don’t exactly hand you a calling card with their name and address.”
“That’s not particularly helpful, Mr. Flint. How did he initially get into contact with you?”
“I never spoke to him in person. One of my men, Ewan Granger, came to me with a message. A job offer: lift some crates from the Cannon Street warehouse and get paid for it.”
“And you accepted?”
Flint’s upper lip drew back again. “I said no thanks. Me and my boys aren’t anyone’s lackeys for hire. The next day, I got a package in the mail. Know what was inside it? Granger’s hands and feet.”
“His—” I had to work not to let myself jerk back in shock or let the sickness that roiled through the pit of my stomach show.
Muscle played along Flint’s jaw. “Envelope that came with it had a hundred Bank of England notes and a message saying I’d be paid double that again if I pulled off the job and got the crates of weapons. Or I could refuse, and it would be my hands and feet that got hacked off next time.”
“So you agreed.”
Flint jerked his head impatiently. “There was money to be made. I like money.”
That might be so, and it was undoubtedly what Flint had tried to tell himself. But the methods used by his mysterious employer had also shaken him. Shaken and angered him.
Flint wanted to get back at the man who had murdered one of his men and threatened him. I could see it in every harsh, furious line of his expression, the tension that corded his muscles.
If the man who had hired him to steal weapons had been standing in the room with us now, Flint would have struck him dead.
Good for us, bad for our nameless adversary.
Flint evidently had a similar thought. His eyes narrowed, a look of calculation cross his face.
“Look, you want the man who hired me. I want him too. We’ve a score to settle, him and me. Maybe we can work out a way we both get what we want.”
I stood motionless, regarding him steadily for a long moment, then nodded at Uncle John. Uncle John released his grip on Flint and stepped back.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“I don’t know his name, but he arranged for McHale to get a job at a men’s club in Pall Mall.”
“The Diogenes. And I knew that already.” I leaned forward, still holding the small glass vial between my fingers. “You aren’t exactly bargaining from a position of strength at the moment, Mr. Flint. You’ll need to give me something more helpful than that if I’m to even consider letting you out of here. If all you have to offer is the fact that your employer has ties to the Diogenes or to someone at the Diogenes I had already surmised as much for myself.”
Flint held himself stiff and straight, as though he were fighting the urge to flinch back again. “That’s not everything. McHale was ordered to … take care of some business at the Diogenes.”
“By which you mean murder.”
Flint jerked his shoulder in as much of a shrug as he could manage with his hands bound. “That’s not the point. The order came to him—to McHale—direct, in care of the club.”
I raised my eyebrows. “And?”
“And I saw the instructions. McHale showed them to me. The message was addressed and stamped, like it’d been delivered by post. But it hadn’t.” Flint leaned forward slightly. “The stamp hadn’t been canceled, like it would have been if the letter’d really been through the post.”
I regarded Flint in silence. Brutal and dishonest he might be, but he certainly wasn’t stupid.
“The message was delivered by someone with daily access to the club.”
A club member, most likely. Someone who was actually there on the premises in the days leading up to General Pettigrew’s death.
“That’s it.” Flint jerked his head in agreement.
“Where is your man McHale now?”
Flint’s gaze shifted. “I don’t know.”
I leaned forward. “Did you know that most people look to the left when they’re about to tell a lie? Precisely the way yours did, just now. The truth, Mr. Flint.”
“I don’t know!” A red flush of anger darkened Flint’s cheeks.
“Really, Mr. Flint? We need to go through again who is in charge of this conversation? This grows even more wearisome than your threats, but very well.” I held up the vial, at the same time nodding to Uncle John, who took a step forward.
“Stop!” Flint breathed heavily in and out. “I don’t know where McHale is now. But I was given an address to use, to report back on when I’d finished the job of robbing the warehouse.”
“The flat on Foley Street.” I thought of the marks where letters had landed through the letter slot, just inside the door.
Flint jerked his head in acknowledgement. “After the raid on my place the other night, I sent another message saying that was it. Another trick like that, and I’d torch the whole lot of crates and then throw what was left into the Thames.”
“Go on.”
“This afternoon I got a message back, saying—”
I interrupted. “How did the message arrive?”
“I own properties all up and down Cheapside. I was making the rounds to inspect them this afternoon when I found the message in my pocket.” A muscle ticked at the edge of Flint’s mouth. “I don’t know how it got there.”
I saw the flash of something unsettled move, shadow-swift, across Flint’s face. He wasn’t the sort of man to have his pocket picked without realizing what was happening. Whoever had planted the message on him was extremely skilled at moving covertly.
“There was a note,” Flint said. “Gave me your description. Pretty girl, dark hair, in the chorus at the Savoy. Said if I didn’t want every business I owned burned to the ground, I’d grab you off the street on your way to the theater tonight.” He swallowed. “Want to know what the note was wrapped around? A human finger.”
“McHale’s?”
“How do I know? He didn’t keep his name tattooed on his fingers. Could have been his, could have been someone else’s.”
I liked this less and less. So far our adversary had managed to kill General Pettigrew by means that we still hadn’t discovered, manufacture a ghost, plant a bomb that nearly killed me, my father, and everyone else at 221 Baker Street—and, not least of all, had managed to rattle a man like Flint Bayles.
“Can you tell me anything else?” I asked.
Flint eyed me warily, but said, “No. That’s all.”
There was always the chance he might be lying, but I didn’t think that he was. Another advantage of being an actress was that it gave me a fairly good idea of when someone was trying to spin a convincing untruth.
“Thank you, Mr. Flint.” I stepped back, dropped the glass vial into a carpet bag, and swept the array of knives and scalpels in after it. “I believe we may consider this interview finished, then.”
I nodded to Uncle John, who opened the door for me. I started to walk out.
“Wait a bloody minute!” Flint’s voice rose as he struggled against the ropes again. The wooden slats of the chair creaked, but held firm. “Where are you going? You can’t just leave me here!”
“Oh, but I can, Mr. Flint. Don’t worry, though. I promise to send the police along to collect you soon. They’ll be quite grateful, I imagine, to find you all nicely trussed up for them like a Christmas turkey.”
Flint’s face was choked, suffused with rage, the look in his eyes enough to raise all the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Though I managed to keep from shivering until Watson and I were out of the room, with the door firmly shut behind us.
“Well done, Lucy, my dear,” Uncle John said.
We picked our way carefully across the empty factory, hulking machines crouching like bizarre metal beasts in the darkness all around.
“You were absolutely terrifying in there.”
“Thank you.”
Suddenly I was exhausted, weary all the way down to my bones. We reached the outer door to the factory and stepped out into the chill, pre-dawn air. Morning was only a few hours away.
We walked in silence for a time. The street lamps made the wet pavement shine almost silvery in the darkness. Here and there, we passed by sailors and dockworkers, already hurrying towards their day’s labor at the docks and shipyards.
“What do you think of what Flint told us?” I asked at last.
“What do I think?” The gas lamps lighting the street showed the lines of Uncle John’s face as grave beneath the makeup, his eyes somber. “I think that there is hatred behind this.”
“Hatred.” I hadn’t thought of it that way. “You mean the threats and the mutilations and the missing fingers. Do you think we are dealing with some kind of political zealot? Someone determined to undermine the strength of our armies, and through that, the British Empire?”
I felt as though I had already dealt with enough madmen of that particular type for several lifetimes.
Uncle John, though, shook his head. His voice was thoughtful. “No, I should not have said that. A political idealist—some might say zealot—may commit heinous crimes in the name of what he sees as the greater good. But that is not the feeling I get from Flint’s account. There is hatred there—intense, personal hatred. As though whoever has committed these crimes is nursing some injury, some sense of having been wronged, and is lashing out in revenge.”
“You could be right.” I fought not to feel chilled.
We paused on a street corner, waiting as a big delivery van drawn by a team of four draft horses rumbled past.
“Was it really poison you threatened Flint with?” Watson asked.
“No. Just some muddy water from the gutter. Although given the general filth on London streets, it might be as harmful to the eyes as poison for all I know.”
The street ahead of us was clear to cross. Watson offered me his arm, and I rested my hand on the crook of his elbow. “You know, I always thought that having a family, people you cared about, made you weaker because you had something or someone to lose. But it’s almost frightening to realize how far you’d be willing to go to protect the people you love.”
“It is indeed, my dear.” Uncle John covered my hand with his. “It is indeed.”
CHAPTER 28
I woke to darkness and the patter of rain drumming against the windows. For a disoriented moment, I lay staring up at the shadowed ceiling of the bedroom, trying to recall where I was and what had woken me. Then I heard it: a faint, surreptitious rustle of noise from the outer sitting room.
Sitting up, I saw that the trundle bed Becky had been sleeping on when I went to bed was empty, the covers pushed back. I got up, my breath quickening, and went to open the bedroom door.
A ghostly apparition hung suspended in the middle of the darkened sitting room, trailing white robes glowing with an unearthly light.
I clamped down on a shriek, though I couldn’t quite stop myself from jolting an instinctive step backwards.
The apparition giggled.
Holmes’s voice spoke from the darkness to my left. “Ah, Lucy. Good morning. Miss Kelly and I were just conducting an experiment in the manufacture of ghostly manifestations.”
The drawing room lights came on, revealing Becky standing on a chair in the middle of the room and draped in what looked like one of Mrs. Hudson’s white linen tablecloths.
My heart started beating again. “Was that one of Mr. Maskelyne’s suggestions?”
“Yes. Apparently this arrangement is frequently used by spirit mediums to cause the spirits to appear under convenient cover of darkness.” Holmes eyed the figure Becky made critically. “It is difficult to believe that such parlor tricks are actually capable of deceiving anyone. But then, the majority of the populace have remarkably lazy minds, willing to ascribe a supernatural explanation to any problem without an immediately obvious solution.”
“The unearthly glow is right,” I said. “But no one was standing on a chair in General Pettigrew’s rooms. If there had been, there wasn’t nearly time enough for them to vanish so quickly.”
“Indeed,” Holmes said. “We shall have to continue our experimentation. The glow is caused by phosphorescent paint, by the way. Quite effective.”
I suspected that Mrs. Hudson would have something to say about the ruin of her tablecloth, but Holmes would doubtless find that out for himself.
Becky jumped down off the chair, and I helped to unwind the fabric from around her.
“I talked to Jack!” she said.
“You … what?”
A glance at the clock showed me that, despite the dark skies outside from the rain, it was actually nearly nine o’clock in the morning. I had fallen into bed somewhere around three o’clock, which meant that I had been asleep for almost six hours. But apparently it hadn’t been enough to clear the general haze of fatigue that felt as though it wrapped me like cotton wool.
“Jack!” Becky hopped from one foot to the other, beaming. “He called on the telephone while you were still sleeping, and I talked to him!”
My heart instantly lurched, beating harder. “What did he say?”
“He couldn’t talk for very long. But I told him all about seeing Mr. Maskelyne’s magic show. And he said that he was doing all right and he hoped he’d see me soon.”
I drew a breath of relief. If Jack had used the telephone, it meant he was back in their St. Giles rooms. More importantly, it meant that he hadn’t been arrested—or killed—the night before.
“Quite right,” Holmes said. “And now, Miss Kelly, do you think you might ask Mrs. Hudson whether she could have breakfast served to us upstairs? I am quite famished.”
The only time Holmes took an interest in food was when he was either not engaged on a case or was half-dead from starvation. It was an excuse only, a reason to get Becky out of the room, but Becky skipped out happily, and a moment later, I heard her footsteps clattering towards the kitchen.
“What happened last night?” I asked Holmes.
He hadn’t yet returned to Baker Street when Uncle John and I came home. Now, despite the fact that he must have had even less sleep than I had—if in fact he had even gone to bed at all—he looked entirely rested, his morning coat immaculately brushed, his jaw shaved, his gray eyes alert.
“We may, I believe, count the night’s endeavors a cautious success. Flint Bayles was discovered and arrested, along with the men in his employ whom we took captive. Due to the weapons found on the premises of the coffee house owned by Mr. Bayles, all three will be charged with theft of Her Majesty’s property. There is even talk of charges of treason being brought against them, since the weapons were intended for military use. Barring anything unforeseen occurring, Flint Bayles’ view will be limited to the inside of prison cell for quite some time to come.”
