Secrets of the Lost Ledgers (The Glass Library #5)

Chapter 3

T he Whitechapel address was an old building in a dead-end court off a market street where a range of cheap clothing and homewares could be purchased. The entire world seemed to be encapsulated in the bustling market, with the diversity of accents forming a tapestry as varied as the goods for sale. We jostled with women carrying baskets over their arms, small children on their hips or clutching their mother’s skirts. Stallholders tried to drown out each other when they spied us approaching, advertising their products with pride. I would have walked away with a pretty pair of black patent leather shoes if it hadn’t been for Willie ushering me along the cobblestone street. I made a mental note to return another day to browse.

The Cockney accent of the woman who answered our knock made a change from the Irish and European ones of the market. She studied us with the indifference of a woman with a lifetime of hardship behind her and a bleak future to look forward to.

Gabe began by asking her if she knew a man named Daniel Barratt.

“No. Why?”

“He may have lived here in the early Nineties. Were you here then?”

She thrust a hand on her hip. “I’m twenty-five, Mister.” She was younger than she looked.

Gabe removed his hat and held it to his chest. “I apologize. Do you know who lived in this house back then?”

“No. Folk come and go around here.” She turned to look over her shoulder as a child began to cry. Another squeezed past her to sit on the stoop near her feet. She blinked at me with big eyes not yet touched by the hopelessness that shadowed her mother’s.

“Do you mind if we come in for a few minutes and look around?” Gabe asked.

The woman crossed her arms. “Why?”

“We have a diagram?—"

Willie nudged him. “Give her something to make it worth her while.”

Gabe removed some coins from his pocket. “We’ll be as unobtrusive as possible.”

The money disappeared into the women’s skirt pocket before he’d finished speaking. She tapped the little girl on the top of the head and ordered her to move aside.

We filed past them and into the house. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the dimness, but when they did, it became painfully obvious how poorly the family lived. Broken windows had been boarded up, internal doors were missing altogether, and some of the floorboards, too. In one section of the kitchen, I could see through to the cellar below. The table had been positioned over the hole. Fortunately, the hole wasn’t big enough for a child to fit through, but they could cut themselves on the jagged, broken boards.

Alex scooped up the crying toddler and tickled him until the boy began to giggle. “You should fix the floor before one of them has an accident,” he said to the children’s mother as he handed the toddler to her.

She made a great show of pressing a hand to her cheek in mock horror. “Oh, thank you, kind sir! I never thought of that. I’ll telephone the landlord straight away so he can fix it before my husband gets home.” She arched her brows at Alex, challenging.

He merely grunted. “Barratt, anything in here?”

Huon had been looking around at the walls and floor, but shook his head. He headed into the adjoining room with Gabe, Alex and Willie in tow, but I hung back in the kitchen. The woman sat at the table, the toddler on her lap, and pulled a stack of flattened boxes towards her. The stamp on the topmost one read A. & F. Pears Transparent Glycerine Soap . Her movements as she folded the flaps to create soap boxes were so quick, they were difficult to follow even though I watched carefully.

She nodded in the direction the others had gone. “You paid for the tour, so take it.”

I joined the others in the bedroom, pushing past Willie standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips.

“This is hopeless,” she whined. “There ain’t no way a painting will still be here after all these years. What was Barratt even doing here anyway? Your family’s rich.”

Huon looked up from the book, open to the page displaying the invisible map and its code. “Daniel’s branch of the family wasn’t well-off. They didn’t manufacture ink like mine.” He shook his head. “I can’t see anything here that uses the same pattern.”

The downstairs consisted of the kitchen and bedroom, which I suspected was once a sitting room in the house’s former days. We headed upstairs, where another family rented rooms. They spoke little English and didn’t understand what we wanted, but they took Gabe’s money and allowed us to look in each room.

Again, Huon shook his head, and again, Willie called the expedition hopeless.

I was about to agree when Gabe told us to follow him. We returned downstairs to the kitchen where the pieceworker had amassed a pile of folded soap boxes. She had another stack of flattened boxes still to go.

Gabe indicated the hole in the floor under the table. “May I look?”

She narrowed her gaze at him. “Why?”

He simply gave her more money.

She squirreled it away then closed her hand over her now bulging pocket as if reassuring herself that it was all still there. “The bloke who rents the cellar is at work. Just don’t touch anything and he won’t know.”

“If we do, we’ll put it back.”

She pointed to the adjoining pantry where I could see several crates stacked with more flattened boxes. It would take her all day to get through them, then the assembled boxes would be collected and returned to the factory where the soaps would be slipped inside, and the boxes sealed. Within days, they’d be distributed to pharmacies, perfumers, and shops around the country.

Gabe opened the trapdoor in the pantry floor. He peered down, then asked Alex to hand him the oil lamp hanging from a hook on the wall. Alex opened the tin enclosure and Willie used her own matches to light it. On his knees, Gabe lowered the lantern inside and peered through the trapdoor.

“This is it,” he said, handing the lantern to Alex. “This is the room.”

“There’s a painting in the cellar ?” Huon asked.

Gabe climbed through the trapdoor. When he was part way down the steps, he held out his hand and Alex passed him the lantern.

Willie darted in front of Huon to go down next. Huon followed and Alex indicated I should go ahead of him. When Gabe realized I was following, he put out his hand to assist me the final few steps, even though there was a railing down one side of the staircase.

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“We found it!” Huon’s voice echoed around the near-empty room. “It’s not a picture or rug we’re looking for. It’s the floor tiles.”

Gabe held the lantern high although it didn’t illuminate the entire cellar, which seemed to occupy the same footprint as the kitchen above. The shard of light piercing through the hole beneath the pieceworker’s table fell across the stained mattress. Willie pushed it aside with the toe of her boot to reveal more of the mosaic tiled floor.

She covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “It stinks down here. Someone needs to speak to the tenant about hygiene.” She pushed a bundle of rags and a few belongings aside, too, but left the bedpan alone.

“This must have been laid in ancient Roman times,” I said. “This floor is far older than the house.”

Despite its age, the mosaic was in near perfect condition. All the small tesserae were in place, although the colors had probably been more vibrant when it was laid centuries ago. It would have been the spectacular floor of a wealthy Roman’s private villa or other important building, designed to impress guests. The builders of the nineteenth century house had kept the original floor instead of laying flagstones over it. Due to its depth below the modern-day street level, they’d turned it into a cellar that would have been used by the household to store provisions. The families who lived in the tenement now had no spare provisions to store. They needed to sublease as many rooms as possible to people even more destitute themselves. Going by the bible written in Polish—a language I recognized from my recent translation efforts at the library—the cellar’s tenant was most likely a newly arrived migrant.

“The floor pattern matches the diagram?” Alex asked Huon.

Huon tapped his finger in a line across the page, silently counting, then counted the triangular shapes at the mosaic’s top edge. “It does.”

“What’s the first instruction?” Gabe asked.

“U-four.”

Willie stood in the middle of the floor, hands on hips. “Up four tiles. But the tiles are tiny. Do we have to count each one? There are hundreds here. Thousands! Where do we start?”

I indicated the steps from the kitchen. “It’s the only way into the cellar.” I stood on the bottom step and began to count tesserae.

Huon stopped me. “I don’t think it’s the number of little tiles.”

“Tesserae. I learned about them one summer when I found a book on ancient Roman Britain. It was fascinating.”

Willie snorted. “Yawn.”

“I think you should count the diamond shapes,” Huon went on.

The diamonds appeared in a line running from the base of the steps all the way around the entire mosaic as well as across the middle in four rows, dividing the entire pattern into segments of equal sized squares.

Huon pointed to the page that only he could read. “Up four.”

I moved forward four diamonds, each one the size of my palm. The black diamond shapes surrounded several flowers made of red and white tiles, with green ones depicting leaves. The entire repetitive pattern was bordered by intertwining strands and Solomon’s knots in black, red and white tesserae. It was an elegant, timeless pattern.

“R three,” Huon told me.

I turned to my right and stepped across three diamonds. It was like a child’s game of hopscotch, only I could use both feet. Huon continued reading the instructions out loud and I followed them until I ended up two diamonds from the back corner.

He lowered the book. “What now?”

I moved off the diamond. “Unfortunately, we have to destroy it.”

Gabe crouched to get a better look. “We can remove each tessera carefully then replace them when we’re finished.”

“Why bother?” Willie asked. “It’s old and I reckon the folk who live here won’t care.”

“It’s been here for a very long time, and I won’t be the one to damage it.” He signaled to Alex. “Have you got a knife on you?”

“Why would he carry a blade?” Huon asked.

“Kidnappings,” Alex said as he handed Gabe his automatic knife.

There was no grout between the tesserae that made up that particular diamond although it appeared to be used elsewhere on the mosaic. Gabe was able to pick out each tessera individually and place them off to the side, recreating the same diamond pattern. Once all were up, he brushed aside the sand to reveal the lid of a metal box. From my reading, I knew mosaic floors were laid on a base of concrete. At some point, the concrete beneath that section had been removed, a hole dug out of the earth, and the metal box placed inside, its lid providing a nice hard surface for the tesserae to be relaid on top.

Willie rubbed her hands together. “I’ve always wanted to find a treasure. What do you reckon’s inside? Gold? Silver?”

Gabe opened the box’s lid. “Two books.”

I gasped and dropped to my knees. “How exciting!”

Willie made a scoffing sound.

We crowded around Gabe as he opened one. It was a ledger, not a book, the sort used for accounting purposes with ruled lines and columns. The pages were blank, although they showed signs of use with some stains that could have been put there by dropped crumbs or spilled tea. The second ledger was the same.

Gabe handed them to me, and I immediately felt the magic warmth of the paper, blended with another magic. I glanced at Huon, leaning over my shoulder. “Can you see anything?”

“There’s a list of entries for money coming in and going out,” he said. “Some of the magic has faded so I can’t read every line.”

“Are there any names?” Gabe asked.

“It looks like each entry has a name associated with it, but I can’t find one to indicate who the mastermind is.”

“Wise,” Alex muttered.

“Daniel Barratt knew there was enough evidence in that ledger to prove a crime had been committed,” Gabe said. “He wrote the name of the man behind the operation in his message to Oscar, but not in the ledgers.”

“Oscar never saw the message,” Alex continued with a heavy dose of disappointment in his voice. “And the name has now faded away.”

Willie was more philosophical than the two men. “It was a long time ago. The villain has probably been caught in the meantime or died.”

“Or he could still be at large,” Gabe said. “If the police haven’t had enough evidence to convict him in the past, these might provide the evidence they need.”

“How? They don’t mention the bookmaker’s name.”

“We can use these to investigate.”

“Why bother? I got better things to do than chase ghosts.”

“No one is asking you to be involved.”

“You should be looking for whoever’s behind this.” She lightly poked him in the shoulder where he’d been stabbed. “The sooner we find out who wants to kidnap you, the sooner we can stop babysitting you.”

“I’m not asking you to follow me around. Besides, I know who’s behind it and there’s nothing we can do to stop him. He’s above the law.”

“Then we deal with him without involving the law.” She poked him again. “You’re as bad as your father, but even he would agree that when it comes to protecting kin, sometimes you got to take the law into your own hands.”

They were referring to Mr. Jakes, the Military Intelligence operative who’d made inquiries into Gabe’s background, and asked questions about his miraculous wartime survival. Jakes seemed to suspect that mutated magic was behind it. He’d even asked to see books from the Glass Library on the topic. If it was him, Gabe was right. He was above the law. It was most likely he had full government permission to perform tests on Gabe with a view to learning the secret to his survival.

In that case, Willie was also right, and Jakes would need to be stopped another way.

Huon tucked the ledgers under his arm. “I’ll get to work transcribing these after we settle on a fee.”

“You expect us to pay you?” Willie snapped.

“I have expensive vices. My father has cut me off and I have no plans to marry an heiress. Until my business venture is successful, this is all I have.”

Gabe offered him a figure and Huon accepted.

Willie shook her head. “It ain’t worth it, Gabe. You ain’t going to earn a penny from this.”

“If it puts Thurlow behind bars, it’s worth it.”

Alex’s gaze met mine.

Gabe returned the empty box to the hole in the ground and smoothed the sand over the top. I crouched down to help him place the tesserae into position to recreate the pattern within the larger mosaic. Once we finished, it looked just as it had when we entered the cellar.

We headed back up the stairs, thanked the pieceworker still seated at the table making boxes, and exited the building. I squinted into the bright morning sunshine. I thought I saw a woman’s face at one of the second-floor windows, watching us, but it may have been a trick of the light.

We parted ways with Huon, but instead of returning to the Park Street house or the library, Gabe suggested we call on Cyclops to let him know about our investigation. I readily agreed, as I wanted to speak to him for other reasons.

We found Cyclops in his office at Scotland Yard, tugging on his lower lip in deep thought as he studied a map of London pinned on the wall. He signaled us to approach and look at the map with him. “What do you think of the Westminster Borough?”

“It’s full of toffs,” Willie said.

“It encompasses my home,” Gabe told her.

She lifted a shoulder in an innocent shrug.

“But is it the dullest precinct in the city?” Cyclops asked.

“It might be,” Alex told his father. “You could ask for some statistics from the Met. Why do you need to know if it’s dull?”

Cyclops did a dreadful job of feigning disinterest. “No matter. It’s not important. What are you all doing here?”

I told him about the discovery of the book with the invisible message and map and taking it to Huon to read, which then led us to the Whitechapel residence this morning. “We found what could be evidence to convict someone of criminal activity, although Huon couldn’t see who. He’ll transcribe the ledgers so we can study them ourselves. If no culprit is named, Gabe and Alex want to investigate and try to tie the evidence to someone.”

“Not me,” Willie chimed in. “Tell them, Cyclops. It ain’t worth anyone’s time.”

The big man leaned back in his chair, his one-eyed gaze drilling into Gabe and Alex. If I didn’t know he was a gentle giant, I’d have expected him to growl his displeasure at having his time wasted. “Why do you think it’s worth investigating? The crimes were committed years ago, and the perpetrator is most likely already behind bars or deceased.”

“It could be Thurlow,” Gabe said simply.

Alex shifted his weight from one foot to the other, but made no comment.

“That’s a slim chance, at best,” Cyclops said. “But it is a chance, I suppose.” He took a pen from the stand and dipped it into the inkpot. “I’ll give approval for you to investigate and access to our resources as required.” He scribbled a note on a piece of Scotland Yard letterhead as he spoke. “Where will you begin?”

“With Hope,” Gabe said.

Cyclops stopped writing without lifting the pen from the page. “What does Lady Coyle have to do with it?”

“Her husband was mentioned in the original letter from Daniel Barratt to Oscar. She may know nothing, or she may have some insights.”

Ink bloomed on the paper from the pen nib. Cyclops stared at it a moment, then slowly nodded. “It’s worth speaking to her, but I doubt she’ll know anything. She knew nothing about her husband’s affairs years ago and I’m sure this is no different.”

“She claims she knew nothing,” Willie said. “But I never trusted her. I reckon she knew more than she let on. Matt just never investigated her properly because she was his cousin. He decided to let her live in peace, as long as she never bothered him again.”

Alex’s gaze slid to Gabe. “Sometimes it’s better to leave things alone.”

Gabe’s jaw firmed, but he didn’t look at his friend.

Cyclops returned the pen to the stand. “You should also call on any known associates of Daniel Barratt. Neighbors, friends, family… His wife might still be missing after all these years, but perhaps her family can identify his associates from the time.”

Willie sucked air between her teeth and let it out in a hiss. “You ain’t going to believe it, Cyclops, but she’s a Hendry.”

Cyclops sat back heavily. His gaze turned distant as he rubbed his jaw. “I suppose that’s where Barratt got the magic paper for his invisible ink.”

Willie slapped her palms down on the desk and leaned forward. “That’s all you got to say?”

“Just because she’s a Hendry doesn’t mean she’s closely related to the Hendry we knew. It doesn’t mean she was like him in any way. Don’t jump to conclusions, Willie.”

“I ain’t!” She stabbed a finger into the desk. “But you got to see there could be a link. Daniel said in the book that the fellow who forced him to write invisible messages was an associate of Coyle’s. Hendry worked for Coyle. Maybe he’s the bookmaker.”

“He didn’t seem the type.”

“That’s what I thought at first, but then I got to thinking. Maybe he changed. Folk do, especially if they’re desperate. I reckon even you’d agree that Hendry became a desperate man at the end.”

Cyclops conceded the point with a nod.

“Imagine if this investigation leads us to Hendry,” Willie went on. “We could put him behind bars, and close that chapter for Matt and India while they’re away.”

“Close it for you, you mean. You’re the one with a deep hatred of the fellow, decades later.”

“He tried to turn me into sliced bacon!”

Cyclops rolled his eye. “Whether the criminal Daniel Barratt refers to in his message is Hendry, Thurlow or someone else, it’s worth looking into. Let me know if you need any resources and I’ll see what I can do.”

Gabe’s fingers brushed against mine to get my attention. He nodded at Cyclops. He then ushered Willie and Alex out of the office and closed the door behind them. I heard Willie question him before their footsteps receded.

I cleared my throat. “I wanted to ask you something about Hendry. I’ve already asked Willie, but I think her answer was somewhat tainted by her experience.”

Cyclops huffed a humorless laugh. “Willie does tend to exaggerate, but in this instance, her account was probably accurate. What did you want to know about him?”

“What did he look like?”

“Ah.” He rubbed the scar dripping from beneath his eye patch. “You want to know if he looks anything like you?”

“He could be my father.”

Cyclops gave no indication whether he agreed or not. Like a policeman giving evidence in court, he simply stated the facts. “He was blond with fair skin and light eyes. He had a slim build.”

“Freckles?”

“I can’t recall. Sylvia…” He expelled a measured breath. “Your parents don’t define who you are. You’re in your twenties. You have a career tied to your magic, friends who like and respect you, and a bright future ahead. If your father turns out to be Hendry, it doesn’t change any of that, and it shouldn’t change how you see yourself.”

Despite my best efforts, my lower lip began to tremble. I wanted to thank him for his kindness but didn’t trust my voice. He stood and rounded the desk to envelop me in a warm hug.

When I rejoined the others in the busy foyer, it was obvious from Willie’s unhappy face that Gabe hadn’t given her an explanation as to why I needed to speak to Cyclops. She pressed me as we exited the building.

I decided to admit the truth. “I wanted to ask his opinion on Hendry’s appearance.”

“I already told you what he looked like. Ugly.”

“I wanted to know whether he could be my father.”

She stopped in the middle of the pavement to stare at me. “Your father!”

I nodded.

She looked me over from head to toe, assessing me anew. “You’re too pretty to be his daughter.”

Gabe held open the door to the Unic taxi at the front of the queue of waiting cabs. “Stop flirting with Sylvia and get in. We’ll call on Hope now.”

“I ain’t flirting with Sylvia. She ain’t my type.”

“Pretty women aren’t your type? Don’t let Tilda hear you say that, or you might hurt her feelings.”

I blinked at Gabe. He thought I was pretty? My mood instantly lifted.

Cyclops was right. The identity of my parents was irrelevant. If it didn’t bother my friends, then it wouldn’t bother me if my father was Hendry.

But from the way Willie eyed me, with deep distrust, I could see that it rattled her. She wouldn’t want me associating with her family out of fear that I would attract Hendry to their door again after all this time.

My mood deflated as quickly as it had risen. When it came to Gabe’s safety, Willie and I were on the same page.