CHAPTER 16 #2
He took his hand away. “Now, don’t tell me it’s not a race. I have eyes in my head.”
The cab had pulled up to the address on Carteret. Lloyd got out, handed the cabbie a few coins, and directed him to Fieldgate Street.
Before the hansom rattled away, Lloyd leaned into the cab. “He’s a good man, the inspector.” He stepped back and raised his hat in farewell.
* * *
That night, Tennant, O’Malley, and ten officers waited in the shadows.
“The crawling clock,” the sergeant said. “’Tis the worst of it now.”
The inspector dared not risk a light to check his pocket watch. But within a quarter hour, he heard the chimes and counted nine bells from the clock tower at Westminster.
“Damn it to hell. Where are they?” he muttered to O’Malley.
The sergeant touched his sleeve. “Look.”
A carriage had turned left from East Pall Mall, and the lights from its dual coach lamps drew nearer.
“All right, lads,” O’Malley said in a low voice. “Hold your places and get ready.”
The four-wheeler clattered and stopped at the back entrance of the Topkapi Club. In under a minute, someone drew the bolts, the doors swung inward, the carriage rolled forward, and the gates banged shut behind it.
O’Malley clapped a constable’s shoulder. “Go, lad.” The young policeman sped to the wall with his partner. One officer braced himself against the brickwork and gave a leg up to the other copper, who inched his eyes over the top. After a short wait, he held up three fingers.
Three girls had exited the carriage.
Tennant struck a match and drew it in a line. A copper at the corner relayed the signal to three officers in separate hansoms. They sped to St. Giles, Limehouse, and Chelsea. There, coppers waited to raid the brothel, arrest Arnie Stackpole at his rooming house, and take Sidney Allen into custody.
The constable at the wall dropped down. “Two blokes smoking at the entrance. And the driver’s up in the coachman’s seat.”
“Let’s give it a few minutes,” Tennant said.
O’Malley said grimly, “We’ll let the party get started.”
Five minutes later, Tennant sent the pair of constables back to the wall. At O’Malley’s signal, one man got up and over, hung by his hands, and dropped. O’Malley called, “Now, lads,” and eight coppers with drawn truncheons massed outside the gates and waited for the doors to swing open.
At that point, they abandoned all attempts at stealth. Bolts screeched, gates banged, and boots pounded up the drive.
The doorman’s head jerked up. “What the bleeding—”
An officer knocked the man’s pipe from his teeth, and his partner seized the doorman by the shoulders. Two others dragged the coachman from his seat while Tennant, O’Malley, and a third constable cornered a gaping man with a cleft lip. The sergeant clapped him on the shoulder.
“Good evening, Mister Rawlings,” Tennant said.
O’Malley twisted the man’s arm behind his back. “Sure, we’ve been searching for donkey’s years, and here you are at last.”
“Hand him off to the constables, Sergeant. Mister Rawlings can sit in the police wagon, contemplate his many sins, and meditate on the virtue of cooperation.”
The acrobatic duo who had scaled the wall frog-marched Rawlings to the police wagon.
“And now you, boy-o,” O’Malley said to the doorman. “You’ll be directing us to the girls inside if you know what’s good for you.”
The man swallowed hard. Then he led them through the back entrance and down a carpeted hallway, where he pointed to three doors.
Tennant asked, “Are they locked?” The doorman shook his head. “Which room belongs to the club chairman, Mister Bruce?”
The man pointed a shaking finger at a fourth door. “Bruce isn’t here tonight.”
“Hell and damnation,” Tennant muttered. He waved O’Malley and three pairs of constables forward. “All right, Sergeant.”
“Now, lads,” O’Malley ordered, and the lead constable threw open the doors.
Ten minutes later, constables escorted three stunned girls from the rear of the Topkapi Club and into a second police wagon.
They’d found two young women in stages of undress, so the officers told them to gather up their clothes and wrap themselves with blankets.
The third girl told O’Malley she was thirteen, but he doubted she was that old.
He found her alone in her room, dressed and waiting on the bed.
The cooperative doorman said, “Her gent never turned up. Surprising, since he ordered the girl for tonight.” The man lowered his voice. “He’s a member of Parliament and likes ’em young. He’s always here on Fridays and Saturdays when the House of Commons sits.”
They arrested the two men they found with the girls. Since sex with a prostitute wasn’t against the law, the charge would be kidnapping. They’d appear in magistrate’s court and be held overnight for further questioning.
The men, braces hanging, trouser bands clutched in one fist and shoes in the other, shuffled into the police wagon in stocking feet.
Rawlings and the coachman waited inside.
Tennant had sent a pair of constables to the club’s front office to arrest the chairman’s secretary.
They marched him handcuffed, looking like a terrified rabbit cornered by yapping hounds, his round, staring eyes magnified by fear and his spectacles.
O’Malley slammed the wagon door. “Are we thinking they’ll face the music or walk free?”
“We’ll do everything in our power, Paddy,” Tennant said. “And, more immediately, they’ll face a tune of a different sort.”
“And what would that be?”
“At lunchtime, I ran into Johnny Osborne at his local on Fleet Street, so I stood him a pint. I wouldn’t be surprised if our newspaper friend appears in magistrate’s court tonight.”
“The buggers will be roasting on the grill of public opinion before long.” O’Malley grinned. “Never thought I’d be saying it, but God bless Johnny Osborne and the free press.”
* * *
On Saturday morning, the raid on Sidney Allen’s printshop and warehouse proceeded as planned.
Allingham’s lewd art-books proved to be a tiny province within an expansive pornographic empire.
Constables seized and carted off boxes of books, prints, and picture postcards of the “French” variety.
Then the police arrested the manager and padlocked the premises.
Later in the afternoon, Tennant returned to the Yard to report the operation’s many successes. But Chief Inspector Clark was livid about a pair of failures.
“What about that Parliament sod who slipped through the net at the Topkapi?”
“The Honorable Alistair Gathorne-Hardy,” Tennant said. “The doorman expected him, but he failed to show up. Interesting that Gathorne-Hardy shares his unusual surname with the government’s home secretary.”
“They’re bloody cousins, damn it, and the Yard reports to the blighter.” Clark clenched his jaw. “I hate this shite, this old boy’s bollocks.” He looked Tennant up and down. “All right for some,” he said, and threw himself into his chair.
Tennant said, “There’s no way to prove he warned his cousin.”
“And if we make an unsupported accusation against the home secretary . . .” The chief slammed his fist on his desk, rattling everything on it. “It will mean our heads.”
“I believe someone alerted Sidney Allen, as well.”
The publisher was their second failure. Allen had slipped out the servants’ entrance of his house, emptied his bank account at a Chelsea branch, and vanished.
“We’ve sent word to all the ports,” Tennant said. “My bet is on Dover.”
“Doing a moonlight flit to the Continent? Likely, I’d say.” Clark scowled at his junior. “Do you think Allen killed those women and Doctor Scott?”
“That is the question.”
“I want a sodding answer, damn it,” Clark shouted. “Lean into Rawlings and Stackpole. Put the squeeze on all the little fish you netted with them.” Clark waved him to the door. “Get on with it, man.”
* * *
Late Saturday evening, Julia regarded a bleary-eyed Inspector Tennant as he sat across from her grandfather in their library.
“It doesn’t take a medical degree to prescribe a good eight hours of sleep. What do you say, Grandfather?”
“I concur. That’s two doctors telling you what you already know, Richard.”
The corner of the inspector’s mouth ticked up. “I haven’t managed that over the past three days together.”
Mrs. Ogilvie brought in a tray with sandwiches and a pitcher of beer and placed it on the table next to Tennant.
“I bet you’ve eaten as little as you’ve slept,” Julia said.
“You’d win that wager.” Tennant reached for a sandwich. “Thank you, Mrs. Ogilvie.”
Julia had never seen him so hollow-eyed and exhausted. He looked as if he’d aged ten years. Frustration had added to the toll: Sidney Allen was still at large, and Herbert Rawlings had been cooperative only up to a point.
“The man stumbled over himself to tell us all he knew about Allen’s prostitution scheme,” Tennant said. “Bringing in girls from China, tricking and drugging locals, trolling the streets of the East End looking for pretty children because one of the gentlemen preferred the very young.”
Dr. Lewis said, “And all this was happening at the Topkapi?”
“There was a club within the club, conceived and orchestrated by Allen with the club chairman’s connivance, Reginald Bruce. Seven members had rooms along the back corridor with a convenient separate entrance. Among themselves, they called it the Harem.”
Julia said, “How utterly revolting.”
“Allen catered to their tastes. The very young. Asians—whatever the members’ predilections, Sidney Allen supplied it. Two girls were artists’ models, groomed the way they’d ensnared Kathleen Morris and the other shopgirls who went missing.”
“So Chief Inspector Clark should have combined the cases from the beginning,” Julia said.
Tennant nodded. “All the girls shared one characteristic: they were virgins. Freedom from venereal infection was the paramount concern. That and . . .”
“And what?”
“According to Rawlings, several gentlemen enjoyed the fear and pain a forced deflowering inflicted.”