The Durham deception

Penharbour Lane

At about the same time as Tom and Helen Ansell were discussing Ernest Smight’s suicide, a man in working clothes turned off Lower Thames Street in the area immediately to the east of London Bridge. He walked down Penharbour Lane, which was little more than an alley between factories and warehouses. The evening was miserable with drizzle. The man arrived at a building which seemed to have had all the life squeezed out of it by its bigger, taller neighbours on either side. At the bottom of a flight of steps was a basement door. Above the door there swung and flickered an oil lamp, hanging from a rusty bracket.

The man knocked twice on the wooden door, and, after a pause, once more. There was a shuffling from the other side, the sound of a bolt being withdrawn, and the door swung open. Whoever had unfastened it was no more than a shape in the dimness, a shape so slight that it might have been a child but one which appeared to acknowledge the man by the slightest of nods as he walked in. At the end of a short passage hung a tattered curtain. Beyond the curtain stretched a long, low-ceilinged room similar to the Tween Deck region of a ship. There were storage places here too, arranged in tiers with a narrow aisle between them. Instead of goods, people were stowed away on tiny bunks. Once the visitor was accustomed to the very subdued lighting, he would have seen slight signs of life. The shift of bodies sitting or squatting, the glow of red embers, now brightening, now fading. From all around he would have heard sounds of disturbed dreamers: garbled phrases, groans and sighs. Above all, there was a sweet and pungent odour smothering the smell of the damp fustian which clothed most of the dreaming bodies.

A dangling hand clutched at the man’s face as he went down the aisle between the wooden tiers. He didn’t flinch or jump but brushed the hand aside. He moved by instinct rather than by sight. At the far end of the room was a second tattered curtain, beyond which was a short flight of stairs illuminated by a single flaring gas lamp. At the bottom was a door. The man knocked again – the same pattern, two quick raps followed by a third – and was told to enter.

The interior was scarcely bigger than a boxroom. A cadaverous man was sitting on a low three-legged stool. He had a long pipe in his hand which he had evidently been about to lean forward and light from a candle on the floor when the knock came at the door. The sweet, pungent smell was even stronger in this little underground chamber where there was no apparent ventilation.

A woman lay on a mattress which was pushed against the wall and which took up half the floor space. One of her legs was cocked up and her skirts had fallen back to reveal pale thighs. Her white face was turned towards the door and her eyes were half-closed. She did not acknowledge the newcomer. Her white complexion by the light of the single candle, together with the gash of her red lips and the dark rings around her eyes, gave her a clownish look.

‘Evenin’, sir,’ said the newcomer.

‘Good evening to you, George,’ said the man crouched on the stool. He spoke with an odd formality as he gestured with his unlit pipe in the direction of the woman. ‘The lady is in the arms of Morpheus. She’s two pipes down and I haven’t even started. But I am glad of it, George. Why am I glad? Because I can listen to you with full attention before I take my pleasure. Sit yourself down on the mattress.’

The man called George – or in full George Forester – took off his cheap mackintosh and lowered himself on to the mattress. He sat cross-legged with the damp garment over his knees. He was small and lithe and did not find the position uncomfortable.

‘How can you breathe in here?’ said George. ‘It’s stiflin’. The air is wicked.’

Even as he spoke he felt the thick atmosphere in the room settle inside his throat like wet flannel. He would have preferred to be on the outside, drizzling and cold as it was.

‘It’s what you’re used to,’ said the other man. ‘Me, I take to this like a fish to water – or is it a duck?’

‘Anyone would think you own this place,’ said George, meaning it as a compliment.

‘Ssh, less of that now. I have my reputation to think of. The owner is a Malay whose name is so polysyllabic that no one can pronounce it apart from me. The fact that I can pronounce it and that I reminisce with him about Penang are reasons enough for him to respect me, and give me a private room when I require it.’

George did not know where or what Penang was. And, although he got the general drift of the other man’s words, the meaning of ‘polysyllabic’ was unfamiliar to him. The individual who’d been about to light an opium-pipe was someone of education and breeding, no doubt about it. You only had to listen to his talk for a few moments to realize he was a cultured gentleman. He might have come down in the world and grown thin and pinched in the face. He might have lost most of what he once had but he still possessed a certain authority. Perhaps it was on account of his old profession, George thought. That was how they had met, through his old profession. George had good reason to be grateful, eternally grateful, to the man he always referred to as ‘sir’.

‘Well, what have you learned?’

‘It’s quite simple, sir. I hung around their drum and asked around their neighbourhood today and yesterday and I visited the shops and picked up a few titbits.’

‘Such as?’

George raised his left hand and enumerated the points, one finger at a time. ‘They are newly married. They recently moved into Abercrombie Road. They’ve got a maid called Hetty who’s got a sister livin’ a few streets away.’

‘I’m not interested in the maid or her sister,’ said the cadaverous man, gazing up at the low ceiling where the shadows jumped.

‘What I’m gettin’ at, sir, is there’s just the three of ’em in the house.’

‘No little ones?’

‘Not yet.’

‘That’s good,’ said the gentleman.

‘Why’s that, sir?’

‘Never mind. Give me more details.’

‘His name is Ansell, which you already know. First name Thomas. Hers is Helen. He works at a lawyers’ in Furnival Street, he does. She’s the daughter of a lawyer, deceased, of the same firm, so it’s all very cosy.’

‘What time does he get back in the evening?’

‘’Bout six or so.’

‘And go to bed?’

‘I saw no lights after ten,’ said George.

‘Hmm,’ said the other. ‘Well, they’re newly married, I suppose. Street lights?’

‘Nearest one’s many yards away. You want any more help, sir? Any more kit? Just ask. I got one or two pieces left over. An’ I got the know-how.’

‘No, I don’t want any more help, George. I am not yet decided what to do.’

‘What about the other two, the ones I’ve already reported on?’

‘I am still thinking about them as well. You may leave now, George.’

And the cadaverous individual leaned forward and started his pipe going at the candle. It was a sign of dismissal. George sprang up from the mattress where the white-faced woman slumbered oblivious, her eyelids completely closed by now. He put on his mackintosh, almost knocking over the candle as he did so. The shadows swirled across the tight walls and low ceiling.

‘Careful,’ said the other. ‘We don’t want to be left darkling, do we? Shut the door behind you.’

George did as he was told. He climbed the stairs, pushed aside the tattered curtain and paced through the long low room full of men and a few women banked in tiers and sprawled in various attitudes in their roosts. The red embers pulsed in the furthest shadows like the eyes of nocturnal beasts. The individual who attended on the outer door was revealed, now that George’s eyes were more used to the gloom, to be an oriental woman, very diminutive and antique.

Once he had been let out and climbed the worn steps to street level, George paused and took in great lungfuls of the drizzly air as if he were striding along the North Downs rather than standing heel-deep in the filth of Penharbour Lane. He disliked his occasional visits to the smoking den – he had never been tempted by the habit himself – and he went only because it was the spot where he could almost definitely count on finding the gentleman he sought.

As he returned to Lower Thames Street, he wondered what use the gentleman was going to make of the information he’d given him. He wondered too why his offer of help had been turned down. For it would have been a simple matter for George to worm his way inside the house in Abercrombie Road. In his younger days he had been apprenticed to a sweep and the training was an excellent introduction for burglary, since climbing boys had to be fit, nimble and small. George dabbled in crime, acting as lookout for burglars, going to the scene of the crime beforehand to check that the coast was clear, then keeping watch while his two mates were at it. He had slithered through the odd window space himself. But he was not really cut out for a criminal life, never felt truly comfortable, and he did his best to turn away from it. Why, he even settled down and married. Now he and Annie had kids, a few of them, which was how he encountered ‘sir’ in the first place.

It was when one of their children had fallen ill of a fever. Someone said there was a doctor down on his luck who lodged round the corner in Rosemary Lane. He’d occasionally attend on a sick child if you caught him at the right time, if you found him in a kindly mood. His name? No one knew his surname. He answered to Tony. So George had hared round to Rosemary Lane and knocked on doors and toiled up rickety staircases and several times risked a punch in the phizog to track down this geezer. He’d inquired with increasing desperation of dozens of loungers and passers-by whether they knew a Tony, a medical gentleman. And, lo and behold, after half a day and when he was about to give up, he asked the man himself without realizing it. Doctor Tony was a tall, thin, long-haired gent with skin that, even by the vaporous daylight of Rosemary Lane, was decidedly sallow. George Forester did not discover his surname then or ask for it later.

The medical man accompanied George back to the two rooms in the Old Mint where he lived with Annie and the kids. He examined the child, a boy called Mike who was three years old and very hot to the touch. He prodded and poked with his long yellow hands as Mike lay on the ticking of the cheap mattress. The other children looked on curious and silent. After a while Doctor Tony nodded to himself. He reached inside the pocket of the greatcoat which he still wore indoors – it was midwinter and freezing in the room – and withdrew a queer kind of wallet from which he took out a phial of amber liquid. He asked Annie if there was any water and she brought him some in a chipped, dirty cup. Doctor Tony poured a little of the amber liquid into the water and swirled it round. He squatted on his haunches, propped up Mike’s head with his left hand and eased some of the preparation into the child’s mouth. Mike spluttered but he swallowed a few sips and then more, until the cup was almost empty. The tall man stood up. He said, ‘The crisis should soon be past.’ And he left.

George and Annie could only pray that he was right. They despaired when the boy seemed to sink further into his fever and grow yet hotter in the chill of the room. But by the next morning Mike’s temperature had fallen and his eyes were open and he was uttering a few feeble words. ‘That man’s a saint,’ said Annie, referring to Doctor Tony. ‘I don’t mind telling him so.’

But it was George who next encountered the good doctor a few days later in Rosemary Lane, by which time Mike was back to his normal mischievous self. George Forester was so grateful that he not only passed on his wife’s comment about saintliness but offered to do anything for the man he could only call ‘sir’.

So it was that he found himself running odd errands for Doctor Tony, who seemed to know without asking that George had a dubious past and that, however respectable his current employment, he retained a few of his old skills. For his part, George came to know Tony a little better but remained in awe of the gentleman who had, surely, preserved his son’s life.

As he sheltered inside his thin mackintosh and made his way along Lower Thames Street and towards the east, he pondered again on why Doctor Tony had instructed him to observe the habits of the newly married couple living in Abercrombie Road.

Back inside the opium den in Penharbour Lane, Doctor Tony drew for the last time on his pipe. He placed it carefully in the brass bowl by the candle and lay back on the mattress beside the sleeping woman. He left the candle to burn itself out, watching the rising spiral of smoke. He observed the smoke-thread joining the other shadows overhead, all of them swelling and shrinking as if they had life. He turned his head sideways and watched the woman. Poor as the light was, everything his eyes lingered on seemed to stand out with an unnatural clarity. He admired the white curve of her cheek and the generous red of her lips. A delicate handkerchief, lilac coloured, had fallen from her sleeve. He picked it up and held to his nose. He inhaled her scent.

He was conscious of the mattress against the back of his head, against his stockinged calves. He knew that the mattress was a rough, thin, cheap thing but just now it felt as soft as down. Doctor Tony was engulfed in a wave, a gradual wave, of warmth and safety. He sighed and gave himself up to his imaginings…

But it was no piece of imagination when, at about one o’clock of that same night, he found himself standing on a street of solid respectable houses; found himself there as if transported through the air. He was clear-headed but still under the influence of the three pipes he had smoked in Penharbour Lane. The sensation was not unpleasant, not at all. Rather, it made him feel secure to the point of invincibility.

So here he was, far from the riverside wharfs. Gaslights bloomed along the street and glistened off mud and stone that were still wet from the evening rain. Between the lights there were larger areas of darkness. The house he was interested in lay within one of these patches of dark.

The Doctor was calm, convinced that what he was about to do was not merely a fitting act but also in accord with the laws of justice, the higher laws. He pulled his greatcoat tighter about him and, despite the weight which caused the coat to pull unevenly to one side, he moved smoothly along the street until he reached the house which he was looking for. He slowed for a moment to make sure there was no stray gleam of light anywhere from within. There was no light. The occupants were tucked up asleep like the other occupants of the other houses in this solid, respectable thoroughfare.

Doctor Tony glided further along the street, counting as he did so, until he came to a narrow passage between two houses. He turned right, entered the alley and then turned right again when he reached the area behind the houses. There was a ragged stretch of ground here, neither cultivated nor wilderness. No doubt it would soon be parcelled into building plots and covered over with brick. Tony paused to let his eyes become accustomed to the greater dark on this side. Then he moved parallel to the direction in which he’d already come along the road, counting off the houses in the row one by one according to their chimney stacks. It would not do to enter the wrong dwelling.

It was awkward walking back here and more than once he almost stumbled over a tussock of grass or kicked a lump of stone. When he arrived at the eleventh house, he scrambled across the wooden palings which separated the garden from the land beyond. By now he could see quite well. There were tent-like supports for runner beans and a faint sheen of light reflecting off what was probably a cucumber frame.

Doctor Tony crept up to the rear of the house. He ignored the back door which led to the kitchen and pantry area and concentrated instead on an extension containing the water-closet. A small barred window was positioned at about head height. Tony drew from his greatcoat a length of thick rope and a steel rod. Working by touch rather than sight he passed the rope twice around two of the bars and inserted the rod between the strands. Holding the rope ends with his left hand, he turned the rod end over end with his right. After a few moments the traction on the ropes began to loosen the bars from their sockets. The row of houses might have been fairly new but the building work was not of high quality. George Forester had done a good job casing the back of the property.

In a few more seconds, one of the bars popped right out with a shower of dust and plaster. Tony placed it on the ground and eased the other bar free with his hands alone. He put the ropes and the steel rod and the bars in a pile at the foot of the wall. Beyond the bars was a pane of opaque glass. The wood of the frame was half-rotten with damp. He worked at the area round the catch with the point of a knife and it did not take long for him to insert the blade and force the catch up. Then he pushed the window open.

Tony was tall enough that he had to stoop slightly to operate on the window. But he was also thin as one of the beanpoles in the garden. Now there was a space of perhaps two-feet square through which he was able to scramble. He took off his coat, shoved it through the space and began to worm his way in. Someone as slight as George Forester would probably have accomplished the task even more quickly and easily but although Doctor Tony was prepared to borrow the little man’s kit and also to listen intently to his burgling tips, he was reluctant to involve the other man in the business itself. He knew that George was trying his best to keep on the right side of the law. More to the point, he knew that George would be horrified if he was aware of what the good Doctor was about to do. In fact, he’d probably attempt to stop him.

Once through the window, Doctor Tony wriggled awkwardly to the floor of the closet. Then he was on his feet, brushing himself down, and so out of the closet and into the main part of the house. He was standing in the kitchen, his senses heightened to the degree that it was almost painful for him to hear and smell. He picked up the just audible ticks and creaks made by an occupied property at night. He thought of the married couple asleep upstairs. Innocent, oblivious. No, they were not innocent. The man and wife deserved what was about to happen to them. The Doctor dismissed them, the man and his wife, dismissed them with a metaphorical snap of the fingers.

Now he could smell the smells of this dwelling-place, so distinct yet so like the smells of tens of thousands of other households. Lingering scents of cooking, of furniture polish, of flowers that should have been thrown out a day or two before. And the faintest odour of gas.

Tony felt his way around the kitchen before going into the dining room, which was adjacent to it. The door was slightly ajar. With eyes well used to the dark, he moved towards the fireplace and examined the wallpaper and fittings on either side. Whatever he found evidently pleased him because he gave a small grunt of satisfaction. He repeated the process at various places in the parlour at the front of the house and then out in the hallway. After that he crept upstairs, keeping close to the wall where the treads were less likely to creak. Once on the landing he waited for several minutes, accustoming himself to the slightly different atmosphere of the first floor of the house. Different because there were human beings up here. He could hear a soft snoring from behind one of the three doors which opened off the landing. The door wasn’t quite closed. There was the creak of a bed as one of the sleepers shifted. It crossed Tony’s mind that he might actually enter the bedroom, but no, it would be enough if he just pushed the door a little wider… like so… and after he’d done that and one further thing he crept back downstairs.

Now he was standing near the front door. There was a gleam of light coming through the stained glass of the fanlight. It was enough for him to see the shape of what he was looking for, near the fanlight and just above head-height, out of a child’s grasp. He reached out, then stopped, his hand poised in the darkness. From outside there was the sound of feet going by, a steady, heavy plod. A constable on patrol? What George Forester would have termed a ‘peeler’ or ‘crusher’? Doctor Tony waited while the footsteps passed the house. He heard a humming sound, a few slurred words. The man was singing under his breath. No, it was not a police constable but a drunk stomping home to bed. The noises faded.

Tony realized he’d been holding his own breath all this while. His hand was where he’d left it, suspended near the fixture on the wall by the fanlight. He let out his breath in a long sigh. He lowered his arm and savoured the tension in his muscles. Then he reached up and pulled down the lever on the gas main until it was fully in the ‘open’ position.

He waited a few seconds. Already he thought he could smell and taste it, the acrid smell of household gas as it poured out of the unlit jets in every room of the house. Some Tony had found carelessly unclosed, others he had opened. Like so many people, the couple who were sleeping soundly upstairs did not turn off the gas lights one by one as they went to bed every night. Perhaps they were fearful of leaks and tried to guard against them by shutting off the supply at the main. Perhaps the husband could not be bothered to turn off the gas lights one by one. Doctor Tony did not know whether the gas jets in the sleepers’ bedroom had been left open but, in any case, the poisonous fumes from downstairs would soon rise to the first floor, seeping through floorboards and creeping around doors.

Clasping a handkerchief – lilac-coloured, with a woman’s scent – to his face, Doctor Tony swiftly paced to the back of the house. He did not make his exit via the water-closet but through the kitchen door which, he had already ascertained, was not locked but bolted. In fact he might have got into the house through the back door, he realized, although he had enjoyed the surreptitiousness of wriggling through a window, making use of George Forester’s simple equipment.

The odour of gas penetrated the handkerchief which he still held to his nostrils. He shut the door behind him, and gathered up the rope and rod together with the bars from the closet window. Then he was striding past the beanpoles and the cucumber-frame and almost vaulting over the palings at the bottom of the garden. He paused to fling the objects out into the dark where they landed with a distant clatter.

By the time he reached the street he was breathing hard. He went back up the street, past the house where he had been prowling only moments before. All was quiet, no light showed, no sound came from the occupants. No sound would ever come from those particular occupants again, thought the Doctor. There would be something appropriate about the way they died, deprived of breath, choking for good honest air. He might have gone about the business in a more straightforward way. He could have shot the sleeping couple, for instance. He carried a gun, which he had possessed for many years. But there was a crude aspect to a shooting. And, besides, the noise of gunshots might have alerted neighbours and made it harder for him to get away. Here he was, striding along the street, free as a bird flying by night.

It was only after he had walked several hundred yards that he realized that he had left his greatcoat behind. He had taken it off before he wriggled through the window and then left it on the floor of the privy. He stopped in the middle of the street. Should he go back to get the coat? He did not want to break into the house all over again, especially a house that was filling up with choking gas. Doctor Tony did not think he could be traced or identified by the coat. It was as old and shabby as the rest of his garments, and any tailor’s or manufacturer’s mark had long disappeared.

Tony decided to leave it. If it was discovered, let the police make of it what they would. Of course, they might never find the coat. The house, and the overcoat with it, might be blown to blazes if someone was careless enough to cause a spark in the vicinity.

Tony was almost indifferent to his fate. He had a mission to accomplish, and once that was finished then he too was finished. There were more individuals to dispose of. But, that done, his work was over.