“Come!” a voice called.
Burton entered and found himself in a high-ceilinged square room, well illuminated by a very tall window. Filing cabinets lined the wall to his left. A big portrait of Sir Robert Peel hung on the chimney-breast to the right. Two armchairs were arranged in front of the fireplace. There was a heavy desk beneath the window. Detective Inspector Slaughter, a slender and narrow-faced man with a tremendously wide, black, and bushy moustache and thick eyebrows, stepped out from behind it and strode forward, his hand outstretched.
“Sir Richard! Congratulations! The Nile! Splendid! Slaughter’s the name, sir. Sidney Slaughter, at your service.”
Burton, trying hard to ignore the line of white liquid that decorated the detective’s moustache, handed him his authorisation, which Slaughter examined with interest before exclaiming, “Stone the crows! His Majesty’s signature, hey?”
“Indeed so. I’ve been given special dispensation to look into the Babbage, Gooch, Brunel, and Nightingale abductions.”
“Oh ho! Have you, now! Well, to be frank, I’m utterly foxed by the whole affair and would appreciate any help you can offer. Would you care for a cigar? I smoke Lord Dandy’s. They don’t measure up to Havanas, but they’re quite acceptable.”
“Thank you.” Burton took the proffered smoke, accepted a light, puffed, and grunted approval.
“Drink?” he was asked.
“No, thank you.”
“You don’t mind if I do?” Slaughter waved the explorer into one of the armchairs before retrieving a large glass of milk from his desk. He seated himself opposite Burton and said, “I have to guzzle this blessed stuff by the gallon else my belly plays up something rotten. Acid imbalance, my doctor calls it. Stress of the job, I’d say. Who’d be a policeman in this rotten city, hey? The place is infested with villains. Anyway, the abductions.”
“Yes. What can you tell me about them?”
Slaughter leaned back in his chair. “Not a great deal, unfortunately. There’s been precious little progress, not for the want of trying. How much do you know?”
“Next to nothing.”
Slaughter lifted his glass to his lips and drained it, adding to the snowy fringe on his moustache. “Well now, old Charles Babbage was the first. He vanished from his home on Devonshire Street, Portland Place, on the fifth of August, ’fifty-seven. Initially, it was thought he’d made off of his own accord. He’d been under immense pressure to further refine the mechanical brains of his clockwork men and was almost certainly losing his mind.”
“There’s evidence of that?”
Slaughter nodded. “According to his wife, he was becoming increasingly and irrationally vexed by noise, especially that made by street musicians. He’d frequently fly into rages and harangue them from his bedroom window, and on three occasions he emptied his chamber pot over their heads.”
“I’ve often been tempted to do the same,” Burton noted.
“The point being that you didn’t, hey? Also, Babbage was obsessive about his work, but apparently he was starting to apply that same mania to rather inconsequential matters. For example, he counted all the broken panes of glass in a factory, then wrote a pamphlet entitled—what was it now? Ah, yes—‘Table of the Relative Frequency of the Causes of Breakage of Plate Glass Windows.’ You can see why, when he was reported missing, we were quick to conclude that he’d gone barmy and scarpered.”
Burton drew thoughtfully on his cigar. “Is there anything to suggest otherwise?”
“Nothing substantial, but an elderly neighbour, Mr. Bartholomew Knock, claimed to have seen Babbage marched into a carriage by two men. I have his written statement, which you’re welcome to examine, but I’m afraid it doesn’t amount to much, and Knock himself died during last year’s cholera epidemic.”
The police detective jumped to his feet and crossed to the filing cabinets. He opened a drawer and withdrew a cardboard folder.
“Are you sure you won’t take a drink, Sir Richard?”
“Perhaps a cup of tea, if it’s not too much trouble.”
“Splendid!”
Slaughter went to his desk, pulled out a speaking tube, whistled for the person at the other end, and said, “Have a pot of tea and a couple of cups sent up, would you? Plenty of milk, please. And give my appointments to Detective Inspector Spearing until further notice.” He returned to his chair and handed the file to Burton. “I occasionally indulge in a cuppa. Plays merry havoc with the guts but it keeps the mind sharp, hey? So, where was I? Yes, Daniel Gooch, he was next to go. Like Babbage, he’s one of the big DOGS. He was last seen on Friday the eighteenth of March, this year. A very odd disappearance, his. He was in charge of construction at Hydroham—you know? The undersea town off the Norfolk coast?”
“I’ve read a little about it.”
“He was wearing an undersea suit—”
“A what?”
“It enables a man to work for prolonged periods on the seabed. Basically, a watertight all-in-one outfit, with air tanks attached. The wearer is completely covered, but for his face, which is visible through a glass plate in the front of the helmet. Gooch was sealed into such a suit, a chain was attached to it, and he was lowered into the water. An hour later, the suit was pulled back up to the boat. It was intact but empty. Gooch had vanished from inside it.”
“How?”
“Exactly. How? And no one has seen him since.” Slaughter frowned, his shaggy eyebrows shadowing his eyes. “Frustrating. Like all detectives, I’m allergic to mysteries. They put me on edge and make me bilious.”
Burton opened the file and scanned the pages. Mostly, they contained information about the people who’d vanished rather than anything useful that might explain how or why they’d gone.
“Brunel,” he said. “His case is also rather extraordinary.”
“Indeed so.”
There came a knock at the door and a short, white-haired woman shuffled in bearing a tray.
“Tea, sir,” she said.
“Thank you, Gladys. Put it on my desk. I’ll pour.”
The woman did as directed and departed. Slaughter went over to the tray.
“You’ll want milk?”
“No. Just sugar. Four spoonfuls, please.”
“Phew! You have a sweet tooth!”
“A taste I picked up in Arabia.”
Slaughter served the explorer. Burton then watched with mild amusement as the detective combined just a few drops of tea with a great deal of milk and cautiously sipped the mixture.
“So,” he asked the Yard man, “what exactly happened with Brunel at Penfold Private Sanatorium?”
Slaughter returned to his chair. “I spoke with a Sister Clements. She said he went there on Thursday evening and claimed he was going to suffer a stroke. The attack occurred early on Saturday morning. It was mild, but Clements was concerned it might be the precursor to something more serious. On Saturday night, at eleven o’clock, two men entered the hospital and attempted to abduct him. The nurses who tried to stop them were pretty ruthlessly rendered unconscious—”
“By what means?” Burton interrupted.
Slaughter raised a hand with the fingers held rigidly straight and made a chopping motion. “To the side of the neck.”
“Not a common method for an Englishman,” Burton mused.
“No. Am I right in thinking the technique is Oriental?”
“Yes. But the men weren’t?”
“No, though their appearance was, by all accounts, rather grotesque. As you’ll see in the report, it matches that of those infamous scoundrels and fugitives, Burke and Hare.”
Burton looked back at the file and turned a page. “But they were stopped?”
“They were indeed. The question is, by whom? Certainly, no police constables were sent to the sanatorium, yet two turned up in the nick of time and a right old punch-up ensued.”