Hammersmith nodded, glad to put his father out of his mind for the moment.
“A child,” he said. “A dead boy in one of the homes along the row there.”
“Damn it all, I should have gone with you.”
“Nothing you could have done to change things. The boy was long since dead and stuffed up a chimney.”
“Stuffed up?” Pringle gazed into his tea for a moment before looking up. “Stuffing a body up a chimney’s no easy feat. Could the boy have been dead in advance and stiff? If he was rigorous stiff, it might make it easier to push him upward.”
“I may have misspoke. Stuffed isn’t the right word for it. It appears the boy crawled up the flue of his own accord. Got stuck and was left there.”
“Oh, so it was a climber.” Pringle sat back again and took another sip of tea.
“Yes, I think the boy was a climber,” Hammersmith said. “But climbers shouldn’t be abandoned in chimneys.”
“Of course not. But the job does come with risks, and it follows that croaking in a chimney is one of them risks.”
“No five-year-old should be made to face those risks. What five-year-old would even understand that kind of risk, let alone agree to it?”
“Whoa,” Pringle said. He waved his arm at Hammersmith and tea sloshed out of his cup, dotting his shirtfront. “Oh, damn.”
He stood and Hammersmith handed him a cloth from the table. Pringle dabbed at his shirt, shaking his head.
“Too much drink, I think.”
“It’ll come out.”
“I’m sure. Never mind the shirt.”
“Never mind the shirt? Who am I talking to? What’s happened to Colin Pringle?”
Hammersmith smiled weakly and Pringle shook his head again.
“No, look, I’ve given the impression that I don’t care about a dead child.”
“I’m sure you do.”
“I do. I really do. Every death is a tragedy, but I don’t understand what makes this one so special.”
Hammersmith looked down at his shoes. Hammersmith’s own shoes were old and worn and cracked. They had never been polished. He looked over at Pringle’s shoes, which reflected the room’s ambient lamplight. He and Pringle shared mutual respect, but had nothing in common. They had been thrown together simply because they’d started as constables on the same day at the same station. Pringle cared deeply about the trappings of life. Being a policeman allowed him access to material privileges and opportunities that Hammersmith cared nothing about. The job mattered to Hammersmith. The job and the people who needed him to do that job properly. He had never been able to make Pringle understand.
“It’s not…” he said. “It was a child, Colin. He was used and discarded.”
Pringle nodded, but said nothing. He waited for Hammersmith to continue.
“It’s true, we do see bodies often enough. This was different.”
“They’ll put a detective on it.”
“No. They won’t.”
Pringle was silent for a moment. When he spoke, he kept his eyes on the floor.
“Did they tell you to let it go?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to let it go?”
Hammersmith took another sip of tea. It was cold now.
“No.”
Pringle nodded at the floor.
“I’m going round to Kingsley’s,” Hammersmith said, “to see if he has any more information about the body yet.”
“Nevil, no. It’s the middle of the night. He’s a family man. Probably as sound asleep as we should be.”
“He might be awake.”
“He might be, but he won’t want to see our ugly mugs. Let ’im be till morning.”
“I feel restless. I need to act.”
“Well, Kingsley won’t have cut on the body yet, anyway. And besides, what’ll he tell you that you don’t know?”
“You’re right. I know how the boy died.”
“And you know there’s nobody to bring in on this. Nobody killed him. He died of natural causes.”
“Not natural causes.”
“He stopped breathing of his own accord. Nobody held a pillow over his face. There’s nowhere to go with this.”
“And the people he trusted? The ones who abandoned him?”
“What can you do? They’ve broken no law.”
Hammersmith ran a hand over his chin. He needed a shave.
“I can scare them.”
“You’re scaring me right now, Nevil.”
“I need to do something about this. You needn’t involve yourself, but if I sit on my hands here it will eat away at me until there’s nothing left.”
“You could lose your commission. You might as well toss your entire career with the Met on the rubbish pile. You’ll be shoveling horse manure in the street.”
“It’s honest work.”
Pringle shrugged. “It is at that. All right, I’m in.”
“You don’t need to-”
“What’s a mate for, then? I’m in it. But I’d like about three days of sleep first.”
“What about your career?”
“As long as I get to keep the uniform, I’ll be fine.”
Hammersmith grinned and finished his tea. He hardly noticed the metallic aftertaste.
15
Inspector Day walked up Northumberland Street, away from the Yard. His heels clicked on the road and echoed back from the high walls of the hotels on either side of him. There was a hole in the bottom of his left shoe, and he could feel the cold of the paving stones under his feet. The bulk of the Hotel Victoria loomed out of the fog to the left of him, and to the right the Hotel Metropole, tall and elegant. Ahead, a cab rank split the street. In the morning it would be filled with hansoms and buses and growlers, queued up in the median between the great hotels, letting off and picking up and waiting, but now the rank was empty. An omnibus rattled past him, its yellow sides dull in the lamplight, a feedbag hung over the horse’s nose. Day moved aside and watched it disappear into the mist.
The road widened out, and Day crossed the Strand to Trafalgar Square. On a clear day he would be able to see the National Gallery on the other side of the park, but tonight he could barely see fifteen feet in front of him. A tide of mist rolled over and past him. He thought he could make out the pillar with Admiral Lord Nelson’s statue against the pale night sky, but it might have been nothing more than a thin distant layering of fog upon fog. The square was silent, the fountains shut off for the night, and the hugeness and the openness of the space seemed cathedral-like to Day, who was still used to the intimate marshes and woodlands of Devon.
He was at the southeast corner of the park. He oriented himself and walked diagonally toward the far end. Within two or three minutes he came to the outside of a low wall that encircled the nearest fountain. He followed it, walking slowly. This close, he could hear the breeze shaping ripples across the water.
After a few yards the wall angled back north, toward the fountain, and Day stopped at the corner where a massive lamppost squatted, joining the two ends of the wall. He had passed this lamppost before, he thought, but had never noticed how much bigger it was than the others that were dotted about the square. The lantern globe atop its pillar was dark. Day ran his hand over the smooth stone of its base. In the center of the structure was a door, two steps up from the flagstones beneath, and in the center of the door was a small, round knob. Now that he was looking directly at it, it was unmistakable, but he knew that the door went unnoticed by hundreds of passersby every day.
Day turned the knob. Nothing. He stepped up to the windows set into the tiny door and cupped his hands on either side of his eyes. Peering in, he saw only darkness.
He turned and squinted into the mist. London seemed empty of any other human soul. He felt utterly alone, but the Ripper was out there somewhere in the grey city. Or perhaps the Ripper was dead and gone, having destroyed the confidence of the Yard and of the citizens who no longer trusted the Yard to protect them.