The Tiger in the Well, Page 2

  He looked at her in a manner she recognized: quizzical, indulgent, knowledgeable. It was Mr Temple's expression, but in that old gentleman it had been backed by real humour and deep knowledge.

  "I think you must allow your professional adviser to judge what's relevant and what isn't," he said, smiling. "Of course, the heart of your case will be that this marriage did not take place. But we have to cover all eventualities, do we not? It would be unfortunate if we left any part of the case vulnerable. We shall have to go through these particulars point by point and be able to satisfy the judge that there is a complete explanation for all of them. Now, in the first place. . ."

  He took a sheet of paper out of a drawer and flipped up the lid of a silver inkpot. His desk was bare except for the blotter and an inkstand. Sally liked desks covered in books and papers and pencils and sealing-wax and all the impedimenta of a job being done, as hers was; no, she told herself, stop comparing.

  Mr Adcock dipped the pen in the ink and fastidiously dabbed it on the edge of the pot to avoid taking up too much.

  "Now then," he said. "When did you first meet Mr Parrish?"

  Sally took a deep breath. "I have never met Mr Parrish. Until this morning, I'd never heard of him. Mr Adcock, with the greatest respect, I think that all those absurd allegations aren't worth wasting time on. The only important thing is whether or not I'm married to him, and I'm not."

  "Of course, of course," said Mr Adcock. "That is the central point in your defence. Make no mistake about that. He will have to prove that a marriage took place, and if, as you say, it didn't, there will be no marriage certificate, no entry in the register of . . . St Thomas's Church at Southam in Hampshire. But you see the tendency of these allegations is to demonstrate that you are not a fit person to have charge of the child, and you wouldn't wish that implication to rest unchallenged, would you?"

  "I suppose not. But I'd reject his right to suggest it."

  "It has been suggested. That is precisely why we must counter it as fully as possible. You must conceal nothing, Miss Lockhart."

  "There's nothing to conceal!"

  "You concealed the birth of your child," he said, his big eyes reproachful.

  She didn't answer. Then she sighed heavily.

  "Very well," she said and, with an effort, made herself sit perfectly upright. "As you say, Mr Adcock. Where shall we start?"

  An hour and a half later, Sally wearily left Mr Adcock tidying the papers he'd covered with his delicate writing and went to say goodbye to the clerk.

  "Mr Bywater, what does a commission agent do?" she said.

  "Is that what Parrish claims he is?" said Mr Bywater. "Say there's a feller in the Indian Civil Service, Calcutta. He wants to send some luggage home, make sure it gets to his old Ma in Littlehampton. Complicated job. Lots of parcels. Commission agent looks after it. Or someone's going out East for the first time. Business. Needs to make sure his samples, his left-handed screw-flange triple-expansion steam-powered sodawater bottle-opener that weighs a ton and a half gets to Shanghai so's he can show the local panjandrum how it works. Commission agent sees to it. Fixes up shipping, insurance, storage, packing, the lot. Gets a commission. Hence the name. Marriage-brokers, some of 'em. Round up a bunch of unclaimed lovelies, pack 'em in a boat, herd 'em ashore at Bombay. Take a cut from the husbands later, probably. Slice of wedding-cake. Negotiate contracts, buy for you, sell for you, exchange your money, get you a passport, arrange your train tickets to Siberia with a box at the Vladivostock Music-Hall thrown in, fix an introduction to the Dalai Lama, cut you in on a Mississippi riverboat poker game, do anything at all. Nice life. Variety. Your man's got an office in Blackmoor Street, by the way. Just off Drury Lane."

  "Has he?" said Sally. "Perhaps I'll go there now. He won't be expecting that."

  "Mr Adcock would find himself defending a murder case," said the old clerk. "Keep away, I should. Have nothing to do with him. The best line is, you're not married to him, you never heard of him, you don't know what he's talking about. Don't be provoked. He'll be anxious, you know."

  "Will he?"

  "Course he will. He's telling a barefaced lie. Whether the court believes it or not depends on how we react to it. Who's Mr Adcock engaging?"

  "What, to appear in court? A Mr Coleman. Apparently he's very good."

  "Well, they all are, silks. Have to be, otherwise the whole edifice of the law would come crashing down around our ears, wouldn't it? Couldn't have that."

  A silk was a Queen's Counsel: an eminent barrister. Mr Adcock, as a solicitor, couldn't appear himself in the High Court, so he had to brief this Mr Coleman to argue Sally's case. She trusted he'd do it well; she had to.

  With Jim Taylor away in South America (his last letter had been dated from Manaus and they'd been about to leave with a guide for the jungle), Sally had no means of inquiring into this Mr Parrish's affairs without calling in a professional agent. Parrish was clearly very familiar indeed with her life, and it chilled her to think of how long and how closely someone must have been burrowing into her past. They'd got everything right: they'd chosen to strike when she was alone, with her friends away so that they couldn't testify on her behalf; they'd picked a time for this fake marriage when Sally had been almost entirely occupied with a dangerous adventure involving an arms manufacturer, and when she'd left few traces - nothing to prove she hadn't been at that church on that date. And they'd got the address of her business right, and Harriet's birthday, and they knew how much money she had invested in which stocks.

  The biggest question was one she hadn't confronted yet. But as she walked away from her solicitor's office and headed up the Strand towards Drury Lane, it began to ask itself more and more insistently: Why?Why's he doing it? Why?

  The brass plate beside the door in Blackmoor Street didn't tell her anything, except that Arthur Parrish, Commission Agent, shared the building with G. Simonides Ltd, The Anglo-Levantine Trading Company and T. and S. Williamson, Spice Importers. Better not to linger: Parrish was bound to know what she looked like, and -

  Well, what if he did see her? She was thinking like a criminal. She had no need to skulk about feeling guilty. This craziness was infecting her already.

  She left and went back down to the Strand. At No. 223 there was a gunmaker's.

  "I want to buy a pistol," she said to the lugubriously moustached assistant.

  "Target pistol, miss?"

  "A revolver."

  Target pistols were light, single-shot weapons which were often used indoors; their effective range was about ten yards. Sally had two of those already, but she had something more substantial in mind now. She looked at a Webley Pryse, a Tranter, and hesitated over a Colt, but she settled in the end for a British Bulldog: a nickel-plated 5-shot pistol which was not only powerful, but also small enough to fit into a pocket.

  "It's got a strong recoil, that one, miss," said the assistant. "Painful to shoot if you're not used to it. Aim a good way below the target, else you'll miss it entirely."

  "I'd like the Colt," she told him, "but it's too big. This is just right. I'll get used to it; I've done a lot of shooting. And a box of fifty cartridges, please."

  It cost her a little under four pounds. She had the gun and the cartridges wrapped and then took them with her, rather to the assistant's surprise; ladies and gentlemen out shopping almost invariably had their purchases delivered rather than walk through the streets carrying a package. Sally felt a little beyond gentility by now, and carried the parcel without a qualm.

  She had, as she'd said, done a good deal of shooting. Her father had taught her, and given her a light Belgian pistol for her fourteenth birthday. She naturally didn't tell the shop assistant, but she'd twice shot to kill. The first time was when she was sixteen and in deadly danger from the man who'd killed her father, the leader of a Chinese secret society called Ah Ling. He was half-Dutch, and under the name of Hendrik van Eeden he had been smuggling opium in Mr Lockhart's ships without his knowledge. Sally had shot him
in a cab near the East India Docks, to save herself from death at his hands. Whether she'd killed him or not she didn't know, for she fled in horror at what she'd done, and no body was ever found. She supposed he'd escaped and gone back to the East.

  The second time had been revenge for the death of Frederick Garland. She'd fired a bullet into the mechanism of the Steam Gun, the appalling weapon invented by the arms manufacturer Axel Bellmann, intending to kill him and to die herself. She, plainly, was still alive, and profoundly glad of it now. Axel Bellmann was not. In the shocked reaction that set in after Bellmann's death, she found herself vowing never to fight again, never to let the violence of others tempt her into vengeance.

  Well, it hadn't worked. She would have a lot of travelling, a lot of digging, a lot of finding out to do before this case came to court; she didn't want to be unprepared if there was to be fighting as well.

  But again: Why? What's he after? What have I done to him? Why? And who is he?

  Chapter Two

  THE JOURNALIST

  Much further down the river than Twickenham lay the London Docks, where at about the same time that Sally was going to bed, a steamer called the Haarlem was tying up. She was carrying passengers from Rotterdam. A customs officer had come aboard at Gravesend, as was the rule, but these passengers had little to declare. It had been a rough crossing. All of them were poor, and many of them were hungry, and a few were ill.

  The gangway was lowered and those huddled on the deck began to gather their possessions and stumble down on to the wet stones of the dockside. Women with scarves around their heads, bearded men with peaked caps or - one or two - shabby hats of fur, patched trousers, worn-out boots; and their belongings - a cardboard box tied up with string, a rolled-up mattress, a shapeless bundle in a blanket, a basket full of clothes, a saucepan, a kettle. . . As one by one they left the ship and moved uncertainly along the dark dockside towards the gaslight flaring over the gate, a dock-worker turned to his mate and said:

  "What's that lingo, Bert?"

  "What they're talking? Yiddish, Sam."

  "Yiddish? Where'd they speak that?"

  "In Cable Street, for a start. They're Jews, mate. They just come from Russia or somewhere. Don't you know nothing?"

  The first man turned back and looked at the stream of refugees. They were still coming off the ship - how many had they got packed in there? - a hundred or more of them, and they were still coming. There was a child of five struggling along with a heavy basket in one hand, tugging at the hand of a sleepy three-year-old with the other, while their shawled mother clutched a baby to her and dragged along a bundle of possessions clumsily wrapped in canvas. There was an old man with a swollen leg, hobbling along painfully on a crutch. There was an old woman, too ill even to move, carried by two middle-aged men who might have been her sons. Individual faces stood out: a young woman of startling dark-eyed beauty; a thin man with an expression of surpassing craftiness; a child hollow-eyed with illness; a stout woman so cheerful she was infecting all those near her with laughter; a young man, red-bearded, blazing-eyed, with the marks of consumption in his cheeks; an old man in a torn coat and a greasy fur hat, with a long white beard and white corkscrew ringlets framing the face of a learned, gentle saint; a sharp-eyed opportunist, more or less clean-shaven, with a black cap and a fur-collared coat.

  The dock-workers watched them shuffle along to the gate, where a uniformed official stood in the gaslight, barring the way. He was trying to explain something to those in front.

  "Addresses? You - got - addresses to go to? You got to have an address. Piece - of - paper. Name - and - address. Somewhere to go to. Savvy?"

  The gaunt man in the tattered overcoat, whose pale wife was clutching one small child and trying to control another, eventually found a scrap of paper.

  "Fashion Street," the officer read. "All right. Straight on up Dock Street under the railway bridge and carry on going, then it's about half a mile up on the right. Next!"

  After a quick glance at the addresses they showed, he let them through and out into the city. A dozen or so people - relatives or friends - were waiting outside the gate, peering eagerly or anxiously in at the arrivals. Those who hadn't got a piece of paper with a recognizable address on it were directed to the Jewish Shelter in Leman Street, not far away.

  Among the passengers there were two girls travelling alone, and their nervousness attracted the attention of a middle-aged woman in a fur coat. As they walked uncertainly through the gate, watched by the young man with the red beard, she beckoned them, laid a friendly hand on their sleeves, and spoke to them in Yiddish. Little by little the line of immigrants filtered through the dock gate and trickled into the vast pool of humanity in the East End.

  Scenes like that were still new in the Port of London, which was why the dock-worker didn't know where the passengers had come from. The immigrants had been driven abroad by the first pogroms, the vicious attacks on the Jews in Russia which began to break out powerfully in 1881.

  The first family in the line had come from Kiev. The husband was a tobacco merchant whose shop had been destroyed and whose goods stolen and thrown out to a screaming mob while Russian soldiers looked on. The old man with the swollen leg was a tailor, also from Kiev; he'd been forced to hobble through the streets in front of a jeering mob while his house was looted and his wife knocked into the gutter. The old man with the ringlets was a scholar from Berdichev. All his books had been torn up and burnt in front of him, and when he tried to save them, a Cossack with a drawn sword had forced him back.

  One by one, family by family, they drifted westward with their bundles of possessions, and the letter from a cousin in London, or a brother in America, or a sister in Hull, as a guarantee that there would be a shelter for them when they arrived; or with nothing more than hope. Many of them were driven on by the knowledge that someone else - a friend or a neighbour, a friend of a friend - had had such a letter, perhaps enclosing a bit of money, and they refused to be put off by the warning of the British Consulate that England was full of unemployed men already, and they'd be better off hungry in Russia than starving in London.

  So they came to the railway stations in Moscow or St Petersburg and boarded the trains that led through Poland or Austria-Hungary, and reached Hamburg or Rotterdam or Libau, where they spent their last bit of money on a steamer ticket. Some parties had made arrangements for the sea journey back in St Petersburg, and paid for a courier to see them to the port and through the customs, and to escort them to the Jewish Shelter at the end of their journey. For some, London was not the end of it, and the courier would take them on by train to Liverpool, where they would board another ship to New York.

  And when they arrived, with no English and no money, there was nothing to look forward to but poverty and sweated labour.

  Thousands upon thousands came in the years that followed, and each of them had a story to tell; but we're concerned with the story of Sally Lockhart, so the individual we'll follow now is the red-bearded young man with consumption.

  He was not Russian but German, and his name was Jacob Liebermann. He was a journalist by profession, a socialist by conviction, and he had left Berlin one step ahead of the police - as he thought. In fact, they were well aware of it, and glad to see him go. In Bismarck's Berlin, Jews were tolerated as long as they kept to themselves and made money which the state could tax. Socialists were not tolerated at all. Liebermann had written a score of articles in the socialist papers of the other German cities, and had begun to try his hand at public speaking, though he was badly troubled by nervousness. He'd gone too far when he'd written an article revealing the part played by Bismarck's private banker in various anti-liberal measures taken by the German parliament, and he'd been given a hint that it would be better for him to leave the country.

  So he did, and in the course of his travels he'd been given a task to do by the man he was going to see now; which was why he slung a rucksack over his shoulder, turned his collar up and pulled h
is cap down, and with frequent stops under streetlights to consult a ragged map, began to make his way towards Soho.

  A basement room: warm and dry and well lit, and furnished with a collection of rough benches and chairs and lined with bookshelves. At one end, a rudimentary platform with a table and two chairs. A row of windows high along one wall that would have shown the feet of passers-by if there'd been any light in the street to see them by, and if the glass hadn't been filthy on the outside and streaming with condensation within.

  At the moment, the room was resounding with an argument in four languages - English, Polish, German and Yiddish. The speaker on the platform, an excitable man in a frock coat, was hammering his fist on the table and bellowing in Yiddish; the other languages came from the floor, where thirty or so other men were listening, heckling, shouting, arguing, smoking, nodding, or even (in the case of two of them) playing chess.

  From the level of passion involved, anyone might have thought it was a meeting of anarchists, differing only over the amount of dynamite to put in their latest bomb. In fact, they were of quite another persuasion, and they abominated anarchists. This was a meeting of the League of Democratic Socialist Associations, and they were discussing the question of whether the new journal they were about to launch should be published in Yiddish, or in German, or in Polish, or in Russian. There were enough exiles, it was reckoned, to support a journal in any one of those languages, not to mention the new floods that were coming in every week. There were arguments in favour of each language, and they were all put forward several times, both well and badly; but none was prevailing. Would it end in stalemate?

  Finally a whisper could be heard: "Ask Goldberg. See what he says. Why don't we ask Goldberg? Goldberg's always worth listening to. We should have asked him before. See what Goldberg says. . ."

  And before long that notion had seized the whole gathering, and they turned to the back of the room, where the man called Goldberg was sitting.

  He was a striking-looking man in his late twenties: thick black hair, a powerful nose, fierce black eyes. He was thickset, with a stevedore's shoulders and the fists of a prize-fighter, and he was sitting at a table with a scatter of papers in front of him, writing furiously, jabbing his pen into the inkpot with a savage energy, disregarding the splashes that resulted on the table, the paper, his hands. A cigar of terrifying pungency was clamped between his teeth.