The Hellfire Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF

shrugged his slender shoulders. “Step in my or-fice, then.”
    “I need your lads here in the Green for a week or so, if you’re willing,” the Guv continued. “A girl has gone missing, a West End girl, and we believe slavers are about.”
    “Got it. Anyfing in p’tic’ler we’se lookin’ for?”
    Barker showed him the photograph. “The young lady and any signs of white slavery. Keep a watch on her father, who will be searching for his daughter on a gray horse. Oh, and I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to watch our backs as well.”
    “It’ll cost you,” Vic warned. “Yer talkin’ an even dozen.”
    “Then it will cost me,” Barker said philosophically.
    “Right. I’ll get on it. ’Night, sir. ’Night, Ugly.”
    The latter was for my benefit. Someday he would be eighteen years of age and I was going to treat myself to a hard one right on the point of his chin. I’d half a mind to take a leaf from Barker’s book and consider him an adult already.
    We plodded along through the gaslit streets. The few lamps had been put here as a deterrent to crime, but this only pushed it into the dark alleyways on either side. The faces of the few people we passed were sunk in the shadow of their hats, save for the chalky white tips of their noses. Everyone was anonymous, which was good for the criminals and bad for the solitary bobby trying to protect people on his beat.
    By eleven o’clock I had run out of energy and was going on sheer endurance. I toddled along beside my employer, trying to keep my eyes open. It was a bad feeling to know that for all our efforts, we had failed to locate Gwendolyn DeVere. Failure is not a word Cyrus Barker takes lightly.
    When the Bow bells finally rang twelve, I nearly fell to the pavement. We had paced these streets for over ten hours.
    “Right,” Barker said with finality. “Let us find a cab, then.”
    His harsh whistle summoning a cab to Mile End Road was the sweetest sound I had heard all evening. I scrambled up into the cab when it arrived and propped myself in the corner. I would need all the sleep I could get; knowing Barker, we would start all the earlier in the morning. I let the steady clop and jingle of the horse, taking us away from this terrible district, lull me to sleep, a London lullaby.

4
    T HE NEXT MORNING I WAS DOWN IN THE KITCHEN having a pain au chocolat and a cup of coffee while waiting for our chef, Etienne, to prepare my omelet. I was still half asleep and ruminating on how different life was here from the harsh reality of Bethnal Green, but a mile away. Then out in the garden I saw that Barker’s ward, Bok Fu Ying, had arrived and was speaking with her guardian while in the act of attaching a leash to Harm’s collar. My employer’s dog was rarely leashed. Washing down the last of the bun with my coffee, I went out the back door to see what was going on.
    “Where is he going?” I asked, for it was obvious she was taking him somewhere.
    “We are going to Yorkshire, where he have union with a lady Pekingese,” she explained. As always, the girl wore a jet-black mourning dress and a heavy veil.
    “It is time to go to the office, Thomas,” Barker said. He tries to curtail any conversation between us, claiming that I am susceptible to female charms. I wished her and her charge a safe journey and followed my employer.
    A note was waiting upon our arrival at Whitehall. There was now a telephone set in Scotland Yard, but old habits die hard. Barker took the message from the salver Jenkins presented and read it.
    “A child’s body has been found in the sewers of Bethnal Green,” he announced. “We had better look into it. Come.”
    The day had started badly and was getting steadily worse. I had not yet prepared myself to see a corpse. Viewing corpses was one of my least-favorite parts of private enquiry work. Children are like fireworks, energy bursting forth in every direction. To see one lying still, never to rise again, is hard. I am no sentimentalist,