Chapter One The Precipice Strikes.

 

 

A velvet gloved hand silently closed the casement against the London street cries while the other ignited the incandescent mantle on the escritoire.

The Moon hung over Pa Guttrell’s Tavern, yellow and malign, pitted and sickly, as if the single bijoux eye of a vengeful deity. The Single Eye of the Invalid Moon picked out a late clerk scurrying home to the Tube. It identified the damp trousers of a Hurdy Gurdy Man asleep in a Tin Trunk, and projected its full and secondary beam on a Company of Merrymaking Officers fresh from the Mess at Knightsbridge.

“ A spiteful jade and no mistake. Let’s this minute upset her pannier and have some cheer…” and so declaiming, spilt her cargo on the flags. Doll Sarney chased her fugitive fruit along the gutter while the young rips attempted to expose her posterior.

The gloved hand drew closed the heavy swags of velvet on the consternation beneath. The sperm oil guttered fitfully on the single cheerless moth. The hooded interloper drew on his second pair of gloves. He grasped the sofa by its ebonised rim the better to manipulate it closer to the escritoire, the better to direct the torrent of blood over the sill, and , of course, the better to see the purloined debentures and the fistful of carbuncular diadems. Seeing the predicament of his portly victim, he emitted a laugh, a roaring bellowing laugh, the depths of which could not have been fathomed by the normally sane. The throaty roar filled the musky chamber and burst the panes and spilt out into the nocturnal soup. The Pot Boy at Gutterell’s quavered at his stirrups and the licentious soldiery drew their sabres in the street against the malignity of the sudden seismic guffaw.

Once more the baleful throatful of sheer torment burst over the ramparts of Old London Town beneath the river. The youngest of the Todgers stirred fitfully under his dampening counterpain, grasping at the dream like horror with a tiny clawlike hand. Ancient termigents hurried their broodlings behind the stoutliest oaken doors and made the sign of the cross to the fireplace.

“ Hark! Something foul afoot…” Even the burliest of the Coster Mongers gulped rather than invade the Night which harboured such Foul Bombast. “Top up the Beaker, mein Host” he said weakly, rather than face his fate.

“HA HA HA…….. HISSSS” came the last intonation of Evil curling as smoke in the evening gloomed under fosset and snatch, under drainpipe and gutter.

In Gropes Alley, near the Stews, Dolly Sarney bemoaned her maiden’s plight.

“Look yon grapefruits…”said the buxom Sarney to nobody at all.” I am ruined, while fondled and cropped of my livelihood.. Each one nipped and bruised… more’s the pity. Curses on the ruinants…..”

“Don’t you go and forget this fine fruit, Doll Sarney.”

A velvet handed glove rolled the single citrus prize along the gutter to her apron’s capacious refuge. A protruding ebony toe cap gleamed in the light of a single fusee.

“Why, due thanks to you, dear Sir …”But there was no-one to be seen. Or heard. She sniffed the hanging odour of sweet almonds and clamped her red jade necklace in her trembling jaw as an act of juvenile superstition, last undertaken before her timely Communion. A shadow near the tobacconist’s cornice flashed from right to left, or was it a trick of the baleful moon.

“There you are, Doll,” It was Bernard Spillsbury, her burly chum with the gentle touch and the coddle eyed look of an odd fish. “Larking about with your provender, when you should be in doors with the bolts shut.” He softly chided.

Looking closer, he saw the sparkling trails of terror tears down her checks in perfect symmetry. “There, there, Dolly Dung Boot” (his usual familiar appellation on a nocturnal perambulation). But her tongue cleft to her mouth roof, and she clearly gibbered. With large ungainly circles of her brawny limbs she fought off an invisible assailant. The Bermondsey Fog Horn sounded the closing in of the Night. St. Magilp’s struck the brace. A beer glass broke in the sand pit where the fast vehicles were invited to slow.

She lurched and screamed again at the spectacle of a thin slow trickle issuing from the overhanging cornice at first floor level of Number 45 in which lived the Nice Old Gentleman who was partial to her grapefruits. First she pointed at it, then, on closer examination found it splashed her nose and shoes. In the phosphorescent gleam of the gas mantle, it turned instantly black, and as black as could be.

Spillsbury, who was by profession an official used to the navigation of the night, shielded her transfixed gaze with one hand while summoning the Neighbourhood Watch with the other. “Saxmundham, over here.” He had recognised the portly presence of the Duty Policeman behind the Posting Box. “It’s me Spillsbury. Over here, Man. Toot sweet.” Reassured, the furtive Guardian of the Lightless Places sprang out into the thin pool of light shed by the Street Lamp, brandishing his Night Stick, and prepared for any eventuality. Saxmundham was one of the new breed of London constables that combined a considerable physical prowess with a keen intellect. "Why, her hair’s turned white and her brow tremulous.” He wiped the lenses of his glasses as if the torrent of blood might have been an optical illusion.

“Steady there Dolly” said the Constable, “Steady now. Girl.”

 

Police Constable Saxmundham struck a pose at one defiant, and yet curiously melodramatic, as if he had experienced the thespian when an adolescent. Dolly seemed increasingly agitated that she could no longer see through the kid gloved fingers of Bernard Spillsbury. For the woman’s own sanity, he allowed no chink. She seemed as if possessed by the very Devil, and foamed over his gaberdine cape. Fastidiously flicking the foam, he bent her back till she ceased her gibbering.
Several costers had by now gathered at the scene, distracted from their duties at the early morning vegetable markets by the brouhaha. There was a heartening and sympathetic bond that formed around the poor and industrious in the Lambeth Ward, Spillsbury noted to himself.

After the briefest of contacts they had soothed her to quiescence within a defensive ring of burly manhood. Dolly quickly lapsed into a condition not unlike that experienced by a cockerel when hypnotised by a Stage Hypnotist, eyes glazed and rigid of limb. Saxmundham sprang to the Duty Phone by the Jeweller’s Grid in the corner of the Megilp Square (the’Blower’ in the parlance of the Yard) and summoned assistance.

...............

The circumstances of the reported event were of such a sinister nature that the gist of the Constable’s brief but highly charged statement went straight to the Top.

Dash and Tube were high in the Executive Suite.

Cork broke into their reveries.

“We got another one, Boss.”