Free The Hellfire Conspiracy by Will Thomas Page B

about Mr. Miacca?”
    Barker finished worrying a piece of ham and spoke. “There’s no point. I have no real proof of a connection between Miss DeVere and Miacca, only a suspicion. There are still white slavers in England and one may have her for all I know.”
    He took up his tankard of stout and drained it. Then he pushed himself up out of his chair.
    “I had been preparing for a case of child slavery. Now I must prepare to hunt for an archfiend. Mac, I shall need a pot of tea in my room. Thomas, I leave you to your own devices.”
    He was almost out of the room when he stopped and turned to me. “Perhaps Etienne’s absence can be used to our advantage,” he said.
    Whatever that meant, I didn’t like the sound of it.

8
    C YRUS BARKER IS LOATH TO MISS SUNDAY morning service at the Baptist Tabernacle, but there was a young girl still missing in Bethnal Green and some things take priority. We had no sooner alighted from the cab in Green Street than we were accosted. The first thing I knew, someone had seized my arm and begun shaking it violently. Automatically, I went into one of the defensive postures Barker taught me, but it was only one of the mudlarks we had spoken to earlier, the woman known as Mum Alice. She was shouting something at us I couldn’t make out.
    “Slow down, Alice,” Barker counseled. “Take a deep breath and speak slowly.”
    “Ah found ’em,” she pronounced slowly. Despite her name, she was not mum. A harelip coupled with a thick Cockney accent and an excitable manner made her difficult to understand, unless one took the time to listen. “Found ’er cwothes.”
    “You found Miss DeVere’s clothes? Where are they?”
    “Pe’icoat Wane. Bu’ ’e go’ Annie!”
    “Who’s got Annie?”
    “Swanson! I wan away ’fore ’e could ge’ me.”
    The next I knew we were climbing back into the hansom, Barker, myself, and Alice, all bound for Petticoat Lane. She was bouncing on her seat in excitement. It may have been her first cab ride. As for me, I found the conditions, squeezed between Barker’s hard shoulder and Alice’s soft one, like an immense, unwashed pillow, less than ideal.
    Once one passes beyond Aldgate pump, Petticoat Lane is the first street one finds on the right. I paid the cabbie. On Sunday it is sheer madness, but the rest of the week the street vendors are gone and only the permanent shops remain. Barker did not object when Alice took his arm and led him down the street. We penetrated farther into the lane than we’d ever gone before. After several hundred yards, the street breaks up into narrow alleyways, with smaller and meaner looking shops. Alice pulled the Guv down one of the alleys. The shallow open booths there were split horizontally, so that while one vendor sat with his legs crossed an inch above the pavement, displaying secondhand collars, his upstairs neighbor sat a few inches above his head, offering ties, handkerchiefs, and suspenders. Inspector Swanson was standing and talking with Dirty Annie, as solid looking as a lamppost.
    “Donald,” Barker said casually, as if he just happened to be doing a bit of shopping in the area and stumbled across him.
    “Cyrus,” Swanson responded, affecting the same casual tone.
    “It’s ’ere, yer worship!” Mum Alice burst out.
    Barker followed her to a booth, and she pointed a warty finger at a square of folded clothing arranged among several others. It was blue and white, with an open collar, and a neckerchief with an anchor design embroidered upon it. A sailor suit. My employer crouched down and lifted one end of the fabric, scrutinizing the label sewn in the collar. He nodded once. It was Rowes of Bond Street. The proprietor of the shop, if indeed one could call the small square of paved space a shop, was sitting so close the Guv might have reached out and shaken him, but he ignored him totally for the moment.
    “How’d you find this booth?” he asked Swanson over his shoulder.
    “I do this for a living,