Free The Limehouse Text by Will Thomas Page B

London.
    “Stay for dinner?” Forbes asked, as if reading my thoughts. Barker pondered it as his fellow Scotsman refilled his glass. The Guv tossed it down again like so much well water and shook his head.
    “No, we must be going.” He turned to me. “What’s wrong, lad?”
    “Nothing, sir,” I grumbled.
    Barker took my remark at face value, but I must have caught Forbes in mid-breath, setting him coughing behind his hand. It was then that my instinct or training took over: the coughing, the sunken skin around his eyes, both signs of illness.
    We took our leave, after Forbes promised he would look into the matter. I wondered if he was a plainclothes policeman working sub rosa, as I understood the Royal was a haven for refugees and anarchists. But, no, he was too genuine, too imaginative, too aesthetic, to use his word. We passed out into Regent Street again and stood at the cabstand.
    “He is consumptive, isn’t he?” I asked.
    Barker nodded slowly. “Yes. Very good, Thomas, but then, you are familiar with the symptoms, are you not?” He referred, of course, to my late wife, Jenny, who had wasted away of the disease while I was in prison. A shudder went down my back. The memory had been dredged up too quickly, before I’d had a chance to prepare myself.
    “How advanced is his condition?”
    “He’s had it at least three years. His father is the laird of Aberdeenshire and chief of the Clan Forbes. Pollock is the oldest son and due to inherit, but he shall not survive his father. He’ll not be getting his threescore and ten, I ken.”
    “Is he some sort of…enquiry agent?”
    “Not as you or I know it,” he said. “Forbes once said we would split the city between us. He would take the West End, I the East. To be more precise, he looks after the aristocracy. When they get into a spot of trouble—blackmail, perhaps, or a scandal—they come to him. He takes care of them better than they deserve. He is a walking Burke’s Peer-age. He can tell you line by line the honors and lineage of England’s most powerful families. It occupies him, I think. He cultivates a flippant exterior, but behind it lies one of the best brains in London. His father does not understand, poor fellow—keeps trying to order him back—but he will not go, not until the very end. I imagine that seeing what he shall miss must be far too painful.”
    “It is abominable, sir.”
    “Yes, well, we can merely play the hand we are given, lad. Cursing the Dealer is a waste of breath.”
    “So, how do you work together, if one of you moves among the upper class and the other among the lower?”
    “Cases are not so simple, lad. They overlap and when they do, we help each other. Do you recall the case I had you dictate on the day you were hired? The one involving William Koehler?”
    I thought back to that day almost a year before. “It was a blackmailing case, was it not?”
    “Aye. Koehler was a petty blackmailer living beyond his means in the Albany, where Forbes has chambers. He dealt in letters of a revealing nature and was quite successful. In lieu of payments, sometimes he would demand letters of introduction or invitations to balls and soirées, which in turn led to opportunities to find more letters. Forbes kept an eye on him until his rise was getting too high. He was a good-looking scoundrel and had begun to woo a certain aristocrat’s daughter. Forbes decided to act, particularly when Koehler began to threaten an MP. We thought it best that the letter warning him off came from me, and I supplied the services of James Briggs, a retired prizefighter, to act as protection. Briggs is awfully good at frightening people away.”
    I thought Barker not so bad at it himself. Were I a criminal, I would not like to receive one of those icily polite letters informing me that I had come under the private enquiry agent’s scrutiny.
    A hansom cab arrived and we climbed into it.
    “One final thing, lad,” Barker said.
    “Yes,