Free Phantom of Blood Alley by Paul Stewart Page B

then laughed uneasily. ‘Perhaps you read about it, Mr Grimes. I was showing my portrait of Lady Sarah Poultney as Diana, goddess of the hunt, to quite considerable acclaim, when …’
    ‘Yes?’ I said, intrigued.
    ‘The painting was damaged,’ he said, his face colouring. ‘Nobody saw it happen, although the gallery was well attended and the paintings watched at all times. But I suspected Laurence Oliphant was behind it.’
    ‘Damaged?’ I said. ‘How?’
    ‘The canvas was slashed, Mr Grimes,’ he said hotly. ‘With the point of a fencing sword by the look of it.’
    Just then, I heard the doorbell jangle in the hallway below, followed by the low mumble of voices.
    ‘That will be Lady Lavinia,’ said SirCrispin, composing his face and returning the paintbrush to a jar on the table. ‘I’m in my studio, Carruthers,’ he called out, then turned to me. ‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you,’ he said. ‘But perhaps you can tell me something, Mr Grimes. How exactly did poor Laurence die?’
    I returned Sir Crispin’s gaze levelly. ‘He was murdered,’ I told him, ‘run through by a fencing sword.’
    A.G. Hoskins Industrial Chemists was situated on Coldbath Road, a grubby back street not far from the wharves of Riverhythe, and a short walk from Laurence Oliphant’s lock-up in Blood Alley. As I stepped through a low door situated next to a much larger set of double doors, a spring-loaded bell clanged above my head, announcing my arrival.
    ‘Can I help you, sir?’ said a thin, stooped-looking man with greasy hair and a grubby apron. Perched on top of his head was a tallstovepipe hat, to which were pinned scraps of crumpled paper – chits, dockets and formulae of various kinds by the look of them.
    ‘Mr Albert Hoskins?’ I asked, and received a nod in reply.
    His brown eyes had a look of disappointment about them, an impression made stronger by his moustache, which drooped at the ends. It was as though fate had dealt him a bad hand, and he knew it.
    ‘I’m enquiring into the affairs of the late Laurence Oliphant …’ I began, only for the chemist to stagger back from the low counter that separated us, like a head-butted bruiser in a bar-room brawl.
    Albert Hoskins sank back onto a sack of desiccated phosphate granules, his head in his hands. Around us in the dismal light of the large warehouse were crates, sacks and huge jars of chemicals in powdered and liquid form, carefully stored and labelled on row upon row of wooden shelves.
    ‘Mr Oliphant … dead?’ groaned the chemist. ‘Well, I’ll be blamed, no doubt about it. Old Albert’s collar will be fingered, regardless of the facts of the case …’
    He gripped the brim of his stovepipe hat with both hands and pulled it down hard on his head, as if trying to take refuge inside it.
    ‘So the explosion killed Mr Oliphant in the end, did it?’ Albert peered up at me from beneath the brim of the hat with those disappointed eyes of his.
    I was about to answer him, when the chemist continued, the words spilling out of his mouth in a spontaneous confession.
    ‘Yes, I supplied Mr Oliphant with the chemicals he needed for his trade – and a strange mixture of powders and tinctures they turned out to be. Nitrates, iodides, naphtha and the like. Dangerous substances. Deadly substances if casually handled or mistakenly mixed. And I warned him, oh, how I warned him, but he took no notice. No,not him. He knew better, you see. He had a vision, a grand experiment; one day he and those precious “oliphantypes” of his would be famous … And he paid, in cash of course, up front for everything, until the explosion …’
    The chemist paused, then rose from the sack, and came back to face me across the counter.
    ‘Horribly burned, he was, when he came round after it happened. He accused me of adulterating my stock, mixing sawdust in my powders, vinegar in my tinctures … As if I’d do such a thing! Told me I’d be sorry, before he stormed