Princess of the 19th Century Department Store - Chapter 26

Chapter 26

In the chaotic maze of streets and alleys that was Whitechapel, night had always been secretive and taboo. Never had it felt as reassuring as it did now.

Daisy thought this with a touch of mockery as she and her grandfather followed the trainee constable, one behind the other, toward the large freight wagon parked at the end of the street.

The night after the rain was thick and dark, yet the narrow street was brightly lit. At an hour when there would normally be only faint rustles, the place was now filled with the clamor of footsteps and horses’ hooves.

Every shop along the street had its doors forcibly knocked open and searched from top to bottom.

Nathan from the underground tavern held a thick stack of receipts in his hands. Unwilling as he was, he had been summoned over by the trainee constable in front of Daisy and made to follow along.

There were also fierce-looking policemen going to the homes of nearby residents, grabbing them by the collars and demanding to know every place and person on this street who might have sold the items on the list of stolen goods.

After getting answers from several people, the police settled on their targets and released the innocent secondhand-shop widow and the coffeehouse owner.

When Daisy passed Lobit Grocery, she saw its doors standing wide open. Inside, numerous policemen were carrying contraband out of the storeroom.

Mrs. Lobit stood off to the side, panicked and utterly at a loss. It seemed Lobit had already been taken away.

The trainee constables searched nearby streets and rounded up a dozen or so key subjects for questioning, including Daisy and Mr. Nash. They were herded in batches into the freight wagon’s carriage and escorted batch by batch to Scotland Yard.

Daisy climbed into the carriage and sat down with her grandfather in a corner, leaning against the wall.

She covered her nose with her shawl, feeling as though the inside of the carriage had been glazed over with grime.

Who knew whether it had been used to transport body bags before? A foul stench kept drilling straight into her nostrils.

Seeing this, Mr. Nash assumed Daisy was frightened because she had never been to the station before. Though he was uneasy himself, worldly as he was, he could not show fear in front of his granddaughter.

He appeared perfectly composed and told Daisy not to be nervous.

A trainee constable holding a truncheon sat down among them and swept his gaze across the carriage.

“All of you, behave. No whispering. Once you’re in the interrogation room, tell us whatever you’ve seen and whatever you know. Come clean on your own.

“Since no contraband was found in your shops, this matter can be settled with a fine. But if we find out you were shielding your suppliers, it won’t be as simple as paying money.”

At that, the people in the carriage no longer dared to speak. In silence, they felt the wheels beneath them turn under the pull of the horses, carrying them all the way toward Whitehall Street. They only dared peer through the cracks in the carriage to look outside.

Daisy could clearly sense that this large-scale arrest meant the investigation was already over. The police had already seized the most crucial criminal force in the case.

While closing the net on the criminals, they were also bringing in petty shopkeepers like them to provide corroboration, to identify the suppliers of the goods, peeling back the layers like an onion.

Daisy closed her eyes and traced the movement of the carriage across the London map she had memorized in her mind.

Of course, she had only memorized London’s map in the first place to explore rental prices in different parts of the city.

Still, that did not stop Daisy from clearly distinguishing that the carriage had traveled west the whole way, passing Strand and St Paul’s Cathedral.

All sorts of clamor rushed past her ears, both prolonged and distinct. After a long while, the carriage gave a jolt, then slowly started moving again.

They were now turning from Trafalgar Square and heading southwest for a short distance.

The surroundings beyond the carriage wall became more tangible. This was Westminster, Number Four Whitehall Street, the current Metropolitan Police Headquarters.

…

To be honest, it was not a particularly respectable office building. Number Four Whitehall Street had served as the Metropolitan Police Headquarters for half a century.

That made it sound as though it possessed a venerable sense of history, but one only had to actually walk inside to discover that, like the aging British government itself, the place was full of cracks everywhere and could not withstand close scrutiny at all.

A good while after getting out of the carriage, Daisy was led through a crowd of busy policemen, weaving through cramped corridors and staircases.

She brushed past constables carrying crate after crate of smuggled firearms.

At last, she entered a somewhat larger underground interrogation room and, as instructed by the policemen, sat on an old-backed chair toward the rear.

Mr. Nash and several neighbors from Clark Street were there as well, along with merchants from other districts of Whitechapel. Thirty or forty people were shut in the room, and most of them were not familiar to Daisy.

Before long, several younger policemen entered and questioned them one by one.

The police held a list and asked whether they had sold any of the items on it within the past month.

Everyone who had been brought here had been identified by customers. No one dared lie, so they all admitted it one after another.

Afterward, the police told them to take out their receipts, no matter who had issued them.

Daisy produced the receipt from the spirits shop, but she noticed that two other grocery owners nearby could also produce something similar.

Wholesale receipts from Helconsa Spirits.

Perhaps fake receipt service had come bundled with the smugglers’ goods. Those slips of paper did not have the same quality as the one in her hand.

After the constable finished inspecting them, he took a form and began writing and crossing things out, seemingly eliminating many people from consideration.

Then he called nine grocery owners to stand, including Daisy and Mr. Nash.

“You lot, come with me.”

With that, Daisy and Mr. Nash numbly followed the others toward the next interrogation room.

They had just stepped out when, in the corridor diagonally opposite, a group of suspects appeared, bound in shackles.

They were not the savage-looking criminals one always saw in films and television. This group looked no different from workers in any factory.

They wore patched coarse tweed suit jackets, secondhand leather shoes, oversized shirts and trousers, and most had faces full of stubble, just like her father.
But the officers beside them were all armed to the teeth, as if this group of people posed an enormous threat.

If Daisy’s guess was right, these people were the subordinates of the mastermind behind the bill of lading fraud.

The smuggled guns that had just been sealed up had probably been seized from them.

Daisy brushed past them and continued following the group into a small interrogation room.

Through the iron bars of the interrogation room, she could see the officers inside questioning several grocery store owners who were under special scrutiny. Lobit, of course, was among them.

All of these people had been caught on the spot with stolen goods.

The two groups were placed in the same interrogation room. From the moment they entered, Lobit’s eyes stayed fixed on Daisy’s side.

However, with the police right there, he did not dare stare too long and risk being noticed. Those batons were not for show.

After they arrived in the interrogation room and endured a long wait, an elderly officer came in from outside, dragging in a middle-aged man tightly bound in handcuffs.

Everyone in the interrogation room recognized him.

Daisy knew him too. He was the owner of the kitchenware shop.

Most likely, the group that had just been escorted past were the fraudster’s men, and this kitchenware shop owner was one of the fences who helped them move the stolen goods.

In a single night, both the upstream and downstream ends had all been caught. Not one person had escaped.

The old officer said, “How many of you bought liquor from him?

“If any of you obtained dirty goods through channels other than him, you’d best confess honestly. This is your last chance.”

The shop owners in Lobit’s row, who had been caught with both goods and evidence, nodded one after another and honestly admitted that they had ordered from him.

Among the later group, some had only obtained the illicit liquor after it had changed hands a second time.

The old officer got the names of the smugglers’ resellers and wrote them down as well.

Seeing this, the two grocery store owners holding fake receipts also nodded and admitted that their seller was the kitchenware shop owner, and that their receipts were fake.

When it was Daisy and Mr. Nash’s turn, however, she shook her head.

“Officer, I did indeed order the rum from Helconsa Spirits. You may examine my purchase order carefully.”

The old officer first frowned, clearly unconvinced, and was just about to bark at her to think before she spoke.

Then he thought of the person interrogating the fraudster in the next room and lowered his voice instead, coming over to take the wholesale receipt.

The old officer’s gaze, along with those of every shop owner in the room, turned toward it.

The wholesale receipt was printed on thick paper, the ink was especially bright, the stamp on it was complete, and the paper even had a serial number.

It truly looked genuine.

Daisy said, “I don’t know whether Mr. Helconsa is here. If he is at the police station, you need only compare it with the register on his end. Even if there is no register, I believe he should remember me.”

The old officer’s fingers pressed against the few coins hidden beneath the wholesale receipt, and his expression softened considerably.

He took the receipt. As he turned on his slightly worn police boots, the coins slid smoothly into his sleeve, then safely into his coat pocket.

After a moment of thought, the old officer said, “Mm. Mr. Helconsa is indeed at the police station. In that case, I will have him come over shortly.

“If you are innocent, Scotland Yard certainly will not wrong you.”

At that, everyone in the room looked at Daisy and Mr. Nash in surprise.

Mr. Nash played along as well.

“Naturally. Scotland Yard must be the fairest of all.”

After saying that, Mr. Nash raised his head, and his profile met Lobit’s gaze straight on.

Utterly bewildered, Lobit suddenly recalled what Nathan had said in the underground tavern.

“Impossible! Officer, their rum is only one shilling a bottle. How could something that cheap possibly come through proper channels?”

Lobit looked toward the secondhand kitchenware dealer. When the man gave a slight shake of his head, Lobit panicked completely.

His face abruptly went ashen. In that instant, he understood that he had fallen into a trap from the very beginning.

No wonder. No wonder the timing had been so perfectly convenient.

“Helconsa could never sell it that cheaply! Even if it was obtained through proper channels, their family deliberately interfered with market prices by selling at a low price!

“They lured the other shops on Dorothy Street into having no choice but to buy illicit liquor in order to compete viciously. That is illegal too!”

Lobit knew he would not escape a fine, and might very well be jailed for a while as well, but he absolutely could not stand by and watch that family walk away without a speck of dirt on them.

He shouted until his face flushed and the veins in his neck bulged. The more he spoke, the more his eyes burned with fury, as though he wished he could pounce on the grandfather and granddaughter and swallow them alive.

Daisy did not panic in the slightest and did not bother getting into a war of words with Lobit.

She cleared her throat, lifted her gaze, and said calmly to the old officer, “This is the Metropolitan Police, not a market street. Everyone must follow the rules.

“Officer, I do not believe anyone should be allowed to slander others arbitrarily in front of you without evidence. It is simply contempt for the authority of the police.”

As Daisy spoke, the old officer also looked toward Lobit, his face full of impatience.

“Who said you had the right to speak? What are you shouting for?”

At the same time, outside the barred door, the mastermind behind the fraud case was escorted away by two armed policemen.

After the interrogation ended, Canning and the inspectors from the Whitechapel and Bethnal Green divisions walked one after another down the corridor.

Narbe, the inspector from the Whitechapel division, noticed the commotion coming from the interrogation room beside them.

He stepped forward, reached out to push open the barred door, and asked the old officer in a stern tone,

“What is being investigated here?”

…