Chapter Twenty-one: Aldgate Riot

It took her a moment to get her bearings. As the border between the western City and the Eastend at Whitechapel, Aldgate High Street was distinctive. At one end of the street, the offices had long since closed; at the other end, the pubs were still open. Drinkers had spilled out of them when they heard the explosions; the first bomb had detonated in this street. It had blown the windows out of a third-floor office and burning paper floated towards the ground.

“IRA,” one man announced confidently as she moved into the crowd.

“Nah, suffragettes,” another argued.

“You think everything’s suffragettes,” the first said.

“’Cause they’re damn she-demons,” the other replied, but then she was too far beyond them to hear more.

Here, there were other conversations. “What office was that?”

“Shipping company, I think.”

“Insurance company,” a woman said. “Our Annie’s youngest’s sweetheart’s pa works there, he does.”

“Insurance fraud,” three voices announced at once.

She moved past them, stepping carefully around people, keeping her head down as much as possible. She was seven inches taller than the average man in this part of the city, ten inches taller than the average woman. The Boys could easily see her moving through the crowd.

“What’s that tram stopped for?”

“Probably damaged by the explosion.”

“Where are you going?” this voice was accompanied by a body stepping directly into her way.

She gazed at the uniformed constable. “Home, officer.”

“Where’s ‘at ‘en?”

Hitting him would probably be a bad idea. “Do you have a reason for questioning me, officer? Am I suspected of having committed a crime?”

“There’s a bombing that might have been suffragettes. Here’s you, the only person moving away from the bombing. You a suffragette, then?”

She was trying to think how to answer that without making this whole night worse, when the Birmingham Boys reached her. She darted aside as two tried to grab her, whilst the third decided to swing for the cop. The cop took the hit, then rattled one back with his truncheon and began to blow his whistle like his life depended on it. Which it probably did.

“What’s happening?”

“Someone tried to kill a copper!”

“Nah, they’re trying to grab that big gel.”

“Is she the bomber then?”

“Tol’ you it weren’ the IRA!”

The sounds surrounded her, the crowd pressing in from all sides, wanting to know what was happening, who it was happening to, and why. The whistle was shrill, loud and piercing, and she felt spikes of pain through her skull every time he blew the bloodything.

The two Boys who had reached her kept trying to grab her. She held them off without showing her ability to fight, making it look like accidents as she redirected them into the crowd, luck as she managed to just avoid a grasping hand.

She moved out of the way of one reaching for her, her hands slightly brushing his arm. With a sudden jerk she pulled him off-balance, into the largest man in the crowd. He had been standing watching the exploded office, occasionally sipping at his pint, until the Birmingham Boy collided with him and sent that pint all over his shirt.

With that Boy getting the hiding of his life, she turned her attention to the second one. She snapped out a low, fast kick that hit his knee hard, and with a pop his leg was bending the wrong way. He screamed and fell down, and she moved on.

Cops were running into the crowd from every direction, already on their way here after the explosion. People were fleeing. The Boys saw the cops running towards them and did what idiot gangsters do; they got in the way. The man with the drink had downed his opponent, and he and his friends piled in on the side of the cops. The cops didn’t realise they were allies and attacked them. In seconds, the bombed street had become a three-sided battle. She saw one drunk woman smacking a constable with a chair.

Stella slipped through the crowd until she was behind Wag. Her arm went around his throat; she pulled him onto his tiptoes. “Darby sends his regards, doggy. Oh, and he cuckolded your brother.” There. The gangs would destroy themselves. Her war with them had been excellent training, but she had to cut it short now she was heading to the compound in Wales.

She didn’t have time for the games she had played as a child.

She had a brothel to raid. Prostitutes to save. A holy mission to fulfil. A mother to convince not to kill her. All that within the next day, there was more than enough on her plate.

She removed her arm from Wag’s throat and pushed him into the nearest cop, then noticed one of the Boys had DI Donald on the ground. He wasn’t healed from his last injuries, the idiot detective! She ran over and kicked the Boy off him, and then a constable swung a truncheon at her head.

She disarmed him nicely, without hurting him. That seemed to really annoy him. Stella offered him the truncheon back. Somehow, that annoyed him more. She really couldn’t win.

Well, of course not, she wasn’t supposed to be playing. She was meant to be keeping things light. At this rate her shoulder was going to grind itself into powder, again.

A heavy hand landed on her good shoulder. She swung around, ready to deck whoever had touched her, and stopped when she saw it was DI Donald. She couldn’t hit him! He was her detective. And still injured. He shouldn’t even be here.

“You’re nicked,” he said.

She considered her options. He couldn’t be bribed, or threatened. That left war or diplomacy. She didn’t want to have to find a new detective, so diplomacy it was.

“I want my lawyer,” she said, giving him her best smile.

He only had one default expression, but there were subtle variations to it. She was sure he was giving her his sweetest glare.

~~~

“You are in a lot of trouble, young lady,” DS Northwoods said.

Stella was sitting in an interview room in Leman Street Police station. Her handcuffed wrists rested on the cheap table in front of her. On the other side of it, Northwoods stood with a file in his hand. He looked surprisingly human for a robot. She was watching him carefully and couldn’t see a single tell.

She cocked her head to the side as she focused her attention on his neck. There was a bead of sweat running down it. It was so incredibly life-like, the goose-marked flesh. Amazing.

“Wh- what is amazing?” he stammered.

She hadn’t realised she had said that out loud. She would need to be more careful. “Your skin. It’s very good. One simply cannot imagine better.”

“My skin?” His voice had gone several octaves higher. She must have said the wrong thing again. People getting squeaky was one of the easiest tells that she had committed some faux pas by breaking etiquette rules she didn’t know existed. Like this one, was it don’t talk about people’s skin or don’t talk about men’s skin or don’t talk about police officer’s skin or don’t draw attention to the secret brass robots by mentioning their skin?

The unspoken rules were vague, confusing, and annoyingly unspoken. How did everyone else learn them?

DI Donald shifted from where he was standing, arms folded across his chest, by the door. He took the folder and glanced at it. “Assaulting an officer. Assault causing a broken leg. Political dissent. You were mixed up in that bombing. There’s arson, too, since it was an incendiary. Running from the scene of a crime. Public disorder. You started a brawl. Stealing a police officer’s truncheon-”

Stella cut in. “I really don’t see what all the fuss is about, I returned it to the fellow immediately.”

“You obstructed police in the execution of their duty. You mortally endangered an officer by relieving them of their weapon in a life-or-death situation. You resisted arrest, and you behaved in a manner unbecoming of a young woman. What do you have to say for yourself?”

She considered her options. Telling them she had been Chosen by God was likely to be almost as bad as telling her mother would be. Her bibi-daj and her mother had trained her in what to do in situations like this. Well, her mother’s training involved a lot more hitting, spitting, and not being allowed to eat or sleep. This was a very easy interrogation by comparison.

So easy it was hard to keep her mind from wandering. “I beg your pardon,” she smiled sweetly. “My attention wandered. Could you repeat that last bit?”

“Are we boring you?” Northwoods demanded.

“Not you, you darling man,” she winked when she said man so he would know she knew he was secretly a robot and she was playing along and keeping his secret. “You are fascinating.” She really wanted to do an autopsy on him. No, autopsies were done on the dead. What was it if they weren’t dead? Ah, yes, she wanted to dissect him to see how the brass parts worked.

DI Donald’s jaw twitched. He tossed the file on the table. She noticed he didn’t use his cane in the building. That was good progress. “There were five bombings. Tell us who your acquaintances were.”

He was such a good detective. She loved getting to watch him work. “No,” she replied.

“Tell us your name.”

“No.”

“Tell us which suffragette leader your group reports to.”

“No.”

“You’re going to go down for a very long time for this.”

She wasn’t really listening. The handcuffs were tight, the metal digging into her flesh. She’d worked a bit of silk into the locks whilst they spoke, and for the first time ever the lockpicking her mother wanted her to learn actually worked. The handcuffs opened on both wrists simultaneously and fell to the desk with a clang.

Two men and a young woman stared at the handcuffs in dumbfounded shock for a moment. She recovered first. “I do apologise, but those were excessively tight. You should purchase more comfortable ones, like with feathers or something.”

“They are not supposed to be comfortable.”

“Oh.” Stella nodded, understanding at last. “This was part of the torture.”

“No, it’s not,” Northwoods said.

“Ah, then the torture comes later.”

“We don’t do that here,” DI Donald said.

“Yes, a secondary site is a good idea,” she agreed.

“We don’t torture criminals,” Northwoods yelled.

“Whyever not?”

There was a knock at the door. DI Donald strode over and pulled it open. There was a brief exchange, and then he looked at Northwoods. “The lawyer is here.”

Ah, finally. The lawyer was a contingency her mother had set up a year ago, in case any of them were ever in police trouble. Apparently he was quite good at talking to the police, or something. Stella had been distracted when meeting him because he had the most amazing eyebrows.

Northwoods lifted the folder and both men walked out the room. A moment later, eyebrow-man strolled in and closed the door. “I see you are already out of restraints, Miss Maris. That is a very good start.” She watched him as he explained why the police had nothing on her, and her release was assured. He had a broad jaw, strong nose, and thick, dark eyebrows. His jacket was immaculately tailored, and his eyes shone with intelligence.

~~~

DI Donald had put the aether kettle on and was waiting for it to boil when Northwoods stormed into the room. “Who is she?” the superintendent demanded.

“I don’t know, sir. She refused to give us her name.” He knew his tone bordered on insubordination, but he was tired and sore, and that gangster might have re-cracked one of his ribs.

“She was meant to be one of the Forty Elephants, that’s what the others said.”

Donald scoffed. “No. None of them have a voice like that. She sounds like she just walked out Kensington Palace.”

“None of them can drag Sir Patrick Hastings out of his bed in the middle of the night, either. She has to be from money.”

“She certainly sounds it, sir.”

“She’s gonna walk straight out of here. We have nothing; we thought a frightened girl would confess to something, but she just calmly sat there and accused us of torture.”

“Not nothing, sir, thirteen of the Birmingham Boys in our cells, and fresh warrants out on Wag McDonald. The Battle of Aldgate High Street will go down as one of the worst for any gang in London. Word is Billy Kimber was shot a few months back. Maybe this will be enough to put the boys down for good. Scotland Yard will be looking into the bombings, too, so we’ll get whoever was behind that.”

Northwood scowled. “I don’t like letting her go. It feels like she’s laughing at me.”

“She’s not the only one,” Donald whispered quietly as the kettle began to whistle.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Twenty

Next Chapter: Chapter Twenty-two

Author’s Note

Sir Patrick Hastings was a real person and the queerguide has a context post about this, today. Also, there’s some politics. Just a little, for fun.