Chapter 328: The Social Ball

Chapter 325 The Social Ball
Liverpool, Old Dock, on the street in front of the Golden Lion Inn.

Arthur had been scouting the roads along the neighborhood blocks since he left the tavern.

As a time-honored Scotland Yard detective, he quickly circled several locations where he could do a permanent surveillance of the hotel rooms, places that would likely be a place for the Red Devil’s mouthpiece killer to hide.

While Arthur had never been one to believe the jokes that popped out of Agareth’s mouth, nay this time the information was bought at the cost of his soul.

It was signed on the deed in black and white, and stamped with the Red Devil’s privately engraved official seal of the hexagram, so it was no wonder that Arthur didn’t believe it.

No matter what Arthur thought, he didn’t think that Agares would be willing to fake for such a small business.

After all, the power of the law is not like the London Stock Exchange that can turn a blind eye to the management, if Agares dares to move a small mind on the soul contract, it is 100% will eat the iron fist of the law, and be revoked his unlimited devil’s business license.

According to Arthur’s knowledge, the devil’s industry is not allowed to work without a license, even Barr, the head of the devil have to abide by the rules, how can I think it is not the turn of Agares, the second-in-command of the person who is gone to violate the tea cold.

Thinking of this, Arthur can not help but hit the cigarette, mouth muttered for a while: “In my opinion, the Britannia construction into hell seems to be better than now. At the very least, they are quite disciplined, and the quality of the frontline staff is generally strong. After all, apart from Hell, I haven’t seen any place where the second-in-command has to personally run to the frontline to pull in customers.”

But while Arthur didn’t think the Red Devil was being alarmist about the assassin issue, it didn’t stop him from thinking out loud about who on earth would have the leisure to run from London to Liverpool to assassinate a special commissioner of the Cabinet.

As a Scotland Yard police officer, and a half-assed one who had been temporarily promoted to this position to save the day, Arthur hadn’t even had time to make some disgusting remarks before he had attracted such hatred. This was unreasonable no matter how you thought about it.

According to Arthur’s experience in investigating criminal cases, all cases involving personal injuries are just a few reasons.

Either because of personal grudges, or because of economic interests, coupled with a small portion of faith and other spiritual issues, these three aspects are sufficient to explain the cause of all the murders Arthur handled.

In terms of personal grudges, it was certainly impossible for Arthur, as Superintendent of Scotland Yard, not to offend anyone. At the very least, the prisoners he sent to prison must have wanted him dead. But those among them who have the guts and the financial resources to hire a hitman to deal with Arthur are very hard to find.

And in terms of financial gain, Arthur did some simple math.

The shares in Thames Tunnels and Brunel Road and Bridge Construction, which Lionel Rothschild had previously recommended him to buy, had climbed out of the trough of their value over the past year.

The Thames Tideway Tunnel project soon received financial support from the government after the Treasury issued two hundred thousand pounds of municipal works investment bonds. The tunnel project, which had been at a standstill, was also restarted on a large scale at the beginning of the year, and the world’s first underground railroad to be built using shield technology is now nearing completion.

As a result of this good news, the tunnel company’s share price has now doubled.

Another company in which Arthur has a stake, Brunel Road and Bridge Construction, has also won the tender for the design of the bridge across the Avon Gorge, as Lionel said, and its share price has also risen.

Today, the net value of both stocks has climbed to seventeen hundred pounds.

In other words, Arthur, who had no idea what he was doing, had already made a seventy percent profit in his first year of trading after making the mistake of breaking into the stock exchange.

He so quietly beat ninety-nine percent of the stockbrokers in the London Stock Exchange, but also let the London stockholders see a in the end what is the black hand.

And before Arthur rushed to Liverpool to take up his post, these two companies also just announced this year’s dividend payout program.

Although the two companies, which had just come out of the red, were not as generous as the insurance companies and the banks, Arthur still received more than his legitimate paychecks for the year in return – £130.

If you add to that the gifts and gratuities Arthur had received, the investment in The Englishman, the pocket money he had earned from his part-time job at the concerts, and the money he had gotten from who knows where that had been added to his Hyde Park mansion and the Scotland Yard high-level policing meetings every now and then, even at a conservative estimate, he was currently in control of more than three thousand pounds in assets.

If Arthur’s heart could be a little darker, and he could touch a handful of the Police Intelligence Service’s operating funds, then he could push that figure up a little further.

If there was anyone who looked at Arthur unfavorably in terms of assets, then the only person he could think of was Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, the majority shareholder of The Englishman, after all, in order to campaign for him, Arthur had lent out a massive five hundred pounds in one go.

But then again, it was only a joke after all. Arthur didn’t think his Jewish friend would kill him for reneging on his debt; after all, there were so many people in debt to Disraeli that five hundred pounds wasn’t even the largest of loans.

Mr. Disraeli hadn’t made a lot of money this year, but because of the debts he had incurred in the early years of his newspaper business, even if he didn’t count the money from Arthur and Dumas and the others, he still had up to 4,000 pounds of unpaid external debt today.

Mr. Disraeli is still usually more worried about getting himself killed by his creditors than hiring an assassin to take them out.

Arthur even suspected for a moment that the boy wanted to be elected to Parliament because of the civil immunity of MPs.

That way, he could avoid the fate of being thrown into debtor’s prison while Parliament was in session, and hide in the Palace of Westminster as an old scoundrel in name only.

But even without civil immunity, Britannia’s debtors are relatively tolerant of MPs.

As far as Arthur knew, there were bankruptcy courts in London that prosecuted merchants, clerks, factory owners, and generals.

The Royal Navy several big names is in order to avoid debt had to move overseas, which also includes Arthur previously met the Royal Navy Admiral Sidney Smith.

The legendary Mr. Elder Carter of the University of London was also suspected of joining the Royal Navy, at least Arthur could be sure of one thing, the kid didn’t even pay his rent when he went to play Fantasy Drift.

But while the ecosystem of the Bankruptcy Court could bear witness to the diversity of species in Britannia, the only thing it couldn’t find in the voluminous cases was a single prosecution of a Member of Parliament.

If Disraeli, the person of greatest interest, had no motive, Arthur would have to categorize the potential assailant as religious.

Although Britain had achieved religious tolerance a long time ago, that didn’t mean that non-nationals were really on equal footing with nationalists.

Catholics had only just been allowed to be able to become MPs last year, and there was still explicit discrimination at the political level against other faiths such as Judaism.

At the executive level, discrimination against non-Nationals is even stronger. Even Scotland Yard, which has a Catholic superintendent, often includes religious beliefs among the criteria for judging criminals.

If there were two suspects, one Nationalist and the other Catholic, the Catholics were certainly interrogated more rigorously.

Both in the government and in the private sector, Catholics continued to be viewed with distrust throughout British society. Although believing in the same God, the Britons just assumed that the Catholics were spies sent by the Pope.

One slip and they would cede the entire country to Gregory XVI of the Vatican.

And if the Catholic didn’t happen to be an Irishman, it would be even worse.

In the eyes of the average Englishman, these two identities together amount to a synonym for evil walking the earth. Lazy, unclean, and of low quality while at the same time being disloyal to the king.

Because of this, before Scotland Yard was founded, once a London sheriff found an Irishman suspected of a crime, it was tantamount to immediate execution when the evidence was clear. And Arthur was luckier than the Irish Catholics in that he was an Englishman and a small farmer who had rolled out of a pigsty in the York countryside, and, most unusually of all, had a delirious little farmer uncle whom the devil had found.

So, while Arthur’s Catholicism may seem a little unorthodox, the agricultural element in him makes him rooted and blue again.

And since Mr. Hastings, as usual, was so uninterested in religious matters that he might not go to the Catholic Church more than a couple of times a year, and since the fellow was a graduate of the University of London, the home of atheism.

Therefore, when Sir Peel examined Arthur’s file before rest assured that he would mention him to the position of senior police officer.

Although it was a bit unbelievable to say it out loud, in the midst of Britain’s government, a person with little faith was conversely more advantageous than a devout Catholic.

Arthur was able to get to where he was today, in his own words, a small part of it was due to hard work, more than half was due to luck, and the final nail in the coffin was persistent groping.

There was no way around it, the devout were just too hard to fake.

When he first came into Scotland Yard, he was only getting a few shillings a week, so what was the point of accompanying them in their act?
With this attitude of Arthur’s, if someone did come to assassinate him because of his religion, then Arthur felt that sending a killer wouldn’t necessarily be a state religious person, and Catholicism seemed to be more motivated to purge him of what looked like a ‘fake conversion, day regretted’ state religious spy.

Arthur pondered for half a day without being able to make sense of it, when suddenly his sixth sense, honed in the Eastern District, reminded him that there seemed to be someone approaching behind him.

Without moving, Arthur pressed his hand to his holster, and just as he sidestepped, he heard a polite greeting ring out behind him.

“Good day, Mr. Hastings.”

“Hmm?”

Arthur turned his head, but the first thing he saw was not Gladstone, but Agareth, crouching on top of the Chopper’s head.

Arthur was slightly stunned, he ignored the Red Devil who was crouching on the future heights of Britain, but instead, he first remembered Gladstone’s identity.

“Mr. Gladstone, what a surprise to run into you here.”

“I’ve only just learned of your being sent to Liverpool. What are your impressions of Liverpool? Do you need me to introduce you to a bit of sights worth visiting?”

Arthur smiled at his words and pointed to a neighborhood in front of him, “I don’t need you to worry about that aspect. The citizens of Liverpool are all very warm, I was stopped by a few ladies not long after I arrived in Liverpool yesterday. They took me by the arm while giving me a detailed introduction of Liverpool’s customs and traditions, and also warmly invited me to visit their homes. The beauty of it was that their accomplices, the kids hiding behind me, had less than clean little hands.”

Hearing this, Gladstone couldn’t help but be embarrassed, “They’re all used to this kind of life, and I’ve been there before to persuade them, such as inviting the ladies and children to listen to me preach about the Bible on the premise of treating them to afternoon tea.”

“Wow……” joked Arthur, “Now then, it looks as if they’re not listening. However, Mr. Gladstone, your efforts are not useless, at the very least the afternoon tea and onion rings are actually getting into their bellies. If you can put forward a proposal in the House of Commons to give out free afternoon tea after you’ve been elected as an MP, at least I’m personally in favor of it.”

With just a simple joke, a smile appeared on Gladstone’s face again, “Mr. Hastings, handing out afternoon tea is simple and straightforward, but it won’t solve the problem of poverty and crime and moral degradation in Britain.”

Arthur took off his hat and fanned himself, “I can’t help it, I’m a simple-minded Scotland Yard policeman, I can’t understand when you say something more complicated. If you say: handing out free afternoon tea will get the ladies to let go of my arm, I can see what you mean. But if you talk to me about protective tariffs or nautical regulations or grain laws, I’m a bit confused.”

Gladstone was half convinced by Arthur’s words, he didn’t think Arthur was as simple as he claimed, after all, there was no way a truly simple man could sit in the position of Superintendent of Scotland Yard.

But again, Arthur seemed too one-dimensional in his resume.

Whether it was investigating cases, sword fighting, playing the piano, or doing electrical research, Arthur’s demonstrated abilities were mostly professional.

And his fiery promotion was, on the surface, mostly due to his superiors’ commendation of his professionalism. Of course, Gladstone couldn’t rule out the possibility that there was a deal going on behind the scenes.

But it had only been a year since Arthur had made his fortune as a farm boy to become Superintendent of Scotland Yard, so how much money could he have gotten to run connections in such a short period of time? It wasn’t as if everyone had a father who could readily come up with eighty thousand pounds for his son’s daughter-in-law.

Gladstone smiled back, “You’re being overly self-effacing. If you can figure out the relationship between magnetism and electricity, you can figure out grain law. If you don’t understand it for a while, it just means you haven’t put your mind to it.”

“True enough.” Arthur sniffed and purposely patted the file bag in his hand, “My mind is on this right now.”

“Is this filled with customs declarations?”

“Hmm?” Arthur asked with a smirk, “How did you know that the customs declaration is here with me?”

Gladstone smiled and responded, “I heard it from a friend who started doing foreign trade at the age of twelve and joined the Customs Department when he was sixteen, counting the time this is his seventh year in the Customs Department.”

The Red Devil, who was crouching over Gladstone’s head, sniffed knowingly and asked, “Arthur, what were you doing at twelve? Whoa! I almost forgot, you first stepped into leadership when you were twelve and finally began to qualify to run the pigsty.”

“It hasn’t changed now.” Arthur glanced at him, then smiled back, “In that case, perhaps he and I have already met. Some day when you’re free, you can introduce me. But about this document well …… unfortunately, Mr. Gladstone, you guessed wrong, this is not a customs declaration. I today in order to investigate smuggling intelligence, on the street and the local residents briefly chat, the result of the question is all useless things, really wasted my so long to do the transcript.”

“Intelligence? Transcripts?” Gladstone asked, “What did the citizens say to you?”

Arthur deliberated for a moment, rummaging through his stomach for the words he’d prepared long ago.

“Nothing more than complaints about the City Council’s over-regulation of Liverpool. Shopkeepers say that since the declaration of the state of emergency, the sailors in the harbor are locked on their ships, and they can’t go to the city to spend their money.

Dockworkers say: Because of the port controls, there are fewer and fewer jobs to be found every day. They may not be able to make a few orders even if they squat on the dock for a day, and some of them can only eat one meal a day in order to save money.

Factory workers, on the other hand, are complaining that the dockers are competing for their jobs, and while the price of work in Liverpool has been falling lately, the price of essentials is rising. If it keeps on like this, I am afraid that the next time London sends men to Liverpool, it will not be the Lord Chancellor’s Department and the Home Office that will be asking for them, but the War and Colonial Office.”

Gladstone’s eyes widened as he said, “The War and Colonial Affairs Department?”

Arthur nodded, “That’s right, military control. Although the Cabinet has been cautious about the use of this tactic since the Peterloo fiasco, I cannot rule out the possibility of military control given the fact that Liverpool has previously seen riots on the scale of a thousand people.”

Speaking of which, Arthur pulled a few more sheets of paper from his filing bag and handed them to Gladstone, “I’ve also inquired about something I won’t be able to use, but it may be of interest to you. To be honest, Mr. Gladstone, even though you weren’t elected as a councilman, your campaign slogan of ‘Clean Out the Corruption’ won my heart. To show my support for you, I’d like to give you some head start on your speech. Of course, I can’t guarantee that this is true, as I have neither the energy nor the ability to investigate these things.”

Gladstone took the sheets of paper and with just a quick scan, den understood what sort of things were stored in them.

Although he didn’t know too much specifically, but people in the circle, he always had heard something about this aspect. Moreover, he also heard Arthur’s voice, he wanted to properly solve the problem, rather than running to Liverpool to smash the scene.

Gladstone silently folded the documents and put them away, then smiled and invited: “Thank you for your support. As a token of appreciation, I would like to invite you to a social ball tonight. The guests are some of the most talented young people in Liverpool’s local area, and I believe you will have something in common, I wonder if you are interested in participating?”

(End of chapter)