Читать книгу An Act of Mercy: A gripping historical mystery set in Victorian London - J. Durham J. - Страница 5

‘There ain’t many things in life I’m afraid of, sir … ’

‘But … ?’ Sergeant Harry Pilgrim glared up at the constable from halfway down the sewer ladder.

He hopped from one foot to the other, peering down at his superior. ‘Rats is one of them.’

‘Rats?’

‘Just so, sir. Fearful scratchy, louse-ridden creatures, sir, and I could no more go down that hole with you than walk on water, sir, even if you paid me a hundred guineas.’

Pilgrim looked at the constable. They both knew he earned just twenty shillings a week.

‘I don’t have time for this, Wainwright. Pass me the tinder box.’

‘Here it is, sir.’ The constable’s face slackened with relief.

Pilgrim took the box and tested the wheel. It fired readily; spinning sparks into the darkness as he descended the ladder. The rungs were surprisingly dry – it hadn’t rained for more than a fortnight – but even so, Pilgrim landed at the bottom with a splash. He didn’t look down to see what he had landed in, but up instead, to Wainwright’s face, haloed by the night sky like a lugubrious saint.

‘If I’m not back in five minutes go to the barracks.’ Pilgrim’s voice echoed off the arched brickwork. ‘Tell Constable Williamson where I am, and get him to wake some of the men to follow me.’

‘Will do, sir … and sorry, sir … about the rats.’

Pilgrim sparked the tinderbox again, and lit the wick of the lamp. He raised it up. He was in one of the new parts of the sewer system. The roof was easily high enough for him to stand, but the bricks were already crumbling, and daubed with rust-coloured streaks. It wasn’t rust, of course.

Pilgrim grimaced. He was glad that smallpox had robbed him of his sense of smell. He knew he had to hurry. The man he was pursuing was at least five minutes ahead of him now. He pressed on into the sewer; a straight tunnel with no turns or visible exits.

‘… seventy-four … seventy-five …’ He counted the paces, until he reached a point where the tunnel split into two. He hesitated. His quarry could have gone down either of them. But which one? He lifted the lamp higher, and listened. Nothing. Except the scratch of claws on brickwork. He could make out the huddle of rats on the copings beyond the range of his lamp. It was just as well Wainwright hadn’t wanted to join him. On the other hand, if he had, they would at least have been able to explore both routes. Frustration welled. Pilgrim had come so far, but now found himself torn between choosing one of the tunnels at random and turning back.

Then he heard it: the rasp of metal on metal, coming from the left hand branch. He took off his scarf, hung it on a nail that was protruding from the wall of the left hand tunnel, then galvanized into action, wading through the water as quickly as he could. It was impossible not to splash, but he hoped that the man he was chasing would be too absorbed in his own progress to hear the pursuit. Pilgrim ran on through the greasy water. Something caught at his foot. He lurched and stumbled, pitching forwards, then floundered a moment, grabbing for something, anything, that might help to keep his face out of the filth. His fingers closed on something substantial, and he used it to push up onto his feet. Releasing it, he recoiled at the sight of an eye staring up at him. A dead dog.

He made an effort to steady the pounding of his heart. At least he hadn’t dropped the lamp. He listened. Nothing. All his senses told him he was alone in the tunnel.

‘Bollocks.’

He lifted the lamp. More brick, more slime, more black water, stretching away into the darkness. But there, on the boundary of the glow cast by the lamp, he saw something else: rungs set into the wall. He waded towards them and peered up at a manhole cover. If his suspect was no longer in the tunnel, he had to have got out somewhere. Realising he couldn’t climb with one hand, Pilgrim took a deep breath and pinched out the wick of the lamp. Blackness swallowed him: a solid thing. He beat down his anxiety by concentrating on the feel of the metal rungs under his hands. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Hand over hand; he pulled himself upwards, until his head bumped against the manhole cover. He lifted it, and slid it to one side. He blinked.

Moonlight painted the lane as bright as midday in Margate. He made a hasty calculation of direction and distance, and decided he was probably somewhere to the west of St James’ Square. Behind Curzon Street, perhaps. Or Half Moon Street. A wealthy area, that wouldn’t take kindly to detectives popping up out of the sewer, even at that hour. He levered himself up out of the hole, glad that most of the worthy citizens of Mayfair would be tucked up in their beds.

After a moment’s hesitation, he left the cover partly off the hole, considering it worth risking an accident in the hope that the moonlight would guide Wainwright, Williamson, and the other constables to him.

He straightened up and listened. His suspect had to be long gone: the manhole was at the junction of three lanes, and he could have fled in any direction. But he willed himself, with a discipline forged from experience, to stand still. To listen and to look. A shadow detached itself from the larger shadow of a nearby wall, and wound itself around his legs. He resisted the urge to kick it, and peered instead at the surrounding buildings. Several stable blocks lined the converging lanes, overshadowed by the houses behind them. The houses were all in darkness.

Except one. One with lights shining in several windows on the upper floors. Pilgrim headed for it. The gate that gave onto the lane was closed, but not locked. The hinges were well oiled, and it swung open without a sound.

As he picked his way towards the house, he paused, his eye caught by something gleaming on the path. Water. He suppressed a thrill of triumph. His man had come this way: given the recent dearth of rain, there was no other way for the path to be wet. There didn’t seem to be a back door, but there was a side entrance, in the shadows of the neighbouring building. It was too gloomy to see the doorway properly, so he bent to touch the step, a parody of genuflection. It was also wet.

He hesitated. He couldn’t go crashing into a wealthy household on his own, although he wouldn’t have had the same scruples in one of the poorer parts of the city. If Wainwright had gone back to the barracks as instructed, if he had then roused Dolly and the other constables and taken them to the manhole in Cockspur Court, then Pilgrim was looking at a wait of at least forty minutes. Providing, of course, that Dolly had spotted the scarf he had left to mark the left-hand tunnel in the sewer. If not …

With a feeling that the situation was slipping out of his grasp, he worked his way around to the front of the house. And there his anxiety deepened: a Hackney carriage was waiting at the kerb. The nag between the traces had a dejected air, looking no happier to be out in the middle of the night than Pilgrim was himself. Pilgrim guessed it had been there for some time.

He crept into a gap in the shrubbery, just yards from the cab. He had no sooner settled into his chosen spot, however, when a gust of night air found a crack in the glass of one of the carriage lamps, and extinguished the flame. The driver’s shoulders slumped, and he slid off the box. Pilgrim heard a flint strike.

‘Come on, you tokey bugger.’ The driver jabbed at the wick, and the lamp flared.

Pilgrim drew back into the shadows so that the driver wouldn’t see him, pulling his collar over the lower half of his scarred face. The carriage lamp died again, plunging Pilgrim back into gloom.

‘Stay like that, then, you bugger.’ The driver continued berating the lamp until he resumed his seat on the box, where he lapsed once more into silence.

Pilgrim’s eyelids drooped, and he wondered, not for the first time, what he was doing there. It was one of his golden rules never, ever, to act on tip-offs from the public. In his experience, anonymous leads were unreliable at best, if not downright mischievous. But there had been something about the note he had received that evening, the use of red ink, perhaps? It had been addressed to him, care of ‘Mr Charles Dickens, at the offices of Household Words’. Pilgrim was not a man given to fancies – far from it – but he had had the strangest sensation when Dickens put the envelope into his hand.

He settled further into his hiding place, pondering the nature of anonymous informants, the use of red ink, and the usefulness of having golden rules if you were in the habit of breaking them. His eyes drifted shut …

He jerked awake again as the carriage door slammed. Had someone climbed inside? The driver shook his reins and urged the horse into motion. Pilgrim resisted the impulse to shout at him to stop; he didn’t want to lose the element of surprise. He had no choice but to spur his reluctant limbs into action. Luckily, the horse was no more enthusiastic for the exercise than he was, and barely accelerated above an amble to the end of the street. It slowed down still further to turn the corner, and Pilgrim seized his chance. He put on a burst of speed, and grabbed for the door handle, using his own forward momentum to open the door and swing himself up into the cab.

‘What the … ?’ The startled passenger, a young man with mutton chop whiskers, leapt off the seat. Pilgrim swung his fist lazily, almost casually, and felt it connect with the man’s chin. He slid to the floor, like a puppet with its strings cut.

The driver sawed the cab to a halt. ‘What in hellfire … ?’

Pilgrim ignored him, and turned his attention to the packages on the floor. There were six in total, all swathed in brown canvas. The largest was about the same size as a hatbox. Pilgrim knelt beside it, and started to tear at the wrappings. It was indeed a hatbox. He fumbled with the strap. As he did, the box slipped from his grasp and it sprung open, dumping the contents. A roughly spherical object bounced away across the floor of the cab, trailing wet strips of rag behind it. It came to rest under the seat.

He stared at it. It stared back. It took him a long, shocked moment to realize what it was.