Читать книгу Arrowood - Mick Finlay, Mick Finlay - Страница 12

Chapter Six

The next morning, I found the guvnor alone in his parlour. His face was red and had a peculiar shine to it as if he’d been buffed by a cleaning maid.

‘She’s out,’ he declared the minute I stepped in from the shop. ‘She’s at an organizing meeting with the others.’

‘Organizing? What’s she organizing?’

‘They’re to visit the poor. Now, what did you discover last night?’

I told him about the junior cook, Harry. Since neither of us had any particular inclination to show our face in the Barrel of Beef, he summoned Neddy and instructed him to take a note. The note was signed ‘Mr Locksher’, the guvnor’s usual alias, and promised a reward of a shilling for ‘a very quick job indeed’. Harry was to come that night, after his work was over, to Mrs Willows’ coffeehouse on Blackfriars Road, the only one open until such a late hour. ‘Your friend from across the Channel suggested your name’ was all the explanation offered. Neddy was under instruction to hold tight to that note and not to give it to anyone other than the fellow called Harry. We told him to look out for the thin man with black eyebrows and yellow hair, and to walk direct into the kitchen and not to tell anybody who had sent him.

The boy scampered off while the guvnor refilled his pipe. When he had it lit again, he looked at me sadly.

‘What do you think about the girl’s death, Barnett? Do you think it was Jack on the prowl again?’

‘It doesn’t seem like it.’

‘Indeed. This murder wasn’t Jack’s work. His killings were all of a similar character. He did his work in solitary places. He preferred to butcher the bodies, and this takes time.’

I waited, knowing from the way he stared into the air that there was more to come.

‘I’ve been thinking about this man,’ he continued. ‘First, there’s his precision. He hurries to the church, delivers three deadly blows and runs into the crowd. He leaves nothing, no clues, no knife. He’s rapid and careful, so we can assume it isn’t an act of passion. Neither was it robbery. A robber wouldn’t choose a poor girl as his victim, not in daylight, and not on a busy street.’

‘He wouldn’t have time to search her pockets.’

‘Quite so.’ He puffed on his pipe and thought. ‘And his clothes. He wears a winter coat when it’s summer. It’s too big for him. Therefore he’s either a man of little means or in disguise. Tell me, as you chased, did he look back?’

‘Not once. I had my eyes on him all the time until I lost him. I only saw the side of his face as he turned the corner.’

‘He didn’t turn his head once to determine whether he was pursued?’

I shook my head.

‘Tell me, if you’d murdered a person on a busy street and fled, how would you feel?’

‘My blood would be up, I suppose. I’d be anxious not be caught.’

‘Yes, yes, and would you turn your head to see if you were being pursued?’

‘I reckon so.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to stop your head turning, Barnett. Your strong emotions would make you do it. This man isn’t like you. He’s used to controlling his emotions. So what is he? A hired assassin? A police officer?’

‘A soldier?’

He nodded, placing his pipe in the ash dish and pushing himself out of the chair.

‘That’s a start. And now we’ll go and visit Lewis. I don’t want to be here when Ettie resumes her reorganization of my life, and you’d better not be here either else she’ll begin on yours.’

Lewis Schwartz was the proprietor of a dark weaponry shop not far from Southwark Bridge. It was where people came with pistols and shotguns they desired to sell; it was where people came when they needed to buy some self-protection. It wasn’t a business I’d have wished to be in: I could only imagine the criminals who came and went from this boutique, but Lewis was as solid and unaffected by the danger of his trade as the river walls that seeped their yellow pus into the bricks of his dark shop. He was a fat man with one missing arm and stringy grey hair that fell onto his grimy collar. The guvnor and him were old friends. He used to go to Lewis when he needed information for the newspaper and, since we’d become private agents, he continued to help us from time to time. The guvnor always brought a packet of mutton or roasted beef or a bit of liver from the cookshop, which he would slap on the little table foul with grease. I was in the habit of standing back on these occasions, just as I did now, my mind imagining all the diseases whose traces could no doubt be found on the mud-black hands of our friend.

Today, Lewis ate carefully, chewing on one side of his mouth only.

‘You got tooth problems?’ I asked him.

‘One of the devils is playing me up.’

‘Let me see,’ demanded the guvnor.

Lewis opened his mouth and tipped back his head. The guvnor winced.

‘That tooth is black. You must have it pulled.’

‘I’m mustering my courage.’

‘Sooner the better,’ said the guvnor.

It was only when the beef was finished, and the fingers wiped on the trousers of these two old friends, that the guvnor fished in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the bullet.

‘Any idea who might use a bullet such as this, Lewis?’

Lewis put on his eyeglasses and held it under the lamp.

‘Very nice,’ he murmured, turning the bullet this way and that, rubbing its shaft with his fingers. ‘It’s a .303. Smokeless. But how did you come by something like this, William?’

‘A dying girl gave it to me,’ said the guvnor. ‘A young innocent girl, murdered before our eyes. And we mean to find out who killed her. Do you know what type of gun it’s from, Lewis?’

‘The new Lee-Enfield repeating rifles.’ Lewis handed the bullet back. ‘Military rifles, only issued to a few regiments so far. This is no huntsman’s rifle. She must have got it from a soldier. Did she have a sweetheart?’

‘He was no soldier.’

‘Then another man. Was she a whore, William?’

‘She was not a whore!’ cried the guvnor.

Lewis looked at him in surprise.

‘Why are you angry?’ he asked. ‘Did you know her?’

‘I don’t understand why everyone assumes she was a whore. She worked in the Barrel of Beef.’

‘She might have been given it by a customer,’ I said, understanding that the guvnor had attached the same purity to Martha as he attached to his wife.

‘Why would a customer give a girl a bullet?’ asked Lewis, his nose twitching. ‘A tip, now that would be one thing. But why a bullet?’

The guvnor shook his head and stood.

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ he said.

As we reached the door, a match flared. The guvnor turned back. Lewis sat hunched in his chair at the back of the shop, surrounded by boxes of bullets and sheaves of gunpowder, a glowing pipe in his mouth.

‘One day you’ll blow yourself up,’ the guvnor said to his friend. ‘I’ve warned you about this for years. Why do you never listen?’

Lewis waved him away.

‘If I started to worry now I’d have to sell up this shop and become a potato-man,’ he said. ‘You should see some of the individuals I have to deal with. One spark and they would explode themselves. Next to them, this is nothing.’

*

Late that night, we waited in Mrs Willows’ coffeehouse. I watched the street outside ebb and flow in the mud and the brown rain, the night-time people stagger and shriek, the horses clop by, their heads low and weary. Midnight passed and the dark new day took its place outside the grimy window. The guvnor read the newspapers like a glutton. He started with Punch, stowing Lloyd’s Weekly and the Pall Mall Gazette under his thighs. On the next table, a thin fellow with the uniform of an undertaker ate a packet of whelks and watched him unhappily, waiting for the chance of a read before he wandered home. But the guvnor took his time, reading every column, every page, then just when it seemed he was finished he went back to the beginning and began scanning the columns again.

‘Look at this, Barnett,’ he said, holding up a cartoon. It was of a tall Irish peasant holding a knife over a cringing English gentleman. The caption read: The Irish Frankenstein. ‘They’re printing these cartoons again. You see what they do? The Irish have monkeys’ faces, covered in hair. The Englishman is defenceless. Good God, why does this never change? Why will they not see our own aggression?’

‘I suppose they don’t want to see it, sir.’

The undertaker cleared his throat and nodded at the paper. The guvnor lit his pipe, then without a word thrust the paper at the man, before lifting his leg and continuing on to the Gazette.

Finally, the door swung open and in walked our man. He stood in the doorway, his long thin arms protruding from a brown woollen coat that was too long in the body and too short in the limbs. His yellow hair was tucked into a grey cloth cap pulled down over his ears. He looked at the undertaker, at Mrs Willows standing in the door to the kitchen, then at us. His black eyebrows twitched.

‘Mr Harry,’ I said, standing. ‘This is Mr Locksher. Have a sit down. You want a coffee?’

He nodded and sat on a stool.

‘What’s the job?’ he asked.

‘We have a parcel for your friend, Thierry,’ said the guvnor softly, leaning across the table. ‘Only we can’t find him.’

Harry stood.

‘You said a job. That ain’t no job far as I can see.’

‘We’ll pay you for the information.’

He looked back and forth between us for a moment, chewing his lip.

‘No.’

He was turning to leave when I grasped his arm.

‘Let go,’ he demanded, his bristly face pinched. Under the thick wool of his coat, I could feel the bones of his arm: he was thin as a workhouse pensioner. His skin was grey, the rims of his eyes red. The bones of his jaw were sharp like a skull.

It was no trouble to shove him back down on the stool. He was a good few inches taller than me but weak as a sparrow.

The undertaker quickly rose, shoved the remains of his whelks into his pocket, and made his exit. Mrs Willows brought over the coffee, her face calm like nothing was happening.

‘You be nice, Mr Barnett,’ she murmured.

‘We intend to be very nice to the gentleman, Rena,’ said the guvnor.

‘I don’t know nothing,’ said the man. ‘Honest. I can’t help you. He’s gone. Went off a few days ago now. Probably gone back to France. That’s all I can think.’ He glanced up at me. ‘That’s all I can say, sirs.’

‘You’re a thin man for a cook,’ the guvnor observed.

‘Cook’s helper. I do the peelings mostly. Pull the bones out the fishes. I ain’t no big cook.’

The guvnor leaned over the table suddenly and shoved his hand in the man’s coat pocket. Before Harry could respond, he pulled out a greasy packet and dropped it on the table.

‘It’s a pudding,’ said Harry, his tone defensive. ‘Half a pudding.’

‘What’s in there?’ asked the guvnor, indicating the other pocket.

‘Couple of spuds. Bit of a ham bone. They was going to throw it.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said, having a bit of a look in his pocket. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with that food. Even if it was on the turn, they’d sell it in the Skirt or outside to those as sleep in the alley.’

‘Don’t tell him, mister. Please. I’ll take it all back. Last thing I need right now is to be out of a job.’

‘No need for that, sir,’ said the guvnor. ‘We’re not on friendly terms with your employer.’

‘Why are you so thin?’ I asked. ‘Are you sick?’

‘If six children be called a sickness. And one of them only two this month.’

‘But you’ve a regular job,’ said the guvnor. ‘Is your wife alive?’

The man nodded, his eyes twitching towards the window where a hansom trotted past.

‘Doesn’t she feed you?’

The knuckle in Harry’s gullet rose as he swallowed.

‘I can’t help you,’ he said.

‘We do mean to give you a shilling, Harry,’ said the guvnor, his voice gentle. ‘We’re investigative agents, working for Mr Thierry’s family. They say he’s gone missing. They’re worried.’

Harry continued to stare out the window, unsure whether to trust us.

‘We couldn’t come to the Beef because Mr Cream has a particular dislike for us,’ continued the guvnor. ‘That’s why we sent the boy.’

For another minute, Harry considered it. Then he rose.

‘I can’t help you. Thierry just left. I ain’t heard from him since, and even if I did know something I don’t know as I’d tell you. I don’t want to be mixed up in what ain’t got nothing to do with me.’

Yet he didn’t leave. The guvnor looked at him in silence, his face puckered in thought.

‘We were there when Martha was stabbed, Harry,’ he said at last. ‘She was waiting to meet us. I held her until the constable arrived.’

The cook froze. His eyes filled with brine. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he let me support him as he sat back down.

‘We think that had something to do with Thierry going missing,’ the guvnor went on. ‘We’re going to find out who killed her. But we need information.’

‘You were there?’

‘She asked us to meet her. She wanted to tell us something.’

All of a sudden Harry began to talk quick. He leaned across the table, his voice low as if not wishing Mrs Willows to hear. ‘Something was happening at the Beef,’ he said. ‘Not the usual. Something bigger. I don’t know what for sure, but there was a gang of them in and out of there. Mr Cream asked Terry to go and get a delivery for him last week. I told him not to go but you never can say no to Mr Cream. Not if you want to work there, you can’t. One day they come in, two of them, up to Mr Cream’s office and start wrecking it. We could hear it from the kitchen. Not a one of Mr Cream’s men went up to stop them. Not Mr Piser, not Long Lenny, not Boots. They all stands down next to the front bar, quiet as mice.’

‘Who were they?’

Harry shook his head.

‘Were they American?’

‘And Irish, but that’s all I know. It was secret. They come in and go straight upstairs, never a word to anybody, like they was in charge.’

‘Come, Harry,’ said the guvnor. ‘Think. You must have heard something about them.’

‘There was some talk of them being burglars. You know Mr Cream’s a fence, I suppose? Somebody reckoned they was doing the big houses up in Bloomsbury and so on. The big houses around Hyde Park as well, the ministers’ houses, the embassies too. Jewellery and silver. You know, things easy to move on. That’s where Mr Cream comes in. That’s the whisper I heard. Didn’t hear any names.’

‘Why did they turn over his office?’

He shrugged. ‘Could of been any reason. He swindled them. Let slip something to the coppers. Made a promise he couldn’t keep. Could of been anything.’

‘What did Martha have to do with it?’

‘Nothing, far as I know. Except Mr Piser was always sweet on her. That’s the only connection far as I can see. But she was sweet on Terry. Mr Piser, well, he didn’t like it.’

‘Did they have an argument?’ asked the guvnor.

‘Mr Piser never had an argument with no one. Doesn’t talk enough to argue.’

‘Why do you think she was murdered, Harry?’

He drained his coffee and straightened his back.

‘Probably on account of going to meet you,’ he said, holding the guvnor’s eye. ‘That’d be my guess, sir.’

The guvnor looked like he’d had the wind knocked out of him. I don’t know why. He knew it as well as I, knew it the minute we saw the girl lying on the church path. Sure as day we’d gotten her killed.

‘Tell us about Terry’s friends,’ I said. ‘Know any of them?’

‘I only know him from the kitchen. Don’t know what he does outside.’

‘You never talked about his life?’

‘I know he went out drinking, but I couldn’t say who with. Never had the money myself to go out for a spree.’

‘Where did he go? Which pubs?’

‘Sorry, sir. I don’t recall him ever saying.’

I gave Harry his shilling along with a little ticket with the guvnor’s address on it.

‘If you hear anything else.’

‘Yes, sir,’ he said, standing. He pointed at the pudding. ‘Can I take it?’

‘Course you can. Take it all.’

‘And you won’t tell no one you talked to me, will you?’

‘You have our word,’ said the guvnor. ‘But tell me, Harry. How long has your wife’s drinking been a burden?’

Harry’s mouth fell open.

‘Her . . .’ he began, but seemed unable to continue.

‘You tolerate her so far?’ continued the guvnor, then left his special silence that I knew well enough by now not to fill. He looked kindly at the thin man, who shifted from foot to foot. Finally, Harry cracked.

‘But how did you know? Somebody tell you, did they?’

‘Nobody told me, my friend. I saw it in you.’

‘It ain’t easy, sir. I don’t get no sleep, what with the youngsters. But I work such long days, she got no one to discipline her. And the old crow next door leads her astray.’

The guvnor stood and grasped his hand. ‘Such things are sent to test us. I know you have the strength to pass the test, Harry, but you must nourish yourself. You’re too weak to be a proper father. You must eat more.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Harry, his eyes on the floor, ashamed.

‘Thank you for your help.’

When he was gone, we stood and wrapped ourselves up in our coats. The sky was clear, but though it was summer the air was cold. Mrs Willows cleaned and swept and turned out the lamps.

‘How did you know about his wife?’ I asked as we stepped out onto the pavement. On the other side of the road a copper walked his beat.

‘I sensed it, Barnett.’

‘Give over. How did you really know?’

‘How much do you think a junior cook makes? Thirty shillings a month? Forty? It’s enough to feed his family and pay for their room without him starving himself. Yet he steals food and risks a job that he badly needs. It must mean his money’s going elsewhere. He doesn’t have the money to go drinking himself, he told us that much. So where?’

‘Plenty of other places,’ I said. ‘Gambling debts, maybe.’

‘Too sensible for that. He was very careful in what he told us until we gained his trust. That doesn’t speak of a gambler. But did you see how he looked away when confessing his wife was alive? Did you notice how he changed the subject when I asked if she fed him?’

‘She might have been bed-bound. She might have been put away.’

‘He would have told us if she was ill. There’s no shame in illness – half of London is ill. Drinking was a guess, Barnett. I admit it. But this city is drowning in drink. It was a good guess.’

‘A lucky guess.’

He laughed.

‘I’m a lucky man, Barnett. In some respects.’

As we wandered back through the early morning streets, past the piles of bodies wrapped in rags outside the workhouse and the cab station where an old fellow swept up a great pile of horse manure, he laughed again. His hollow laugh echoed in the quiet street like a thunderclap.