The Hangman's Child Read online

  'Just move slow, Sam,' Tomnoddy said quietly, 'as if we ain't seen him. There's nothing for him to know.'

  'Infant - what they call The Scaldrum Dodge. He let slip Verity been nosing them houses that Jack and Pandy worked last autumn. If he's been bum-nosing that Joanne dollymop down here, he likely followed her to the Cornhill Vaults. He could have talked to Trent and Walker by now. If he's not nosing her, he wouldn't be here.'

  Then a far worse thought struck him.

  'Tom! He knows Jack's girl! Miss Jolly! Twice he's took her in! He'd only have to twig her at the Chinese Shades and follow her. She'd have led him straight to us. Handsome Rann would have that little wriggler of his in the game! God knows he was warned different!'

  A penny steamer bumped the pier timbers, bound for Rotherhithe and West Kent Wharf. The paddle wheels went astern to bring the vessel to a halt, metal fins thrashing the river to a hissing froth. Tomnoddy took Samuel by the arm and pushed him into the line of waiting passengers. Smuts from a tall black funnel fell in a thin drizzle across the wooden planking. The old tosher handed two coins to a clerk at the pay-box. With Samuel, he stood alone in the bows, the wind cool in their faces as the boat cut across the flood tide. Samuel shivered in the breeze.

  'So long as it was Fowler, even Bully Bragg, we were wise to them, Tom. But we never had cause to look for Verity - and we never did!'

  Tomnoddy shook his head to dismiss the old man's fears.

  'He came for a doxy found drowned. No reason to look for us. If he knew about us, you and Jack would have been nabbed at the vaults. He won't catch us now, Sam. There's only Oxford on

  Monday, then it's done.'

  Samuel stared at him, white hair ruffled by the wind.

  'I'm going nowhere near another bank in Oxford nor anywhere else, Tom! I'll bury my head till it's all quiet again. If I have to, I'll go back down the outfall or under the cellars of the old King James till I can get right away.'

  Tomnoddy's rubicund face went through a series of silent answers and rejected them.

  'But the job's done, Sam. There's been no bother yet.'

  Samuel looked at him helplessly.

  'They can find Handsome Rann's shop-mouse in the Shades any night they want, Tom. If they've had their eyes on her, she must a-led them this far. I daresay it ain't the vaults concerns them most of all. So far, they might not know that part of it.'

  Tomnoddy pulled a face at the steamer's bow-wave.

  'What then?'

  'What they know Miss Jolly will give 'em if they sniff after her long enough,' Samuel said bitterly. 'It's not the vaults they're after, it's the chance to take Jack Rann again - and hang him this time, good and proper.'

  27

  Rann closed the door of the shipping office and crossed Jamaica Road. In his note-case he carried a receipt to James Patrick for a passage in three days' time on the Batavia, bound from Rotterdam and London to New York. He knew the ship by sight, a three-masted iron-hulled Dutchman with two short black funnels. A foreign ship was best. He spoke no word of the language and would seem to his companions like any other Englishman.

  By Bermondsey Wall, a purlman's skiff was scudding among tiers of collier-brigs, selling drink to the grimy and half-naked coal-whippers. No one paid him the least attention among clinking capstan-palls, the rumble of wagons and carts from Horselydown Lane and Maguire Street, the engine-throb of a steamer off Swan Pier, the shriek of a railway whistle among the high platforms of London Bridge.

  At the station piazza, he took a cab for Farringdon. There was a debt to be paid, though the thought of it cramped his heart and entrails. But he promised himself that if he faced the dark memory and came away free, he was safe for ever.

  As the cab trembled and shook on the cobbled approach to London Bridge, he took the receipt for his passage, folded it long and slim, and inserted it with five gold sovereigns into the open hem of a large linen handkerchief. The bonds, letters of credit, and

  bank notes in the name of James Patrick were in a large envelope in the shipping agent's safe. When he boarded the vessel they would be returned to him. He had gold enough for two more days. His other arrangements were made. Even the partnership with his penny-dancer was dissolved. While they were together, the chances of recognition and betrayal were doubled.

  'I'll write and tell you where I am,' he had said to her gently, as they lay in the little Panton Street room together. 'You'll see. You won't be able to get there fast enough.'

  But he did not believe it.

  At Cheapside, he tapped the roof with his stick and ordered the cabman to drop him. Like a man reliving a dream, he walked over the crossing and into Newgate Street. Beyond the little shops, dusty in the strong summer light of afternoon sun, with their advertisements for Hildyard's Patent Dog Cake and The Metropolitan Boot Company, the walls of the prison were black and silent.

  Short of the prison wall, the chimney of Tyler's Manufactory, its lettering painted vertically down the brickwork, rose from a flat roof. Next was the garment warehouse and the arch of a dark courtyard. He turned to make sure he was unobserved, then walked into the yard and up stone stairs to the attic tenement.

  She might have moved on in the last few weeks. Even if she still lived here, she might have gone out. At the unpainted door he thought he heard the baby's cry. Rann knocked and a bolt was drawn back.

  She stood as he remembered her on that other morning, the same grey woollen shawl and white apron, astonished at the sight of him, but no longer afraid. Jack Rann in his grey suit and polished boots, brown silk cravat at his throat, was a rare vision in the Newgate Street garrets. She seemed about to drop a curtsy.

  'Don't you know me?' he said quickly. 'You helped me. I'd got nothing but the clothes I wore. Not shoes on my feet. But I told you one day I'd thank you, though I didn't know how.'

  'You're my stranger!' she said, half-startled and half-laughing.

  He stepped into the room. The tarnished mirror in which he had appeared as a bloody ghost still hung on its nail. The basket of laundry was on the floor and the baby in its wooden cradle was on the table. The rush chair in which he had sat was still at the same angle.

  He took a leather folder from his pocket.

  'What's here is yours. It ain't half enough. Paper tubes has ten sovs in each. Each note is five sovs. A bank or shops will change 'em, not the market.'

  'No!' she said, recoiling from the money.

  'Yes,' said Rann. 'Now, listen. If you got any worry about getting the money changed, go down the Ratcliff Highway. You'd know it? Beyond Aldgate Pump?'

  'Yes,' she said cautiously.

  'There's an opening on the right to Preedy's Rents. Remember that. Preedy's Rents.'

  'Preedy's Rents,' she said uncertainly.

  'Ask for the top floor and Lord Tomnoddy.'

  'That's never you!' she smiled at him.

  'No,' Rann said impatiently, 'Tomnoddy's a man that's honest and good. He'll know how to help you.' She looked doubtful. 'And you?'

  ‘I can't stay,' Rann said quietly. ‘I got to go a long way off. And I got to go alone. But not without doing what I promised. No more said, then. I got to be moving.'

  He looked at the room, the young woman with her reddened arms, the child in the cradle. Then he surprised himself by an involuntary pang of misery at his exile.

  'You'll be all right,' he said firmly. 'If not, Tomnoddy will see you are.'

  He turned with his unexpected sense of wretchedness and isolation that she seemed instinctively to guess. The young woman seized him and held him briefly in her gratitude and understanding.

  'God bless you, my poor stranger,' she said again.

  He turned and hurried down the stairs. Forlorn as he felt, he sensed danger to himself in the bare room with its scents of fresh linen.

  He went back again as far as Cheapside, then walked on to the Marquis of Granby. They were used to James Patrick by now, a man who might come and go for hours or days. Sitting down in a booth of the
saloon bar, he watched the waiter serving an order. Then he looked up as a man slid on to the bench facing him. This was an old man, tall and sunken-cheeked, stooping, dark hair long and lank. In black coat and white tie, he was still the figure of a consumptive butler drinking himself to death on his master's port.

  'Hello, Handsome Rann,' said Barrister Saward pleasantly, ‘I understand you got something that belongs to me.'

  'James Patrick,' Rann said helplessly, sure that Saward had never seen him before. 'I'm James Patrick.'

  Saward chuckled.

  'So they say. Attorney's clerk? That you?'

  There was no way back. Rann nodded. Saward pointed towards the waiter.

  'What's Coke-upon-Littleton?'

  No way back. He felt himself forced another step on the path to his destruction.

  'Stout taken with brandy.'

  'Treatise,' said Saward jovially. 'Most famous treatise upon the law of real property. Attorney's clerk! James Patrick! You smell to me like Jack Rann. A snivelling little thief.'

  Rann said nothing. Someone behind his shoulder echoed the conclusion.

  'A snivelling little thief!'

  He twisted and saw the four men standing behind him. Bragg, with his dark hair piled Pompadour-style, was looking down at him, the soft face with a mouth twisted by the humour of the situation. Moonbeam stood next, a leaden-eyed unmarked bruiser, the waistcoat under his jacket strained and creased by his size. Hardwicke and Atwell waited for their master's orders.

  The waiter approached but Bragg turned to him good-naturedly.

  'Not now, if you please, old fellow. The gentleman just remembered a bit of business to be talked over.'

  He turned back to Rann. The upper lip above the teeth was a parody of a smile.

  'Well, Handsome Jack. Seems you never learn. No sooner you get the chance but you must be thieving off respectable folk.'

  'What's it to you?'

  Bully Bragg considered his victim without expression, the eyes varying half an inch from Rann's direct gaze.

  'It's a lot to Mr Saward. Still, what you got to ask yourself, Jack Rann, is simple. You want to leave here with us, nice and quiet and friendly? Or you want Mr Saward to give you in charge? You fancy leaving here in a police van with four officers that I can call at a snap of my fingers?'

  'Flash Fowler!'

  Bragg frowned, as if this truly puzzled him.

  'Mr Inspector Fowler? He got nothing to do with this division. "H" Division. That's him. You'd know that if you was half-clever, Handsome Rann. But, then, if you was clever, you wouldn't be sitting here now. Would you? Do as you're told. You only got to give back what never belonged to you in the first place.'

  This time there was no escape, nothing but the hope that Bragg would not hand him to the police but might let him live. The law was on Bragg's side. He had only to call a policeman and name James Patrick as the hangman's child.

  Saward gave his own order to the waiter. Rann stood up and went with Bragg and his companions. They took him to a cab and then to a building off Drury Lane, which he knew as Mother Martileau's French Introducing-House. It had been a merchant's residence a century earlier, now far gone in decay. Its front formed part of a paved courtyard between two streets. One side of the building looked down on Drury Lane, the other on Crown Street.

  The lower floors with their over-furnished mirrored rooms, softly padded chairs and sofas, revealed the house for what it was. A wide staircase followed the walls of the vestibule, under a dome of patterned glass. At the top, the oval arch of the stairway was closed by a wrought-iron wicket gate, locked and bolted. Such things were common in houses where children were confined to the nursery floor or where street-girls who rebelled against their keepers might be instructed.

  Bragg unfastened the iron wicket-gate and Rann was pushed through. The attic passageway had several doors. Moonbeam unlocked one and opened it so that Rann and Samuel saw one another. Samuel drooped, his eyes pleading for forgiveness of stupidity and weakness.

  " ‘s all right, Sammy,' Rann said gently.

  Moonbeam shut the door and locked it. He pointed at the next. 'Likewise, we got Mag Fashion in there. She'll be wishing otherwise in a while.'

  'She knows nothing,' Rann said firmly.

  'How most unfortunate for her, then!' Bragg turned, the comic pompadour hair wobbling, the face an expression of pure and delighted good humour. 'In there, Handsome Rann.'

  Moonbeam opened a door on the opposite side of the passageway. Rann walked in but Bragg was not yet done with him.

  'What I want, Jack Rann, is the dibs you thieved from the Cornhill Vaults - and which you couldn't have done if you hadn't also thieved Mr Saward's papers.'

  'Cornhill Vaults?'

  'It's over, Jack. We know it all, without asking Soapy Samuel or Mag Turnbull. We want it back, what Mr Saward lost. We mean to have it, with or without hurting. We got no interest in you after that. Go where you like. Do as you please.'

  'I got nothing from any vaults,' Rann said indifferently.

  Bragg shook his head.

  'You never really thought you'd have it away? Police you might make fools of. Not old friends like us. You was down them fucking Cornhill Vaults on Sunday night! Year ago, you and Quinn were sniffing round them like greenhorns round a dollymop's skirt. You thought you was clever, waiting and following home the men that went to the deposits. But you was the one followed, Jack, you and that old fool Quinn. And them houses that were done last autumn with nothing took! The greenest stickman in the game'd know that was to get keys or papers! Eight houses, all with deposits in the Cornhill Vaults! Mr Saward found that.'

  Rann stared at Bragg. The bully became waggish.

  'I hope you enjoyed finding your gallows pamphlet in the safe deposit.'

  Rann's heart missed a beat and Bragg chuckled.

  'You got Mr Saward to thank for that, him having an arrangement there. Common box that don't belong to one client but the bank keeps oddments for whoever hands them in. Because any clerk might have to open it, it has to have a lock that any of the keys can fit. So if you was to get in, you'd be sure to open that one. Bit of a shake-up, was it?'

  ‘I got no idea,' Rann said wearily. ‘I never was there.'

  Bragg sighed.

  'Sunday night. Miss Joanne went there done up like a fourpenny hambone in black and veil. She'd need a bloody veil if she was caught freelancing on my board and lodging. She used to sneak there to give Mr Trent a romp before he got Mag Fashion. Last Sunday, Moonbeam was shadowing her. She never got an answer to Trent's bell but she hung around Cornhill, waiting for him perhaps. Moonbeam watched her, from down Leadenhall end. And you know what he saw, Handsome Rann? Later on a doxy comes out of Sun Court. Ain't Pretty Jo Phillips but remarkably like that randy little wriggler, Jolly, down the Shades, done up for arsey-farcey in tights and cloak. Then he sees Samuel. And you,

  Handsome Rann. So don't bloody come it.'

  'And you never thought your Moonbeam might be having you on?' Rann tried to sound as if he had not a care. 'You asked Miss Joanne, I s'pose.'

  Bragg affected puzzlement.

  'You know what, Jack? I never had a chance. She must've had a turn-up with her beau, Mr Trent. All events, her not getting an answer to the bell, she sort of despaired. Threw herself in the river. Body found. Felo de se, they reckon.'

  'She wouldn't be the first of yours,' Rann said quietly.

  Bragg lifted the corner of his lip from moist teeth in the same parody of a smile.

  'You got hopes, Jack Rann! Not a mark on her! True, when she went freebooting with Trent those months back, she got a smacking. That's all.'

  'Hardwicke thrashed her,' Rann said. He was watching carefully and saw that Bragg's eyes went still with a small shock. 'What you know about Hardwicke?'

  'Hardwicke boasts to the world what goes on in this house, after a glass or two.' Rann spoke as if it was nothing to him. 'Hardwicke and Atwell. Drinking down the Three Tuns in Saffron Hill. Sayi
ng how photographs was taken and sold of him leathering Pretty Jo. Her being found dead now, p'raps it mightn't so easy be felo de se. Not if the inquest was to see the pictures of him doing it. Still, if that was for working away from home, why d'you kill her now? Not for going to Trent. I'd say she must have known something that could hang you. What was it?'

  It was too late. Bragg had regained his balance, his eyes cold but no longer dead. Looking at Rann, he called Moonbeam.

  'Get the things out of his pockets.'

  Rann put them on the table. Bragg drew the banknotes from the note-case. He turned to Moonbeam.

  'Take the rest. Give him his snotter back. He'll want it to wipe up his tears.' He looked at Rann. 'Fancy you're a smart boy,

  Handsome Jack? Brave boy? Hurting won't make you give away your fortune? Still, we shan't start with you. First you'll listen to Samuel and Mag Fashion. You brave enough to hear them on and on - and say nothing? Are you, Jack? If you are, when they've said all they'll ever say, we'll come asking you. And if you won't say a word, and if we really think you won't, for a start you won't have much need for a tongue, will you?'

  They went out. A key turned and the bolts slid across. The room had been a maid's bedroom. A mattress lay on the floor near a small wooden table with a hairbrush and a hand-mirror. A single window was bolted into place and covered by vertical iron bars no more than six inches apart. Even the high window-lights of Newgate's death cell had seemed easier. The creak of a board assured him that the corridor of this informal prison was guarded with equal care.

  Rann stretched his hand between the bars and tapped the window. The glass rang thick as wood. Even if he could break the leg off the little table, it would never shatter such panes. There was no fireplace, no attic flue for him to work his way up. His cleverness had brought him back where he had begun. But now he had given Samuel and Maggie as hostages, whose first cries would break his silence. Beyond the guarded door and barred window remained only a dwindling hope that Bragg knew nothing of Preedy's Rents nor the whereabouts of Miss Jolly.