The Hangman's Child Read online

  Tomnoddy stared at the debris of meat and pickles on his table. 'You ain't got Pandy now, Jack. You start on the rob again, you'll be took. Sooner or later. And when you're took, you'll be stretched. Sure as if they had you in Newgate now.'

  Rann shook his head. ‘I mean to finish, Tom, not start. What me and Pandy was fitting up might keep a man the rest of his life. Six men, even. Thanks to you, I've still got my kit. Give me three pairs of hands, I'll do that job. And then I'll be on my way. I can't stay here.'

  The sewerman looked at him as a white cloud masked the sun and the light began to thicken. 'Where'll you go then, Jack?'

  'A long way off. Where I can't be found nor fetched back. Somewhere not a living soul could know me. 'merica, p'raps. With those emigrants on the ships out of Liverpool, like peas in a pod. Might try 'stralia. Who's you, they say? Jack Rann? Never 'eard of him, I say. Merchant venturer, I am. And here's the cash to show it.'

  Tomnoddy inclined his head and breathed out hard through his nose.

  'Trouble is, Jack, it's now that matters. Not when you're in 'stralia nor 'merica. Now's when they'll catch you, if they do. This week, not next year.'

  Rann shrugged. He looked round the garret with its bare walls, a cheap case-lock ticking, the sparse plain furniture.

  'I'll live down the sewers, same as Samuel, if I must.'

  The older man nodded.

  'If you don't drown in the sluice or get ate by the rats. You don't even know the lie of the sewers, Jack.'

  'No,' said Rann brusquely, 'but you do, Tom. If it comes to that. Which it won't.'

  'Which it has,' said Tomnoddy glumly. 'And it's forbidden down there now as well. They won't let us in to hunt the sewers, 'cos there's a little danger. They fears as how we'll get suffocated. At least they tells us so. But they don't care if we get starved. No, they doesn't care nothink about that. But the police and the narks is always on the look-out for men going into 'em by the river tunnels. And they waits sometimes above the open street-gratings for any noise or light below. If you're took that way, Jack, you'll be stretched as sure as if you'd waited quiet in your cell for Mr Calcraft.'

  'Get me in there, Tom,' Rann said firmly, ‘I need that carpet-bag. It's got the kit. Jacket, trousers, shoes with rope soles. There's even a few sovs in the lining.'

  ‘I can bring it.'

  'And I want Soapy Samuel. You can't bring him.'

  'But Samuel ain't no use to you, Jack. He never did nothing but dress up like a fancy parson and collect money at house-doors for poor missioners in Africa that never existed. Sam couldn't open a kiddy's money-box with a carvin' knife.'

  ‘I want him, Tomnoddy.'

  'And he won't come up, for mortal terror of Bully Bragg.' Rann nodded.

  'That's one reason I want him, Tom. I mean to show him it's the only way he can ever be safe.'

  Tomnoddy sighed and shrugged. He gave it up.

  'Tell you this, Jack Rann. You ain't going nowhere as you are. Not to the corner of the street, let alone the outfalls and tunnels. You get cleaned up, rested, healed. You stay here, understand?'

  ‘I ain't got time, Tomnoddy!'

  Lord Tomnoddy was unimpressed.

  'You have got time, though you don't know it. The way they watch the outfalls, it means going by dark and low water. It's light at low water now, forenoon and afternoon. If I'm caught, it's twenty-eight days for trespass. If you're took, it's your death. End of the week, Jack. Almost dark at low water then. We'll go down the foreshore and in through the tunnels. There's thirteen lots of stairs down to the river between Execution Dock and Limehouse Hole. And there's Pelican Stairs in Wapping Wall. They can't see much by dark, so they don't watch.'

  'You shan't be the poorer for this, Tomnoddy,' said Rann gently, but the old tosher ignored him.

  'Another thing you'd best remember, Jack, in case you should ever go alone. The commissioners put iron doors on those tunnels a while back. Doors that close with the pressure of the flood tide against 'em and open again to let the sewage out with the ebb. A little before the ebb, they open the sluices higher up the drains. If you was in the main channels then, and if you couldn't get smartly into one of the unused branch tunnels, you'd be swept to death and found in due course on the river mud. But once the channels have run dry again and the sluices been closed, a man can get in that way without being swept off. It's safe from the ebb to the flood, until the river gets too high. Never safe when it's still on the ebb. Savvy?'

  Jack Rann looked about him at the garret room with its sloping roof and the blankets on the floor that made up the old sewer-hunter's bed.

  'Safe enough after where I've been,' he said quietly.

  But Lord Tomnoddy had not quite finished.

  'So long as you ain't seen and caught by the river police or the Customs or one of the sewage commissioners' men,' he said sternly. 'You might as well be swept away as have that happen to you now.'

  6

  Sergeant Verity sat on a tall counting-house stool and spread Inspector Croaker's memorandum on the slope of the high desk. He read it again. Above his head, at the level of the pavement, the iron-rimmed wheels of a coal-wagon from Whitehall Wharf crashed on the cobbled surface like an ocean breaker hitting a bank of shingle. The reverberation shook the basement room. Even with the ceiling-light closed, the office allocated to the sergeants of the Private-Clothes Detail rang like a foundry and reeked in the warm May evening with an air of horse dung and soot. Somewhere in the cells of Metropolitan Police 'A' Division, beyond the wall, a man was singing, a child sobbed, and an elderly woman let out arpeggios of screams in a nightmare of delirium tremens.

  The cramped office seemed smaller for Verity's bulk. The tall stool seemed about to shatter like doll's-house furniture under his tightly trousered buttocks. As he gazed at the memorandum, a slight frown of concentration clouded the pink moon of his face with its black hair flattened for neatness and the moustaches lightly waxed at their tips.

  He eased himself off the tall perch and stood with hands clasped under the rusty black tail of his frock-coat which, with dark trousers and stove-pipe hat, made up his Private-Clothes issue. In his mind he saw Henry Croaker's dark glittering eyes, the neatly pressed coat of the former lieutenant of artillery buttoned up tightly to its leather stock, a face the colour of a fallen leaf.

  'Sour as vinegar and mean as a stoat!' he said decisively.

  Sergeant Albert Samson, the other occupant of the office, looked up from the ledger in which he was entering his official diary. He grinned through a luxuriance of ginger mutton-chop whiskers.

  'You heard from Mr Chief Inspector, then? I hope he saw the funny side of it. You bleatin' on about how Jack Rann wouldn't hurt a fly, much less kill an old fraud like Pandy Quinn. An' no sooner you tell Mr Croaker, than that little bugger Rann hauls hisself out of Newgate, shows his arse in all our faces, and bloody disappears. I do hope Mr Croaker had a laugh but I shouldn't think so.'

  Verity's colour deepened at Samson's ginger-whiskered grin.

  'Ain't you got no conception, Mr Samson, of how easy a poor rogue like Rann can be sewn up by villains like Bragg and Catskin Nash?'

  Samson received the suggestion with a single hooting laugh and a clap of the hands.

  'I got a conception of you, my son, on next quarter's roster. Three months on night-duty, supervising loaded sewage carts to see they don't splash the boots of their betters.'

  Verity glared at him.

  'You might laugh the other side of your face, Mr Samson, when you hear the rest of what Mr Croaker had to say. Flash Charley Fowler been made up to inspector.'

  'Inspector? Charley Fowler? How'd he pull a stroke like that?'

  At arm's length, Verity handed him Inspector Croaker's confidential memorandum. Samson read it slowly.

  'Made up to inspector, Mr Samson. Not a sergeant any more. From now on, so long as you and me is on this smuggling detail, he's our superior officer.'

  Samson shrugged.

  'Still, Fla
sh Fowler ain't likely to be hard. Better him than some. And so long as he lets the reins lie easy ....' Verity looked at him grimly.

  'He's a rogue, Mr Samson, and a lecher. And worse. It ain't just Bragg put Rann where he is. That whole business of Pandy Quinn got a smell about it like last week's bloater. If that knife wasn't found honestly a few days back, then Flash Charley is number one for being a necessary after the fact.'

  'The word,' said Samson with quiet pedantry, 'is accessory.'

  Verity glared again and shook his head.

  'Oh no it ain't, Mr Samson. The word is murder. Even if done by the public hangman.'

  Samson watched him clamber back on to the painful little roost of his high stool.

  'You let the reins lie slack, Verity,' he said amiably, 'that's my advice to you. Once this smuggling caper's seen to, we'll be back to usual.'

  Verity stared at him.

  ‘I never was brought up at home nor in chapel to let duty lie slack, Mr Samson. Least of all when a poor wretch is being hunted to be took again and hanged.'

  Samson picked up a cylindrical ruler to draw a line under the day's ledger-entry in his police diary.

  'And when you and me was against the Rhoosians before Sebastopol,' Verity added accusingly, 'where should we all have been then, if we'd let our duty to Old England and the Queen lie slack? And suppose it wasn't Handsome Rann as coopered Pandy Quinn? Then there's a poor devil to be hung for nothing. And a murderer gone scot free.'

  Samson gave a short gasp of exasperation at a blot on the duty ledger, which might not have been there had he been left in peace.

  'Don't prose so,' he said without lifting his head.

  Verity stared at the ceiling-light as a brewer's dray passed with a clatter of flagons.

  ‘I’ll do more than prose, Mr Samson. Mr Croaker made my mind up for me. Baptist Babb's a good man and he put his trust where it belongs. He's no business to be suspended, only doing his duty for conscience sake. If there's mischief over Pandy Quinn and Flash Fowler, what hope d'you suppose we got of putting the lid on the smuggling trade? You think Bully Bragg ain't behind that too? 'Course he is! I mean to see where the truth lies in all this, Mr Samson. And I ain't going to be put off easy.'

  Ten minutes later, the two sergeants emerged into the twilight of Whitehall Place. The gentleman's town-house, which gave the side street its name, remained the centre of Scotland Yard. Verity drew a red handkerchief from his trouser pocket and dabbed his forehead.

  'Mr Samson, what did he mean about his hat?'

  'Whose hat?'

  'Pandy Quinn. "My hat'll be the death of me". He said it when he was dying. What did he mean?'

  'How should I know? Coves that's about to snuff it often rambles.'

  'Funny thing, Mr Samson, I seen a few snuff it. Here and in the Rhoosian War. My poor friends at Inkerman. You know what? They talked more sense in the last few minutes, most of 'em, than in the rest of their lives. I want to know about a lot o' things to do with Pandy Quinn. And I want to know about his hat!'

  Samson said nothing. They cut through the cobbled alley, past the wine vaults with their faded gilt lettering, the bootmaker's with its display of 'The Wellington Boots' in a bow window, and the little jeweller's on the corner with its discreet notice that "Ladies' ears may be pierced within".

  Standing in the length of Whitehall, the gas-lamps burning against the last pale daylight of the city sky, the two sergeants took their separate beats on the night-patrol. Verity glanced at his watch.

  'Right, Mr Samson. North of the river for you, south for me. I'll watch so far as London Bridge until midnight, then take the Bermondsey wharves and streets till dawn. I'll cross after that and see you at the dock gates down Ratcliff Highway or in the hiring-yard after that. Seven o'clock sharp.'

  'Don't prose!' said Samson again, looking a good deal more genial in the open air. He had replaced his dark stock with a sportsman's green cravat.

  'Not prosing, Mr Samson. And what I don't want is you found, supposed to be on duty, in a riverside snug with a glass of rum-shrub. Or, worse still, found passing the time o' night with Fat Maudie or one of them. Land both of us in the cart.'

  Albert Samson stared at the pink moon of a face under the brim of the stove-pipe hat, the waxed moustaches and flawless self-confidence.

  'Gammon!' he said cheerfully, turning away towards The Strand, a promise of hot shrub and Fat Maudie.

  Verity measured his pace towards Westminster Bridge. The pavements were hot and gritty under the worn soles of his boots. Smoke of the day's fires and wagons from the coal wharf had left a deposit of soot in the air, which gave the city the taste and smell of a railway terminus. He felt a hard black dust between his teeth.

  To one side rose the gothic silhouette of parliamentary towers, on the other lay verminous tumbledown slums of Union Court and the Devil's Acre. Whores in shabby cloaks and feathered bonnets sidled out in the summer dusk, bearing disease and hunger in their looks. Whitehall was a good spec for a woman who might catch a rickety silver-haired captain from the Horse Guards, even a parliamentary gentleman. But such women knew Verity's type as well as he knew them. None approached him. A few shuffled further away. His threadbare 'private-clothes', his lumbering gait with hands clasped under his coat-tails, his habit of talking to himself alone on the night-beat, marked him out for what he was to the greenest bunter in the game.

  A young girl on the opposite pavement called out, 'Ain't yer feeling frisky then, old crow?'

  A shrivelled woman screamed with delight. Laughter rippled along the length of the pavement. Verity walked on. The sluggish flow of the river stank in the summer dusk, he could smell it a street's length away. Elegant folk rode over it, handkerchiefs to noses. A policeman's duty, he told himself, was to trudge through the miasma with the determination of the soldier he had once been. Wagons drawn by heavy ungroomed horses rattled past him as he reached the Surrey shore. Its blackened houses of London brick were painted with advertisements for the pleasures of the Big Ben Cigar Stores and Lumley's English Confectionery.

  'You do not fit a murder to a man like Jack Rann unless there is a mighty tale he can tell, sir! Supposing you are Bully Bragg, which you ain't, sir!' Verity addressed the wraith of Inspector Croaker who rose mute and abashed against the darkening sky. 'No, sir! And you do not send a man to his death when he had nothing in his hand that could have coopered Pandy Quinn. And as for Handsome Jack having done Pandy Quinn and then dropped his cutter down a drain most convenient for Flash Fowler to find .... Just ask yourself, Mr Croaker, sir, how many murderers can you count who did their victims, went off to hide the weapon, and then came back special so's they could be found standing beside the body of the deceased?'

  On the high brick viaduct over Westminster Bridge Road, the engine and carriages of a Waterloo train were stationary during the collection of tickets.

  'Not one!' said Verity furiously, having given the ghostly chief inspector time to answer.

  Faces at the carriage windows stared down into the deep canyon of the street with its public house and the long plate-glass windows of the monster linen draper's.

  'Not bloody one!' said Verity, warm with indignation.

  He emerged from the New Cut into the gaudy traffic of the Waterloo Road, fiery pillars of steam rising from the terminus of the South Western Railway. As he waited to cross the long thoroughfare towards the river again, tarpaulined drays and hansom cabs from the terminus jostled against horse-buses placarded with garish advertisements for Holloway's Pills and Reid's India Pale.

  A boy of nine or ten with torn trousers and soiled shirt, clutching a broom taller than himself, waited to whisk a path for frock-coated or crinolined pedestrians through the horse-dung and the vegetable refuse of coster-barrows. Verity conveyed a coin in his open hand, a periodic transaction for information received. The little crossing-sweeper spoke from the corner of his mouth.

  'Soapy Samuel gone, Mr Verity. Clean gone, sir. Folks think he might have to
ok the same boat as Pandy Quinn. Mr Sam being of much that family. And Mag Fashion got a frightened look since Handsome Rann went down. She and that little wriggler, Miss Jolly the penny-dancer, rented a two-pair back off some widow in Houndsditch. Bully been askin' after 'em.'

  It was unlikely that Bragg or his 'watchmen' could follow the boy in such a crowd as this but when the coin passed from Verity's hand, the child gave no sign of gratitude or receipt. He skipped out into an opening between the traffic at the road's centre, daring the cab-drivers and draymen to run him down. He whisked with his broom, eyes shielded by a greasy cap picked up from an old-clothes yard.

  'Copper for a crossing, gents! Here's your chance and never say die! Copper for the orphans of the fleet!'

  Under the midnight shadow of Southwark's square cathedral tower, Verity crossed the piazza of London Bridge station. Lights still burnt in bow-fronted little shops under the colonnade. Cabs waited outside, drivers nodding on their boxes, hats and whips askew, the warm tawny glow of the carriage-lamps glimmering like the riding-lights of distant ships.

  He went down narrow steps from the station plateau into Tooley Street, warehouses behind the Bermondsey wharves rising high on either side, crowds at the doors of ramshackle oyster-bars and drinking shops with their grimy and uncurtained windows.

  Outside the tap-room of The Green Man, two sparring 'snobs' in loud check jackets let him pass, grinning at him. Then they put their heads together and shouted with laughter. One of them entered the tap-room and touched Strap Mulligan on his elbow to draw attention. The sporting gent whispered in his patron's ear. And Strap's jaw dropped in a panting-dog grin that might have been mistaken for pure good humour. He beckoned a green-aproned pot-boy, dropped a penny in his hand, and gestured towards the street.