The Hangman's Child Page 7

  His opponent lunged twice but Verity dodged back, so that the fists merely patted his cheeks. He kept his guard up. The man lunged again. Verity went back with the blow, then came forward with one knee going straight to his attacker's groin. The bruiser in the red waistcoat lost his balance, recovered, backed to the wall and picked up a short wooden spar. He advanced with it, driving Verity back by jabs to the face. At the next thrust, Verity grabbed the wood and hung on, twisting and bending with his assailant until both men lost their footing.

  In a flailing of arms, clutching and snatching, they fought half-kneeling and half-standing. With a crash of glass they went sprawling over a crate of bottles by the brewery wall. Dogs began to bark. Suzanne was screaming again. They struggled to their feet, grappling, while the onlooker who had been picking his teeth with the straw fenced round them, for a chance to intervene. Snatching the fallen spar, he ran in and hit Verity behind the knees. Verity tried to face both men and tripped. He caught his foot on the stone edge of a deep gutter, an outlet from the brewery wall to the river. There was sufficient discharge in the drain to soak his black trousers as he fell, tearing the elbow of his frock-coat.

  Shaken by the fall, he got to his knees, preparing for battle again. But his assailants now stood back and he saw a newcomer above him. Looking down was the soft smile and dark pompadour hair of Bully Bragg. Over Bragg's shoulder, stood the newly made-up Inspector Fowler, exquisite in fawn summer suiting and royal-blue cravat.

  'Why, Mr Verity!' Bragg's quiet smile conveyed bewilderment. 'Whatever has happened? Let me give you a hand up, my dear fellow!'

  'I'll thank you to stand out of my way . . . .'

  'Mr Fowler! This way, if you please. My poor Mr Verity!'

  The man with the straw and his companion with the red waistcoat had an unapologetic air. Bragg swung round on them.

  'Mr Hardwicke! Mr Atwell! Can either of you explain this? Or the young lady?'

  Fowler intervened, holding out his hand to Verity.

  'We'd best have those cuffs off her. No call for them now.'

  Verity handed him the key.

  'She was on the ground and him on top of her,' said Hardwicke in the red waistcoat. 'Ravishing in an alley, it looked like.'

  'You was told I was police!' said Verity ferociously.

  'Told,' said Hardwicke reasonably. 'But telling and being is different things. You didn't look like police. You didn't act like police, neither. You fought like a brick. You could've been anyone. That's how misunderstandings d'come about.'

  Fowler unlocked the cuffs. Suzanne set up a hooting cry. The dim light of the alley caught a slim, sun-tanned shoulder, where the dress had been torn from her.

  'He tried to have me clothes off! See me dress!'

  Fowler's enquiring glance at Verity invited an explanation, but Lambeth Sue had not finished.

  'And he walloped me! Look at me arse!'

  There was a respectful silence at the sight of a pink imprint.

  'Indeed,' said Fowler quietly. He looked again at Verity.

  ‘I never! What she got there come from the lighterman on the coal-barge and well deserved! You ask on the barge off King's Head Stairs. You'll see the truth!'

  'Well,' said Fowler pleasantly, 'I'm glad of that.'

  A few minutes later, Verity followed Fowler from the alley. The others walked behind. He sensed their hidden smiles at his humiliation. With Fowler and four known criminals in attendance, he left hatless, like a felon under escort.

  When they were alone together, Fowler rested his thumbs under the lapels of his fawn summer suiting.

  'Just 'cos a man's made up, Verity, he don't cease to be human. And I hope I don't.'

  Verity said nothing. He noticed that Fowler now called him 'Verity,' rather than 'Mr Verity,' the familiarity of a superior with a former equal. Verity stood hatless in torn frock-coat and wet trousers. Fowler sat, or rather lounged, behind the duty officer's table, dressed more like the keeper of a Regent Street night-house.

  The police ship was an old wooden frigate with masts cut down, moored just below Waterloo Bridge. Square stern-windows in its after-cabin reflected watery brilliance on low beams and whitewashed ceiling.

  Fowler gave him a leer.

  ‘I hope I'm human, eh?'

  Verity nodded. He could not bring himself to answer.

  'Nothing personal,' Fowler insisted. 'Nothing vindictive.'

  ‘I did what was right.' He felt that the words were being torn out between his teeth.

  Fowler's hand gestured, as if waving an invisible cigar.

  "Course you did, Verity. And that little slut who made the trouble, she's well suited. Or will be at the next sessions. You and the lighterman, that's two witnesses to robbery of the barge. Industrial school for her, or some such reformatory as takes the court's fancy. She thinks her backside's smarting now, wait till she finishes twelve months there.'

  ‘I did nothing wrong, sir! With respect, sir!' He made 'sir' sound like a reprimand rather than a term of deference. But Fowler treasured it smilingly.

  "Course you didn't, Verity. Not wrong, but most unfortunate. What you have done, see, is wipe out months of surveillance that'll have to start all over again. 'Course, you hadn't been told about barges off Lambeth, your beat being down Bermondsey and the wharves. The coal-barge that caught your eye this morning has been watched for some time. So have four others.'

  'They never have!' The full extent of his tragedy was becoming clear to him. ‘I was never told!'

  'On my manor, Verity, a man gets told what he needs to know, not what he don't.' Fowler's thumbs were still in his lapels. He seemed to be rolling the invisible cigar in his lips. 'Your job was the wharves, not lighters nor barges. Five of them been suspected of bringing contraband from the big ships. Lighters can come in close, discharge cargo, keep the contraband on board. Then, at night, or when no one's watching, it's got just a few feet to travel at low water. They can toss the packets down to someone standing in the water. Easy as that. See?'

  'Robbery!' said Verity firmly. 'That's what I saw.'

  A fly landed on Fowler's immaculately stitched lapel and he flicked it away.

  'You got no evidence, my friend, beyond the lighterman cursing Lambeth Sue for a thieving little bitch and taking a swipe at her. That don't necessarily have to be because of robbery. Look! You been on a smuggling detail two months. Then you see half-a-dozen young villains passing ashore packages from a lighter. Didn't it never cross your mind what else they might be doing?'

  'Robbing!' said Verity, desperate for the first time in their encounter.

  'And you recovered any goods to prove it, have you?' ‘I couldn't hold her and chase them!' Fowler shook his head, as if it were all beyond him. 'So, for all you know, each of the items stolen could have been stuffed with tobacco or anything else.' Verity stood his ground. 'No alternative but what I did.'

  'Listen, Verity. You tell me, an officer of your experience, it never occurred to you to get help?'

  ‘I'd have lost the girl.'

  'But you knew who she was, old fellow! We could have got her any time. According to you, she wasn't carrying anything! But the others who had the goods, you let 'em all get away. Suppose you'd grabbed one of those little brutes and we'd found contraband in his packages. We'd be halfway to court now. Whereas, it's only the evidence of a lighterman that's stood between you and charges of attempted ravishing of her and grievous bodily harm all round. You'd have been off the Force and in Horsemonger Lane lock-up before tonight!'

  Verity said nothing. He loathed Fowler. But Fowler was right.

  'Whereas,' Fowler said quietly, 'the master of that barge now knows that the police saw everything that happened today. And the reason they saw it, he'll think, is because they were watching. And by now he's told his four friends on their other barges that he's been watched. So what do you suppose they'll do?'

  'Don't know, sir,' said Verity miserably.

  'Don't you? They'll all tell their friends
. And they'll start their scheme again all different. So that's half the river-police surveillance plan blown to smithereens.'

  There was silence. The trap had closed so neatly that Verity could neither see a way out nor even guess who had sprung it.

  ‘I hope I'm human,' said Fowler again. 'I'll put it to Mr Croaker as reasonable as I can. Make plain you did no wrong.'

  Verity stared at him.

  'What's it to do with Mr Croaker?'

  Fowler looked surprised.

  'I'm human, Verity, but human ain't the same as being stupid! You're done for on surveillance. Back to Division's the only way for you. I can't keep you here. Not now your face is known as watching the lighters.'

  'My face is known anyway!' As he stood before the table, he sensed odours of malt and hops seeping from his clothes, after his fall into the brewery outlet. 'I'm known from walking a beat round Bermondsey and the hiring-yard. Anyway, my face been known to Bragg and his two men for weeks past. So's Mr Samson's.'

  Fowler's teeth touched his lower lip and his eyes narrowed, as if a thought had occurred to him.

  'You suggesting some connection between Mr Bragg or his men and the smuggling of contraband? Are you, Verity?'

  He saw the precipice in time.

  'No, sir. Just that my face had been seen by a lot of people round the wharves and the docks for a long time.'

  'So it has.' Fowler sat upright and shuffled some papers together, as if that decided the sergeant's fate. Then he looked up, surprised to find Verity still there.

  'Division,' he said firmly. 'After all, it's where you and Samson belong. Make your peace there. Mr Croaker's all right, he's a reasonable man.' Fowler looked up from his papers again and gave Verity a wink. 'Reasonable man is Harry Croaker. Once you know him. P'raps not so human as I am, though. Eh?'

  9

  At dusk on Friday, the two men were dressed alike. Tomnoddy and Jack Rann wore toshers' velveteen coats with baggy pockets, trousers and aprons of dirty canvas, bags slung on their backs. Each carried a bull's-eye lantern and a seven-foot pole with a hoe on its end.

  'Mostly,' Tomnoddy said, 'sludge in the channels is about a foot. In places, it's five or six foot where the brick's rotted away. When you feel it sink, use the pole. Catch anything with the hoe.'

  They passed the bar-room windows of the Town of Ramsgate, Wapping Old Stairs and Pierhead Wharf. Iron bridges connected riverside warehouses by the upper floors. Tomnoddy turned by the Prospect of Whitby, a tavern door between elegant bow windows, following the alley to Pelican Stairs, a muddy foreshore scattered with stone and brick.

  On its darkling mud, the tide had withdrawn to a luminous rim of froth. No movement showed on the sluggish water, except for a dozen little skiffs and wherries, dredgermen with grappling irons over the bows and nets hanging at the sides. A haul of bones, coal, and old rope was jumbled in the sterns. Each boatman hoped for the weight of a dead man or woman in his net, the emptying of sodden pockets, and the 'inquest money', to reward the landing of a corpse.

  Tomnoddy ignored the lengths of wood, copper nails, and scraps of iron across the moonlit flanks of soft mud. Etiquette reserved them for those who understood nothing of the sewers. A shape in a coat or an old dress glimmered across their path in the thin moonlight, darted down and shuffled off with its booty.

  The nearest outfall appeared at first to be bricked in. Then Rann saw the square iron doors, which hung from hinges at the top of the arch.

  'Aladdin's cave,' Tomnoddy said, 'if a man knows how to look. There's ten thousand gold sovs lost down drains or manholes every year. Hold t'other side of the iron, Jack. This is how it shuts tight with the river against it at the flood. So's they don't have water up the sewer and in the streets.'

  Rann took the cold flank of plate-iron and felt it move as Tomnoddy added his weight. The brick-lined tunnel was shaped like an egg upright on its narrow end. Rann had imagined something grander than a channel three feet wide and six feet high. A man trapped in it when the sluices were opened would have no chance.

  'Open your bull's-eye.' Tomnoddy set the example. 'Take the shade off. It'll shine ahead while you're stood and light the ground when you stoop. When you see a roof-grating, shade it. Move like a ghost. They can see light up in the street and hear any word. When you see rats, shine it on 'em. They don't stay for that.'

  The old sewerman went first, the sound of his boots splashing lightly in the ooze and the shallow ripple of water running over it.

  'Rats is the worst,' he said philosophically. 'A man gets lost down here easier than in a maze. And he drops down at last and is ate to the bone by packs of brown Hanover rats like good-sized kittens. They mostly feed on waste from slaughterhouses round Whitechapel and Smithfield. But leave a dead man down here, next day he's skull and bones picked clean.'

  The tunnel opened into a large cavern, where narrower drains converged. The vault of the roof was hung with stalactites of putrefying matter two or three feet long. Rann shivered.

  'A man can't live down here!'

  'Samuel can. He's that much in fear of what Bragg's knife can do. Watch yerself, Jack, it's low and narrow just there. Don't knock against them bricks! They're rotted from what grows on 'em. One tap brings 'em in like an avalanche.'

  Lamplight showed a narrower tunnel, the flow running deeper. With a pang of disgust, Rann felt it wet his canvas trousers above his boots. The stench was worse: gas-factories and breweries, vegetable decay and stable dung, slaughterhouse offal and chemical waste. A heap of fallen brickwork blocked a channel to one side. Before it, dry ground was littered with tin kettles, ashes, broken jars, shards of flower-pots. Sewage stagnated behind it.

  'Air's foul where the roof's low,' Tomnoddy said, 'fresher where the gratings are.'

  The brickwork of roof and drain had fallen in ahead of them. Tomnoddy was stepping on transverse planks laid across the channel. A wooden beam, dark with rot, spanned the tunnel roof. The sewermen paused.

  'Lombard's Tailoring rests on that beam. The day the timber gives, half the street'll come down with it.'

  He paused and straightened up. Rann saw a faint light ahead, from an oblong recess in the roof. He did not need to be told that it was the shaft of a street-grating. His companion turned.

  'Stay here,' he said softly, 'and don't move for nothink. Sam's lodging up ahead in a chamber that's wholesome and dry. It's up a bit, at the end of a side-tunnel. Ain't seen use for years. But if he starts a kick-up and row when he sees you, he'll be heard above. I'll go to him first.'

  Rann watched Tomnoddy tread carefully from board to board, the pale lantern-ray fainter on a dark curve of rotting brick. At the overhead grating, the light went. The silence was scarcely broken by the ripple in the channel under the boards. He felt the loneliness of a man in his grave.

  Scampering feet from a ruined side tunnel made his heart jump.

  On the broken masonry, his lamp showed a breathing shape, the size of a black pony, curled in an indistinguishable heap. The light caused it to shift and break, a mound of more brown rats than he could count.

  Oil-light glinted on eyes that were bright with hunger. But the lantern beam kept them back, half the pack staring into the brilliance, others fighting and squeaking. He put the lantern down and clapped his hands once. The pack scattered out of sight, into a warren under the planks and fallen bricks. Then he saw a glimmer beyond the street-grating and knew Tomnoddy was coming back.

  'He's there,' Tomnoddy said wryly, 'seeing he got nowhere else to be.'

  They followed the main channel, under the street grating, and into an old branch tunnel, long disused. It lay on rising ground, the brick dry underfoot, littered with broken earthenware and stone.

  'Used to carry rain off above the Fleet Ditch,' Tomnoddy said. 'Now the water goes in the main. More wholesome up here, suppose a man's got to live like this.'

  They were six or eight feet above the main sewer. Tomnoddy turned into another branch, blocked about twenty feet in. To one side w
as a makeshift door, vertical slats with two cross-braces. The old sewerman pushed it open.

  'Cellar of the old King James - what they calls Jimmy's. The tannery took the building down to clear a yard for the hides and skins. Never bothered with filling in the cellars. Yard's above us now, five or six feet. There's no way in save this.'

  Tawny light from three lamps lit the low vaulting of the cellar roof on which they hung. The racks and bins where wine had once been laid were transformed into a makeshift bed, table, and cupboards. The brick walls were dark, shabby, but dry. A few sacks contained Samuel's possessions.

  'Handsome Jack? Jack Rann? That really you?'

  "Course it's me, Sammy. And I ain't been hung. Not yet.'

  Samuel stepped into the light, so bedraggled that Rann only knew him at first by his voice. Even in fear, the voice had a rich confidential tone. With a few words of prayer, a phrase from Bible or liturgy, it had made men and women offer their lives and fortunes to such a friend. Soapy Samuel's best days were past, but he had seldom returned from a 'mission' to Wandsworth or Bayswater without a gold sovereign or two in his pocket. At a street meeting in Kensington, supported by Chelsea George dressed as a converted African pagan, the old pals had once taken up a collection of eighteen pounds from a well-dressed crowd.

  'Hello, Sammy,' said Rann more formally, holding out his hand. Samuel took it limply. The sleek white hair that had given him nobility was unkempt. The blue eyes that warmed easily with love and persuasion stared in dismay. The sharp nose that had scented opportunity, now smelt peril and destruction. The smooth-shaven gill, the keen lines of the face, the profile of an amiable questing rodent, had grown sharp with hunger. His dark clothes were crumpled. Even in the odours of the sewers, the clerical impostor stank of spirits.