Death at Hungerford Stairs (8 page)

Weazen took them out of the alleys, and into a wider road lit by gas. Outside a rough-looking house, a knot of men lounged. Another man knocked at the door. A thin line of light gleamed for a moment and then he went in, carrying a sack in which something squirmed and yelped. Dickens thought of brave Mrs Browning outside the house of Sam Taylor in Shoreditch where she went to rescue Flush. The brother could not be any worse, surely. Weazen looked up at Zeb.

‘This is it,' he whispered. ‘That's three bob yer owe me. I brought yer like I sed.' His rat's face was eager for the money but his restless stepping from side to side told them that he wanted to be off. Zeb gave him the coins, and he darted away. Zeb gripped his stick tightly.

‘I'll go an' ask. Wait here, Mr Dickens.'

‘No, I'll come. Two are better than one. Money might talk and I've got my stick. I'm stronger than I look, remember.'

Zeb smiled. Dickens sounded confident, but he could not help thinking that Sam had told him not to get into a fight. And he could feel the twinge of last night's bruises. Perhaps Rogers was somewhere near. If there was trouble, he could rattle up the beat constables. They crossed the road, passed the group of men whose louring faces looked menacing, and went up to the front door. At their knock, a man came out. Georgie was not yet at home, but they could wait inside if they wanted. He leered as he said it, and Zeb glanced briefly at Dickens with a slight shake of the head which said they should wait outside. Zeb said that they would like to know how much to find the old gentleman's dog.

‘Wait 'ere,' the leering man ordered. The door shut in their faces. They stepped back, looking round to see where they might escape to if it were necessary. They backed towards the pavement where they stood uncertainly. Perhaps Georgie was really there and talk of money would bring him out.

The door opened again and a woman came out, a mountainous creature with a fat, doughy face and little, cunning black eyes. She looked them over, assessing their worth. Her eyes lingered on the old gentleman. Yes, 'e'd pay, she thought. No need ter say the price – yet. Yer niver knew 'ow much yer could get till yer found out 'ow desperate a cove woz. Shrewd, Mrs Taylor. Dickens would have been most amused to know that a respectable and pious father had called her Charity.

‘My 'usband won't be long, sir. Should be back in 'alf an hour. 'E'll tell yer 'ow much when 'e comes.' She attempted a smile which was more like a snarl, showing long, yellow teeth.

Husband, thought Dickens, she was his guard dog more likely. Heavens, she was like some great bulldog. He knew a bulldog once who kept a man. Perhaps Mrs Georgie kept Georgie on a tight leash. He hoped she would not come any nearer. He wondered what kind of dog Georgie resembled. Odd, he thought, how people looked like their dogs: Mrs Browning with her long curls exactly like Flush's silky ears and a well-dressed little terrier he knew who looked just like his master, both sporting white gloves and neat black boots, going to the races in a smart painted dogcart.

His idle thoughts were interrupted by Zeb apparently declining another invitation to sample the delights of Dog Villa. At that moment a cab drew up on the opposite side of the road. Dickens said they would wait in the cab. Mrs Georgie looked disappointed. Perhaps she had a good tea service which she wanted to show off, or, more likely, she was brewing up a cauldron of dog meat, and her two visitors might have added a new piquancy to the stew. With that harrowing thought, Dickens stepped smartly off the pavement and crossed the road, Zeb hurrying after him. The cab driver evinced no surprise at being asked to wait. It was all one to him, moving or waiting would mean payment.

Dickens and Zeb stepped inside – safe, they thought – but there was someone there. Rogers.

‘'Eard it all, sir, I was waitin' in that doorway – followed you in the alleys. Thought you was in danger – some great, hulking feller was following you, but 'e went off. Got the cab, sir, so we can make a quick exit if need be. Slipped away while Mrs there was talkin'.'

‘Thank you, Rogers. We did feel a bit uncomfortable out there, but we were not about to go in.'

Rogers settled himself in the corner furthest away from the road, and Dickens and Zeb made sure they could be seen if Mrs Georgie came over. They watched and waited. Mrs Georgie stood on her step, her huge arms folded. From time to time, someone would come with a sack, and go in, but no Georgie came. It seemed a very long half hour.

He came at last, little, cocky Georgie in his fancy jacket and waistcoat, like a little spry terrier whose bite was almost certainly worse than his bark. His nose might be purple but he was cleaner by far than his wife, and with good-natured, twinkling eyes that could turn cold in a moment – if he were crossed. Oh, Georgie would find the grandchild's dog. Little girl, was it? Missin' 'er doggie, was she? Well, Georgie would find the dog if 'e could. Only it'd cost – Georgie 'ad 'is livin' ter make, dint 'e? Way o' the world, weren't it? Couldn't do it fer nothing. The wheedling voice went on until the price was fixed – three sovereigns – cheap as 'e could do it. Finder's fee of two sovereigns and one more when the dog would be brought to – where?

Zeb gave his address. Poll was described. Georgie would do what 'e could, o' course. No guarantees, mind. He twinkled at them again. All heart was Georgie, in this wicked world, an' as for Mrs G, well, yer might not guess it, but she woz a lamb, really, a lamb wiv daughters of 'er own. Dickens glanced over at the scowling lamb – daughters forsooth, he thought – harpies, probably.

The two sovereigns paid, the cab took them back to Bow Street.

‘Daylight robbery,' said Rogers, indignantly. ‘Well, bloomin' midnight robbery, if you like.'

Dickens and Zeb laughed – from relief, perhaps, rather than Rogers's wit.

Not many streets away, in another twist of alleys, huddled behind the broken door of an abandoned garden, Scrap waited for the house across the narrow alley to fall silent. By day, his eye was fixed to a hole in the door. He could see across the alley a closed door which gave access to the yard of a house. He knew Poll was there. He had heard her bark, and the yelping and snapping of other dogs. Several times, he had scuttled across and peered through a crack in the wood, and he had seen the cages. He had been round to the front of the house and had watched the men, and boys, arrive with their sacks in which live things wriggled and whimpered. He heard the clink of coins as money changed hands. Once, a little man in a fancy jacket and waistcoat came and took away a spaniel which he tucked under his arm. Scrap watched when further down the road the little man put the dog down and walked off as if he were a respectable householder, taking his dog for a walk. Scrap had watched in the back alley when the hulk of a man they called Nat Boney took sacks away; sometimes the sacks moved and writhed, but sometimes, he heaved them over his shoulder where they hung, limp with something bulging at the bottom.

Scrap had seen strange things in the alley. Last night he had seen a giant, a great, stinking bundle of rags which had shuffled along by his door. It grunted and muttered, shaking its huge matted head, and it was dragging something along. Scrap had shrunk back into his doorway, covering himself with the sack he used for his coat, and his bedding, so that he looked just like a heap of discarded refuse. The thing had shambled by and he had heard the sound of something banging on the stones. Before that he had seen a thin stick of a woman struggling with a man who pinned her against the dripping wall, and tore at her, and pummelled her with his fists until she slid down the wall, and the man lay on top of her. Scrap had huddled back through the hole in his door, but he could hear the man grunting, and the woman groaning. Then there was nothing. In the morning, they were gone.

Scrap had no sense of time; he heard, without registering the meaning, the distant clocks strike the hours. It was two o'clock in the morning now, and the lane was quiet. He did not know how long he had waited – days, he thought. He was sometimes hungry and always cold, but he had only one fixed idea and that was how to get Poll out. He had talked to a cross-eyed boy who came and went through the blistered door. The boy had no curiosity about Scrap who was just there sometimes and who would give him a penny in return for bread. There were plenty of ragged boys about. This one seemed to live in the ruined garden opposite. He wasn't always there – out on the scavenge, the boy supposed, but he was all right. The cross-eyed boy was glad to get a penny for the bread – there was plenty of food in the house for a boy who knew just when to filch it from the empty kitchen.

Scrap was patient. No sense in hurrying the cross-eyed boy. There would be a moment when he could ask to see inside, ask if there were any jobs, ask if he could earn a bit of bread by helping the cross-eyed boy who sometimes came out of the wooden door with more than one sack which he had to take to a house where a mountainous woman with a face like a bulldog's would pay him. The cross-eyed boy had to take the money back to Nat Boney. Scrap knew it all. He had followed the cross-eyed boy, and he just had to wait for the right time when he could say he had no more pennies, but that he would help with the sacks in which the dogs would twist and writhe. Once, the cross-eyed boy came out with a starved-looking greyhound on a lead which he took to the entrance of a great square lined with white houses where a man in footman's livery took it and gave the cross-eyed boy a purse in exchange. And if, when he helped the boy with a sack, Poll was in it, then he would seize it and run like the wind. Pity the cross-eyed boy when Nat Boney knew he had lost a dog, but Scrap did not care about that.

Tomorrow it would be. Tomorrow, he would get in. If the cross-eyed boy did not come, Scrap would go in, and ask for food, a job, anything. There was a woman. He had seen her throwing bits of food to the dogs. He had seen her come into the alley earlier. He had watched her, a girl, really, thin with fair hair scraped back from a long face where a bruise showed livid against the pale skin. In her slate-coloured gown and drab cloak, she had looked sad, he thought, and crushed somehow, and she had glanced behind her as if she was frightened that someone would follow her. She had carried a basket. He had wondered where she was going and if she would come back. She had come back about an hour later, and she had slipped in through the door. Then he had heard the dogs barking and whining, and he had heard Poll, her high, short yaps, distinguishable to him from the others. Perhaps the girl might go out again, perhaps he might slip in as she closed the door, and perhaps he might see where Poll was. He might be able to hide in the yard somewhere, and release Poll, and take her home.

Home. For the first time in days, he thought of the shop where Eleanor and Tom Brim would be waiting. The memory was sharp as an ache. Did they think he had left them? Not Miss Nell. She would know.

Somewhere a clock struck the half hour. Scrap crept out through the hole in the broken door and waited, crouching like a cat in the darkness. He could see a light upstairs in the house, a candle that flickered. Someone was at the window. Scrap froze, holding his breath. A door banged shut and footsteps came through the yard. Scrap squeezed back through his hole. The dogs barked and when the figure came through the door in the wall, the noise was stilled. Scrap waited.

The sound of the footsteps in the alley died away, and the silence settled once more. Scrap inched his way out and crouched again, listening. He darted across the alley and flattened himself against the blistered door of the yard. Through a crack in the door, he whispered, ‘Poll, Poll.' A short yap. She had heard him. ‘Poll, quiet, now. I'll come fer yer.' He heard footsteps. Voices whispering. A spurt of laughter. Someone was coming down the alley.

Scrap fled. Away from the footsteps. He did not look round. He turned right at the end of the alley, knowing that he could work his way back to the front of the abandoned house. He kept close to the wall, his head down, just a boy – no one, really. He slid into the house, through the empty rooms to the shed in the overgrown garden where he pulled his sack over him, and slept. Cloud covered the bruised moon which dimmed to a hazy glimmer. The rain came, drumming on the roof of the shed, and on the metal roof of the cages, but Scrap slept on. Poll stayed awake, her head on her paws, and her black eyes staring into the night. He would come.

It had rained all night. In the morning, Dickens looked out on his garden where the trees and bushes dripped disconsolately. An air of melancholy pervaded the scene; even the raindrops on the window fell listlessly, pausing and halting as they slid down the window.
How weary,
stale, flat and unprofitable,
Dickens thought. November, a dreary month, unforgiving in its gloom when night was always at odds with morning. Even the air looked sodden like a wet rag that needed squeezing. Too early for news.

He turned back to his desk. It was as it always was: the goose quill pens, the blue ink, the bronze image of two toads duelling which always made him laugh, a paper knife, a gilt leaf with a rabbit upon it, the blue slips on which he would write his monthly numbers, and, his eye fell on it, another bronze image, this time of a dog fancier with the puppies and dogs swarming all over him.
How all occasions do inform against me.
He thought of Georgie Taylor, that insinuating little man who might or might not bring back Poll.

He stood pensively, gazing at the desk. With that capacity he had for standing outside himself, he wondered if, when he was gone, the desk would be there waiting for the author to come back to the empty chair and pick up his pen. The deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished occupation, all images of death; he had written that. Where would his chair be? He loved his house in Devonshire Terrace – he did not know now that it would be his favourite of all the houses he would live in. He loved his iron staircase leading to the garden – not today, though, when he could hear the drip, drip of the rain on the railings. He loved his garden where on sunny days – if there were ever to be any – he would lie on the grass with a handkerchief over his face, and he loved this room with its bookcases, and the round mahogany table with its secret drawers where he kept his secret keys. But it was only leased, and he had the anxiety of finding another house in a couple of years.