Printer's Devil (9780316167826) (19 page)

The bosun. And it was all our fault.

“It was our note,” I said in a frantic whisper, “if we hadn’t written that rubbish with an eye drawn on it, thinking we were
being so clever …”

“You can’t blame it on that,” Nick said, “he’d’ve suspected it was them anyway. They were the people that wanted it most,
‘cos they were the people he took it off in the first place.”

There was silence. Our minds were rattling with the possibilities.

“Coben will think
I
told someone,” I said. “Who else could’ve split? They were already after me for escaping from the chest.”

“But he thinks you’re me,” said Nick. “He’ll just think I’ve been doing Pa’s dirty work as usual, and that
I
told him where they were hiding.”

“Okay, so he’ll want to kill us both,” I hissed, agitated. “What are we going to do, Nick?”

“Look, don’t panic,” he said, doing a passable
imitation of someone not panicking.

“Have you seen your Pa today?” I asked.

“No. I heard him go out early this morning.”

“Did you hear him come in last night?”

“Yep. He was with Ma Muggerage. They were drunk. They fell asleep straight away, far as I could tell.”

“Mrs. Muggerage must know, then,” I said. “D’you think they both did it? Together?” I pictured the awful pair advancing on
the skinny and terrified Jiggs, backing him up against a wall in a dark alley near the river … the bosun’s arm flexed, with
Mrs. Muggerage’s cleaver in his hand …

A man at a table nearby reached into his bag and pulled out a newspaper. I nudged Nick. We both watched him as he read, and
tried to see what stories were on the front page. At one point he saw us straining to read the headlines.

“What do you two want?” he asked haughtily. “It ain’t polite, to read somebody else’s paper.”

“Sorry,” said Nick. “Look, Mog,” he continued in a loud voice, “that first one’s a D, and then there’s a A … I’m not sure
what the next one is.” His eyes met those of the man again. “Been learnin’ to read, I have,” he told the man, with a proud
face on.

“Sounds like you’re doing very well,” said the
man, unsmilingly, and went back to his reading.

“What did you tell him that for?” I whispered.

“Make him think we can’t really read,” Nick said out of the corner of his mouth. “He might get suspicious otherwise. Do you
know who he is?”

“No,” I whispered, “I’ve never seen him before.”

“There you are then,” Nick said, “he might be anybody! If he thinks we can’t read, he might not be so — careful.”

Eventually the man folded up his newspaper again, stuck it in his pocket, and rose to leave. He sidled past our table on his
way out. “Good evening,” he said.

“Oh — evenin’,” Nick said, grinning stupidly.

“Evenin’,” I added. When I was sure he’d gone, I got up and went to the bar to ask Tassie if she knew who the man was.

“Can’t say I know, Maaster Mog,” she said, her brow furrowed. “But I seen him once or twice before. Has business in Leadenhall
Street, I’ve heard ‘em say.”

“What makes you say that?” I asked, intrigued.

“Well, ‘s funny you should ask about him, ‘cos so did another customer a few days back. Just like you, Maaster Mog, started
asking questions about ‘im the minute he’d gone. A regular conversation started in ‘ere, and I heard one man tell how he’d
climbed into
a cab outside and how he’d distinctly heard him give the instruction ‘Leadenhall Street’ to the driver. ‘S only a guess, though,
Maaster Mog.”

Tassie was miraculous; nosy, but miraculous.

“That might be important,” I said to Nick quietly as I sat down, “did you hear what she said? Other people have been asking
after him.”

“Leadenhall Street’s a long way off,” said Nick. “It’s near Spintwice’s. And he’s too smart-looking to live round here. So
what’s he been doing in here in the first place?”

It was anybody’s guess, and I realized that Nick had been completely right to make sure we didn’t give too much away. I was
anxiously trying to work out how much of our conversation he might have heard before we’d realized he was there.

“Well, anyway,” Nick said, “we can read that newspaper in peace now.”

“No,” I said, puzzled, “he took it with him. I saw him put it in his pocket before he went out.”

Nick placed a neatly folded newspaper on the table.

“Shocking, the number of thieves round here,” he said.

The item we were interested in took quite a lot of finding. It had a couple of column inches on page two.

CABMEN QUESTIONED

Corpse Found in Abandoned Hackney Carriage

Carriage drivers in the City of London were questioned today over the discovery last night of a man’s body in a hackney carriage
near Swan Stairs. The deceased has been identified from certain belongings about his person as Mr. William Jiggs of Foulds
Walk by Eastcheap. Mr. Jiggs was an unmarried chandler. The authorities are pleading for testimony from witnesses who may
have seen or spoken with Mr. Jiggs on the night of May 20th. A gentleman with a bandaged head, described by eyewitnesses as
having been with the deceased early in the evening, is urgently sought. Mr. Jiggs is known to have been at the Three Friends
Inn, Whitechapel, which he left on foot. The cause of his death is still uncertain as no marks of obvious violence have been
found on the body.

“No marks of obvious violence?” I said, surprised. “They didn’t cut him up with a meat cleaver then.”

“Yeh, that’s the surprising bit,” Nick agreed. “You don’t think he was poisoned, do you? I wouldn’t have reckoned that was
much in my Pa’s line.”

I read the column again, fascinated, trying to imagine the events which had led to Jiggs being left for dead in the carriage.
“I suppose they followed him home from the Three Friends,” I said.

“He wasn’t going home,” Nick said, “not if he was found down by the river. I’ll tell you what I think. I think the murderers
were disturbed. I’ll bet they did him in somewhere else, and were taking his body to the river to dump it. But for some reason
they had to scarper and Jiggs was left in the cab.”

“How could they take a dead man in a cab without the driver getting suspicious?”

Nick laughed shortly. “You think most drivers wouldn’t just do what they were told, if someone like my Pa turned up in the
middle of the night with a dead body over his shoulder and stuck a knife in their face?” he said.

“I wonder where Coben was,” I said. “I bet he’s lying low, knowing that stuff about a man with a bandage is all around town.”

“He’ll have taken it off,” said Nick. “And I shouldn’t be surprised if he’s halfway to France.”

There was a sudden clatter at the taproom door which made us both jump; and two of the regular customers, men I knew from
another of the shops in the square, came bowling in good-naturedly. We greeted them as they strode over to talk to Tassie;
and they stopped in their tracks.

“What have we here?” one of them asked. “Two peas in a pod! Well one of you is Mog Winter, but as sure as I’m standing here
I can’t tell which.” And they laughed and pointed and generally drew attention to us for the whole of the next five minutes.

“I think we’d better stop going around together,” I said to Nick in a low voice. “Too many people have seen us already. It’s
not safe to come here anymore. Tomorrow evening, if you can, meet me at the fountain.” This was close to Nick’s house, and
sufficiently busy to make it a likely place for two lads to be seen without arousing suspicion. I got up to leave. “And keep
your eye on the jeweller’s shop,” I said, “if anyone’s watching it, watch them!”

“I’ve done this before,” said Nick, “I’m all right. What are you going to do?”

“Keep my head down, I think.” I hitched up my pants and tugged at Lash’s lead to make him stand up. “See you tomorrow.”

“Mog,” he said.

I stopped in the doorway. He was sitting looking
very small, with the enormous newspaper spread out in his lap.

“Be careful,” he said.

As I left the Doll’s Head I looked very carefully in every direction before deciding which way to go. Turning into the little
narrow lane which was the quickest route home, I became aware, out of the corner of my eye, of something moving, a little
way behind me. Constantly, during the last few days, I’d been convinced that eyes were watching me from every available window
and from behind every corner. It crossed my mind, not for the first time, that someone might even have been watching me from
the windows of the Doll’s Head itself. I’d toyed with the idea of asking Tassie exactly who she was letting rooms to at the
moment — but I was wary of arousing even her suspicion. The fewer people who knew what we were mixed up in, the better.

When I turned my head, I could have sworn I saw someone disappearing behind a wall. I was
definitely
being followed. In that case, I thought, I’ll confuse them. Grasping Lash’s lead and drawing him close to my heels, I made
up my mind to follow the most convoluted route home I could possibly devise; and I headed first down a path between red brick
walls, leading in completely the wrong direction. On one side, the most ramshackle buildings in the whole parish leaked their
effluent not
only into the nearby Fleet ditch, but over the cobbles in the lane. In these ruins, with the white spire of St. James’s Church
rising behind them, were hordes of people for whom London hadn’t found a use. This was where they nested, in a dense huddle,
sleeping ten or twenty to a room — children alongside grown-ups, healthy people alongside ill people — in disgusting houses
which had been here for centuries and which had fallen into such disrepair that they should really have been knocked down
years ago. Every now and again, one of them would fall down: with no more warning than a sudden crescendo of creaking, it
would just collapse, sending a cascade of dust and bricks and wooden beams out into the lane and leaving a hole between two
houses like a gap in a mouth where a tooth had fallen out. Anyone unfortunate enough to be inside at the time would probably
be killed among the collapsing rubble. Those who’d ventured out would return to find themselves with no where to live; and
the process would start again, of finding another unsafe and squalid building into which to move themselves and their blinking,
consumptive family. If their minds were agile enough, they might plot clever and violent crimes; and if their bodies had enough
energy they might give a squalid existence to newly wailing little children beside whom the pinkest and baldest of rat-kittens
stood a better chance of survival. There was no
shortage of stories of people who’d gone down these lanes in the dark and never been seen again; and, in spite of my anxiety
to get away from whoever it was who was following me, my heart was in my mouth at every street corner and I stopped each time,
plucking up the courage to venture round the corner for fear of what I might find.

But what really frightened me was that I knew I was really no different from the people who lived here, and that if I’d been
spilled out from my mother’s body onto dirty straw or old newspapers in one of these damp and stinking houses, I’d now be
just the same. A cloth-wrapped bone-creature who made other children scared; a thin, jaundiced thing with sunken eyes and
no understanding of anything but survival; a scarecrow.

It would be getting dark very soon, and by now I was pretty sure I’d shaken off my pursuer. I’d turned north and west and
south and west again and doubled back on myself so many times I’d lost track of where I was. When we rounded the next corner
we were suddenly in a familiar, much wider street into which the evening sunshine poured reassuringly, and I could see the
unmistakable open space of Clerkenwell Green at the far end. Lash knew where he was now. We weren’t far from the back of Cramplock’s,
and he struck out purposefully for home, practically dragging me behind him.

As we neared the square, I could hear something from one of the houses nearby. At first I thought it was a person singing,
but after a couple of seconds’ listening I changed my mind. It was certainly music, of some kind, on an instrument which might
have been a flute, or a bagpipe, but somehow didn’t quite sound like either.

Then I remembered the Irish tramp — who had talked in his own musical way about sounds like snakes. So he hadn’t been mad
after all: as I stood listening to this convoluted, dizzying music I realized I was hearing exactly what he’d described. Extraordinary,
rising and falling, twisting itself up in knots, it was somehow as different from normal music as the strange symbols on the
man from Calcutta’s note were different from normal writing. Something about it reminded me of those unfathomable squiggles
dangling from their line like knife-slashed washing. And I’d heard it somewhere before! Hadn’t I heard it, when I thought
I was imagining things, locked up in Coben and Jiggs’s stolen chest?

Running now, along the lane toward the source of the music, I suddenly knew what I was going to find. And, sure enough, peering
through the gates into the dingy backyards, I could tell it was coming from the mysterious empty house next door to Cramplock’s.