The Hangman's Child (10 page)

'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 was 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.

'Christ, Sammy!' said Rann, 'Look at you!' Samuel drew back, as if he had been struck a blow. He moved unsteadily.

'Frightened,' he said with a downward shake of his head. 'Frightened I was, Jack, frightened I am.' 'Down here, I shouldn't be surprised.'

'Up there.' The old man pointed at the ceiling. 'I go up at night. I beg, if I can. There's a few give. Then I get back, quick-sharp. Bring me what you can, there's a chum.'

He sat down heavily on the makeshift bed, a study in defeat.

Rann took a step closer. Sour fear mingled with drink in the air of the cavern.

'You can't stay down here, Sam. Summer comes, this air'll be full of cholera. That'll kill you, if rats don't eat you first.'

The points of Samuel's bony cheeks shone as he shook his head. 'You don't see it, 'andsome Rann! They know you and Pandy was up to something tasty. They meant to have it off you. They know I put up those houses for you, so they reckon I know too. Which I don't. They want to know who's the putter-up and what's the game. I can't tell 'em.'

Rann brought himself to sit down on the wooden bed. But Samuel looked away.

'You're out of it now, Sammy!'

'Don't be a fool, Jack Rann.' Samuel looked briefly at him. 'They didn't mean to do Pandy so quick. They was asking him things and hurting him when he didn't answer. The ways they cut him! He answered in the end, you bet. Then you was to be asked next, then me. Didn't you wonder why you were called to the Golden Anchor that afternoon? They'd have had you all right. But first, the knife slipped on poor Pandy. Seeing as he was bleeding away to a corpse, they couldn't do you the same. Not with Fowler upstairs, ramping some doxy of Bragg's. Flash Charley may be their man but he couldn't straighten two murders in one afternoon. So you was fitted for knifing Pandy Quinn. Two birds at one go.'

Jack Rann sighed.

'You got no cause to be ashamed of being scared, Sammy.'

Samuel had the look of a child about to cry at some injustice.

'Pandy must have spoke my name, Jack! I don't blame the poor devil, but where's that leave me? You and Pandy knew what you was up to. You could say, if it got too bad. But they'd hurt me to make me tell 'em things I don't know! I never was a schoolbook 'ero, Jack. I'd answer 'em straight off. But I couldn't, if I didn't know!' He shuddered. 'Bully Bragg, Moonbeam, Catskin, and a knife. I couldn't be naked under that knife, Jack. I'd drown in the river first. I'd live down here. I'd die down here, if I have to, not watch meself being cut bit by bit. . . .'

He bowed his head and covered his face with his hands. Rann thought he might begin to weep. But Samuel did not weep.

'Jack's right, Sam,' said Tomnoddy from the shadows. 'You can't live 'ere for ever.'