The Hangman's Child (7 page)

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 Pr
ivate-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, Flash 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 Bridg
e 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 took 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.

At the tall dock gates, off the commercial length of the Ratcliff Highway, a solitary figure sat on a bench by the high wall, a woman in shabby black. The new cooking-tins at her feet marked her as a pauper emigrant preparing for her voyage. The high wooden gates were bolted back against the walls. From the yard came a subdued murmur of many voices. Verity stood in the gateway, feet astride, one hand in the other behind his back, the stance of an officer on duty, scowling a little as he waited for Samson.

He had done duty at the hiring-yard a dozen times during his surveillance with 'H' Division. The high-walled space divided the steamer berths from a street of tall brick repositories and the attic workrooms of weavers or cabinet-makers. By half-past seven the yard was packed by 2,000 men. Most came from the unpaved alleys of Wapping and Shadwell, the tenement-courts or lodging-houses of Shoreditch and Whitechapel, some from the hovels under river bridges or embankment arches. As they pressed forward to the row of bookmaker-stands, where the 'calling-foremen' were ranged, the very number of faces made it impossible to pick one from another. Still the Private-Clothes Detail made regular visits at the morning call. The yard was a common refuge for thieves and fugitives, even for men who had killed by accident or intent. It was one of few places where a man could get work without a character or a recommendation.