The Hangman's Child (34 page)

At the foot of the ladder, they stood in a domed cavern through which the main drain disappeared down a long tunnel. As in all the sewer caverns, stalactites of putrefying human waste hung from the roof. Fowler cursed as the stream in a brick channel splashed his polished shoe and wet the cuff of a trouser-leg. Fowler and Moonbeam carried lanterns and heavy ash-plant sticks.

'If you're having us on, Handsome Rann,' Bragg said softly, 'I'll give your mother something to weep for. Which way's the stuff?'

Rann remembered the plan of the main sewers in this area from his previous journey through them.

'This way,' he said meekly, 'down the high tunnel.'

'Moonbeam goes first. Then 'im. Then Mr Fowler and me.' Bragg turned to Rann.
‘I
half-hope you are having us on, Handsome Jack. I gotta taste for cutting you. Not all at once but one by one. Dusk to dawn and you cryin' to have it over with.'

'I know what's what,' Rann said meekly. 'I ain't having you on.'

Bragg made a sound of disgust as the tunnel roof opened upwards again and they saw above them the holes of the public latrines near Wapping High Street. Fowler spoke to Bragg for the first time since they had left Drury Lane.

'If he hasn't delivered the goods in the next half-hour, cuff him to a wooden prop and let him wait for the sluices to open, better still for the rats. Either way, he could be another found-drowned skeleton.'

'You can have the goods,' Rann said quietly,
‘I
got no use now.'

They were level with the side tunnel, above which Samuel had made his makeshift lodging. Rann knew what he must do.

'It's on from here,' he said, 'towards the river a little way.'

Ahead of them, like distant thunder down the dark tunnel, the last of the river's flood tide boomed against the iron doors of the outfall.

'When's the sluice?' Bragg said suddenly.

'Time enough.' Fowler held his lantern to his watch. 'Time enough to go straight back the way we came.'

In the next stretch of tunnel, Moonbeam cursed as he stumbled over a small heap of fallen bricks and tore his coat. They came out into another domed cavern, fed by a dozen side-drains. A family of kitten-sized brown rats scattered squealing into the darkness.

Bragg stopped suddenly.

'What's that?'

Somewhere down the main tunnel, from which they had come, there was a muffled reverberating blow, and then another. 'It's not the sluice?'

'No,' said Fowler impatiently, 'not with the outfall doors still shut. They can't raise it till those are open.'

Before either man could speak again, there was a distant crack from the same direction, like wood splitting, then the pattering of fragments, a clatter of broken bricks the size of clenched fists, and the steady rumble of an avalanche. The muffled blows were still audible when the rumbling faltered. The dry torrent came again, closer to them, almost drowning their words.

Bragg's features were rigid with fright. He coughed abruptly as the air of the vaulted cavern filled with a foul and rancid dust. The sound was now a muted but continuous roar, like the breath of a dragon, bricks bouncing on fallen bricks closer still to them. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the noise ended.

'What the fuck,' Bragg asked, 'was that?'

Fowler ducked back into the tunnel, handkerchief over his face, and walked out of sight. The others waited, Bragg's tongue running on his lips. Fowler reappeared.

'It's gone,' he said stupidly, 'the whole main tunnel's gone. Caved in. There's no way back through it.'

'So how the fuck do we get out?'

Fowler ignored the question and turned to Rann.

'He's not getting out! This bloody little squeak had something to do with it. I'll swear he had!'

'How could the tunnel go? How?' Bragg now foresaw the sequel with undiluted dread.

'I don't know how,' Fowler said quietly, 'but however it was, this dirty squeak got something to answer for. We can't stay here. Get through the outfall to the river foreshore before the sluice opens. That's safe. But let Moonbeam finish him before we go.'

'No!' shouted Bragg. 'We ain't got what we came for!'

'And never will,' Fowler said. 'Ain't it plain? There's nothing here! There never was! It's his trick! But we got to get out on the foreshore. Now! The way we came is blocked. The side tunnels are a maze. The flood comes down some and not others. Can't tell which. The only safe way's straight on, the outfall and the foreshore.'

'But him!' Bragg almost screamed the words at Rann. Fowler turned again. 'Do him now!'

He handed Moonbeam his heavier ash-plant. Moonbeam looked at Bragg and Bragg, in his fear, nodded. The unmarked bruiser put down his lantern and closed on Rann, who threw up locked hands to protect his head. The first blow missed but drove him back against the wall where a smaller side-tunnel ran off. The nightmare had come upon him, after all, in a stinking brick cavern like a burial vault, the light of two oil-lanterns throwing giant light and shade upon the walls.

His back was in a corner. The hands raised to protect his head left him open to a blow to the ribs, so powerful that when it came he felt numbness at first rather than pain. They would beat him to death and leave him, if he was lucky. At the worst they would leave him half-conscious by the side-tunnel for the flood of sewage to drown him or the rats to find him.

Moonbeam raised the heavy stick to break the fingers shielding the skull. Rann saw the monstrous shadow of the weapon on the wall, saw the giant shadow-hands that held it, saw it swing down. He cried out in a last terror of the sluice, or the rats, and heard the pistol-crack of skull-bone splintering.

But he felt nothing. Before him, Moonbeam went down without a murmur, sprawling across a brick channel. His dead eyes looked upwards at the fetid dome, unconcerned. The gigantic shadow-killer, an iron bar in his hand, was black against the lamplight. But the face, when it turned to Jack Rann, was the face of Lord Tomnoddy.

33

Bragg and Fowler, defenceless but for a single ash-plant against an iron bar, scrambled to the foreshore tunnel.

'Tomnoddy!' Rann held out his manacled wrists. 'We got to have 'em. Samuel and Maggie is still in Bragg's whorehouse. They'll be killed when he gets back.'

‘I
know,' Tomnoddy said. 'Come down the side tunnels. I can follow them like my own hand in front of my face. And I got the whole story of you and Bragg.'

Rann stumbled on. 'You can't, Tom! How could you hear any of that?'

Tomnoddy shrugged.

'You always was a soft bugger, Jack Rann. You was kind to a poor young washerwoman that lived in Newgate Street. You gave her my name to see she was all right. You was so kind, she couldn't quite puzzle why. Curiosity near killed a cat. So she followed you back to the Granby with her baby in a shawl. Saw you took off by four men. Heard them say Drury Lane to the cabman. She might be a simple soul but she knew trouble when she seen it. She come to me. That house of Bragg's been watched ever since.'

Jack Rann slipped and fell against the brick wall of the narrower tunnel. Tomnoddy helped him up.

'But they was sure it wasn't watched.'

'They would be,' the old sewe
rman said contemptuously. 'That
red-haired fancy-dancer, Brigid, put on a veil and walked about there. They knew her shape wasn't Miss Jolly and they'd got Mag Fashion under lock and key. Miss Brigid was just another bunter to them. So they never bothered. But she saw your mirror flashing, though couldn't be sure it was you. Miss Jolly let on to Policeman Verity. Mr Verity reckons you never cut Pandy and couldn't a-done. He's got evidence. On'y he's singing a solo there. Still, he tried to search Bragg's place last night. Cabman Stringfellow, Mrs Verity's old father, been parked special to watch for anyone leaving that house. Policeman Verity and me was in the cab watching when Fowler and Bragg and Moonbeam came out. And there was another passenger - you - in police clothes. 'Course, we might not have known it was you. On'y Bragg and Fowler was stupid. Mr Verity knew you was never a policeman, for all the clothes. Too small for police. They don't take 'em your size, Handsome Jack. So we reckoned it had to be you.'

They were in the main tunnel, short of the outfall but ahead of Bragg and Fowler.

Thanks to Cabman Stringfellow and Policeman Verity, you was followed here. Fortunate, seeing you was never meant to come out alive. Mr Verity watched the outfall. I could travel faster through the sewers than him or Bragg and Fowler. I was to drive 'em out by the outfall. I let 'em get through a good stretch of the main tunnel, keeping behind. Then I took the bar to break the roof down and block their way back. They got no chance then before the sluice opened but going on to the outfall. Still I come through the side-tunnel in time to stop your brains being knocked out. We'll get out of the main drain now. This way!'

'I hoped, getting them down here, I could catch them in the sluice,' Rann said.

Tomnoddy straightened up. Moisture dripped from the curve of the narrow roof.

'Listen,' he said quietly. 'They got no idea of the distance to the outfall nor how long it takes. What d'you think that is now?'

Jack Rann heard nothing yet but presently they came to an opening on to the main tunnel again. The iron door to the foreshore had been raised but no more than a suggestion of light carried from it, several hundred yards away.

'Listen!' Tomnoddy said again.

Rann heard only a hollow finger-tip reverberation of water drops falling from the points of rotten brickwork into stagnant pools. Then, far off, there was a sound like traffic in a busy street. A man's voice shouted, a single syllable, echoing and dying along the brick shaft.

'That's them,' Tomnoddy said quietly.

The traffic-murmur was thunder now, a storm in a circle of hills. Then, with a terror that took Rann's breath away, there was a sudden smash of water, a shriek, and the main tunnel seemed swept towards him. Tomnoddy snatched at him.

'Get back!'

There was a human figure ahead of the churning flood. Bully Bragg was trying to run with no sure footing. The sluice-water chased him and caught him. It knocked him down and he scrambled up. It hit him sideways and he spun in a mad dance, hitting the wall and sliding to his knees. He struggled up, waist deep in the flood. The level fell away and for a moment he seemed safe. He broke into another slithering run, striving for the outfall and the safety of the foreshore. But the sluice came like an express train and hit him full in the backs of the legs.

The absurd pompadour hair vanished in the torrent, his footing gone for ever. The flood carried him, arms and legs fighting, like a hero borne shoulder-high. While his head was above the surface he tried to scream but, where the tunnel curved, the force of the water turned him over and smashed him high against the arch of the roof. After that, there was no sound from him. The rising surge beat him against the wall. As the race carried him past the side-tunnel, Rann and Tomnoddy knew that Bully Bragg was already dead.

'Back!' Tomnoddy shouted. 'Further in!'

Rann drew away, watching the flood swirl and splash through the low-roofed main channel. Of Fowler there was no sign. Rann imagined him drowned deep in the torrent, beaten beyond recognition by the walls of the sewer.

He was never to know how long he stood with Tomnoddy in the shelter of the side-channel before the swirling of sluice-water slackened and the level began to fall. Then it grew quieter and the water was no more than knee-deep. The current dwindled into ripples and fell until the flow was held in the drainage channel itself.

In his mind, Jack Rann had prepared a death of this sort for Bragg, but the sight left him silent. Whether the sluice had washed the body of Moonbeam to the foreshore, he had no idea. Where Fowler might be lying was any man's guess. A body washed into a side-channel and left would be picked to the bone by the next day.

'The outfall,' Tomnoddy said softly, 'that's our way home. You don't know who might be waiting at the place you came in.'

Rann lifted his hands.

'Get these darbies off me, Tom. Once I get shot of 'em I'm clear. In my pocket I got a handkerchief. Along the hem is five sovereigns and a receipt folded small. A passage on the
Batavia
from Rotherhithe Dock tomorrow night and a bag that's in the shipping office behind Bermondsey Wall. Everything of mine's in that.'

'Let's get you out of here first,' Tomnoddy said quietly.

The thunder of the sluice still rang in Jack Rann's ears as Tomnoddy led the way. The outfall was a pale oval, lit by stars. The tide had withdrawn to a luminous rim of froth in the summer night, its foreshore sleek with the reflection of sky. Dim figures in long toshers' coats and hats, old women with skirts tucked into boots, waded the shallows and scavenged in the mud.

A small group was stooping over an object of particular interest. The torrent of sewage had flowed into the river but bodies from the outfall were usually too heavy to be carried beyond the mud. Three old women began rifling the pockets, stripping the choker and waistcoat from the corpse of Bully Bragg.