The Hangman's Child (6 page)

They passed Sun Court, a courtyard of Tudor brick within the arch of Walker's Vaults. Pandy Quinn's legacy. Jack Rann looked away, as if the passers-by might read the secret in his eyes. He gazed instead at the reflections of the vaults in the display windows of Trent's Cornhill Family and Complimentary Mourning Tailors, plate-glass framed by black marble, divided by corrugated brass pillars. But Mr Trent's funeral tailoring was as much part of Pandy's master-plan as the vaults themselves.

Rann jumped off at Aldgate pump, where the classical pillar under an iron-framed gas-lamp spouted water into a shallow trough for a poorer district of the city. Here the shops and houses were stained by weather and neglect, windows dusty and empty, the road almost deserted. With nothing in the world but the shirt and trousers that he wore, he slipped down as the cart slowed at the crossing.

His destination was a slum courtyard off Rosemary Lane, along the drab length of the Ratcliff Highway. Narrower streets faded into the distance of a noon haze. Provision merchants and gin-shops traded behind the plain shop-fronts, families lodging two or three to a room on the floors above. The long canyon of the street was crowded at this hour by labourers from the nearby docks, in round, wide-brimmed hats, canvas trousers and shirt-sleeves. Bells that might have tolled for a funeral were sounding from Wapping to the Isle of Dogs to call the gangs back to work from their dinner break.

Boys with trays of glazed cakes slung about their necks, and girls offering fried fish, mingled with the crowd. A thinly clad woman with a child on her back bought a piece of fish for a halfpenny. She walked in front of Rann, tearing at it hungrily with her teeth, eating the warm flesh covered in breadcrumbs and sucking at the bone before she threw it away.

From Rosemary Lane, he turned into a low archway, no wider than a house door. It led into the slum court known as Preedy's Rents.

Beyond this narrow tunnel, which lay under the upper floors of the building that fronted the street, rose a turmoil of voices. A crowd was packed into a courtyard, a hundred feet long but not twenty feet wide. Men and women shouted and jumped at the far end. Every window of the upper floors was filled with faces, watching a quarrel between two neighbours as it turned into a fight.

Even at noon, the yard was in deep shadow, wooden tenements rising like cliffs above it. Projections had been built out at random on the higher levels. Preedy's Rents had the air of a slum that might crumple at any moment in a cascade of rubble and timber upon the crowd in the courtyard.

Inside the tenements, a narrow hallway and wooden stairs were almost in darkness. He climbed slowly and with care. The unlit stairway creaked and trembled under the gentlest footstep. He came to an unpainted door at the top and listened. There was movement but no voices. Rann knocked sharply.

'At?' The reply sounded brisk and confident.

'You there, Lord Tomnoddy? That you, Short-Armed Tom?'

A chair-leg scraped. Whoever had been sitting down said something to himself as he got up. A bolt was drawn and the door opened by a thickset man with a florid face and dark hair, arms conspicuously long for his height. He was any age between fifty and seventy, his face lightly wrinkled like fruit dried on the branch. Lord Tomnoddy, or Short-Armed Tom, was a tosher or sewer-hunter. His trade gave him the only names by which he was known.

Before the sewerman could speak, Rann said quietly, "s all right, Lord Tomnoddy. It's me, Jack Rann. And I ain't a ghost, 'cos I ain't been hung. Nor mean to be! Not if you'll help me now.'

'Christ Aw-mighty!' Tomnoddy stood back and opened the door wider to let out more light. 'You never been respited?'

Rann shook his head and stepped into a plainly furnished garret-room. Tomnoddy had been at dinner.

'If you ain't been respited, Jack

Rann put his hand against the wall.

'I'm that famished ...' he said, and fell silent.

Tomnoddy helped him to a chair, as if caring for an invalid.

'Famished? You look like the Cock Lane Ghost, my son. 'Course I'll help you. What else would I do?'

On the bare table was a half-eaten plate of cold boiled beef, a saucer of red pickled cabbage and some dingy-looking pickled onions. The meat was profusely covered with mustard, ready to be eaten with thick slices of bread t
hat had been cut into big mouth
fuls by a clasp pocket-knife lying open beside the plate. A dented pewter pot contained half a pint of ale.

'I got your kit safe,' Tomnoddy said proudly, the worn face breaking into a quick smile. 'All in the carpet-bag. No one touched it. It's back of a wall in a Shadwell tunnel, well off the main drain. No one been there for years. Anyone looked for it'd have to choose from a couple o' million bricks! Old Samuel had to make himself scarce from Bragg and Catskin Nash. So he's with it. Flash Charley Fowler'd give a bit to know where your tools was. And Bully Bragg'd give as much to have Samuel with a fork through his gullet.'

The kindly smile returned to the sewerman's face but the smile and the words meant nothing to Rann. He sat on the plain wooden chair and could neither eat nor drink. He began to shiver, in the heat of the day and the stifling air of the garret. Once he had begun to shiver, he found he could not stop. And when he could not stop he began to weep, until he could not stop that either. For all his hunger and thirst, it was half an hour before he could eat or drink or tell his story. Tomnoddy listened. Then they sat in silence until the old sewerman spoke.

'Mind you,' he said admiringly, 'that was a swift dodge, that soot. Won't last but good enough for now.'

'Nothing can last me here,' said Rann thoughtfully. 'I can't stay. Not on the same manor with Flash Fowler and Bully Bragg. Elsewhere in London, my face ain't much known. But even then it's a chance someone'd spot me, next week, next month, next year. I never hurt Pandy Quinn, he was my friend. On my soul's salvation, I swear I never did. Pandy was like a father who taught me a trade. But so far as that court goes, judge, jury, Flash Charley, and the rest, that's past history. If I'm caught, I'll be stretched. And that's all about that.'

The lines of Tomnoddy's face deepened earnestly. The crowd outside had long since fallen quiet and the tenements were silent in the afternoon heat.

'You thought what you'll do, Jack? They'll look for you round here. First place.'

'I thought of nothing else,' Rann said. 'Lying there, waiting. I decided. There was a job Pandy and I was fitting up before he was cut. A real sweet job, Tom. It's what caused the trouble with Bragg and Catskin, 'cos we never asked them to be putters-up. We worked on it six months and more. It's a big one and it's still there to be done. So, my Lord Tomnoddy, it's what I mean to do. It's my way out.'

Tomnoddy stared at the debris of meat and pickles on his table. 'You ain't got Pandy now, Jack. You start on the rob again, you'll be took. Sooner or later. And when you're took, you'll be stretched. Sure as if they had you in Newgate now.'

Rann shook his head.
‘I
mean to finish, Tom, not start. What me and Pandy was fitting up might keep a man the rest of his life. Six men, even. Thanks to you, I've still got my kit. Give me three pairs of hands, I'll do that job. And then I'll be on my way. I can't stay here.'

The sewerman looked at him as a white cloud masked the sun and the light began to thicken. 'Where'll you go then, Jack?'

'A long way off. Where I can't be found nor fetched back. Somewhere not a living soul could know me. 'merica, p'raps. With those emigrants on the ships out of Liverpool, like peas in a pod. Might try 'stralia. Who's you, they say? Jack Rann? Never 'eard of him, I say. Merchant venturer, I am. And here's the cash to show it.'

Tomnoddy inclined his head and breathed out hard through his nose.

'Trouble is, Jack, it's now that matters. Not when you're in 'stralia nor 'merica. Now's when they'll catch you, if they do. This week, not next year.'

Rann shrugged. He looked round the garret with its bare walls, a cheap case-lock ticking, the sparse plain furniture.

'I'll live down the sewers, same as Samuel, if I must.'

The older man nodded.

'If you don't drown in the sluice or get ate by the rats. You don't even know the lie of the sewers, Jack.'

'No,' said Rann brusquely, 'but you do, Tom. If it comes to that. Which it won't.'

'Which it has,' said Tomnoddy glumly. 'And it's forbidden down there now as well. They won't let us in to hunt the sewers, 'cos there's a little danger. They fears as how we'll get suffocated. At least they tells us so. But they don't care if we get starved. No, they doesn't care nothink about that. But the police and the narks is always on the look-out for men going into 'em by the river tunnels. And they waits sometimes above the open street-gratings for any noise or light below. If you're took that way, Jack, you'll be stretched as sure as if you'd waited quiet in your cell for Mr Calcraft.'

'Get me in there, Tom,' Rann said firmly,
‘I
need that carpet-bag. It's got the kit. Jacket, trousers, shoes with rope soles. There's even a few sovs in the lining.'

‘I
can bring it.'

'And I want Soapy Samuel. You can't bring him.'

'But Samuel ain't no use to you, Jack. He never did nothing but dress up like a fancy parson and collect money at house-doors for poor missioners in Africa that never existed. Sam couldn't open a kiddy's money-box with a carvin' knife.'

‘I
want him, Tomnoddy.'

'And he won't come up, for mortal terror of Bully Bragg.' Rann nodded.

'That's one reason I want him, Tom. I mean to show him it's the only way he can ever be safe.'

Tomnoddy sighed and shrugged. He gave it up.

'Tell you this, Jack Rann. You ain't going nowhere as you are. Not to the corner of the street, let alone the outfalls and tunnels. You get cleaned up, rested, healed. You stay here, understand?'

‘I
ain't got time, Tomnoddy!'

Lord Tomnoddy was unimpressed.

'You have got time, though you don't know it. The way they watch the outfalls, it means going by dark and low water. It's light at low water now, forenoon and afternoon. If I'm caught, it's twenty-eight days for trespass. If you're took, it's your death. End of the week, Jack. Almost dark at low water then. We'll go down the foreshore and in through the tunnels. There's thirteen lots of stairs down to the river between Execution Dock and Limehouse Hole. And there's Pelican Stairs in Wapping Wall. They can't see much by dark, so they don't watch.'

'You shan't be the poorer for this, Tomnoddy,' said Rann gently, but the old tosher ignored him.

'Another thing you'd best remember, Jack, in case you should ever go alone. The commissioners put iron doors on those tunnels a while back. Doors that close with the pressure of the flood tide against 'em and open again to let the sewage out with the ebb. A little before the ebb, they open the sluices higher up the drains. If you was in the main channels then, and if you couldn't get smartly into one of the unused branch tunnels, you'd be swept to death and found in due course on the river mud. But once the channels have run dry again and the sluices been closed, a man can get in that way without being swept off. It's safe from the ebb to the flood, until the river gets too high. Never safe when it's still on the ebb. Savvy?'

Jack Rann looked about him at the garret room with its sloping roof and the blankets on the floor that made up the old sewer-hunter's bed.

'Safe enough after where I've been,' he said quietly.

But Lord Tomnoddy had not quite finished.

'So long as you ain't seen and caught by the river police or the Customs or one of the sewage commissioners' men,' he said sternly. 'You might as well be swept away as have that happen to you now.'

6

Sergeant Verity sat on a tall counting-house stool and spread Inspector Croaker's memorandum on the slope of the high desk. He read it again. Above his head, at the level of the pavement, the iron-rimmed wheels of a coal-wagon from Whitehall Wharf crashed on the cobbled surface like an ocean breaker hitting a bank of shingle. The reverberation shook the basement room. Even with the ceiling-light closed, the office allocated to the sergeants of the Private-Clothes Detail rang like a foundry and reeked in the warm May evening with an air of horse dung and soot. Somewhere in the cells of Metropolitan Police 'A' Division, beyond the wall, a man was singing, a child sobbed, and an elderly woman let out arpeggios of screams in a nightmare of delirium tremens.

The cramped office seemed smaller for Verity's bulk. The tall stool seemed about to shatter like doll's-house furniture under his tightly trousered buttocks. As he gazed at the memorandum, a slight frown of concentration clouded the pink moon of his face with its black hair flattened for neatness and the moustaches lightly waxed at their tips.