The Potato Factory (32 page)

They walked onto the Isle and Sparrer led Hannah by a circuitous route to an area where the houses seemed deserted and were so closely packed that they appeared to be leaning on each other for support. They walked down an alley, wide enough to take a wagon, which was strewn with debris and foul with mud and evil-smelling puddles some of which appeared to carry a thin veneer of ice. Hannah had cause to lift her skirt and, despite the care she took, her boots sank into the stinking ooze, often almost to their tops. Sparrer, who walked ahead, came to the end of the alley and put his hand up to signal Hannah to stop. Then he called her forward with a flick of his fingers, indicating that she should move slowly and without making a sound. Hannah came towards him more carefully than ever, though the squelch and sucking of the mud, and crunching of thin ice under her feet seemed to be announcing her every step.

When she reached the far end of the alley Hannah discovered that it led to a small loading yard in the form of a quadrangle. It appeared to have once been paved with flagstones, though most of these had been removed and were piled high into one corner and partly covered with snow. The building which occupied three sides of the quadrangle had once been a fairly large warehouse backing on to the river. The warehouse seemed to have been deserted for a long time and its few windows and the main doors, big enough to take a horse and cart, were boarded up. The urchin put his finger to his lips and pointed to the pile of snow-covered flagstones.

'Entrance be there, missus,' Sparrer whispered. 'Be'ind them stones.'

Hannah's heart pounded furiously. She stood a few feet back from the entrance and deep within the shadows so that she could not possibly be seen, but she nevertheless imagined she could feel Ikey's eyes boring into her from a gap between two planks which boarded up the hoist door, set high up into the roof of the three-storey stone building. Hannah could sense Ikey crouching on his knees, wild strands of greasy hair flying from the sides of his head, his shiny bald pate vulnerable for want of the security afforded by his broad-brimmed hat. She could almost feel his eyes glued to the gap between the boards, willing her to come to him, though too fearful to call out lest her presence be some sort of trap.

She waited until she felt her breathing grow calmer then placed her hand on Sparrer's shoulder and gave it a tiny squeeze. Sparrer turned his head and looked up at her.

'Come!' she whispered and, turning about, began to retreat down the muddy alley. She walked ahead of Sparrer until they were well clear of the buildings. Not a soul had appeared in all the while they had been in the vicinity of the derelict row of houses. The part of the island they were on seemed to be totally desolate and their footsteps showed clearly in the snow, but it had begun to snow lightly again and they would soon be concealed. A low pewter-coloured sky added to the sense of isolation and misery of the broken-down surroundings. Hannah let out a discernible sigh of relief once she considered they had retreated sufficiently far from the deserted houses to communicate.

'Ya sure that be it, Sparrer? Gawd's truth, that old ware'ouse be Ikey's deadlurk?'

Sparrer looked hurt. 'Yes, missus, 'course I is. I knows these parts like the back o' me 'and. Before I growed up, Jacob's be where I come from.'

Hannah walked with Sparrer to the small causeway connecting Jacob's Island to the city side of the Thames. Here she opened her purse and took out two single pound notes and held them up in front of Sparrer.

'Ya never seen me, ever, ya understand? If ya tells a single livin' soul about Ikey's deadlurk I'll tell Bob Marley ya followed 'im and 'e'll come after ya with 'is razor and cut yer bleedin' throat from ear to ear!' Hannah ran a mittened hand across her throat for emphasis. 'You 'as never seen me, we's never met, ya understand, Sparrer?' Sparrer nodded, his eyes fixed on the money she held in her hand. 'Good!' She handed him the one pound notes. ' 'Ere, for yer trouble. Now disappear, scarper, I never seen ya, whoever you are.'

Sparrer placed one of the pound notes between his lips which were beginning to tremble from the cold again, then using both hands, he held either end of the second note and brought his fists together then snapped them suddenly apart pulling the banknote taut to test its strength. Satisfied as to the quality of the bank paper he held the note up to the sky to examine the Bank of England watermark. He seemed pleased with what he saw, but opened his mouth, the remaining note sticking to his bottom lip as he wet his fingers with spittle and rubbed the watermark on the note with his wet fingers to see if it would disappear. Sparrer then tried to remove the remaining note from his bottom lip, but it had frosted to the skin and he pulled gingerly until it finally came away, leaving a bright smear of blood where the paper had removed the skin. He folded both notes together and pushed them somewhere deep within the interior of his tattered coat.

Then, his breath making smoke in the cold air, Sparrer scanned the desolate surroundings at some length, then brought his gaze back to Hannah's face, his eyes showing no recognition.

'I must 'o been dreamin',' he declared in an exaggerated voice, ' 'cause I could o' sweared there was a woman standing right 'ere in front o' me not a moment ago!' He turned and began walking away from Hannah, not once looking back.

Hannah crossed the causeway and stopped at a hoarding where a man was busy pasting up a poster for Madame Tussaud's Travelling Waxworks. She purchased a handful of torn poster paper for a halfpenny and, seated on a low stone wall, she commenced to clean her muddy boots. Soon thereafter she hailed a hackney. 'Take me to Threadneedle Street, Bank o' England,' she instructed the driver.

Ikey was arrested by the City police in the early afternoon of the day Hannah visited Jacob's Island with Sparrer Fart. He was taken to Lambeth Street Police Office and bound over. After a thorough search of the inner parts of his body and clothes the two counterfeit five pound notes were discovered in the lining of his overcoat. Thereafter he was taken to Newgate, where he was lodged in a single cell reserved for prisoners thought to be dangerous.

'Oh shit! I 'as been shopped!' was all he was heard to cry when the fake soft was found. The senior constable, who went by the unpropitious name of George Smith and who had searched him, looked disgusted. A notorious old hand at the searching of suspects, he was known to any who had 'passed through his hands', as 'The Reamer', for he would delight in prodding his victims. Two great sausage-like fingers with fingernails grown long and filed sharp as a mandolin player's thumb entered their rear passage with a jabbing and stabbing that left them bleeding for days.

'Yer full o' shit, Ikey! But clean o' contraband!' he'd exclaimed in a booming voice, much to the delight of the constables who were holding down the screaming, blubbing Ikey with his breeches pulled down below his skinny white thighs. Then, after first having gone through the amazing configurations of pockets, slots, tubes and hiding places within Ikey's coat and eventually finding the two offending notes secreted within the innocuous tear on its outside, the senior constable held up the counterfeit notes and, shaking his head, declared, 'It ain't worthy o' you, Ikey, me boy, I expects much better from the likes o' you! Summink more ingenious, a hiding place what could challenge yours truly! A glorious adumbration to bedazzle the mind!' The Reamer waved the two notes in the air above his head and grinned. 'You'll be the laughin' stock o' Newgate Gaol, me boy!'

Ikey immediately concluded that Bob Marley had betrayed him and by means of half a sovereign placed into the hand of a turnkey sent urgent word for Hannah to come to Newgate. Here he had been placed in a cell on the third floor of the central block where, if he stood on the stone bed, he could catch a glimpse through the small barred window of the great dome of St Paul's. Though the stench was no better at the top of the building, some natural light penetrated into the cell. Moreover, the floor and walls, while of stone, were not covered with faeces, urine and the evacuation of drunken stomachs as in the dungeon cages. Nor were they especially damp, so that the fear of gaol fever, now known as typhoid, and which was said to be carried by the appalling fumes into every cell, was less likely to strike.

Ikey's more private incarceration was not intended to indicate his superior status but rather his notoriety. It was designed to keep him from being murdered in a public cell where drunkenness, fornication, starvation and every form of despair and degradation did not preclude a peculiar loyalty to the King of England.

It is an English paradox that prisoners who are flogged and starved in the name of the Crown and treated far worse than a barnyard pig by the society in which they live, remain loyal subjects to the King. The scurrilous and exaggerated stories of Ikey's attempt to bring financial ruin to the Bank of England were as well known in the dark public cages of Newgate as elsewhere, and should he have been thrown among these poor wretches it was feared that he would not live to face the full force of British justice.

Ikey, always the perfectionist, was as much dismayed as the senior Bow Street constable had pretended to be that someone had managed to plant the two five pound notes within the tear on his coat. He cursed himself bitterly for neglecting, after escaping from the coach in Birmingham, to immediately sew up the offending rip. It was just such lack of attention to detail which leads to downfall and, Ikey told himself, if a mistake of the same magnitude of neglect had occurred with one of his urchins, the young tooler would have been most severely punished.

Ikey's disappointment in himself was therefore profound. He prided himself on being alert to the lightest of fiddling fingers. So how had Bob Marley managed to plant the fake soft on him? Ikey knew Marley was no tooler. The slasher's fists were ham-like and would not have had the skill required to plant the notes within the coat.

Finally, after a process of elimination in which his careful mind examined every detail of his escapades over the past two days, Ikey arrived at the correct solution. Sparrer Fart had been the perpetrator. Ikey recalled how the young pickpocket had moved close, begging for the half sovereign he withheld from him. Such was the curious nature of Ikey Solomon's mind that he congratulated himself for having trained both Marley and Sparrer Fart - Marley for the foresight he showed in recruiting the urchin and young Sparrer for the way he had executed the plant.

Ikey was aware that he had finally come to the end of the line, which, in this event, was dangerously close to the end of a rope. All of England was braying for the noose to be placed around his scrawny neck, the public having believed the scurrilous twaddle in the penny sheets. Ikey's nefarious plans to undermine the very throne of England itself with fake currency, its distribution undertaken by a gang of international Jews and spread across all the capitals of Europe, was discussed in even the poorest netherkens. All of London wanted the case dealt with in a summary manner and damn the due process of the law. 'Hang the Jew bastard now!' was the popular call of the day. There were even some among the better classes who paid a reserve price for a window overlooking the scaffold erected in Newgate Street outside that notorious gaol. The only question which remained was the date on which Ikey's execution would be celebrated.

In Ikey's mind, though, there was a more urgent need in his life than the business of avoiding the hangman. He must, at all costs, contact Marybelle Firkin and retrieve the letter of credit for delivery to the bankers Coutts & Company before the seven days for its presentation expired. Ikey faced what appeared to be an impossible task. He had just three days to lodge the note in person and found himself trapped, a prisoner of His Majesty, locked in a guarded cell.

Moreover, and to Ikey's enormous chagrin, if he failed to present the letter of credit and lost the money he would not even be permitted to enjoy the satisfaction of shopping Silas and Maggie the Colour. To inform on them would be to indict himself as surely as if he had been caught with the bill paper in his possession. Ikey, for once in his miserable life, had been simply and elegantly foiled by a man with a mind like a suet pudding and a woman who wore wooden clogs.

However, having paid much for it in a lifetime outside the law, Ikey was possessed of a good mind for legal procedure. He knew that in England a man could be sentenced in a magistrate's court to be transported for stealing half a crown or a fat goose. But should he be able to afford the costs involved in a rigorous defence in a higher court, he had a much greater chance of avoiding transportation even though the crime committed be a hundred times more extravagant in its nature.

Ikey comforted himself that it could be argued by a good barrister that the two fake five pound notes found in the lining of his coat might well have been planted, the offending and obvious tear in his coat being the evidence to show how simply this might have been done without his knowledge.

This argument, if successful in casting some doubt in the mind of the judge, could be further supported by a timely stroke of great good fortune. Abraham Van Esselyn, who had taken full advantage of his twin afflictions and admitted nothing in his trial, had been sentenced to fourteen years transportation and had hanged himself in Cold Bath Fields Gaol just three days previously. The deaf mute, never able to share the joy of social intercourse with his fellow man, had finally decided to take his leave of the silent world around him. Ikey's defence could therefore proceed unencumbered by evidence of collaboration with his erstwhile partner.