Chapter Twelve
Upper Thames Street was crowded out with carts and trollies and sweaty nags pulling rickety wagons to and from the warehouses. Little groups of kiddies dashed here and there, begging and nicking from the carts as they rattled along the road. Servants on errands pushed their way through the bustle, glad to get out of the house for a few hours, while dawdlers dawdled, chatting to neighbours and getting in every bugger’s way. The first pub we reached was the King’s Head and Lamb. Inside, the porters from Billingsgate were shouting and swearing, drinking hard with their white coats hanging open and their wooden hats by their feet. I got us each a mug of porter and a pot of eel jelly while the guvnor took a space by the door.
‘No spoon?’ he asked.
‘None left.’ I took a long swig. Once the beer hit my belly I felt the weariness come over me and remembered I’d only had an hour or so’s sleep since yesterday. I lit a fag; the guvnor got his pipe going.
‘I’m worried about that girl,’ he said as he blew out a long cloud of silver smoke. ‘If they’ll kill two women they’ll just as easily kill her.’
I finished my porter and held out my hand. Sighing, he dropped me a sixpence, then looked back in his little cotton purse. He gave it a jiggle and cursed under his breath.
I went and got us two more.
‘Change, please!’ he barked before I even had a chance to put the mugs down. When he’d put away the coppers, he took a swig. He burped. ‘We need those fifty shillings Moon owes us. Ask him as soon as he returns.’
‘Petleigh’s on the case now. The captain doesn’t need us any more.’
‘You know Petleigh won’t solve it without our help.’
‘And you know Moon can’t pay us.’
With his pipe in one hand, the guvnor put the pot of eel jelly between his knees and dug in his fingers. He scooped the mess into his mouth, dropping a gobbet on his shirt front.
‘Well, we can’t just leave it,’ he said with his mouth still full. ‘Moon and Suzie might be next. Oh Lord, we can’t keep working without payment, Norman. Not with my sister and the baby.’ He wiped the gobbet off his shirt and licked it from his grimy finger. ‘Petleigh was acting suspiciously just now. I’m more and more convinced the baby’s hers. She’s ashamed, why else would she refuse to tell me? But she doesn’t seem to have an instinct for child-rearing, that’s what puzzles me. She stiffens when she picks it up.’ He puffed on his pipe and pondered. He shook his head. ‘Perhaps it is an orphan after all. But why she wouldn’t tell me that, I do not know.’
‘Maybe she thinks you’ll make her take it back.’
‘She knows I can never make her do anything she doesn’t want to do. She’s just bloody-minded, Barnett. She makes a decision and that’s it. Never changes her mind.’
‘That’s not true, William.’
We sat for a while thinking about it. We both understood that if it really was hers, then Petleigh had to be the father. He’d visited her so many times, brought gifts, played cards. It was that possibility that vexed the guvnor more than anything.
He cleared his throat. ‘Could you ask her, Norman? There’s too much anger between us for her to tell me. I think she trusts you.’
‘It isn’t really my place.’
‘Your place? What does that mean?’
‘You know what it means. I work for you.’
‘I don’t like it when you talk like that, Norman. We’re bonded, you and me.’
‘Maybe so, but we can’t change where we’re from. You may be a fallen man now, but you and Ettie came from a better place.’
‘You’re too sensitive,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re too caught up in your childhood.’
‘Look at me, William. I’ve a tear in my britches. A patch on my jacket. You really think I’ve left it behind?’
‘It won’t always be like that.’
‘I’m useful to you because of where I’m from, and you need to remember that.’
He frowned. ‘Anyway, I’m not a fallen man. I’m good at what I do. If any of our cases had been recognized half as much as that charlatan Holmes then—’
‘Look at how you live. You’ve lost almost everything you had when you left the newspaper. Your clothes are almost as shabby as mine. You always owe somebody.’
‘One of these days they’ll report our cases properly,’ he said. ‘We’ll start to get paid what we deserve.’
‘And then we wouldn’t be able to help folk like Moon and his daughter.’
‘We’d do both.’
I dropped my fag and ground it under my heel. ‘We can’t ask Moon for the money.’
He sighed. ‘No, you’re right. He’s already in debt.’
‘Didn’t Holmes pay you?’ I asked, suddenly remembering where he’d gone the night before.
His raddled eyes shut for a moment. He took a big draught of his porter, then spooned the rest of the eel jelly in his mouth. As he chewed, he picked up a paper from the floor and opened it.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me what happened, William?’
‘He wasn’t there,’ he said at last.
A laugh fell out my mouth afore I’d a chance to catch it.
‘Where was he?’
‘I don’t know!’ he barked, his fearsome nose-holes flaring. ‘The hotel said he hadn’t been there at all. I waited till morning and got the first train back. Four bob it cost me.’
‘You haven’t heard from him since?’
‘Not even a blooming note of apology. I’ve sent him a telegraph.’
I watched the side of his face for some time, the blood sausage nose, the fleshy ears etched with soot, the thin, greasy hair curled over his balding crown. He took another lug of porter.
‘Stop watching me!’ he hissed.
I put out my fag and stood.
‘I need a kip. You want me this afternoon?’
‘There’s nothing we can do until Polgreen returns at seven. Meet me then.’
I was just leaving when his hand reached out and gripped my thigh. ‘I shouldn’t have left you there last night, Norman,’ he said, his eyes cast down to the paper on his knee. ‘But you know I can’t think straight when it comes to that charlatan.’
I was tuckered out when I reached my room. The building was quiet, and I was glad I’d told Lilly to go. The door stuck a bit so I gave it a kick, no patience left in me for care. It jerked open and there she was, laid out on her belly on my mattress. The air was thick with heat, wet with her catarrh. I looked to the floor: the chamber pot was still full, still there by the foot of the bed, and now there was a jar beside it, half-full itself.
Her face was pressed against the grey sheet. She opened one eye.
‘Hello, Norm, darling,’ she mumbled. ‘I kept it warm for you.’
I threw open the window to the street.
‘You said you’d leave.’
‘I know, but where am I to go? And don’t we have a laugh together?’ She raised herself on her elbows and looked at me. Her stringy hair fell over her face. It was a face I liked well enough, it just wasn’t the one I wanted to see. ‘You didn’t come home last night,’ she said, covering her mouth as she yawned. ‘I missed you, mate.’
‘I was working.’
‘You look knackered.’ She patted the bed beside her. ‘Get your boots off. Come on. I’ll look after you.’
The anger had already left me, and all that was left was the tiredness. So off came the boots, the shirt, the britches. The mattress was a blessed relief, and even the sense of her body next to me was a comfort of some kind. I should have fallen straight off to sleep, so tired was I, but as my head sunk into the pillow I thought of the little dead woman, her head resting on the belly of the bigger one. What were the two of them to each other? And what was the man to them? I felt the greasy rope in my hands, the ache in my arms as I hauled up the chain of bodies. Their faces came before me again, wet and streaming. They were playing with me, stirring my brain. I gave a grunt of rage; I’d be up again in a few hours and needed to get some sleep. I tried to stop thinking, to listen instead to the noises of the street outside. I turned my mind to the fingers working their way under my vest, stroking the black hair of my belly, and the slow breathing in my ear.
Chapter Thirteen
Arrowood was already at the pier when I arrived that evening. Next to the Gravesend Queen, a big paddle steamer, the Clacton Belle, had just docked and her passengers were getting off. The guvnor stood at the side, waiting for them to climb the stairs up to Swan Lane. Among them moved the gang of dippers: the lad in the mourning suit, the little girl in the ragged dress, the boy with the stained white britches. I nudged the guvnor as they lifted a watch and chain off a city gent then disappeared like pipe smoke.
It was low water, and Polgreen’s boat was idling over by the barges, waiting for the Clacton Belle to give up its mooring. His decks were packed out with passengers, whose shouts and laughter came over the water: a good day for him with Moon’s boat out of action. We climbed aboard the Gravesend Queen and found Belasco in the engine room. His hands were dark with grease and oil; his face shone with sweat. He told us Moon was still at the police station.
‘Is he any better?’ asked the guvnor.
‘They let me go soon as I’d answered their questions so I reckon maybe he ain’t talking yet.’ He sighed and looked over at the Clacton Belle, at its shiny paddle box, the brass railings glinting in the evening sun. An African sweeping the deck shouted out a greeting. Belasco raised his hand and cried, ‘Aye aye!’ He dropped his voice again. ‘It’s hit him hard. Suzie gone home, has she?’
‘About midday,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I’m going to keep a watch here till morning. Just hope that the inspector lets us take the boat out tomorrow.’
‘How much money does the captain owe, Belasco?’ asked the guvnor.
The deckhand scratched his tattoo. ‘Well, he owes the piermaster, and Suzie says they’re behind on rent. I ain’t been paid in a month neither. But it’s more than that. We had a visit a week or so since from a couple of bad types. Money lenders, I reckon. Came on the boat looking it over like he’d borrowed on it.’
‘Names?’ I asked.
Belasco shook his head. ‘Captain made me get off the boat when they come. One of them was big, bigger than you, Norm. Cauliflower ear, long moustache, bald. The other was a short fellow, built like a bull terrier. I didn’t hear what they said, but it weren’t friendly.’
‘Does Miss Moon know?’ asked the guvnor, turning to look up Swan Lane.
‘She weren’t there. Captain’s not the type to worry her neither.’
Arrowood nodded. ‘We’ll keep watch with you tonight.’
‘You don’t have to, sir,’ said Belasco. ‘Reckon the Old Bill’s looking into it now.’
‘I wouldn’t expect too much from Inspector Petleigh,’ said the guvnor, looking up Swan Lane again. He frowned. ‘You’d have thought he’d be here to interview Polgreen when he disembarks. Apparently he has more important things to do.’ Half an hour later, the Clacton Belle moved off to a great cheer from the crowd on Polgreen’s boat. When it took its place at the pier, his son jumped off and tied the ropes, while Mrs Polgreen let down the gangway. We waited till all the passengers had cleared off, then made to board the ship.
‘You stay where you are,’ said Polgreen, appearing on the deck next to his wife. He wore a loose checked shirt, a black bowler, his battered face handsome enough for an older bloke. His fists gripped the handrail.
‘We need to talk to you for a moment, Captain,’ said the guvnor. ‘It’s important.’
‘You can talk from there.’
‘D’you know who tied those people to the Gravesend Queen?’
‘No, and you’re a bloody fool if you think I’d risk murder just to get this route.’
His son sat down on the bollard, the rope in his hand. He was a strong lad, clear-eyed and brown. He pulled an onion from his pocket and had a bite.
‘Ah! So you have been intimidating him,’ the guvnor declared as if Polgreen had so much as said it himself. It was one of his little ideas, that if you treat someone as having already confessed something they’d be more likely to admit it.
Polgreen let go of the handrail. He scratched his stiff whiskers. ‘I did a few things to his boat, yeah. Smashed the windows. Threw some fish guts about. But it was his own fault, the miserable old prick.’
‘How so?’
Mrs Polgreen took his arm. She was looking at me steady like she knew me somehow. I was sure I’d never seen her before; I hadn’t met more than a few Hindoos in my life.
‘When we first started on the Gravesend run we didn’t know how it were. He could have explained there weren’t enough passengers for two boats. I’d have gone upriver. No skin off my nose. But he weren’t like that, started up cursing and swearing, calling my wife the worst things, even my boy. I wouldn’t stand for it.’
The guvnor looked over at Mrs Polgreen. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, ma’am.’
‘I don’t need your sorry,’ she said. Her accent was odd, like nothing I’d heard before. Wasn’t Cornish, that was sure. Her cheeks were chubby, her black hair tied back tight on her head. ‘I heard it many time.’
‘I wouldn’t take it,’ said Polgreen. ‘Made up my mind to drive him out. But I only did the guts and the windows, that’s all. When I heard there’d been other damage I reckoned I didn’t need to.’
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier just to leave him to his route?’ asked the guvnor.
‘I’m thinking that now.’
‘That’s what I say to him,’ said Mrs Polgreen. ‘He don’t listen. Big bloody ape he is sometime.’
‘Shut your face,’ barked Polgreen.
‘You shut your face,’ she said, pulling her arm away and flicking him on the ear.
Their boy was listening to it all in silence. There was something angry in his eyes that unsettled me, something that seemed directed at his old man. This was a queer family, all right. But there was nothing unusual about that.
‘I’d nothing to do with this morning, and you can tell the coppers that,’ Polgreen went on. ‘D’you know who those people were?’
‘Do you?’ asked the guvnor.
‘Do I?’ He was starting to get vexed again. ‘Haven’t I just told you it weren’t me?’
‘Cockles, mate?’ asked a ragged woman coming along the pier. ‘Winkles?’ She showed us her bucket. ‘Fresh as a daisy.’
‘Fresh as a turd, you old teef,’ said Mrs Polgreen from the boat.
‘You shut your hole,’ croaked the dirty woman.
‘I’m up all night with those you sell last before. She’s come out both me up and down.’
‘Aw, why don’t you learn to speak proper, Pocahontas?’ The ragged woman turned back to us. ‘What’ll you have?’
‘I don’t think I will, thank you, madam,’ said the guvnor.
She turned and showed me her bucket.
‘Cockles, sir?’ she asked me, shoving her finger up her nose. ‘Winkles?’
I waved her away.
‘I can see you’re a reasonable man, Mr Polgreen,’ said the guvnor, his voice now softer. ‘Something evil’s happened here. Wouldn’t it be better just to start another route now? This feud has gone far enough. Rosherville Garden’s dying anyway.’
Polgreen looked over at his wife for some time, exchanging whatever understandings or feelings passed between foreigners like them. He lifted his bowler and wiped his forehead. He nodded slow. ‘Been thinking that’s maybe best. Don’t know what’s going on with Moon and his old bucket, but I don’t want nothing to do with it.’
‘You’re giving up the run?’
Polgreen nodded. ‘I’m going down Windsor on Monday, see about getting a slot on one of them piers.’
I was watching his son as he spoke. For just a moment, the lad stopped chomping his onion. His eyes narrowed; a cloud passed over his face.
We watched the steamer push off. Its engines picked up and it moved away towards London Bridge.
‘D’you believe him?’ I asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ said the guvnor. ‘I’m inclined to, but did you see his boy when he said he was giving up the route?’
‘Something was up with him.’
‘I felt a prickle go through me. Anger.’
I nodded. The guvnor believed emotions were contagious, and if you opened yourself you could sometimes feel what another person was feeling. It was something to do with magnetism, he said, some kind of invisible fluid passing between us all the time. I wasn’t so sure about those fluids, but I thought maybe he was right about the emotions.
His belly made a low growl; he clutched himself. ‘I saw a fellow selling trotters up there on Swan Lane. Go and get some, Barnett.’
After our supper, we took turns pacing the deck and sleeping badly on the floor of the saloon. By midnight it was raining. The guvnor had the only two blankets, yet still he complained about his rash and the rock of the boat, and when he did fall off he snored loud as the Prince of Wales. It was a long night, but no boat came close, no figure tried to climb aboard.
Suzie arrived at seven or so the next morning. The Koh-i-Noor, one of the bigger paddle steamers, was tied beside us, and a few deckhands busied themselves preparing her for the day ahead. Kate stood by her wherry, waiting for custom.
‘Dad ain’t here then?’ asked Suzie.
‘Must still be with the coppers,’ said Belasco.
Her face darkened. ‘Why’re they keeping him so long?’
‘He was too shook up to talk yesterday. Maybe he needed to sleep it off.’
She nodded, wanting to trust him.
‘We’ll go without him if he don’t turn up,’ said Belasco. ‘We run her often enough when he’s jiggered.’
‘Right,’ said Suzie, her bottom lip trembling as she said it. She was a girl on the edge of a woman, and she seemed to flip between the two like a turn in the breeze. I could see she was trying to be strong, but she was only fifteen. She breathed in deep, drew down her freckled brow, and set her face. ‘Let’s get her ready, then. I’ll find Ken. See how many tickets he’s sold.’
The three of us watched her as she crossed the pier and marched up the steps to the embankment. As she passed the crippled lad begging at the top, she gave his shoulder a quick rub, then disappeared into the throng.
‘My Lord, I hope the Captain pulls himself together,’ said the guvnor. ‘This city eats girls like her.’
Belasco shook his head. ‘You don’t know Suzie too well, do you, Mr Arrowood?’
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