Dodger (35 page)

Instantly her hand touched the ring, and the silence in the room thundered great peals of absence of sound while Dodger waited for the explosion. Then Simplicity smiled and said, quite softly, ‘It’s a pretty ring, isn’t it? I loved it when he gave it to me. And I thought I was married in the eyes of God. But what do I now know about being married? The poor priest who conducted the ceremony is dead, and so are two good friends, so I think that God was never in this marriage. He was never there when I was beaten, or when I was dragged into that coach, and then there was Dodger. Angela, I trust my Dodger, completely.’ With that, she looked into his eyes, then dropped the ring into his hand and gave it to him with a kiss, and of the two he considered the kiss to be truly twenty-four-carat.

Angela looked at Solomon, who said, ‘Mmm, I think there is
no
doubt about it, Angela. What we have here is a rather unusual
Romeo and Juliet
.’

‘So you say,’ said Angela, ‘but as a practical woman, I think we will also need a dash of
Twelfth Night
. Mister Dodger, you and I must talk about particulars before you leave.’

Angela’s coach carried Dodger and Solomon back to Seven Dials, and they barely exchanged a word until after they had got back from Onan’s late-night run, and even then, still lost in their own thoughts, they spoke little in the gloom. Finally Solomon said, ‘Well, Dodger, I have faith in you, Miss Burdett-Coutts may have some faith in you, but Miss Simplicity has a faith in you which I venture to suggest is greater than that of Abraham.’

In the darkness, Dodger said, ‘Do you mean your friend Abraham, the slightly suspect jeweller?’

And the darkness came back with, ‘No, Dodger: the Abraham who was prepared to sacrifice his son to the Lord.’

‘Well,’ Dodger said, after a moment, ‘we are not going to have any of that sort of thing!’

After that he tried to sleep, seeing as he tossed and turned the face of Simplicity repeating again and again the words that she had said during that last discussion: ‘
I trust my Dodger, completely!
’

The echoes of it bounced among his bones.

In the morning, he counted what he took to be three plain-clothed policemen, trying to be surreptitious and as ever not doing it properly. He pretended that he didn’t see them, but Sir Robert Peel obviously meant what he had said; two nights in a row there had been someone outside his crib, and now they were
here
in the daytime too! They were, in a policemany sort of way, trying out new ideas, such as having no man visible near the tenement but putting a couple just round the corner, where he might run into them. Was Sir Robert getting nervous?

Long before daylight, Dodger had already been a very busy boy while the fogs, steams and smoky darkness gave him lots of cover, and now, as the world woke up some little way away, a poor old woman could be seen hobbling past the policemen – if there was anyone about who cared to look at poor old women, who were in reality something of a glut on the market, owing to the fact that they tended to outlive their husbands and generally speaking had nobody who cared about them very much. Dodger thought it was sad; it always was, and sometimes you saw the old girls scraping a living by scrabbling around in the dust heaps and sieving household dust for anything remotely usable.
¹
Of course, it was out-doors work but you hardly ever saw one of them in anything like a decent coat. And they were scary; they really were. Terrible bright eyes some of them had as they held out a claw for a farthing; toothless old ladies with that fallen-in look to the face that made you think of witches, and you found them everywhere – anywhere a body could get out of the rain.

But on this occasion, moving through the lanes and alleys, there was a now rather more spry old woman towing a handcart – a vehicle of high status on the streets – and she was fussing over it as elderly ladies did. If there was indeed a watcher on the moon, looking down on London, they would have noticed her zigzagging her way to the embankment, whereupon she hazarded a penny on a boat that took her and her little cart across the
Thames
, although on this occasion she paid no more than a farthing – not the official sum for the trip, the watcher would have noticed, but the lighterman himself had never seen an old girl in such a sad old dither. Having an old mother himself, he felt a little generous today and even agreed to wait to take her back across the river, only to find that when she came back from her errand, on her cart was strapped a corpse in a winding sheet. This, to tell the truth, was a problem, but then one of his mates stopped on the landing to disembark a fare and, waving vaguely towards the old girl, who was still in such a terrible state, the lighterman got his mate to help him on with the cadaver. Fortunately, it was still bendy.

Dodger – because the old lady was indeed Dodger – felt rather happy about all this. And also slightly ashamed since, after all, the coroner of Four Farthings himself
and
his officer had come out to help the old lady with the cart and had assured her that the remains of her niece had been treated with veneration at all times. It warmed the cockles of your heart, so it did.

Then, of course, there was the return journey, this way against the tide, and the lighterman could see that he was not, as it were, going to become a rich man in this situation, so he said gruffly, ‘OK, dear, in for a lion, in for a lamb, a farthing each and let’s call it quits.’

The journey across the water wasn’t that long, although it was a bit choppy, and after the man helped the fussy old lady to get the little cart over the cobbles he was amazed beyond belief when the old girl handed him a shiny three sixpences, calling him the last gentleman in London. For a long time afterwards he remembered the incident fondly.

Once back on the right side of the Thames, a watcher would
have
seen the old lady pulling her cart in a haphazard way along a dark and foggy alley where there was a shadow and a great smell of gin, and a very drunken, very dirty and very nasty-looking man who said, ‘Got anything for me in your bag there, Granny?’

This little tableau was witnessed through the gloom by a bootblack who was sitting down on the kerb to eat his breakfast. Just as he began to think that he should do something about the ambush further on, something very strange eventuated in which the old lady seemed to vanish in a whirl and the man was on the ground while she was kicking him merrily in the fork, crying out, ‘If ever I see you around here again, sonny, I’ll have your giblets on my griddle, just you see if I don’t!’ Then, after adjusting her dress somewhat, the old lady once again became, well, an old lady in the eyes of the bootblack, who had watched with his half-eaten jacket potato neglected in his hand. Then the old dear waved at him cheerily and said, ‘Young man, who’s doing potatoes around here today?’

This led to Dodger continuing his journey with quite a lot of jacket potatoes in his bag, which he distributed to any old ladies he saw sitting pitifully on the kerb; it was a kind of penance, he thought. And God, who must surely have looked kindly on this act of charity, seemed to have arranged it that a lavender girl had set up right in the next street, which meant that Dodger was spared the chore of going out to find one, not a difficult task since in the stink of London everybody liked to buy some lavender now and again. In this case the lucky girl sold all of the stock to the old lady with grateful thanks and went to the pub, while the old lady, smelling far more fragrant, trundled on her way.

Moving a dead body is never easy in any case, but in the murkier part of Seven Dials Dodger treasured an alley with a
drain
in it that was just the job; and of course, once he was in the sewers he was in his element. He could go about his business unrecognized by the people walking about above, and the chances of meeting another tosher were small. Anyway, as the king of the toshers, he could do as he pleased. In sewers, if you knew where to look for them, there were places that would make a good-sized room – places the toshers had given wonderful names to, like Top and Turn Again.

Splashing his way into one of the tunnels, Dodger set about the nastier piece of the enterprise. This particular stretch had so far never been given a name; it got one now: Rest in Peace. Death was always around in the darker places of London, and it was an unusual day when you didn’t see a funeral procession, so this engendered a kind of pragmatism: people lived, people died and other people had to deal with it. At this point, because he very much wanted to live, Dodger pulled off his disguise to reveal his normal clothes hidden beneath the rags, and pulled on a pair of large, well-greased, leather gloves, just as Mrs Holland had advised, and he was grateful for the advice, and grateful too that he had spent so much on the lavender, because however you looked at it, the dull, heavy, cloying smell of death was something that you didn’t put up with for any longer than you had to.

So with traffic a few feet overhead, he pulled, pushed and levered very thoroughly until he had got things looking just right. All was well right up until when, as he was just positioning the remains of the young lady in her nook, she sighed as her head moved. Dodger thought, If something like
that
is going to happen it’s a good job you
are
standing in a sewer. It was nothing; he knew the dead could be quite noisy at times, as Mrs Holland had said.
What
with gases and so on, corpses might be said to speak long after they were dead. He opened his carefully prepared little bag of camphor and cayenne pepper, which ought to keep the rats away, for long enough at least.

As he stood back to look at his handiwork, he was glad, very glad, that he wouldn’t have to do it ever again. Then there was nothing more to do, apart from packing up his gloves, but he also took great care to leave the sewer at some distance away from the scene of the crime – if such it could be called, he added to himself. Finding a pump, he washed his hands in London water, which he knew was always slightly suspicious unless you boiled it, but good old lye soap was a reliable if caustic companion. Then he strolled back to Seven Dials with the air of a young man just enjoying the sunshine which, in fact, was rather strange today, as if something was going on in the upper air.

He didn’t think very much about this, however, for as soon as he got home two peelers were waiting for him, and one of them said, ‘Sir Robert would like a word with you, my little lad.’ He sniffed at the leftover lavender that Dodger had chosen to take home because it was always welcome around Onan. ‘Flowers for your girl, hey?’

Dodger ignored him, but he had been expecting something like this, since once the peelers had got interested in you, they kept on being interested in you, apparently thinking that sooner or later you would break down and confess to everything. It was a sort of game, and the worst of it was when they tried to seem to be friends. And so, like the upstanding citizen he was, he accompanied the two men to Scotland Yard, but making sure that he went with the swagger of a geezer and everyone in the rookeries could see that this wasn’t something he was in agreement with –
for
Dodger had a reputation to keep down; it was bad enough to be an official hero, but he would be damned if he was going to be seen to go willingly into anywhere where peelers lurked. It wouldn’t be the first, third or tenth time the peelers thought they had got Dodger and would have to think again.

Sir Robert Peel was waiting for him. Even now Dodger didn’t trust him – he looked like a swell, but had a street gleam in his eye. The head of the peelers regarded him over his desk and said, ‘Have you ever heard of the Outlander, my friend?’

‘No,’ lied Dodger, on the basis that you always lied to a policeman if at all possible.

Sir Robert gave him a blank look and said that the police forces of Europe would very much like to see the Outlander behind bars or, for preference, swinging from the gallows. ‘The Outlander is an assassin. He is a sharp man, Mister Dodger, and so are his knives. We presume from as much information as we can glean that he is very much interested in the whereabouts of Miss Simplicity. And, by association, you. We both know the facts of the matter, and I must assume that someone somewhere is getting extremely impatient, as evinced by the murder of Sharp Bob and his employee. We appear to be running out of time, Mister Dodger. You must understand that the British government would be doing nothing wrong in the eyes of many people if a runaway wife was sent back to her legal husband.’ He sniffed. ‘Distasteful as that would seem to many of us who are cognizant of the circumstances of this whole sordid matter. The clock is ticking, my friend. People in power do not like to be continually thwarted, and can I at this stage also draw to your attention the fact that I am one of them.’

There was a tapping noise and Dodger glanced down at Sir
Robert
Peel’s left hand, the fingers of which were drumming on a pile of documents which seemed rather familiar.

Sir Robert looked at his face and said, ‘I know, because it is my job to know these things, that a certain embassy was broken into two nights ago, with a great deal of documentation and miscellaneous jewellery stolen. Subsequently it appears that the miscreant, who we are under some pressure to bring to justice, then saw fit to set fire to a coach house.’

Dodger’s face was all innocent interest as Sir Robert continued, ‘Of course, my men had to go to check upon the details of this theft and this wilful vandalism and it seemed that even before the fire one wheel of this coach was damaged, but the perpetrator appeared to have scratched across the crest of this coach the name “Mr Punch”. I must assume that of course you know nothing about any of this?’