Dodger (7 page)

‘Grandad’s dead.’ He dropped it on them out of the sky.

‘Never!’ said Bent Henry. ‘I was toshing with him only the day before yesterday, just before the storm!’

‘And I saw him today,’ said Dodger sharply. ‘I saw him die, right there in front of me! He was thirty-three! Don’t nobody say he ain’t dead, ’cos he is, right? Down below Shoreditch around about the Maelstrom!’

Mary-Go-Round started to cry; she was a decent sort, with an air all the time of being from somewhere else and having only just arrived here. She sold violets to ladies during the season, and sold anything else she could get the rest of the time. She wasn’t all that bad at being a pickpocket, on account of looking very much like an angel what had been hit on the head with something, so she wasn’t suspected, but however you saw her, she had more teeth than brains, and she didn’t have many teeth. As for the others, they just appeared a bit more miserable than they had before; they didn’t look him in the eye, just stared down at the ground as if they wished that they weren’t there.

Dodger said, ‘He gave me his haul, such as it was.’ Feeling awkwardly as if this was not enough, he then added, ‘That’s why I came here, to buy you all a pie and porter to drink his health.’ This news appeared to raise the spirits of all concerned more than somewhat, especially when Dodger reached into his pocket and disembogued himself of sixpence which magically became tankards all round of a liquid so thick that it was food.

While these were being emptied with variations on the theme of ‘glug’, Dodger noticed that Mary-Go-Round was still snivelling, and being a kind sort of cove, he said softly, ‘If it’s any help,
Mary
, he was smiling when he went; he said he’d seen the Lady.’

This information apparently didn’t satisfy, and in between sobs Mary said, ‘Double Henry stopped off just now for some grub and some brandy, seeing as how he’d just had to pull another girl out of the river.’

Dodger sighed. Double Henry was a waterman, constantly paddling his way up and down the Thames looking for anyone who wanted transport. The rest of Mary’s news was unfortunately quite familiar. The gang of people who were more or less his own age that Dodger met most often were a tough bunch, and so they survived; but the city and its river were harsh indeed on the ones who didn’t make the grade.

‘He reckoned she’d jumped off the bridge in Putney,’ said Mary. ‘Probably up the duff.’

Crestfallen, Dodger sighed again. They usually were with child, he thought: the girls from faraway places with strange-sounding names like Berkhamsted and Uxbridge, who had come to London hoping it would be better than a life among the hay seeds. But the moment they arrived, the city in all its various ways ate them and spat them out, almost always into the Thames.

That was no way to go, since you could only call what was in the river ‘water’ because it was too runny to be called dirt. When the corpses came to the surface, the poor old watermen and lightermen had to gaff them and row them down to the coroner of one of the boroughs. There was a bounty for turning over these sad remnants to the coroner’s office, and Double Henry had told him once that sometimes it was worthwhile to take a corpse quite a long way to get to the borough that was paying the most, though it was generally the coroner at Four Farthings. The coroner would post notice of the dead person and sometimes, Dodger had heard,
the
notice got into the newspapers. Maybe the girls’ bodies would end up in Crossbones Graveyard, or a paupers’ burying ground somewhere else, and sometimes, of course, as everybody knew, they could end up in the teaching hospitals and under the scalpels of the medical students.

Mary was still snivelling, and in a conversation made up largely of blobs of snot said, ‘It’s so sad. They
all
have long blonde hair. All the country girls have long blonde hair and, well, they are also, you know, innocent.’

Messy Bessie intervened with, ‘I was innocent once. But it didn’t do me any good. Then I found out what I was doing wrong.’ She added, ‘But I was born on the streets here, knew what to expect. Them poor little innocents never stand a chance when the first kind gentleman plies them with liquor.’

Mary-Go-Round sniffed again and said, ‘Gent tried to ply me with liquor once, but he ran out of money and I took most of what he had left when he fell asleep. Finest watch and chain I ever pinched. Still,’ she continued, ‘them poor girls wasn’t born round here like the likes of us, so they don’t know nothing.’

Her words reminded Dodger of Charlie. Then his thoughts turned to Sol and what
he
had voiced earlier. He said, as much to the open air as anything else, ‘I should give up on the toshing . . .’ His voice trailed off. Now he was talking to himself more than to anyone else. What
could
I do? he thought. After all, everybody has to work, everybody needs to eat, everybody has to live.

Oh, that smile on the face of Grandad; what had he seen in that last smile? He had seen the Lady. Toshers always knew somebody who had seen the Lady; nobody had ever seen her themselves, but nevertheless any tosher could tell you what she looked like. She was quite tall, had a dress that was all shiny, like silk; she had
beautiful
blue eyes and there was always a sort of fine mist around her, and if you looked down at her feet you would see the rats all sitting on her shoes. They said that if you ever saw her feet, they would be rat claws. But Dodger knew that he would never dare to look, because supposing they were; or even worse, supposing they weren’t!

All those rats, watching you and then watching her. Just maybe – he never knew – it would take only one word from her, and if you had been a bad tosher she might set the rats on you. And if you were a very good tosher, she would smile on you and give you a great big kiss (some said a great deal more than just a kiss). And from that day on you would always be lucky on the tosh.

He wondered again about those poor wretched girls who’d jumped. Many of them, of course, were with child, and then, because the barometer of Dodger’s nature almost always gravitated to ‘set fair’, he let go that chain of thought. Generally speaking he had always tried to keep a distance between himself and grief; and besides, he had pressing business to attend to.

But not so pressing as to prevent him from raising his mug and shouting, ‘Here’s to Grandad, wherever the hell he is now.’ This was echoed by all concerned – quite possibly, knowing them, in the hope of another round of drinks. But they were disappointed because Dodger continued, ‘Will you lot listen to me? On the night of the big storm, somebody was trying to kill a girl – one of them young innocents you was just talking about, I reckon – only she ran away, and I sort of found her, and now she is being looked after.’ He hesitated, faced with a wall of silence, and then carried on again, losing hope, ‘She had golden hair . . . and they beat her up, and I want to find out why. I want to kick seven types of shite out of the people who did it, and I want you to help me.’

At this point Dodger was treated to a wonderful bit of street theatre, which with barely a word being spoken, went in three acts, the first being: ‘I don’t know nuffin’,’ and the next, ‘I never saw nuffin’,’ and finally that old favourite, ‘I never done nuffin’,’ followed at no extra cost by an encore, which was that tried and tested old chestnut, ‘I wasn’t there.’

Dodger had expected something like this, even from his occasional chums. It wasn’t personal, because nobody likes questions, especially when perhaps one day questions would be asked about you. But this was important to him, and so he snapped his fingers, which was the cue for Onan to growl – a sound which you could have expected might come not from a medium-sized dog like Onan but from something dreadful arising from the depths of the sea, something with an appetite. It had a nasty rumble to it, and it simply did not stop. Now Dodger said, in a voice that was as flat as the rumble was bumpy, ‘Listen to me, will you? This is Dodger – me, right, your
friend
Dodger. She was a girl with golden hair and a face that was black and blue!’

Dodger saw something like panic in their eyes, as if they thought that he had gone mad. But then Messy Bessie’s big round features seemed to shift as she struggled with the concept of something unusual, such as a thought.

She never had many of them; to see them at all you probably would need a microscope, such as the one he saw once on one of the travelling shows. There were always travelling shows, and they were ever popular; and in this one they had this apparatus you could stare into. You looked down into a glass of water, and when your eye got accustomed you started to see all the tiny little wriggly things in the water, bobbing up and down, spinning and dancing little jigs and having such fun that the man who ran the
travelling
show said it showed how good the Thames water was if so many tiny little creatures could survive in it.

To Dodger, Bessie’s mind seemed to be like that – mostly empty, but every now and again something wriggling. He said, encouragingly, ‘Go on, Bessie.’

She glanced at the others, who tried not to look at her. He understood, in a way. It didn’t do to be known as somebody who told you the things they saw, in case those things included something they did not want to get about, and there were, around and about, people much worse than mudlarks and toshers – people who were handy with a shiv or a cut-throat razor and had not a glimmer of mercy in their eyes.

But now, in the eyes of Messy Bessie, there was an unusual determination. She didn’t have golden hair – not much in the way of hair at all, in fact; and such as it was, the strands that remained were greasy and tended to roll themselves into strange little kiss curls. She fiddled with a ‘curl’, then looked defiantly at the others and said, ‘I was doing a bit of mumping in the Mall, day before the storm, and a nobby coach went past with its door open, you see, and this girl jumped out and had it away down the street as if she was on fire, right? And two coves dropped off the thing, right, and legged it after her, spit arse, pushing people out of the way like they was not important.’ Messy Bessie stopped, shrugged, indicating that that was that. Her associates were idly looking around, but specifically not focusing on her, as if to make it quite clear that they had nothing to do with this strange and dangerously talkative woman.

But Dodger said, ‘What sort of coach?’

He kept his focus on Bessie, because he just knew that if he didn’t she would suddenly get very forgetful, and what he got,
after
some churning of recollection on Bessie’s part, was: ‘Pricey, nobby, two horses.’ Messy Bessie shut her mouth firmly, an indication that she didn’t intend to open it again unless there was the prospect of another drink. It was quite easy for Dodger to read her mind; after all, there was such a lot of space in there. He jingled the remaining coins in his pocket – the international language – and another light went on in Bessie’s big round sad face. ‘Funny thing about that coach; when it went off there was a, like, squeal from one of the wheels, nearly as bad as a pig being killed. I heard it all down the road.’

Dodger thanked her, sliding over a few coppers, and nodded at the rest of them, who looked as if a murder had just taken place there and then.

Then, suddenly, Messy Bessie, the coins in her hand, said, ‘Just remembered something else. She was yelling, but I don’t know what, on account of it being in some kind of lingo. The coachman too – he weren’t no Englisher neither.’ She gave Dodger a sharp and meaningful look, and he handed over an extra couple of farthings, wondering as he did so if he could reclaim some of this necessary expenditure from Mister Charlie. He would have to keep a tally though, because Charlie was definitely not the kind of man you could run rings around.

As he walked away, Dodger wondered whether he should go and see the man; after all, he had important information now, didn’t he? Information that had cost him money to acquire – a considerable amount of money, and possibly worth a bit more too if he put a shine on it. Although he knew it really wouldn’t be sensible to get ambitious about the amounts paid to start with . . .

He fumbled in his pocket, a receptacle that contained anything that Dodger could punch into it. There it was: the oblong piece of
card
. He carefully put all the letters together, and the numbers too; for after all, everybody knew where Fleet Street was. It was where all the newspapers were made, but to Dodger it was a halfway decent toshing area with one or two useful other tunnels nearby. The Fleet river itself was part of the sewer and it was amazing what ended up in there . . . He recalled with pleasure that once when he was exploring there he had found a bracelet with two sapphires in it, and on the same day also a whole sovereign, which made it a lucky place, given that a decent haul from a day’s toshing could often be as low as a handful of farthings.

So he set off, Onan still trotting obediently behind him. He walked on, lost in thought. Of course, Messy Bessie wasn’t the sort to come up with something so helpful as a crest such as might have been seen on a nobleman’s coach, and it dawned on Dodger that in any case, if the coach was doing such dirty deeds as taking young ladies to places they shouldn’t be going to, someone might not want to put their crest on it. But a squeaky wheel would go on speaking until somebody did something about it. He didn’t have much time and that was all he had to go on, in a city with hundreds of coaches and other miscellaneous conveyances.

It is, he thought, probably going to be a little bit difficult, but if I have anything to do with it, the squeaky wheel will get the grease, the grease being Dodger. And possibly, he entertained in the privacy of his own head, the men involved might form a close acquaintance with the comfort of Dodger’s fist . . .