SV - 03 - Sergeant Verity Presents His Compliments (15 page)

'That ain't the point, Mr Samson!' said Verity angrily.

'No,' said Samson. 'The point is them photographic plates ain't worth a Pandy's spit. It's Miss Elaine and her letter that might tell a tale.'

'Funny name,' said Verity.

'We don't know it is her name,' Samson confessed. 'Being a foundling, she had to take a name for her profession. Seems she took one out of a poetry book by Mr Tennyson, something of King Arthur, to please the quality. So Miss Elaine she is.'

They turned into the New Cut, Lambeth, and Stringfellow reined in the elderly horse. In the hot summer afternoon the pawnbrokers had turned the contents of their small stifling shops on to the pavement, in order to do business in the open. Tables, chairs and looking-glasses blocked the promenade with precarious pyramids of copper kettles and pans. The cheese-dealer in a blue apron stood before the marble slab of his open window with quarters and slices of cheese on stands at either side. White eggs on deal racks were placarded as 'fresh from the country', and large cuts of bacon, 'fine flavour', made up the rest of the ticketed display. Stringfellow drew up the cab outside the secondhand clothes store, where bereaved families came to sell the clothes of the dead. Corduroy jackets, vests and fustian trousers hung from the rows of brass rods under the awning.

'It ain't the work of the world to catch young Elaine,' said Samson thoughtfully, 'but there's no harm in liming your bird good and proper.'

He and Verity got out of the cab. Samson helped Stringfellow down from the box and changed coats with him, so that it was now Samson who appeared, at first glance, as a shabby coachman and Stringfellow who seemed, in the dark interior of the cab, a man who might have ten or twenty sovereigns in his pocket. Stringfellow remained in the cab, holding a silver-topped stick which Samson had procured for the occasion to give a final touch of affluence to the old man's appearance. Samson swung himself on to the box of the cab, tilted his hat forward a little over his face, and appeared to doze in the warm sun. Verity leaned in through the cab door.

'Mr Stringfellow,' he said softly, 'I want you to have this.' He handed Stringfellow a wooden device consisting of a six-inch stem and a small slatted piece which protruded from the upper half of the stem like a flag on a pole.

'What's this, old chum?' asked the cabman doubtfully.

'It's my constabulary rattle, Mr Stringfellow. If there's any cause for trouble, or if the young person should make off, you're to spring the rattle. Press the top and then swing it round for all it's worth. Makes a racket to wake the dead.'

With this promise, Verity withdrew, lurking among the chairs in green and puce-coloured leather displayed before a furniture shop at some little distance from the cab. The bright, hot summer afternoon passed in dusty silence. A ginger-beer fountain pulled by a pair of ponies rumbled slowly down the street. It resembled nothing so much as an upright mahogany piano with two brass pump-handles and glass containers for receiv
ing the drink. Beyond the motionless perspective of St
rin
gfellow's cab and the beer fountain, a small group of m
en was gathering on a corne
r. They were stripped to the wa
ist and bore on their bare flesh marks of burns and scalding so h
orrifying that any passer-by was
likely to throw a shilling into the tin mug and hurry on, so that he might avoid being accosted by the injured
men. Verity knew the trick of ol
d, 'the scaldrum dodge' practised by beggars who learnt the art of staining their bodies with acid and gunpowder before setting out on their rounds. Under other circumstances he might have intervened, but there was more important business on hand.

'Kind and benevolent Christians!' the voice of the beggars' leader drifted faintly on the warm afternoon air of the street, 'It is with feelings of deep regret and shame that we unfortunate sailors are compelled to appear before you this day, to ask charity from the hands of strangers.'

Sailors, thought Verity, recognizing one of the beggars as Jack Tiptoe who had made a considerable living as a disabled beggar who could not put his heel to the ground. When discovered walking with both heels comfortably on the pavement he had been despatched to six months on the treadmill at Coldbath Fields Gaol. Jack Tiptoe had never been to sea in his life, nor was he likely to unless it was on a convict hulk.

'We are brought here from want, I may say actual starvation. What will not hunger and the cries of little children compel men to do?'

Several small children, possibly associated with the beggars, had approached the ginger-beer fountain.

'When we left our solitary humble homes this morning, our children were crying for food. I assure you, kind friends, we and our families would have been houseless wanderers all last night but, as you may see, we sold the shirts off our backs to pay for lodgings. We are English sailors, British jack-tars. It is hard that you won't give your own countrymen a penny, when you give so much to foreign hurdy-gurdies and organ-grinders.'

A girl of five or six, walking slowly away from the scene of the begging, holding a little tin cup, passed Stringfellow's cab. She stopped and turned a tearful face at the open door and then entered, holding out the cup. Verity began to move slowly and unobtrusively forward.

'I hope and trust,' chanted the beggars' spokesman, 'some humane Christian will stretch out a hand with a small trifle for us. . . .'

At that moment, Verity saw the prey. She was by no means seductive enough for Charley Wag's private collection, though she had served her time in Ned Roper's bawdy-house. At fifteen years old she appeared a loud, defiant youngster as she tossed the fair hair spread loose across her shoulders. Her face was a study in vulgar, snub-nosed insolence, her dark narrow eyes seeming to have the tint of green bronze. She moved rapidly along the street, a rough, striding tomboy, her grey skirt worn as short as possible to display a length of leg. At the cab she stopped, faced the interior and swore at Stringfellow for a dirty, filthy thing. Verity crept closer and Samson, as 'cabman', still appeared to doze on his box. Her voice was loud enough for Verity to catch every word as she swore at Stringfellow, demanding what he meant by trying to rape the little girl of five or six. Then there were hints at the financial cost to 'such a gentleman as he was' of having to face the police, a court case and public shame.

So that was the caper, Verity thought. Perhaps it was an extension of the scaldrum dodge. Elaine working in partnership with the beggars. No doubt it was more remunerative than the fairground display for which she had worn the page's costume.

She was calling now to the beggars, urging them to come and see what had happened. By God, Verity thought, there must be a score of silk-hatted gentlemen, moved to pity by a little girl's tears, who had fallen victim to the dodge and had turned out every pocket and parted with watch, chain, pocket-book and stock-pin to silence the hue and cry of the begging school.

The beggars had fallen silent and were now beginning to move with slow determination down the pavement towards the cab. Verity braced himself for a scuffle. But just then, the hot quiet afternoon erupted with a din of the most raucous and clattering kind. Seeing the advance of the beggars, Stringfellow had sprung Verity's rattle. It was a sound which any member of the criminal class knew all too well. The beggars heard it, paused, turned and ran, scattering in every direction, separating down different alleys and turnings to lessen the chance of capture. Jack Tiptoe led the retreat, sprinting away down the New Cut like a champion.

The little girl ducked away from Verity and ran off. It was not worth giving chase, he thought, and losing the more important catch. With Samson at his side and Stringfellow now out of the cab, he pinned the girl against the coachwork and locked the iron cuffs on her wrists.

'Why, Miss Elaine,' said Samson cheerily, 'fancy you ha
ving come to this sort o' caper!
'

'You bastards!' she said, in the tone of a belligerent heif
er, 'you put this up on purpose!
'

They bundled her into the cab, where she landed sprawling on the leather seat, the grey pleated skirt hauled up far enough to display the sturdy roundness of her young thighs.

'Now,' said Samson conversationally, 'bastards we may or may not be, miss, but we ain't here to arrest you. We want you where you can be got and seen from now on.'

The girl's narrow eyes brightened, as though at the thought of what she might make as a police informer.

'First,' said Samson, 'there's got to be a reckoning for the dodge you been working in the New Cut here. You'll be took to Mrs Rouncewell's.
..."

'No!' cried Elaine.

'You'll be took to Mrs Rouncewell's, dealt with by her, and put to honest toil in her hygienic steam-laundry. When she's brought you to the right frame o' mind, Mr Verity will ask you some very important questions. . . .'

'Bugger your questions!' she snarled, struggling between them.

'Arrest might be better, Mr Samson,' said Verity nervously. 'Arrest is proper.'

'You want your questions answered,' said Samson, 'you leave my case to me. She ain't going to say a word unless she's obliged.'

He tapped the roof of the cab.

'Mr Stringfellow, 'ave the goodness to take us round to Mrs Rouncewell's Steam Laundry, off Old Kent Road.'

Lightning stumbled forward with a rattle of harness, under Stringfellow's gruff command, and they jogged sedately towards Blackfriars, the Elephant and Castle, and the strange domain of Mrs Martha Rouncewell.

The Hygienic Steam Laundry was a forbidding building behind a facade of soot-blackened London brick, windows with frosted glass and iron bars, its single vaulted entrance which suggested the gate of a workhouse. Mrs Rouncewell was a widow with a living to earn and she was no believer in allowing her working-girls off the premises. Ten years before, she had been a redoubtable police matron who took a lively interest in her duties of close-searching female suspects. After a brief marriage, which proved too much for her spouse, Horace Rouncewell, she undertook the running of his business with vigour and determination. The laundry was a greater success in his widow's hands than it had ever been in his own, and she remained the friend, often the assistant, of any detective officer who took her fancy. To this class, both Samson and Verity belonged.

Even on such a hot afternoon, a fog of escaping steam half-filled the cobbled courtyard as the gate was locked again behind Stringfellow's cab. Beyond the opaque glass of some of the windows, flesh-pink shapes moved to and fro. It was no secret that in such establishments, in the moist heat, the girls' clothes became sodden rags within ten minutes.

Many of them worked stripped naked to the waist and some chose to work naked altogether.

In her parlour, to which the hiss and clatter of the laundry penetrated clearly, Mrs Rouncewell, dark and brawny with two tufts of hair springing from moles on her chin and cheek-bone, surveyed her visitors.

'We 'oped,' said Samson piously, 'that you might favour us with your assistance in a delicate investigation. This young person, Miss Elaine, is to be asked questions of great consequence to a titled and noble family. Only she won't answer. However, she has also been apprehended begging and extorting. Now, for that she might be confined in gaol. But such wouldn't serve the noble family and wouldn't answer questions. On the other hand, if she was brought to repentance by a lady of a firm hand, such as yourself, and taught to answer when spoke to, then her misdemeanour might be forgot. And o' course, Elaine here would be expected to apprentice herself here to you, for which the parish might reimburse you, and for which you wouldn't pay a 'aypenny wages to her.'

Mrs Rouncewell thought about this.

'Quite the best thing for 'er,' she said at last. 'It beats the Old Bailey by lengths. Miss Workhouse! Sister Charity! In 'ere.'

Two burly young women in grimy smocks appeared. 'Her,' said Mrs Rouncewell, nodding at Elaine, 'for the barrel.'

Without another word said the two smocked women seized the handcuffed girl and in a few deft movements stripped off the skirt and the pants she was wearing underneath. One of them pulled aside a curtain, revealing an alcove into which a barrel lying on its side had been securely wedged. Verity, nervously sensing what was about to happen, looked at Samson. But Samson watched with complete calm. The women lifted Elaine and pushed her face down over the barrel. As it was happening, the sturdy adolescent tossed back her fair hair and twisted her face round defiantly. Then her head and shoulders disappeared over the far side of the barrel and Verity could see nothing beyond the full pale cheeks of Elaine's bottom. Mrs Rouncewell armed herself with a switch cut from an ash plant.

'And now,' she said, 'p'raps you gentlemen'd 'ave the goodness just to take a turn down so far as the Elephant.'

As they left the parlour, she turned to her task, measuring the ash-plant carefully across the plump globes which Elaine reluctantly presented.