The Streets Read online

  I found out. Conducting me in cuffs to my lodgings, the police discovered the place in tumultuous disarray, drawers emptied, the bed and mattress torn apart, every last stitch I owned strewn across the floor. Whoever had broken in must have known there was loot to be had, and had turned the room upside down looking for it. This was plainly not the scene the chief detective had anticipated. At his quizzical look I gestured to a small storeroom where I kept a travelling trunk and other unwieldy items. The trunk’s lock had been jemmied, its innocent contents upended. It was upon seeing the disturbed wedge of floorboard beneath it that I knew, instinctively, that the burglar was no stranger to me. She had seen me go in there, and perhaps had noticed the slight delay in my re-emergence. I thought I had been crafty. But she had outdone me, had she not? The policeman lowered a candle to the hole in the floor: my haul had gone. ‘Been bested at your own game, lad,’ he muttered. ‘Any idea who?’ I shook my head.

  Whilst I was in prison awaiting trial I learned what had become of my ill-gotten gains. A man and a woman had been arrested, in Paddington, London, and after some paltry dissembling had confessed their crime. They had worked the trick several times before, with success, the woman befriending a needy stranger (never a shortage of them, I gathered), ensnaring him with a story of woe, then finagling money on the pretext of being ‘rescued’. The woman’s name was Amy – an alias, I believe. The man was Fenton. It transpired that he had provided the anonymous tip to Flegg and co. that I was about to leave town, my pockets bulging. Meanwhile, with the key I had given Amy, the couple entered my rooms and set about their search.

  The only part of their scheme that continued to puzzle me was how Amy came to have that bruise down the side of her face, the one she said he had given her for trying to escape. During those first weeks of incarceration, staring at the limewashed brick wall of my cell, I pondered the idea of Amy – or whatever her name was – agreeing to submit herself to a blow from him, leaving such a mark as would induce a sympathetic observer to action. Yet that bit of fakery didn’t sit quite right with me. I could not believe that bruise was premeditated, and instead of cursing her name I would contrive a different scenario, of Amy acting under duress. She had been his accomplice often enough before, but this time she could not go through with the deception, tormented as she was by a secret tender feeling for their dupe. Her professions of love to him were perhaps not counterfeit after all. She had begged Fenton to stop, to spare just this one from all the rest. I imagined her reasoning with him, then begging him, and finally provoking the violent reaction that everyone would see on her face. Yes, that must have been how it happened . . . For a while I clung to this fantasy of her regret, nurtured it of a lonely night, until it met the fate of so many illusions, and withered in the foul prison air.

  The gaslight in Casti’s had been dimmed to a brownish glow since I had begun my tale. Roma’s expression, steeped in shadow, was unreadable, whilst her dark eyes, fixed on me, were as still and opaque as a cat’s. I did not feel shame, or remorse, or bitterness; only a kind of vacant exhaustion from recounting my folly.

  ‘How long did you get?’ she said eventually.

  ‘Four months. Though it felt more like four years.’ There was another long pause before she spoke again.

  ‘The sewing. I should have guessed.’

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘That day you helped me repairin’ those dresses. I remember you told me you learned to sew at school. But that’s not true, is it?’

  I shook my head. ‘Sewing was the one thing I learned to do in prison – apart from surviving. I can never look at a mailbag now without wondering if it’s one of mine.’

  A slight dimpling in her cheek suggested she was trying not to smile. ‘You’re a dark’un, ain’t ya? A real dark horse.’

  ‘Am I?’ I shrugged. ‘I only told that story to clear myself of the charge – I never believed you a thief.’

  ‘Yeah, well . . . I s’pose I got that wrong.’

  ‘Then we are friends again, you and I?’

  Her face leaned out of the shadow, and I saw upon it the beam, half rueful, half playful, that secretly touched me even more than those green and blue eyes of hers. She was holding out her hand, and I took it right willingly.

  12

  Noser

  I ONCE FANCIED I knew Somers Town better than I did. It was now September, which meant that I had been nearly seven months employed there on behalf of The Labouring Classes of London. Yet though it was one of London’s smaller districts, its topography was dense. No map of it I ever saw did justice to that warren of lanes and alleys, those turnings so obscure that they failed to merit the courtesy of a name. You will recall my earliest experience of its labyrinthine intricacy was the day I found myself ambushed somewhere in the Brill, and Jo saved me from a mugging by Gaffy and co.

  Late one afternoon I happened to find myself in that very same little maze. It was perhaps not advisable to be there alone, but Jo was still abed with a hacking cough, and by now I felt no need of a protector. It was the sign above a public house that first jolted my memory: the Victory. I knew it to be a dangerous den from Jo and others, a meeting place for most of the neighbourhood villians – the sharpers and snide-pitchers, the busters and screwsmen, the priggers and cracksmen. The name of the pub seemed an irony in itself. The Victory, with its carious brickwork and smeared windows, wore a look of sullen defeat. A few drinkers stood outside its doors, while a starved-looking dog slunk about, sniffing the cobbles as if they might yield some sustenance.

  I loitered on the other side of the street for a while, and watched as the pub began to fill up. Every so often a child would walk in, emerging some minutes later with a jug of beer to carry home, I presumed for parents too incapacitated to fetch it themselves. I had heard that measures were afoot in Parliament to prevent drink being sold to children under the age of thirteen, though even if that became law I could not imagine it being enforced around here. The rare police constable one saw patrolling hereabouts would be more likely to call in for an ale himself than to stop anybody else purchasing it. Judging the place sufficiently busy for me to go unnoticed, I crossed the street and sidled into the taproom, dimly illumined at this hour by flickering gas jets. Most of the clientele sat at tables playing cards or chatting; in certain gazes I saw the cheerless determination of drinkers who would not leave this room without being well and truly soused.

  I stood at the bar drinking a half-and-half and took advantage of a lull to ask the potman if Gaffy had been in lately. The man curled his lip, as if such a question were pure impudence. He turned away and strolled to the other end of the bar, where I soon saw him conversing quite genially with a ‘reg’lar’. At about seven, people began pouring through the doors, signalling the end of market day at the Brill. The room became so smoky and crowded that I didn’t notice the shortish cove until he was at my elbow. He wore a billycock hat and a cord jacket so deeply engrained with dirt that it almost gleamed under the yolky pub light. His stubbled jaw and ferrety features confirmed him as a trosseno. He mumbled something, and leaning down – he really was quite short – I said, ‘Beg your pardon?’

  ‘I said move yer trotters,’ he hissed, and hoicked his thumb over his shoulder. I followed him out of the taproom, down a narrow passage and into a backyard, where he told me to wait. I looked about me. The yard was enclosed on all sides, the only exit being the door I had just come through. Most of this tiny space was occupied by giant kegs and crates of ale stacked against the side wall. I was just testing the strength of a drainpipe (I could shinny up this at a pinch) when the door swung open and three figures ambled through, then a fourth, my diminutive host from before. Gaffy stood there, nasty, brutish and tall, staring at me.

  ‘This ’im?’ he said, and Shorty nodded. At an invisible signal the two slab-faced youths at his side stepped forward and grabbed me, one by the arm, one by the scruff of the neck. They walked me Spanish, feet off the ground, to Gaffy, whose face was now so c
lose to mine I could smell porter on his breath. As he stared, his expression changed to a frown. ‘Don’t I know you?’

  I suppose the beard I had grown since our first encounter had caused him this uncertainty – or perhaps I simply had an unmemorable face. I shook my head, not daring to speak.

  ‘You’ve been sniffin’ around in my bisniss, I’ve ’eard,’ he continued. ‘At the dolly shop, now ’ere. I reckons you’re a noser.’ I knew this word for a police spy. And I also knew it was an invidious thing to be in these parts.

  ‘No, I’m not. I’ve nothing to do with the police.’

  Gaffy seemed not to have heard me. ‘Yeah . . . a noser. And ya know what ’appens to nosers?’ By a snake-quick movement of his arm I realised what he had just taken out, and I saw my reflection in its thin blade as he held it before my eye. ‘Well, do ya?’ Having drawn the flat of the knife down my cheek, he pressed its point against the inside of my nostril. My heart was now going like a racehorse. I wanted to struggle, but realised an abrupt movement could be perilous.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ I breathed. My voice, with the knife up my nose, sounded queerly metallic, which in other circumstances might have been humorous.

  ‘Don’t what?’

  ‘Don’t know . . . what happens to nosers.’

  For answer he jerked the blade, and I yelped like a dog. An unutterable molten pain burned inside my nose, and a Niagara of blood was purling down my chin and turning my shirt front crimson. I sank to the floor, moaning, my hands cupped over my poor sliced nostril. I sensed them talking, but heard only a high keening of distress in my ears. (I realised later that this was my own voice.) A few minutes passed, then someone else came into the yard. I was picked up beneath the arms and seated on a crate. My nose had become a flaming agonised throb in the centre of my face, and my trembling hands could not staunch the flow. Someone was lightly shaking my shoulder, but when I looked up my eyes were watering too much to see.

  ‘I said, who are ye?’ asked the voice, a newcomer.

  I whimpered my name, and then he must have turned back to remonstrate with Gaffy. I overheard vexed phrases: ‘. . . cut him for? . . . bleedin’ like a stuck pig . . . get him in here’. He stalked off in a fury, and I was helped inside by the two young bruisers. They took me into a washroom, where I was left with a rag and a basin of cold water. I cleaned myself up as best I could, still moaning piteously. I glanced at a speckled looking glass, and started at the reflection; blotched cheeks, red-raw eyes and a nose that looked like a bit of bloody liver. Even to dab at it was agony. They returned for me some minutes later, and I was led into a snug at the back of the pub. The man whose voice I had heard sat there: it was the owner and slumlord Moyles, whom I had not seen since the day I had harangued him to advantage in the St Pancras Vestry Hall. Unlike Gaffy, who leaned against the fireplace, Moyles knew who I was.

  ‘Mr Wildeblood,’ he said, gesturing me to a chair at his table. ‘Takes some nerve to come round here after the trouble you’ve caused. Your little stunt at the Vestry Hall cost me, I can tell ye. So, speak up – what’re you doing here?’ His glowering deep-set eyes and saturnine brow might have caused me unease were I not preoccupied by my wound.

  I lowered the rag from my face. ‘An item of jewellery was mislaid by a friend of mine. I was led to believe that this might be the place I should recover it. For a price.’

  ‘This is a public house, not a dolly shop,’ he said, and turned a look of undisguised scorn on Gaffy. ‘What d’you know about this?’

  Gaffy shrugged. ‘He’s been to the Jew fence off Ossulston Street. Some talk about a lost fawney – dunno what it has to do with me.’

  ‘I have money,’ I said carefully. ‘I can pay a . . . reward for its return.’

  Moyles, still frowning with displeasure, exchanged a look with Gaffy. After some silent contemplation the former addressed me again. ‘You’re one of Marchmont’s lot, ain’t you? Your guvnor’s got himself in some rare trouble.’

  I had no idea what ‘trouble’ he meant, but I had learned a method of wheedling out information during my time as an interviewer: pretend to know. Prompt your interlocutor. Wait to see how the cat will jump – I had got that from Paget. ‘You mean the business with Condor Holdings?’

  I saw a flicker of surprise momentarily cross Moyles’s face before he composed himself, and I knew I had hit a nerve. ‘Ye’d think a man on his beam ends would be more circumspect about money. But now he’s cutting up rough, objecting to how the League intends to run the place.’ I didn’t altogether understand this. I guessed he meant the Social Protection League, and his reference to ‘the place’ was Bindon Fields. I waited for him to continue, but his expression had changed to narrow-eyed cunning. ‘You know Marchmont well, I dare say?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ I agreed.

  ‘And you have access to his records and such?’

  I sensed where he was tending with this enquiry. ‘I can get it very easily,’ I lied.

  Moyles leaned back in his chair and considered me. ‘He’s become quite a liability, the guvnor. Believes himself above it all. I know certain fellows in the organisation would like rid of him. But they’d need something, from the inside . . . if you take my meaning’.

  I did not take his meaning. What organisation? And what information on Marchmont were they after? I betrayed none of this, only sat there, listening, nodding. I had to keep him thinking I was on the inside.

  ‘I am on good terms with Mr Rennert, his secretary,’ I said. ‘If there is something in particular you require . . .’ Moyles stared hard at me. I could tell he was calculating the odds on my being useful to him. Whilst he did so I thought back to what he had just said about Marchmont’s ‘cutting up rough’. With as much nonchalance as I could feign, I returned to this question. ‘So what’s Marchmont’s beef with the League . . .?’

  Moyles, distracted, spoke loosely. ‘It’s still the appointment of the superintendent. Threatens to kick up a stink.’

  ‘Superintendent? Who would that be?’ My curiosity was too obvious, and his gaze sharpened on me.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘I – heard rumours . . .’

  That was my mistake, the moment Moyles seemed to twig I had been groping in the dark. His expression asked the question: How much about this do you know? The tentative mood of intrigue between us suddenly dissolved, and when he spoke again his tone was brisk and businesslike. ‘You said you had money, for the ring. On you?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, feeling the insult to my worldliness, ‘not on me. But I can get it.’

  Moyles looked round at Gaffy, his silent sentinel. ‘I’m sure my associate knows where it can be found, at a price. I leave that for you to arrange.’ Our interview was at an end. Gaffy gave a small lift of his chin in acknowledgement, and I rose from the table, dismissed. As I walked to the door, Moyles said at my back, ‘You’d be well advised to keep away from here, Mr Wildeblood. And look after that nose. Next time you could lose the whole thing.’

  My landlady squawked in horror when I came through the door later that evening. When I saw myself in the looking glass I used for shaving I understood why. From my misadventure at the Victory I had made my way to a hospital on the City Road, ignoring the surprised look of the lady I sat next to on the ’bus. Even at the hospital’s receiving room, where one would suppose they were used to such sights, my injured nose had provoked an audible gasp of dismay from one young nurse. When the doctor had explained the procedure he was about to perform, I had lost my nerve and bleated to him, ‘Is there really no other way?’

  The doctor, a squat, jovial fellow with extravagant whiskers, had smirked at my cowardice. ‘Do you wish to continue breathing through your nose?’ he had asked.

  I admitted that I did.

  ‘Then there is no other way.’

  Thus followed a half-hour of suturing that felt as though the wing of my nostril were being liberally employed as a pincushion. Now, in the glass, the face that had frightened
my landlady stared back in all its repulsive absurdity. The hospital nurses had been nothing if not clinical. A thick wad of white dressing criss-crossed my nose, overwhelming it. I looked like a muzzled dog, or a sinister clown from a commedia dell’arte. Purplish-black rings had formed beneath my eyes, adding an extra dab of ugliness. As I discovered the next morning, I could not have drawn more startled looks from passers-by if I had worn a leper’s bell around my neck.

  My appearance at the office prompted sniggers, and not a few guffaws. One of the copy editors, Timms, capered in front of me, rolling his fists like a boxer. I had only just sat down when Rennert appeared at his office door and wordlessly summoned me within. He must have been quite distracted, because it was only when I sat down opposite him that his expression tightened into a frown.

  ‘What on earth is that on your face?’ he asked.

  I spun him the tale of a domestic accident, though he showed scant interest in listening to it. He seemed in an oddly remote mood, so different from his usual hawkish vigilance. I was proceeding through an account of a recent interview with a street ballad singer when he held up his hand to silence me. He brooded for some moments, then puffed out his cheeks. ‘Mr Wildeblood,’ he began, ‘the paper is to make a number of changes, mostly to do with cutting costs. It has come to the point, alas, where we must dispense with the services of certain contributors, and I regret to say that you are amongst them.’