The Inquiry Agent

by William King

  “My business is good,” I said, knowing that this is what she really wanted to find out and that she would keep talking until she did unless I was prepared to be very rude to her, which at that moment I was not. “I got a new job today.”

  “A good one?” What she really wanted to know was whether it was a well-paying one, but she could not come out and say that what with me being her employer and all.

  “I have some hopes.”

  “I hope so, because the butcher and the baker are asking about their bills. The doctor too, most especially the doctor.”

  Money had been tight for a while and I could see she was worried not just about her wages but what might happen to the children and perhaps even to me. She’d been with us for a while, had served the children’s mother, and looked on them with something of the fondness of a grandmother.

  Like me, she was worried about Rachel. Her doctors’ bills already had eaten up most of my savings and a good deal of my income for the previous year but there was nothing much that could be done about that. A guinea a visit is what medical men charge and that’s what you need to pay. I just needed to find more money, to pay the doctor and the butcher too as well as Mrs Marshall's wages.

  If I had to I would go to the moneylenders and write accepted across the top of a bill of hand but that was the option of last resort, to be put off for as long as possible, to be avoided completely if I could help it. I knew only too well what happened to those who got themselves into the moneylender's clutches. Going to them would only postpone the problem rather than solve it. Indeed, in many ways it would make things worse, for in the long run the moneylenders would take far more money than even the doctors would, and cash used to pay their interest would not buy medicine.

  The only thing to be done was to find the money myself, and the best way of doing that at the present moment was to find the men who had robbed Charles Soames. I would keep my eyes open for other paying work while I was about that business.

  “Not to worry, Mr Brodie,” Mrs Marshall said. “The Good Lord will help us through this.”

  “The Good Lord helps those who help themselves,” I said.

  “There's truth in that Mr Brodie. But he helps anyway. And now I think, with your permission, I'm away to my bed. Is there anything you would like before I go?”

  “No,” I said. “Goodnight, Marshall.”

  “Goodnight, Mr Brodie.”

  I went over to my desk and wrote out a receipt for the money Mr Soames had given me and then inscribed the events of the day in my diary. It was a habit I got into when I first became a Runner and I never lost it. When you do police work you never know when having such a record might prove useful, you see.

  Once that was done, I sat by the fire for a long time, staring at the coals, watching shapes form themselves in the flame. There were times when I thought I saw castles, there were times when I thought I saw goblin faces, but what I didn't see was any easy answer to my problems.

  I let my mind drift back over the events of the day, and I thought about what Sarah had told me about Billy Tucker. I still found it hard to take seriously the idea that he intended to kill me. In my mind, I pictured him as that small cheeky lad. It was about as hard to imagine him hurting me as it was to imagine Donald being able to do it.

  I should have known better, for I had seen what 10 years and transportation to Australia could do to a man. Of course, I didn't want to take it seriously. I had enough problems at that time without doing so.

  I fell asleep in the chair, and it was sometime after midnight when I woke, put the guard on the fire and pulled out the sofa bed. For a long time Rachel kept me awake with her coughing.

  Her mother had died that way, coughing.

  Thursday, April 8th, 1841

  It was a bright sunny morning in the Strand. Caged birds were singing in the open windows. I threaded my way through a long line of sandwich board men advertising Bailley’s patent medicine, Dr Proudie’s beauty creams and numerous pills that would cure everything from gout to baldness. Every wall was plastered with advertisements for medicines and plays and musical shows. They told me that Tom and Jerry would be playing at the Adelphi tonight and every night until further notice, and that you could take a steamship to Ostend if you had the mind. Everywhere people barged into each other, knocking each other off the pavement and into the street to dodge the cursing cabmen and their chariots. It was business as usual in the most commercial city in the world.

  We were well into April now and the respectable sort of flower girls had mostly switched to selling oranges- they keep longer and there’s more profit in them. They lined the roadside, their freight of fruit in small baskets or spread out on a square of old newspaper in front of them. I stopped one of the youngest of them, she couldn’t have been more than eight and bought three oranges, one for myself and one for each of the children, and stuck them in my pocket. The girl smiled gratefully, which was understandable because I had just ensured that she could eat herself today.

  I paused at the window of Mr Beadle's bookshop to look at the picture book that Rachel fancied. It was still there and it was expensive, even though it was second-hand. Books always are. I wondered what it would be like to be able to spend the one pound eighteen shillings required to buy a new three-decker novel and realised that I was never likely to find out. I always had other things to do with my money.

  I went inside to see if I could come to some arrangement with Mr Beadle. It was possible he had heard of some of my financial troubles with the butcher and baker for he did not seem all that keen to lay the picture book by for me. This did not make me happy for I had long been a customer of his small circulating library and I'd kept up my subscriptions regularly no matter what financial problems had come my way.

  He seemed a little embarrassed, and I could not blame him under the circumstances. We parted civilly enough. But as I made my way back along the street, the day looked a little less bright than it had done.

  Nicholson’s shop was near the docks. I took the opportunity to walk along the banks of the Thames as I made my way there. It was a long winding way along verandahs on the outside of buildings and narrow paths between small docks and wharves. There were people everywhere, with their eyes on the river and the small boats. Some fished hopelessly; some eyed the boat men as if they were prey. In the mouths of alleys whelk stands and eel sellers touted for business and lads played pitch and toss.

  Many people hate the river because of the sewage smell and the drowned bodies that they have a superstitious fear of seeing but I have always loved it, ever since I came to London aboard a coal ship from Newcastle and first caught a glimpse of the docks.

  I loved to walk along the river and look out at the ships. Steamers, barges or sailing ships or the small boats from which the corpse fishermen land their catches, it doesn’t matter to me. It gave me great pleasure to look at the forests of tall masts that grew where fleets of merchant vessels brought their cargoes to the greatest port in the world.

  Those ships have always seemed to me to be the very essence of romance; they come from everywhere and they go everywhere, carrying goods to and from every corner of the world. When I was younger, I would stand by the docks for hours, dreaming about boarding a ship and going to some distant land.

  Steamships still seemed a novelty to me although they'd been plying the river for ten years or more. Their great paddle wheels churned the brown Thames. Their smoking stacks added to the great clouds of fug that glowered over the city. Gulls were everywhere squawking and fighting over scraps of food, sometimes snatching morsels out from beneath the very hands of the beggar children.

  Despite the stench you could almost taste the salt in the air and the closer you got to the Pool and its armada of ships the more interesting the air became. It reeked not just of the pollution of the river but of spices and tar and molasses and all the other things that passed through the giant warehouses of that great entrepôt.

  The nature of the peop
le changed too, even their voices and accents. You could hear words in fourscore languages as sailors from every corner of the globe raced through the streets and alleys, filled with excitement, pockets full of money and ready to spree. Hungry-eyed women greeted them and fat, cheerful-faced landlords with cold glances welcomed them into dozens of taverns and beer shops. There was a whole industry here, large as any other in London and larger than most, geared to parting those sailors from their money.

  There are those who say that it's a shame that those innocents can lose every penny acquired during long months at sea in such places but I have to say, most of the sailors I have known have gone to the slaughter willingly enough. They knew what they were getting into and took pleasure in being parted from the cash. Life on the ocean is risky and a man never knows what tomorrow might bring so why save your sovereigns for the next day when you might not be alive to see it?

  At the Pool, I stopped for a moment to look in wonder at all the vessels. They seemed arks full of wonder, vessels from what was almost another world, a place of freedom and danger and mystery that I would never quite understand. I watched scores of men clamber over rigging, or sit quietly on cross spars or the flanges of masts smoking pipes or shouting jokes or helping unload their cargoes. Many more were busy about the ship, scrubbing decks, caulking planks, mending sails.

  In a moment of nostalgia I walked to the area where the coal boats unload. There were great cranes sticking out of the sides of the warehouse and an iron railway where the black stuff was offloaded into metal trucks to be hauled away by ponies.

  I worked there as a coal-whipper more than 20 years ago. Just thinking about it made my back hurt and my muscles ache with remembered weariness. It had been the hardest labour I have ever done and possibly the worst paid but it had put a roof over my head and given me a familiarity with the rough houses just back from the river. It had also put me in touch with the boxing men. Many of those had been drawn from the coal-whippers of the port. For there is no work quite like hauling hundredweight sacks of coal or shovelling the stuff from trucks to build muscle. I had first met Nicholson about then and we'd been in and out of each other's lives ever since.

  The entrance to his shop was a small door of heavy oak with even heavier locks. There was a slot set in it so that Nicholson or his man could look out and see who was there without opening the door. The shop had only one tiny round barred window something like a ship’s porthole through which you could see the faintest gleaming of light. That came from a small lantern, for the Sun never intruded his presence into that grimy courtyard. Above the doorway, hung a sign that identified Nicholson as a dealer in second hand goods, a profession to which he was not the greatest ornament. It said Goods Bought and Sold- Excellent Prices, though I would have been surprised if more than half of his customers could read.

  It being daytime his door was not locked. I pushed it open, and made my way down the thirteen steps into a cluttered basement full of every type of rubbish and bric-a-brac, of things people had no longer any use for and possibly never had. Broken crockery sat atop piles of mouldy books, eyeless dolls sprawled like corpses amid the trash, only the fat rats played with them now. Furniture was stacked around the walls as high as the ceiling, and it filled alcoves on either side of the door. Racks of dresses, coats and other old clothes filled up the space between the heaps of tables, old chairs and cabinets.

  Slumped in an armchair, looking deceptively somnolent, was a huge black man with a bald, tattooed head and teeth filed to very sharp points. His name was Caliban and I'd heard it said that he was from some island in the South Seas. Some claimed that he had been a harpooner on a Yankee whaler and jumped ship here in London. Others thought he was a companion that Nicholson had picked during the travels of his youth and who had accompanied him since. Those who attributed to the old man supernatural powers claimed he was a familiar sent by Satan himself to serve his favoured servant. Many claimed he was a fierce cannibal and he certainly could fight when provoked although, as far as I knew, he'd lived in perfect amity with old Nicholson for over two decades. He was trouble for anyone who gave Nicholson trouble, a sort of dark protector of the old man's shop, but he never been anything but friendly to me. He opened one eyelid when I came in, saw who it was, and then closed it again.

  At the far end of the cellar, protected by a barred grill, stood a heavy wooden counter and behind that counter stood Old Nick Nicholson.

  He was a tall man, pale and skinny with a hungry look about him and a boneless manner of moving that always reminded me of a weasel. His grey hair was cropped short and his huge eyes stared out of his bony face like candles glittering in the sockets of a jack o' lantern. Despite the faded hair and the deep wrinkles his face had an ageless quality, and it was hard to tell exactly how old he was.

  Some said that he made a pact with the devil, and certainly he was steeped in enough wickedness for there to be some justification in that claim. He had a finger in many pies, and bought and sold the lives of men and women with the same ease that he bought old junk. I've always thought of them as a sort of tutelary spirit of the dark side of old London.

  He wasn't a pawnbroker exactly, for they had to be licensed and report things to the police. He was more what you would call an “uncle”, a moneylender, a Shylock, a man to whom people would hock their best clothes on a Monday and redeem them when they got paid on a Saturday night to look their best on Sunday morning. That was one of his lines of business, and the least profitable. He did another line in receiving stolen goods, and brokering deals with people like me, and he sold information to the police about criminals and politicals and, for his part in that particular Faustian bargain, they let him be.

  He looked up, gave a startled glance, recovered his composure, rubbed his hands together and said, “Mr Brodie, sir. It is always a pleasure to see you.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Nick,” I said. He looked at me for a moment and I could feel those serpentine eyes measuring me, weighing my worth to him in the scales of his brain and coming to an exact assessment of my value on that particular hour of that particular day. I had a sense that he was locating me in some vast ledger, marking my position in the great labyrinth of schemes that he kept always in his mind.

  “Is it business that brings you to me, Mr Brodie?” He paused for a moment. “Of course it is. It's always business with you, isn't it? There was never a man like you for the business was there, sir?”

  “You know me too well, Nick.”

  “And what would your business be today, Mr Brodie?”

  “Robbery, Nick.” He leaned back and glanced up at the door as if frightened that someone was going to walk through it.

  “Robbery, Mr Brodie?”

  “As I said, Nick. As I said.”

  “There are an awful lot of robberies in a city like London, Mr Brodie. Did you have any one robbery in particular in mind?”

  “A nice place outside the city called Brighton House. Done in three nights back and by a professional crew too unless I miss my guess.”

  “And what would your purpose be in looking into this, Mr Brodie? Are you looking to feel the collars of the miscreants responsible? Or is it something else you have in mind?”

  “I’m looking to recover what was taken, Nick. Bonds and papers and such. There will be a reward. And no questions asked either. Do you follow me?”

  He tapped the side of his nose to show the depths of his understanding. “Oh I follow you, Mr Brodie. I follow you very closely.”

  “Good man. Put the word out and if you hear anything get the word to me. There will be something in it for you too if things work out.”

  “I’ll see what I can do Mr Brodie. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks, Nick,” I said. “You do that.”

  My next step was to investigate the rooming house that Carstairs' labourers had told me about. I wasn't very hopeful but in this sort of case you investigate every lead.

  It wasn't easy to find the place e
ven though I knew the area in which it lay; one of those rotten old courtyards near the centre of St Giles where the walls are cracked and crumbling and supported by wooden beams. It was a haunt of the worst sort of slum dwellers, the poorest and most hopeless of them, the ones wedded to drink and dissipation, who have long since given up a fruitless search for work and found themselves a place as rotten as they are going to become, where they can rot away themselves. You could hear many an Irish accent, and there were priests of the Roman faith there, some sleek, some tired, and all treated with the greatest respect.

  Much to my surprise, I found old Madge, the flower seller, in the courtyard outside the rooming house. She was a squat thin old woman who probably had been handsome once but wasn't any more. Her hair was white and stringy and trapped by a faded blue scarf. Her feet were bound in rags, and her body wrapped in the remains of what must once have been a respectable apron and dress. She was sitting on the ground, staring blankly into space and crooning The Ratcatcher's Daughter to herself in a voice that was at once sweet and mad. There were few words to her singing, only strange mutterings, but the tune was recognisable.

  I was surprised to see her, for she'd not been about since the last summer. I had thought that perhaps she had thrown herself into the Thames the previous autumn, as many old folks do, unable to face another winter in cold and poverty. She had a shawl spread on the ground in front of her, and on it there lay a few pitiful flowers, dry and withered, that she had somehow managed to collect somewhere.

  I leaned down and placed a penny on the shawl and picked up a flower and put it in the buttonhole of my coat. “Hello, Madge,” I said.