“Beg pardon, guv’nor! Pore blind chap! ‘Ope I didn’t ‘urt ye! Was ye wantin’ anybody in this ‘ouse?”
The limy man looked ahead, and reckoned the few remaining doors to the end of Blue Gate. “Well,” he said, “I fancy it’s ‘ere or next door. D’ye know a woman o’ the name o’ Mag — Mag Flynn?”
“I’m your bloke, guv’nor. Know ‘er? Rather. Up ‘ere — I’ll show ye. Lord love ye, she’s an old friend o’ mine. Come on...I should say you’d be in the lime trade, guv’nor, wouldn’t you? I smelt it pretty strong, an’ I’ll never forget the smell o’ lime. Why, says you? Why, ‘cos o’ losin’ my blessed sight with lime, when I was a innocent kid. Fell on a slakin’-bed, guv’nor, an’ blinded me blessed self; so I won’t forget the smell o’ lime easy. Ain’t you in the trade, now? Ain’t I right?” He stopped midway on the stairs to repeat the question. “Ain’t I right? Is it yer own business or a firm?”
“Ah well, I do ‘ave to do with lime a good bit,” said the stranger, evasively. “But go on, or else let me come past.”
Blind George turned, and reaching the landing, thumped his stick on the door and pushed it open. “‘Ere y’are,” he sang out. “‘Ere’s a genelman come to see ye, as I found an’ showed the way to. Lord love ye, ‘e’d never ‘a’ found ye if it wasn’t for me. But I’m a old pal, ain’t I? A faithful old pal!”
He swung his stick till he found a chair, and straightway sat in it, like an invited guest. “Lord love ye, yes,” he continued, rolling his eye and putting his fiddle across his knees; “one o’ the oldest pals she’s got, or ‘im either.”
The newcomer looked in a puzzled way from Blind George to the woman, and back again. “It’s private business I come about,” he said, shortly.
“All right, guv’nor,” shouted Blind George, heartily, “Out with it! We’re all pals ‘ere! Old pals!”
“You ain’t my old pal, anyhow,” the limy man observed. “An’ if the room’s yours, we’ll go an’ talk somewheres else.”
“Get out, George, go along,” said Mag, with some asperity, but more anxiety. “You clear out, go on.”
“O, all right, if you’re goin’ to be unsociable,” said the fiddler, rising. “Damme, I don’t want to stay — not me. I was on’y doin’ the friendly, that’s all; bein’ a old pal. But I’m off all right — I’m off. So long!”
He hugged his fiddle once more, and clumped down into the street. He tapped with his stick till he struck the curb, and then crossed the muddy roadway; while Viney emerged again from the dark arch to meet him.
“All right,” said Blind George, whispering huskily. “It’s business now, I think — business. You come on now. You’ll ‘ave to foller ‘em if they come out together. If they don’t — well, you must look arter the one as does.”
XVIII. — ON THE COP
WHEN the limy man left Blue Gate he went, first, to the Hole in the Wall, there to make to Captain Kemp some small report on the wharf by the Lea. This did not keep him long, and soon he was on his journey home to the wharf itself, by way of the crooked lanes and the Commercial Road.
He had left Blue Gate an hour and more when Musky Mag emerged from her black stairway, peering fearfully about the street ere she ventured her foot over the step. So she stood for a few seconds, and then, as one chancing a great risk, stepped boldly on the pavement, and, turning her back to the Highway, walked toward Back Lane. This was the nearer end of Blue Gate, and, the corner turned, she stopped short, and peeped back. Satisfied that she had no follower, she crossed Back Lane, and taking every corner, as she came to it, with a like precaution, threaded the maze of small, ill-lighted streets that lay in the angle between the great Rope Walk and Commercial Road. This wide road she crossed, and then entered the dark streets beyond, in rear of the George Tavern; and so, keeping to obscure parallel ways, sometimes emerging into the glare of the main road, more commonly slinking in its darker purlieus, but never out of touch with it, she travelled east; following in the main the later course of the limy man, who had left Blue Gate by its opposite end.
The fog, that had dulled the lights in Ratcliff Highway, met her again near Limehouse Basin; but, ere she reached the church, she was clear of it once more. Beyond, the shops grew few, and the lights fewer. For a little while decent houses lined the way: the houses of those last merchants who had no shame to live near the docks and the works that brought their money. At last, amid a cluster of taverns and shops that were all for the sea and them that lived on it, the East India Dock gates stood dim and tall, flanked by vast raking walls, so that one might suppose a Chinese city to seethe within. And away to the left, the dark road that the wall overshadowed was lined on the other side by hedge and ditch, with meadows and fields beyond, that were now no more than a vast murky gulf; so that no stranger peering over the hedge could have guessed aright if he looked on land or on water, or on mere black vacancy.
Here the woman made a last twist: turning down a side street, and coming to a moment’s stand in an archway. This done, she passed through the arch into a path before a row of ill-kept cottages; and so gained the marshy field behind the Accident Hospital, the beginning of the waste called The Cop.
Here the great blackness was before her and about her, and she stumbled and laboured on the invisible ground, groping for pits and ditches, and standing breathless again and again to listen. The way was so hard as to seem longer than it was, and in the darkness she must needs surmount obstacles that in daylight she would have turned. Often a ditch barred her way; and when, after long search, a means of crossing was found, it was commonly a plank to be traversed on hands and knees. There were stagnant pools, too, into which she walked more than once; and twice she suffered a greater shock of terror: first at a scurry of rats, and later at quick footsteps following in the sodden turf — the footsteps, after all, of nothing more terrible than a horse of inquiring disposition, out at grass.
So she went for what seemed miles: though there was little more than half a mile in a line from where she had left the lights to where at last she came upon a rough road, seamed with deep ruts, and made visible by many whitish blotches where lime had fallen, and had there been ground into the surface. To the left this road stretched away toward the lights of Bromley and Bow Common, and to the right it rose by an easy slope over the river wall skirting the Lea, and there ended at Kemp’s Wharf.
Not a creature was on the road, and no sound came from the black space behind her. With a breath of relief she set foot on the firmer ground, and hurried up the slope. From the top of the bank she could see Kemp’s Wharf just below, with two dusty lighters moored in the dull river; and beyond the river the measureless, dim Abbey Marsh. Nearer, among the sheds, a dog barked angrily at the sound of strange feet.
A bright light came from the window of the little house that made office and dwelling for the wharf-keeper, and something less of the same light from the open door; for there the limy man stood waiting, leaning on the door-post, and smoking his pipe.
He grunted a greeting as Mag came down the bank. “Bit late,” he said. “But it ain’t easy over the Cop for a stranger.”
“Where?” the woman whispered eagerly. “Where is he?”
The limy man took three silent pulls at his pipe. Then he took it from his mouth with some deliberation, and said; “Remember what I said? I don’t want ‘im ‘ere. I dunno what ‘e’s done, an’ don’t want; but if ‘e likes to come ‘idin’ about, I ain’t goin’ to play the informer. I dunno why I should promise as much as that, just ‘cos my brother married ‘is sister. She ain’t done me no credit, from what I ‘ear now. Though she ‘ad a good master, as I can swear; ‘cos ‘e’s mine too.”
“Where is he?” was all Mag’s answer, again in an anxious whisper.
“Unnerstand?” the limy man went on. “I’m about done with the pair on ‘em now, but I ain’t goin’ to inform. ‘E come ‘ere a day or two back an’ claimed shelter; an’ seein’ as I was goin’ up to Wappin’ to-night, ‘e
wanted me to tell you where ‘e was. Well, I’ve done that, an’ I ain’t goin’ to do no more; see? ‘E ain’t none o’ mine, an’ I won’t ‘ave part nor parcel with ‘im, nor any of ye. I keep myself decent, I do. I shan’t say ‘e’s ‘ere an’ I shan’t say ‘e ain’t; an’ the sooner ‘e goes the better ‘e’ll please me. See?”
“Yes, Mr. Grimes, sir; but tell me where he is!”
The limy man took his pipe from his mouth, and pointed with a comprehensive sweep of the stem at the sheds round about. “You can go an’ look in any o’ them places as ain’t locked,” he said off-handedly. “The dog’s chained up. Try the end one fust.”
Grimes the wharfinger resumed his pipe, and Mag scuffled off to where the light from the window fell on the white angle of a small wooden shelter. The place was dark within, dusted about with lime, and its door stood inward. She stopped and peered.
“All right,” growled Dan Ogle from the midst of the dark. “Can’t ye see me now y’ ‘ave come?” And he thrust his thin face and big shoulders out through the opening.
“O Dan!” the woman cried, putting out her hands as though she would take him by the neck, but feared repulse. “O Dan! Thank Gawd you’re safe, Dan! I bin dyin’ o’ fear for you, Dan!”
“G-r-r-r!” he snorted. “Stow that! What I want’s money. Got any?”
XIX. — ON THE COP
IT was at a bend of the river-wall by the Lea, in sight of Kemp’s Wharf, that Dan Ogle and his sister met at last. Dan had about as much regard for her as she had for him, and the total made something a long way short of affection. But common interests brought them together. Mrs. Grimes had told Mag that she knew of something that would put money in Dan’s pocket; and, as money was just what Dan wanted in his pocket, he was ready to hear what his sister had to tell: more especially as it seemed plain that she was unaware — exactly — of the difficulty that had sent him into hiding.
So, instructed by Mag, she came to the Cop on a windy morning, where, from the top of the river-wall, one might look east over the Abbey Marsh, and see an unresting and unceasing press of grey and mottled cloud hurrying up from the flat horizon to pass overhead, and vanish in the smoke of London to the West. Mrs. Grimes avoided the wharf; for she saw no reason why her brother-in-law, her late employer’s faithful servant, should witness her errand. She climbed the river-wall at a place where it neared the road at its Bromley end, and thence she walked along the bank-top.
Arrived where it made a sharp bend, she descended a little way on the side next to the river, and there waited. Dan, on the look-out from his shed, spied her be-ribboned bonnet from afar, and went quietly and hastily under shelter of the river-wall toward where she stood. Coming below her on the tow-path, he climbed the bank, and brother and sister stood face to face; unashamed ruffianism looking shabby respectability in the eyes.
“Umph,” growled Dan. “So ‘ere y’are, my lady.”
“Yes,” the woman answered, “‘ere I am; an’ there you are — a nice respectable sort of party for a brother!”
“Ah, ain’t I? If I was as respectable as my sister I might get a job up at the Hole in the Wall, mightn’t I? ‘Specially as I ‘ear as there’s a vacancy through somebody gettin’ the sack over a cash-box!”
Mrs. Grimes glared and snapped. “I s’pose you got that from ‘im,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of the wharf. “Well, I ain’t come ‘ere to call names — I come about that same cash-box; at any rate I come about what’s in it...Dan, there’s a pile o’ bank notes in that box, that don’t belong to Cap’en Nat Kemp no more’n they belong to you or me! Nor as much, p’raps, if you’ll put up a good way o’ getting at ‘em!”
“You put up a way as wasn’t good un, seemin’ly,” said Dan. “‘Ow d’ye mean they don’t belong to Kemp?”
“There was a murder at the Hole in the Wall; a week ago.”
“Eh?” Dan’s jaw shut with a snap, and his eye was full of sharp inquiry.
“A man was stabbed against the bar-parlour door, an’ the one as did it got away over the river. One o’ the two dropped a leather pocket-book full o’ notes, an’ the kid — Kemp’s grandson — picked it up in the rush when nobody see it. I see it, though, afterward, when the row was over. I peeped from the stairs, an’ I see Kemp open it an’ take out notes — bunches of ‘em — dozens!”
“Ah, you did, did ye?” Dan observed, staring hard at his sister. “Bunches o’ bank notes — dozens. See a photo, too? Likeness of a woman an’ a boy? ‘Cos it was there.”
Mrs. Grimes stared now. “Why, yes,” she said. “But — but ‘ow do you come to know? Eh?...Dan!...Was you — was you—”
“Never mind whether I was nor where I was. If it ‘adn’t been for you I’d a had them notes now, safe an’ snug, ‘stead o’ Cap’en Nat. You lost me them!”
“I did?”
“Yes, you. Wouldn’t ‘ave me come to the Hole in the Wall in case Cap’en Nat might guess I was yer brother — bein’ so much like ye! Like you! G-r-r-r! ‘Ope I ain’t got a face like that!”
“Ho yes! You’re a beauty, Dan Ogle, ain’t ye? But what’s all that to do with the notes?” Mrs. Grimes’s face was blank with wonder and doubt, but in her eyes there was a growing and hardening suspicion. “What’s all that to do with the notes?”
“It’s all to do with ‘em. ‘Cos o’ that I let another chap bring a watch to sell, ‘stead o’ takin’ it myself. An’ ‘e come back with a fine tale about Cap’en Nat offerin’ to pay ‘igh for them notes; an’ so I was fool enough to let ‘im take them too, ‘stead o’ goin’ myself. But I watched ‘im, though — watched ‘im close. ‘E tried to make a bolt — an’ — an’ so Cap’en Nat got the notes after all, it seems, then?”
“Dan,” said Mrs. Grimes, retreating a step; “Dan, it was you! It was you, an’ you’re hiding for it!”
The man stood awkward and sulky, like a loutish schoolboy, detected and defiant.
“Well,” he said at length, “s’pose it was? You ain’t got no proof of it; an’ if you ‘ad — What ‘a’ ye come ‘ere for, eh?”
She regarded him now with a gaze of odd curiosity, which lasted through the rest of their talk; much as though she were convinced of some extraordinary change in his appearance, which nevertheless eluded her observation.
“I told you what I come for,” she answered, after a pause. “About gettin’ them notes away from Kemp — the old wretch!”
“Umph! Old wretch. ‘Cos ‘e wanted to keep ‘is cash-box, eh? Well, what’s the game?”
Mrs. Grimes in no way abated her intent gaze, but she came a little closer, with a sidling step, as if turning her back to a possible listener. “There was two inquests at the Hole in the Wall,” she said; “two on the same day. There was Kipps, as lost the notes when Cap’en Kemp got ‘em. An’ there was Marr the shipowner — an’ it was ‘im as lost ‘em first!”
She took a pace back as she said this, looking for its effect. But Dan made no answer. Albeit his frown grew deeper and his eye sharper, and he stood alert, ready to treat his sister as friend or enemy according as she might approve herself.
“Marr lost ‘em first,” she repeated, “an’ I can very well guess how, though when I came here I didn’t know you was in it. How did I know, thinks you, that Marr lost ‘em first? I got eyes, an’ I got ears, an’ I got common sense; an’ I see the photo you speak of — Marr an’ his mother, most likely; anyhow the boy was Marr, plain, whoever the woman was. It on’y wanted a bit o’ thinkin’ to judge what them notes had gone through. But I didn’t dream you was so deep in it! Lor, no wonder Mag was frightened when I see ‘er!”
Still Dan said nothing, but his eyes seemed brighter and smaller — perhaps dangerous.
So the woman proceeded quickly: “It’s all right! You needn’t be frightened of my knowin’ things! All the more reason for your gettin’ the notes now, if you lost ‘em before. But it’s halves for me, mind ye. Ain’t it halves for me?”
Dan was silent for a m
oment. Then he growled, “We ain’t got ‘em yet.”
“No, but it’s halves when we do get ‘em; or else I won’t say another word. Ain’t it halves?”
Dan Ogle could afford any number of promises, if they would win him information. “All right,” he said. “Halves it is, then, when we get ‘em. An’ how are we goin’ to do it?”
Mrs. Grimes sidled closer again. “Marr the shipowner lost ‘em first,” she said, “an’ he was pulled out o’ the river, dead an’ murdered, just at the back o’ the Hole in the Wall. See?”
“Well?”
“Don’t see it? Kemp’s got the pocket-book.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t see it yet? Well; there’s more. There’s a room at the back o’ the Hole in the Wall, where it stands on piles, with a trap-door over the water. The police don’t know there’s a trap-door there. I do.”
Dan Ogle was puzzled and suspicious. “What’s the good o’ that?” he asked.
“I didn’t think you such a fool, Dan Ogle. There’s a man murdered with notes on him, an’ a photo, an’ a watch — you said there was a watch. He’s found in the river just behind the Hole in the Wall. There’s a trap-door — secret — at the Hole in the Wall, over the water; just the place he might ‘a’ been dropped down after he was killed. An’ Kemp the landlord’s got the notes an’ the pocket-book an’ the photo all complete; an’ most likely the watch too, since you tell me he bought it; an’ Viney could swear to ‘em. Ain’t all that enough to hang Cap’en Nat Kemp, if the police was to drop in sudden on the whole thing?”
Dan’s mouth opened, and his face cleared a little. “I s’pose,” he said, “you mean you might put it on to the police as it was Cap’en Nat did it; an’ when they searched they’d find all the stuff, an’ the pocket-book, an’ the watch, an’ the likeness, an’ the trap-door; an’ that ‘ud be evidence enough to put ‘im on the string?”
Delphi Complete Works of Arthur Morrison Page 141