Lee Raven, Boy Thief

by Zizou Corder

  Finn had a peculiarly unhelpful way of a telling a story but the sting of it was coming through loud and clear.

  I was in trouble. Big trouble, big big trouble.

  I had just stolen a Beano Annual for which apparently this guy had been murdered. So to add to police being after me – which they always – are and Mrs Asteriosy’s top-of-the-range private Russian security being after me for nicking her purse, there was now a murderous person after this bliddy Beano, which I nicked by mistake.

  But why in crike would anyone murder someone for a Beano?

  Well, all right, I panicked a bit. My heart started going, higher and tighter and quicker, and my breathing was suddenly all out of time with it, and my shoulders went up round my lugs and I was retching with sickness, my stomach clutching and twisting itself, clutching and twisting.

  ‘Whassup?’ said Finn. ‘Lee? You all right?’

  I was bent double and gasping for breath. You would’ve thought he could see I was extremely not all right.

  He put his hand nervously on my back.

  ‘I got to hide,’ I whispered. ‘Got to hide me, Finn.’

  I must have looked hideous enough for him to take me serious. For a moment I thought he was going to chat, or query, but he never – to his credit he just looked at me, blinked a couple of times, furrowed his brow and then said, ‘Come on.’

  He led me a couple of hundred yards further up. The moving steadied my breath a little. There was bins, a skip, some builders’ detritus. It was some kind of maintenance area.

  ‘Sit down a moment,’ he said, and I did, curled up by the skip, and then he looked at me again and said, ‘What’s going on?’

  Like I said, Finn’s OK. But.

  ‘I saw you in the paper this morning,’ he said. ‘Dipping Romana Asteriosy. You dork! Getting papped, dipping.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I said. I wasn’t going to tell him that I had, in my pocket at that exact moment, what the Frenchman had been drowned for. ‘Can’t stick around here.’

  ‘You sure?’ he said.

  Looking over his shoulders, I saw a line of public police cross the end of the lane, heading up to Green Park. In the distance the sound of their sirens drifted over the everyday sounds of London in the spring as more of them arrived. Yeah, I was sure.

  I nodded. My throat was too tight to utter.

  We sat there a moment or two while I calmed down a bit. While calming, I thought. While thinking, I decided. It was not a nice decision but you don’t always get nice in this life.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ I said, after a while, ‘that you’ve got a skello?’

  Finn stared at me. There’s only one reason you’d want a skello, and it’s not something very attractive or everyday.

  ‘Have yer?’ I asked.

  ‘Lee,’ he said, ‘what you thinking?’

  ‘You know what I’m thinking,’ I said. And he did. I filled him in.

  ‘The Tyburn is right there,’ I said. I pointed across the road to a heavy round iron grid sat in the tarmac of the road like an ancient cowpat.

  ‘You can’t, Lee,’ he said. ‘It can’t be that bad. You can’t. You’ve got no kit!’

  ‘You can bring it me,’ I replied. ‘Not here – it’s not safe. I’ll make it down to – no, not down…’ Finn knew as well as I where downstream led to – to Buckingham Palace, to the Parliament buildings – just to more security. ‘I’ll go up.’ I was trying to remember where the easy manholes were. ‘Avery Row? Bourdon Place? No, too crowded…’

  ‘Way too crowded,’ he agreed. Those were all cafe streets like Lansdowne Row. We needed a dipper’s street, badly lit, a cul-de-sac…

  ‘Stratford Place,’ I declared. ‘Should be far enough away. Then I can hang out in the old reservoir. It’s not that far.’ It was further than I wanted to go – but to be honest, so was anywhere – down there.

  ‘It’s not safe!’ Finn said. ‘You’ve no torch, no waders, no oxygen, nothing…’

  His face showed right and proper fear of the dreadful world I was about to enter.

  ‘You’ve got a skello then? Give it me.’

  Finn gave me a long, hard look, full of doubt and fear, and then he dredged in his pocket and pulled out a long, hard metal key. I had it off him in a second, and we jumped up and crossed to where the big grid sat. Round the circumference were some worn-down words. I knew it said ‘Dudley and Dowell Ltd, Cradley Heath, Staffs’ because Dad had taught us that those were the words written on the Tyburn’s entrances. I didn’t read ‘em. But I remembered what they said.

  How many people have walked over here, trod on that manhole cover, and never thought of the little captive river under their feet, still trundling along the same route it had a thousand years ago, running through fields?

  We stared down through the little holes of the grid. After a moment our eyes found the distance in the dark, and there, about fifteen feet down, where we knew it would be, black and sparkling like fisherman’s glass, gushed the twinkling, filthy waters.

  No time to lose. Bruton Lane is quiet but it ain’t that quiet. I found the pickhole and within moments I had the heavy iron lid of the manhole levered off. I did not want to hang around, and I did not want him changing his mind, and I did not want me changing mine either.

  I grinned at him as I slipped down. ‘I’m a natural-born tosher, Finn,’ I said. ‘Ravens can see in the dark, as long as it’s the putrid filthy dark of the London shores. It’s in my blood. I’ll make it up to Stratford Place. Meet me there. Bring some soap and supplies.’

  And with that I took my last long breath of the sweet air of West One and slipped down into the undercity world.

  My brave face was a complete fake. The shores, the bowels of London for a thousand years, are a hideous and revolting world, a labyrinth full of human excrement and worse. You think I’m exaggerating? A thousand years ago people were already complaining about the stink of them. True, this particular sewer, then, was the nice little River Tyburn, flowing from Hampstead down to the Thames, with islands and ducks and pebbles dappling in the sunlight; but for hundreds of years now it’s been closed over in a tunnel like a shite-filled route to hell.

  Reputable people going down the shores leave the lid off. It can be pretty criking poisonous down there and you want all the fresh air you can get. The flushing gangs – when they still used guys – took oxygen tanks, and a buddy, and a gas mask, and a safety harness, and a radio.

  I had nothing. But then I Wasn’t reputable.

  Up above me, calling ‘Bye’ with fear and doubt in his voice, Finn heaved the lid back on, and there I was, suspended in echoey speckled darkness, perched on the metal-rung ladder built into the wall, surveying the pitch darkness of the shores, as Granddad Fred called them, when he told his stories of the days when ordure ran in the streets of London, and a fellow could make a decent living from toshing for coins and dropped earrings and bits of whatever of this and that that turn up down there – if he could stand the filth (and the miasmas and the gases and the bunnies and the cockroaches and the inspectors’ men after you with their lanterns and their guns).

  A flurry of activity scuttled past my ear. A bunch of rats or something twitched by and were gone, down in the darkness, silent again but for the perpetual low roar in the distance, and the gurgles of the Tyburn as it spun along below me.

  Like I said, there’s three things that Ravens did. We were toshers, flushers or thieves. Nowadays there’s no toshing and little quad tractors with CCTV do the flushing, so we’ve not much choice and that’s why I dip for a living. I ain’t proud. Seems to me everybody works in ordure one way or another. My family started toshing before the Victorian times, when the sewers were just ditches and gullies covered over, and anyone could reach in and grab a dropped penny if they weren’t too dainty. My great-great-great-granddad, whose name was Frederick Bryden Raven, by the end of his life knew the main routes of all the main sewers and most of the local ones: the old ones based on the ditches and the o
ld London rivers that had been covered over as they filled up with filth, and Mr Bazalgette’s new ones, which were tall and fine and clean, with steps in and out, and a timetable for the weekly flushings so you could plan to go out the day before and get the week’s worth of tosh and not get flushed away. Frederick Bryden had it all in his head, so he could walk from Notting Hill to Whitechapel, from Richmond to Camberwell, upstream and down, all underneath the city and no one would ever know. He made a map of his knowledge of the routes and my dad’s still got that map. It’s been copied a few times, and things added as explorations were made and changes have come about, but it’s still Frederick Bryden’s map. I don’t know all of it, but I learned a lot when I was a little kid. Billy and Squidge would test me on it. My memory was the best of all of us and when they got on my back about the not-reading business I could floor them with what I remembered.

  ‘Oi, Lee,’ they’d say. ‘How do you get from Number One Whitechapel and Brick Lane to the King’s Scholars’ Pond?’ And I’d tell ‘em you couldn’t; you’d have to come up at Holborn because of the sluice gates. That kind of stuff.

  Frederick Bryden’s son Edward got hepatitis, and there’s that rat-piss disease: Weil’s disease. Sounds pretty vile too. You’d get bunnies’ piss on a cut, then your headache would start, symptoms like flu, and in three days you turn yellow, then you’re dead. Well, that’s what they say.

  Edward’s grandson, my granddad Fred, was the one who changed sides. He went and joined the flushers, spending his days scraping shite off the walls, putting it in buckets and winching it up to the real world. I saw a film on the telly once about heart disease and they showed this artery all silted up with fat from junk food and smoking, and it was getting blocked all up so the blood couldn’t get through, and the guy was about to have a heart attack from it. There’s more fat on the walls of the shores under the West End because of the junk food restaurants, and it goes solid so it’s really hard to clean off. Dad told me. And I thought, What they need is a team of tiny flushers in that guy’s arteries, with their brooms and scrapers, cleaning him out, like in the shores.

  All this was in my head while I stood hanging on the metal bars of the staircase, staring down into the darkness. Were these walls going to be slick with fat? Or just sticky and putrid?

  I didn’t want to go down. All that stuff I told Finn –bravado. All stuff of Dad’s that he tried to fill us up with before we knew any better.

  Yeah, Dad was a flusher too, for a while. Used it to learn the ropes and the ways. But it was dying by then – technology was coming in instead, all quads and computers and nobody getting their hands dirty. He’d go down freelance though. The shores were extremely bliddy useful to a man in my dad’s trade. He didn’t actually literally crawl up the sewers into your bathroom, none of us was quite skinny enough for that – though he’d have made me do it if it had been possible, believe me but he’d take the shores route to the house, and he’d retreat to the shores for the journey home again. The memory of the shores lingered longer in the criminal memory than in the police’s, and they seemed to have forgotten that there’s another city under the city, with its own roads and alleyways, its main routes and cut-off corners, its bad neighbourhoods, its junctions and its dead ends.

  Dad’d taken me down early enough, lying to Mum, and making me lie too. And here I was again. I hitched my hankie up round my mouth and nose with one hand while still holding on to the metal bar of the ladder. The stink was nasty and my membranes were starting to prickle already.

  I gave my eyes a few moments to settle, trailed my hand from the ladder to the wall – yeah, greasy – bit my lip and edged my foot into the invisible stream. All I could see of it was glints of daylight freckling this way and that in the dash of blackness. So how would it be for me today?

  Oh, Mariani. I should’ve waited there and got Finn to bring me some waders. There is very little more revolting than wading in shitey water. Wading in watery shite, I suppose. The Tyburn is cleaner than most sewers, with the river water flushing it through all the time. Be thankful…

  Come on, Lee. It’s not that deep. It’s not too fast. Small mercies, come on. I filled my mind with images of the clear babbling brook that this was a thousand years ago and started upriver.

  I waded midstream. The higher up a sewer you go the smaller it becomes, but I was well downstream here and there was plenty of room even though I was going up. The flow of the river was lively but manageable, and I trailed my hand along the slimy curve of the walls, both to steady myself and to find my way in the dark. The ground beneath me was silty and treacherous, ‘to the hazard of my balance and my bones,’ as Granddad Fred used to say, but I’d be done with it soon. Sparkling streams, Lee, sparkling streams.

  Sparkling streams – that’s all just crike.

  It is horrendous down there. It stinks. It’s hot because of all the hotel laundries and restaurants, and there’s a steamy shitey smell mixed up with chemical smells and the fat greasy bunnies under your feet… any moment my hand could trail across a rat’s nest in a hole in the wall. Baby little naked rats.

  And the stories don’t leave you alone. The herd of pigs that lived up the Fleet sewer, getting fat on eating human effluent. The medical students throwing dead arms and legs in, when they’d finished dissecting them. Murder victims. Dead children. Giant slugs… Marauding gangs of thieves. The Fleet exploded once – it was so poisonous and filthy with gases and chemical filth, it just exploded up out of the road, split the street and took three houses with it. It killed some cows, and King’s Cross was flooded for days and everyone’s houses up there was filled with shite.

  Tyburn’s not like that though. Tyburn was never as filthy as the Fleet. Really.

  I carried on walking. Slow and steady up the incline. It’s hard to be steady though when the floor under the filthy mud stream you’re wading through is all jagged with broken-up tiling, and invisible holes you could put your foot in and twist it, or break it, and then you’d be done for, rat’s piss getting in your blood…

  I did have a headache. Maybe from all my evil fears.

  I snorted a little bitter laugh. It blew up my bandanna and for a moment the warm smell was in my face, naked and revolting. I decided not to laugh again and kept walking.

  CHAPTER 5

  Continuing the Story According

  to Mr Maggs

  Saturday morning had been unusually busy. That is no excuse. I had been held up late on Friday night by Mr de Saloman, and woken early on Saturday by the girl calling herself Maple, but that is no excuse. I hadn’t wanted the book to be left with me in the first place. That is no excuse either. There was no excuse.

  Mr de Saloman had consigned his book to my care, and that brat of a horrible boy stole it, and it was my fault. What was I thinking of, leaving him in there alone?

  Janaki had gone out to fetch us some lunch when I finally had the opportunity to return to my study after the morning’s meetings, which I did specifically with a view to showing Freddy the diary. It was only when I picked up its case that I realized the weight was wrong, which propelled me to look inside, which revealed the sorry truth. The diary was gone.

  The only possibility was that the boy had taken it when I placed him in my study earlier that day.

  Well, he couldn’t have got far. Naturally I called the police. They told me that they were very busy and would send someone round when they could. I found this attitude rather dismissive, and told them so, and the young man was almost rude to me in response. I couldn’t say what I thought it was that I had lost. They would have thought me a mad old man – as perhaps I am.

  I much prefer Janaki to make this type of call. She understands modern manners better than I do.

  Alas, when Janaki returned, the customary lightening of the heart which I feel on her appearance was soon dashed. Her long hair was awry and her black eyes – always bright – had a glint of fear in them.

  ‘Mr Maggs,’ she cried, and her voice was somewhat
hoarse, ‘sit down. There is bad news.’

  ‘My dear girl,’ I said, ‘what on earth…? Listen, something very bad has happened.’

  ‘Indeed it has,’ she replied. ‘There has…’

  And so we continued for a moment, each convinced that our own bad news was worse than the other’s, not listening one to the other. In the end, as I am a gentleman, I let her go first.

  She read to me from the newspaper.

  My face grew longer and more disbelieving with each sentence.

  ‘But that is him – Mr de Saloman!’ I cried in a dreadful voice – dreadful even to my own ears.

  ‘I believe it is, Mr Maggs!’ she said. ‘He – he must have been killed so soon after leaving here last night! Should we call the police?’

  ‘Janaki, my dear,’ I said, ‘before you do, hear my tale. The… volume… that Mr de Saloman left in our care moments before this dreadful fate befell him, for us to keep until his return – it has disappeared. I cannot but think that the boy, this morning, took it.’

  I could not bring myself to tell her the nature of the volume that was lost. I wasn’t sure and so I could not speak of it.

  ‘What boy? It was a girl,’ she said, which confused me.

  ‘What girl?’ I replied.

  We stared at each other blankly until I remembered the person calling herself Maple who had presented herself practically before dawn.

  Could she have taken it? Could she?

  ‘Oh, that girl,’ I said.