Once he finally attracts his attention, this first landlord is not unduly taciturn, but what Charles hasn’t allowed for is the sheer quantity of drinking-dens in this district, and the extraordinary lack of curiosity their owners seem to share about even their most regular customers. If the man he’s looking for really is a tanner, and lodges anywhere near here, surely someone must know who he is, but four hours and four times that many inns later Charles is nowhere nearer a name. But perhaps his luck is about to change.
He’s left the last till last, because he knows from experience that it’s the best this place can boast, and therefore—to his mind—rather out of reach for a common workman. Right on the margins of the Dials and everything the Dials is not: bright, gleaming, gaudy, and pricey. One of the largest and handsomest gin-shops in the West End of town, glittering with mirrors and plate glass and brazen with gilt. As Dickens himself found when he visited the same establishment, every window shouts its advertising slogan—The Out and Out, The No Mistake, The Good for Mixing, The Real Knock-me-down—and every wall holds its ‘Genuine Endorsement’ for an obscure sub-species of gin we’ve now long since forgotten, including some—like Cream, Honey, and Butter—which seem to be trying to sell themselves on the basis that they might just be good for you. One or two even claim to be ‘medicated’, though how, and with what, they do not say. When Charles gets to the door he can hear the drone of voices even before he pushes it open. It’s lunchtime now, and trade is brisk. The inside is—if anything—even more dazzling than the outside, with a long gleaming counter, a spacious saloon (crowded nonetheless), and lines of green casks behind brass rails labelled with names like Old Tom and Samson. On display behind the bar are an array of glossy spirits bottles, and two well-upholstered young women for whom the term buxom wench would have to be invented, if it didn’t already exist. They look remarkably similar, these two, right down to the red-and-black-striped bodices and artfully arranged beauty spots, and they’re clearly as adept at dispensing drinks as they are at repartee, as the raucous laughter of the group of young men leaning on the bar proves.
“Put another nice warm rum in there, would yer, Lily,” says one with a wink, “and if you want to put yer nice warm hands somewhere else in the meantime, then I’m sure I could come up wiv a few helpful suggestions.”
“That’s enough of your filth, Harry Murray—if Mr Dudley hears talk like that he’ll ’ave you out on your ear’ole soon as look at yer.”
She sounds annoyed, but she’s blushing all the same.
“Aw—you wouldn’t tell on me, would yer, Lily?” he smirks. “Not when I’m so good to yer.”
He reaches out to pinch her cheek, but she’s too agile for that (or perhaps she just knows this routine all too well already) and ducks away in plenty of time, to the vast amusement of the rest of the lads. They’re by far the gayest and best-dressed posse in the place, for despite the gorgeousness of the surroundings most of the clientele are decidedly down-at-heel. There are three washerwomen on a bench by the door, a group of bricklayers (to judge by the dust) clustered at the far end of the bar, and two old men who’ve drunk themselves maudlin, leaning against each other and managing thereby to stay reasonably upright, at least for the moment. There’s a pinched-faced woman in a tattered great-coat stained with fish-scales, waiting quietly for one of the full-blown barmaids to fill her little flask, and two or three wan-looking children who can barely reach up high enough to put their bottles on the bar. One of the hawkers Charles saw in the street an hour ago is now touting his boiled trotters to the assembled drinkers, though it seems most of them would rather spend their penn’orth on something rather stronger. Charles scans the dingy crowd and finally locates the landlord, who has a fire of his own in a cosy snug, where he can keep an eye on his girls without getting caught in the draught from the door, which swings open every few seconds, leaving most of the room as cold as the street outside.
Charles orders as small a dram of rum as he can get away with. He’s already had rather more than he should, but no self-respecting landlord is going to waste his time on a man with no drink in his hand. The fellow here looks affable enough, with his puckered red face, and mustard whiskers, and tight round belly. Charles edges through a gang of loud labourers who seem undecided whether to clap each other on the back, or clatter a fist into their faces. They’ve clearly been at this some time, and show no sign of coming down on one side or the other for a good while yet, though a gambling man would probably bet on their level of aggression rising in reasonable proportion to the amount of drink they put away.
“Mr Dudley?” says Charles, with a silent acknowledgement to his unwitting informant behind the bar.
The landlord looks up and takes his pipe out of his mouth. “Who’s asking?”
He’s not particularly hostile, just curious.
“I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions. If you have time.”
This may well strike you as rather abrupt, given everything I just said about the way Charles has been going about his business so far this morning, but remember that this is a very superior establishment, and he’s pretty sure he’s not going to discover very much useful here. Frankly, he just wants to get it over with.
Dudley looks him up and down.
“I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? A while back. I’ve a good memory for faces.”
Charles flushes, caught off-guard. It’s such a long time since he patrolled the streets—either here or anywhere else—that he thought he was safe from embarrassing recognitions. This was never really his patch, after all, and no-one else he’s spoken to this morning showed any sign of knowing who he was. Out of the uniform he’s just another punter; in it, just another rozzer.
“Well—” he begins.
“That’s right,” interrupts Dudley, “you were with that other fellow—Wheeler, is it? Little feller—carrot-top. I remember now—he used to come in ’ere a lot at one time. Saw you in the street with him once, nibbing a couple of dippers. That was you, weren’t it?”
No point in dissimulation now. Charles—like those pickpockets—has been well and truly collared.
“I’m not in the police any more. I’m working on my own.”
The man looks sceptical. “I’ve heard that one before. So what do you want with me—or my shop for that matter?”
“Nothing,” says Charles quickly. “At least nothing I’m aware of. I’m looking for someone who may lodge nearby. Someone who could well drink in here.”
Dudley snorts. “You’ve got your work cut out—hundreds come through these doors.”
“I know, but you might know this one. I think he works in Bermondsey. In the tanneries.”
The man’s face does not change, but he drops his eyes and looks away. Charles knows what that means.
“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you. Who is it?”
He spoke too eagerly, and Dudley draws back. “I’m not sure as I should say any more. Not to you. You haven’t even said what this is about.”
Charles shrugs, faux-nonchalant. “Suit yourself. Though there could have been something in it. For you, that is.”
Dudley looks at him narrowly. “Money, you mean?”
“Could be. If you lead me to the right man.”
“How much?”
Charles does a quick mental calculation. He needs to offer enough to loosen the man’s tongue, without making him suspect how important the information really is.
“A thicker?”
Dudley’s eyes widen. A sovereign is no poor return for a few minutes’ idle chat. Idle chat, moreover, that’s very unlikely to have any disagreeable personal repercussions.
“Well,” the landlord begins slowly, “I’m not saying as he’s definitely your man—I only saw him a few times—but there was a tanner in ’ere a few weeks ago. Got bawling drunk and had to be hauled out by the pot-boy.”
“Has he been in since?”
“Once. Twice maybe.”
“D
o you know his name?”
Dudley shakes his head. “Can’t help you there.”
“And that’s it?” snaps Charles. “That’s all you have?”
“Like I said, I only saw him a few times—”
Charles makes to get up—“If you think I’m parting with good money for that”—but Dudley holds him back, “Hold on, hold on,” he says. “I may not be able to tell you who he is, but I’m pretty sure I know where he is.”
“You mean—”
Dudley smiles knowingly. “Absolutely. The pot-boy didn’t just haul him out. He hauled him home.”
NINE
Bell Yard
THE POT-BOY IN question seems sharp enough—an active curious sort of a lad whose wits have been filed so fine by life’s knocks and scrapes as to earn him the general nickname ‘Razors’—but when he leads him to what turns out to be a dark and boarded-up house in St Clement’s Lane, Charles’s first thought is to turn on the boy and ask him what he’s playing at. The ramshackle building flutters with bills for penny-theatres, law-writers, and dancing-schools, and all the windows are broken. No-one lives here, and clearly no-one has, for a good long time.
Razors is already turning to leave when Charles seizes him by the ear and jerks him back. “I thought you said you brought the man here?”
“Oi—that hurts! And it’s God’s ’onest truth. I took ’im right ’ere. That’s where ’e lived.”
“Don’t mess with me, lad—look at the place.”
“Ain’t my problem, mister. This is where ’e lived and this is where I brought ’im. It weren’t boarded up then. He lived up there—up the back stairs. Took me ’alf an ’our to drag ’im up there, and no tip neither.”
He’s now looking rather pointedly at Charles, who gives him tuppence and shoves him on his way. He gets no reply when he knocks on the doors either side, but there’s a small butcher’s shop two doors down, with the gas already lit and a crowd of women with knotted hair and torn shawls standing in front of it, contemplating the slabs and hunks of rancid greenish meat. There are no cuts here Charles recognises; all that can be said for it is that it’s meat, and it’s just this side of edible; even then it’s more than most of the women can afford.
He pushes his way to the back of the crowd and manages a word or two with the harassed proprietor. The house, he finds, was closed down weeks before, when the floorboards in the ground floor caved in on an open sewer choked with corpses. It turned out the landlord had excavated his basement and started a lucrative side-trade in bargain burials, with standard no-frills interments for less than half the price of the official graveyard up the road at St Clement’s Lane. With two slaughter-houses nearby no-one had even noticed the smell. Something that may also explain, Charles realises suddenly, why a tanner might choose to lodge in a place like this. A quarrel now breaks out in the queue of women outside, but before Charles loses the butcher’s attention altogether, he manages to elicit the one fact that has been eluding him all this time. The one fact—small though it seems—that will make all the difference.
A name.
A name that even Charles recognises as unmistakably Cornish. William Boscawen, late of this parish. Lodging now at Bell Yard, Holborn.
It’s an area, as it happens, that Charles knows well. Part of that warren of courts and lanes behind Lincoln’s Inn, and hard by the far more palatial residences of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that number among them Mr Tulkinghorn’s tall and blank-faced house. Another fact that cannot—surely?—be irrelevant. Bell Yard, by contrast, is narrow and dingy, and the lad he corners by the entrance points him towards Cook’s rag-and-bottle shop at the far end of the court. First impressions are not encouraging. The windows are all but pasted over with old law notices and Offers to Buy, and the other side of the glass is stacked to obstruction with oddments of iron and brass, and shelves of dirty used bottles of every conceivable shape, purpose, and colour. Inside the shop there are tables of chipped plates, tin pans, and old rusty kettles, and the broken remnants of a horse’s harness hanging on a hook, as well as sack after sack of assorted unsavoury rags, human hair, and ancient laceless boots and shoes, none of which seem to be in pairs. A sudden movement at the back of the unlit shop betrays the presence of what Charles can only deduce is the said Cook, eponymous owner of this unprepossessing emporium of unconsidered trifles. A squat hairy man with spectacles and a moth-devoured cloth cap, his eyes wary and his brows low.
“You there!” he growls, coming towards him, a guttering candle in his bony hand. “Have you anything to sell?” He looks Charles up and down, then, “Or perhaps you’re interested in the room I have to let? It’s a fine room, even if I do say so myself.” He squints at Charles slyly. “You can live up there as private as you like. I’ll ask no questions. Even if you should want to bring ‘company’ home. Know what I mean?”
He winks obscenely at Charles, who returns his gaze with a controlled composure. “I’ve come to see one of your tenants—Mr Boscawen. Is he in?”
The man screws up his eyes. “Not him. Never here at this time of day.”
“May I wait inside? I’ve come a long way.” A lie, of course, in the literal sense, but not perhaps in the metaphorical.
The man ponders him for a moment, and then steps aside to let him pass.
“You can wait if you want. You may even find something to interest you in my shop,” he continues, as Charles stands looking about him, “though most of it is mouldering in cobwebs, and the rest rotting in the damp.”
There’s certainly a smell of something in this close dusty little room, but it isn’t rot. Or damp, for that matter. The air reeks so strongly of cheap gin that Charles starts to feel a little light-headed.
“You a friend of his?” asks the man warily.
“An acquaintance.”
Charles’s tone is steady, but Cook’s penetration is unnervingly sharp.
“What do you want with him then?”
“That’s between me and Mr Boscawen.”
The landlord sniffs and lowers himself carefully into a rickety chair. “Never heard no-one talk like that who weren’t police. Or one of them accursed lawyers I see about here.”
“Then you’ll be relieved to hear I’m neither.”
Cook nods slowly. “If you’re going to hang about, there’s nowhere to sit. I don’t go in for entertaining.”
“Perhaps I could wait upstairs?”
“Perhaps you could.”
“Would you mind?”
“It’s not for me to mind. You say you’re a friend of his, and I’m in no position to know if that’s true, or if there’s something else you’re after.”
It’s too dark in this gloomy room to see whether Charles flushes at this, but I can tell you he does. He turns away to hide his awkwardness, and sees for the first time that there’s a narrow staircase in the corner of the room. He doesn’t wait for further permission but makes his way quickly through the assorted lumber and up the uneven stairs. The first room he comes to is clearly the one available to let. A cramped empty room with one or two scraps of old furniture the landlord has clearly extracted from his more presentable stock. The door to the attic at the top of the house is closed, but even on the landing Charles can tell that the air up here is bad; a cloying mix of soot, sweat, and the scummy fatty smell he remembers only too well from his jaunt to Bermondsey. The room itself turns out to be large—much larger than the one downstairs—but there is little in it apart from the remains of a coke fire in the grate and a low bed covered with rough ticking. Much more interesting to Charles, though, is the desk in the corner, with its pile of twisted paper and stumps of pencil. Boscawen is no man of letters, if this illegible and barely literate scrawl is anything to go by. But there is no mistake: Charles has seen this writing before. The letters posted to Sir Julius Cremorne were sent by this man. There’s a creak on the stairs and Charles stuffs the scrap quickly into his pocket before turning to face the beady eye and watchful face of the owner of the shop.
Only it’s not him. The man filling the doorway is thick-set, dark-faced, bearded. His hands black with grime, his trousers worse. And he has some sort of cudgel in his right hand.
“Who are yow, and what dusta think yow doing?”
Charles takes a step back without even realising he’s doing it. “I—I was interested in the vacant room. I must have made a mistake.”
The man moves towards him, and Charles can now see the landlord standing blinking in his shadow. A furtive smile twists his face.
A moment later Boscawen has seized Charles by the collar and lifted him almost off his feet. He’s about to protest when the man’s heavy fist hits him dead centre and he drops heavily to the floor, completely winded. He rolls over, trying to get back up again, but Boscawen has him by the hair and hauls him to his feet. His face this time. Jaw, cheek, temple, nose. Slumped again. Retching. Something hot running into his eye. By this time things are getting a little blurred round the edges, and there’s a sharp pain in his right side that wasn’t there before. Up again, and he braces himself, but this time nothing comes. The man brings his face close to Charles’s, and he can feel the heat and stench of his breath.
“If I find ee anist here agen, or hear yow’ve been arsting any more questions arter me, sure’nough I will give ee such a basting as will gut the bettermost of ee. Are’ee hearing me?”
The Solitary House (With Bonus Novels Bleak House and the Woman in White) Page 12