Without Fear or Favour

by David Field

  ‘I can teach you how to tell your story without being too shy about it,’ Giles assured her. ‘We might even practice down in the Meadows.’

  ‘You’ll never change, you randy cockerel you,’ Susan smiled as she leaned forward and kissed him. ‘Make it soon, though.’

  When Giles got back to the constables’ room in the Guildhall, Tom had been there for almost an hour, and was getting fractious from the inactivity. He looked up with an annoyed expression and demanded to know why Giles was late. ‘Or was you having dinner with the Duke of Newcastle?’ he enquired sarcastically.

  ‘Better than that,’ Giles beamed. ‘I got a line on that brute what’s been attacking girls in The White Boar.’

  ‘I thought we agreed that would have to wait while we find Ed Franklin’s killers,’ Tom complained, but the smile remained on Giles’s face as he revealed his latest information.

  ‘One and the same, it seems. The bloke what attacked and ravished Susan Coleridge were almost certainly one of them three what attacked us last night, and what may have done for Ed Franklin. The one with the bald head and the scar down his mug.’

  ‘So now we got another reason for finding him,’ Tom conceded, ‘but that don’t tell us where to look exactly, does it?’

  ‘I’ve got another girl – well, a woman, really – to talk to. One what didn’t complain because she’s an old town doxie, and nobody would’ve believed her if she’d complained. Nor would they have been likely to give a shit, more’s the pity. But she might be able to tell us more about one of them three fellers at least.’

  ‘Not before we’ve gone back and spoken to Ted Hollins,’ Tom reminded him. ‘I were going to go down there on my own if you wasn’t back in the next ten minutes or so.’

  ‘Well here I am,’ Giles smiled, ‘and if I’m forgiven for being late back from dinner on account of what I found out, we can go together.’

  The look on Ted Hollins’s face said it all as they strode into the main room of The Bell and made for the counter, where Polly was washing pots in the sink. She smiled lovingly in Giles’s direction and enquired if he was feeling better ‘where you was kicked.’

  ‘Haven’t had time to try it out yet, Polly,’ Giles smiled back. ‘Well, I don’t mind assisting you when you decides to,’ she smiled back, and Ted had heard enough.

  ‘Get on with your work, you shameless baggage. And as for you two,’ he glared at Giles and Tom, ‘have you come in search of a pot of ale, or do you plan on causing another fight in here?’

  ‘We didn’t start that last fight,’ Tom reminded him, ‘and as the landlord what was playing host to them what did, you’d be best advised to keep quiet on that subject. We’ve come to inspect your stables, as it happens.’ Ted shrugged his shoulders. ‘Please yourselves. Mind and take a spade each and shift some shit while you’re in there.’

  ‘Talking of shit,’ Tom persevered, ‘how come you mentioned to us last night that Ed Franklin were murdered?’ ‘Because he were,’ Ted persisted, and it was Giles’s turn to ask a penetrating question. ‘And what made you think that, when the story around town were that he’d hung himself?’

  ‘I don’t know what were being said around town,’ Ted replied, ‘but it were being said in here that somebody had done for him.’

  ‘Said by who?’ Giles persisted, and it was Polly who answered ‘By one of them blokes what attacked you two. The one what kicked Giles in the you know whats.’

  ‘I thought I told you to get on with your work,’ Ted growled. ‘There’s still a few pots what needs to be cleaned.’

  ‘And still a question to be answered,’ Tom joined back in. ‘How did the man with the poxy face know that Ed had been murdered?’

  ‘So it’s true then?’ Ted enquired, at which Tom slammed his fist down on the counter, making Polly jump and causing Ted to step backwards in an involuntary movement.

  ‘Stop pissing us about, if you wants to carry on running this place! We’re damned near certain that Ed Franklin had his head smacked hard before he were strung up to make it look like suicide. And what’s more, we’re equally damned certain that it were done by them three what was frequenting this place, guarding that guest of yours what had a big bag of silver coins to deliver to someone here in the town. So you can see why we think you might know a bit more than you’re telling us about them three. Like their full names, where they comes from, and where they been staying since they come to Nottingham.’

  ‘No idea, and what’s it got to do with my stables?’ Ted bluffed. Giles was almost as angry as Tom at the man’s uncooperative attitude, and his response was delivered in a cold voice.

  ‘How many horses in there at the moment?’

  ‘Just the one,’ Ted replied evasively. ‘And yesterday?’ Tom persisted, at which Ted’s eyes dropped to the counter. ‘There might have been more yesterday – you’d need to ask the stable boy.’

  ‘Who’s no doubt been told by you to keep his mouth shut,’ Tom sneered. ‘But we’ll ask him anyway. Stable out the back, is it?’

  ‘He was lying about them horses,’ Giles assured Tom as they walked through the back of the empty skittle alley towards the stables. ‘His eyes gave him away.’

  ‘I saw that for myself,’ Tom insisted, ‘but I don’t think we’re going to fare any better out here than we did in there.’

  ‘Let me try something sneaky,’ Giles grinned as they entered the stable, at the far end of which was a ragged youth rubbing down a fine mare in the end stall who Giles recognised even from that distance. He stormed down the passageway alongside the five stalls, grabbed the youth by the collar, and hauled him, protesting loudly, two feet in the air, using only one hand.

  ‘Ben Tanner, isn’t it? Ben Tanner what got done for stealing from washing lines up in Cow Lane? The beak told you that if you ever come up before him again you’d be dangling on the end of a rope, mind? Well, that day’s come, you little rat!’

  ‘I hasn’t stole nothing!’ the terrified youth protested, and Giles did his best to look unimpressed. ‘That right? Then what did you do with the horse what that big bloke with the baldy head and the scarred face left here on Sunday?’

  ‘I didn’t steal no horse, honest!’ the boy squealed. ‘Then where is it, cunny?’ Giles demanded, and the youth was only too anxious to explain ‘He took it out of here on Monday morning!’

  ‘That’s not what he says!’ Giles persisted in a menacing tone, ‘so unless you can prove that he’s been telling us lies, by telling us where we can find his horse, you’re coming with us!’

  ‘Honest, I don’t know!’ Ben croaked, on the verge of tears. ‘All I know is that he asked me where there was a stables further out of town somewhere. Him and his two friends – they had a horse each stabled here on the Sunday, but they took them out before it even got light on Monday morning. Them and another bloke – a cripple - what was with them, and when they come back they asked where there was a good stables well away from here. Honest, that’s the truth!’

  ‘And what did you tell them?’ Tom demanded as his first contribution to the conversation. The boy looked appealingly towards him as he answered ‘Dan Bradwell’s place, up on the Derby Road, just out of town, above the Castle there.’

  Giles let go of the youth’s collar, and he collapsed into the straw. ‘You’d better be telling us the truth, else we’ll be back with a rope!’ Giles threatened him as he and Tom walked away, each with a carefully concealed smirk on his face.

  ‘That were a bit rough on the poor lad,’ Tom said in a tone of voice that nevertheless betrayed his admiration.

  ‘And if we’d gone in there all polite and asked the same questions, we’d have got the answers Ted Hollins had told him to give us. Doing things my way, we’ve now got a likely stables to go to and wait ’til the fellers turns up for their horses. And we knows that there was somebody else with them when they collected their horses. For my money, Robert Franklin’s back in the picture.’

  ‘And how did he get up here?�
� Tom challenged him. ‘We still needs to find them three fellers, anyway, because they’re obviously mixed up in all this. They’re probably out somewhere today, so we’ll leave it for the moment. In the meantime, I owes you a favour, and the least I can do is help you collar this feller what’s been attacking girls in The White Boar. That should keep Lizzie quiet as well, until I tells her that I’m going to be spending another night swilling down beer in an alehouse.’

  ‘Ever tasted the ale in The White Boar?’ Giles enquired with a quizzical smile, and Tom grinned back.

  ‘Bloody good point, but we at least has to pretend to, while we waits for a bloke with a bald head and a scar on his face to try the same trick once too often.’

  Chapter Five

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ Giles grimaced as he forced down another mouthful, then put his pot down heavily on the window ledge in the corner in which they were standing, ‘is how they manages to get the horse to stand still while it’s pissing in the pot.’

  Tom grunted in appreciation of the humour, and took another sip of his. ‘At least we won’t need any encouragement to make one pot last all night, so if the bugger comes in we won’t be too pissed to grab him.’

  They were in The White Boar in Fisher Gate, waiting to pounce on the man Susan Coleridge had described as the one who’d attacked her the previous night. Not because they were giving priority to her complaint, but because, from his description, he was one of the three they were really after, for the murder of Ed Franklin. The White Boar was a ‘low’ alehouse, in one of the ‘low’ areas of town, and its clientele was therefore far from being from the top layers of society. Most of the women in there were obviously doxies, since they were displaying sprigs of lavender on their bodices, a well established indication that the ‘lady’ wearing it might be acquired for a brief dalliance, if the price was right. As for the men in there, the vast majority of them were already approaching insensibility, and there was more than one pile of vomit in the rushes that one was required to navigate carefully around in order to keep one’s boots clean.

  ‘I doubt if he’ll be stupid enough to show his face in here again, three nights in a row, after attacking two girls on two previous nights,’ Tom observed gloomily, but Giles wasn’t so pessimistic. ‘He didn’t attack either of them in here, did he?’ he objected. ‘They was both done outside, so who in here is likely to know, or even care? Certainly not that scrofulous oaf what calls himself the landlord. And both girls will be terrified to ever come back in here, so what’s he got to lose? At least we know what he looks like.’

  Tom shook his head. ‘Does we? And how can we be sure it’s the same feller? If you think about it, it were late on in the evening when he were one of them three what tried to kill us, so did he have either the time or the inclination to come over to this side of town looking for a girl to misuse? Did you talk to the girl he done over the previous night, and did she say how late on in the night it were?’

  ‘That were Alice Winters – according to Susan Coleridge anyway – and I haven’t been able to talk to Alice yet. She maybe won’t even want to talk to me, since I’ve run her in many’s the time for parading her arse on the streets.’

  ‘I thought you was soft on them girls?’

  ‘Some of them, but not the likes of Alice Winters, what spreads the pox like some farmers spread cow shit.’

  Two hours later there was still no sign of the man with the bald head and the scar, and Tom and Giles were not tempted to order any more of what Tom described as ‘potted cows’ piss’, so they wandered outside and enjoyed the fresh breeze that was blowing up Fisher Gate from the Trent a half mile to the south where it was crossed by Hethbeth Bridge.

  They were not the only ones abroad at that time, and as they strolled up Malin Hill, discussing in low voices how they planned, the following morning, to approach the owner of the stables on the Derby Road, they were vaguely aware of an older man walking ahead of them, slightly slow of pace. There were several side alleys between the jettied houses with shops on their lower floors, and it was from one of these that a dim shape leaped out into the main laneway and grabbed the older man around the neck, putting a knife to his throat and demanding his purse. Both Tom and Giles gave an instinctive yell and raced towards the incident, causing the would-be robber to push his intended victim to the ground and run back into the dark alleyway.

  ‘Leave him be!’ Tom instructed Giles, as they reached the man who was attempting to get back to his feet. They helped him upright, and he began to thank them profusely as he dusted down his clothes.

  ‘I’m mightily indebted to you gentlemen,’ he wheezed as he regained his breath. ‘This is of course a well-known part of town for that sort of thing, but I was obliged to attend a paying customer on a boat on the river.’

  ‘Your trade?’ Tom enquired, and the man advised them that he was a bone-setter by profession, and had been called to attend on a man who’d broken his leg earlier that day when he slipped in the mud by the river bank while trying to moor his boat alongside a store house to which he’d been delivering timber from further upstream. ‘Do you think we should alert the constables to what just happened?’ the man enquired, and Tom and Giles both laughed as Giles replied ‘We are the constables. Just give us your name, and we’ll make a note of what happened, and leave it at the Guildhall when we report for work in the morning.’

  ‘Gladly. My name’s John Tingle, and as I said I’m a bone-setter. I live in Stoney Street, and I also have my treating room there, so if ever you should need anything from me, I’d be more than happy to assist. You must get quite a few broken limbs in your line of work.’

  ‘Since you’re offering,’ Tom smiled as they continued to walk back towards the junction of High Pavement and Stoney Street, to which both constables were heading anyway on their way home, ‘can you tell us if a rough type of feller, with a face full of ugly boils, come looking for you to fix an arm what my colleague here busted for him on Monday night?’

  ‘No, not me,’ Tingle replied, ‘but I suggest you ask my friend and fellow practitioner Joseph Pryce. He has a treating room in Beastmarket Hill, and coincidentally we were in each other’s company earlier today. We’re both widowers, you see, and we enjoy playing chess against each other. We also tend to talk over business matters, and today we had occasion to commiserate with each other over those who seek out our services, then fail to pay for them. Joseph mentioned one unpleasant encounter the previous day – or it may have been the day before that – anyway, an unpleasant encounter with a ruffian who looked as if he was recovering from smallpox, but who claimed to have broken an arm when he slipped on some horse dung in the road. He was accompanied by a man who said he was his brother, and after Joseph had treated him, this other man produced a knife and threatened to slit Joseph’s throat if he demanded payment. It was a most distressing incident, and I fear that it may have left poor Joseph with a reluctance, in future, to treat anyone who can’t pay in advance.’

  ‘Beastmarket Hill, you said?’ Tom enquired with a broad smile. ‘A bone-setter called Joseph Pryce?’

  ‘Yes, that’s correct,’ Tingle smiled back. ‘He’s a few doors up from The Bell, on your way up the hill towards Chapel Bar.’

  They escorted Tingle to the foot of Stoney Street, where Giles bid them goodnight and continued towards his lodging in Low Pavement, while Tom walked up Stoney Street alongside the elderly bone-setter until they came to the junction with Barker Gate, and it was Tom’s turn to wish his companion a safe journey along the remaining few yards towards his house. Then he unlocked the door of his own darkened dwelling, got undressed, said a hasty prayer on his knees, then slipped into bed beside Lizzie.

  Giles was first in the following morning, and they discussed the order in which they should follow up the two useful lines of enquiry they’d acquired the previous day. They opted for the bone-setter called Pryce, and as they passed the door of The Bell, already open for business with a few customers whose bedraggled
appearance suggested that they’d never been home the previous night, Tom made the obvious observation.

  ‘The fellers we’re looking for either don’t know Nottingham from a cow’s arse, or they’ve got a limited circle of acquaintances. When one of them gets his arm busted they only travels a few yards up the hill to get it seen to, and then they goes just a bit further up, and out of the town altogether, in order to find a new stable for their horses. I wonder why they thought they needed to do that.’

  ‘They probably noticed the bone-setter’s place when they first arrived in town,’ Giles mused out loud, ‘which suggests to me that they were staying somewhere nearby. And if you’ve got a busted arm then you’d be likely to go to the first person you know of what can fix it. Here we go – this looks like the place.’

  Tom hammered on the door, and from inside the premises could be heard a shuffling noise, followed by a voice calling out nervously ‘Who is it?’ ‘Constables Lincraft and Bradbury’, Tom called back in response, and the door opened a fraction to reveal the scared looking countenance of an elderly man pointing a firearm of some sort at them through the gap.

  ‘Best put that down, before somebody gets killed,’ Tom advised him, but the man seemed reluctant to do so. ‘How do I know that you’re constables?’ he demanded. ‘You doesn’t,’ Giles conceded, ‘but we knows that you’re Joseph Pryce, and that you had an unwelcome visit from a man with a face full of boils and a busted arm a couple of nights ago.’

  ‘I never reported that!’ Pryce objected, and Tom smiled reassuringly. ‘No, but you told your friend John Tingle, and it were him what told us. We’re not here to take your complaint, so don’t worry yourself on that score. We needs to know more about the fellers what did you out of your fee, that’s all.’

  ‘But if I let you in, and the men who threatened me learn that I opened my door to a couple of constables, they’ll think that I made an official complaint, and then they’ll come back and finish me off, like they threatened. I can’t take that risk!’