SV - 01 - Sergeant Verity and the Cracksman

by Francis Selwyn

  He shouldered his way determinedly towards the ground-glass globes of the tea dealer's shop and the dazzling row of gas-lamps outside the bootmaker's. An old man stood in the glare, which was no inconvenience to him, since he was blind. He held a bamboo flute to his lips and played "Villikins and his Dinah" in a mournful tremolo. Verity had no need to touch the old man's sleeve. The beggar, sensing his presence, lowered the flute and turned up the whites of his eyes.

  "Can you tell me," said Verity, breathing heavily and confidentially over the man's ear, "where Miss Ellen Jacoby does business tonight?"

  The old man's mouth twisted, as though he were gathering saliva to spit.

  "Ellen Jacoby, you mean," he said.

  "Just so," said Verity humbly.

  "She don't do business at all," said the beggar. "Least, not in the Dials. You want her, you go to St James's Street with five or ten sovereigns running loose."

  Verity sighed heavily and dropped two pennies in the cap. The chapped hand slid down, examined them, and then withdrew. The beggar nodded.

  "That's not to say," he continued thoughtfully, "as you mightn't find her in the palace. Not that she does business there, but more as she might oblige a friend."

  Then, gathering up the saliva in a final twist, he spat accurately past Verity and into the gutter.

  The lights of the market fell away behind him as Verity entered the first of the twisting alleyways which led to the heart of Seven Dials rookery. The narrow path was unlit and, for all the warmth of the day, a stinking moisture lay in a film over the footway. Tall, rat-ridden houses overhung the alleys, monuments to two hundred years of relentless decay. The sharper and the cracksman, the magsman and his poll, lived in uncongenial squalor behind the boarded windows and cracked masonry. At some points the houses clustered so close together that a man of Verity's bulk had to squeeze sideways to pass between them.

  Shadows and quick footsteps moved along the edges of the ill-lit alley.

  "Why, Mr Verity," said a voice from the darkness. "You're a way off your beat, ain't you? All alone, as well! "

  "It won't do, Jack Flash," said Verity magisterially. "Don't try it!"

  "I bin in stir afore for muzzling a peeler." The voice was closer.

  "Hook it, sharp! " said Verity, plodding onwards. "What am I a-doing, then?" asked the voice indignantly

  "I'll let you know pretty quick, if you don't hook it!" answered Verity softly.

  Other voices came from the dark, in derisive imitation of his own.

  "Hook it, Jack Flash! . . . Why don't you hook it nicely, when Mr Verity tells you? . . . Oh, I say, Flash! Do hook it when Mr Verity says so! "

  The voices fell silent and the alley was empty again. Its dark passageway opened out abruptly into an irregular cobbled square, crowded with porters and street women, and blazing with the great ornate gas lamps that hung on iron brackets the length of the gin palace. French and Irish voices mingled with cockney. Here at last was anonymity, even for Verity. In the angle of two streets stood the most splendid building in all the Seven Dials, the fairy palace of gin. The brilliance of its lamps streamed out through plate-glass windows, between marble pillars and gilt mouldings. Verity chose the doorway whose lettering on frosted glass promised "The Wine Promenade."

  The floor was thickly carpeted and a bar of polished French mahogany ran the full length of the building. Behind this, two plump young women and a stout, unshaven man in a fur cap busily dispensed "combinations of gin" to the impatient crowd. Voices called out for "The Real Knock-Me-Down!" "The Reg'lar Flare-up" and the "No Mistake."

  At the end of the mahogany counter was a tall girl in black satin. She was not particularly pretty, her blue eyes were a little too vacant and her lips a little too thin. But her height gave her a handsome length of leg, and her hips seemed all the rounder for her close-waisted jacket. The jacket followed the inward curve of her back, emphasising the erotic swell of her buttocks under smooth black satin. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a chignon held by a black velvet bow. It was too short to fall in a "horse's tail," and Verity, admiring her broad hips and long legs, was reminded of a restive mare with her tail docked. The brushing of her restless thighs, the impatient movements of her bottom under the long black skirt, seemed a permanent sexual challenge to every man in the room.

  Verity crossed the bar towards her, watching her toss back the last mouthful in a glass. She was easy, this one. She had been arrested once too often as a common whore. The next time, she knew what to expect.

  "Ellen Jacoby," he said, standing just behind her, "Miss Ellen Jacoby."

  "Ellen Jacoby." She turned on her elbow, wrinkling her nose in tipsy contempt. "Mrs. Ellen Jacoby."

  "Ah," said Verity respectfully, "wrong on the charge sheet last time, was it?"

  Then she turned to face him properly, pushing her skirts back in a gesture of bravado.

  "You've got no call to roust me. I ain't done nothing."

  "That makes me happy," said Verity in a gentle voice. "Will you take a glass of something?"

  "Don't mind then," she said, shrugging and automatically smoothing down the front of her dress to outline her breasts more dearly. "Drop of summat short, miss!" she called to the barmaid.

  "Now," said Verity, "you can oblige me if you will."

  She half smiled and bent her knee forward until it just played against his.

  "I oblige those I choose to oblige, that's all. I oblige one or two jacks in the "C" Division, and they returns favour for favour. If you take my meaning."

  Verity nodded. He had heard enough reports of the corruption in "C" Division, where constables in the pay of Hay-market brothel keepers stood guard over the establishments, protecting them from law and competition alike. It was no secret.

  "I want to find a girl," he said simply, "name of Jolie. Darkish. Expensive. Used to work for Mr Roper." "What you want her for?"

  "I was recommended," said Verity. "They say she's a real artist."

  "That's all gammon," said the girl. "Another bloody little shickster, most likely."

  "You know her, then?" "Never 'eard of her." "Nor of Ned Roper?" "Who's he?"

  Verity took off his hat. Very slowly and lovingly he began to polish the worn brim on his sleeve. Ellen Jacoby half turned away from him.

  "Cross me once more, Ellen Jacoby," he said pleasantly, "and I'll have such things done to you that'll break your heart clean in two."

  Then she turned back, lips narrower than ever, looking like a cat about to spit defiance. Her eyes moved quickly and angrily over him.

  "It'll take a considerable bigger man than you to touch me," she muttered. "I'm that handy with me mauleys, it'd take you and six more to get me through that door. And I got friends in certain places."

  "Not in the workhouse, you haven't," said Verity softly, "not in the dear old spike."

  For the first time he saw the self-assurance ebb from her eyes.

  "Go on with you," she said feebly, tipping back her gin.

  Verity picked up his own glass of shrub, the gin hot and the pineapple cordial pungent.

  "You'll pick oakum there, my girl, till those pretty fingers are raw. You'll cry at night to see the blisters and the corns."

  "Won't scare me," she said bravely.

  "Not even the Hoo Union?" Verity inquired. "Because it'll be the Hoo Union for you, I give you my word. Mr Miles's little house of sorrow."

  Now she was frightened. As a girl of fourteen she had been in the notorious Hoo workhouse. She had known James Miles, the workhouse master, who ruled girls by the rod and loved his work.

  "You got no right..." she said hopelessly.

  "With a known whore, I have special rights-at all times," said Verity placidly. "Not all the jacks in "C" Division can help you there."

  "I've done nothing. It's Roper who carries the cash for the girls."

  "Mr Miles remembers you," said Verity cheerfully, "and those afternoons you spent kneeling over the block in nothing but a pair of stoc
kings. But with such a fine young woman as you've grown into, why, he'd wear out four or five birches on your backside and think nothing of it. If the justices send you to the old spike, Miss Jacoby, it'll be the Hoo Union for you. Why, Mr Miles would never forgive me if I let a strapping young doxy like you slip away from him !"

  "All right," she said venomously, "Monmouth Street. You might find that little shickster in the gaff there. But she won't talk to you."

  "And why not?" asked Verity, his face a study in plump, angelic innocence. Ellen Jacoby tipped back the last of her gin.

  "Why not? Because she thieved some codger's watch and clothes and spouted them for all she could get. Bloody near put Ned Roper in quod. Now she wears his mark to remind her."

  "What mark?"

  Ellen Jacoby put her hand under the chignon of blonde hair at the back of her neck.

  "Just there. Took two men to hold her down while he did it. Put a great cross there with a knife-blade heated twice. That bitch won't ever wear her hair up again. She hates Roper like a dose of poison, but she's a hundred times more scared of him than she'll ever be of you."

  Verity finished his shrub, watching Ellen Jacoby move away from him across the room. He felt warm and content.

  He had heard of Roper's ways with his girls, but now Jolie, scarred for life by him and hating him, would be easy to talk round. She might even inform against him on her own behalf, for grievous bodily harm. At the very least she would turn Queen's evidence over McCaffery. Not at first, perhaps, but when Verity had talked to her about the death cell and the last morning, and the suffering of a bungled hanging. It seldom failed with young women, who would generally do anything to stay alive. It never failed when they would otherwise face death to shield a man they hated. Roper was stupid as all of them, in the end. To mark a girl like that and then turn her loose, knowing what she did!

  In his mind's eye, Verity saw himself standing before Inspector Croaker on Monday morning and, with an air of effortless superiority, laying the conclusive evidence before him. For the present, he eased his way through the crowd towards the door. As he passed by Ellen Jacoby, he allowed his hands to travel over the black satin which covered her strong hips and the softness of her thighs. How warm, he thought wistfully, and how smooth. Then the glass door closed behind him and he disappeared once more into the darkness of Seven Dials, heading towards Monmouth Street.

  4

  Drab and ill-shaped coats or dresses hung in rows before the second-hand shops which lined the narrow street. In front of the cracked and boarded windows, the costumes of dead men and women, the only legacies of the poor, drooped from long rails. The shopkeepers, whose own dress seemed even more worn than their stock, leant against door-posts and smoked their short clay pipes. Ragged children sat cheerfully on the pavement edge and watched paper boats race down the gutter. Beyond the darkness of the street, Verity saw the penny gaff, its glare of gas light streaming out into the thick night air and glittering on the grimy windows of the houses opposite. There was a babble of voices and the cracked sound of an old piano playing "Oranges and Lemons."

  The shop front had been taken out to make an entrance to the improvised theatre, where a crowd of a hundred or more young men and women pressed forward with their pennies towards the money-taker in his box. Girls in cotton-velvet dresses with feathers in their pork-pie hats danced noisily with one another in the middle of the street. Among the crowd were several young dragoon officers and a number of elderly gentlemen who would have looked more at home in the United Service Club. The gaff was close enough to Pall Mall to attract the occasional swell.

  Verity pushed his way past the groups of costers, lounging against the walls, smoking and shaking handfuls of coppers in time to the music. As he handed his coin to the money-taker, those already in the gaff began to stream out through a doorway in the canvas partition, as the first performance ended. In the warm evening the smell from the unventilated auditorium was nauseous. The crowd surged out, laughing and twisting, girls screaming convulsively as boys behind them fumbled, tickled, or jumped on their backs. A young woman, stupefied by drink, carried a sickly child with a bulging forehead, while two boys behind drove her forward.

  Verity drew a red handkerchief from his sleeve, dabbed the sweat from his cheeks and neck, and shuffled forward with a heavy groan. The auditorium was a small warehouse with plain brick walls and a platform at the far end. Black curtains were painted on either side of this makeshift stage, where double gas-jets flared with a harsh brilliance to provide a form of limelight. Costers in cut-away jackets and small cloth caps monopolised the front benches, bawling, "Port—a—a—r! Port—a—a—r!" as they passed dark flagons of Allsops India Pale Ale among themselves. Others munched chestnuts or oranges, spitting husk or pip nonchalantly into the dark corners.

  Already the heavily ringed fingers of "Professor Robin-sini" at the broken-down Broadwood had struck up a rattling drum-roll. From the costers there was a roar of derision to greet the "comic singer," a drayman in concertina'd hat, false nose, and a monstrous red cravat which drooped to his waist. The gas dwindled to tall undulating flames, leaving all but the stage in semi-darkness. The singer glanced left and right, cocking a foot up behind him and shielding his eyes, like a sailor sighting land. The audience roared for "Flash Chants! " "Pineapple Rock! " and "Port— a__a—r!"

  He glanced down at them, grinning self-consciously. " 'old yer jaws! "

  The "Professor" struck a single accompanying chord and the singer followed, loudly but off-key:

  "I've just dropped in, dear ladies fair,

  I 'opes it won't yer shock.

  I'll sing you a song, and it ain't too long,

  It's about my long-tail jock!"

  He flipped up the dangling red cravat with a knowing grimace, and even Verity was shocked to hear that the girls screamed loudest with laughter.

  "Whatcher waitin' for, then?" roared the singer, "Chorus!"

  "Just look at my long-tail jock!

  Oh, how do you like my jock?

  I'll sing you a song, and it ain't too long,

  It's about my long-tail jock!"

  Through the half-light, the features of the brick interior grew dimly visible again, like Thames landmarks in a December fog. There was a curtained doorway to one side of the platform. Verity wondered to what, and to whom, it led. The comic singer reached a crescendo:

  "I sailed to the city of Washington,

  Of pluck I'd got a good stock,

  I went to President Jackson's levee,

  And there I showed my jock ..."

  The audience at the rear of the gaff consisted mainly of counting-house clerks in stovepipe hats, and clubmen with a taste for adolescent coster girls. An elderly man with military whiskers and check trousers breathed port wine and cigar in Verity's ear.

  "Ruffians, sir! Out-and outers! Some deuced pretty horseflesh showin' off in these places, for all that!"

  "Go to the devil, sir! " said Verity, jowls quivering indignantly at the intrusion. The elderly man sat at attention, hands clasped on the knob of his cane, as though he had never spoken.

  The "Professor" was now skipping though an imitation of flute and tambourine in an Arabian dance. When inspiration failed, he fell back on half-remembered scraps of Mozart's Turkish Rondo. Verity emitted a long, contented whimper of satisfaction, causing the elderly man to look sharply at him with a censorious sniff. But now he knew he was right! There on the stage was McCaffery's young Eastern princess, her hair worn thick and glossy to her slender shoulders, the oriental elipse of her eyes, and the exquisite features more mysterious than the harem veil she wore.

  Verity knew that she must be wearing her hair so unfashionably in order to hide Roper's mark by letting the tresses fall loose to her bare shoulders. There, on the girl's skin, was all the evidence needed to bring Ned Roper to justice.

  Though the costers roared their approval of "Miss Jolly," her expertise as a ballet-girl would not have got her on to the stage o
f the most easy-going music-hall in Southwark or Blackfriars. Yet her dance and costume was everything a Saturday-night crowd in a penny gaff could wish. Her pretty lips were just visible through her veil, and her ankle-bells sent out ripples of dainty sound with every movement of her limbs. A low-cut band of emerald silk supported her neat breasts sharply, leaving her shoulders and brown-white belly bare. There was total silence as her hips and thighs began a snake-like undulation, and then as the music rose, the flower-like little navel began to open and close rhythmically in her lascivious belly-rolling.

  To the delight of the costers, she had shown herself "game" by wearing no tights under the thin silk of her slave-girl trousers. The light shining through the filmy gauze showed the slender rotundity of her thighs and the palest gold sheen of bare flesh. When she arched her hips forward and writhed her breasts in their taut silk halter, there were subdued murmurs of approval. It was the height of professionalism in a penny gaff.

  Above the veil, her eyes watched them knowingly. Her raised arms twined and caressed one another suggestively and, while she fondled herself in this manner, she turned slowly and undulatingly round. The insistent belly-movements were hidden as she edged her bottom to face the audience, arching the full cheeks under the thin silk and squirming them invitingly. Hollowing her back until the translucent silk was skin tight across her buttocks, she bent slowly forward, her backside broadening until she presented her complete rear view to the costers and their girls. There were growls of sexual menace from the boys and shrieks of amusement from the girls, who seemed no less eager than their escorts to view the young ballet-girl's anatomy. She remained motionless for a long perspiring moment in the gaff, as though carefully watching the effect of her posture upon those who saw it.