The Oversight

by Charlie Fletcher

  … and then he was out of the river and flat on his back and somewhere on the other side of the water from where he had gone in, coughing and spluttering, aware that someone was sitting on his chest and pumping him as if he was some kind of engine. His rescuer was emptying his lungs of river by squashing his rib cage and then releasing it again; he felt like some kind of human accordion.

  He waved his hands and sat up.

  His rescuer stepped away and looked at him in the light of a meagre camp-fire, which was smoking fitfully and throwing more light than warmth. The man who had saved him was a tinker. That much was apparent from the large pack drawn up to the fire, hung with tinware of all shapes and sizes, with a small knife-grinding machine strapped to the back of the pack. The tinker prodded him.

  “You all right, matey?”

  Amos nodded.

  “You might have drownded, weren’t for me,” said the tinker. “Would have, more like. Dead as a stone. Saved you.”

  Amos looked at him. He was not a pretty man. His head was bulbous at the top and fell away in an alarmingly triangular fashion to an undershot jaw which was almost indistinguishable from the neck it disappeared into. As he swallowed, Amos saw his Adam’s apple was more prominent than his chin.

  “Might thank a fellow as has plucked you from a watery end?” said the tinker. His tone was both querulous and demanding. “A fellow as has got himself wet through in the process.”

  Amos signed that he could not talk. The tinker looked at him.

  “Cat got your tongue?” he said.

  Amos nodded and pantomimed his inability to speak for the second time. Then he took the man’s hand–cold and boneless, like a wet sock–and shook it enthusiastically to show his thanks.

  “You’re a simpleton, are you?” said the tinker. “Well, there you go. You sit there by the fire and get what wits you do got back, eh?”

  Amos moved closer to the mean fire. A cast-iron pan sat in the embers at the side with a blackened pair of sausages in it. He was conscious of the tinker looking back across the river. He wondered if the Sluagh were there. He tried to see them or hear anything that might give a clue.

  All he could hear were the tinker’s thoughts, like a whisper.

  “Something strange out there in the night. What was he running from? Maybe he’s a thief. Maybe it was bogles. Never seen a bogle. Don’t want to see a bogle. Mind, if it is a bogle we’re safe enough. Always safe we are, carrying so many iron knives in our pack. Never hear of any tinker getting bogle-led or taken. Enough iron in that pack to scare off a whole squadron of bogles. Bogles don’t like iron is what the old dad said, and he never got bogled any…”

  Amos felt something slippery in the way the tinker thought, word tumbling after word, like a barrel of fish being poured onto the slab at Billingsgate market. He was used to judging people as much on how they thought as on what they thought, and people who thought like the tinker, people whose thoughts were a cascading babble, were not usually trustworthy.

  A point proved by the tinker’s next flurry of thinking.

  “What about the idiot then? Strange looker. More’n a touch of the tar-brush in him. Someone’s darkie, a servant, likely, slave blood from the West Indies or such. Stolen something and on the run maybe. Money in his pocket. Felt it go clink. Good shoes. Belt is new. Get something for his coat. He can’t talk. Who’s he going to tell? Knock him on the head and by the time he wakes up in the morning we’ll be long gone. No. No. Maybe he’s clever. Maybe he’s a one as can write. If he can write he can tell on us. Not good. So cut him. Cut him fast after he’s taken his coat off. Don’t want blood on it. Snickersnee across the throat and skip away sharpish cos it always sprays so. Don’t look till his heels stop drumming on the ground. We done it before. Trick is don’t think too much. Do it quick and don’t look till he’s gone and the body’s still. Then we’ll have his money and his shoes and that belt and we’ll plop him back in the water with a big stone round his neck and the eels can have him.

  Tidy night’s work.

  And it’s not like real murder cos if we hadn’t picked him out of the water he’d have drownded anyway and all that money and his nice things would have been no use to anyone. Eels don’t need nice shoes. No more’n a darkie does. No feet on an eel. Now, quiet now as we opens the knife and then snickersnee quick as thought once we’ve told him to take the jacket off. Tell him we’ll a-dry it for him, before he catches his death…”

  “Tell you what, matey,” said the tinker solicitously. “Why don’t you take that jacket off and hang it over the fire so it can dry quicker, before you take a mortal chill?”

  Amos nodded and slipped his arms out of the wet coat one at a time.

  “Wait till he turns to hang the jacket over the fire. Then snickersnatch at his throat from behind. He won’t feel a thing. And he can’t scream anyway, dumb idiot as he is.”

  Amos knew about fighting and moving fast from his uncomfortable fostering with the other Templebane “brothers”.

  He only turned long enough to grab the handle of the iron pan, and then swung back as hard as he could.

  The tinker was closer behind him than he had thought, and his elbow hit the man’s hand, knocking the knife wide, while the arc of the heavy cast-iron ended in a thunk against the tinker’s head.

  Something cracked nastily.

  The tinker staggered back stiff-legged, something unnatural in the angle of his neck. He stumbled out of the ring of firelight, and then suddenly disappeared with a splash.

  Amos went to the edge of the river and looked down.

  No more splashing.

  No body.

  No tinker.

  The river had taken him.

  He watched the water flow past for a long while. He was shaking, and trying to think if he’d done a bad thing.

  Then he shrugged, unable to decide, and went back to the fire.

  He felt a little sick at what he’d done.

  But not too sick to look for those two sausages.

  CHAPTER 32

  THE TRAP SPRUNG

  The watchers outside the Safe House saw no one except Mr Sharp leave by dawn, and so followed Templebane’s instructions about what they should do if Lucy failed to emerge with the key: Bassetshaw Templebane, who had never been seen by the Reverend Christensen and was therefore unknown to him, went to the pastor’s house and interrupted his breakfast by showing him the folded paper he claimed to have picked up in the street, having seen “a young girl” signalling from one of the windows prior to tossing the note. The note was weighted with a half-crown (which he begged to be allowed to keep) and a small fragment of bloodstone in which could be seen a distinctive carving of a unicorn. The note claimed that one Lucy Harker had been carried into the house by a man on the night previous, and was being held captive against her will, having been kidnapped from the safety of her normal care under the protective wing of one Francis, Viscount Mountfellon, a man who would, if shown the fragment of bloodstone, attest to the truth of what she said (it being part of a ring with which he was well acquainted).

  By no coincidence at all, at exactly this time Mountfellon’s coach arrived at the home of Lemuel Bidgood, Magistrate, to be met by Issachar Templebane, refreshed by a short night’s sleep, who had been waiting in his carriage at the corner of the street for the last hour.

  The coaches pulled up side by side and neither alighted, the conversation taking place through the two open windows.

  “Did the girl escape with the key?” Mountfellon said with no regard for the niceties of a greeting.

  “No,” said Templebane. “But we knew it was a long shot, my lord. Now we shall proceed with the contingency, which is, as I explained, a sure one.”

  Mountfellon clicked his teeth in irritation.

  “You appear to have lost my son, sir,” added Templebane mildly.

  “Lost be damned. The boy was told to hold on, and warned we would stop for nothing,” replied Mountfellon without a shred of apology.
“I am not a parcel delivery service, Mr Templebane—”

  “Never got back on after we changed horses,” said the coachman with a half bow to his master, as if apologising for having overheard.

  “There you have it,” said the noble lord. “Probably went for a pot of ale which he is even now sleeping off in the inn’s stables, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “He does not drink,” said Templebane, “but just so, just so, my lord. It can’t be helped and he will no doubt roll back home soon enough. He is an enterprising boy.”

  Templebane was not especially irked by the cavalier treatment of his messenger. He knew Mountfellon to be a driven man who was on the very point of achieving a long-held ambition, that of obtaining what he called the Blood Key, or the Great Discriminator. The Templebanes had not achieved the things they had by holding the wrong kind of grudges, or letting personal matters interfere with business. Amos would find his way home, and by the time he did, Mountfellon would be satisfied and the Sluagh paid back with their own flag, and beyond the formal fee he was to be paid by the viscount, Templebane would have struck his blow against The Oversight. If Amos were lucky, he would arrive home in time for a celebratory dinner.

  Magistrate Bidgood was startled out of bed by the sound of his great brass door-knocker hammering away as if the devil himself were on the tail of the person trying to gain entry to the house. He was further astounded to arrive at the head of his stairs, rumpled and unshaven, to be greeted with the worrying news that a great lord was now waiting in his parlour with suspicions that his young ward had been abducted along with some valuable property, and was being held at some unspecified house in the parish.

  Bidgood dressed quickly and not well, and tumbled down the stairs, still unshaven and almost as rumpled as when he had risen, to greet his visitors. He was not a tall man, and since Mountfellon not only was, but also refused the offer of a chair, Bidgood had to conduct the interview looking awkwardly up into a face which looked back down at him like the overhanging brow of an incoming thunderstorm. In this way a badly cricked neck was added to his discomfort and disorientation at such a rude awakening.

  It was explained that Templebane was Mountfellon’s London agent and had brought the viscount to Bidgood’s door immediately on receiving his distressed patron in the pre-dawn hours, straight from Rutlandshire.

  In support of the story Mountfellon provided a sketch of the unique cobra-shaped key that he claimed had been stolen from him, and further identified the girl by explaining that though she would be, in Bidgood’s eyes, somewhat indistinguishable from any other well-formed young person with reddish hair, she wore a distinctive ring, whose seal he was able to show, being a blob of wax on a fragment of old letter, a lion and unicorn facing each other.

  When Bidgood, with suitable deference and hesitation, asked how the noble gentleman knew that, in all the great haystack of London his own particular needle was to be found in Wellclose Square, he was told coldly and with a degree of condescension that the lord’s footman had been tied up and knocked about the head during the theft, but had managed to overhear the kidnappers laughing about how pleased they should be to get the booty back to the house on Wellclose Square.

  “Wellclose Square is in your parish, is it not?” said Mountfellon. “Or am I mistaken?”

  Magistrate Bidgood stuttered his confirmation and thought no more about it, since at that moment his overworked knocker mounted a fresh assault on his front door which, when opened, revealed an out-of-breath Danish reverend and the innocent face of one Bassetshaw Templebane, who gave not a sign of recognition when he was shown into a room containing both his father and brother. Bassetshaw was, among other things, a very good actor.

  Pastor Christensen (alerted by Bassetshaw and his story of glimpsed faces and notes thrown from windows) had immediately abandoned his customary morning bloater, put on his good coat and hurried through the streets to Bidgood’s house hoping to enlist his aid and that of a squad of sturdy constables.

  His story was told, as was Bassetshaw’s. The scribbled and much-folded note was reopened and read several times. Bassetshaw again asked if he might keep the half-crown and it was agreed that he might. He went on his way, having given a false address and an undertaking to return and give evidence should Bidgood later require it. As this was happening Coram, no mean actor himself, turned to the reverend gentleman as if struck by a sudden bolt of wonderment out of the clear blue sky and asked if he thought that the “strange cove” they’d remarked on carrying a sack last night as he slunk past them might indeed have been the very thief and kidnapper in question? Pastor Christensen became inflamed with guilt and conviction at the same moment, grabbing the magistrate’s sleeve and told him he had, by chance, seen exactly such a figure and bewailed the fact that, had he but known it, he had had a chance to save the poor, poor abducted girl from whatever indignities she might have been subjected to in the night just past.

  Quite inflamed himself by now, and convinced that he not only had the chance to foil a vicious (and no doubt soon to be infamous and prestigious) crime but also to ingratiate himself with one of the greatest aristocrats in the land, the energised Bidgood sent for the constables, who came at once. They brought ladders and crowbars, and set off at a jog for Wellclose Square.

  Templebane at this point faded into the background of the moveable scene as Mountfellon and Bidgood followed the long and brawny arms of the law through the narrow streets, which were beginning to fill as the city awoke, hurrying towards the docks in the viscount’s own coach.

  The door of Sara Falk’s house was, in very little time, subjected to the same percussive indignities as Pastor Christensen’s and Magistrate Bidgood’s. The insistent rapping on the wood brought, at first, no reply. A second fusillade was cut off in mid-attack as the door swung suddenly inward to reveal Cook.

  The more perceptive constables stepped back half a pace, having noticed the cleaver she was carrying in one hand. One of the others stepped officiously forward.

  “Open in the name of the law!” he said.

  “I have,” said Cook. “Otherwise we couldn’t see each other, could we?”

  “No,” he said, belatedly spotting the steel in her hand. “Er…”

  It was in all fairness now hard for him to miss the hatchet, since she had spun it into the air and caught it by the handle without looking at it.

  “Because if I hadn’t opened it, you’d still be denting my shiny paint and putting your smudgy fingermarks all over my nice clean knocker, wouldn’t you?” she smiled.

  “Um, yes,” he said, gulping as he now saw matching steel in her eye.

  “So, constable, now we’ve cleared that up, how may we help you?” said Mr Sharp, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere and was smiling pleasantly over Cook’s shoulder.

  “Where is the owner of the house?” said Bidgood from behind the constables.

  “Did someone say something?” said Cook, looking from one constable to the other. “Only I didn’t see your lips move.”

  “Excuse me,” said Bidgood, pushing the constables aside. “I have a warrant to search this premises.”

  “Premises,” sniffed Cook looking down at him and then at Mr Sharp. “The gentleman thinks these are ‘premises’.”

  She looked back at Bidgood.

  “This is a home. And a law-abiding one. This is not premises.”

  “And I am a magistrate. I have it on good authority that there is a girl here, an abducted girl being held against her will,” blustered Bidgood. He looked back at Mountfellon’s carriage, and seemed to gain confidence through his connection with the unseen aristocrat who was watching from the shadows within. Mr Sharp saw the direction in which his eyes flickered and nudged Cook. They both looked at the carriage.

  “And there may also be stolen property. We will search the house.”

  He held out the hurriedly drafted warrant. Cook and Mr Sharp looked at it.

  “It is the Law,” said Mr Sharp.

&n
bsp; “Indeed,” said Cook.

  “We are sworn to uphold it,” he said under his breath.

  “Yes,” she replied. “That’s the trouble with swearing. Never ends well.”

  “I must insist,” said Bidgood. “Or you will be arrested.”

  “There is no girl in this house, and no stolen property,” said Mr Sharp, looking deeply into the magistrate’s eyes. “You have my word.”

  “And mine,” said Cook.

  “Well,” said Bidgood, wavering as he began to fall under the spell of the warmth tumbling in Mr Sharp’s eyes. “Well…”

  “We will find that out for ourselves,” said an icy voice.

  Mountfellon, apparently frustrated by the delay, emerged from his coach. He wore dark-lensed spectacles which he adjusted as he strode up the steps.

  “And you are?” said Cook.

  “Unaccustomed to introducing myself to other people’s domestics,” he replied.

  Cook tensed. Mr Sharp quietly reached down and removed the hatchet from her hand.

  She exhaled.

  “The aggrieved party,” said Bidgood, regaining his momentum.

  “No, he’s not,” said Cook under her breath. “He’s trouble.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bidgood. “I didn’t catch that.”

  “I said you may have a warrant but you forgot something,” said Cook, seeming to swell like a wind-freshened sail and filling the doorway.

  “The document is legal,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Cook. “But you forgot to say please.”

  “I don’t have to,” blustered Bidgood. “I am an officer of the court…”

  “Please,” said Mountfellon, though the frost crackling in his voice made it sound more like a threat than a request.

  “Miss Falk is the owner of this house. She is currently quite severely indisposed,” said Mr Sharp. “You will make your search quietly.”

  “But we will have to search her room too,” said Bidgood, pushing past them. “We must be most thorough.”

  The search was indeed thorough, beginning in the cellars and missing nothing except the very well-hidden door to the passage which went to the Privy Cells and the Tower beyond. The kitchen was searched as Cook simmered by the range, looking as if she might boil over and grab the blunderbuss at any moment. The formal rooms on the ground floor were examined, floors and walls tapped for hidden entrances or hideaways, and then the searchers moved to the first floor.