Retribution Road

by Antonin Varenne

  Reeves dropped an envelope on the table, in the middle of some bottles, and turned around. When he stopped in front of him, Bowman sniggered.

  “Get fucked. Why don’t you just find him yourself, that whoreson you sent to the river?”

  He spat in Reeves’s face. The old man wiped his eyes with a gloved hand.

  “Unfortunately for you, Bowman, you survived things a normal man would not have borne. You should have killed yourself a long time ago, but if you haven’t, that’s because there is something stronger in you than what you suffered. It is now up to you to choose what you will do in order to keep surviving. Remember that the man you are looking for is like you, but that he is perhaps not as strong as you.”

  Reeves put his hand on Bowman’s shoulder.

  “I am sorry, Sergeant, for what happened to you. To you and your men.”

  Bowman shoved his hand away. The old man lowered his head, concealing his face under the brim of his hat, and left the room. Bowman caught him on the landing and shouted: “I tried to die and someone saved me! Why did I have to be saved, eh? What does that mean?”

  Reeves turned around in the stairwell, his hand on the banister, face still hidden beneath his hat.

  “That your life no longer belongs entirely to you, Sergeant Bowman. You should leave here as soon as possible. I couldn’t obtain this list without people finding out. It won’t be long before they’re here. Farewell, Bowman.”

  Reeves walked down the stairs. Bowman remained on the landing until the sound of footsteps faded to silence. He went back to his room, grabbed the envelope and tore it open. He took out a sheet of paper, saw some neatly written words, and from the folds of the letter fell five ten-pound notes. A year’s pay at the Thames Brigade.

  He dropped the list of names and addresses so he could pick up the cash, and a second sheet fell to the floor. Bowman knelt down and retrieved the document. A bank’s insignia and address. A bearer bond in his name, to the sum of five hundred pounds.

  Bowman rushed over to the window and opened it. The carriage was rounding the street corner. He turned around when he heard sounds coming from the other side. Five Wapping coppers, led by O’Reilly and Superintendent Andrews, were walking along Fletcher Street towards his building. For a few seconds, Bowman watched them, incapable of moving. Then he ran to his sink, shoved the three fingers of his left hand down his throat and puked his guts out. The adrenaline that was running through his bloodstream sharpened his mind and his eyes. He didn’t even put on his shoes, just put the money and the list, the bond and the powder horn into his pockets, then went out on to the landing and pulled himself up through the skylight. He crawled over the ridge of the roof to the neighbouring building. Then, his feet bleeding, he ran through back-alleys, stopping at every corner to make sure that no other coppers were waiting for him. Keeping a wide berth around his district, Bowman crossed through China Court, his lungs on fire, and ran ever faster eastward towards Limehouse.

  He didn’t stop until he reached the hut, his whole body cramping. With a shoulder barge, he smashed the door open and rushed inside. After running two miles without slowing down, his body refused to go any further and he collapsed on the earth floor. His stomach heaved as his mouth opened wide, gasping for air, and his head felt as if there were a leather strap being tightened around it, crushing his skull.

  He lit a fire in the stove. Wedged against some crates, Bowman struggled to stay awake. When he opened his eyes, night had fallen. He didn’t have time to get up – his body was too stiff and aching for him to move. The door opened and two men entered. One of them held an oil lamp, the other a bludgeon. Bowman lifted one hand to protect his eyes from the light and with the other he fumbled in the darkness until his fingers touched an iron bar, which he held up to defend himself.

  “Shit!”

  “What’s he doing there?”

  “Don’t come any closer,” Bowman warned them.

  “Bloody hell, Sergeant! It’s us. You scared the shit out of us.”

  Bowman recognised the fisherman’s face.

  “Frank?”

  “Jesus, who did you think it was? What are you doing here?”

  The fisherman saw Bowman’s clothes and laughed.

  “Where did you find these old rags?”

  The other fisherman had remained standing at the door, the club still in his hand.

  “This bloke’s dodgy, I told you before. We should get rid of him.”

  “He won’t give us any problems. Will you, Sergeant?”

  Bowman looked at the two men.

  “I won’t make any trouble. I just need a roof. Not for long.”

  “I told you before: this is your home. What happened to you this time?”

  The other fisherman put his hand on Frank’s shoulder.

  “Frankie, you shouldn’t. You’ll end up in deep shit. And this time, I won’t help you.”

  “I’ll take care of this. You go home.”

  Frank’s colleague took one last look at Bowman, then left the hut and closed the door behind him.

  “Don’t worry. Stevens is always like that. He’s not very trusting, but he won’t make any trouble either. I know him.”

  The fisherman hung the lamp to a ceiling beam.

  “Are you going to let go of that iron bar?”

  Bowman put the piece of metal back on the floor.

  “I won’t stay long. Just a few days. I’ve got money.”

  Bowman took a ten-pound note from his pocket. Frank whistled with surprise.

  “Shit. How did you get all that money? Oh, Sergeant, maybe my mate was right . . . How can you be on the street with that much cash in your pockets? What have you done?”

  “It’s my money. I didn’t steal it.”

  “This isn’t about money. What I want to know is, why have you come back? And don’t give me any rubbish.”

  Bowman crumpled the banknote and put it back in his pocket.

  “The coppers are after me.”

  “What have you done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “They think I’ve killed someone.”

  “Have you killed someone, Sergeant?”

  Bowman lowered his head.

  “I killed dozens of people when I was a soldier. Women, old people and children. But I didn’t kill this one.”

  Frank pulled the little bottle of hooch from his pocket and drank half of it without stopping for breath. He wiped his lips and put the bottle on a crate next to Bowman.

  “Well, I didn’t think you’d spent fifteen years in India just counting sheep, Sergeant, but what difference does that make, what you’re telling me?”

  Bowman picked up the bottle.

  “The killer, the other one . . . I have to find him. You won’t have any problems with me, but I need your help. I’ll pay you. I’ve got more money. Enough.”

  “You have to tell me more, ’cos otherwise you’ve already told me too much.”

  “I didn’t kill that man.”

  “You’re not going to go crazy and attack someone, are you, Arthur? Or throw yourself in the river again?”

  “I have to find that man.”

  6

  The first name on the list was Edmund Peavish. The preacher. With an address in Plymouth.

  Bowman dipped his pen in the inkwell and put crosses next to four addresses. Four of his former men, out of the nine, lived in or near London. Peter Clements and Christian Bufford, known as Buffalo, recruited by Bowman on the Joy. Frederick Collins, the corporal with the knife, and Erik Penders, the one who wanted to escape – both of them Wright’s men. John Briggs, another man from the Joy, lived in Bristol. Norton Young, one of Wright’s recruits, lived in Southampton; Edward Morgan and Horace Greenshaw, two of Bowman’s soldiers, in Birmingham and Coventry. Most of the entries were followed by the words “Last known address”. Still ghosts, all of them, as on the Rangoon list when they had been liberated.

  The addresses in
London could be the most likely, though really he had no idea. Just because he hadn’t moved for years didn’t mean that the others didn’t travel. They had to live. Move to wherever they could find work.

  Squinting at another piece of paper, he copied down Peter Clements’ address. 16 Lamb Street, in Spitalfields.

  Then he opened the door of the red-hot stove and threw his old Company uniform inside.

  Standing in front of a shard of broken mirror placed on the shelf, he shaved his beard, washed himself in a bucket and put on the new clothes that he’d asked Frank to buy for him. High-quality shoes, a pair of wool trousers, solid and comfortable, a shirt, a herringbone tweed jacket, a leather cap lined with soft wool, and some underwear.

  Bowman had not been this well-dressed since they gave him his first soldier’s uniform. He hadn’t worn clothes that actually fitted him for a long time either. He couldn’t see this in the little mirror, but the fact of wearing a new suit made him stand a little straighter.

  He slipped a flask of gin into the jacket’s inside pocket, put the cap on his head, and walked away from Dunbar, heading towards the north of the city. A cold wind blew and Bowman pulled up the collar of his jacket. On Commercial Street, he asked a passer-by for directions. Like many inhabitants of the East End, Bowman didn’t really know his way around the rest of London, just a few names he’d heard people mention, including Spitalfields Market, which he reached one hour after leaving the hut.

  He walked through the market, with its silk boutiques and its weavers’ workshops. Half of the stalls sold imported Indian cotton. At the corner of Commercial Street and Lamb Street, he unfolded his sheet of paper and checked Peter Clements’ address.

  Spitalfields had been a refuge for Protestant weavers fleeing France. The whole area was devoted to fabrics, and trade had boomed until the market was invaded by Indian products. The people who Bowman had, ever since he was a child, heard referred to as “the Silkers”, were a bunch of poor beggars, of no higher standing than those from the East End.

  *

  The brick buildings on Lamb Street were all occupied by shops with storefront windows on the ground floor, with run-down apartments above them. The street swarmed with carriages and porters, sellers and beggars, who clung to his legs. Bowman pushed them away without understanding what they wanted. He was not yet used to his new clothes or to the reactions they provoked. People moved out of his way and greeted him politely.

  He stood for a moment on the pavement facing number 16. The door leading upstairs was in a narrow gap between two shop fronts, its door gaping open, without a bolt or a handle. On the first floor, he chose a flat at random. A fat woman opened the door and took a step backwards. A man dressed like him, knocking at the door . . . It had to be bad news. Bowman asked where Peter Clements lived and the woman appeared relieved that misfortune had simply got the wrong floor.

  “The Clementses? They’re on the second floor, on the left. Are they in trouble?”

  Bowman went up to the next floor and stopped outside the door. Sweat dripped under his armpits and his arms moved, fists tightening on emptiness, searching for a weapon that wasn’t there. Earlier, they had just been names on a scrap of paper; now he was standing at this door. Peter Clements might be inside. The strongest of all the men who had boarded the Sea Runner.

  Bowman knocked and bent his knees, ready to bolt. A girl of about ten opened, a skinny little thing, in a patched-up pair of overalls. Her blonde hair was as pale as her face, her fingers brown with dye; she had worker’s hands, incongruous at the end of those spindly little-girl arms. She looked at the well-dressed man, her eyes too tired to express the slightest surprise, and Bowman lost his composure. So even ghosts had children . . .

  “Peter Clements?”

  The girl left the door open and trudged back into the apartment.

  In the narrow entrance hall, Bowman saw a tall, stooped figure. Peter Clements stopped at the threshold. He had the same white-blond hair as his daughter, and his right eye was deformed by scars, the cornea whitened and swollen by hot metal. The eyelid was stuck to the arch of the eyebrow and did not move at all.

  “Sergeant?”

  Bowman had not imagined that Clements would recognise him – in these clothes, without his uniform, but particularly in his emaciated state. He realised that, for the men on the list, Bowman would always be a skeletal figure trapped in a cage. That the only man to retain a memory of the old, strong Sergeant Arthur Bowman was he himself.

  “Sir? Is that really you?”

  Clements’ lips trembled. His right eye began to shine.

  “You’re alive?”

  The sergeant stood before him, but Clements asked him the question anyway. A succession of emotions appeared and then mingled on his face. When he smiled, his forehead wrinkled with pain; when his eyes lit up with happiness, the corners of his mouth fell and his chin began to quiver.

  “Say something, Sergeant. Please.”

  “It’s me, Clements.”

  “What are you . . . what are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “Me, Sergeant?”

  “And the others.”

  “The others?”

  “The ones from over there.”

  “They’re alive too?”

  Bowman loosened his lips and swallowed some air.

  “I don’t know.”

  Clements lowered his head.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “I have to talk to you, Clements.”

  “What?”

  Clements put his hand through his hair and lifted his head.

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  “Not here.”

  “Do you want to come in?”

  He withdrew into the room without taking his eyes from Bowman’s face.

  “Come in, Sergeant. Come inside, if you need to talk to me.”

  The cap reduced his field of vision; Bowman took it off and put it in his pocket before following him. Clements had lost weight. He even looked less tall, with his stooped, humped back, which Bowman followed into the little kitchen. The room was six feet square, with a stove next to the open window, a saucepan warming on it. Clements’ daughter stirred the contents with a spoon, and a smell of porridge filled the air. Clements grabbed a bottle from a shelf.

  “You want a drink, Sergeant?”

  The old soldier was still looking at him doubtfully. Bowman turned to the little girl, then to her father.

  “Tell her to leave, Clements.”

  Peter Clements looked startled and then sad. He leaned his head sideways as he looked at the sergeant.

  “Why should she leave, sir?”

  “Do as I say.”

  Clements gently spoke to his daughter.

  “May, go out for a walk, would you? I have to speak to the sergeant. You understand? You have to leave us alone.”

  The girl observed the man in his new clothes, let go of the spoon, and left the kitchen.

  There was no chair or table in the kitchen; through the door to the living room, the only other room in the apartment, Bowman saw two beds pushed close together, mattresses lying on the floor, rumpled blankets and a pile of clothes.

  Clements took a gulp from the bottle, forgetting to offer some to the sergeant.

  “She’s gone. You’re right, Sergeant. It’s better if it’s just the two of us.”

  He drank again. His limbs moved jerkily, as if his joints had been broken, as if his arms and legs moved from position to position like a rusted piece of machinery.

  “I always wondered if you were alive. And the others? I haven’t looked for them, Sergeant. I mean, I wanted to, but I didn’t know how to go about it, where they lived.”

  Clements’ voice grew more emotional, his nervousness increased, but the strangest thing was that he didn’t seem to be speaking to Bowman at all; as if he were in the habit of talking to people who weren’t there.

  “Why didn’t you want my daughter to hear w
hat we’re talking about, Sergeant? My wife and my son are at work. I don’t have a job at the moment. It’s difficult. How did you find me, Sergeant? It’s . . . it’s good to see you. Really. You’re here and I don’t have to imagine it. You understand? Because it’s hard to imagine. When I think about it, I feel so bad. I can’t talk about it. It’s not a nice thing and I don’t want my children to hear that. That’s why it’s better for her to leave, my little May. So she doesn’t hear. My wife and my children, they get woken up at night when I think about it in my dreams. They don’t understand.”

  Clements advanced towards Bowman. He leaned forward so the sergeant could hear him, his face drawn with the fear that he would not be understood or that his interlocutor might suddenly disappear.

  “I had trouble working when I got back. They offered me my old job back at the slaughterhouse, where I worked before I went to India. My son was three years old back then, and the little ’un had just been born. They were eight and five when I returned to England. The pension isn’t really enough to live on, and I couldn’t work in the slaughterhouse anymore. I just couldn’t. I tried, because we needed the money, but it made me sick to my stomach. I just kept puking. So they gave me the sack and I looked elsewhere. My son started working and my wife and the little ’un too. We get by, just about, but it’s better when I can find a job from time to time. But there are so many things I can’t do. Because of the headaches, and sometimes the fatigue that comes over me. I shake all over and bite my tongue. The others don’t want to work with me anymore, because I never know when it’s going to happen. So I keep getting sacked. It’s not that I lack courage, I just have no strength left. You see, Sergeant?”

  For a moment, he seemed unable to speak or move. His burned eye stared straight ahead, the other down at the floor.

  “I try, Sergeant. Every day, I go out to look for work, sometimes pretty far – into the countryside, so I can work in the fields during harvest time. But it means leaving my family behind. I don’t like to leave them alone. I don’t like being alone, Sergeant. It never lasts long, though. Because of the pains that make me collapse, and when I wake up I don’t know where I am.”