The Great Stink

by Clare Clark

  'Your friend is not in trouble,' he insisted. 'I swear it. The case I am working on has not the least connection with him. But I am told he could help me. That is all.'

  Tom peered at him closely, sizing him up. A lawyer. What were the chances? The Captain's contract dragged at his hem, insistent as a brick.

  'You don't look like a lawyer.'

  'Well, I am one. In a highly regarded chambers, for that matter.'

  'You alone?'

  Unease prickled at the nape of Rose's neck. He nodded.

  'All alone,' Tom mused, shaking his head. 'Asking for trouble, it is, a gentleman like you venturing into the rookery on your own. There's men wander in here don't never come out. You'd think a man of your profession'd know better'n that. Still, stroke of luck for me, you might say. A lawyer, are you? Who'd've thought?'

  With that Tom smiled to himself, showing black stumps of teeth. His eyes flashed white in the thickening dusk. All around them the shadows bristled with menace. Rose swallowed the bitter saliva that rose in his mouth.

  'Thank you.' His voice was shrill as he fumbled a half-crown from his pocket. He could turn and run, he supposed, but the darkness pressed in so thickly that the alleys closed over like scabs. He was trapped. He felt dizzy with dread. 'You have been most helpful. Now if you will only let me pass —'

  The old man did not move. Instead he spat on the coin before rubbing it vigorously on what remained of his sleeve. Satisfied, he slipped it into his cuff.

  'I thought you was after meeting Tom?'

  'But —'

  'Waste of half a crown other ways.'

  It was the wink that settled it. Surely a man could not wink at you in that merry way and then the next moment set about dispatching you. At least that was how Rose was later to explain it. At the time, he felt barely connected to his feet as he allowed himself to be led through a twist of alleys and into a broader lane where the red smoky flame of an old grease lamp illuminated a dingy lodging house. On a blanket in front of it, dressed in a welter of rags and filth, a family huddled around a collection of dusty bottles and iron chains. They stared at Rose as he stepped over them, their eyes sunken and dull. One of the smallest children whimpered and reached out for the hem of Rose's coat but it cowered backwards as Tom growled, threatening it with the cracked toe of his boot. A few steps further on the tosher ducked through a low entrance, where the heavy wooden door was held ajar by a leather strap. Rose hesitated for a moment and then followed. The tavern was gloomy inside and quiet, no more than a few plain tables and benches set upon a sawdust floor. The ceiling was draped with a grey-green lace of mould. Tom slung a leg over a low seat in a corner and gesticulated at Rose to do the same. But instead Rose stood, clenching his hands behind his back.

  'I understood we were to meet Tom,' he said fiercely.

  'So we are.'

  Rose looked around him. There were only a few men in the tavern, mostly sitting alone. They had looked up when he came in, as cows fix upon a stranger in a field, but now they had returned to their glasses. They drank as they stared, with a kind of stolid intensity.

  'Well, then. Which one is he?'

  'You's talking to him.'

  'But —'

  'Can't blame a man for caution.'

  Rose hesitated. He had no idea whether the old man was telling the truth. But perhaps it didn't matter. All that mattered was getting into the tunnels. A woman with a square red face and a grimy apron brought mugs of porter. Tom nodded at Rose who dropped coins into the woman's outstretched hand.

  "Very well,' Rose said reluctantly.

  'Mebbe we can help each other out,' Tom added.

  'Perhaps.'

  'So what is it you want?'

  Rose gave only the briefest necessary explanation. There'd been a murder. Tom had most likely heard talk of it. A gentleman, killed in the sewers. Tom shrugged but already he heard the warning bells in his head. By the time Rose was done with his story, Tom had a knot tied tight in the pit of his belly. The lawyer hadn't mentioned the Captain, not even so much as in passing. Still, there was a chance the Captain wasn't out of the woods, not if the lunatic got off. The thought of trouble for the Captain prickled like the smell of roasting beef in his nostrils. But his hands were tied. The lawyer here, talking to him, knowing what he looked like and where he lived? It was too close. Too close by half.

  'Ain't going to be able to help you,' Tom said, and he shrugged. 'Don't go down the tunnels no more. Haven't been in years. 'Gainst the law it is, these days.'

  'Surely there must be ways? Legal or otherwise. I'd pay you.'

  Tom shook his head firmly.

  'No way of getting in, not now they've closed off the river sluices.'

  'So —'

  'So that's that. Nothing to be done about it.'

  Rose gazed pleadingly at the old man for a moment. Then he let out a long breath, like he was the air balloon at Cremorne letting down, and stared miserably at the table. Tom took an impatient gulp of beer.

  'Something you could do for me, though,' he said quickly. 'As you're here.' He felt in his hem. 'I got a legal document here. By way of a contract. Only I don't rightly know how to get what's due to me.'

  Rose ran a fingernail disconsolately along a scar on the table and said nothing.

  'Here.' Tom opened up the papers and pushed them across the table.

  Rose pressed his fingers against his eyes. The beginnings of a headache ran down his neck to clamp his shoulders. When at last he opened his eyes he glanced without interest at the papers in front of him.

  'What the —?' Rose gaped at the papers. 'Where on earth did you get these from?'

  'They's nothing more than my due,' Tom said defensively, gripping them more tightly. 'Sold a man a dog, all above board. Only now he's not for paying me what it says here in the contract and now I wants my dog back. Simple as that.'

  Rose frowned.

  'This contract is for supplying sand.'

  'No. A dog. There was a witness. Look —'

  'Five tons of sand for the making of cement. To the Metropolitan Board of Works, dated 12th December 1858. Witnessed by a Mr Badger.'

  Rose pointed to the place where Brassey had signed.

  'But Brassey — Jesus Christ, the double-crossing bastard —'

  But Rose wasn't listening. Rummaging inside his own coat he pulled out another set of papers which he laid on the table beside Tom's.

  'It is him. The same letterhead, do you see? And the same style of signature, here. The names are different but —' Rose looked up at Tom, his eyes urgent. 'Who did you say you sold your dog to?'

  'The Captain's what they call him round here. But I never catched his name.' Tom cleared his throat. 'Hardly knew him meself.'

  Rose laid one paper over another so that the signatures almost overlapped. His eyes shone.

  'He signed himself Smith. But the hand is the same, there's no mistaking it.' Rose pointed, his eyes shining. 'The way the letters tilt backwards, the spikes on the M here, and here on the W? He's cheated you out of your dog, him and Mr Badger.'

  That's what I said, ain't it?'

  'Well then,' Rose said, triumphantly, seizing the old man's sleeve. 'You want your money, don't you?'

  'Rather have me dog back,' Tom muttered.

  'Really?'

  Tom scowled at Rose's surprised expression, yanking his arm away.

  'Very well,' Rose said hastily. 'The dog, then, if that's what you want. But I need to know everything, if I'm to help you. You have to tell me everything you know about the man you call the Captain. You see, I know him too. But his name isn't Smith, I'm afraid. His name is Hawke.'

  XXIX

  The tide was on the out. Tom waded to the recess and squatted there in the darkness as the stream leaked away, its solid leavings huddled together in the bricks where the tunnel made a sharp turn. There was a space beside him where Lady'd liked to sit, so familiar to him he could swear he could still see the outline of her, pale as a ghost, long after
he'd shuttered his lantern. There'd always been comfort in it, the feel of her head beneath his hand. But tonight he clenched his fist, locking his arms between his knees and he squeezed his eyes shut, so as the white of her was lost in the explosion of dark red behind his eyes. Down here, there was room to think. Down here, in the darkness, he'd see things straight.

  The lawyer'd asked him all sorts about the Captain, or plain old Mr Hawke as he'd insisted on calling him. Turned out the swindling bastard'd never been a Captain at all, nor a Doctor neither, though he'd had some kind of yellow-bellied grocer's job in the army in the Russian War, tucked up warm and cosy away from the fighting counting out coats and rations of meat. No doubt he'd skimmed a fair whack from them and all. Not that it'd hurt him. Now he was some bigwig in the Metropolitan Board of Works. No doubt he'd've had himself a chuckle over that, buttering Tom up to do his dirty work while all the time he was busy taking his livelihood away from him. If Tom'd known it he'd never've had nothing to do with him. Too close for comfort it'd been all along, too close by half.

  Too late now. Even though he'd not set a foot wrong, far as he figured it, not done a thing that'd call attention to himself, a lawyer'd still turned up on his doorstep asking questions Tom had no intention of answering. It was just as well that the boy was green as raw cabbage. Tom'd thought straight off the lunatic didn't have much of a chance, not with a tenderfoot like that the only person to stand between him and the full weight of the law. Everything that one thought was written clean across his face, or in the twisting of his great red hands. When he was nervous or not sure of how you'd take something the lump that stuck out of his throat jumped up and down like it was out to get your attention. So Tom reckoned he was safe to believe him when the lawyer said he didn't reckon Tom had nothing to do with the murder.

  But for all that, for all his greenness, he'd found Tom. Somehow there he was, that lawyer, twisting his hands and blinking his great bulging eyes and pressing Tom for answers, so nervous you could see the sweat standing out across his forehead. But there was something dogged about him all the same. And now he'd got Tom and the Captain linked together. Tom might be out of the way of things for now but it wouldn't be long before the bad smell coming off the Captain began to cling to Tom too, he didn't have no doubts about that. Like as not the next thing the lawyer'd do was to set about asking the Captain what he knew of Tom. And the Captain'd shop him, soon as look at him. Make most of it up, most likely, but they'd believe him. A man like that, slippery as a stinking eel, he'd wriggle out of anything, given even the faintest chink of a gap. Come up smelling of roses, he would, while he slapped you with the shit. He'd smile at you, showing his pointed teeth, and shake his head and walk off, your money in his pocket, your blood on his hands. Your dog at his heels.

  Lady. Day or two before, Joe's boys'd gone and brought him a pup, a terrier with startled fur and bright button eyes who snarled at Tom, straining at its length of rope. A right bloodthirsty little bugger, they'd said, for all it was no bigger than a man's fist. Schooled up, they'd said, they reckoned it could be a proper little earner. Teeth like needles and not averse to using them neither. Tom'd thanked them, of course, they'd meant well enough, but he sent them away, and the dog with them. There'd be someone else'd have a better chance with it, he told them. As for Tom, he was too old and tired to start over again. That night and the last one he'd dreamed of her. She sat very still, half in the shadows, close enough so as he could hear the quick tugs of her breath, smell the warm yeast of her. Tom'd smiled at her, he'd clicked his fingers, held out his palm, but she just went on looking at him, her head on one side, never blinking her pink eyes. In his dreams he'd felt it then, the uneasy churn as the happiness soured in his stomach. He shouted at her then to come to him. He couldn't stop himself. Long after she'd vanished he was still shouting, so hard he woke himself up with the force of it. As he clutched his knees to his chest, struggling to steady his breathing, the pain'd pierced his throat like a knife.

  In the darkness of the tunnels Tom swallowed. He'd been right. Down here you did see things straight. He bent his head as the tunnel sloped upwards, bringing the roof down to shoulder level before opening up again. The package was there, tucked in behind the granite slab, just where he'd left it. Only way with a man like the Captain was to play him by his own rules. Throw everything at him, everything you had, even if you wasn't sure exactly what it was, and hope it stuck. Bury him so deep in his own shit he was drowning in it before he so much as saw you coming. And then run like hell.

  There was a place Rose and Tom had agreed on, a small coffee-house near the Temple, where the lawyer'd said the tosher could leave messages, if anything came back to him. He'd suggested his chambers first, which was the name fancy lawyers gave their offices, but something about Tom's face then had changed his mind. So he'd suggested the coffee-house instead, it being open all hours for the river trade. Tom could leave word there and Rose would meet him wherever, whenever. Any time of the day or night.

  It were Joe who took the papers, wrapped in an old cloth and tied with twine. At first Tom'd thought to leave them there secretly so that the lawyer might find them in the morning, a gift from a nameless well-wisher, but they was all he had. He wasn't in the way of giving something away for nothing, even if that something turned out to be nothing but tailors' bills. But if it wasn't? He wasn't about to serve himself up to the law as an accompaniment to the main dish, neither. At Tom's insistence Joe darkened his copper hair with soot and muffled himself near to the eyes, just so as the lawyer'd be sure not to know him again, but his eyes twinkled above the grimy scarf and he brushed away Tom's repeated instructions like a cloud of troublesome flies.

  'I got it, you daft bugger,' he grinned. 'Not hard, is it? Show this Rose cove the papers. If he's interested tell him they're his. Soon as you get your dog back.'

  XXX

  The stranger's thumbs were black against the creamy paper. For all that it was written on formal stationery, with the name of the business engraved in handsome black capitals at its head, it would not have pleased a schoolmaster. The writing was cramped and smudged and so hastily conceived that in places the words were strung together by loops of ink. In one or two places the pen had leaked. There was no envelope. The outside of the paper was marked with streaks of rusty brown and speckled with the first dark peppery dots of mould. It was clear that the letter had been much handled. The folds in the paper were deep and soft and showed up grey in the smoky light of the oil lamp. The rag in which it and the other correspondence had been wrapped was stiff with dirt and smelled unpleasantly of drains.

  The boy from the coffee-house had banged on the door a little after one o'clock in the morning. Earlier that evening Rose had instructed the proprietor to alert him immediately if there was any message, any message at all, certain that he would be unable to sleep. But before he had even reached his lodgings the excitement had begun to ebb away. True, it had been an extraordinary coincidence. But he had discovered precisely nothing. Hawke had acquired a dog by deception. Or so the tosher claimed, and frankly Rose doubted whether he was a man who concerned himself overly with the finer details of the truth. With its shrewd eyes and broken teeth, his was far from an honest face. Hawke had not signed the contract in his own name. Rose might be able to point up the similarities between the style of the two hands, might even be able to persuade a jury that Hawke had signed an illegal contract, but what then? The most it proved was that Hawke dabbled a little in the seamier peripheries of the city. That might sit somewhat uncomfortably with his position at the Board of Works but it was not in itself illegal. The trail ended there. And still Rose had turned up nothing that might incriminate Hawke in the murder of Alfred England.

  Rose had sat in the darkness, poring over the few facts he had gleaned until, like words read too many times, they became no more than meaningless shapes, stripped of any consequence. A little before midnight, as his little fire crumbled into the grate, he had fallen into a cavernous slumb
er. The barrage of the boy's fists upon the door had insinuated itself threateningly into dark dreams of the rookeries so that Rose woke to a fearful alertness, his heart thumping fast in his chest. His heart still thumped now and he sweated beneath his heavy coat in the thick fug of the coffee-house. Excitement tugged impatiently at his belly as he read the letter again.

  Dear Mr Bazalgette,

  It is my unpleasant duty to inform you that Mr Charles Hawke, currently in your employment at Greek-street, is right under your noses selling contracts for Works' business to the highest bidder. No doubt as an honest man this will come as a shock to you, Mr Bazalgette, but all the time he claims to be driving the hardest bargain for the good of the Board, Mr Hawke is busy taking a rake-off for himself. I don't doubt he's already a rich man. And all in the most underhand manner imaginable.

  How do I know? Mr Hawke first approached me on the 4th September 1858. In return for the sum of one hundred guineas to be paid to him in cash, Mr Hawke would propose our company for a contract which he guaranteed would carry a minimum value of five thousand pounds. On signature Mr Hawke would take ten per cent of the contract or one thousand pounds, whichever was the greater. There is no need to concern you with the details of the financial difficulties in which England's has found itself in recent years, for all they claim the market has taken off. Suffice to say we understood the unlawful nature of Mr Hawke's offer but we felt we had no choice but to accept it.

  As it went there was no contract. It is too late to seek others. The bank has foreclosed on its loan. The brickyard is to be sold. It is over. But, as I close England's doors for the last time, I feel I must set things straight. For myself, I am ashamed of my part in the whole shabby business. I was desperate and allowed myself to be persuaded into desperate measures. No doubt my confessions in this letter expose me to the full force of the law. It hardly matters now. But as for Mr Hawke, I could not stand aside as he cheated his way to a fortune. If you care to look you will find that at least three of the current suppliers to the Board 'purchased' their contracts from your Mr Hawke. He is a cold and calculating confidence trickster who is ruthlessly using a position of privilege to line his own pockets. If this letter does its part in bringing him to justice I will consider it worth the writing, whatever trouble I bring down upon my own head.