After a slap-up meal which Finch declared to be the finest roast he’d had in a considerable while – which was true – and an exquisite bottle of Jilkes’ favourite Bordeaux, he sat with the kids and read them some passages from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. He impressed them with his impassioned, by-heart recitation of the Jabberwocky poem before they were prised away, objecting noisily to the unfair prospect of being dispatched upstairs to wash faces and brush teeth.
Agatha and her husband exchanged a look and Jilkes led Finch into the drawing room for a glass of port and a smoke. Finch wondered whether he had brought him home just to underscore how sacred his family was. He couldn’t blame him.
‘Jilkes, until such time as you reverse your decision, I solemnly swear that I will not call on your professional services again.’
‘I’ll let you off today. It was a “little bird” who tipped me off you were in trouble.’
‘PC Woodruff?’
‘Aye. He’s a good copper. Old school. You can’t police a community unless you understand that community.’
Finch’s voice was tinged with sadness.
‘Seriously, I don’t know what I’d have done without you. Not just today. I mean everything.’
‘It’s me who should be thanking you, Ingo. I was a bit of a star for a while in the War Office. Your case got me a long way.’
They both smiled.
‘But you know what, Ingo. It doesn’t hurt for a man to share some of this stuff… your troubles… Not all of them, but at least some of them. You know you can talk to Maude…’
‘Jilkes, can I ask you something?’
‘Not the God question again.’
Finch laughed, then turned serious.
‘Who got to you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know what I mean. Someone approached you… told you to wind up your affairs with me.’
Jilkes sighed.
‘I suppose I owe you this. But when you mentioned the scent of lavender…’
‘It was him… in person?’
Finch could sense that Jilkes wanted him to leave it at that.
‘Look, this is just so you’re clear…’
He hesitated.
‘Go on.’
Jilkes caught Finch’s eye and stared intently for a moment.
‘You cannot breathe a word. You understand?’
Finch nodded.
Jilkes pinched another of Finch’s smokes and struck a match. He kept his voice down so Agatha couldn’t hear.
‘Friday morning. Came to my office. Had made an appointment by telephone, ostensibly to discuss some minor concern, a contractual dispute – something I was going to pass on to a junior partner. But it was a pretence. Kept it short and to the point. Just said that I should terminate my professional relationship with you with immediate effect.’
‘Did he make a threat?’
‘Didn’t need to.’
‘And then…?’
‘Gone. Was in and out in five minutes… Which is why you should just stick to the narrative… as shaky as that narrative may be. Pickersgill was a petty crook… a drunk… and someone did him in as a consequence.’
‘He was no drunk, Jilkes. That was horseshit. He was a religious man, a teetotaller.’
‘Or so he presented himself…’
‘No, Jilkes. And I don’t believe he was a conman, either. That was no act.’
His volume was increasing. Jilkes motioned for him to keep it down.
‘Then make yourself believe it was an act. It makes no difference to Pickersgill now… God rest his soul.’
He raised his glass in a silent toast. Finch did the same.
‘Then why did he seek me out? Why go to such great lengths? There must be something I know… Something I’ve done in the past…’
‘He was fixated on you, that’s all. You treated him in the war, mended him. In his mind you were his hero. Such things are not unknown. You have some training in psychology…’
‘And all this stuff about the Dogger Bank incident?’
‘Half the country’s speculating on crackpot conspiracy theories about what happened in the North Sea that night; every other person is sounding off about war. Hell, we did it ourselves. What made Pickersgill so different?’
A small human dynamo entered the room, running around the front parlour in her nightdress, giggling mischievously, pulling funny gap-tooth faces. Jilkes chivvied Agnes away playfully.
‘Up to bed, you wee monkey!’
He turned back to Finch.
‘Ingo, I’m away tomorrow… for a few days… I have some business in Oxford… When I return, I hope we can say that we’ve all moved on.’
* * *
On the way home, in the moonlight, Finch stooped by the side of the road to pick some woodland violets whose bloom had lingered on through autumn. He then commandeered a cab to Maude’s. Her door was answered by her stern landlady who reminded him that it was after gentlemen’s calling hours. He handed her the bunch, which she regarded with disdain, and asked if she could pass them on. She bade him a curt ‘good night’ and closed the door.
He walked the rest of the way home, if only to clear his head and exercise his knee, which had stiffened up. The wind whipped up and dead leaves swirled. The gas street lights were on. In the amber glow of the one at the far end of his road, he thought he saw, momentarily, the strange hulking presence of a man who was there one minute before slipping back into the shadows. The fleeting image was of someone huge, with broad muscular shoulders and the thickest of necks – a neck so meaty that it gave the odd impression of a near conical head set upon it, the likes of which he had never seen before.
It made Finch shiver and he hastened into his house and locked and bolted the door, cursing the fact that his beloved Webley had been confiscated.
He kept the light off, the better to peer out. But after a while, he was driven by a greater necessity to seek out the emergency bottle of claret. Finding it under the sink, he was emboldened by sufficient Dutch courage to draw the curtains, switch on the light and carry on with the business of tidying up, driven primarily by the fear of what Mrs P-A might say when she arrived back tomorrow.
As he placed the books back on the shelves, trying to remember how they had been arranged previously – classics, reference books, mysteries – he came across something. Though stashed amid the others, the volume was unmistakable: small, black, leather-bound and stained by damp round the edges. On the front was a gold-embossed crucifix. It was Pickersgill’s Bible.
Had he left it for me?
In it, still, was the newspaper cutting Pickersgill had shown him only yesterday morning and Finch unfolded it – the sad death notice of poor old Bertie Brandon.
But there was something new this time… an addition. On the top of the page, above the strap carrying the newspaper’s title and the date, was a word written in pencil, scrawled as if in a hurry.
‘Ursa.’
Chapter Twelve
It was not yet light when Mordecai crossed the iron swing bridge over the lock. The road followed the line of the old marsh wall with its derelict, crumbling windmills. The earthworks skirted the western shore of the Isle of Dogs – the great teardrop of land pinched within a meandering loop of the Thames – preventing it from becoming a flood plain.
The trudge became more purposeful, the numbers swelling as they approached the gates of the Millwall Dock, the silhouettes of masts sprouting like an unkempt hedge. The men jostled hard to be at the front, marshalled by constables of the Dock Police, though they knew better than to touch the chain that extended across the entrance. There was wry amusement as the newcomers had their knuckles rapped.
The crowd had grown more fevered these past few days. Last week, a particularly sadistic foreman had chosen his gang by flinging brass washers into the air. The men who grabbed one and managed to hold on to it, scrabbling in the dirt, punching and kicking and eye-gouging the opposit
ion, had been rewarded with labour. Those who failed had not.
The Dockers’ Union had assured there would be no repeat of this stunt. The rogue foreman had been ‘dealt with’ by the management. But no one ever believed the word of the management. Or, for that matter, the union.
At six o’clock the gates opened and the foremen stepped through, ready for the ‘call on’. They fanned out along the wall. It was palpable – the suspicion, the contempt… the desperation. It began to rain. Men twitched their caps and pulled their collars up
It had taken Mordecai a while to divine the muddled hierarchy of the workforce. He knew the ship-loading stevedores were at the top, along with the lightermen and watermen. Below them came a raft of tradesmen whose names, in English, meant nothing to him: porters, coopers, riggers, tallymen, warehousemen, pilers, baulkers, blenders… What was clear was that, right down at the bottom, came the ordinary dockers, first the regulars, then the casuals – miserable bastards like himself, scrapping for labour on a daily basis at sixpence an hour.
Though even the casuals had their rankings – from the dependable favourites, the so-called ‘royals’, descending to the lowest of wretches, the filthy coalers; or the men willing to toil in the deep freezers where they wore sacking over their boots to stave off the frostbite.
The ‘royals’, it was said, were either friends or relatives of the foremen, or ones who had bribed them in advance. To Mordecai this made no sense. The gang system relied on emptying a ship’s hold as quickly as possible to gain the ‘plus money’. Good business sense surely dictated that a foreman select the fittest, most able gang, not one based on patronage? There was more logic in selection based on tossing out brass washers.
‘Mordecai Plavinas.’
He raised a hand. This foreman, Mr Morris, knew him by now – knew he was strong, knew he was reliable. He was, he supposed, a royal, whether he liked it or not. The feeling of resentment around him told him he was, especially from the native-born. The others had been called on too – Viktors, Fjodors, Vlad, Nikolajs… permitted with the lucky few to pass through the chain, each group then following its master.
‘Call on’ complete, the constables stood to block the gates and the rejected men grumbled and walked away. Most knew which foremen were ‘theirs’ and had probably calculated the odds. One frustrated individual was dragged off by his mates, swearing and swinging while the constables moved forward, patting truncheons into their palms.
In through the hallowed portal of the dock gate and the chosen ones stamped their feet beneath the McDougall flour mill and its four giant granary towers.
The air was rich with the smell of grain. Timber too – bread and soil as Mordecai liked to think of it, much of it channelled via the Baltic Sea and the land he still called home. It was a pungent cocktail, fighting hard against the fetid stench of the Mudchute and the dumped silt and spoil from the harbour’s dredging.
Before dawn, it was always the smell that hit you: the tar and the hemp of the rope stores; the rank animal hides; the delicate aroma of coffee and spices as you crossed the West and East India Docks. Tobacco, rum, sulphur, cork, copper ore, stale sweat…
Sound too: the shouts of the gangs; the creaking of the chains; the hollow drums rattling down the cobbles. Beyond came the cries of the mudlarks, searching at low tide for anything they could sell – cigarette butts… even dog turds to flog to the tanneries.
And then the sun would come up… It never ceased to amaze Mordecai – that forest of masts that stretched all the way out to Tilbury. The watery November light could not dim the shine of this, the ‘workshop of the world’, the most powerful city on earth. The scale of activity was monumental.
It was only when the hooter sounded, and the slow march back up the Westferry Road began, that the complexity of the operation was fully revealed: the shops stocked with shiny compasses and sextants; sailmakers’ stores crammed with rope; grocers touting indestructible tins of meat and biscuits; clothiers with brightly coloured flannel shirts; the pubs teeming with boisterous, rum-soaked men.
There were the sailors: fair-haired Scandinavians; shivering black Africans; turbaned Lascars. There were the store hands, some with faces stained blue from indigo. There were the customs officials in their brass-buttoned jackets…
Though the modern Millwall Dock could accommodate steamers, the ship they were unloading today was a sailing vessel, a steel-hulled barque, a large four-master, Finnish, its hull full of wheat grain – though not from Scandinavia but Australia, that strange Other England on the far side of the world that seemed so rich in everything.
The fabled pneumatic elevating machine could suck the grain straight out of a ship’s hold and into the granary – with its hoppers and sifters – but McDougall’s would still only mill a third of it. The rest had to be sacked up – half hauled to the rail yard, the remainder to the lightermen, who would run it in barges upstream. They stood on the quayside, arms folded and smoking (‘Not our job, mate’), watching with indifference while the gangs toiled.
The work was hard, back-breaking. A grain sack weighed fifty-five pounds – four stone. It was difficult to get a handhold. At the end of the day you were stooped double after carting the things, hundreds of them, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…
Mordecai and his friends knew well enough by now to look out for each other. A gang was only as strong as its weakest member. It required the administration of private justice to a freeloader or the chivvying of a genuine struggler. One man today, in his fifties – big, strong, but with diminished stamina and lungs gurgling from a lifetime of smoking – tried hard but was clearly not up to the task. They helped him along, wheezing and panting and apologising, giving him the easiest chores.
At noon they had a break, half an hour. It was still cold but Mordecai was dripping with sweat, his undershirt soaked. As the men hung about – eating, smoking, resting – the dock manager looked out from his office, a raised wooden structure next to the grain elevator, and crooked a finger in Mordecai’s direction.
Mordecai put down the hunk of bread he had stowed inside his shirt and walked across the cobbles and up the steps. He guessed what this might be about. The older man, the struggler, the one they had helped – he would vouch for him no matter what.
The office was cramped – the desk, the windowsill, the chairs piled high with papers and ledgers. The man, a sneery-looking individual with a paunch belly, half-moon spectacles and wild whiskers, informed him of some news. The foreman, Morris, had been singing his praises. McDougall’s were in the process of recruitment. It had been recommended that Mordecai become a regular – work that was guaranteed, and with the possibility to start learning a trade.
Mordecai smiled.
‘But unfortunately there’s this…’
The manager produced a bottle of rum and stood it in what space he could find on the desk. ‘Mount Gay’, the label said, ‘Barbados’.
‘There,’ he said. ‘What have you got to say for yourself?’
Mordecai did not know what he meant.
‘Found it in your things.’
‘Things?’ He did not have any ‘things’.
‘Don’t deny it. Pilfering’s a criminal offence.’
‘I not understand…’
‘You, son. Stealing. The job was yours had it not been for this…’
There was a knock on the door’s pane. A dock constable had been summoned. The manager beckoned for him to enter.
‘Too bad, Plavinas. Now get out. Sling your hook. Go quietly. You hear me?’
‘But—’
‘Docked your morning’s pay and don’t show your face here again.’
‘No, sir. There is mistake! I not take drink. I not—’
The manager nodded to the constable who grabbed Mordecai by the lapel. Though Mordecai could have overpowered him easily, he knew better than to resist.
‘Such a shame, Plavinas. And we thought you were a good ’un.’
‘There
is mistake!’
‘Think yourself lucky,’ snapped the constable as he ushered him out and down the steps. ‘Bloody McDougall’s and their do-goodery. Myself? I’d have slung you in the nick.’
His gang mates looked on, raising palms, gesturing. Morris, puffing on a clay pipe, looked confused. He hastened to the steps up to the office.
‘This is wrong. There is mistake,’ yelled Mordecai.
The copper yanked him away, manhandling him more roughly than was necessary. Mordecai shrugged the hand away, meant to demonstrate that he was coming quietly. But a truncheon was stabbed hard, end first, into his thigh, deadening his leg.
‘All the same, you lot. Always thieving. Always causing trouble…’
Mordecai writhed on the ground, clutching his leg.
‘…Fuckin’ Russians.’
The pain of the accusation was greater than that in Mordecai’s thigh – greater even than the news of his dismissal.
‘I not Russian…’ he yelled. ‘I Latvian… LATVIAN!’
Back in his office, the dock manager opened his hand and admired the ten shining shillings the stranger had given him.
Chapter Thirteen
With all that was whirring through his head, Finch endured a restless night. A couple of times, in the wee small hours, he got up and peered out of his window, but was satisfied that no malign presence lurked.
With sleep a stranger, he rose early and busied himself with tidying the house in advance of the return of Mrs P-A, who was due back in the afternoon. He bathed, shaved and did his best to purge the smell of the police cell.
After breakfast, and at the chime of eight, he grabbed his medical bag and set off for work, his mind toying with the significance of ‘Ursa’. He knew from his schoolboy Latin, and from the constellations, that it meant ‘bear’ – ‘Ursa Major: the Great Bear’. But the bear was what… Russia? Maybe not the country… Perhaps it was an organisation? An acronym even…?
Had the word been scrawled on the newspaper cutting previously and it was a case of him simply not noticing it? Had Pickersgill left his Bible by accident – dropped it, maybe, perhaps when he was drying out his jacket?
The Cold North Sea Page 9