Dodger (32 page)

He paused. ‘Of course, I see no reason to mention anything to him about the jewellery. Incidentally, it’s worth a king’s ransom, even for the rubies alone. Or perhaps a gift from a prince and his father, mmm? As you know, I am not a fence, but I think I know one or two associates who might take the stuff off our hands, and I am sure I will be able to negotiate an acceptable price. Indeed I shall, because they go to the synagogue as I do, and sooner or later every man has to bargain with the Devil, and in those circumstances God is inclined to help him achieve a good price. You
won
’t, of course, get the full value, but I believe that after I have negotiated, you will have a second fortune. As a dowry for your young lady, perhaps?’

He plucked one of the documents from the pile. ‘And, mmm all I will ask from you, my friend, is that I am allowed to take this document concerning the Tsar, and quite possibly make some use of it one day, when the occasion ever presents itself, especially if my young friend Karl is still alive . . . Mmm, and incidentally, in another one of these packages is a scurrilous piece of information about a member of our own royal family. I suppose I should throw it into the fire . . .’ He hesitated for a moment. ‘But perhaps I will just keep it in a place of safety mmm, so that it never comes to the attention of unfriendly eyes.’ He grinned again. ‘And, of course, gentlemen like ourselves would have nothing to do with such things, but nevertheless there are times when a little leverage is worth having.’

With that, the old man carefully stowed away both the jewellery and the precious information somewhere inside his voluminous jacket, and turned to his workbench while Dodger sat and stared at nothing. He thought, If you put Solomon in a room full of lawyers, how many would come out, and in what condition would they be as they crawled along the floor?

He took this opportunity. ‘Solomon,’ he asked, ‘could you do a little job of work for me, please? Could you melt out some gold from this haul and make a gold ring? With a decent ruby maybe? And possibly a sprinkling of diamonds to set them off?’

Solomon looked up. ‘Mmm, I would be delighted to do that for you, Dodger, and at my very best price.’ He laughed at Dodger’s expression and said, ‘Honestly, my friend, what must you think of me? You must understand that was just my little joke, and
I
do not make many of them.’ He added, ‘Mmm, by any chance would you like an engraved inscription?’ His expression looked sly as he went on, ‘Perhaps something relating to a young lady? We can agree the exact wording later, yes?’

Dodger blushed and said, ‘Are you a mind reader too?’

‘Mmm, of course! And so are you, the only difference being that I have had far more chances to read them than you have, and some of the minds that I have fathomed were very tangled and convoluted minds indeed.’

Dodger stood back and said, ‘I have never asked you this before, but you know so much and you can do so much. Why then do you spend most of your time fiddling with bits of old jewellery and watches and so on down here in the rookeries when there are many other things you could be doing?’

And Solomon said, ‘That in itself is a convoluted question, but surely you know most of the answer, mmm? I enjoy my chosen trade and receive good remuneration. That is to say, for your benefit,
money
for doing something that gives me great pleasure.’ He sighed and went on, ‘But I suppose the main reason is that I can no longer run as fast as I once could, and death is, well, so final.’

This last piece of information caused Dodger to sit up straight. But it was a call to arms, the starting of a clock, which meant Dodger wasn’t so free as he had been because now time itself was his master, so he got dressed in a hurry.

He had to be careful about this; there were quite a number of people whom he could trust, but there were, as it were, several stages of trust, ranging from those he could trust with a sixpence to those he would trust with his life. There weren’t all that many of the latter, and it was probably a good idea not to trespass on their goodwill, because: a) goodwill, if trespassed on too often,
might
have a tendency to lose some of its bloom; and b) because it didn’t do for anyone to know too much about Dodger’s business.

Now he made his way once again to the stall of Marie Jo, who probably wouldn’t be too busy at this time of day, since most of her customers would be out there on the streets, begging, stealing, or – when all else failed – earning enough for their dinner. But she was there, as reliable as the peals of the Bow bells – and Dodger made sure
he
was reliable too, and paid her the promised few sixpences more for the children’s soup – and then there were not many around to hear them so he lowered his voice and told her what he wanted.

When she laughed and said something in French that he didn’t understand, he said, ‘I can’t tell you why I need to, Marie Jo.’

She looked at his face and laughed again, giving him the expression that a certain type of woman has when they are dealing with a saucy young gentleman such as Dodger, and he recognized this as he had spent a lot of time analysing this in the University of Dodger; it was accusing and forgiving wrapped up together in a complicated parcel, and her eyes twinkled and he knew that she would do anything for him. But knowing that, he also knew that he shouldn’t ask for too much.

Looking him up and down, she said, ‘
Cherchez la femme?
’ Dodger knew this one, and very carefully looked embarrassed. She laughed, that laugh which somehow came from her childhood, and she insisted that he run the stall and chop up some onions and some carrots while she ran this little errand for him. How embarrassing! In the full light of day, passers-by could see Dodger – yes,
Dodger
– working on a stall; he was glad that there weren’t too many people about.

Fortunately, Marie Jo soon came back with a small package which he carefully stowed away, and in good faith he spent half an hour cleaning and chopping vegetables and welcomed it, because the attention to detail meant the inner Dodger could think about what he was going to do next, which was to take a walk among the shonky shops and pawnbrokers. He knew what he needed, but was careful not to get it all from one single shop, although he was particularly fortunate in one old shop smelling of not quite properly laundered clothing to find just what he wanted, and the proprietor smelled of gin and appeared not to know Dodger at all.

But the clock was still ticking and he was short of time.

By mid-afternoon, though, after a trip to the Gunner’s Daughter and a couple of pints of porter with a few mates, and one in particular – good ol’ Dodger, never forgot his friends now he was in the money after his exploits with the Demon Barber – he was ready, though Solomon chuckled rather too much for his liking.

Dodger had heard that God watches everything, although he thought that around the rookeries, He tended to close his eyes. If God wasn’t available today, and since people didn’t look too much, just in case they saw anything, possibly only a watcher on the moon would have seen an elderly lady – an extremely pitiful one, even by the standards of the rookeries – shin down a length of rope, land like an athlete and then, very slowly, hobble away.

Dodger wasn’t particularly bothered about this bit; there were only a few places you could stand to see the rope in any case, but being an old lady meant that you couldn’t travel fast. Regrettably, little old ladies – rather unwashed ones, at that – didn’t often have enough money to hire a growler, but since he would be
damned
before he hobbled all the way to the river, the old lady did manage, by the frantic waving of her walking stick, to hail a cab. Unusually, given the pitiful condition of the old girl, who seemed to be a jolly playground for warts, thanks to the theatrical help of Marie Jo, the growler captain, thinking about his old mum, carefully helped the old girl up and didn’t short-change her.

Indeed, she was a very pitiful old lady; she smelled six days away from a good wash. And warts? Never before had he seen such terrible warts. She wore a wig, but that wasn’t unusual knowing the sensitivities of old ladies, and goodness, he thought, it was a terribly bad wig even so, about the worst a shonky shop could offer.

He watched her walk away, and it looked as if her feet were in a terrible way, and this was true because Dodger had put a piece of wood in his boot which hurt like the blazes. By the time he reached the nearest wharf, his feet were killing him. Once upon a time, Marie Jo had told him that with his skills, he should be on the stage, as she had been, but since he knew that actors didn’t get paid very much he had always reckoned that the only reason to be on a stage would be to rob it.

A waterman, coincidentally one whom Dodger had chatted to earlier in the day – Double Henry, a regular at the Gunner’s Daughter – gave a lift to the dear old lady with the warts and
terrible
bad teeth, and kindly helped her out quite near the morgue at Four Farthings, London’s smallest borough. Possibly somebody on the moon watching the old lady from that point on would have watched her progress all the way to the coroner’s office. It was pitiful, absolutely pitiful. So pitiful, in fact, that an officer in the morgue, generally not well disposed to living people
and
with something of a temper, actually gave her a cup of tea before directing her to the coroner’s office, some distance away.

The coroner was a kind man, as generally the coroners were, which was quite remarkable given that so often they saw and knew things that decent people should neither see nor know, and this one listened to the old lady, who was in floods of tears about her niece, who had gone missing. It was a familiar tale, a tale just like one Dodger had heard from Messy Bessie: the sweet girl had come up from somewhere in Kent, seeking to improve herself and get a better job in London. A dreadful engine, if she did but know it, that took the hopeful, the innocent and ultimately the living, and turned them into . . . something else.

The coroner, hardened though he was to this sort of thing, was overwhelmed by the tears and the lamentations on the lines of, ‘I told her, I said we could manage, we could run along all right.’ And, ‘I told her not to talk to any gentlemen on the street, sir, I certainly did, sir, but you know how it is with young girls, sir, ever the prey of a dashing gentleman with money to spend. Oh dear me, if only she had listened. I shall always blame myself.’ And, ‘I mean, the country ain’t like the city, that’s for God’s certainty. I mean, generally, if a lad and a lass got to grips and she started to swell around the waist, then her mum would have a word with her, wouldn’t she? And then her mum would talk to her dad and her dad would talk to the boy’s dad in the tavern and everyone would sigh and say, “Oh well, but at least it shows that they can have kids.”’ According to the old lady, the young couple would very quickly then go and see the vicar, and all in all there would be no harm done.

The coroner, not only a man of this world but in some sense of
the
next one too, was not certain it was always as easy as that, but he took care not to say so. Eventually, the old woman explained about the girl running out of the house and how she had gone as best she could from bridge to bridge in search of the runaway. The coroner nodded gloomily at that point, because this was the same old tragic story. He knew that there were always Christian people who patrolled the London bridges at twilight, looking out for these unfortunate ‘soiled doves’. Generally, they were given a pamphlet and urged not to do it; sometimes this even worked, but then it was going to be the workhouse, and most likely after the birth the poor girl would never even see the child for more than the time it took to be delivered.

You had to develop the hide of a rhinoceros to deal with this sort of thing on a daily basis and, alas, he found himself not very good at it, but he listened to the old woman’s description of her niece with a glum countenance. In between sobs were the words, ‘A blue dress, sir, not very new, but very nice underthings, sir, very good with the needle, so she was . . . Just an iron ring made out of a horseshoe nail like the blacksmiths make, ’cos it’s a ring, you see. Ain’t got no jewels, but a ring is a ring, ain’t it, sir. Maybe this is important, sir; she had yellow hair, lovely yellow hair. Never cut it, not like the other girls who would cut it every year or so and sell it when the wigmakers’ man came round. She wouldn’t have none of that, sir, she was a very good girl . . .’

After hearing all this, the coroner brightened a little, and so did Dodger on seeing his expression. It had been worth the time spent to locate Double Henry and the two pints of porter had got every single detail out of him.

The coroner said, ‘It would be invidious of me to use the word “luck” in this context, madam, but fortuitously it may just be the
case
that your niece is even now lying in our mortuary and has been there for a few days. She was drawn to my attention when I visited there yesterday morning, and indeed the officer on duty and myself were much taken by the wonderful colour of her hair. Alas, all along the lower Thames this sad tableau is re-enacted far too often. In the case of this lovely young lady, I must say that I was beginning to despair that anyone would claim her as their own.’

At this point the old lady broke down, whimpering, ‘Oh dear, whatever am I going to tell her mother! I mean, I said I’d look after her, but young girls these days . . .’

‘Yes, I fully understand,’ said the coroner hurriedly, and continued, ‘Do let me give you another cup of tea, my good woman, and I will take you to see the corpse in question.’

There was another wail at this, and another flow of tears, and they were real tears, because by now Dodger was so wrapped up in the drama that he might have had a fainting fit but he, or strictly speaking at this point
she
, carefully drank the proffered tea, taking great care not to knock off a wart. Shortly afterwards, the coroner, having taken so much pity on her dreadful state, led her by the arm to the mortuary. One glance from the old lady at the girl on the slab, who had been cleaned up a little to the point where she looked as if she was sleeping, was enough. There was no more acting now, or perhaps the acting was so good, so perfectly in the role that there should have been a gallery of theatre-goers cheering to the rafters.