Andrew Taylor - The American Boy

"I cannot say, sir."

"I wonder. Mrs Frant believes you had private business with her husband."

"It is true that on one occasion I was able to be of service to Mr Frant." I turned away, so that he could not see my face. "I confess I do not understand why you find this meeting that Mrs Frant witnessed to be of such significance in the matter of Mr Frant's death."

"I should have been surprised if you had. I have not told you the whole of it yet. The drawing-room window was open, despite the cold, because Mrs Frant had been airing the room. The stranger raised his voice, and she heard him quite distinctly say the words Wellington-terrace. Moreover, she believes – though I do not know how much weight one should attach to this – that the man had an Irish or perhaps American accent." Carswall tapped the arm of his chair with the base of the glass. "I do not deny that her ears may have heard, at least in memory, what she wanted to hear. One more thing: she is convinced that the private business you had with her husband had to do with the stranger in Stoke Newington. She is barely well enough to speak at present but she charged me to lay all this before you."

I bowed my head. A wave of shame swept over me.

"You would not wish to make her suffering worse, I take it?" Carswall said.

"No, sir."

"Then you can have no objection to disclosing whatever you know."

"Very well. After the man's first visit to Stoke Newington, Mr Frant was naturally concerned for the safety of his son. I saw the man again, by chance, one afternoon in Long Acre. I gave chase and eventually ran him down and heard his story. He is an American, he told me, but of Irish descent. He called himself David Poe. The reason for his visit to Stoke Newington was not Charlie or Mr Frant. Charlie's friend Edgar Allan was the object of his interest."

"Allan? The son of the American who lives in Southampton-row? The Mr Allan who was badly hit when the tobacco market collapsed?"

"I cannot comment on Mr Allan's business dealings, sir, but he is certainly the father of Edgar Allan – or rather the foster father. Young Edgar makes no bones about the fact that he has been adopted. This David Poe claimed to be his natural father."

"Why should he turn up now after all these years?"

"He hoped for money." I hesitated. "I think, too, there may have been an element of paternal affection in him. Or at least of curiosity."

Carswall blew his nose long and loud into a large yellow handkerchief. "I do not understand. On the second occasion, he gave them money."

"Yes, sir. I can only infer that in the interim Mr Poe's material circumstances had considerably improved."

Carswall consulted his watch. "There is another point: Mrs Frant made it quite clear that on that first occasion the man was interested in Charlie, not in the other boy."

"I believe it probable that Poe made a mistake. I should make it clear that at the time the man seemed inebriated. Also, there is a certain resemblance between the two boys."

"A double, eh?"

"Not precisely, sir. There is a similarity, no more than that."

Carswall threw the butt of his cigar into the fire. "Tell me, were you able to establish where the man lives?"

"In St Giles. He would not say exactly where, but he informed me that he is often to be found at the Fountain, where he works as a screever."

"And you told Frant all this?"

"Yes, sir."

"Some time after this, the man Poe reappears in Stoke Newington, with his circumstances miraculously changed for the better. Later, Mrs Frant sees her husband talking with a man, who may be this Poe, in Russell-square, an encounter her husband afterwards denies, and also overhears the words Wellington-terrace. Later still, a body which purports to be that of Mr Frant is discovered foully murdered in Wellington-terrace. Well? How does that strike you?"

"On the present evidence, sir, it is impossible to judge whether these circumstances are connected, whether they are in some way linked."

Carswall hammered the heel of his left hand against the arm of the chair. "Don't lecture me, young man. That's the trouble with you bumbrushers, you treat the world as your schoolroom. Now – how well do you know St Giles?"

"I have walked there on occasion."

"For pleasure?" When I did not answer, he gave another of his laughs, a strange, hard, almost inhuman sound that could have come from the mouth of a great bird. "Do you know the Fountain?"

"It's somewhere north of the church," I said. "Near Lawrence-street, I believe."

"Will you go there tomorrow and seek out Mr Poe?"

"I am, sir, as you remind me, a schoolmaster, and-"

"Just so, just so, Mr Shield. You are also a man who has seen something of the world. And you are the only person I am aware of, with the possible exception of Mrs Frant herself, who knows what this man Poe looks like."

"But Mrs Frant has charged me to look after her son."

"God damn it, am I not paying for the privilege of your presence?"

The rich assume we are in their power, and usually they are right. For now, I was scarcely more than one of Carswall's servants. If I aroused his ire, he would speak to Mr Bransby and I would be out of my place.

He pressed the repeater button on his watch and it emitted a tiny chime. "Besides," he said gently, "I am not asking you to do this for me. I am asking you to do this for Mrs Frant herself. And I know you will not refuse me."

The following morning, I slipped out of the house, made my way through the market to Oxford-street, and walked eastwards towards St Giles. I had purchased an old, patched coat from the man who brought the kindling. I carried a heavy stick, borrowed from Mr Carswall.

It was a foul day, the air rendered almost opaque by a yellow fog that found its way into the mouth and tasted like soot. I blundered along the pavements colliding with my fellow pedestrians, and on one occasion nearly losing my life to a passing coal cart.

In the days of what they were pleased to call my lunacy, I would often wander in the Rookeries of St Giles-in-the-Fields. The worst parts were north of the church in that dark lozenge of courts and alleys and lanes that lay between Bainbridge-street, George-street and the High-street. I was never molested, though, even by the dogs that ran wild in the streets. Misery calls to misery. They had known I was one of them.

As I drew nearer the black heart of the place, the smells and the noise rose up to greet me, enveloping me, sucking at me, as though they were but extensions of the fog. The Rookeries were a place where the natural order of things was reversed: where victims became beasts of prey, and preyed in turn on their natural enemy.

I turned off the High-street into Lawrence-street. A woman wearing but a shift despite the cold tore at my coat with fingers as small as a child's. I brushed past her and in my hurry stumbled over a lean pig ambling through the pool of muck extending into the roadway from the mouth of an alley. A pair of urchins ran after the animal, shouting shrill obscenities in their excitement. I hurried on. I passed a woman swathed in grey blankets, huddled in a doorway, with a baby at her breast. She held out a bare, scrawny arm to me and beckoned. "I'll make you happy, dearie," she cried in a thin, reedy whine. And I heard her cursing me in the same, unchanging voice as I left her behind.

"And would you spare a copper for an old soldier to drink His Majesty's health?" a husky voice inquired from the level of my knees.

I glanced down and saw a red-faced man without legs, huddled on a low trolley.

"Would you direct me to the Fountain? It is not far from here, is it?"

"His Majesty's health," the man insisted.

I found a penny in my pocket and dropped it into his waiting palm.