Mick Finlay - Arrowood

‘Let me get you another drink,’ I said to the sculleryman. Before he could refuse, I gestured to the barmaid and placed a nice mug of gin in his raw fist.

‘Let’s sit. You look like you need to get the weight off your feet. You’ve been working hard, Ernest.’

He followed me meekly to the table.

‘Did you ever see Thierry’s sister at the Beef?’ I asked when we were sat down. ‘Good looker, dark hair? French, as you might suppose.’

He breathed in sharply, then quickly swallowed his gin.

‘Not as I ever saw. Never saw him with any woman but Martha.’

‘What about the American? What did you hear about him?’

‘You said oysters?’ he said, folding his arms over his matted coat.

I went to get him a bowl and another mug of gin. He’d got through half of it and survived a short burping fit before I asked him again.

‘Mr Cream has plenty of business acquaintances,’ he replied. ‘They was in day after day. Some of them you’d recognize, but this one I never seen before. Bald, with black hair around the crown. Black beard. Blue eyes that pierced you. I took them up some coffee and he almost stared right through me. There was an Irishman with him. I seen him in the place a few times before. Little fellow with a big voice. Stringy yellow hair. One of his ears was cut off. Horrible-looking he was.’

‘And you don’t know his business, I suppose.’

‘They talk business in the office, not the scullery.’

‘I need to know anyone else Terry was tight with, Ernest. Who did he talk to? Give me some names.’

‘I give you a name last time. Martha. Ask her.’

‘I need another name.’

‘I’ve given you a name!’ he protested, chafing now that he was flushed through with gin. ‘Ask Martha. If anybody knows anything, it’ll be her.’

I leaned in to him and whispered, ‘She’s dead, Ern. Murdered on her way to work this evening.’

His mouth fell open; he stared at me with his rheumy eyes. It seemed as if his pickled brain couldn’t absorb what I’d told him.

‘Did you hear me? Murdered. That’s why I need to talk to somebody else.’

Slowly, fear took him over. His arm trembled, his eyes blinked fast. He swallowed his gin; I gestured for another.

When it arrived he shook his head.

‘I got to go, mister,’ he said. His voice was strained. ‘I don’t know nothing.’

He made a move to rise; I held his wrist fast.

‘A name, Ern. One name. Someone he might have talked to. Who did he work next to? Who in the Beef did he spend most time with?’

‘I suppose Harry.’ He was talking quick now, looking around him at each noise. ‘You could try him. One of the junior cooks. He worked in the same part of the kitchen.’

‘And what does he look like?’

‘Very thin. Unnatural thin, he is, and his eyebrows are dark but his hair’s yellow. You can’t miss him.’

I let go of his wrist.

‘Thank you, Ernest.’

In a flash he was up and scurrying out of the gin-house. As I rose, I felt someone’s eyes on me. I turned. The bald head of the match-seller had appeared around the side of the glass partition, and he was staring at me with curiosity. He sniffed, his shoulders twitched, and he disappeared back into his hole.

Chapter Six

The next morning, I found the guvnor alone in his parlour. His face was red and had a peculiar shine to it as if he’d been buffed by a cleaning maid.

‘She’s out,’ he declared the minute I stepped in from the shop. ‘She’s at an organizing meeting with the others.’

‘Organizing? What’s she organizing?’

‘They’re to visit the poor. Now, what did you discover last night?’

I told him about the junior cook, Harry. Since neither of us had any particular inclination to show our face in the Barrel of Beef, he summoned Neddy and instructed him to take a note. The note was signed ‘Mr Locksher’, the guvnor’s usual alias, and promised a reward of a shilling for ‘a very quick job indeed’. Harry was to come that night, after his work was over, to Mrs Willows’ coffeehouse on Blackfriars Road, the only one open until such a late hour. ‘Your friend from across the Channel suggested your name’ was all the explanation offered. Neddy was under instruction to hold tight to that note and not to give it to anyone other than the fellow called Harry. We told him to look out for the thin man with black eyebrows and yellow hair, and to walk direct into the kitchen and not to tell anybody who had sent him.

The boy scampered off while the guvnor refilled his pipe. When he had it lit again, he looked at me sadly.

‘What do you think about the girl’s death, Barnett? Do you think it was Jack on the prowl again?’

‘It doesn’t seem like it.’

‘Indeed. This murder wasn’t Jack’s work. His killings were all of a similar character. He did his work in solitary places. He preferred to butcher the bodies, and this takes time.’

I waited, knowing from the way he stared into the air that there was more to come.

‘I’ve been thinking about this man,’ he continued. ‘First, there’s his precision. He hurries to the church, delivers three deadly blows and runs into the crowd. He leaves nothing, no clues, no knife. He’s rapid and careful, so we can assume it isn’t an act of passion. Neither was it robbery. A robber wouldn’t choose a poor girl as his victim, not in daylight, and not on a busy street.’

‘He wouldn’t have time to search her pockets.’

‘Quite so.’ He puffed on his pipe and thought. ‘And his clothes. He wears a winter coat when it’s summer. It’s too big for him. Therefore he’s either a man of little means or in disguise. Tell me, as you chased, did he look back?’

‘Not once. I had my eyes on him all the time until I lost him. I only saw the side of his face as he turned the corner.’

‘He didn’t turn his head once to determine whether he was pursued?’

I shook my head.

‘Tell me, if you’d murdered a person on a busy street and fled, how would you feel?’

‘My blood would be up, I suppose. I’d be anxious not be caught.’

‘Yes, yes, and would you turn your head to see if you were being pursued?’

‘I reckon so.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to stop your head turning, Barnett. Your strong emotions would make you do it. This man isn’t like you. He’s used to controlling his emotions. So what is he? A hired assassin? A police officer?’

‘A soldier?’

He nodded, placing his pipe in the ash dish and pushing himself out of the chair.

‘That’s a start. And now we’ll go and visit Lewis. I don’t want to be here when Ettie resumes her reorganization of my life, and you’d better not be here either else she’ll begin on yours.’

Lewis Schwartz was the proprietor of a dark weaponry shop not far from Southwark Bridge. It was where people came with pistols and shotguns they desired to sell; it was where people came when they needed to buy some self-protection. It wasn’t a business I’d have wished to be in: I could only imagine the criminals who came and went from this boutique, but Lewis was as solid and unaffected by the danger of his trade as the river walls that seeped their yellow pus into the bricks of his dark shop. He was a fat man with one missing arm and stringy grey hair that fell onto his grimy collar. The guvnor and him were old friends. He used to go to Lewis when he needed information for the newspaper and, since we’d become private agents, he continued to help us from time to time. The guvnor always brought a packet of mutton or roasted beef or a bit of liver from the cookshop, which he would slap on the little table foul with grease. I was in the habit of standing back on these occasions, just as I did now, my mind imagining all the diseases whose traces could no doubt be found on the mud-black hands of our friend.