Mick Finlay - Arrowood

Today, Lewis ate carefully, chewing on one side of his mouth only.

‘You got tooth problems?’ I asked him.

‘One of the devils is playing me up.’

‘Let me see,’ demanded the guvnor.

Lewis opened his mouth and tipped back his head. The guvnor winced.

‘That tooth is black. You must have it pulled.’

‘I’m mustering my courage.’

‘Sooner the better,’ said the guvnor.

It was only when the beef was finished, and the fingers wiped on the trousers of these two old friends, that the guvnor fished in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the bullet.

‘Any idea who might use a bullet such as this, Lewis?’

Lewis put on his eyeglasses and held it under the lamp.

‘Very nice,’ he murmured, turning the bullet this way and that, rubbing its shaft with his fingers. ‘It’s a .303. Smokeless. But how did you come by something like this, William?’

‘A dying girl gave it to me,’ said the guvnor. ‘A young innocent girl, murdered before our eyes. And we mean to find out who killed her. Do you know what type of gun it’s from, Lewis?’

‘The new Lee-Enfield repeating rifles.’ Lewis handed the bullet back. ‘Military rifles, only issued to a few regiments so far. This is no huntsman’s rifle. She must have got it from a soldier. Did she have a sweetheart?’

‘He was no soldier.’

‘Then another man. Was she a whore, William?’

‘She was not a whore!’ cried the guvnor.

Lewis looked at him in surprise.

‘Why are you angry?’ he asked. ‘Did you know her?’

‘I don’t understand why everyone assumes she was a whore. She worked in the Barrel of Beef.’

‘She might have been given it by a customer,’ I said, understanding that the guvnor had attached the same purity to Martha as he attached to his wife.

‘Why would a customer give a girl a bullet?’ asked Lewis, his nose twitching. ‘A tip, now that would be one thing. But why a bullet?’

The guvnor shook his head and stood.

‘That’s what we have to find out,’ he said.

As we reached the door, a match flared. The guvnor turned back. Lewis sat hunched in his chair at the back of the shop, surrounded by boxes of bullets and sheaves of gunpowder, a glowing pipe in his mouth.

‘One day you’ll blow yourself up,’ the guvnor said to his friend. ‘I’ve warned you about this for years. Why do you never listen?’

Lewis waved him away.

‘If I started to worry now I’d have to sell up this shop and become a potato-man,’ he said. ‘You should see some of the individuals I have to deal with. One spark and they would explode themselves. Next to them, this is nothing.’

*

Late that night, we waited in Mrs Willows’ coffeehouse. I watched the street outside ebb and flow in the mud and the brown rain, the night-time people stagger and shriek, the horses clop by, their heads low and weary. Midnight passed and the dark new day took its place outside the grimy window. The guvnor read the newspapers like a glutton. He started with Punch , stowing Lloyd’s Weekly and the Pall Mall Gazette under his thighs. On the next table, a thin fellow with the uniform of an undertaker ate a packet of whelks and watched him unhappily, waiting for the chance of a read before he wandered home. But the guvnor took his time, reading every column, every page, then just when it seemed he was finished he went back to the beginning and began scanning the columns again.

‘Look at this, Barnett,’ he said, holding up a cartoon. It was of a tall Irish peasant holding a knife over a cringing English gentleman. The caption read: The Irish Frankenstein. ‘They’re printing these cartoons again. You see what they do? The Irish have monkeys’ faces, covered in hair. The Englishman is defenceless. Good God, why does this never change? Why will they not see our own aggression?’

‘I suppose they don’t want to see it, sir.’

The undertaker cleared his throat and nodded at the paper. The guvnor lit his pipe, then without a word thrust the paper at the man, before lifting his leg and continuing on to the Gazette .

Finally, the door swung open and in walked our man. He stood in the doorway, his long thin arms protruding from a brown woollen coat that was too long in the body and too short in the limbs. His yellow hair was tucked into a grey cloth cap pulled down over his ears. He looked at the undertaker, at Mrs Willows standing in the door to the kitchen, then at us. His black eyebrows twitched.

‘Mr Harry,’ I said, standing. ‘This is Mr Locksher. Have a sit down. You want a coffee?’

He nodded and sat on a stool.

‘What’s the job?’ he asked.

‘We have a parcel for your friend, Thierry,’ said the guvnor softly, leaning across the table. ‘Only we can’t find him.’

Harry stood.

‘You said a job. That ain’t no job far as I can see.’

‘We’ll pay you for the information.’

He looked back and forth between us for a moment, chewing his lip.

‘No.’

He was turning to leave when I grasped his arm.

‘Let go,’ he demanded, his bristly face pinched. Under the thick wool of his coat, I could feel the bones of his arm: he was thin as a workhouse pensioner. His skin was grey, the rims of his eyes red. The bones of his jaw were sharp like a skull.

It was no trouble to shove him back down on the stool. He was a good few inches taller than me but weak as a sparrow.

The undertaker quickly rose, shoved the remains of his whelks into his pocket, and made his exit. Mrs Willows brought over the coffee, her face calm like nothing was happening.

‘You be nice, Mr Barnett,’ she murmured.

‘We intend to be very nice to the gentleman, Rena,’ said the guvnor.

‘I don’t know nothing,’ said the man. ‘Honest. I can’t help you. He’s gone. Went off a few days ago now. Probably gone back to France. That’s all I can think.’ He glanced up at me. ‘That’s all I can say, sirs.’

‘You’re a thin man for a cook,’ the guvnor observed.

‘Cook’s helper. I do the peelings mostly. Pull the bones out the fishes. I ain’t no big cook.’

The guvnor leaned over the table suddenly and shoved his hand in the man’s coat pocket. Before Harry could respond, he pulled out a greasy packet and dropped it on the table.

‘It’s a pudding,’ said Harry, his tone defensive. ‘Half a pudding.’

‘What’s in there?’ asked the guvnor, indicating the other pocket.

‘Couple of spuds. Bit of a ham bone. They was going to throw it.’

‘I doubt that,’ I said, having a bit of a look in his pocket. ‘Ain’t nothing wrong with that food. Even if it was on the turn, they’d sell it in the Skirt or outside to those as sleep in the alley.’

‘Don’t tell him, mister. Please. I’ll take it all back. Last thing I need right now is to be out of a job.’

‘No need for that, sir,’ said the guvnor. ‘We’re not on friendly terms with your employer.’

‘Why are you so thin?’ I asked. ‘Are you sick?’

‘If six children be called a sickness. And one of them only two this month.’

‘But you’ve a regular job,’ said the guvnor. ‘Is your wife alive?’

The man nodded, his eyes twitching towards the window where a hansom trotted past.

‘Doesn’t she feed you?’

The knuckle in Harry’s gullet rose as he swallowed.

‘I can’t help you,’ he said.

‘We do mean to give you a shilling, Harry,’ said the guvnor, his voice gentle. ‘We’re investigative agents, working for Mr Thierry’s family. They say he’s gone missing. They’re worried.’

Harry continued to stare out the window, unsure whether to trust us.

‘We couldn’t come to the Beef because Mr Cream has a particular dislike for us,’ continued the guvnor. ‘That’s why we sent the boy.’