James McGee - The Reckoning

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollins Publishers 2017

Copyright © James McGee 2017

James McGee asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Micaela Alcaino © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Mark Owen / Arcangel Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2017 ISBN: 9780007320127

SOURCE ISBN: 9780007507665

Version 2018-07-03

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Historical Note

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by James McGee

About the Publisher

It was late evening and in the Hanged Man trade was brisk, which wasn’t surprising, given the weather outside. Rain had been falling on and off most of the day and there was nothing more welcoming on a wet winter’s night than a crackling fire to warm the bones, a swig of brandy to comfort the soul and perhaps a wager or two to while away the time.

The tavern was situated – some would say hidden – in an alleyway behind Buckbridge Street and thus it did not cater for what other, more salubrious, establishments might have termed a passing trade. The Hanged Man was for locals. It wasn’t somewhere you stumbled upon by accident.

The western end of Buckbridge Street was only a stone’s throw from Oxford Street; not in itself a notorious address, but it was the area that lay beyond the street’s eastern border, trapped between Broad Street to the south and Great Russell Street to the north, which deterred those citizens of a more upstanding character from venturing uninvited into its shadowy maw.

Covering close to ten acres, the St Giles Rookery was a fetid maze of crumbling tenements, roofless hovels, dank cellars, crooked passageways and rat-infested sewers. To law-abiding Londoners it was a filthy, festering sore; a canker eating away at the city’s heart. To its inhabitants – those who were seen as living on the more disreputable fringes of society – it was home. The Hanged Man was a refuge within a refuge.

On the ground floor, dense tobacco fumes rising from the tables had merged with the smoke from the hearth to form an opaque layer of fog which sat suspended between windowsill and ceiling. A hubbub of conversation and coarse laughter filled the room. In one corner, close to the fire, a fiddler – blind in one eye and seemingly oblivious to the din around him – was attempting to scrape out a tune on an instrument in dire need of a new set of strings. At his feet, a small wire-coated terrier rested its head on its paws, while his immediate neighbour, a drunken moll, sprawled half in and half out of her chair, her large, blue-veined breasts spilling like opened sacks of lard from her part-fastened bodice.

Reached by a staircase leading up from the back of the taproom, the first floor was noticeably quieter. At a table next to the rear window, a game of dominoes was in progress. Relaxed and unbothered by the sounds filtering from below, the four players studied the pattern of tiles laid out on the table before them; each man ruminating over his hand and the move he was about to make.

“Jesus, Del, you’ve been lookin’ at those bloody bones for ’alf an hour. How long’s it goin’ to take?”

The speaker, a balding, morose-looking individual with stubbled jowls and a silver ring in his right ear, rolled his eyes towards his other two companions in exaggerated disbelief.

“I’m thinkin’, ain’t I?” the player to his left protested. Of a similar age to the speaker, but with a fuller face and salt-and-pepper hair, he wrinkled his brow as he contemplated his remaining tiles and scratched his chin with the edge of a stubby thumb.

“Well, think faster. God knows, I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”

“You take your time, my son.” It was the bearded player to the speaker’s right who spoke. “Jasper’s only narked ’cos he’s down a bob. If he was up, he wouldn’t be botherin’.”

“Plus he wants us to forget it’s ’is round,” the player opposite Jasper murmured without raising his head. “Mine’s another brandy, when you’re ready.”

“Heard that,” the first speaker responded. “I’ll get ’em in soon as Del here makes up ’is mind.”

“You catch that, Del?” the bearded man said. “Best get a move on.”

“There,” Del said, as he slid his tile across the table and deposited it at the end of the row. “How’s that?”

Jasper stared down at Del’s contribution and then at his own instantly redundant counters. “Double three? Double three ?”

“Make that two bob.” The bearded man – whose name was Ned – grinned as he added his own tile to the opposite end of the row. “I were you, I’d get the drinks in afore Del cleans you out. Mine’s a porter.”

As the player opposite him – stocky, broad-shouldered, with a craggy face and close-cropped, pewter-coloured hair – relinquished his remaining tile, Jasper snorted in disgust, regarded the man to his left with exasperation and muttered darkly, “One of these days. One of these bloody days …”

Placing his leftover tiles on the table he rose from his chair. “Right, I’m off to the pisser. Get ’em in. I’ll settle up when I get back.”

“Heard that one before,” Del chuckled as he totted up the score on a ragged scrap of paper. Calculations made, he began to spread the tiles face down in preparation for another game.

By which time Jasper was already out of earshot and heading for the back stairs.

“You want to watch it,” Ned warned. “You wind him up too hard and the bugger’ll snap. Seen Jasper when he snaps. Not a pretty sight. Last time it ’appened, he chewed a watchman’s ear off. He was spittin’ gristle for a week.”

“Nah,” Del said confidently. “Bark’s worse than ’is bite.”

“Tell that to the poor sod who lost ’is ear.”

As the two men traded quips, their companion, seated with his back to the window, remained silent, his right hand curved around his glass. From his posture and calm expression, he looked at ease with his surroundings, though as he surveyed the floor his watchful eyes told a different story. Raising his glass to his lips, his attention moved towards the table at the top of the stairs and the man seated there alone, reading a book.