Anne Perry: A Christmas Odyssey

Squeaky felt a wash of panic rise inside him. He couldn’t do this alone. He knew enough about the underworld of self-indulgence to be aware of its labyrinthine depths and dangers. What on earth had possessed him to begin this? He should have told Henry Rathbone that the whole thing was impossible. For that matter, Rathbone should have told Lucien’s father that in the first place. Squeaky was really losing his grip. Respectability was an idiot’s calling.

“Right!” he said tartly. “I’ll go back and tell Hester I can’t do it.”

“You didn’t tell her anything about it in the first place,” Crow pointed out, but there was no smile in his eyes.

“And how do I tell Mr. Rathbone that I can’t do it?” Squeaky said sarcastically. “Without her knowing, eh? She’s clever, that one. She can read a lie like it was writ on your face. She’ll know, whatever I say.”

Crow thrust his hands into his pockets. His hands always seemed to be bare, whatever the weather. Squeaky looked at him. “Why don’t you get someone to pay you with a pair o’ gloves?” he said pointedly.

Crow ignored the remark. “Are you saying obliquely that you will tell Hester I refused to help?”

“Obliquely? Obliquely? You mean sideways?” Squeaky said crossly. “Why can’t you say it straight out? And no, I’m not saying it sideways, I’m telling you plain that she’ll know, ’cause if she were in my place, you’d be the person she’d ask. Which comes to my point. You want me to tell her you won’t help, or you want to tell her yourself?”

Crow shook his head. “You haven’t lost your touch, Squeaky. You’re a hard man.”

“Thank you,” Squeaky said with unexpected appreciation.

Crow glared at him. “It wasn’t a compliment! What do we know about this Lucien Wentworth, apart from the fact that his father is wealthy and seems to have let him have a lot more money than is good for him?”

Squeaky shrugged and started to walk again, talking half over his shoulder as Crow caught up with him. He repeated what Henry Rathbone had told him about Lucien’s weakness for physical pleasure, his need to feel a sense of power, to feel admired, to feel—as it might appear to his deluded and immature mind—loved.

Behind them a string of barges went downriver with the ebbing tide, their riding lights bright sparks in the wind and darkness. To the south a foghorn sounded mournfully.

Crow’s expression grew grimmer as he tramped beside Squeaky. Finally they turned inland and slightly up the slope, leaving the sounds of the water behind them. The thickening gloom of the winter night lay ahead. Lamps shone one after another along the narrow street, angular beacons toward the busier High Street.

“It’s going to be a long night,” Crow said as they reached the crossroad. They waited for the traffic to clear, and then hurried over, their boots splashing in the gutter and then crunching on the cobbles already slicked with ice. “And we may not find anything.”

Squeaky wanted to tell him to stop complaining, but he knew that Crow was right, so he said nothing for several minutes.

“Let’s have a drink first,” he suggested finally. He thought of offering to pay for both of them, but that was a bad habit to start.

I t was, as Crow had said, a very long night. They began with extremely discreet inquiries in the Haymarket. The area was notorious for the prostitutes who patrolled its pavements so openly that no decent woman went there, even if accompanied by her husband. However well-dressed she was, she would be likely to be taken for a lady of the night. In this area such women might be indistinguishable from ladies of society, especially those whose taste was a little daring.

“I don’t know what we’ll learn here,” Crow said, watching a couple of young women quite openly sidle up to a group of theatergoers.

“Do you know which theaters are fashionable right now for tastes a bit sharper than usual?” Squeaky asked challengingly.

“My patients don’t come up this way,” Crow admitted. “East End music halls are more their line, if they’ve a few pence to spare.”

“Then shut up, and watch,” Squeaky retorted. “And follow me.”

They tried to find places selling more than alcohol, entertainment, and the chance to pick up a prostitute.

Their first three attempts were abortive, but the fourth led them to a very small theater off Piccadilly where the drama on stage was overshadowed by the exchanges in the many private boxes and on the narrow stairs. The lighting was yellow and very dim, making most of the people look sallow and a little sinister. Heaven only knew what they looked like in daylight.

Squeaky watched and waited. He did not know the names of the current young dandies who indulged themselves. Their dull eyes were half-focused, lids drooping. Opium, he thought to himself.

He studied one young man closely, and, brushing past him, felt the quality of the cloth in his jacket sleeve. Yes, definitely money there. He hoped he had not lost his childhood art of picking pockets. There was often very good information to be had from the contents of a gentleman’s pocket—his name and address from his card, if nothing else.

Squeaky knew that moving unnoticed in places such as these would require a little money, and he had no intention whatsoever of financing it himself. His money was earned with proper work these days, and deserved to be spent respectably. Better to pick pockets without Crow’s noticing, though. You never knew what his peculiar aversions might be. There was no accounting for taste, or superstition.

From that theater they learned of others, more daring. The first cost them even to gain entrance. From the outside it looked like a perfectly ordinary public house.

“Don’t look worth the trouble,” Squeaky said disparagingly, regarding the chipped pillars and peeling plaster with distaste.

“An affectation, perhaps?” Crow suggested. Then he hurried over to explain. “A suggestion to the eye of the more sordid appetites catered to within?”

Squeaky was amused, not so much by the idea as by the wording Crow chose. He shrugged and paid for their entry.

“Ye’re right,” he said generously as soon as they were through the archway and down the steps into the main room. It was crowded with people, all of them with glasses or goblets in their hands, except the two almost-naked women who were practicing the most extraordinary and vulgar contortions on a makeshift stage, to the hoots and jeers of the onlookers.

“They’ll be needing me professionally,” Crow observed, wincing at a particularly unnatural-looking move.

Squeaky made no comment. He began to methodically talk to one person after another, asking questions, learning little.

It took them over an hour to learn that Lucien was known here, but had not been seen in more than a month.

They moved on to another place where they learned nothing, and then a farther tavern that at first seemed very helpful. However, in the end the man they found there turned out not to be Lucien, merely some other lost youth bent on finding oblivion.

By four in the morning Squeaky was tired and cold. His head ached. And his feet were sore. He realized all the reasons he had been willing to give up the pursuit of temporary pleasure in favor of a warm bed in the Portpool Lane clinic, and only the very occasional night awake chasing around after other people’s needs. Even then, his time was not spent outside in the rain and the freezing wind, with his feet wet and water sliding down his neck from the rain. Being inside a low-ceilinged room and among the confusion of loud voices was not much better. He had forgotten how he disliked stupid laughter and the crush of bodies in narrow spaces, the smell of stale smoke and drink. Even the music had less appeal than it used to.