Tom All-Alone's (8 page)

He stops and seems to be gazing back into his own mind, seeing again, as Charles cannot, the crowd of silent bystanders gathered about the gibbet, and the thin body swinging slowly, slowly, under a leaden April sky. A moment later he shakes his head, and resumes. ‘A most deplorable case, but the point I wished to make was that in the course of that inquiry I had occasion to interrogate a number of local villagers and labourers from the surrounding district. Your suspect, my dear Charles, is
Cornish.'

Charles sits back in his chair, dumbfounded.

‘I am very sorry, Uncle. When you put the paper to your face just now, I thought, well, I thought—'

‘You thought I was going mad. Deranged. Like that poor dead girl, seeing people who do not exist, hearing voices that are not there.'

A shadow crosses his face, and all his old self-assurance shrinks to fear. He reaches forward and grips hold of Charles' wrist. ‘There are days now, Charles, when I cannot see beyond the dark – when I cannot trust my own body – when I can barely untangle my own
thoughts
. Do you know what that is like – for a man like
me
? Listen to me, Charles,' he whispers, his grip even tighter. ‘These people watch me night and day, but
you
are the one I trust. Which is why I want you to promise me something.'

‘If I can—'

‘Promise me you will not let them take me away. Promise me
I will not lose my mind.'

The old man's eyes are locked on his own. Charles opens his mouth to reply, then—

‘Here we are, Mr Maddox,' says Billy cheerily, bumping down a tray of tea on the table beside them. ‘Hot and strong, just the way you like it.'

The old man slumps slowly back in his chair, his head against his pillows, his mouth open. The moment has passed; the light in his eyes has gone out.

W
hen Charles opens his eyes the following morning, he can tell at once that the weather has changed. He already loves this room – the way river reflections play across the ceiling on sunny days, flickering chains of light into bright geometric shapes. But not today. This morning the room is filled with that off-white over-white glow that means only one thing: snow. He dislodges a heavy and very sleepy cat from the counterpane and goes to the window to look out over the roof-tops. The flakes are coming down in huge clumps, slow and steady, and the skylight overhead is gradually layering with translucent grey. There's a perfect inch of snow on the parapet, and on the ledge, a track of large, fastidious pad-prints to show where Thunder beat a tactical retreat sometime during the night.

The house is suddenly very cold, and Charles gets dressed quickly among his heaps of boxes; he really must find time to arrange his collection properly, now he finally has the space to do it. He slides a hand, half-automatically, down the side of one of the cases to reassure himself his pistol-case is still where he left it. And if you're surprised to find he owns such a thing, it is not, after all, so very unusual that he should: just like any other young man brought up in the country in the first half of the nineteenth century, he learned to handle a rifle hunting rabbits as a boy, and thinks no more of owning a gun than of
taking laudanum when he has a tooth-ache, though both would brand him a dangerous delinquent now. He is, by the way, rather good at shooting, and keeps his hand in at a little rundown gallery he knows near Leicester Square. He is also – as you have just seen – assiduous to ensure that the pistol is always safely stowed. But for all his precautions, and all his care, this gun of his may still prove to be his undoing.

The only person up and about downstairs is Molly, who's on her knees raking out the hearth in the drawing-room. He stops on the stairs a moment, then takes a step or two into the room.

‘It's cold today.'

She tilts her head slightly towards him, as if to show she's heard, but does not look up; there is no break in the slow, methodical movement of her large rough hands across the sooty tiles. He wonders if she's seen snow before; wonders, in fact, how long she's been in England, and whether the unforgiving sunlight of her native land – wherever that is – might not now be stranger to her than the dank grey London streets. He eats what he can find in the kitchen (bread and butter only, since the bacon is still frying), and then trudges through the thickening snow to the Strand, a flurry of white flakes settling on his eyelashes and his hair and his coat (though this time, at least, he has retrieved his muffler).

There's an even longer queue than usual for the omnibus, and Charles can barely feel his feet by the time it arrives. He has to change twice more before he's finally heading south towards the river, the gritty, partly frozen snow churning under the wheels like gravel and the horses slithering on the icy stones. It's not the best day for such a journey, but now he has both a genuine lead and a point to prove, and not just to his client, but to himself: the next time he and Tulkinghorn meet,
he wants it to be at his request, not the lawyer's. And given that knowledge is power – especially when it comes to a man like Tulkinghorn – if there is indeed something about this case the old man is concealing, Charles wants to find out what that is, so he can decide for himself what information to give, and what to keep. All of which makes perfect sense, of course, but since as far as we know he's had no new information, how is it that he's suddenly so sure of where he should be going? And where – for that matter – is he going? That question, at least, is easy enough to answer. Maddox told him he's looking for a tanner, and that being the case, even a half-competent London detective would know where to start: Bermondsey. This densely packed district barely one mile across holds more tanners, curriers, fellmongers, parchment-makers, wool-staplers, leather-dressers, and glue-makers than the rest of the country put together. Dyeing they do here too, though dying has been more prevalent of late – over six thousand were killed by cholera in the last year, so overcrowded is this strip of land hard by the Thames, and so hard the subsistence for those who live here. As the 'bus hauls slowly over London Bridge, the footways on both sides are thronged with people, some workers, some tradesmen, and some poor stitchers from south of the river, carrying huge canvas bags made for the wealthy
wool-merchants
on the other side. The snow is too thick to see far in either direction, but Charles can make out the dark wharves and wherries of Shad Thames, and further away still, the dim outline of Jacob's Island, with its warehouses, docks, bridges, and alleys, bristling with the masts of ships. Less lethal now than once it was, but still an infamous slum, the houses clustered thick and the rooms cramped and stinking, overhanging water that clogs with refuse, and sewage that empties hourly into open ditches.

It will not surprise you to find that this part of London is not much frequented by the idly inquisitive (though Charles Dickens himself will make almost exactly this journey in a few months' time). Nor is it an area that Charles knows well, so when he swings down from the 'bus at Tooley Street, he asks the driver what he suggests.

‘Start with the Skin Depository, guv. Up ahead off Bermondsey Street. On yer right.'

The quadrangle of buildings proves surprisingly elegant for such a down and dirty trade, but there's no disguising what's really being bought and sold here. Men with stained hands and soiled aprons press close against him, and laden carts push at him through the throng, leaving a trail of dark, viscous slime matted with hanks of animal hair. Inside the Depository there are stacks of hides and wet skins piled in bays on every side of the courtyard, horns still dangling from slices of skull, and while the buyers do their rounds in their black coats and tall hats, picking over the merchandise and questioning its quality, a horde of bedraggled little boys follows them from carcase to carcase, stripping them of any flesh still edible, however rotten it smells. Charles suddenly feels rather ill. The air is sickly with blood, and the snow is treading red into the mud under his feet. He's wearing the wrong boots for this. He takes as deep a breath as the evil air will allow, and heads for one of the more respectable-looking fellmongers. A slight little man with a thin, nasal whine. He's courteous enough to start with, but lapses into indifference when it becomes clear Charles has not come with money to spend. He claims to know nothing of the tanneries, and even less of the men who work there. In any case, there are scores of them – hundreds even. But if Charles is intent on such a hopeless quest, he should probably start by enquiring in Long Lane. There must be a good twenty establishments there.

And so it proves. Charles has never really thought much about leather production before, and even though Maddox's words should have prepared him for something of what he's about to find, the reality still comes as a shock. If the smell was rank in the market, it's ten times worse here. The first tannery he finds has a narrow entrance under two overhead gangways, and when he reaches the inner yard he finds a group of men stripping a cartload of new hides of their last scraps of bone before loading them into one of a score of lime pits. Another heavier man has a wet hide slung over a wooden frame, and is deftly stripping the hair and spongy white fat with a two-handled blade. In the corner, a coil of steam rises slowly from a bating tank of pale, cloudy water; there are brown sticky clods floating on the surface, and believe me, it's only too horribly obvious what they are. Looking at the man at work on the carcase, Charles no longer questions how the letter sent to Sir Julius Cremorne gained its distinctive smell – it must be next to impossible to rid their hands of the stink; though what strange thread it is that connects two men from such disparate strata of London society is even more obscure to him now than it was before. He makes his way carefully across the yard towards the man; the snow has all but stopped but the whole area is an inch deep in slop and grease, and most of the workers are splashed to the knees.

‘Could I talk to you for a moment?'

The man looks up, then back at his work. ‘I'm busy. What are you – police, or what?'

Charles shakes his head. ‘No, not police. But I am looking for someone.'

The man looks up again, for longer this time, but says nothing.

‘I'm trying to find a man who does a job like yours.'

‘Thinking of openin' a tanner's, are you? Nah, I didn't think so somehow. Look, I don't know who you are or what you're after, but I'm not about to get some other poor bugger into trouble. 'Cause trouble's all that can be comin' from a face like yours.'

Charles wants to deny it but knows he can't. Lying is the one tool of his trade he's never really mastered. He tries another tack. ‘Sounds to me like you come from round here.'

The man eyes him guardedly. ‘What's that to you?'

‘I assume most of the men who work here are Bermondsey boys?'

The man puts the knife down and looks Charles full in the face. He's a big man, and thickly built, with a shaven head and a dark indistinct tattoo on the side of his neck. ‘
Bermondsey boys
?' he echoes, his voice barely able to contain his contempt. ‘What are you, some kind of bloody nancy? Looking for a bit of local rough and ready?' This last is accompanied by a particularly lewd gesture, and before Charles can react, he's reached out a hand dripping with fat and taken him by the chin like a girl, to the coarse amusement of the rest of the yard. ‘Well we might just be able to help you there, what do you think, lads?'

Something flickers red in Charles' brain, and though he's barely half the man's weight, he seizes his thick wrist and tries to force his fingers away. ‘Get your stinking hands off me.'

The man comes closer and brings his face within a kiss of Charles'. ‘Oh really?' he says softly. ‘So you don't like the way I smell? Well in that case, why don't you take your pretty face and your fancy voice, and
hook it.
We don't take to the likes of you round 'ere, and we look after our own. Am I makin' myself clear?'

The man puts both hands on Charles' chest and pushes him roughly away. He stumbles, landing flat on his back in the
muck, and only just misses drowning himself in the bating trough. The viscous white filth is clinging to his face, and he wipes it away in furious disgust. He gets to his feet and retreats across the yard with as much dignity as he can manage. One or two of them grab at his backside as he leaves, and when he reaches the gate, the yard behind him, the air is raucous with laughter and strident whistling.

He made a complete mess of it, he knows that. Well-spoken stranger asking leading questions; small wonder the man was wary. He should have known better. At the building next door he adopts different tactics, and opts to speak to the manager, not the men, but it doesn't get him much further. The man is harassed and only half-listens, but he claims he doesn't know of anyone from Cornwall working in the area. And nor, indeed, does anyone else Charles asks. One owner thinks he recalls a man who might have been from those parts, but it was months ago and he can't remember his name; another can only think of a young lad who had ‘a strange accent – thick as soup – we could hardly make out what he was saying half the time', and a third refuses to speak to him at all, all the while eyeing Charles' filthy trousers with obvious suspicion. By the time he reaches the end of the street, he's beginning to wonder if he's wasting his time. He considers for a moment asking in the Fellmongers' Arms, but a glance through the window at the group of silent men smoking together in the gloomy taproom convinces him otherwise. He's not sure he would even want to drink in there. And in any case, it's getting late. He's had enough.

The journey back is very uncomfortable. It's not that he's wet through from shirt to feet (though he is), or even that once the Bermondsey smell abates somewhat he finds he's ravenously hungry (though he's that too), it's the looks of those around
him that make him shift in his seat and look determinedly out of the window. The 'buses are more and more crowded the closer he gets to home, but even though the last one up the Strand is packed full, the only person willing to take the seat next to Charles is the smallest son of a large and alarming lady with spectacles and a prominent nose sitting opposite, who flaps her handkerchief in front of her face and says, ‘Oh, dear me, this is most trying, most trying!' very loudly indeed, to no one in particular, for a whole slow half a mile. The child looks absolutely ferocious with discontent, and glowers at Charles' reeking trousers as if he can never forgive the injury being done to his olfactory nerves. By the time Charles gets to Buckingham Street he wants to tear his clothes off and dump them in the nearest ditch, and as soon as he reaches the house he rushes down the back-stairs to the kitchen, looking for Molly and hot water.

Both of which he finds.

She's standing before the kitchen grate, stripped to the waist, a bowl before her and a wash-cloth in her right hand. He's never seen her without her starched white cap, and her hair is cut so close to her head that he can see the exquisite curve of her skull, the delicate hollow at the nape of her neck. He's seen naked girls many times, but never one so unadorned. Her breasts are as flat as a boy's, the nipples erect and tender in the cold air. The dark skin, the white cloth, the cool milky light from the kitchen window; it is as perfect, and as motionless, as a Vermeer. How long he stares at her, he could not have said; it's only when she lifts her face to his, and meets his eyes for the first time in that house, that he shifts his gaze and turns away, his cheeks burning.