Printer's Devil (9780316167826) Page 15

  Over the road people were loitering, sailors and workmen in their shapeless clothes. The occasional murmur drifted across the road, which became a busy roar whenever the door was opened and smoky light fell over the cobbles. There were still hundreds of people in there: people who probably wouldn’t go to bed until dawn broke, or until they fell into a drunken sleep wherever they were sitting. A short distance away down a dark lane, the lights of ships glinted on the dirty water of the Thames. Every now and again I cast a nervous glance behind me. Who might be lurking behind the tombstones? As I listened, I thought I heard something resonate high above me — a faint, stifled clang.

  But there was a sudden barrage of noise from the opposite direction as a group of men tumbled through the door of the Three Friends to continue a drunken brawl and pushing match for which there hadn’t been room inside. One of the men appeared to be being forcibly ejected by the others. He was so hopelessly drunk that he kept falling against the wall as he tried to stagger off along the street. An upstairs window rattled open as the crowd of men were pushing him away, and a woman’s voice screamed, “Serve you right, you filthy pig! Come back when you can conductcherself! Pig!” More customers seemed to be gathering in the doorway to see him off, roaring in amusement and looking up at the window above their heads as the woman slammed it shut. I was too far away to pick out the faces of the men as they stood with the light from the inn falling across them, but as I watched I became more and more certain I recognized one. He was currently laughing and pointing, but the last time I’d seen him he’d been slumped stupidly and silently in one of Flethick’s chairs.

  As the clamor died down, I thought I heard something moving behind me again, in the graveyard; but all I could see when I turned was the silent little cemetery with the blank wall of the church behind. I surveyed the churchyard for a few moments, watching it for movement, straining my eyes in the dark. And now something did move, over by the gate where I’d come in.

  I watched a big uneasy figure lope out of the shadows into the road, and cross to the inn. My hands tightened around the bricks of the low wall. He was glancing nervously to left and right, and rather than go inside the inn he retreated into the shadow by the wall, to wait.

  Coben.

  The man I’d seen at Flethick’s had spotted Coben too, and after a couple of seconds I saw him venture over to the wall to speak to him. I strained to hear what was being said; but it was drowned out by the clomping of hooves as, at that moment, a carriage came gliding around the corner, made its way up the street, and stopped directly in front of the inn, blocking my view of the villains. The sleek black horse snorted shortly, and shook its head with a jangle of brass. It seemed to be looking down its nose at the poorly dressed people to-ing and fro-ing around the inn; and I noticed it had a long, shiny scar along its flank.

  The driver was leaning down and asking one of the men something. There was a murmur, and then a shout went up.

  “His Lordship wants you!” someone called. “His Lordship wants to talk.”

  The carriage stood there, black and silent. Nobody got out. But Coben emerged from behind it — looking very scared, I realized. He stood at the carriage window and began talking in a low voice to whoever was inside. Normally a large, brutal man, he suddenly seemed shrunken: diminished by his fear, and by the gleaming red-painted carriage wheel which was very nearly as high as he was. He wasn’t a man accustomed to showing respect to anybody; but, to judge from his body language, this was as close as he got. He kept casting nervous glances up and down the street and over at the cemetery where I was hiding. I shrank back, convinced I’d been seen; but he’d turned again, and was talking to the man in the carriage.

  “I don’t know!” I suddenly heard him say, in a loud voice. “I told you all I know!”

  There was a pause while the man in the carriage said something. Coben’s reply, as so often, came in dense slang I couldn’t understand.

  “Spoked a spavy nose,” was what it sounded like; “the bosun’s ginch.”

  Another comment I couldn’t hear, from the carriage window.

  “Yeah, well it’ll serve Damyata right,” growled Coben, and banged once on the side of the carriage with the flat of his hand. The driver gave a click and the haughty-looking horse moved off, leaving Coben standing in the road looking after the cab with an expression which, even in the near darkness, I could tell was indescribably nasty.

  I watched him stroll up the street a little way, rather aimlessly, as if wondering what to do next. He glanced at the cemetery gate, and after a few seconds’ deliberation he moved off in completely the opposite direction, around the dark corner behind the Three Friends. From the inn I could hear a great deal of laughter and song which kept bursting out at odd moments; yet the noise seemed joyless, even pained, and the harder I listened the more the laughter began to sound like wailing, as if the inn were crammed full of souls in torment. I watched the drab, flickering light of its windows and suddenly felt cold.

  Coben had completely disappeared. It seemed unlikely there’d be anything else much to see tonight. I gazed up at the high decorated spire of the church, which had obviously been white when it was built, but in whose crevices years of soot had accumulated, rather as shadows accumulate in the corners of people’s eyes when they haven’t had enough sleep. The words of a song seemed to shimmer on the night air, coming from the Three Friends: voices raised in a slow, melancholy, bell-like tune, raucous and wavering.

  Ding, dong, ding, dong,

  Here’s a sweet song:

  Ding, dong, ding, dong

  Ere long, life’s gone.

  I felt my eyelids closing and I told myself that my bed at Cramplock’s would be much more comfortable than the rough wall against which I was leaning. Watching carefully for observers, I crawled towards the cemetery gate and made my way home, while behind me the tinny voices of the drunken singers seemed to echo down the street to the river, across the black rooftops, through the smoky night air of the humming city and into the silent fields and marshes beyond.

  I don’t have any idea what time it was when I arrived home that night. I had dragged myself back through the streets in an exhausted trance, barely conscious; and when I unlocked the heavy door of the printing shop and crept inside in the darkness, Lash greeted me with all the fervor of a dog who had convinced himself his owner was never coming back. I turned up a lamp and took it upstairs, relieved to be home.

  But I was still awake enough to be fretting about something which, before I went to bed, I just had to check. Tonight I’d heard the name “Damyata.” It will serve Damyata right, Coben had growled. But I’d heard it before. I’d seen it on the document in the captain’s cabin aboard the Sun of Calcutta. And I’d also seen it, I was certain, on one of the papers I’d taken from Jiggs’s cellar.

  For the second time that night I reached for my little biscuit tin of treasures on its shelf in the cupboard. Sitting down on the bed, I pried off the lid.

  It was empty.

  I must have forgotten to put the things back when I’d taken them out earlier. Had I put them on a different shelf in the cupboard? No. Had they fallen under the bed? I hunted around the room, feeling increasingly sick as I realized my things were nowhere to be found. The notes from the villains had all been taken. Mog’s Book had gone too, with my latest thoughts and secrets in it; my peg doll was gone; and most importantly of all, my bangle.

  I was trembling. I sat down on the bed, with Lash between my knees looking up at me, and tried to think. I was so tired I couldn’t actually remember putting anything back in the tin; but there was no trace of the contents anywhere else in the room, and I knew I hadn’t taken them with me. So where were they? There was only one possible explanation, I realized with a sick feeling. While I was out, for those short hours of darkness, someone must have been in here and taken them.

  Could Cramplock have been back while I was out? Had he let himself in late at night, found the place empty, been nosing around my
room and found the tin? Or perhaps he had come up to find me, been surprised to find Lash here alone, discovered the tin quite by accident, and taken the contents out of curiosity?

  It seemed unlikely. But there was another possibility, I thought, as I stared at the open cupboard before me. The man from Calcutta could have been in here. Knowing I was out, he could have come in through the wall. He’d have seized straight away upon the pieces of paper with the notes and lists of names: they’d be exactly what he was after. It was bad enough to lose those, but the bangle … my most precious thing, gone! He’d have seen it, and known it was valuable, and possibly even recognized the engraved patterns, as I had.

  Blinking back tears, I clung to Lash’s neck and whispered my thoughts aloud to him. After every few words he turned his head and licked the salt from below my eyes.

  “The man from Calcutta’s got them,” I told him. “He’s got all the papers, Lash, and all the names of who’s in the plot!”

  The more I thought about the list of names, the more important it seemed. I’d brought the papers away in the full knowledge that they contained vital information; but in all the excitement I simply hadn’t had time to sit down and look through them. I’d supposed there’d be plenty of opportunity. Now, it seemed, it was too late.

  “And he’s got my mother’s bangle,” I said, remembering; and now I really did burst into tears of frustration. The last thing I knew, before I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion, was the sensation of Lash trying to lick my face as I nestled my forehead into the wiry hair of his neck, and sobbed.

  The next morning, in the printing shop, I felt dazed. Dawn had seemed to come almost as soon as I’d laid down to sleep, and I’d probably only managed a couple of hours before I’d been woken by the sound of Cramplock letting himself in downstairs. My dreams had been vivid again, and the faces in the fog of the dream more anguished than ever. For the second time in just a few short nights my mother had appeared, and she’d been holding her arm up and pointing to her wrist. “I’ve lost it, Ma!” I’d sobbed back at her, as she circled her wristbone with the fingers of the other hand to signify the bangle. “I’ve lost it! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!” And her lips repeatedly mouthed silent words which looked like “Find it,” or “Find him,” her face agonized and imploring, drifting away from me.

  Now, even though I was awake, everything still seemed a bit unreal. Cautiously, at the beginning of the day, I’d asked Cramplock about the biscuit tin. He’d denied all knowledge of it, as I feared he would; but I didn’t dare say any more in case he started asking awkward questions about what was in it, and why it mattered. I kept my lips tight shut and got on with my tasks.

  I was waiting for Mr. Glibstaff to come back for his murder announcements, fifty of them stacked neatly on the counter. If I could get away with it, I was hoping to worm some information out of him about the murder investigation. At around half past ten he came in, strutting officiously, leaning on a knobbly and misshapen stick which he carried everywhere and used to wave in people’s faces by way of a threat. It was a hot day again and his horrible, bristly little black mustache, which looked like the kind of brush you use for cleaning mud out of the nooks and crannies of boots, was shining with sweat. It was a struggle to be polite to him.

  “Hello, Mr. Glibstaff,” I said, as brightly as I could, “here are your posters, sir.” I glanced back into the workshop, where Cramplock was now busy with a noisy press. I leaned forward over the counter. “Fascinating case this, innit, sir?” I said, putting on my enthusiastic-little-boy voice. “I been readin’ about it in the newspapers, sir. No injuries! Curious, innit?”

  Glibstaff was looking at me askance.

  “Do they know what the gentleman died of, sir?” I asked.

  “Yes, as it happens, they do,” he said, closing his eyes and lifting his chin as though to stop me looking inside his head for information.

  “Poison, I shouldn’t wonder,” I rabbited, watching his expression. “Strange business, innit? We get all kinds of murders round ‘ere, Mr. Glibstaff sir, you wouldn’t believe it. Why, only last weekend a murderer escaped from the New Prison! Don’t know if they’ve caughtim yet, but what a villain ‘e looked!”

  My tactics were working. Glibstaff just couldn’t resist letting people know he knew more than they did. It made him feel important. “That case and this are connected,” he said, pompously. “It’s believed the deceased in this case was well known to the escaped jailbird.”

  I feigned astonishment. “Is that so?” I said, wide-eyed.

  “So if you see anything suspicious,” he continued, “we’d be grateful for the information.”

  Oh, the number of suspicious things I could tell him! I had so many pieces of information in my head I felt as though I were beginning to burst. It occurred to me that I could have some fun by feeding him some misleading morsel — but I looked down at his heavy stick and thought better of it. The first thing he’d want to know would be how I had found out, and that would be very hard to explain. I’d probably end up in deeper trouble than anyone else.

  Just to reinforce his self-importance he leaned forward and lowered his voice, his little mustache twitching close to my ear. “Nothing you can tell me, is there? Nothing you’re — concealing, boy, is there?”

  “I only know what I’ve read, sir,” I said innocently. “Have they caught the jailbird yet, then, sir?” I persisted.

  “No they haven’t,” he replied. “Still at large. Hiding out somewhere, no doubt … but we’ll get him. Bow Street are vigilant, and he’ll not be able to leave London, by road or by sea.”

  “I should think not,” I said, handing him the stack of posters. Just as he was leaving, I added, “Oh — so was it poison, then?”

  “Beg pardon?” he said, stopping in the doorway.

  “Was it poison, sir? What the gentleman in the hackney carriage died of?”

  “In a manner of speaking it was,” Glibstaff said. “If you must know, they have cause to believe it was a snakebite. Good day to you.”

  I think I must have whistled, because after Glibstaff had gone Cramplock peeped through the door and said, “Something wrong?”

  “No,” I said, “he liked them.”

  My blood was buzzing in my veins with the thrill and horror of what I’d just learned. Suddenly I felt extremely wide awake. I was bursting to tell someone about the snakebite. Specifically, of course, I was bursting to tell Nick, and I knew telling Cramplock just wouldn’t have the same impact. But I simply couldn’t keep it inside.

  “He, er — he had an interesting story about the murder,” I said, brightly.

  “Oh yes,” he grunted, squinting distractedly at his type and barely seeming to care whether I told him the story or not.

  “The murdered man,” I gabbled, “the one in the carriage, you know, Mr. Cramplock, the one described in the murder notice, well, according to Glibstaff, it sounds incredible, but he said —”

  “Mog, I need to concentrate for a few minutes,” Cramplock said, not unkindly, looking up briefly before returning to his type. He didn’t need to say any more. I knew enough to shut up and get on with my work. My eagerness to talk was going to have to wait.

  But the events of yesterday and this new piece of information were going round and round in my head all morning. With Coben and Jiggs’s list of names now in the hands of the man from Calcutta, I reflected, it was probably only a matter of days before the whole criminal underworld of London was bitten to death. As Cramplock finished his typesetting job and relaxed a little, I remembered there was something else I had been plucking up the courage to ask him, and hadn’t yet had the chance.

  “Mr. Cramplock,” I said, “do you know about watermarks?”

  “What about watermarks?”

  “Well,” I said carefully, “I saw a — an interesting watermark the other day. I’ve, um — lost the piece of paper I saw it on. But I can sort of remember it. It was like a dog asleep.”

  “Like a what?�
�� said Cramplock sharply. “A what, did you say?”

  “A dog,” I said, “like this.” Taking a pencil, I roughly sketched for him the little watermark I’d seen on the document that had gone missing from my tin. Cramplock eyed the little drawing through his half-glasses, and then eyed me with what looked like suspicion.

  “Only one papermaker I know,” he said gruffly, “man called Fellman.”

  “Do you buy paper off him?” I asked.

  I seemed to have annoyed him. “Who’s been filling your head with questions all of a sudden?” he asked, irritably.

  “Nobody,” I said, “I’m just interested, that’s all.” He picked up a huge book, slammed it sharply down on the table in front of him, and opened it, pretending to read. There was silence. My questions had plainly sent him into one of his moods, and I had no doubt that it had something to do with the piece of paper I’d found in the storeroom, with the strange message on it — which of course I’d put in the biscuit tin, and had lost along with everything else. “I don’t appreciate deceit,” it had begun, the sinister air of a threat lurking behind the polite language. He was hiding something. I trod softly around him for a few minutes, doing little inconsequential tidying jobs; and he ignored me, continuing to pore over the huge ledger which I knew very well he wasn’t really interested in.

  After a while I had another go.

  “Have we got any of that watermarked paper?” I asked, trying to sound innocent. “From Fellman?”

  He sighed. “You don’t give up, Mog, do you,” he said, resignedly. “I don’t buy paper from him anymore, though I used to. I had a bit of a—a disagreement with the man, if you must know. Bad temper, he’s got. Put a lot of people off his business a few years ago, when his name got linked with, ah — with criminal types.”

  This was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  “But he hasn’t stopped making it, has he? I mean, I’ve seen —” I bit my lip. Perhaps I shouldn’t say too much. “Who buys his paper now, then?”