Dead Ringer (24 page)

‘Right, let’s go. Our friend’s at home, it seems.’ Gully
hesitated
, stood squarely in front of me, squinted at me in the gathering gloom. ‘You
sure
you want to be in on this business, Mr James?’

‘I’m sure.’

We went forward. There were women in the streets now, bare-armed and lacking bonnets or caps, and the public houses were opening their doors to bustling sailors seeking grog among a medley of men in greasy sporting jackets, surtouts burst at the elbows, a mockery of gentility with the collars of their paletots worn through to the canvas. Gully turned left into a narrow court: some Irish dock labourers were lolling there, smoking their pipes. They said nothing as we pushed past them, but there was a certain truculence in their bearing as they observed us which made the hairs on the back of my neck rise and tingle. Clothes lines hung across the rubbish-strewn court, festooned with limp, dirty-grey washing and women and men sat at the doorsteps of the narrow houses, smoking and drinking. At the end of the court was an open yard: two
costermongers’s
carts stood at its centre with their shafts up in the air. Beyond the yard was a tall pair of green gates, half open. Gully
gestured with his right hand, and led the way to the house beyond.

It had once been a house with a certain grandeur, perhaps a merchant’s house overlooking the river, but its small garden was now littered with refuse, and the building itself was in a sad state of disrepair, long since given up to lodging house keepers. I guessed that it would now be a haven for the penurious, the drunk and the vicious. We entered through an open kitchen door. The kitchen itself was full of smoke and the fireplace of the chimney stood out from the brick wall, belching fumes into the room. The floor was unboarded and a wooden seat projected from the wall all around the room. There was one bewhiskered old man in the room: dressed in ancient knee breeches and a soiled red plush waistcoat he was seated on the bench with a bottle of ale in his hand. Gully stared at him, and the man stared back, unflinchingly. Gully put his hand in his pocket and drew out a small heavy bag, tossed it to the man who caught it deftly. He stared at Gully, jerked his head in the direction of the stairs, and without a word rose and left the room.

‘Upstairs, but quiet,’ Gully warned.

The naked boards creaked and groaned as we ascended, but from one of the rooms above there was the sound of a man and a woman singing a drunken chorus: it was sufficient to mask the sounds of our progress. Gully paused at the head of the stairs: the corridor was dimly lit by a single oil lamp hanging above the stairwell and there were four doors either side of the corridor. Gully pointed to the last on the left. He had obviously been well primed by his informants.

We walked quietly to the door, Gully leading. He tried the latch: it lifted, but the door did not move. Gully wasted no time on ceremony: he stepped back, drew something from the deep pockets of his coat and with one thunderous kick burst the door off its hinges.

There was a shouted obscenity as Gully threw himself into the
room. When I followed a moment later it was to see Gully pinning a struggling man against the wall beside a rumpled bed. Gully had a pistol in his hand. He thrust the muzzle under the man’s chin, and in a moment the struggling ceased.

‘Hello, Sam,’ Gully growled. ‘Come down in the world, ain’t you? Not the most salubrious surroundings, down here at the docks. But useful for a man on the run.’

Sam McGuire was a short, thickset man with cropped hair and a surly countenance. His skin was tanned but pock-marked and his shoulders were muscular, his chest deep. He would probably have given Gully a run for his money had it not been for the pistol. Now, in the light of the oil lamp hanging from the ceiling he sat tensely on the edge of the bed, his coarse shirt torn, and the dark stubble on his heavy features lending an almost
demoniac
grimness to his appearance. His broad hands, well used to rubbing down horses, hung between his knees but the thick fingers were curled menacingly, and the muscles of his
shoulders
were bunched as though he was ready at any moment to hurl himself at Gully, should the opportunity present itself. I leaned against the door jamb, watching, trying to quell the excited thunder in my chest as Gully thrust the muzzle of the horse pistol playfully against McGuire’s chin.

McGuire did not lack courage. He found his voice. ‘Who are you?’ the horse trainer growled. ‘What d’ye want with me?’

‘The benefit of a little conversation with you, Sam, that’s all.’

‘What about?’ McGuire turned his head, glared at me standing in the doorway. ‘If there wasn’t two of you—’

‘Oh, don’t pay mind to the gentleman there, Sam, it’s me you got to talk to, and don’t think I’m not man enough to put out your lights if you try to cause me any trouble.’

There was a short silence. ‘How did you find me?’ McGuire asked at last, in a rasping tone.

Gully sighed theatrically. ‘That’s the trouble with this world, Sam. There’s always a way to solve a problem, if you got the tin.
Now you paid well over the odds to get this cosy little berth, didn’t you – where you thought you’d be safe from Goodman and Porky Clark? But you couldn’t be safe from me, Sam me lad – I got the contacts and connections, and I got the tin.’

‘Was it Goodman who sent you?’ There was a sudden hint of nervousness in McGuire’s voice.

Gully shook his head. ‘No, I gather Goody Levy’s still hunting around. Thinks you’ve nipped across to France, maybe. But me, I know you’re heading for Ireland and your own folk, soon as the coast is clear.’

‘If you’re not working for Goodman … what d’ye want with me?’

‘Information.’

There was a long silence. The oil lamp sputtered, casting dancing shadows across our faces. McGuire shook his head. ‘I got no information for the likes of you.’

‘But what about my little persuader here?’ Gully asked
pleasantly
, stroking the pistol muzzle gently against the man’s throat. ‘Or maybe you’d prefer we took you along to Goodman, and let him ask you a few questions….’

Sam McGuire sat stiffly, thinking hard. He cast a quick glance at me, standing silently in the doorway, and then abruptly, he asked, ‘So what the hell is it you want to know? What’s this all about?’

‘
Running Rein.
’

McGuire let out an obscene expletive. ‘I don’t know nothin’ about that business.’

Gully shook his head mournfully in mock sympathy. ‘Now, that’s not so. You’re one of the people who knows
all
about that business. But I’ll make it easy for you. I’ll tell you the way it was. You trained the ringer in Ireland. You brought him over here for Goodman. You helped gull the corn merchant into buying the horse, describing it as a two year old. And then you helped train him up at Malton, until he was entered for the Derby, taken down to Epsom and left under the eye of Joe Bartle.’

McGuire made no reply, but he stared fixedly at Gully with subdued fury in his eyes.

‘Now we know most of what happened after that,’ Gully went on, ‘but we don’t know
why
. After the nag won the Derby, Bentinck and Peel turned nasty and the matter ended up in court. When the case turned badly against Mr Wood, and the judge ordered production of the horse all hell broke loose. Goodman knew he was in trouble, and maybe Bentinck wasn’t too happy either. So when Baron Alderson demanded the horse be brought to court someone sent you down to Epsom to take the horse away from Smith—’

‘That’s a damned lie!’

‘Not the way Smith tells it,’ Gully replied sweetly. ‘He says you arranged for the horse coopers and Porky Clark to come down for the horse, and he got paid by you to keep quiet.’

‘Then he should have kept his mouth shut.’

‘Thing is, who paid
you
to do the job? Since you had Porky in tow, I suppose it could have been Goodman. But Porky was always slow, easily led … and why would Goodman be looking for you now? And you lying low?’

I had my own theory. I spoke for the first time. ‘It was Lord George Bentinck, wasn’t it? He provided the cash, you did the deed.’

Gully glared at me, little pleased by my intervention, but after a moment he allowed himself to go along with my suggestion. ‘And you took poor simple Porky along with you, for muscle. Which will be how Goodman learned it was you. Porky couldn’t have kept his mouth shut, not with Goody Levy breathing on him. Ah, but things changed, didn’t they, Sam? It wasn’t just taking Bentinck’s money, grabbing the horse and putting it down, burying him in quicklime at Barling’s Meadow—’

McGuire raised his head angrily, about to say something, but curbed his tongue.

‘You got nothing to say?’ Gully went on. ‘All right. As I was
saying, it wasn’t just putting down
Running Rein
– it was the matter of Joe Bartle, wasn’t it? It spooked friend Cornelius Smith, and that’s why he talked to me. And maybe it spooked you too, and made you cut and run.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ McGuire growled sullenly.

Gully shook his head. ‘I think you do. What was it? Why did the stableman have to die? Did Bartle get religion? Did he want to be released from his part in the fraud? Why was he unwilling to go to court? Or maybe, was he going to blow the whistle for other reasons?’

‘I got nothing to tell you,’ McGuire snarled defiantly.

Ben stroked the muzzle of the horse pistol against McGuire’s throat. ‘But I think you
are
going to tell me. Because if you don’t one of two things is going to happen. Either I turn you over to Goodman – and you won’t enjoy that – or I haul you down to the police office, and sing a little song. It goes like this. Joe Bartle had a quarrel with Sam McGuire. Joe Bartle went missing. Joe Bartle turned up with his head bashed in, down a sewer. And Sam McGuire goes into hiding in the docks.’

‘I never laid a hand on Bartle. You’re bluffing me – you’re talking nonsense.’

‘The facts are there, Sam, all there. I think there’s enough even to get you dancing in the air at Newgate. The police don’t take kindly to truculent individuals like you. You want to rot there in Newgate, Sam, until they decide to hang you?’

‘I didn’t do nothing!’

‘Persuade me.’ Gully leaned forward confidentially. ‘Tell me what the quarrel was all about – between you and Joe Bartle.’

McGuire grunted and shook his heavy head. ‘There wasn’t a real quarrel. His work was falling away. He … he had things on his mind, like. And he said he was leaving the stable.’

‘Because he didn’t want to give evidence at the trial?’ I demanded.

McGuire’s eyes flickered in my direction. ‘I don’t know about that.’

‘You’ve got to know about it, Sam,’ Gully insisted coldly. ‘Because we have a theory, my friend over there and me. We think maybe you had a quarrel because he didn’t want to turn up at the trial, and under Goodman’s orders you beat him to death—’

‘I never!’

‘—or,’ Gully warned, shoving the pistol muzzle more firmly against McGuire’s chin, ‘or it was Goodman who put Porky Clark to the business, when he heard from you that Bartle was refusing to give evidence. Maybe Porky was just supposed to persuade Bartle, but knowing the way his slow mind works, things got out of hand, it was almost accidental, like—’

McGuire growled deep in his chest. ‘Last time I saw Bartle he was all right. He was at the prize fight on Sunday, at Hampstead Heath, but I didn’t speak to him. I don’t know what happened to him after that.’

‘I think you do, McGuire. You know Goodman arranged it … because of Bartle’s back-tracking—’

‘I didn’t even know Bartle was dead till now!’ McGuire flared.

‘You’re lying!’

‘No.’ A sudden paroxysm of fear and fury seized Sam McGuire, sufficient to disregard the weapon in Ben Gully’s hand. With a violent heave he threw himself away from Gully, brushing aside the horse pistol. Involuntarily, Gully pulled the trigger and there was a flash and a roar. Next moment Gully was crashing backwards to the floorboards and I found himself thrust violently aside as Sam McGuire dashed from the room.

‘Gully, you all right?’

Cursing violently, Ben Gully struggled to his feet, pushed me aside and thrust the horse pistol back into the pocket of his coat. ‘Get after him, dammit. We can’t lose him now!’

A costermonger was trundling his empty cart into the yard to
join the others when we burst out in pursuit of McGuire. The Irish labourers were no longer lolling against the wall, and one of them seemed inclined to step in Gully’s way until he saw the expression on his face. I was hard put to it to keep up with Gully as he plunged into the streets, twisting away between sailors in canvas trousers, women in tawdry shawls, and big-whiskered dock labourers. I caught the occasional glimpse of McGuire rushing ahead of us, spilling casks and drawing curses as he plunged headlong through the crowded narrow streets, and Gully clearly kept him in sight, cursing violently as he ran. But after a while it was only the signs of disturbance that I saw ahead of us, the parting of the crowds, men standing in public house doorways, laughing drunkenly and pointing the way. As I told you, I was never built for running.

At last I emerged from the rabbit warren of dark, ill-lit streets, panting hard, some distance behind Gully. I saw him stopped on the dockside itself.

Ben Gully was standing, chest heaving, some twenty yards away, staring along the quay with its jumble of rope and casks and hawsers and casual wanderers. The coal backers and the dock labourers would have been paid off at four in the afternoon and were now busy in the taverns drinking their way to
temporary
oblivion before they started another hard day. There were several colliers tied up at the quay, some with their decks riding high now their cargoes had been discharged, but there was considerable movement about the hold of one of them as a crew of ballast heavers climbed aboard from one of the Trinity lighters that had shipped ballast alongside from the dredging engines in the Pool.

I walked forward, breathing hard, to stand beside Gully. ‘Have we lost him?’

Gully shook his head and sniffed the air like a questing dog. ‘No. He’s here on the quay. I saw him slip across….’ He moved quietly towards the edge of the dock, peering down at the
ladders that led to the decks of the colliers below, and then slowly he began to pace along the rough stone of the quayside, manoeuvring between casks and drums, stepping over coils of rope, pushing aside half-drunken lumpers smelling of the timber they had handled. I followed him, watching, looking about, but there was no sign of the fugitive. I was beginning to regret my decision to accompany Gully: I was never much a man of action, my figure was against it, and nights at the gambling tables did little for my physical stamina.