Dodger (15 page)

‘Very nice,' I said. ‘She your daughter?'

‘This is Louisa,' he answered. ‘My first wife. And I draw your attention to what the former Lady Evershed is wearing around her neck.' I peered closer and saw that the woman had a tiny black jewel hanging off a necklace.

‘The Jakkapoor stone?' I asked.

‘Yes,' said Evershed in a flatter voice than before. ‘I gave it to her as a love gift. She wore it always.' We came to some daffodils what was in our way. He just trod across them. ‘She even wore it when she was with him,' he muttered.

He was several steps ahead of me now and it was as though he wanted to get away from what he was telling me. I looked behind me to see if Warrigal was still following. His eyes had not left us. I quickened my pace and caught up with Lord Evershed, who seemed to be ranting to himself under his breath.

‘George Shatillion had her for his whore,' he seethed. ‘That is the crux of the thing. The how and the why of it do not concern you, Mr Dawkins, and I have no intention of telling you any more about the shameful business than I have to. But the fact is that you need to know the bare bones of the affair if you are to be of any use to me at all, so here they are. While I was abroad, attending to matters of Empire, the only woman I have ever loved, my young bride Louisa, found herself seduced by this ridiculous dandy. Their affair soon became common knowledge in gossiping London society and they ran off together, taking the jewel of Jakkapoor
with them. I suspect that the priceless jewel was the real reason that Shatillion had made her his prey in the first place but I will never be certain. Whatever his purpose, he took my wife and my treasure and both were lost to me forever.'

We was facing the river now and stopped to sit upon a rock. In the trees above, the noise of the kookaburra was like cruel laughter. Evershed's fingers stroked his moustache and he looked lost in his thoughts. I could not imagine what any of that had to do with my Fagin or with me.

‘Shatillion was a famous man,' Evershed continued. ‘Loved and cherished by the people of England, they would forgive him any scandal. But once fallen, a woman stays fallen forever. The respectable world closes itself to her. As soon as his passion cooled then George Shatillion simply returned to his wealthy wife and was welcomed back into polite society. Louisa, however, found herself an outcast. She disappeared from public sight, taking only one thing of any value with her: the jewel around her neck.' Evershed gripped his cane and looked as though he wanted to thrash something. I felt the need to inch away from him. It was as though he had forgotten about me and was talking to himself, throwing up all these old memories like a sickness.

‘So you want to find her,' I asked, filling the silence, ‘and get the jewel back off her. Is that the thing?'

Evershed shot me a look that said I was understanding nothing. ‘She's been dead for seventeen years, Dawkins.' He sighed. ‘The police fished her body out of the Thames about a year after she had gone missing.'

He waited as a mob of kangaroos bounced past us in the distance, as if worried that they would overhear him.

‘I was in England then, trying to locate both her and the jewel, and they came to tell me that a young woman had destroyed
herself by jumping from Southwark Bridge. When they found her she was wearing a necklace that identified her as my wife. The stone had been removed but the inscription on the back read: “To my darling Louisa – I shall treasure you always, Franklin.” A gift from me to her in happier times. I was in agony.'

‘I'm not surprised,' I said, recalling the beauty of the woman in the locket and wanting to sound all sympathy. ‘It must have been heartbreaking.'

‘Heartbreaking?' Evershed snorted and rose to his feet again. ‘Because the bitch had died? Nothing of the sort. She had betrayed me, Dawkins, or have you not been listening. I was glad to hear that she had suffered.'

His stare dared me to challenge him for his callousness but I did nothing of the sort. ‘Why was you in agony then?' I asked instead, although I already knew the answer.

‘Because the Jakkapoor stone was missing of course! It was my imperial prize and I had been beset by bad luck ever since I had given it away. Just as the legend had said I would be. I simply must retrieve it before bad luck destroys me.'

Oh dear, I thought as we walked towards a high iron bridge what crossed the Hawkesbury, and I started to make sense of who I was dealing with. This Lord Evershed, for all his aristocratic airs and military talk, was a lunatic who believed in foreign nonsense about magic jewels and cursed fortunes. Had he been born into my class then they would have thrown him into Bedlam and forgotten all about him but instead here he was, strutting about the Empire and getting himself into a hot state about lost trinkets.

‘George Shatillion musta had it,' I suggested. ‘Couldn't you have just bought the jewel back off him?'

‘Buy it off him?' Evershed's reply was loud enough to be violent
and we was far along the high iron bridge for him to throw me to my death. In spite of his age he was a bigger man than me, and Warrigal was close enough by to aid him. ‘Offer money to the man who cuckolded me? I would rather turn on my own sword.' Then he stopped walking and turned to look over the river, forcing me to do the same. ‘I set my lawyers on him instead and demanded that he return my property at once. He sent back one terse reply, the only communication he ever deigned to send me while alive, saying that the jewel was no longer in his possession. Soon after that he became reclusive. He spent his time writing his novels in hiding as if in fear for his life. He seemed impossible to get to.'

It was then that Lord Evershed pulled from his pocket the piece of paper he had taken from the writing desk on the veranda. ‘Until six months ago. When the clumsy fellow finally slipped and fell from a great height. An even greater height than this one.' I looked at the water below what sparkled in the sun's rays. It was a long way down. ‘He was walking alone along a cliff edge in Kent and a gust of wind must have taken him. At least that is what the coroner's report said.' Warrigal was not far from us now, leaning against the rail of the bridge, alert for any order.

‘Shatillion left a will,' sniffed Evershed. ‘And in this will were some written documents that he had left for his biographer, some autobiographical fragments. These fragments, which a faithful servant of mine managed to acquire from the biographer, were not meant for publication until after
my
death, would you believe? I have a copy of their contents here, sent to me by my man in London, and they reveal a great many secrets. Including who it was that gained possession of the Jakkapoor stone. Do you think you can guess who that person might be, Mr Dawkins? I'll give you a clue. The document describes him as a fence and a kidsman.'

‘
Fagin?
' I asked in proper disbelief.

‘Indeed he,' replied Evershed with some relish. My surprise must have been plain to see but I could no longer hide my interest. I was at a loss to imagine what the Jew's involvement could be in all this.

I could feel Warrigal drawing near, his fists clenching. Evershed's voice became a threat.

‘Mr Fagin,' he said through stained teeth. ‘The same Mr Fagin that you claim never to have heard of, Jack Dawkins, despite my private investigators identifying you as his only known associate currently imprisoned here in Australia.'

Warrigal now stood beside Evershed and the two of them had me pressed tight against the iron rail of the bridge. My terror was building fast as Evershed grabbed my shoulders with his hands and kept on talking.

‘There is much more to this story than you can imagine, Mr Dawkins,' he said. ‘It is even more fanciful than one of Shatillion's own fictions. There is a small wooden toy at the heart of things and an orphan child to whom it was given. But you shall never hear the rest of this tale if you continue to insist in this wrong-headed refusal to cooperate. Now, I shall ask you one more time …' He spoke slow and with menace. ‘Have you … ever heard … of a man named Fagin?'

The sudden recollection came upon me of a time when the old Jew had presented me with a rattly old doll and told me to keep it safe. I looked at the two of them and considered how high we was up from the river below.

‘Come to think of it, Your Lordship,' I said to him, ‘that name is starting to sound a bit familiar.'

As we walked away from the bridge and back to the path there was so many conflicting emotions at work within me that it was hard even to concentrate on where I was stepping. My nerves was much shaken on account of having just been spared a long plummet to my death, but even this powerful sensation was nothing compared to the thrill at what I had just been told. The Jakkapoor stone, the priceless treasure what had inspired so much bloodshed and literature, had been placed inside a little wooden doll. A wooden doll what I was now certain had been given to me when I was only a kinchin.

‘He must have stolen it,' I said, lit up with excitement. ‘Fagin, I mean. He must have pinched it from Shatillion or somehow swindled him out of it.' I chuckled at the thought and did nothing to disguise my love for the man. ‘My eyes, he's good. The best thief in all London.'

Lord Evershed, bastard that he was, must have known that Fagin was dead at this time. I now have no doubt that this information would have been found out by those private detectives what had tracked me down, as well as being mentioned in Shatillion's document. But I had shown Evershed my loyalty towards the Jew and, maybe because he knew that thoughts of reunion would spur me
on or perhaps out of sheer cruelty, he chose not to share this fact with me. Instead, as we followed the path back to the stone house, he told me what Shatillion had written about Fagin and the story of how they had first met.

‘George Shatillion was a young writer when he first encountered your Mr Fagin. He was writing his debut novel and was on the hunt for inspiration.'

‘Like Ikey Slizzard!' I exclaimed. ‘The villain from
Thimble and Pea
. You know, he always reminded me of Fagin. So that's why.'

‘The Jew had tried to swindle Shatillion with a game of chance when they had met on a street corner and Shatillion, who was no fool either, had caught him out. But rather than report him, like an honest Englishman would have done, Shatillion instead insisted that Fagin take him on a tour of London's lowest haunts so he could get a taste of the underworld for his book. He would disguise himself on these outings to blend in among the criminal class, adopting the persona of an old Jew much like Fagin himself. This went on for many years, long after the book was published, and it seems as though Shatillion had become a little too accustomed to the delights of the gutter, often losing himself in gin-houses, brothels and gambling dens. He had a special weakness for playing cards and before long he found himself owing a substantial amount to some nefarious villains who Fagin had introduced him to. Shatillion was told that Fagin would cover the debt for him but that now there would be a terrible and very public reckoning if it was not paid. In the document Shatillion asserts the idea that Fagin had orchestrated this turn of events in order to place the novelist under his power. He refers to the Jew in very unflattering terms, calling him a “wicked trickster” and a “vile devil”.'

As Evershed told me all this my heart swelled with affection. Of course Fagin had arranged all that. It was so like him.

‘To worm his way out of this predicament,' Evershed went on, ‘Shatillion hatched a scheme. He offered to pay Fagin off with the Jakkapoor stone.' At this part of the telling he began to growl again. ‘This was soon after his abandonment of Louisa. He had left her with only that very jewel, the last thing she had to trade with. Louisa had hidden the Jakkapoor stone, what she often referred to as the black heart of India, inside a blue-coated wooden doll that resembled an Indian prince. But it was Shatillion whose heart was black and he stole the doll away from her and took it for his own.'

The stone house came into view and Evershed kept talking as we followed the path up to it. ‘Oh yes,' he said, ‘Shatillion's document is full of expressions of regret about the theft and he tries to justify his actions on superstitious grounds. It seems he hoped that the curse of the jewel would soon bring destruction down upon Mr Fagin. He had just finished writing
The Curse of the Jakkapoor Stone
, the book that so callously mocks my military triumph, and his head was full of how dangerous the jewel was and he claims he was protecting Louisa from its curse by taking it from her.'

A fat lot of good it did her, I wanted to say as we stepped back up towards the door of the house and Warrigal unlocked it. Evershed seemed to sense this thought and waited until we had entered a dark mahogany study what let in little sunshine before continuing.

‘Shatillion did not understand the curse,' he remarked as we both took our seats in red leather chairs and Warrigal lit us some fat cigars from a wooden case. ‘Its power is not over those who possess the jewel but over those who subsequently lose it. The curse is a punishment for letting the jewel go.'

I nodded as he came out with this, fixing my face to look as
interested in it as possible. But inside I just wished he would get back to the business at hand as I cared nothing for silly curses. I only wanted to know about this doll.

‘So Fagin accepted the jewel as payment,' I said, knowing that with his magpie's eye for real treasure he would have known at a glance that the stone was of a rare kind. ‘And then what?'

‘I was hoping that this part of the story you could explain to me, Mr Dawkins,' Evershed replied after his cigar had been lit. It seemed he did not want to smoke these on the veranda, although this would have been more natural. ‘The Jew's behaviour becomes most unaccountable at this point, even to Shatillion. He writes that the jewel was left inside the wooden doll and given to a child – a child he described as his favourite. Now why on earth would a greedy old villain like him do a thing like that?'