Dodger of the Dials (38 page)

‘HELP!’ he at last called out as I manhandled him away so he could not be heard from the main house and told him to shush. ‘Help us, someone! It’s the Artful Dodger! It’s Jack perishing Dawk—’

Then there was a pistol click from behind and I could tell by the look on Bolter’s face that my friend with the gun had stepped through the door after me.

‘Keep quiet, Noah!’ I heard Oliver command in a low voice as he shut the door behind him, making the room much darker. ‘Or whatever you’re now calling yourself.’

Bolter looked most astonished to be addressed by this name and he blinked at Oliver’s weapon in the dim candlelight. I darted over to him and removed some matchsticks I could feel in his pocket while he sneered at us. There was just three flickering candles about the place and most of that horrible dungeon was still in shadows.

‘I don’t know no one by the name of Noah,’ he said as his chin raised in defiance, ‘yer’ve mistaken me for another, sir.’

‘You’re Noah Claypole,’ Oliver continued as I lit the nearest lamp to get a better look around, ‘and I would recognise you
anywhere. We worked together in Sowerberry’s funeral home in Mudfog when I was a boy. You made the mistake of making disparaging remarks about my mother if I recall and I made you pay for it. Do not test me again, Noah, I have not become less sensitive with age.’

‘
Twist!’
Bolter hissed the word like it was poison to him. Then he looked to me as my eyes scanned the large and cluttered outhouse to see who else was in here. ‘What’s this, Dodger? You and Twist, is it? And after what he done to dear old Fagin, eh? Yer a disgrace.’

‘I ain’t the one working for a police informant, Morris,’ I shot back regardless of what Oliver was calling him. ‘Billy Slade serves the peelers. Or rather one peeler in particular. But then why am I telling you? I’d wager you know all about it.’

‘Lies!’ Bolter protested. ‘Slade’s an honest crim.’

Oliver walked over to him, muttered something about contradictions in terms, and grabbed him by the arm. I went back to searching the room what was full of nasty-looking gardening implements to see who was here.

‘Lily!’ I called over to the darker half of the outhouse where the Turpins had been tied up. ‘Are you in here? It’s me, Jack, come to rescue you.’ Then I heard something metal clatter to the floor from off a workbench. Somebody was crawling out from their hiding place and had knocked over a box of horseshoes. ‘Who is that?’ I asked as I stepped towards where the noise had come from. The voice what responded was tiny but straining to sound brave.

‘It’s me, Dodge,’ I heard a boy say as he poked his head out into the light. ‘Paul.’

‘Scratch!’ I called out and ran straight over to him. ‘Are you hurt? What have they been doing to you?’

‘Let’s get out of here, Dodger,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough.’ I threw my arms around and gave him a big embrace as I told him that
this was exactly what I was about to do. His body stiffened and he showed little emotion. He was behaving in such a tougher manner to the little boy what had burst into tears before the crack in Kent just six months before. ‘It’s all right, my young covey,’ I promised him, regardless of his grown-up posturing. ‘You’re safe now.’

‘What is that child doing in this place, Noah?’ Oliver demanded behind me, all fury. ‘What have you done to him and, for pity’s sake, why?’

‘We was never gonna kill him or nothing,’ the squirming Bolter said as I continued to hold Scratcher tight. Scratcher resisted my affections for a second but I could tell he had been through some ordeal. ‘We was just keeping him here for punishment, like. Serves him right for running away an’ all. Mr Slade was going to put him to work once he’d learned his lesson.’

‘To Hell with all of you people,’ Oliver said in a raw voice. ‘That’s what Sikes and Fagin wanted to do with me.’

I then drew away from Scratcher so I could ask him some questions and, as the candlelight allowed me a better view, I was shocked to see his face. There was two big purple bruises on either cheek.

‘Who done this?’ I cried out in anger. ‘Was it Slade?’ Scratcher nodded.

Oliver, with his pistol still pointed at Morris Bolter, came over so he could see what I was talking about. His reaction to Scratcher’s face was even more outraged than my own and, as I stroked Scratcher’s cheeks and promised him that I would see that Slade pay for hurting one of my best boys, I heard him cross back to where Morris stood. Then there was the sound of a sharp punch and someone stumbled to the floor and cried out in pain. I did not need to look behind me to know who had proved victorious in the long-awaited Twist versus Claypole rematch.

‘What’d I do?’ Morris moaned from the floor. ‘I never laid a finger on the boy!’

‘You’ve locked him up in an outhouse like a dog,’ Oliver charged him with. ‘Just knowing about his maltreatment is enough for me to have you arrested, Noah.’

Oliver then proceeded to explain to his fellow funeral boy that he was now going to fetch some peelers, as well as other journalists, this very morning and that, if Morris had any sense, he would tell them everything he might know about the dark dealings between Weeping Billy and any corrupt policemen of the Metropolitan Police Service. Bolter began protesting his innocence in an unconvincing voice but, as he babbled, I had my own things what I wanted to say to Scratcher.

‘I’m sorry they done this to you, Scratch,’ I said as he looked at me with much older eyes than when I had last seen him, ‘and that Slade was ever able to track you down in the first place. I thought I had taken you somewhere safe. But I need to know where Lily is. She was brought here with you, right? What have they done with her?’

‘She’s up in the big house,’ he answered with no expression. ‘He keeps her in the attic.’

‘The attic?’

‘Yeah. He locked her up there. She tried to stop him from hitting me,’ his voice paused and I heard the child again, ‘and I ain’t seen her since.’

I turned back to the fallen Bolter and stood beside Oliver. We both looked down on him as he wiped some blood from his face.

‘What’s this attic, Morris?’ I asked him. ‘Is he forcing her to work for him again or what?’ Bolter said nothing and even when
Oliver’s pistol was pointed at his damaged nose he still stared us down.

‘Yer can punch a man, Twist,’ he snarled. ‘I’ll give yer that much. But yer ain’t a shooter, I see it in yer eyes.’

‘Perhaps not,’ said Oliver as he lowered the weapon. ‘But I am the pressing charges sort so don’t get too comfortable. And here’s another question. Why are you Morris Bolter now? People don’t change their names unless they’re hiding from something?’

‘Dunno what yer on about,’ he snorted.

‘If I were to tell the police that I knew your real name, your town of origin and your previous employer, what would we discover? What crime is Noah Claypole wanted for?’

Bolter went to speak again but nothing came out. Then he sank further down onto that dusty floor and his eyes flicked to me. ‘Don’t let him tell on me, Dodger,’ he whimpered in a voice what was close to begging. ‘I know yer hate a peacher.’

I was disgusted by the sorry manner what he was so quick to adopt when beaten. His eyes was now pleading and pitiful and struck a sharp contrast with the strength and endurance what I had just spied in Scratcher’s.

‘Oliver won’t be telling no peelers about how he knows you, Morris,’ I said and I sensed the respectable Brownlow turn to me in displeasure. ‘He’ll keep whatever secrets you’re hiding.’ Before Oliver could inform me that, as a professional journalist, he had no intention of keeping any of Bolter’s secrets, I added the caveat. ‘But that is only if you’ve got something worth peaching to us. About Slade and Detective Mills.’

I glanced at Oliver and I saw that the idea appealed to him. ‘An anonymous source,’ he agreed and looked back to Bolter. ‘Very well,
Morris
. If you have some decisive testimony to give me which
will link Mills to the criminal underworld then I shall never call you by your given name again. But it’ll need to be good, so if you continue to insist that you know nothing then the police will hear all about where Noah Claypole has ended up.’

Bolter let out a little groan and then rolled over onto his knees. He was a born sneak and it was only a matter of time before he began peaching on Slade.

‘I knows about this Mills, yeah,’ he admitted after a long cough. ‘He’s a Detective Super-something from Hampstead way.’

‘What about him?’ Oliver said.

‘He’s the master,’ Morris confirmed. ‘Slade’s the dog. Only nobody around here knows it save for me.’ Oliver asked him how he knew all this. ‘I ain’t deaf, dumb and blind,’ he shrugged. ‘I learn lots through holes in the wall.’ I recalled then that I had heard a noise behind those walls in Slade’s pub on that occasion when I had been engaged to break into the Rylance home. That noise, I was now sure, was Morris Bolter eavesdropping. ‘I knows the deals and I knows the dates. I know that Slade hired Dodger here to go into that home and made it so that a body would be there to greet him. I knows lots of interesting stuff.’

‘Then we’re going to my office in the
Chronicle
where I shall write them all down.’ Oliver was still holding his pistol in a threatening manner as he smiled. ‘If you can prove that any of this “interesting stuff” is true then we have a deal, you and I.’

‘We’re here to rescue Lily!’ I reminded Oliver in sudden agitation. ‘Or have you forgotten? I’m going to this attic up there to get her.’ I turned to Bolter. ‘Has he hurt her?’ I demanded.

‘He was in a vicious mood when he got back from visiting yer in prison,’ Bolter shrugged. ‘Went straight up there and locked himself in with her. That woulda been an uncomfortable few hours, I should think.’

‘Right, that’s it, I’m killing him!’ I announced then and reached over to Oliver. ‘Give me that pistol. I’m going up there to shoot the bastard.’ But he refused to hand it over.

‘You didn’t murder Anthony Rylance, Jack,’ he told me. ‘And I certainly won’t help you to kill Slade.’

‘But the whole of London reckons I’ve got blood on my hands already, Oliver,’ I shouted, no longer caring if we was heard from the main house. ‘If they catch me again I’ll hang, so doing in a man like Slade, who deserves it more than most, can’t cost me more.’

‘It can cost you your innocence and that’s a heavy enough price.’

‘Slade ain’t up there anyway,’ said Bolter who was making a shaky attempt to stand back up again. ‘He left the place hours ago.’ Oliver and myself both turned to him as he rubbed his bruises and steadied himself against the wall.

‘In the middle of the night?’ asked Oliver. ‘Why?’

‘Dunno,’ Bolter answered, ‘the master whistled, I s’pose.’

‘Yeah, well, there’ll still be plenty of those red hats though,’ I said as I kept my hand held out for the gun. ‘Give me the barker, Oliver. I just want to wave it about if I need to.’

Oliver hesitated but I knew he would agree. He could not come with me to get Lily as he had promised because he now had Morris to keep an eye on and Scratcher to look after.

‘I’m taking these two back to the curricle, Jack. We’ll wait for you to come out with Lily there, but don’t be too long about it. Here, take the gun then.’

I snatched it from him and forced Morris to show me which key on that big chain of his opened the garret room where Lily was being held. Before I left, Oliver had more that he wanted to say to me.

‘I never thought you were as bad as some of the others, Jack,’ he said as he grabbed the miserable Bolter by the arm and gripped
tight so he could not run off. ‘I knew you were a thief, a liar and a terrible influence on other boys. But I have never considered you to be as black as somebody like Bill Sikes.’ He looked down to the barker I was holding before we went our separate ways. ‘Don’t prove me wrong.’

Chapter 23
Execution Monday

Relating the events surrounding my second visit to the house of Molly Gay

On that first occasion on which I had approached the front door of this house of ill-repute, I had been led up the rose-garden path by Slade himself as if I were a favoured customer. My impression of the place then was that it was a veritable haven of luxury and sin. Now, months later, when winter had deadened the garden, I considered it to be a very different place. I gripped Oliver’s pistol tight as I crept up the porch towards the Goblin Victoria knocker what was again frowning out at me from the door. As before, the crimson curtains was drawn tight and so I could not see who was inside, but the house was still quiet so I was sure that all the prostitutes and their callers would all be in a deep sleep after a long Sunday night. I took the bunch of keys what I had snatched from Morris Bolter and slipped the correct one into the lock. The door opened but there was these two gold chains preventing my entrance. But a skilled burglar, such as myself, had no trouble squeezing a hand through the crack and releasing them from within. Soon I was into that hallway and I shut the door behind me as silent as could be.

Even if it were true that Billy Slade was not at home that did not mean that I should be too careless on my way up to the garret, however. There was still sure to be several of these red-hatted Slade men what he kept about his places of business and Bolter had told
me that there was at least six staying in this house that morning. But as I looked around that hallway I got no sense that anyone was stirring. The place was in a mess, with empty, upturned spirit glasses rolling about on hall tables, fresh stains upon the new rugs and a large pair of men’s trousers what had been discarded on the floor. There was plenty of men’s coats upon the racks though and I counted two red bowlers hanging on the hatstands. I heard no voices or footsteps but there was the ticking of the grandfather clock what I was surprised to see was now past seven o’clock. My execution had been due for eight and I wondered if the news had left the prison yet that the star attraction was going to disappoint his adoring public. The realisation that there was still just time enough for me to be recaptured was a sobering one. London could still claim its Monday hanging after all and so I stiffened my resolve to stay quiet and I proceeded to tiptoe onwards.