Dodger of the Dials (42 page)

I kicked out the chair on wheels back towards the man and I
grabbed the first missile that my hands could reach – the ink pot on the desk. I then spun around and threw it straight at his head. The ink pot struck him square on the nose and the shock of it stopped him in his tracks as black liquid exploded all over his face. He was not slow to recover and he lunged at me with his knife. I had already picked up the next handy object on that desk though and I ran towards him for a follow up punch and landed it before he could strike. This knocked my assailant back two steps and I grabbed the arm with the knife and tried to force it off him. I was now face-to-face with him and as we wrestled for the weapon, he looked as astonished as you can look when one cheek is splashed with ink and the other has the words T
HE
M
ORNING
C
HRONICLE
stamped on it.

‘Dawkins?’ cried Billy Slade in outrage as our eyes and arms locked in struggle. ‘What in hot hell?’

I could have replied to this with some dry and cutting retort but I instead decided that a more clever riposte would be just to knee him hard between the legs. He bent over and moaned but his grip held and he would not drop the knife. He seemed surprised to see me which, in turn, was a surprise for me, considering that he was the one what had crept up on me with a deadly blade.

‘You’re supposed to be dead by now!’ he grunted as I kept my hands over his on the knife handle and I fought hard to stop him from using it on me. ‘You annoying little bastard!’

‘I
am
dead, Billy,’ I said as we continued to fight each other into a stalemate. ‘This is my ghost come back to haunt you.’

Then I butted him in the head with the only other weapon I could find which was, unfortunately, my own head. Like most butts there was a strong chance it did more damage to me than to him and I regretted it at once. Slade called out in pain but he did not release the knife and we staggered into the centre of the room.

‘Why are you here, of all places?’ he demanded as if I still worked for him. ‘Where is Brownlow?’

‘Oh, I see it now!’ I snarled, as I tried tripping his legs with my feet. ‘It ain’t even me you’ve come to kill. I’m offended, Slade!’ Our feet became entangled but there was a chance that I would be the one to fall if I were not careful. My hands was still over his though as I held down his arms and I remembered that here I had an advantage. I made my hand a claw and I dug into his smaller glove where his severed nubs would be. I had hoped to exploit this weak spot of his and sure enough he dropped the knife. But his legs tripped me as it fell and I crashed backwards against the wall.

‘Don’t be!’ Slade said as he reached down to collect the dropped knife. ‘I’ll need to gut someone anyway or it’ll be a wasted trip.’

I charged him before he could grab the handle and we both smashed backwards into that glass-fronted bookcase where I had seen my own reflection. This made an almighty noise and the glass smashed as the whole case rocked. When I pulled Slade back again I could tell that the assaulted piece of furniture, what was already overloaded with Oliver’s books, was threatening to lurch forward in this small room. So I decided to help it along and I let go of Slade and pulled the whole thing towards him. The books poured out onto the ground making a thunderous noise and the tall case itself hit the top of the opposite wall. This formed a sort of barrier between Slade and myself with me on the side of the room where the door was. I dashed out of the study into the main room of the apartment and I almost called out for Lily. But then I remembered that he might not know she was here and so I decided not to give her away if she was hiding in there. Of course, I would never abandon her and so by the time he emerged from the study with the blade back in his good hand I had already obtained my own weapon. This was a brass poker what was resting by the fireplace and seemed to have a decent
reach on it. I took that and readied myself to swing at him should he charge me with the knife. He just flashed me a foxy grin as if he thought me the fattest chicken in the coop.

‘You should have stayed in Newgate, Dodger,’ he taunted. ‘Because a quick drop would have been a lot kinder than what I’m going to do now. I’ll make ribbons out of you.’

The blanketed settee was now between us and we stalked around it slow, both of us waiting to see which way the other would go. My innards was hammering hard now that I was confronted with him again. Here was a man I had been wanting to kill for many reasons but now all I could think about was how to stop him from killing me.

‘Detective Mills gets you at it, eh, Slade?’ I said as I brandished the poker at him. ‘Was it you what killed Anthony Rylance, then?’ We was edging closer together by inches and I could tell he was preparing to make a strike. ‘Because I’d wager it was. And Constable Wingham too? The master keeps his dog busy.’ Soon it would be time for one of us to make a lunge at the other and the game would be over in seconds.

‘I haven’t got any masters, Dodger,’ he returned as he moved around the settee. ‘I have a client who pays very well.’

‘Ever worry that one day he might pay someone else?’ I asked as I prepared myself for a strike. ‘To come calling for you?’ Slade laughed.

‘He’d have to pay a heavy fee to convince someone to try and kill me, Dodger.’ He was starting to enjoy himself now. It was as if he already thought he had won and was now just relishing the play of it. ‘There would be severe consequences for those that failed.’

‘I’d give it a try for a bent farthing.’

‘No, you wouldn’t,’ he jeered as he drew closer. ‘I keep saying it, Dodge. You’re not the killing kind.’

‘He might not be,’ said Lily from elsewhere in the room. ‘But I bloody am.’

We both turned our heads around sharp to see her standing in the doorway of the bedroom. She had Oliver’s pistol pointed right at Slade.

‘Lily!’ Slade gasped as he saw her. ‘How are you here?’ Then he turned back to me. ‘You stole her from me again, Dawkins? Will you never bloody learn?’

‘He didn’t
steal
me, bastard!’ Lily shouted, her face fierce as the gun trembled. ‘I ain’t your possession and I never was!’

Slade chuckled which was bold considering he was staring down the barrel of a gun with a woman of high emotion at the other end of it. He began walking towards her then and spoke as if they was just lovers having a tiff.

‘Petal,’ he said with his arms out but the knife still in his fist. ‘Don’t be like this, eh? I get angry sometimes and I know I shouldn’t. I definitely shouldn’t. I’ve hurt you in the past, yes, and I may well hurt you again. But it’s only on account of how much I love you, see? And you love me too, eh? That’s why you’d never pull that trig—’

Lily pulled the trigger.

Slade jumped – as did I – before we both realised that no shot had been fired. Oliver’s gun, it now appeared, was unloaded and may have been all along. Lily dropped it in horror while Slade recovered from the shock of an attempted assassination from someone who he seemed to think he had mastery over. When he spoke next his voice was quiet but never more menacing.

‘You disgusting little pipe-hole,’ he said. ‘You nasty little whore.’ Then he ran towards her with his knife raised high only to find his path blocked by my good self. I darted into his way before he could reach her and I landed a hard strike into his stomach with the
edge of the brass poker. He dropped in front of me and I grabbed a small ugly vase from off a nearby shelf and brought it straight down onto his head. This shattered and black dust began to scatter all about from within.

‘That’s for Anthony Rylance,’ I said, as Slade raised his hands to cradle his head. I looked at the cracked vase and saw that it had come from a crematorium. ‘And from him, I think.’

I was about to tell Lily to run for it but Slade was not bested so easy and he dealt me a sharp uppercut just as I was saying her name. His fist hit under my chin, causing me to bite my own tongue as I was between her two Ls, and I was shocked by the pain it caused. This did not stop me from kicking him in the face though and, before he could reach the knife, I pounced on him so that Lily was free to take the deadliest weapon in the room for herself. She picked it up and turned back to us.

‘Stop struggling, Slade,’ I said with a lisp, as I at last got him lying face down on Oliver’s rug with his arms locked behind his back. I had beaten him into submission, having received far fewer blows than he had, even with my cut tongue. ‘Or Lily’s gonna stab you!’ He lay underneath me and I had my foot on his back. He was writhing like a savage and if I released him by any degree he would be up again. ‘Ain’t that right, Lil?’

As I held him down, Lily walked over to us and spoke in a voice I had never heard her use before. It was cold but there was a shake to it.

‘Not
or
, Jack,’ she said, and I looked up to where she was standing as Slade remained trapped beneath me. ‘I
am
going to kill him. And you’re going to hold him down while I do it.’

For all my talk to Oliver of wanting to settle Slade with his life, I was still stunned to hear Lily say such a thing. Now that the chance was here I had lost all appetite for blood but I could see as I looked
into her eyes that she had more violence in her than I did. Slade meanwhile, seeing that his life was in mortal danger, began kicking out at me even harder and he used his now free arm to try and punch me off. I was then in the difficult position of having to keep him restrained with one arm while trying to talk some sense into her.

‘You can’t kill him like this, Lily,’ I told her. ‘It’s a barbarism.’

‘We need to do this now while he’s down,’ she said as he screamed. ‘You hold his neck back while I do the rest.’

‘Don’t you cut me, you bitch!’ Slade yelled as his skin turned red with the sudden terror. ‘Don’t you do it!’ I could not help but feel as though this raw language was not going to cool things down very much and I told him to shut his trap as I kept holding him down. Lily stayed staring at him with sheer hatred in her eyes but something rooted her to the spot.

‘Slade’s a killer, Lily,’ I said, seeing that she was losing her nerve already. ‘But you ain’t. If you do this, if you make a murderer of yourself, you’ll be bound for the noose like I was. And – speaking as someone what has just spent the worst weeks of his life in a condemned cell – I wouldn’t wish that on a dog.’

‘We’ll do it,’ she answered. ‘Then run.’

‘But we’d still be murderers, Lily,’ I told her, recalling those what had sat beside me on the condemned pew. ‘And there’s no running from that.’

She stopped then and her whole body slumped in defeat. She threw the knife onto the settee and flopped down beside it. ‘So what do we do with him, then?’ she asked, close to tears. ‘You can’t sit on him like that forever!’

There was a few moments’ silence from all three of us as I puzzled over it. Then a shaking and timid female voice called out from behind the front door.

‘Mr Brownlow?’ said a woman what I took to be the landlady who lived below. I would imagine that the racket we had just made must have terrified the very ears off her. ‘Are you all right in there, sir? What in heaven’s name is all that crashing?’ Lily and I looked at one another, unsure of how to respond. The she nodded at me to indicate that she would be doing the talking.

‘Mr Brownlow isn’t in at the moment, dear,’ she called out. ‘We’re …
friends of his
!’

‘Friends?’ shrieked the now hysterical voice.

‘Yeah, if you like,’ Lily shrugged. Silence from behind the door. There was a chance that the respectable woman had been turned to stone with the shock.

‘My husband has gone to a fetch a policeman,’ she announced at last. ‘They won’t be long.’

Slade cursed from his position underneath me. ‘Let me up, Dawkins,’ he pleaded. ‘That way we can all escape out the back window. It’s in no one’s interest for us to be here now, is it?’

I considered this and then shook my head at the lunacy of what I was about to shout through to the woman beyond the door.

‘Get them to hurry up, then,’ I told her with some urgency. ‘My lady friend and I have just caught a burglar in the act. And we don’t want him getting away now, do we?’ Slade almost choked as he heard that. Footsteps from behind the door was heard scurrying away down the steps and into the street. I sighed and glanced at Lily. ‘I never thought I’d hear myself say anything like that,’ I remarked.

‘Perhaps it was the suit talking,’ she replied.

Chapter 25
The Morning Chronicle

Seven months after the events of the previous chapter, I am at last at my liberty

‘Somebody important has come,’ announced Turnkey McColl after he and another guard had unlocked the door to my cell on that stuffy July morning in 1848, ‘to take you away from us, God bless his kind soul.’ McColl winked at me as he handed over some boot polish and a suit of clothes what I had got laundered in readiness for this, the day of my release.

‘Don’t go pretending like you won’t miss me, Barry,’ I grinned as I got dressed in front of them and my two cellmates who had risen from their beds to bid me farewell. ‘I can see the tears glistening in your eyes already, you hopeless bugger.’

Barry McColl and his colleague both scoffed but I had my suspicions that they was indeed a bit sorry that I was leaving Horsemonger Lane Gaol that morning as I had brought a lot of excitement into that prison with me. I had been in their custody ever since the trial what had followed my re-arrest in Oliver Brownlow’s apartment and I felt like the biggest celebrity the place had ever entertained. On the day I was first brought here, after I had been cleared of murder but not of house-breaking, the streets leading up to the gates was lined with a great many spectators. The population of London had enjoyed reading of my exploits in the newspapers – of how I had been condemned to die for a crime I had
never done, escaped from the walls of Newgate and apprehended the real killer myself – and I must have been even more adored by the poorer class than Jack Sheppard had once been. When the police van in which I had been transported from the court at last made it to the prison gates of Horsemonger Lane the crowd had grown thick and I could hear them stamping their feet and chanting my name over and over from within. As I emerged from out the back of the van and into the daylight, with my hands still manacled, and escorted by two guards, a huge roar went up from all around. Men and women was looking down from all the surrounding windows and people was pointing at me and whispering into their children’s ears. Someone shouted ‘Dodger!’ louder than the others and I spun around to acknowledge him and held my chained hands into the air in triumph. A bigger cheer went up from all about as the peelers tried to force me into the prison and away from my excitable admirers. The whole street then began chanting my moniker, over and over, and I could still hear them by the time I was in my new cell.