SV - 05 - Sergeant Verity and the Swell Mob. (21 page)

The
men grew bored and turned to their cigars or shrub. Their women, dyed and
painted as marionettes, caught Jane Midge's gaze and smiled vindictively at
her. The youngster had thought herself clever enough to be their rival and now
she was learning a bitter lesson.

Stunning
Joe cursed them all, their amusement at the young dancing-girl's predicament,
caught between modesty and necessity. All the cocksureness had gone from her
eyes now. In an attempt to hold their interest she turned her back and swayed
the firm young hips again, watching the men and women over her shoulder. Jack Strap
grinned as the taut transparent silk gathered in a little sheaf of creases between
the rear opening of her legs and pulled, smooth as drumskin, over the cheeks of
Jane Midge's bottom. But Stunning Joe had had enough. Several more copper coins
rattled on the floor. Joe got up, brushing aside two spectators who stood in
his way, and seized the girl in the middle of her dance.

He
took her bare arm' and led her to the door where he knew the staircase began.
The customs of such houses were simple. Among hoots of encouragement from the
crowd and a grin from Jack Strap, Joe put his money on the bar, and dragged the
unwilling girl up the stairs.

It
distressed him that she was too frightened to listen to his protests. In the
shabby little room with its linoleum, plain mattress and china ewer, he turned
his back on her and drew the curtains. The gas was already lit and when he
looked round again he was dismayed at what she had done. The halter and
headpiece lay on the mattress. She was just stepping out of the silk
fleshings. Joe looked at the firm elasticity of the young body, the small
formed breasts, the flat belly, the incurve of bone-pattern at the base of her
spine, the taut, smooth buttocks.

'No!'
he said, exasperated. 'Yer don't 'ave to!'

In the
mirror he caught sight of them, Jane Midge with her firm young figure nude and
pale, he with his stunted growth. They looked like a pair of children playing a
game. Jane caught the weariness in his eyes.

'You
don't like me!' she wailed. 'After all that, you don't!'

Joe touched her shoulder.

'Course I do,' he said gently.
'Who wouldn't? But you're to do as I say. Stay here. Room's paid for. All night
and tomorrow too. 'ungry, are you?'

She shook her head, sitting on
the stained mattress. Joe squatted down and looked into her face. He saw the
same hopelessness now as he had seen in the eyes of the men on the hulks. All
the grinning merriment which pretty Jane Midge assumed for her dance was now
gone. She might as well have been on the hulks, he told himself. But there was
no need. For her, as well as for him, the whole bloody world was a hulk.

'I gotta go and see someone,'
he said gently, brushing the youngster's brown hair back from her face. 'I'll
be back as soon as I can. Then it'll be all right. Wait here. See?'

'Yes,' she said, her voice
sounding tearful though the dark eyes were dry. Joe comforted her a moment
longer. Then a boot crashed against the door.

'C'mon Joseph!' bellowed Strap
from the passageway. 'Your friends is missing you.'

Joe
kissed the girl clumsily on the cheek and stepped to the door.

'Get
dressed,' he said. 'I'll be back. That's a promise.' Jack Strap was in great
humour.

'Mr
Kite sent for you,' he said.' 'ad yer greens all right? I could fancy chasing
pretty Jane's arse for her meself if there was time! 'ere, Joseph! You never
let her go? You silly little bugger! What they do to you on that hulk then? Or
did you hook it in such a hurry that yer whatsits got left behind?' And Strap
grinned hugely at his silent companion.

Stunning
Joe followed Jack Strap up the thickly carpeted stairs of the Bedford Hotel.
Sealskin Kite's suite of rooms opened off the first-floor landing. Strap was
dressed with unaccustomed elegance, russet suiting and silk hat disguising the
crudity of his muscular figure. The interior of this, the most exclusive of the
Brighton hotels, was designed like a temple of the ancient world. Doric columns
and a balustrade turned the first-floor landing into the atrium verandah of
Greece or Rome, looking down into the well of the vestibule below.

Jack
Strap tapped once at the main door of the suite and the two men were admitted.
Sealskin Kite, the old woman beside him, and the sallow figure of Old Mole,
were like figures in a family bereavement. Everything in the room exuded a
sense of luxury and extravagance, from the Italian sideboard and the Venetian
mirror-frames to trefoil grates with their ormolu of burnished steel.

Sealskin
Kite and his wife were snuggled together on a settee of fringed velvet. They
stared at Stunning Joe simultaneously. In the shrewd old faces there was now a
common look of accusation and the indignity of betrayal. Joe, who had been
about to smile at them in recognition of a mutual triumph, suddenly let his jaw
go slack. Something, it seemed was badly out of place. Mrs Kite turned her gaze
aside from Joe, as if unable to bear the sight of him, and scuttled from the
room. After a long pause, during which Mole and Strap took up position behind
their master, Kite spoke. In one hand he held the red leather jewel case, from
the other he dangled the glory of the Shah Jehan clasp as though it had been a
soiled rag. For the first time, in Joe's experience, the old man was not
smiling.

'Now
then,' said Kite at last, 'now then, my young friend! What d'ye call this? Eh?'

Joe swallowed,
suddenly and compulsively nervous.

' 's
the clasp, Mr Kite. I meant to show meself grateful. And I did.'

Kite waggled the clasp which
still dangled from his right hand.

'
'Course it's the clasp, little Joseph! Don't I see it? Sealskin Kite ain't
blind, though you may wish him so! Sealskin Kite may take his ease in an
invalid carriage, his legs ain't what they once were. But he ain't
blind
^’
.
And by God he ain't blind,
least of all, when a trick's put up against 'im!'

The
panic began to rise in Joe's gullet until it almost stopped his breath. He
wanted only to throw himself before Mr Kite, to make the old man see that he
had been nothing but brave, loyal and true to every promise.

'God's my witness, Mr Kite, I
never had so much as a thought of tricking you!' In his terror Joe could not
produce a voice louder than a whisper. He watched the cruel satisfaction
kindling in the eyes of Old Mole and Jack Strap. With a rag to stop his mouth,
they could practise pain and death upon a victim even here, in the most famous
hotel in Brighton. Perhaps it was only a joke, Mr Kite pretending anger to
amuse his friends by Joe's discomfiture. 'I owe you everything, Mr Kite. Me
and any that come after me shall bless your name for what you done. I couldn't
trick you! How?'

The
fury of the little old man had mottled his face and flecks of saliva spun from
his lips as he talked.

'Then Sealskin Kite is blind,
sir? You call him blind? An old loon? This is the present you bring him, after
all he does for you?'

The last words rang in Joe's ears like a scream.
'Ain't it the clasp?'Joe whined. 'Ain't it, Mr Kite?' 'The devil take the
heathen rubbish, and you with it!' Joe started as the old man caught up the
Shah Jehan clasp

and
flung it petulantly on the carpet, like a sulky child with a toy. The other
hand wagged in the air.

'This!' squealed Kite. 'What d'ye take this for? Eh?'

'Case,' mumbled Joe. 'Case as belongs to the jool.'

Kite
leant forward, his mouth twitching as he sought for words to convey the force
of his displeasure.

'That's just what it ain't, sir! Just what it ain't!'

'May I be struck dead, Mr
Kite,' said Joe softly, 'if that ain't the case the jool was in.'

Kite hissed back at him.

'If it ain't, little Joseph,
things shall be done to you as shall make you wish yourself back on the hulks
under the drummer's lash! This was never the case that Banker Lansing had made
for his clasp.'

'It's the only one I ever saw,
Mr Kite. There was nothing at Wannock Hundred that time. Neither jool nor
case.'

He was
calmer, now that he understood the cause of Kite's anger. There was only one
thing to be done, tell the truth as he knew it. If that would not save him,
then there was no safety to be found at all.

'There was other cases, Mr
Kite, hid in the back of the drawing-room piano. But they was full of nothing,
just glass and trumpery.' '

Kite
had ceased to listen. His head lolled forward on his chest and he appeared to
be talking to himself.

'You
lost Sealskin Kite a fortune,' he murmured. 'Sealskin Kite had a fortune almost
in his hands, and you let it slip from him.'

'Listen,
Mr Kite,' said Joe gently, 'I'll go back. Only tell me what it is and I’ll go
back to that house and get it for you. And if I'm caught, I'll take me chance,
'fact, I'll make such a fight that I won't be took alive, not to be sent back
to the hulks. Only say the word, Mr Kite.'

But
Kite's energy seemed spent by his anger and he made no acknowledgement of
having heard the offer. It was Old Mole who stepped round the settee and took
the little spiderman by his arm.

'Seems
you'd best be put in your quarters, Stunning Joseph. What's to be done in your
case must need a little sleeping on.'

The
room in which he was confined was the smallest of the suite. Visitors to the
Bedford Hotel were accustomed to bring at least one of their own servants with
them, a maid or valet who slept in a cupboard-sized room off the master's
quarters. It was here that Joe had been kept since their arrival in Brighton,
cast in the role of Sealskin Kite's attendant. During the night which followed
he slept little, puzzling in his mind why Mr Kite should make such a bother
over a leather jewel case when he held the splendours of the Shah Jehan clasp
safely in his hands.

When
they came for him the next morning Joe followed Jack Strap and Old Mole
apprehensively into Sealskin Kite's drawing-room. The Shah Jehan clasp lay on a
scrap of black velvet on the table. By the light of day, the emerald green and
the maroon rubies had an almost funereal pomp about them. Joe looked and
thought that every stone seemed either a green eye of evil or a red eye of
bloody death.

He turned and, to his
astonishment, saw Sealskin Kite on the sofa, the old man's eyes twinkling
merrily as he smiled up at Joe once again.

'Well, my dear young sir,'
said Kite amiably, 'you have more friends than you ever knew, it seems. Mr Mole
is your friend. And is there anything Mr Mole could ask that Sealskin Kite
would refuse? Eh?'

Kite looked about him, but no one spoke.

'Mr
Mole has convinced me, Joseph,' the old man continued, 'that you did all a man
could have done. Why, after all, should you know the actual complexion of a
jewel case, never having seen the same? No, Joseph, you was good as your word.
True, Mr Mole?'

'Yes, Mr Kite,' said the scrub-haired man impassively.

'Very well,' said Kite, the breath whistling between
his teeth, 'and what's Sealskin Kite if he ain't a man o' his word. I ask you,
sir? What is he, eh? The jewel case ain't to be had. Well, so it ain't, and
there an end on't. But all the world knows that Kite keeps his bargains, and so
he shall. Mr Mole! See the young gentleman paid!'

Mole
stepped round the settee again. He folded the black velvet over the rich green
and purple shimmer of the clasp. Then he handed it to Stunning Joe.

'Understand,' said Kite more
sharply, 'that you and the old Sealskin have never met. You was never here, my
dear young sir.' He snuffled at his own wit. 'Indeed, you ain't anywhere now,
being dead. The party that attended me was quite a different man, who shall be
brought to testify if necessary. I never so much as saw that heathen gee-gaw.
But I
did
make you a promise, little Joseph, that you should
have the value of that item for your labour. And so you shall. Take it, depart
hence, and let us meet no more.'

For a
moment Joe could hardly believe what he had heard.

'You
never mean to have the clasp, sir? All them jewels that you went to such bother
to come by?'

Kite's eyes crinkled with elderly benevolence.