Dark Assassin - Anne Perry [25]
“Why are the toshers unhappy?” Monk asked. “There’ll always be sewers, just better ones.”
“Change,” Scuff said simply, and with exaggerated patience. “Everybody’s got their stretch, their beat, if yer like, seen’ as yer a policeman o’ sorts.”
“I’m a perfectly regular policeman!” Monk defended himself.
Scuff treated that assertion with the silence it deserved. In his opinion Monk was a dangerous novice who had taken Durban’s position out of a misguided idea of loyalty. He was miserably unsuited for it and was much in need of the guidance or protection of someone who knew what they were doing, such as Scuff himself. He had been born on the river, and at nine years old—or possibly ten, he wasn’t sure—he knew an enormous amount, and was not too proud to learn more every day. But it was a heavy responsibility to look after a grown man who thought he knew so much more than he did.
“Is there going to be a fight over the new stretches?” Monk asked.
“Course there is,” Scuff replied, sniffling. “An’ lots o’ folk gotta move their places. ’Ow’d yer like it if some bleedin’ great machine came an’ crashed your ’ole street down wi’out a word, eh?”
Scuff was referring to the entire communities on the edge between honest poverty, close to destitution, and the semi-criminal underworld who lived nearly all their lives in the sewers, tunnels, and excavations beneath London. To drive a new tunnel through the old was like putting a hot poker into a wasps’ nest. That had been Orme’s analogy.
“I know,” Monk replied. “Mr. Orme has already warned me. I’m not doing this alone, you know.” He looked from left to right through the thickening fog to see if he could see the lights of any kind of food or hot-drink peddlers. The cold was like a tightening vise around them, crushing the heat out of their bodies. How did an urchin like Scuff—so thin he was merely skin and bone—survive? The baleful cry of the foghorns was growing more frequent on the water, and it was impossible to place the sound in the distortion of the mist.
“ ’Ot-chestnut seller that way,” Scuff said hopefully, sniffing again.
“Tonight?” Monk doubted it. It would be a bad night for barrows; no one would be able to see them in this.
“Charlie,” Scuff said, as if that were explanation enough.
“Do you think so?”
“Course.”
“I can’t see anything. Which way?”
“Don’ need ter. I know where ’e’ll be. Yer like chestnuts?” There was a definite lift in Scuff’s voice now.
“Hot, I’d eat anything. Yes, I do.”
Scuff hesitated, as if considering whether to strike a bargain, then his charity got the better of his business sense. “I’ll take yer,” he offered magnanimously. It was clear that Monk needed all the help he could get.
“Thank you,” Monk accepted. “Perhaps you would join me?”
“I don’ mind if I do.”
THREE
The Portpool Lane clinic was a large establishment, not with the open wards that made nursing easy, but with numerous separate bedrooms. However, it had the greatest advantage any establishment that was devoted to the treatment of the penniless could have: it was rent-free. It had once been a highly disreputable brothel run by one Squeaky Robinson, a man of many financial and organizational skills. He haxd in the past made one serious technical error, and it was that upon which Hester, with the help of the brilliant barrister Oliver Rathbone, had capitalized on. It was then that the brothel had been closed down, its extortion business ended, and the building turned into a clinic for the treatment of any street woman who was either injured or ill.
Some of its former occupants had remained to work at the more tedious but far safer occupations of cleaning and laundering sheets. Squeaky Robinson himself lived on the premises, and under vociferous and constant complaint kept the books and managed the continuing finances. He never allowed Hester to forget that