Dark Assassin - Anne Perry [77]
“Several people working together,” Monk judged. “One to distract, one to take it, a passer, another to block the way with offers of help, and maybe a fifth to take it and disappear.”
“Yer right. An’ from what I ’eard, I’m pretty certain at least one of ’em was a kid, ten or eleven, each time.”
“Not the same child?”
“No, just that sort of age. People take ’em for beggars, mudlarks, just strays ’anging around for a bit of food, likely, or to keep warm. Better in a boat than on the dockside in the wind.”
Monk thought of Scuff. He would probably rather work than steal, but what was there for a child to do on the river in midwinter? The thought of hot food, a dry place out of the wind, and a blanket would be enough to tempt anyone. He was brave, imaginative, quick—the ideal target for a kidsman, one of those who took in unwanted children and made thieves of them. It was afar from ideal life, but in return the children ate and were clothed, and to some extent protected. The thought of Scuff ending like that sickened him. There was no leniency in the courts for children. A thief was a thief.
“Any idea who?” He found the words difficult to say.
Orme must have heard the emotion in his voice. He looked at him quickly, then away again. “Some. Only the arms and legs o’ the gang, so to speak. Need to catch the ’ead to be any use. Won’t be easy.”
“We’ll have to plan,” Monk replied. “See if there’s any pattern in the reports of theft. Any of the goods turn up? Who’d take that kind of stuff? Opulent receivers?” They took the valuable things and knew where and how to dispose of them. Durban would not have had to ask; he would have known their names, their places of business and storage, the goods in which they specialized.
“Yes, sir.” Orme did not add anything.
Monk realized, as if he had suddenly come to a yawning hole in the earth in front of him, how much Orme missed Durban, and how far short Monk still was of filling that space. Perhaps he could never earn that loyalty or give the men cause to accept him as they had Durban, but he could earn their respect for his skill, and in time they would come to know that they could trust him.
For now it was Orme they trusted, Orme they would be loyal to and obey. Monk would get no more than lip service, and less than that from Clacton. That was a problem that still had to be addressed, and they would all be waiting to see how Monk handled it. Sooner or later Clacton himself would provoke a confrontation, and Monk’s authority would hang on whether he won, and how.
He tried to think of other plans he had used in the past to catch rings of thieves, but since the accident that had taken his memory he had worked largely on murder cases. Petty thieving belonged to a past before that—in the early years, when he and Runcorn had worked together, he thought wryly, not against each other. He had had flashes of going into the rookeries, those vast slums, which were part underground tunnels, part sagging tenements. There were passages, trapdoors, sudden drops, and blind ends—a hundred ways to get caught, and to get your throat cut. Your corpse would possibly go out on the tide, or if it finished in the sewer, most of it would be eaten by rats.
That world was violent and ugly. The poverty in it was so absolute that only the strongest and the luckiest survived. Police seldom went there at all, but if they did, they took with them someone they trusted not only in loyalty but in skill, speed, and nerve as well, and above all courage. He and Runcorn had trusted each other like that once.
In the rotting tenements of the waterlogged patch on the south bank known as Jacob’s Island, there could be a hundred men hidden in the wrecks of buildings sinking slowly into the mud. The same was true of the teeming slums of the docks, the ever-shifting tides of the Pool of London with its great ships, its cargoes here one day and