Seven Dials - Anne Perry [111]
There was no point in pretense, and perhaps no time to waste. “I am looking for someone who has gone missing,” she replied. “And I believe he may have spoken with you shortly before the last time he was seen. May I have a little of your time . . . please?”
“Of course.” He held out his hand. “If you would like to come with me, we can go to my office. I’m afraid I don’t have a church, more like an old hall, but it serves.”
“Yes, I’d like to,” she agreed without hesitation.
He led the way with no further speech, and she followed him back up the cobbles between the silent people, around the corner and along an alley towards a tiny square. The buildings were four or five stories high, narrow and leaning together, creaking in the damp, eaves crooked, the sour-sweet smell of rotting wood clinging to everything, choking the throat. There was no distinct sound, and yet there was not silence. Rat feet scuttled over stone, water dripped, rubbish moved and fluttered in the slight wind, wood sagged and settled a little lower.
“Over there.” Sandeman pointed to a doorway and walked ahead of her. It was stained with damp and swung open at his touch. Inside was a narrow vestibule and beyond a larger hall with a fire burning low in the huge open fireplace. Half a dozen people sat on the floor in front of it, leaning close to each other, but not apparently talking. It was a moment before Charlotte realized they were either insensible or asleep.
Sandeman held up his finger to request silence, and walked almost soundlessly across the stone floor towards a table in the corner to the right, at which there were two chairs.
She followed after him and sat as he invited.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I have nothing to offer you, and nowhere better than this.” He said it with a smile, not as if he were ashamed for it. It was more an accommodation to her than to himself. His face was gaunt and the marks of hunger were plain in his thin cheeks. “Who is it you are looking for?” he asked. “If I can’t tell you where he is, I can at least tell him that you asked, and perhaps he will find you. You understand that what is told me in confidence has to remain so? Sometimes when a man . . .” He hesitated, watching her intently, perhaps trying to judge something of the man she was seeking from her emotions.
She felt like a fraud, imagining the desperate women, wives, mothers or sisters who had come to him to find a man they had loved, lost to experiences he could not share with them, or whose burden he could not carry without the oblivion of drink, or opium.
She had to be honest with him. “It is not a relative of mine, it is the brother of a young woman I know. He has disappeared, and she is too distressed to look for him herself, nor has she the time. She could lose her position and not easily find another.”
His expression of concern did not alter. “Who is he?”
Before she could reply the outer door swung wide open, crashing against the wall and bouncing back to catch the person coming in. It hit him so hard he lost his precarious balance and crumpled to the floor, where he remained in a heap, like a bundle of rags.
Sandeman glanced at Charlotte too briefly to speak, then stood up and went over to the door. He bent down and put his hands under the man, and with considerable effort, lifted him to his feet. The man was very obviously drunk. He looked to be in his mid-fifties, but his face sagged, his eyes were unfocused and he had several days’ stubble on his cheeks. His hair was matted and the dirt on him could be smelled even from where Charlotte sat.
Sandeman looked at him with exasperation. “Come on in, Herbert. Come and sit down. You’re sodden wet, man!”
“I fell,” Herbert mumbled, dragging his feet as he shambled half beside, half behind Sandeman.
“In the gutter, by the look of you,” Sandeman said wryly.
And the smell, Charlotte thought. She longed to move farther away, but the dignity with which Sandeman spoke to the man made her feel ashamed to.
Herbert made no reply, but allowed himself to be