Traitors Gate - Anne Perry [157]
“Thank you,” Pitt said with a lift in his voice he could barely control. “That’s excellent advice.” He fished in his pocket and found a shilling. “Have a pint each. I’m obliged to you.”
“Thanks, guv.” The man took the shilling and it disappeared into his pocket. He shook his head as Pitt turned away. “Nutter,” he said to himself. “Right nutter.”
“Back to Little Bridge Stairs,” Pitt told the cabby.
“Right y’are.”
They went back up to Tooley Street and then down Mill Lane towards the river. This time there was no road beside the water. Mill Lane ended abruptly at the bank and Little Bridge Stairs. There was a narrow dock a few yards upriver, and nothing else but the water and the bank. Pitt alighted.
The cabby wiped the side of his nose and looked expectantly at him.
Pitt looked around him, then down at the ground. Nothing would pass that way, except to go to the steps and the water. A carriage could wait here for hours without necessarily being remarked.
“Who uses these stairs?” Pitt asked.
The cabby looked affronted.
“Y’askin’ me? ’ow the ’ell would I know? Be fair, guv, this ain’t my patch.”
“I’m sorry,” Pitt apologized. “Let’s have luncheon at the nearest public house, and they may be able to tell us.”
“Now that sounds like a very sensible idea,” the cabby agreed with alacrity. “I saw one jus’ ’round the corner. Called the Three Ferrets, it were, and looked quite well used, like.”
It proved to be more than adequate, and after a meal of tripe and onions, followed by steamed spotted dick pudding and a glass of cider, they returned to the stairs armed with even more information than Pitt had dared hope for. It seemed very few people used the stairs, but one Frederick Lee had passed by that way on the night in question and had seen a carriage waiting sometime before midnight, the coachman sitting on his box, smoking a cigar, the carriage doors closed. On his way home, more than an hour later, the man had seen it again. He had thought it odd, but none of his business, and the coachman had been a big fellow, and Lee was not inclined to make trouble for no good reason. He believed in minding his own business. He despised nosiness; it was uncivil and unhealthy.
Pitt had thanked him heartily, treated him to a glass of cider, then taken his leave.
But at the narrow, riverside end of Mill Lane, overlooking the water and the stairs down, Pitt walked back and forth slowly, eyes downcast, searching the ground just in case there were any signs of the carriage that had waited there so long, while the tide reached its height, hung slack, and then began the ebb. The surface of the road bore no trace; it was rutted stone sloping away to gutters at the side.
But it was summer. There had been only a brief shower or two of rain in the last week, nothing to wash away debris. He walked slowly up one side, and was partway down the other, about twenty yards from the water, when he saw a cigar butt, and then another. He bent down and picked them up, holding them in the palm of his hand. They were both coming unraveled from the leaf at the charred end, the tobacco loose and thready. He pulled it gently. It was distinctive, aromatic, certainly costly, not the sort of a cigar a cabdriver or waterside laborer would smoke. He turned it over carefully, examining the other end. It was curiously cut, not by a knife but by a specifically designed cigar clipper, the blades meeting equidistantly from either side. There was a very slight twist to it, and the mark of an uneven front tooth where someone had clenched a jaw on it in a moment of emotional tension.
He took out his handkerchief and wrapped them both carefully and placed them in his pocket, then continued on his way.
But he