But on this occasion, moving through the lanes and alleys, there was a now rather more spry old woman towing a handcart – a vehicle of high status on the streets – and she was fussing over it as elderly ladies did. If there was indeed a watcher on the moon, looking down on London, they would have noticed her zigzagging her way to the embankment, whereupon she hazarded a penny on a boat that took her and her little cart across the Thames, although on this occasion she paid no more than a farthing – not the official sum for the trip, the watcher would have noticed, but the lighterman himself had never seen an old girl in such a sad old dither. Having an old mother himself, he felt a little generous today and even agreed to wait to take her back across the river, only to find that when she came back from her errand, on her cart was strapped a corpse in a winding sheet. This, to tell the truth, was a problem, but then one of his mates stopped on the landing to disembark a fare and, waving vaguely towards the old girl, who was still in such a terrible state, the lighterman got his mate to help him on with the cadaver. Fortunately, it was still bendy.
Dodger – because the old lady was indeed Dodger – felt rather happy about all this. And also slightly ashamed since, after all, the coroner of Four Farthings himself and his officer had come out to help the old lady with the cart and had assured her that the remains of her niece had been treated with veneration at all times. It warmed the cockles of your heart, so it did.
Then, of course, there was the return journey, this way against the tide, and the lighterman could see that he was not, as it were, going to become a rich man in this situation, so he said gruffly, ‘OK, dear, in for a lion, in for a lamb, a farthing each and let’s call it quits.’
The journey across the water wasn’t that long, although it was a bit choppy, and after the man helped the fussy old lady to get the little cart over the cobbles he was amazed beyond belief when the old girl handed him a shiny three sixpences, calling him the last gentleman in London. For a long time afterwards he remembered the incident fondly.
Once back on the right side of the Thames, a watcher would have seen the old lady pulling her cart in a haphazard way along a dark and foggy alley where there was a shadow and a great smell of gin, and a very drunken, very dirty and very nasty-looking man who said, ‘Got anything for me in your bag there, Granny?’
This little tableau was witnessed through the gloom by a bootblack who was sitting down on the kerb to eat his breakfast. Just as he began to think that he should do something about the ambush further on, something very strange eventuated in which the old lady seemed to vanish in a whirl and the man was on the ground while she was kicking him merrily in the fork, crying out, ‘If ever I see you around here again, sonny, I’ll have your giblets on my griddle, just you see if I don’t!’ Then, after adjusting her dress somewhat, the old lady once again became, well, an old lady in the eyes of the bootblack, who had watched with his half-eaten jacket potato neglected in his hand. Then the old dear waved at him cheerily and said, ‘Young man, who’s doing potatoes around here today?’
This led to Dodger continuing his journey with quite a lot of jacket potatoes in his bag, which he distributed to any old ladies he saw sitting pitifully on the kerb; it was a kind of penance, he thought. And God, who must surely have looked kindly on this act of charity, seemed to have arranged it that a lavender girl had set up right in the next street, which meant that Dodger was spared the chore of going out to find one, not a difficult task since in the stink of London everybody liked to buy some lavender now and again. In this case the lucky girl sold all of the stock to the old lady with grateful thanks and went to the pub, while the old lady, smelling far more fragrant, trundled on her way.
Moving a dead body is never easy in any case, but in the murkier part of Seven Dials Dodger treasured an alley with a drain in it that was just the job; and of course, once he was in the sewers he was in his element. He could go about his business unrecognized by the people walking about above, and the chances of meeting another tosher were small. Anyway, as the king of the toshers, he could do as he pleased. In sewers, if you knew where to look for them, there were places that would make a good-sized room – places the toshers had given wonderful names to, like Top and Turn Again.
Splashing his way into one of the tunnels, Dodger set about the nastier piece of the enterprise. This particular stretch had so far never been given a name; it got one now: Rest in Peace. Death was always around in the darker places of London, and it was an unusual day when you didn’t see a funeral procession, so this engendered a kind of pragmatism: people lived, people died and other people had to deal with it. At this point, because he very much wanted to live, Dodger pulled off his disguise to reveal his normal clothes hidden beneath the rags, and pulled on a pair of large, well-greased, leather gloves, just as Mrs Holland had advised, and he was grateful for the advice, and grateful too that he had spent so much on the lavender, because however you looked at it, the dull, heavy, cloying smell of death was something that you didn’t put up with for any longer than you had to.
So with traffic a few feet overhead, he pulled, pushed and levered very thoroughly until he had got things looking just right. All was well right up until when, as he was just positioning the remains of the young lady in her nook, she sighed as her head moved. Dodger thought, If something like that is going to happen it’s a good job you are standing in a sewer. It was nothing; he knew the dead could be quite noisy at times, as Mrs Holland had said. What with gases and so on, corpses might be said to speak long after they were dead. He opened his carefully prepared little bag of camphor and cayenne pepper, which ought to keep the rats away, for long enough at least.
As he stood back to look at his handiwork, he was glad, very glad, that he wouldn’t have to do it ever again. Then there was nothing more to do, apart from packing up his gloves, but he also took great care to leave the sewer at some distance away from the scene of the crime – if such it could be called, he added to himself. Finding a pump, he washed his hands in London water, which he knew was always slightly suspicious unless you boiled it, but good old lye soap was a reliable if caustic companion. Then he strolled back to Seven Dials with the air of a young man just enjoying the sunshine which, in fact, was rather strange today, as if something was going on in the upper air.
He didn’t think very much about this, however, for as soon as he got home two peelers were waiting for him, and one of them said, ‘Sir Robert would like a word with you, my little lad.’ He sniffed at the leftover lavender that Dodger had chosen to take home because it was always welcome around Onan. ‘Flowers for your girl, hey?’
Dodger ignored him, but he had been expecting something like this, since once the peelers had got interested in you, they kept on being interested in you, apparently thinking that sooner or later you would break down and confess to everything. It was a sort of game, and the worst of it was when they tried to seem to be friends. And so, like the upstanding citizen he was, he accompanied the two men to Scotland Yard, but making sure that he went with the swagger of a geezer and everyone in the rookeries could see that this wasn’t something he was in agreement with – for Dodger had a reputation to keep down; it was bad enough to be an official hero, but he would be damned if he was going to be seen to go willingly into anywhere where peelers lurked. It wouldn’t be the first, third or tenth time the peelers thought they had got Dodger and would have to think again.