Simplicity was watching him intently, Mister Bazalgette was looking somewhat dismayed, and Charlie was just strolling carefully back the way they had come. Mister Disraeli, quite surprisingly, took Simplicity’s hand. ‘Come along . . . Miss . . . young man. Frankly, I could do with a breath of fresh air.’
As they climbed up and out, Dodger took care to say again, ‘Probably nothing at all, nothing at all, but I had best check.’ Then he dropped back into the sewer and was free, free of other people. Someone else had got into his sewer and if it were any of the work gangs there would have been a shout along the lines of ‘Bugger off, you toshers!’ – not exactly a cheerful greeting, but at least something human. No, someone was there. It couldn’t be the Outlander, could it? That would be too glib. But the Lady knew there were still a number of people after Dodger, and everyone knew where Dodger could usually be found. Oh well, at least he was on his own ground, sticky and stinking though it was.
In the dark now, he heard the rattle of a coach overhead, and the sounds of voices, one of which was unmistakably that of Simplicity. He breathed a deep sigh of relief. Well, whatever happened now couldn’t happen to her. Of course, he told himself again, it almost certainly wasn’t the Outlander, who was surely just a bogeyman, after all . . . though try as he might, his thoughts dived from being optimistically cheerful to: I’m a bloody fool. If the Outlander has been so successful in his trade, then he must surely know just about everything concerning Dodger and Simplicity.
That was just the start of the terrible scenarios jostling for space in front of his eyes. Pictures flashed across his mind at speed, nasty pictures. Well, would someone like the Outlander go down into the sewers? Perhaps someone had paid him enough money. And then what further scenarios could near-panic throw up? Everybody knew Dodger had gone into the sewer with his group. Who did the Outlander know? How fast did news travel? And how clever must someone like the Outlander have been still to be alive when by now he must have so many enemies in so many countries. Just how stupid had Dodger, good old Dodger, been to have thought that the threat was something he could just brush off? But perhaps it was someone else?
Well, Simplicity was safe, for now. Then the sensible thing for Dodger to do was to be up and out of the sewer as soon as possible before the stranger caught him up, but with his heart pounding most unusually against his ribs, he considered his limited options. He could get out of the sewer by another drain further along, but if he took the time to get there, anything could happen, and if he tried to leave by the nearest one, whoever it was – and suddenly he felt certain that it was the Outlander and he was trapped down here with him – could come out right behind him.
Then the last of the sunlight faded. He thought, This is my world. I know every brick. I know every place where if you put a foot wrong, you are up to your waist in stinking mess. He thought, Here I am. Maybe he could use this to his advantage. Make a new plan, a plan with a different way of getting to the same end. And Julius Caesar appeared in his mind, admittedly sitting on a jakes (an image which would stay with him for a long time) – and Dodger thought, He was a warrior, wasn’t he? A cove who was difficult to kill too. He whispered, ‘There!’ and said aloud in the gloom, ‘Come along. Here I am, mister; maybe you want to be shown the sights.’
Looking down, he realized that someone was most definitely on his way, because the rats were running straight towards him, trying to keep ahead of whoever or whatever was coming up the sewer. Dodger, by now, was up against the sewer wall, mostly in a little alcove where several ancient bricks had fallen out (and where, he recalled fondly, he had once picked up two farthings and one of the old-fashioned groats that you didn’t see around these days).
The running rats clambered over and around him as if he wasn’t there, and he thought, They see me nearly every day. He had never hunted them, slammed his boot on them or even tried to shoo them away. He left them alone and so they left him alone. Besides, he didn’t know how he would stand with the Lady if he was nasty to her little subjects. Grandad had been very firm about this, saying ‘Tread on a rat and you’re treading on the Lady’s robe.’ Dodger whispered to the silence and said, ‘Lady, it’s Dodger again. About that luck I mentioned? If you can see your way clear, thanking you in expectation, Dodger.’
And up there in the darkness, there was the scream of a stricken rat. They were capable of dying quite noisily, and there was another squeal, and even more rats were pouring past him, surrounding him.
There, suddenly, barely visible in the grimy light, was the intruder, crawling with commendable stealth along the sewer, actually passing Dodger in his stinking hideaway, since Dodger was clearly invisible, being the same colour and certainly the same stink as the sewer itself. The rats were running over the intruder too, but he was hitting out at them with something – Dodger couldn’t quite see what – and the rats were screeching, and most certainly the Lady would be listening.
Now, in his hand Dodger had – yes! – Sweeney Todd’s razor; he had brought it with him not so much as a weapon but as a talisman: a gift from fate that had changed his life, just as it had changed that of Sweeney Todd. On a day like this, how could he have left it behind?
In the darkness, Dodger’s dark-accustomed eye saw the gleaming stiletto dagger in the man’s hand. It was an assassin’s weapon, if ever he had seen one. No decent murderer would use something like that. The thought came to him fast and all at once: he had nothing at all to fear down here. It was his world, and he could feel the Lady helping him, he was sure of it. No, the person who ought to be afraid was the man stealthily crawling along the drain just where Dodger could see him . . . and Dodger jumped on him, pinning him down immediately, and assassin or not it is hard to use your dagger when you are splayed in the muck of a sewer with Dodger sitting on your back.
He was a wiry boy, but he held the man more or less fixed to the ground as if he had been nailed to it, and pummelled every bit of the man that could be pummelled. Even as the man struggled, Dodger pressed cold steel to his throat and whispered, ‘If you know anything about me, then you know that pressed to your neck is Sweeney Todd’s razor – wonderful smooth, so it is, and who knows what it could cut off?’ He allowed the prone man to at least lift his mouth and nose out of the muck for a moment, and added, ‘Upon my word, I was expecting rather more of an assassin than this. Come on, speak up!’ Dodger grabbed the stiletto and flung it into the darkness.
The man below him spat out mud and a piece of what might once have been part of a rat and tried to say something that Dodger couldn’t understand, so Dodger said, ‘Come on, what was that again?’
A voice – a female voice – said, ‘Good evening, Mister Dodger; if you look carefully, you will see that I am holding a pistol, quite a powerful one. You will not make a single move until my friend here stops throwing up so unpleasantly, whereupon I expect he will wish to do unto others that which hath just been done to him. In the meantime, you will stand where you are and I will pull the trigger if you move so much as an inch. Later I will kill your young lady friend . . . By the way, I can’t say I like that gentleman very much, not the best assistant I’ve ever had. Oh dear, oh dear, why is it that everybody assumes that the Outlander is a man?’ The owner of the voice stepped nearer and Dodger could now see both her and her pistol.
There was no doubt about it. The Outlander was attractive, even in this gloom, and Dodger could not pinpoint the accent. Not Chinese, certainly not European, though very fluent in English. He had Sol’s pistol strapped in his boot; that had been for use later, for the plan which was now of course in tatters, and so he said, ‘Excuse me, miss, but why do you want to kill Simplicity?’