“Gone,” I said out loud. “No sight of him.” And I was just leaning on Tubby’s shoulder to climb back down when I saw a boy come out of an alley down across the way. He stood staring at me, as if trying to classify what species of creature I might turn out to be. To my utter surprise, he headed straight toward me, waving a hand in the air.
CHAPTER 2
What Happened to the Map
What’s this now?” I said, and Tubby, still holding steady, said, “Enlighten me,” with a good deal of irony, as if he was miffed that his only useful business was to anchor the table while I took in the view.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” the boy said, breathing heavily. “There was a man came over this wall. I seen him.”
“How long back?” I asked.
“Not ten minutes, sir. I followed him down toward the market, but lost sight of him. I thought at first he’d taken an oars downriver, but then I saw him duck into a gin shop, what they call the Goat and Cabbage.”
“Send the boy around to the front,” Frobisher said a little pettishly. “I’m not a damned pilaster.”
“Right,” I said, and was about to convey the suggestion when the lad took a mad run at the wall, sprang up, latched onto the copings, and heaved himself over, landing on his feet like a cat.
Tubby shouted and trod back in astonishment, letting go of the table, which toppled sideways, pitching me into the rock roses, thank heaven, and not onto the paving stones. It was the boy who helped me to my feet, dusting off my coat and asking was I injured, which I said I was not, although I gave Tubby a hard look for shirking his duty with the table. The boy might have been twelve or thirteen, and was in need of a haircut and a new pair of trousers a good three inches longer than the pair he wore.
“Finn Conrad, at your gentlemen’s service,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook heartily enough. I immediately liked the look of the boy, who reminded me a little of myself at that age, but with considerably more gumption.
“Jack Owlesby,” I told him. “And this is Mr. Frobisher. They called him Pilaster Frobisher out in India, where he spent a great deal of time in the sun. If you’d just lead the way inside, Mr. Frobisher.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, young comet,” Tubby said to the boy, bowing in his portly way and shaking the offered hand before heading in through the open door “I’m speaking to an acrobat, I don’t doubt?”
“Duffy’s Circus, sir, born and bred. But I ran away two years back, after my old mother died, and I’ve been living hereabouts since, making my living in what way I can. Are these your whacking sticks?” he asked, gesturing, and we said that they were. He collected the leaded cane and shillelagh where they lay atop the workbench, surveyed the bones and skeletons as if they were pretty much what he expected to find under the circumstances, and went on into Merton’s like an old hand.
Merton wasn’t dead, thank God, but was sitting in a chair now, in that comfortable little browsing parlor he’s got at the front of the shop. He held a glass of brandy and wore a bandage round his forehead. St. Ives and Hasbro sat opposite, and Tubby and I took the two remaining chairs. Through the window I could see London Bridge. Upriver lay the Pool, the masts of the shipping just visible, and faint on the air you could hear bells and whistles and other sorts of nautical noise. “I saw his face clearly,” Merton was saying to St. Ives. “It was a broad face, nose like a fig and small eyes. Not a dwarf, mind you, but a small man. Apelike is the word for him. Quite horrible in appearance.”
“In a brown coat,” young Finn said, “begging your pardon, sir, and a watch cap. That’s the very man I was telling these gentlemen about.”
“What have we here?” St. Ives asked.
“Finn Conway, sir, at your service. I seen him come over the wall out back. ‘What’s this now?’ I asked myself. Why would a man come over a wall when there’s a door out front unless he’s up to no good?”
“Quite right,” Tubby said.
“He didn’t see me,” Finn said, “because I didn’t want him to. He headed straightaway toward the river with me following after him, and went into a gin shop in what they call Peach Alley.”
“The Goat and Cabbage,” I said helpfully,
“That’s the one. I took a look inside, nonchalant like, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he’s gone on through, I thought. There’s a lot of what you might call passages down along there by the river. I waited for a bit, thinking he might come out from where he’d gone, but then a man came in and told me to clear out.”
“Can you take us there in the morning?” St. Ives asked, and Finn said that he could, and then assured us that he could find very nearly anyplace a second time if he put his mind to it, just as easy as the first time. He had lived hereabouts long enough to know the riverside, he said, although he was presently without an address and was looking forward to summer and to less of this wind.
St. Ives asked him if he could find us a bite of supper, and sent him off with a handful of coins, considerably more money than was necessary, enough to tempt him if he were a rascally young hypocrite and not who he seemed to be, and in any event to get him out of the way while we reconnoitered.
“He’ll be back right enough,” Tubby said. “He’s a game one. You should have seen him scale the garden wall, speaking of apes.”
I could see that Merton was in a state, glancing fearfully about him as if at any moment his assailant might return to finish him off, but he calmed himself with an effort, and for the next quarter of an hour he laid out the facts as he knew them, and we pitched in with comments when we were able. Merton, it turns out, had been given the map by his uncle Fred, a sand pilot on Morecambe Bay who lives in the area of Grange-over-Sands. Fred takes excursions across the sands at low tide, Merton told us, out into the cockle beds off Poulton-le-Sands, or back and forth from Silverdale to Humphrey Head if the moon is right. Uncle Fred — a legend thereabouts — had been mired in quicksand, caught up by the incoming tide, run afoul of smugglers, and suffered all manner of perils and had lived to tell the tale. He wasn’t one of the Queen’s Guides, mind you, but that’s what made him useful to certain people, especially that class of dredger who fished the quicksand by night.
Fred had found the map — it was as simple as that — near the top of the Bay. It was corked up in a bottle that had suffered some leakage. It looked curious to him, and he kept the map as a souvenir, putting it into a drawer and after a time forgetting about it. Then one day two weeks past he sorted out the drawer and found it again, and when Merton and he ran into each other at their Aunt Sue’s house in Manchester, he gave it to Merton as a curiosity. Merton put it straight into the catalogue without a second thought, although he’d been cagey with the description, in case there was more to the business than met the eye. Then he sent up to Chingford-by-the-Tower to alert St. Ives.
“More what than met the eye?” Tubby asked, in his usual impatient way.
“The thing is,” Merton said, “Uncle Fred talked the map around, you see, after he found it again in the drawer.”
“Talked it around to whom?” asked St. Ives, looking at him narrowly.
“To the lads in a pub there in Poulton-le-Sands, over a pint, you know. Natural sort of thing, if you see what I mean, passing the time. Except there turned out to be two men sitting nearby, listening hard. One of them asked to see it, but Uncle Fred made up an excuse for not having it with him, although he did, right there in the pocket of his coat. He didn’t like the look of either of them, and didn’t know them, although he could describe them right enough. The one was a tall, scowly sort of fellow, swarthy, Fred told me. Unpleasant. A murderer’s face, Fred called it. The other had dead white hair, and a face that looked as if it had been carved out of ice. There was something wrong with this second man that you couldn’t quite name — Dr. Fell comes to mind. It was the tall man who did the talking.”