Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
The lights were out at Erlsley Bird Cabs.
Duncan hung grim-faced at the mouth of an alley a dozen doors down on the other side of Skoldergate, taking in the scene.
For all that he wasn’t surprised, seeing it for himself was a blow.
The frontage windows were all darkened; there were no cabs in the rank.
Two tall-helmeted, caped figures stood out front, stamping their feet against the cold.
There was a thin, early evening crowd trudging up Skoldergate toward the cross with East Cavendish Street.
Duncan drifted from the alley, joined them as casually as he could.
He tugged the woolen cap he wore lower on his forehead, kept his head down.
People were spilling off the pavement on the Erlsley Bird side, crossing the street to avoid the apparent crime scene, so he was well covered.
He made his way slowly past among them, glancing across a couple of times at the police like everyone else, then moved on with the crowd to where Crammond’s chestnut stand was doing its usual roaring trade.
He stood behind a portly woman with a crocodile of small children who was buying chestnuts for them all.
He waited until she was gone, slid up to the head of the queue.
“Got anything for an old soldier?” he asked softly.
Crammond, to his credit, never missed a beat.
He stared into Duncan’s face a bare second with his one good eye, then went back to raking the chestnuts over with his prosthetic arm.
With his other hand, he took a ready bagged packet from the warmer plate on the side of the cart, handed it over to Duncan. Leaned close.
“Bricklayer’s Arms, Ivy Street,” he murmured. “Ask fir Angie, tell her the Big Man says tae show ye the facilities.”
Duncan nodded and slipped away. Heard Crammond giving the next customer a casual line of chat, for all the world as if nothing at all had happened.
He made his way across town to Ivy Street, found the cheery corner glow of the pub soon enough.
He cracked the door and slid inside, was wrapped instantly in a bright, cozy fug of smoke and noise and cooking smells.
He went to the bar, asked for Angie, and was presented with an ample, amiable blond barmaid who could have passed for Reuben Kegg’s younger sister.
She took in Crammond’s message and nodded, led Duncan back through cramped corridors, down a tight stair and into a cold basement room stacked with crates, where she switched on the lights—cheap, dim bulbs strung on hanging wires from the ceiling—and gestured at a well-worn wooden table and chairs in one corner.
“Take a seat. He might be a while. I’ll see if I can scare you up summat to eat. If you need to piss, there’s a sink over there. Don’t worry, it’s seen worse.”
She locked the door behind her as she left.
Duncan sat under the dim bulbs and ate the chestnuts, slowly, one by one. Angie never did come back with better food, but about an hour later, Crammond showed up instead, followed by a different barmaid bearing a tray.
“Pirate coffees,” she announced brightly. “Bit of snap. Cheese and ham butties, all right?”
Crammond waited in silence while she laid out the two steaming mugs, a nearly full bottle of Lamb’s navy rum, and a plate of sandwiches cut doorstep thick. He saw her to the door, closed it after her. Gestured at the food.
“Dig in, pal. Looks like ye could use it.”
Duncan caught the whiff of smoked ham and pickles, realized suddenly how hungry he was.
The chestnuts aside, his last meal was breakfast, a crack-of-dawn bread-and-sausage platter in the Turk’s Head fourteen hours gone.
He’d been too wary to risk eating anywhere in public once he got back into town, too tense even to dig provisions out of his pack while he waited in shadowed, abandoned places he knew, for night to come, so he could approach Skoldergate and Erlsley Bird Cabs under cover of darkness.
He took one of the doorstep sandwiches and bit deep into it, felt his hunger really stir. Rush of saliva into his mouth, light kick in the stomach. He closed his eyes and chewed in something approaching ecstasy.
“Sorry aboot the wait,” Crammond said. “Had tae haud oaff closin’ up the stand till it looked right. They fuckin’ busies wiz there, the whole time. One o’ them even came over, bought a bag.”
Duncan swallowed his current mouthful, washed it down with the pirate coffee. Warm bite on his tongue—the rum slug had been generous. He put down his mug, harder than he’d intended. “Where’s Niamh?”
“Whir dae ye think? Fuckin’ polis took her.”
“When?”
“Friday night. Woulda been aboot seven. Big fuckin’ production, too, whole vanful o’ they bastards. Plainclothes in charge. Took three of they cabbies, too, an’ that young lad?”
“Gordon?”
“Aye, if ye say so. Musta let they drivers go pretty sharpish, mind you. They all came back, drove the cabs away before Ah packed up fir the night. Nae sign o’ the lad, though, or yir lassie.”
“She’s not my—” Drop it. “This was four nights ago, aye? Anything in the papers yet?”
“No’ that Ah saw.” Crammond’s eye-patched face grew somber. “Ye know whit that means, Ah suppose?”
Duncan nodded, jaw set. “Fucking Special Branch.”
“Aye. They’ll have took her for a Fenian. That’s indefinite fuckin’ detention wi’oot trial. Defense o’ the Realm Act; they can haud her as long as it fuckin’ suits them.”
“I remember when DORA was going to be a temporary fucking thing, just for the war. Remember that?”
Crammond shook his head. “That much power an’ regulation?
They’re never gaunnae give it up. Fuckin’ temperance wifeys are aww creamin’ their knickers over the restricted licensin’ hours, all the shite they kept on fir the Dangerous Drugs Act.
An’ the polis love it, right enough. They fuckin’ IRA idiots shooting Wilson dead last year in London didnae help either.
Ah mean, that’s a British field marshal murdered oan his own fuckin’ doorstep.
Nae chance Churchill’s sittin’ still for that.
And the way things are goin’ over there now?
Nae cunt buys this Irish Free State shite, it’s all gaunnae fall apart. ”
“You reckon?”
“Already happenin’. Don’t ye read the papers?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Aye, well—this, all this, is wi’oot even considerin’ the fuckin’ Forest. Got some heid cases Ah know back in the toon used tae say Collins an’ De Valera are in league with the Huldu, the whole Unbindin’ is a Fenian plot tae bring doon the empire.”
“Seriously?”
Crammond gestured. “Aye, they’re fuckin’ Orangemen, whit dae ye expect? But the point stands. The way things are the noo, Special Branch can disappear yir lassie fir as long as they fuckin’ like, just fir bein’ Irish. That’s aww it takes.”
“I don’t think this is Special Branch, Billy. Or at least—it’s someone else using them.”
Above the eye patch, a cocked Glaswegian eyebrow. “Ye have good reasons tae believe that?”
“Aye.”
“Awright.” Crammond sat for a moment, then leaned in and took a sandwich. Took a gargantuan bite out of it, chewed, and went on talking through a filled mouth and a spray of crumbs. “Ah’m listenin’. Whit the fuck have ye got yisael tangled up in?”
—
Duncan gave him the trimmed version. The meeting with Irene Rush, the invitation from Hardy and the Forestry Commission, his trip with Garner.
Combat with Stordalen, the sworn word of the Final Isles.
Bringing Mimi Rush home. The betrayal—or whatever it was—by sniper at Maltby Ferry, the changeling and the sprite, his healing in the Forest. He took off his cap, showed Crammond the long, pale scorch line through his hair where the bullet had gone.
He left out the matter of Stordalen’s heart, the complications of his past with Mebhuranon and Svalenkari. No point in fogging further what was already a tangled-enough mess.
Crammond sat through it all in almost complete silence.
“So whit noo?” he asked when Duncan was done.
“Now?” Duncan stared off into the corner of the basement. Big porcelain trough sink, slow drip from the tap that overhung it. “Now I’m going to get Niamh back from the fucks that took her, and I’m going to kill anybody who objects.”
“Includin’ this Hardy?”
“Especially fucking Hardy.”
Crammond grunted. Poured from the Lamb’s bottle into their empty mugs—they’d finished the pirate coffees a while back, gone onto straight rum refills.
“Ye realize it may no’ be Hardy behind this.
Ever think maybe he wiz relieved o’ command?
Disnae make a lot o’ sense, him wantin’ ye oan salary down in London, then three days later havin’ someone put a bullet through yir brainpan. ”
“Aye, but it does.” Duncan knocked back a chunk of the rum, grinned through the harsh burn it left in his gullet.
He’d had time to think this through—lying faceup beneath tightly tucked bedclothes, sleepless with tension in his drafty room at the Turk’s Head, he’d turned it this way and that, worried at it like a dog with a rabbit’s corpse.
He drifted off to sleep, finally, in the early hours, snapped instantly awake a moment later with the missing piece of the puzzle right there in his head.
“See, I don’t think Hardy wanted me down in London at all.
I think he just wanted me well away from Irene Rush and her daughter. Job offer was just the bait.”
“An’ if ye’d accepted?”
“Oh, I daresay the ticket was there, at least. They have the funds, that’s very clear.
I imagine they would have run me down to the big city, put me up there for a few days, hotel or something, however long they needed, then made some excuses and sent me home again.
Or maybe not.” Duncan mimed a pistol with his fingers.
“Maybe they would have just taken me off the train, put two in the back of my head, and dumped me in the Thames.”