Kraken appeared to be half asleep when minutes later St. Ives set the two pint glasses on the tabletop. The pleasant and solid clank of the full glasses seemed to revive him. Kraken set his peapot between his feet. “It’s been a while, sir, hasn’t it?”
“Fourteen years, is it?”
“Fifteen, sir. A month before the tragedy, it was. You wasn’t much older’n a bug, if I ain’t out of line to say so.” He paused to drink off half the pint. “Them was troublesome times, sir. Troublesome times. I ain’t told a soul about most of it. Can’t. I’ve cheated myself of the hereafter; I can’t afford Newgate”
“Surely nothing as bad as that…” began St. Ives, but he was cut short by Kraken, who waved broadly and shook his head, falling momentarily silent.
“There was the business of the carp,” he said, looking over his shoulder as if he feared that a constable might at that moment be slipping up behind. “You don’t remember it. But it was in the
“But the carp affair was the least of it. I’m ashamed to say more. And it wouldn’t be right to let on that Sebastian was behind the worst. Not by a sea mile. It was the other one. I’ve seen him more than once over the fence at Westminster Cemetery, and late at night too, him in a dogcart on the road and me and Tooey Short with spades in our hand. Tooey died in Horsemonger Lane Gaol, screaming mad, half his face scaled like a fish”
Kraken shuddered and drained his glass, falling silent and staring into the dregs as if he’d said enough — too much, perhaps.
“It was a loss when Sebastian died,” said St. Ives. “I’d give something to know what became of his notebooks, let alone the rest of it”
Kraken blew his nose into his hand. Then he picked up his glass and held it up toward a gaslamp as if contemplating its empty state. St. Ives rose and set out after another round. The moon-faced publican poured two new pints, stopping in between to scoop up mashed potatoes with a blackened banger and shove it home, screwing up his face and smacking his lips. St. Ives winced. An hour earlier a hot banger had seemed paradisial, but four bangers later there was nothing more ghastly to contemplate. He carried the two glasses back to the table, musing on the mutability of appetite and noting through the open door that the rain had let off.
Kraken met him with a look of anticipation, and almost at once did way with half the ale, wiping the foam from his mouth with the sleeve of his shirt. St. Ives waited.
“No, sir,” said Kraken finally. “It wasn’t the notebooks I’m sorry for, I can tell you.” Then he stopped.
“It wasn’t?” asked St. Ives, curious.
“No, sir. Not the bleeding papers. Damn the papers. They’re writ in blood. Every one. Good riddance, says I.”
St. Ives nodded expansively, humoring him.
Kraken hunched over the table, waggling a finger at St. Ives, the little basket of condiments on his neck swaying beneath his face like the gondola of a half-deflated balloon. “It was that damn
“Thing?” St. Ives hunched forward himself.
“The thing in the box. I seen it lift the corpse of a dog off the floor and dance it on the ceiling. And there were more to it than that.” Kraken spoke so low that St. Ives could barely hear him above the din. “Them bodies me and Tooey Short brought in. There was more than one of them as walked out on his own legs.” Kraken paused for effect and sucked down the last half inch of ale, clunking the glass back down onto the oaken tabletop. “No, sir. I don’t rue no papers. And if they’d asked me, I’d ’a’ told them Nell was innocent as a China doll. I loved the young master, and I cry to think he left a baby son behind him, but by God the whole business wasn’t natural, was it? And the filthy shame of it is that Nell didn’t plug that damned doctor after she put one through her brother. That’s what I regret, in a nut”
Kraken made as if to stand up, his speechifying over. But St. Ives, although shaken by bits of Kraken’s tale, held his hand up to stop his leaving. “I have a note from Captain Powers,” said St. Ives, proffering the crumpled missive to Kraken, “asking me to meet a man in Leicester Square at eight-thirty”
Kraken blinked at him a moment, then peered over his shoulder toward the door and squinted round the pub, cocking an ear. “Right ho,” he said, sitting back down. He bent toward St. Ives once again. “I ran into the Captain’s man, up in Covent Garden, at the market it was, three days back. And he mentioned the…” Kraken paused and winked voluminously at St. Ives.
“The machine?”
“Aye. That’s the ticket. The machine. Now I don’t claim to know where it is, you see, but I’ve heard tell of it. So the Captain put me onto you, as it were, and said that the two of us might be in a way to do business”
St. Ives nodded, pulse quickening. He patted his pockets absentmindedly and found a cigar. “Heard tell of it?” He struck a match and held it to the cigar end, puffing sharply. “From whom?”
“Kelso Drake,” whispered Kraken. “Almost a month ago, it was. Maybe six weeks.”
St. Ives sat back in surprise. “The millionaire?”
“That’s a fact. From his very lips. I worked for him, you see, and overheard more than he intended — more than I wanted. A foul lot, them millionaires. Nothing but corruption. But they’ll reap the bread of sorrow. Amen”
“That they will,” said St. Ives. “But what about the machine — the ship?”
“In a brothel, maybe in the West End. That’s all I know. He owns a dozen. A score. Brothels, I mean to say. There’s nothing foul he don’t have a hand in. He owns a soap factory out in Chingford. I can’t tell you what it is they make soap out of. You’d go mad.”
“A brothel that might be in the West End. That’s all?”
“Every bit of it.”
St. Ives studied the revelation. It wasn’t worth much. Maybe nothing at all. “Still working for Drake?” he asked hopefully.
Kraken shook his head. “Got the sack. He was afraid of me. I wasn’t like the rest.” He sat up straight, giving St. Ives a stout look. “But I’m not above doing a bit of business among friends, am I? No, sir. I’m not. Not a bit of it.” He watched St. Ives, who was lost in thought. “Not Bill Kraken. No, sir. When I set out to do a man a favor, across town, through the rain, mind you, why it’s, ‘keep your nose in front of your face. Let it rain!’ That’s my motto when I’m setting out on a job like this one.”
St. Ives came to himself and translated Kraken’s carrying on. He handed across two pound notes and shook his hand. “You’ve done me a service, my man. If this pans out there’ll be more in it for you. Come along to the Captain’s shop on Jermyn Street Thursday evening. There’ll be a few of us meeting. If you can round up more information, you won’t find me miserly.”
“Aye, sir,” said Kraken, rising and fetching up his peapot. He secured the cloths and tied them neatly about the lip of the pot. “I’ll be there.” He folded the two notes and slipped them into his shoe, then turned without another word and hurried out.
St. Ives’ cigar wouldn’t stay lit. He looked hard at it for a moment before recognizing it as the damp thing he’d pitched at Kraken an hour and a half earlier. It seemed to be following him around. The man without the thumb loomed in toward him. St. Ives handed him a shilling and the cigar, found his coat on the rack, checked the inside pocket for his parcel — actually a sheaf of rolled paper — and set out into the night.
Powers’ Pipe and Tobacco Shop lay at the corner of Jermyn and Spode, with long, mullioned windows along both the south and east walls so that a man — Captain Powers, for instance — might sit in the Morris chair behind the counter and, by rotating his head a few degrees, have a view of those coming and going along either street. On the night of the fourth of April, though, seeing much of anything through the utter darkness of the clouded and rainy night was unlikely. The thin glow cast by the two visible gaslamps, both on Jermyn Street, was negligible. And the light that shone from lit windows here and there along the street seemed to have an antipathy to flight, and hovered round its sources wary of the damp night.
Captain Powers would hear the sound of approaching feet on the pavement long before the traveler would appear in one of the two yellow circles of illuminated pavement, then disappear abruptly into the night, the
