'Sure I am. Will you be wantin' some nice fresh cod, now? Best in the market!'
'I want some information. It'll cost you nothing, and I'm prepared to pay for it-if it's right,' Evan replied, standing very upright and looking at the fish as if he were considering buying it.
'And why would I be selling information at a fish market, mister? What is it you want to know-times o' the tides, is it?' Chinese Paddy raised his straight black eyebrows sarcastically. 'I don't know you-'
“Metropolitan police,'' Evan said quietly. 'Your name was given me by a very reliable fellow I know-down in Pudding Lane. Now do I have to do this in an unpleasant fashion, or can we trade like gentlemen, and you can stay here selling your fish when I leave and go about my business?' He said it courteously, but just once he looked up and met Chinese Paddy's eyes in a hard, straight stare.
Paddy hesitated.
'The alternative is I arrest you and take you to Mr. Monk
and he can ask you again.' Evan knew Monk's reputation, even though Monk himself was still learning it.
Paddy made his decision.
'What is it you're wanting to know?'
'The murder in Queen Anne Street. You were up there last night-'
' 'Ere-fresh fish-fine cod!' Paddy called out. 'So I was,' he went on in a quiet, hard tone. 'But I never stole nuffin', an' I sure as death and the bailiffs never killed that woman!'' Ignoring Evan for a moment, he sold three large cod to a woman and took a shilling and sixpence.
'I know that,' Evan agreed. 'But I want to know what you saw!'
'A bleedin' rozzer goin' up 'Arley Street an' down Wim-pole Street every twenty minutes reg'lar,' Paddy replied, looking one moment at his fish, and the next at the crowd as it passed. 'You're ruinin' me trade, mister! People is won-derin' why you don't buy!'
'What else?' Evan pressed. 'The sooner you tell me, the sooner I'll buy a fish and be gone.'
'A quack coming to the third 'ouse up on 'Arley Street, an' a maid out on the tiles with 'er follower. The place was like bleedin' Piccadilly! I never got a chance to do anything.'
'Which house did you come for?' Evan asked, picking up a fish and examining it.
'Corner o' Queen Anne Street and Wimpole Street, southwest corner.'
'And where were you waiting, exactly?' Evan felt a curious prickle of apprehension, a kind of excitement and horror at once. 'And what time?'
' 'Alf the ruddy night! 'Paddy said indignantly. 'Fromten o'clock till near four. Welbeck Street end o' Queen Anne Street. That way I could see the 'ole length o' Queen Anne Street right down to Chandos Street. Bit of a party goin' on t'other end-footmen all over the place.''
'Why didn't you pack up and go somewhere else? Why stick around there all night if it was so busy?'
' 'Ere, fresh cod-all alive-best in the market!' Paddy called over Evan's head. 'Ere missus! Right it is-that'll be one and eight pence-there y'are.' His voice dropped again.
'Because I 'ad the layout of a good place, o' course-an' I don't go in unprepared. I in't a bleedin' amacher. I kept thinkin' they'd go. But that perishin' maid was 'alf the night in the areaway like a damn cat. No morals at all.'
'So who came and went up Queen Anne Street?' Evan could hardly keep the anticipation out of his voice. Whoever killed Octavia Haslett had not passed the footmen and coachmen at the other end, nor climbed over from the mews-he must have come this way, and if Chinese Paddy was telling the truth, he must have seen him. A thin shiver of excitement rippled through Evan.
'No one passed me, 'cept the quack an' the maid,' Paddy repeated with irritation. 'I 'ad me eyes peeled all bleedin' night-just waitin' me chance-an' it never came. The 'ouse where the quack went 'ad all its lights on an' the door open and closed, open and closed-I didn't dare go past. Then the ruddy girl with 'er man. No one went past me-I'd swear to that on me life, I would. An' Mr. Monk can do any damn thing 'e can think of-it won't change it. 'Oever scragged that poor woman, 'e was already in the 'ouse, that's for certain positive. An' good luck to you findin”im, 'cos I can't 'elp yer. Now take one o' them fish and pay me twice wot it's worth, and get out of 'ere. You're holdin' up trade terrible, you are.'
Evan took the fish and handed over three shillings. Chinese Paddy was a contact worth keeping favor with.
'Already in the house.' The words rang in his head. Of course he,would have to check with the courting maid as well, but if she could be persuaded, on pain of his telling her mistress if she was reluctant, then Chinese Paddy was right- whoever killed Octavia Haslett was someone who already lived there, no stranger caught in the act of burglary but a premeditated murderer who disguised his act afterwards.
Evan turned sideways to push his way between a high fishmonger's cart and a coster's barrow and out into the street.
He could imagine Monk's face when he learned-and Runcom's. This was a completely different thing, a very dangerous and very ugly thing.
Chapter 2
Hester Latterly straightened up from the fire she had been sweeping and stoking and looked at the long, cramped ward of the infirmary. The narrow beds were a few feet apart from each other and set down both sides of the dim room with its high, smoke-darkened ceiling and sparse windows. Adults and children lay huddled under the gray blankets in all conditions of illness and distress.
At least there was enough coal and she could keep the place tolerably warm, even though the dust and fine ash from it seemed to get into everything. The women in the beds closest to the fire were too hot, and kept complaining about the grit getting into their bandages, and Hester was forever dusting the table in the center of the room and the few wooden chairs where patients well enough occasionally sat. This was Dr. Pomeroy's ward, and he was a surgeon, so all the cases were either awaiting operations or recovering from them-or, in over half the instances, not recovering but in some stage of hospital fever or gangrene.
At the for end a child began to cry again. He was only five and had a tubercular abscess in the joint of his shoulder. He had been there three months already, waiting to have it operated on, and each time he had been taken along to the theater, his legs shaking, his teeth gritted, his young face white with fear, he had sat in the anteroom for over two hours, only to be told some other case had been treated today and he was to return to his bed.
To Hester's fury, Dr. Pomeroy had never explained either to the child or to her why this had been done. But then Pomeroy regarded nurses in the same light as most other doctors did: they were necessary only to do the menial tasks-washing, sweeping, scrubbing, disposing of soiled bandages, and rolling, storing and passing out new ones. The most senior were also to keep discipline, particularly moral discipline, among the patients well enough to misbehave or become disorderly.
Hester straightened her skirt and smoothed her apron, more from habit than for any purpose, and hurried down to the child. She could not ease his pain-he had already been given all he should have for that, she had seen to it- but she could at least offer him the comfort of arms around him and a gentle word.
He was curled up on his left side with his aching right shoulder high, crying softly into the pillow. It was a desolate, hopeless sound as if he expected nothing, simply could not contain his misery any longer.
She sat down on the bed and very carefully, not to jolt the shoulder, gathered him up in her arms. He was thin and light and not difficult to support. She laid his head against her and stroked his hair. It was not what she was there for; she was a skilled nurse with battlefield experience in horrific wounds and emergency surgery and care of men suffering from cholera, typhus and gangrene. She had returned home after the war hoping to help reform the backward and tradition-bound hospitals in England, as had so many other of the women who had nursed in the Crimea; but it had proved far more difficult than she expected even to find a post, let alone to exert any influence.
Of course Florence Nightingale was a national heroine. The popular press was full of praise for her, and the public adored her. She was perhaps the only person to emerge from the whole sorry campaign covered with glory. There were stories of the hectic, insane, misdirected charge of the Light Brigade right into the mouths of the Russian guns, and scarcely a military family in the country had not lost either a son or a friend in the carnage that
