When Alfred Binnie was born there were no celebrations of fireworks or grateful peasants gathering under the castle windows to shower the newborn infant with gifts from the harvest table.
His mother dropped him like a crouching animal to grow as best he might manage and join the brood of children that swarmed onto the streets of Shoreditch like maggots.
Cholera had come and gone but the stench remained, safely ensconced in the dead bodies of the dogs, cats, and rats that littered the highways.
The mudlarks went to scour the mud of the Thames for coal dropped by the cargo boats but Binnie stayed in the crevices of alley and side-streets, his cunning round face disguising the predatory purpose within.
He was apprenticed by his kidsman to a pocket delver and learned the trade well. Alfred had swift, dexterous hands – lightning swift, despite his mole-like appearance.
He also learned the gift of invisibility, how to mingle with the crowd, become non-existent almost until the moment when he struck for the pocket or razor-slit the handbag.
The young Alfred developed apace but few found him appealing, girls especially; the little ladybirds who gave their favours with carefree abandon to other young keelies found him oddly repellent, part to do with his appearance which was, as one sharp dollymop accurately described,
The other part was not so easily defined and in fact puzzled Alfred himself.
It was as if he starved for something, a hunger that came out of his pores like a sweat and it put an aura around him that even the most hard-bitten of street dwellers found to provoke an uneasy feeling.
His hungry little heart could only suffer, not name its desire, only the empty yearning.
Then one day he found it.
Death.
His mobsman mentor, flushed with gin, a drink that encourages the careless rapture that no harm will befall a man soused and saturated with its cloying alcoholic charm, overreached himself in a flash house, a tavern where the cream of London’s reprobates mixed with the lowest of the low. All equal under the blanket of crime.
It was a given rule that no pocket delving was done, no sharping, no find-the-lady. Not in this tavern.
Good behaviour between thieves.
However the tooler could not resist the temptation of a heavy pocketbook in the side coat of a quietly dressed mark at the bar.
He signalled Alfred to supply distraction, a clumsy trip and spilling of a beer glass that would fit in so well with the boy’s oafish demeanour.
But Alfred hung back.
He had noticed that there was space around this man, no-one slapped him on the back or attempted familiarity. He had been drinking alone, steadily, the best rum, not making a show or unnecessary move.
Which was what the mobsman did.
Bumped in, fixed apologetic smile already upon his face, fingers upon the leather of the pocketbook, then a sharp pain under his ribcage as the knife punctured his skin and pierced the heart like a blackbird’s beak.
The executioner then placed the tooler’s hands upon the bar as if to steady him, laid down the empty glass of rum, then turned and walked unhurriedly out of the place.
Tom Partridge, for that was the mark’s name, walked carefully through the dirty streets of Shoreditch until he became aware that someone was dogging his steps.
When he turned, he saw a strange lumpen creature neither man nor child.
‘How did you do that?’ asked Alfred Binnie.
‘Practice,’ said Tom.
‘Will you teach me?’
Partridge looked into the boy’s eyes and saw the same emptiness that met his own gaze in the mirror every morning.
The blank, dispassionate stare of an assassin.
He said nothing. A sudden uproar in the distance signalled the discovery of a dead man slumped over the bar with a smile fixed upon his face.
‘Why did you stick him through?’
‘He broke the rules.’
Alfred smiled. That made sense.
‘What did you see?’ asked Tom quietly.
‘I saw your hand. The steel. But not where you kept it. That’s a mystery.’
Partridge sighed. He had no wish to take on an acolyte but the alternative was to kill the witness.
Any witness runs that risk.
He turned and walked away, with Alfred taking this as acceptance, following like a dog its master.
The boy had learned and learned well.
Alfred Binnie allowed himself a smile of satisfaction as he thought of the pleasure in that sweep under the table when his knife cut through the thick material to find the soft flesh beneath.
The Countess, however, who was sitting opposite him, was anything but pleased.
She had been informed at first light as to the events in the Rustie Nail and it did not fit with her plans so carefully constructed while the city slept.
‘How could you do this?’ she asked.
Alfred laughed, a strange sound.
‘My hand slipped,’ he replied.
‘You might have ruined everything.’
‘I don’t like being bilked.’
The Countess fixed him with a cold stare and the pleasure drained from his face.
‘You were to stay here,’ she said.
‘I was confined to no purpose! This poky little room offends me and that woman you sent up was no such thing.’
‘What?’
‘All bones and elbows.’
His face was now like that of a sulky boy and her thin eyebrows rose in some surprise. Binnie’s taste ran to large women and she had provided him with the fleshiest specimen in the hotel.
‘Not many would describe her so,’ she murmured.
He laughed scornfully.
‘She wouldn’t play any games. I like games. That’s why I defenestrated.’
Indeed after realising that what he thought of as a bit of fun had produced a look of repugnance in the woman’s eyes, Binnie had dismissed her and then suspecting that the Countess might have a watch kept on his door, swung out of the window and down the drainpipe.
It was no strain, either for him or the pipe. Binnie was surprisingly agile despite his appearance and though plump was small enough not to weigh a great deal.
The two large German Shepherds that the Countess kept as watchdogs had growled in their kennels but Binnie was silent in movement and possessed the odd attribute of having no body odour. His pores gave nothing away.
He returned by the back stairs, however, not the drainpipe. Alfred Binnie was no monkey.
His unattractive but unthreatening form had been a great boon to him in his chosen and beloved profession; many a body mouldering in the grave, if it ever got to such a resting place, bore witness to the fact that violent death can come from other sources than the belching mouth of cannon.
She watched him as his face smoothed out again till it resembled a nondescript little man, easily overlooked.
Binnie had come highly recommended, laid down a fierce price that would not be haggled over and the Countess, foreseeing the coming war as soon as Simone had deserted, indeed almost welcoming the opportunity,
