donate them to Oxfam. He had explained to her that the RSPCA was always looking for blankets and stuff, and that he put in time there as a volunteer; she was perfectly amenable to having the blankets go there (and also told him what a good child he was to be so concerned about the poor animals).
Benny found the Sergeant reading a book with the aid of his flashlight. He had an old terrier that would sit and bark, but in a friendly manner, at Sparky. Sparky woofed back, also in a friendly manner, and Benny imagined it was by way of having a conversation.
“Ah! Young Bernard. What’ve we today?”
Benny handed him the paper-wrapped chops. The Sergeant would then distribute them according to “rank,” his term, meaning only to whoever was left out last time. Benny preferred not to do the handing out. They knew he brought it, and they certainly appreciated it (and thanked him), but it was better if the Sergeant handed it out himself.
“And is it Mr. Gyp we have to thank for all this?”
It always was, but the Sergeant always said this, making a ritual of handing over the goods.
“The generous Gyp.” The Sergeant winked.
For both of them knew that Gyp was not a generous man.
Tonight, Benny watched the Sergeant walk to the enclosure beneath the bridge, and clutched his cap in his hand. In a rusted oil drum they’d got a fire going with newspapers, cardboard boxes, twigs and maybe some skinny branches they’d picked up in Hyde Park or Green Park. Sometimes the air smelled of pine, and he could imagine himself in the freedom of the north woods somewhere, maybe in the Alps or even in the northern United States.
No one here seemed to have the name he was born with, but instead had exchanged it for a name that better suited. “Mags” was not short for Margaret or Megan, but for “magazines,” which Mags had collected over time and trundled around in her stolen Safeway shopping cart. About the cart she said, “You’ll not see many more of these in future. Now, they lock ’em up. What bloody nonsense. Why, what I got here-” she put her hand on the metal cart “- it’s gonna be a collector’s item! When I went to Safeway awhile back, here they’d fitted the line of carts with this fancy locking thingamajig where you bung in a pound coin-a whole pound, can you bloody believe it?-and then get your pound back at the end at customer service. Don’t think I didn’t call the store manager over and gave him what-for. Like what if a person’s not got a pound coin on him and was I expected to go wait in line just to get a fiver changed? Had one, too. I keep a fiver by me so’s they don’t think I’m homeless. Disgraceful! I said. ‘I call lockin’ up the carts a bloody disgrace! I know there’s thieving, but to put your shopper through all this foolery just because a few of these carts gets nicked!’ I went on and you bet the women standing there and heard this, they were with me all the way and started in complainin’ and gettin’ quite shirty with him. He wanted to throw me out, but with all them women, well, he couldn’t very well. So what he did was smile his smarmy smile and plug a pound in the slot and Bob’s your uncle, I had me cart. I strolled round the produce with it and then when I didn’t see him, I just wheeled it out the door.”
“Benny,” Mags had gone on, “one thing you always want to do is stay on the offensive. This is the best life lesson you’ll learn. For the second you turn
That was Mags. Benny had no idea what the Sergeant’s birth name was. It was the Sergeant who kept watch over the place under the bridge to make sure it got cleared up every morning or the Bill would have something to say. (Thames police had a station just by Waterloo Bridge, too.) Benny didn’t know where the Sergeant stashed the blankets and pallet. But the Sergeant had said that as Benny was working all day and bringing food back for them, the least they could do for him and Sparky was take care of his stuff. Benny could have afforded a bed-sit somewhere nearer his job in Southwark. People were always putting up little cards in Mr. Siptick’s window advertising bed-sits and rooms for rent. The problem wasn’t money, but age. What landlady would rent to a twelve-year-old boy (and his dog)? What would happen, and he knew it would happen, was the Social. His mum had warned him and so had Mags. For Benny the Social had horns and cloven feet.
Benny loved the Victoria Embankment, Waterloo Bridge and Westminster Bridge beyond it, and up the other way was Blackfriars, and the Thames in the early morning layered in mist. He liked to watch the river and think about the stories the Sergeant was always telling him about the old docks and warehouses, Wapping and Stepney, Whitechapel and Limehouse. All the ships, maybe five hundred of them, coming up the Thames from Gravesend, when the Thames was a real working river. It still was, but now, not much muscle or sinew-too many boats carrying tourists back and forth.
Occasionally, a sunset could be so intense that it looked as if London were burning. Great flares of orange and red that seemed impossible to have ignited over a city so vastly gray, and often dreary, Benny thought, if you didn’t look underneath.
There was always underneath. You couldn’t take things at face value. He thought of his mother, Mary. Underneath her head scarf and wool shawl, his mother was never a beggar. She had lost everything in one fell swoop-Benny’s father, and his pay, and she having no skills to work going had lost their little house in County Clare. But there had been those fortunate few years when she had worked as cook for the bankrupt family, but that too had gone. It was a terrible thing about coming finally to the streets; it was a long slide that you’d thought you’d stopped once, twice, three times; that you thought you’d got a handle on, and then only to find you’d slid farther down until your bum at last connected with cement.
He could see each of them now with his chop on the end of a stick holding it over the fire, and the Sergeant on his way back. He wore a long, heavy brown coat that had all of its buttons still. He was very proud that it didn’t look seedy. It was all he had, the Sergeant had told Benny, from the old life in National Service. “Mucked about in the military police, me, in the war. Be surprised what you learn as an MP. Proper job I had of it, sorting out who done what to who. But it seems I’ve a mind for that sort of thing.”
They had sat down to look out over the river. Benny said, “I met a policeman a couple days ago. A detective from Scotland Yard.”
“Scotland Yard? Now that’s something, that is. What did he want?”
Benny told him about the murder. “He wanted to know about Gem, too.”
“That poor little girl someone wants her out of the way? Never did hear of such a thing. Terrible.”
“The thing is, I always took it that Gem was making it up. You know, so people’d pay attention to her. She hasn’t got a proper family, I mean, no mum or dad, sisters, brothers-she hasn’t got anyone.”
“It’s a puzzle, young Ben, it surely is.” He was quiet for a few moments. “I wonder… now, I had experience as an MP with a young soldier who was, uh, messing around with the captain’s wife. I finally twigged it, but what he done, see, was parade a good-looking German tart-ahem, I mean a woman-around just to put us off the scent. With a girl that looked like her, why bother with the wife? What I’m sayin’ is, could the business with young Gemma be a distraction?”
Benny frowned. “Distraction? But from what?”
The Sergeant shrugged, wetting cigarette paper with the tip of his tongue. “How about that murder?”
“Yes, but… trying to kill Gem, all that happened before the murder.”
“Still…”
They were silent for a few moments as the Sergeant smoked his cigarette. Benny looked through the dark out over the river to the lights on the far side. “Still, I wish that detective’d come back.”
The Sergeant pinched the end of his cigarette before lighting it. “You can bank on that, young Ben. The Bill always comes back.”
