65
such a means to further their cause. He spoke to senior officers in many other police districts of London, and even to the Foreign Office to see if they were acquainted with any other nation or power who might have had an interest in the death of a member of Parliament. Eventually he gave what he had to Pitt and told him to try his own sources in the underworld and its fringes, to see if he could pick up any whispers.
Pitt read the reports and discarded three quarters of them. The constables had done their job thoroughly, and their own informant had exhausted everything likely to produce any information of use. Of the last quarter he chose the few he could follow through fences, petty thieves, or small-time forgers who owed him a favor, or who were seeking some advantage.
He changed out of his own clothes, removed the beautiful boots Emily had given him, and got into some shapeless trousers and a jacket so old and rimed with dirt he could pass without comment in the poorest of tenements or rookeries, the grimmest of East End docks or public houses. Then he went out, took a cab for two miles eastward and got out just short of the Whitechapel Road.
In the next three hours he spoke to half a dozen petty criminals, always moving eastward towards Mile End, and then south to the river and Wapping. He had a thick sandwich and glass of rough cider in a public house overlooking the water and then set off again deeper into the slums and narrow, fetid streets within sound and smell of the Thames, looking towards Limehouse Reach. At last, in the late afternoon, he had enough information to trade for what he wanted.
He found the right man up crooked stairs, damp with the rot of ages, a thousand yards from the pier stakes where once they had tied pirates and let the tide rise to drown them. He stopped at a doorway and knocked on the warped panels.
After several minutes it was opened a crack and there was a rumbling growl with a high-pitched menace at the back of
66
I
it-a dog who would attack at the slightest misstep. Pitt looked down and saw the beast's head, a white blur in the shadows, a piglike cross between a bull terrier and a setter.
The door swung a little wider to show yellow oil light behind and a squat man with a thick neck and pale bristly hair cut in the 'terrier crop' of one recently in prison. His face was ruddy and his eyebrows so pale they seemed colorless, almost translucent. It was not until he pulled the door fully open that Pitt saw he had a wooden leg below a fat thigh cut off above the knee. He knew he had the right man.
Pitt eyed the dog which stood between them. 'Deacon Stafford? 'he asked.
''Yeah-'oo're yer? Wotcher want? I dunno yer.'' He surveyed Pitt up and down, then looked at his hands. 'Yer a crusher out o' twig!'
So his disguise was far less effective than he had thought. He must remember his fingernails next time.
'Thin Jimmy said you might be helpful,' Pitt said quietly. 'I have certain information you would find useful.'
'Thin Jimmy . . . Well, come in. I in't standin' 'ere; I got a bad leg.'
Pitt had heard Deacon's story. His father had 'got the boat'' to Australia back when deportation was still a common punishment for petty robbery, and his mother had been sent with her three children to the workhouse. Young William Stafford had been set to work 'picking oakum'-unraveling old rope-at the age of three. At six he had run away, and after begging and stealing till he was on the point of starvation, he had been picked up by a kidsman, a man who trained and ran a bunch of child thieves and pick-pockets, taking the largest portion of their profits, fencing them, and in return giving them food and protection. William had picked pockets successfully 'cly faking,' then progressed to a higher form of the art, specializing in stealing from women- 'fine-wiring.' After a spell in the Coldbath Fields jail, the damp had got into his bones and bis fingers lost their nimble-
67
ness. He took to 'flying the blue pigeon'-stealing roofing lead, most particularly from churches, which earned him his nickname. A bad fall on a freezing night had resulted in a splintered thigh, which became gangrenous, costing him his leg. Now he sat in this narrow room piled with furniture by the embers of a smoky fire and traded information and power.
Deacon offered Pitt a seat in the huge overstuffed chair opposite his own, a yard from the fire, and the dog waddled in and lay between them, watching Pitt with its pink piggy eyes.
' 'So wotcher got?'' Deacon
