Dodger Page 0,117

said gruffly, ‘OK, dear, in for a lion, in for a lamb, a farthing each and let’s call it quits.’

The journey across the water wasn’t that long, although it was a bit choppy, and after the man helped the fussy old lady to get the little cart over the cobbles he was amazed beyond belief when the old girl handed him a shiny three sixpences, calling him the last gentleman in London. For a long time afterwards he remembered the incident fondly.

Once back on the right side of the Thames, a watcher would have seen the old lady pulling her cart in a haphazard way along a dark and foggy alley where there was a shadow and a great smell of gin, and a very drunken, very dirty and very nasty-looking man who said, ‘Got anything for me in your bag there, Granny?’

This little tableau was witnessed through the gloom by a bootblack who was sitting down on the kerb to eat his breakfast. Just as he began to think that he should do something about the ambush further on, something very strange eventuated in which the old lady seemed to vanish in a whirl and the man was on the ground while she was kicking him merrily in the fork, crying out, ‘If ever I see you around here again, sonny, I’ll have your giblets on my griddle, just you see if I don’t!’ Then, after adjusting her dress somewhat, the old lady once again became, well, an old lady in the eyes of the bootblack, who had watched with his half-eaten jacket potato neglected in his hand. Then the old dear waved at him cheerily and said, ‘Young man, who’s doing potatoes around here today?’

This led to Dodger continuing his journey with quite a lot of jacket potatoes in his bag, which he distributed to any old ladies he saw sitting pitifully on the kerb; it was a kind of penance, he thought. And God, who must surely have looked kindly on this act of charity, seemed to have arranged it that a lavender girl had set up right in the next street, which meant that Dodger was spared the chore of going out to find one, not a difficult task since in the stink of London everybody liked to buy some lavender now and again. In this case the lucky girl sold all of the stock to the old lady with grateful thanks and went to the pub, while the old lady, smelling far more fragrant, trundled on her way.

Moving a dead body is never easy in any case, but in the murkier part of Seven Dials Dodger treasured an alley with a drain in it that was just the job; and of course, once he was in the sewers he was in his element. He could go about his business unrecognized by the people walking about above, and the chances of meeting another tosher were small. Anyway, as the king of the toshers, he could do as he pleased. In sewers, if you knew where to look for them, there were places that would make a good-sized room – places the toshers had given wonderful names to, like Top and Turn Again.

Splashing his way into one of the tunnels, Dodger set about the nastier piece of the enterprise. This particular stretch had so far never been given a name; it got one now: Rest in Peace. Death was always around in the darker places of London, and it was an unusual day when you didn’t see a funeral procession, so this engendered a kind of pragmatism: people lived, people died and other people had to deal with it. At this point, because he very much wanted to live, Dodger pulled off his disguise to reveal his normal clothes hidden beneath the rags, and pulled on a pair of large, well-greased, leather gloves, just as Mrs Holland had advised, and he was grateful for the advice, and grateful too that he had spent so much on the lavender, because however you looked at it, the dull, heavy, cloying smell of death was something that you didn’t put up with for any longer than you had to.

So with traffic a few feet overhead, he pulled, pushed and levered very thoroughly until he had got things looking just right. All was well right up until when, as he was just positioning the remains of the young lady in her nook, she sighed as her head moved. Dodger thought, If