Dodger Page 0,43

became strangely alive. Toshers liked nights with a bit of moonlight. If they went down there then, they sometimes carried a dark lantern – one of the ones with the little door so you could shut off the light if you didn’t want to be seen. But those came expensive and were cumbersome, and the tosher sometimes had to move fast.

It wasn’t only good honest toshers down there in the dark, though, oh no and dearie! There were rats too, of course – it was their natural home, and they didn’t particularly want to meet you and you didn’t want to meet them – but after the rats came the rat-catchers, trapping rats for the dog fights.

And then you got down to the really dreadful things . . .

There were still plenty of places in the city where the sewers were open and above ground, and where some of them were pretending to be rivers; this meant that anything that could float or anything that could roll could be dropped or trapped in them in the dead of night. A sensible tosher stayed away from those areas, but there were other people who used the privacy of the sewers for purposes of their own – they were the kind of people who normally wouldn’t go out of their way to do a horrible thing to a tosher, but on the other hand they were the kind of people who might just do so if the mood took them, just for a laugh.

They liked a laugh . . .

Dodger’s thoughts shot back to what Marie Jo had told him. Someone who looked like a lawyer was asking after somebody called Dodger. And Marie Jo was a very shrewd lady; otherwise she wouldn’t have survived.

These thoughts spread out in his brain like the incoming tide (always a nuisance to toshers near the Thames). And an answer sprang back at him.

This was his territory; he knew every sewer in the length and breadth of the city, every little hidey hole that could barely be seen lest you knew where to look, the places that were half blocked off and nobody knew they were there. Honestly, he could navigate by the smells themselves and he knew exactly where he was right now. If someone is looking for me, he thought, if I’m going to have to fight someone, I must see to it that it’s on my patch. I’m Dodger; I can dodge down here.

Right now, the air in the tunnel was more or less sweet – well, in comparison to the things that weren’t sweet at all, with the possible exception of Onan who had, of course, brought his own particular odours with him. Dodger gave the two-tone whistle that every tosher knew, and listened for a reply; there was none, and so, at least for now, he had this area all to himself, as he so often did.

Almost without thinking he picked up a tie pin and a farthing within a couple of yards; luck was with him, and he wondered if it was because he had just done a good deed. As he thought this, Onan began to snuffle and whine and worry at something in a broken-down pile of old bricks. Dodger suddenly heard a clink as Onan’s nose knocked something loose. Now the dog had something golden in his jaws – a gold ring with a big stone in it! Worth at least a sovereign!

Good old Onan! And thanks to the Lady. But things happened, or didn’t happen, and that’s all there was to it, Dodger knew. You could drive yourself mad thinking otherwise.

In the gloom, listening to the sounds of the world above, hunting through the tunnels, Dodger was in his element and Dodger was happy.

Elsewhere, others were not . . .

There were many candles in this room, but none of them illuminated the face of the man seated by the tapestry. This considerably disconcerted the man known to his special clients as Sharp Bob – most certainly not the name he used when dealing with more ordinary legal affairs. He always liked to see whoever it was who was employing him; on the other hand, he also liked gold sovereigns, and they didn’t worry him at all – he was always pleased to see them. He could see two of them now; a lamp in the darkness before him showed them shining on a low table. He hadn’t picked them up yet, because he thought, If I