Dodger Page 0,45
very nearly drowning one in a gutter. It seems to me that we should perhaps have employed him instead.’
The man who liked to think of himself as Sharp Bob but wasn’t feeling all that sharp right now said, ‘I can still be of some help, sir, bearing in mind that you already owe me quite a lot for having tracked her down in the first place. I believe you have had my bill for that for some time . . .?’
The speaker ignored the latter part of this statement, saying instead, ‘I would like to assume that you have some news pertaining to this little difficulty. I understand there was something further about this troublemaker? Do be so kind as to enlighten me, will you?’
Sharp Bob said, ‘He has been asking around, sir, and being very what you might call methodical about it, sir.’
Sharp Bob was satisfied with ‘methodical’ as a description, but not pleased when the voice said, unnecessarily sharply in his opinion, ‘Good heavens, man, surely you can use your own initiative, can you not?’
Sharp Bob knew what an initiative was, but right now he was certain he hadn’t got one. Hopefully he said, ‘The body asking the questions ain’t just any nobody, if you get my drift; he’s got contacts on the street, which makes things a little more difficult.’
The voice sounded angry, and that did not sit well with Sharp Bob’s bladder. Things got no better when, out of the dark, the voice came back with, ‘Is he working for a policeman . . . what you call, I believe, a peeler?’
A peeler! What a word to use to a troubled gentleman of fortune. The bloody, bloody peelers. You couldn’t bribe them, you couldn’t make friends with them – not like the old Bow Street runners – and mostly the new boys were war veterans. If you had been in some of the wars lately and come back with all your bits still attached to your body, then that meant you were either a hard man or very, very lucky. Bloody Mister Peel had sent them scurrying about like busybodies and no mistake, and they wouldn’t take no for an answer, and mostly they wouldn’t take any answer at all from anyone unless it was: ‘It’s a fair cop, I’ll come quietly, sir.’ You cried uncle, you cried aunt, you cried your eyes out the moment you fell foul of the peelers, and the bleeders wouldn’t even help you put them back, and they drank like fish and roared like the Devil, and weren’t friends with anybody – and that, amazingly, included the nobs. It certainly included those on the fringes of the legal business, like himself, who had relied on the old Bow Street boys who were, well . . . understanding, especially when money jingled.
What could you do with men like the peelers, who respected nobody except Sir Robert Peel himself? The very thought of them was just another problem for Sharp Bob’s bladder to cope with. A certain amount of fear trickled down his leg as he said carefully, ‘No, sir, not for the peelers, sir. He’s a bloke, sir, although he is really more of a geezer, sir, if you catch my meaning?’
This led to a frosty silence, which was followed by, ‘I do not intend to catch anything of yours, Mister Bob. What is a geezer?’ The word was said as if the speaker was pulling a dead mouse out of their soup, or more accurately, half a dead mouse.
Sharp Bob, who in these circumstances now realized that only half his name was accurate, was struggling now. Didn’t everybody know what a geezer was? Of course they did! Well, every Londoner did, anyway. A geezer was . . . well, a geezer! It was like asking: What is a pint of beer? Or, What is the sun? A geezer was a geezer; although it did occur to Bob that he would have to do some work on the definition before he answered the dangerous voice in the darkness.
He cleared his throat again and said, ‘A geezer, now, well, a geezer is somebody that everybody knows, and he knows everybody, and maybe he knows something about everyone he knows that maybe you wished he didn’t know. Um, and well, he’s sharp, crafty, um, not exactly a thief but somehow things find their way into his hands. Doesn’t mind a bit of mischief, and wears the street like an overcoat. Dodger now .