I hadn’t forgotten that I was to meet McCabe, head of the Cobbwallers, on Friday night, but what with one thing and another, I didn’t leave Wapping until nearly half past seven. I was still dressed in plainclothes, but I took the precaution of concealing my truncheon in the special pocket of my trousers, covering it with my large coat.
O’Hagan had asked to meet at the Waterman Pub, and I arrived at just past eight o’clock. He was already seated near the hearth, with two men who eyed me and stiffened as I approached the table. One muttered out of the corner of his mouth; O’Hagan’s right hand rose an inch above the table and resettled, and the two men sat back in a way that made me think of dogs heeling at the command of their master.
I glanced around the pleasant room. I’d been here several times, and I knew there was a back room that would be private enough for a conversation, but I didn’t remove my hat. McCabe wouldn’t be here. This would be merely a stopping point, for he would want to be certain I had no one accompanying me.
My coat still buttoned, I stood at the table, showing no impatience, knowing O’Hagan would enjoy that sign of nerves, the same way he used to enjoy seeing his boxers’ restless feet and hands before sending them into the ring. With deliberate slowness, O’Hagan finished his pint and rose, and I followed him out the back door, with the two other men behind. Their shadows came alongside me and vanished in the lights from windows above. We cut through one lane, a mews, a courtyard, another mews, all of which I recognized, and at last we halted at an unnamed crossroads that stank of rancid fish.
Wordlessly, O’Hagan put one open palm toward me. I undid my coat and withdrew the truncheon from its pocket. Then I bent and slid the knife from my boot. I handed both to O’Hagan, who passed them to the shorter of the two men before he ran his hands over my person.
“For God’s sake,” I muttered. When O’Hagan finished, I held out my hand in return, and with a short bark of laughter, he withdrew a black hood from his pocket. As I hoped, he left me my hat with the reinforced brim, so I wasn’t entirely without a weapon. I pulled the coarse cloth over my head, adjusting it so the seam didn’t cut across my face and I could breathe, and kept my hat in my right hand. The cloth smelled of cheap tobacco, no doubt from a previous wearer. I could see bits of light through it.
O’Hagan’s footsteps fell away, and the two men each took one of my arms, presumably so I wouldn’t trip, and walked me forward.
We started down Bett’s Alley, no more than a narrow passage, really. About thirty paces on, we turned right and then left, walked forward and back, then took enough turns that I stopped counting and started to gather what information I could. I felt the dirt under my feet give way to cobbles and back to dirt. I smelled burnt bread and the piss of cats, stenches that the dustman left behind, even if he carted out the waste. Then came a waft of an acrid, metallic smell that would be easy to identify again, as the men’s steps slowed. Merely from the feel of the hands on my arms, I could tell the men were tense, watchful, looking about. We stood silently, waiting for God knows what. A signal, perhaps, that it was safe to advance.
A keen anticipation quickened my pulse. It might seem peculiar that I, as a senior inspector at Scotland Yard, had never met one of the most infamous figures in the London underworld, but our paths had never crossed until now. No doubt McCabe took some effort to keep himself out of the way of the police, so we didn’t know much about him, but I brought the few facts to mind.
James McCabe was brought up in Seven Dials by his grandfather, a notorious thief-taker with a network of pawn shops and receiving houses where stolen goods could be sold or returned to their rightful owners for a fee. I’d never heard much about his father but after his grandfather’s death, young James, shrewd and determined, expanded his modest empire of pawnshops, low-rent boarding houses, gaming houses, opium dens, boxing halls, and counterfeiting establishments. But never brothels. It was a peculiarity of McCabe’s; rumor had it that his mother was a prostitute, and he’d never wanted anything to do with that business. During the past decade, McCabe had extended his reach into Clerkenwell, St. Luke’s, Spitalfields, and Whitechapel, but he tended to keep his crime orderly. People understood his rules, and so long as they played by them, he didn’t change them arbitrarily. When they didn’t, his revenge had been swift and uncompromising—a snitch’s house burned to the ground, a thief’s hand cut off, an informer stabbed and left for dead in an alley with his mouth full of feathers. Unlike some leaders of the underworld, including Murphy in Southwark and Shelton in Lambeth, McCabe didn’t vent his fury in rash actions but tended to calculate his movements. To my mind, that made him a more dangerous man.
At a low whistle from somewhere ahead, both men tightened their grip on my arms, and we advanced, my feet moving unsteadily down a short slope of small loose stones. The man on my left rapped twice on wood and then pushed open a door that swung away from us with a low creak. I was shoved across the threshold, and the air collapsed behind me as the door closed. I reached up and tugged off the hood.
McCabe stood behind a table, his shirtsleeves rolled, his heavy hands resting on the top rail of a wooden chair. He was probably ten or fifteen years older than I, forty or forty-five, and perhaps a few inches shorter. But there was a bulk to his shoulders that made me think of filled sandbags. His eyes were as Irish blue as my own, looking at me from under hooded lids. His complexion was pale, almost fine, as if he didn’t spend much time outdoors, but his hands were broad and weathered. He turned one of them over, revealing a scarred palm, and gestured for me to sit in the chair opposite.
In these situations, when I have no idea what someone knows, or what someone assumes I know, I stay quiet. I let him study me for as long as he liked, and at last his left eye twitched and crinkled, and I saw what might have passed for the beginnings of a smile.
“What can I do for you, Mr. McCabe?” I asked, at last.
He chuckled softly. “You’re mighty p’lite. They teach you that at the Yard?”
“No reason not to be polite. We’re just two men talking.”
He gave a throaty sniff, folded his hands at his waist, and sat back, all the humor wiped from his face. “O’Hagan told me about you.”
“I expect he knows a good bit.”
There was a short silence.
“Do you know, I began as a star-glazer myself,” he said conversationally, but the words scraped at me like a razor against a strop. How did O’Hagan know that piece of information, that I’d been a star-glazer? It was years before I’d met him. I’d been barely thirteen. I was one of a hundred boys who worked under a brutal man named Simms. Then again, London’s underworld was a web of connections. It wasn’t unlikely Simms knew O’Hagan. More important to me was the reason McCabe laid down this shard of knowledge. He wanted to demonstrate his long reach—both into Whitechapel, where I’d been a thief, and into my past.
McCabe pushed back from the table, deliberately, as if to reassure me he meant no harm. He paced slowly back and forth before the hearth. Though his step was firm and as noiseless as a cat’s, he walked with a slight imbalance that spoke of an old injury. A man less sure of his power might have tried to hide the infirmity, but McCabe didn’t. At last he turned to face me. “Beggin’ your pardon if I keep you.”
I spread my hands. “I have time.”
“Do you know where I come from?” he asked.
“Seven Dials, or so I’ve heard.”
A grimace. “Ach, ye know as well as I, it don’t matter the name of the place.”
I spread my hands again, to let him know I was listening.
“My grandda was a thief-taker. Did you know that?”
I allowed I did.
“Back in the day o’ the Bow Street Runners, he used to snap up thieves and let ’em go for ransom.” His mouth twisted. “He saw the possibilities of havin’ thieves in his pocket and police in his pay, receivers and fences and pawnbrokers, all working together. Taught me plenty ’afore he died.”
“What about your father?” I asked.
He returned to his chair, his bulk creaking it. “A jockey. He was thrown from a horse. Died before I knew him to speak of. Like yours.”
Again, I felt surprised by McCabe’s knowledge about me. Had I ever mentioned my father’s death to O’Hagan? Perhaps. More likely, knowing I was living with the Doyles, he’d guessed I’d been orphaned.
McCabe set his forearms on the table and rubbed the palm of one hand absently over the knuckles of the other. I sensed him feeling his way forward, as if down a dark alley, careful of his steps and willing to take his time. “You’re not at the Yard anymore?”
“No. I’m at Wapping, at least for now. They needed a temporary superintendent.”
His mouth twitched, which told me he knew about Blair’s disgrace.
“There was a shooting a while ago here in the Chapel, by a Russian,” he said. “You know about it?”
“I heard.”
“They’re moving here, you know. Russians, Poles. Men from places I never heard of.”
Was McCabe blaming his two dead men on the Russians and Poles? I wondered.
“You want a name?” he asked.
“I imagine you’ll tell me if you want me to know.”
“Dead man is Jovanovich. Man who killed him is Belsky.” He pursed his lips. “Not so tall as you, and thinner. Black hair, brown eyes, about your age.” He touched his cheek. “A scar here, and a big chin.”
“Do you think he’s killing your men?”
“No.” He drew out the syllable. “Just want you to pass it along to your friends at the Yard. If Belsky’s causing trouble, I don’t want the blame landing on me.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll pass it along.”
He glanced away and then back. “What does the Yard say about my three men?”
So there had been another murder since Monday night, I thought. “O’Hagan told me there were two. Not that I’ve heard anything about them.”
His eyes narrowed in disbelief. “Not a word?”
“I haven’t been at the Yard for three months,” I replied. “There are twenty men there, each with at least thirty cases on their desks. Why would I know about these murders? Not to mention I’ve been bloody busy of late. So if you have something you want to know, you need to explain yourself.”
One shoulder raised and lowered as if to concede my point. “Three shot dead in the past fortnight. Is the Yard doing it?”
I didn’t pretend to be affronted. “I know you’re thinking of Clerkenwell. But there’s a new man at the helm—Director Vincent—and he’s a stickler for laws. He’d never condone Yard men killing anyone. He’d arrest them himself.”
A skeptical smile formed around his mouth and vanished.
“Even if he weren’t the upstanding sort,” I added, “he can’t afford another scandal.”
This was a logic McCabe understood.
He deliberated for a moment before he said, “I’ve a man who told me he saw Yard men kill one of ’em.”
An eyewitness? I wondered, feeling a stab of dismay. And more than one Yard man? I sat back, wanting to anchor my spine against the wooden back of the chair.
He tipped his chin up so he could look at me down his nose. “So you think it’s Russians, trying to shake me out of my place?”
His tone told me this was a test to see if I’d jump at the chance to push his suspicion away from the Yard. I wasn’t about to tell him that Stiles was already looking at the Russians. I shook my head. “I’m not going to make guesses that might steer you false.”
McCabe gave a nod, as if I’d satisfied him. “The man who told me the Yard men were to blame—well, I might have reason to doubt ’im.”
“One of yours?” I asked.
He gave a noncommittal sound, but his eyes held a bitterness that made curiosity flare along my nerves. Had this man once been one of McCabe’s but was no longer? Did this mean a rupture in the Cobbwaller gang—perhaps one of the younger members breaking away?
“What’s his name?” I took care to flatten my expression, so he would see no reaction, no matter what he said.
“Finn Riley.” His eyes never left mine, but I didn’t have to feign indifference. The name was vaguely familiar, but there were plenty of Rileys in Whitechapel.
“O’Hagan says the first two men were found in Boyd Street and Folgate,” I said. “What about the third?”
“Deal Street.”
I wasn’t supposed to know their names. “Who are they?”
He hesitated, weighed the cost of telling me, then shrugged. “Sean Doone, Tom O’Farrell.” He cleared his throat, as if that second name was harder to say than the first. “Ian Dwyer.”
I didn’t know him, either. “When was Dwyer?”
“Two days ago.”
“How were they killed, specifically? How many shots?”
“One, in the back of the head. All three of them.” He frowned. “I’ll tell you another thing. There’s reports of guns coming into Whitechapel. By the dozens.”
The skin around my eyes tightened.
“Thought that might int’rest ye.” He planted his heavy elbows on the table. “They ain’t for me. More guns means trouble for both of us.”
“Yes, it does. Any idea how they’re coming in?”
“Couldn’t say,” he said.
“I’ll pass that along,” I said.
“That’s right, Mickey.” His voice held a note of scorn for what to him seemed no action at all. “You pass it along.”
This was the third time he’d dropped a piece of information that suggested he knew plenty about me. This one made me more uneasy than the others, for some reason. Perhaps because Mickey was a name I’d left behind in Whitechapel, when I’d run for my life.
McCabe’s eyelids were half lowered, but his gaze was unwavering, and he turned over his palm for the third time. It called to mind the old Irish tales Ma Doyle used to tell; the giants were always beaten on the third try. McCabe jerked his chin upward. This was my signal to depart, so I rose and knocked on the door. When a man opened it, I put the hood back over my head.
A key scraped in the lock behind me, and once we were back out in the cold, the men walked me about a third of a mile in silence, taking a series of turns. At last, the hood was yanked off, my truncheon and knife silently returned, and the two men melted away into the shadows.
I stowed my possessions in their usual places and stared up at the roofline. Above it was a silvering quarter-moon, tipped so far it reminded me of a metal pan on one side of a dockyard scale, until a cloud slid over it, dimming it to nothing.
The thought that the Yard was being blamed for the murders worried me, and I hoped I’d convinced McCabe that Riley was wrong. If I hadn’t, and the Cobbwallers retaliated, the Yard would clamp down, starting a cycle of revenge killings and arrests like the one between the police and Murphy’s gang in Southwark four years ago.
But there was something else McCabe said that nagged at me, sparking a feeling of danger close by.
I retraced the last few moments of my conversation with McCabe and found it. McCabe had called me “Mickey.”
O’Hagan called me “Corravan,” same as the men on the docks did. “Mickey” was what the Doyles called me. It’s what Colin called me, as soon as he could speak plainly, after he got over the funny sound he’d make at the back of his throat because he couldn’t say his “k’s” properly.
My heartbeats slowed to thick, hard thumps driving into my ribs.
“Mickey” was McCabe’s way of telling me that he knew Colin. That he had Colin close enough to learn that from him. Which meant Colin felt more loyalty to McCabe than to me.
I didn’t want to think about how that hurt.
I needed to find Colin.
I needed to know how deep he had waded into these waters.