Dodger

she smiled at him and there was a peace that you didn’t get in the rookeries until one in the morning when the dead had stopped screaming and the living were too drunk to care. Suddenly it didn’t seem to matter whether Simplicity recognized anything important or not; it was enough that they were out for this walk together.
    Yet there was a part of Dodger that would always be a dodger, and it guided his eyes and ears around, listening to every footstep, looking at every face and watching every shadow, calculating, figuring, estimating, judging. Now he turned his attention to old Soft Molly, whom he could see approaching.
    For a long time Soft Molly had been a puzzle to Dodger, because he had never been able to make out where the flowers came from that she sold in the streets – little nosegays, all very delicate and fine. One day the old lady, who had a face that was a playground for wrinkles, told him where she got them from, and after that he had never thought about the cemeteries in the same way. She had made his flesh creep, but he reckoned perhaps that when you were so very old that you were older than some of the people buried beneath your feet, and therefore deserving of some respect yourself, he could see why it would make sense to you to ‘borrow’ some of the blooms scattered on the headstones of the recently deceased. It was hard to see where the harm was, and if you thought about it, the flowers stolen from the dear departed who, it must be said, could hardly be able to smell them now, were nevertheless keeping the old dear alive.
    It was a sad thought, and a horrible picture, that Molly would spend time in the graveyard at night methodically collecting floral wreaths to be carefully unravelled in the heart of darkness and lovingly made into little posies for the living. In the scales of the world, how much did it matter that the dead had been robbed of the flowers they could never have seen when, for one night at least, poor old Soft Molly, who had as far as he could tell just one tooth, was still living. Besides, he thought, some of those wreaths looked like a florist shop all by themselves so would barely miss a few blossoms, and that thought made him feel a bit better.
    That was why he gently pulled Simplicity with him as the old girl crouched on the pavement, looking pitiful and not having to try. He pressed sixpence, yes, a
whole
sixpence, on a little bundle of fragrant blooms. And if the dead turned over in their graves, they were generous enough to do it quietly, and besides, the exercise would do them good.
    When he handed them to Simplicity, all he could find to say was, ‘Here is a present for you,’ and she said, she actually said, ‘Oh, roses!’ He was certain of it. He saw her lips move, he saw the lips become a rose as they pronounced the words and then close, and even Simplicity seemed surprised to have heard the words, while deep in his heart, once again, Dodger wanted very much to hurt somebody.
    Then she said, ‘Please, Dodger, I heard them talking. I am very grateful to Mrs and Mister Mayhew but . . . it is as I feared. I heard them say that they will be very pleased when I am sent back, to the safety of my husband.’ The look on her face as she said it was pure terror.
    Dodger turned to look at the housekeeper, who was some way behind them, still clutching her notebook, and whispered, ‘I believe that despite everything you are not quite as ill as you appear, yes?’ There was a silent ‘Yes’. To which he more or less silently said, ‘Don’t let them know. Trust me, I’ll see to it that you go somewhere else.’
    Simplicity’s face shone as she said quietly, so that only he could hear, ‘Oh, Dodger, I am so happy to meet you again. I burst into tears every night when I remember that storm and how you drove away those terrible men who were’ – and here she hesitated a little – ‘so unkind, shall we say.’
    The softness of that speech pierced Dodger’s heart, orbited right round him and came back and did it again. Was she truly beginning to believe him when he said he wanted to help her? Believe that he wasn’t playing some kind of game?
    ‘I know I should not hate,’ she continued, ‘but for them, yes! Because of them I must not use my proper name, and I dare not tell anyone it – not even you, not yet. For now, I
must
remain Simplicity, although I do not believe that I am very simple.’
    But although the sun was still shining and the honey was