Dodger

cleaning and chopping vegetables and welcomed it, because the attention to detail meant the inner Dodger could think about what he was going to do next, which was to take a walk among the shonky shops and pawnbrokers. He knew what he needed, but was careful not to get it all from one single shop, although he was particularly fortunate in one old shop smelling of not quite properly laundered clothing to find just what he wanted, and the proprietor smelled of gin and appeared not to know Dodger at all.
    But the clock was still ticking and he was short of time.
    By mid-afternoon, though, after a trip to the Gunner’s Daughter and a couple of pints of porter with a few mates, and one in particular – good ol’ Dodger, never forgot his friends now he was in the money after his exploits with the Demon Barber – he was ready, though Solomon chuckled rather too much for his liking.
    Dodger had heard that God watches everything, although he thought that around the rookeries, He tended to close his eyes. If God wasn’t available today, and since people didn’t look too much, just in case they saw anything, possibly only a watcher on the moon would have seen an elderly lady – an extremely pitiful one, even by the standards of the rookeries – shin down a length of rope, land like an athlete and then, very slowly, hobble away.
    Dodger wasn’t particularly bothered about this bit; there were only a few places you could stand to see the rope in any case, but being an old lady meant that you couldn’t travel fast. Regrettably, little old ladies – rather unwashed ones, at that – didn’t often have enough money to hire a growler, but since he would be damned before he hobbled all the way to the river, the old lady did manage, by the frantic waving of her walking stick, to hail a cab. Unusually, given the pitiful condition of the old girl, who seemed to be a jolly playground for warts, thanks to the theatrical help of Marie Jo, the growler captain, thinking about his old mum, carefully helped the old girl up and didn’t short-change her.
    Indeed, she was a very pitiful old lady; she smelled six days away from a good wash. And warts? Never before had he seen such terrible warts. She wore a wig, but that wasn’t unusual knowing the sensitivities of old ladies, and goodness, he thought, it was a terribly bad wig even so, about the worst a shonky shop could offer.
    He watched her walk away, and it looked as if her feet were in a terrible way, and this was true because Dodger had put a piece of wood in his boot which hurt like the blazes. By the time he reached the nearest wharf, his feet were killing him. Once upon a time, Marie Jo had told him that with his skills, he should be on the stage, as she had been, but since he knew that actors didn’t get paid very much he had always reckoned that the only reason to be on a stage would be to rob it.
    A waterman, coincidentally one whom Dodger had chatted to earlier in the day – Double Henry, a regular at the Gunner’s Daughter – gave a lift to the dear old lady with the warts and
terrible
bad teeth, and kindly helped her out quite near the morgue at Four Farthings, London’s smallest borough. Possibly somebody on the moon watching the old lady from that point on would have watched her progress all the way to the coroner’s office. It was pitiful, absolutely pitiful. So pitiful, in fact, that an officer in the morgue, generally not well disposed to living people and with something of a temper, actually gave her a cup of tea before directing her to the coroner’s office, some distance away.
    The coroner was a kind man, as generally the coroners were, which was quite remarkable given that so often they saw and knew things that decent people should neither see nor know, and this one listened to the old lady, who was in floods of tears about her niece, who had gone missing. It was a familiar tale, a tale just like one Dodger had heard from Messy Bessie: the sweet girl had come up from somewhere in Kent, seeking to improve herself and get a better job in London. A dreadful engine, if she did but know it, that took the hopeful, the innocent and ultimately the living, and turned them into . . . something else.
    The coroner, hardened though he was to this sort of thing, was overwhelmed by the tears and the lamentations on the lines of, ‘I told her, I said we could manage, we could run along all right.’ And, ‘I told her not to talk to any gentlemen on the street, sir,