William Monk 16 - Execution Dock

approach. “I'll make it fer yer. I know ‘ow ter make toast.”
    “Thank you,” she accepted. “That would be very nice. Perhaps I should boil the kettle again?” She began to rise.
    “I'll do it!” He stepped in her way so she had to sit down. “All I gotta do is move it over on ter the ‘eat.”
    “Thank you,” she said again, slightly puzzled, but willing to accept.
    Very carefully indeed he cut two more slices of bread, a littlethick, a trifle crooked, but good enough. He put them on the toasting fork and held them to the open door of the stove. This was not going to be easy, but he could look after her. It needed doing, and it was his new job. He would see to it from now on.
    The toast started to smoke. He turned it round just before it burnt. He had better concentrate.
    Hester had debated whether to take Scuff with her or not when she went back to look further into Durban's history and whether the charges against him were in any part true. The matter was taken out of her hands by Scuff himself. He simply came.
    “I'm not sure …” she began.
    He smiled at her, continuing to look oddly important. “You need me,” he said simply, then fell in step beside her as if that settled the matter.
    She drew in her breath to argue, and found that she had no idea how to tell him that she did not really need him. The silence grew until it became impossible, and by default she had accepted that she did.
    As it transpired, he helped her find most of the people she eventually wished to speak to. It was long and tiring walking from one narrow, crowded street to another, arguing, asking, pleading for information and then trying to sort out the lies and the mistakes and find the elements of truth. Scuff was better at that than she was. He had a sharp instinct for evasion and manipulation. He was also more prepared than she to threaten or call a bluff.
    “Don't let ‘em get away with nothin’!” he said to her urgently as they left one smooth-tongued man with a wispy black mustache. “That's a load o’ …” He bit his tongue to avoid the word he had been going to use. “I reckon as it were Mr. Durban ‘as pulled ‘im out o’ the muck, an’ ‘e's too … mean ter say it. That's wot that is.” He stood in the middle of the narrow pavement looking up at her seriously.
    A costermonger wheeled his barrow past them, knowing at a glance that she would not buy.
    “Yer din't ought ter b'lieve every stupid sod as tells yer,” Scuff continued. “Well, yer din't,” he granted generously. “I'll tell yer if it's true or not. We better go and find this Willie the Dip, if ‘e's real.”
    Two washerwomen barged past them, sheets tied around dirty laundry bouncing on their ample hips.
    “You don't think he is?” Hester asked.
    Scuff gave her a skeptical look. “Dip means ‘e picks pockets. ‘Oo don't, round ‘ere? I reckon ‘e's all guff.”
    And so it turned out. But by the end of the day they had heard many stories of Durban from a variety of people up and down the dockside. They had been discreet, and Hester believed with some pride that they had also been inventive enough not to betray the reason for their interest.
    It was well after dusk with the last of the light faded even from the flat surface of the water when they finally made their way up Elephant Stairs just a few yards along from Princes Street. The tide was running hard, slapping against the stone, and the sharp river smell was almost pleasant in the air after the closed-in alleys they had walked all day, and the heavy, throat-filling odors of the docks, where men were unpacking all manner of cargoes, pungent, clinging, some so sweet as to be rancid. The quiet movement of water was a relief after the shouting, clatter of hooves, and clank of chains and winches and thus of heavy loads.
    They were tired and thirsty. Scuff did not say that his feet were sore, but possibly he regarded it as a condition of life. Hester ached all the way up to her knees, and beyond, but in the face of his stoicism, she felt that it would be self-indulgent to let it be known.
    “Thank you,” she said as they started to walk up in the direction of Paradise Place. “You are quite right. I do need you.”
    “S'all right,” he said casually, giving a little lift of his shoulder visible as he passed under the street lamp.
    He took a deep breath. “‘E weren't a bad man,” he said, then looked sideways at her quickly.
    “I know, Scuff.”
    “Does