“There’s someone else who needs some information whispered in his ear, and I suspect he’ll not be terribly pleased about it.”
Indeed, were she to wager, she’d put every penny she had on her soon-to-be confidant disliking everything about their coming encounter, not because of what she would be telling him but because she was the one doing the telling.
Chapter 2
The filchpurse dropped down on t’ other side of t’ wall!”
Fitzgerald Parkington acknowledged his colleague’s shouted report by shifting his aim to that very wall and running at it, full tilt. On his last step, he sprang into a jump and flung his arms atop the stones, then pulled himself up and over the wall. He landed on the spongy ground and continued his pursuit.
The thief was well within view. In fact, the prattle-head had actually paused to look back. Fitz had chased him before, and Lanky Mack had slowed his escape on those occasions, too. This’n was a regular beef-head, he were.
With a flash of panic across his overly pale face, Lanky Mack took to a run once more, jumping over headstones and weaving around trees.
Why was it so many criminals thought he wouldn’t chase them through a churchyard?
Fitz leapt over a precariously crooked stone slab, then dodged one lying newly on its side. This cemetery hadn’t had a new burial in years, full to bursting as it was. Sometimes it seemed even the grave markers were being crowded out.
Mathers, his fellow constable, would make for the churchyard gate. That was what always happened when Fitz kept on the heels of a fleeing ruffian: his colleagues headed their quarry off at the next pass and then crowed over the capture.
Lanky Mack dodged to the right of a tree, but he’d have to double back seeing as a toppled stone cut off the path in the other direction.
Fitz set himself at the trunk, feet braced for collision.
Only a moment later, Lanky Mack and his pocket of plunder crashed into him. The man fell backward against the tree trunk.
With a grip as ironclad as he could manage, Fitz grabbed hold of the thief’s collar and pulled him forward, spinning him around and pressing his chest against the tree. He grabbed the man’s upper arms, pulling them toward each other behind Lanky Mack’s back. He tightened his grip enough to make it too uncomfortable for wiggling overly much. That’d simplify things.
Unfortunately, it also put Fitz at an uncomfortably close distance to the man’s stench, one that identified his newly adopted variety of thievery: toshing.
“Blimey, Lanky Mack,” Fitz muttered. “You know scavenging in the sewers is against the law.”
“Seems to me a bloke oughta be permitted to keep what he digs out of the dung heaps.”
Fitz agreed, truth be told. The horridness of the job spoke to a desperation he hated punishing people for.
“You’s a blue-bottle, not an alley cat. Seems to me you oughtn’t be climbing walls.” Lanky Mack was always full of complaints whenever Fitz caught him committing any of his specialty crimes: bobbing, gulling, pickpocketing, and now, it seemed, lowering himself into the perils of the sewers to dig out coins or whatever valuables he could find in the muck below. He weren’t dangerous in the way many criminals were, but he certainly caused a heap of trouble.
“I saw you nip a watch off that cove on Baker Street,” Fitz said. “Which is what I chased you down for. But you’ll be searched at the station and lose whatever it is you dug from the sewers.”
Lanky Mack muttered a frustrated oath.
Mathers walked leisurely over to them. “You’ll be for t’ prison this time, Lanky. Oughtn’t be stealing.”
The soon-to-be prisoner went along quite willingly—this was a familiar arrangement, after all. “Just tryin’ to feed my children. Cain’t blame a man for that.”
“Shouldn’t take much to feed them children,” Fitz drawled, “seeing as they don’t exist.”
“Forgot you knew that,” Lanky Mack grumbled.
“I think you also forgot I can scale a wall.”
Lanky Mack grinned back at him as they made their way toward the station, marked by the distinctive blue lamp recently adopted as the means of identifying a police station. “Did forget for a minute there. You do it faster than you used to.”
Lanky Mack weren’t the only regular occupant of the station cell who treated Fitz with some degree of friendliness. He had an odd connection with the people of Marylebone.
It weren’t the rummest part of London, and not everyone living there had much liking for the constabulary, so he and Mathers received a few side-eyes and looks of distrust as they went along. But most people knew Fitz and that he understood the difference between hardened criminals and those made desperate by poverty. He felt he’d earned some trust from the people he looked out for.
He had the faith of both his fellow officers and the chief of D Division as well. That meant a lot to him. He worked hard to be good at what he did.
Sergeant Ott looked up from his reading—the familiar red cover of Mr. King’s latest penny dreadful offering—as they stepped inside the station.
“You look a bit worse for the wear, Parkington,” he said.
“Had to climb a wall,” Fitz explained.
“Wha’? Again?”
“Getting so a man cain’t make an honest living,” Lanky Mack said, putting on the same show for the sergeant as he had for Fitz.
“If you ever decide on an honest living, drop a word, mate,” the sergeant tossed back.
“Oi,” Fitz agreed. “We’ll parade you about for all to cheer such a change in you.” He locked the man in the cell that awaited him, one he’d spent many a day in. “Turn out your pockets. Off with your hat and shoes. Mathers’ll be in to gather up all your ill-gotten items.”
“Even them I dug out of the—” He seemed to suddenly remember that scavenging in the sewers was a crime. “Even them things?”
Fitz nodded. “Even them things, Lanky Mack. All of it.”
With a grunt of annoyance, the man set to work.
Fitz made his way back to the sergeant’s desk.
“Last night on patrol for you, i’n’it?” Ott said.
“Oi.” Fitz managed not to preen, though he was well chuffed at the change he was making. “D Division’s loss is the Detective Branch’s gain, or so I’d like to think.”
Ott gave a quick nod, which was as sentimental as he was likely to get about losing his best constable. Praise was sparse in the Metropolitan Police. Fitz hadn’t embraced the role of constable to be admired, but he wanted to feel he was doing good and doing it well. It was sometimes blasted hard to tell.