Morton descended from his hackney-coach in Petticoat Lane, just south of Highgate Street. The rain had finished and it was clear now, with a bright half-moon shining, so that he could see a long way up and down London's most notorious market for prostitutes. Even well after midnight it was as crowded with figures as a normal street in daylight, women and men moving busily up and down, and the shrill voices of drag-tailed Sally and her sisters began at once to urge him from several sides.
News that there was a “horney” in the neighborhood would spread quickly, so Morton pulled the brim of his topper down over his brow, bent his head, and strode resolutely away. Opposite the East India warehouses he entered Parker's Alley and passed through into the dingy silence of tiny Cox Square. In a few moments he came out into narrower, less frequented Bell Lane.
Here it was much darker, and completely still. The lightless bulk of Constitution Brewery loomed above, blocking out the moonshine. All the old, nondescript buildings on this cheerless street were unlit, except for a dim yellowish glow deep behind the dirty glass of number 12, midway along. Toward this pale beacon Morton made his way, wondering what had brought young Glendinning to such a place. Was Louisa Hamilton utterly wrong in her belief in her fiance's honour? Many women were.
No signboard marked the Otter, but it was a public house for all that, and its door was not latched or guarded. Two stone steps down into total obscurity, around a narrow corner, and then, removing his hat and bending, he passed through a low archway. Just as he did he encountered a fat man dressed like a shopkeeper, who was coming out. Something about Morton seemed to alarm him and he ducked his jowled head shamefacedly, brushing past and out into the street. Morton went into the taproom. Small lamps glowed in the corners, but it took his eyes several moments to adjust to the dimness. He was immediately aware that there were people in the place but, uncannily for a tavern on a normally busy night, there was no movement and no sound. Gradually the forms of low benches along the walls emerged, and two small, freestanding tables. A plank bar ran along one side, behind which, on his stool, sat the hunched, motionless figure of the barman. Behind him, rising over his barrels, a set of steep wooden stairs led upward into even deeper obscurity. At one of the tables two other men sat, looking steadily at the newcomer.
Hat still in hand, Morton made his way across to the empty table, pulled up a flimsy chair, and sat down. The publican very slowly stirred himself and presently arrived at his side.
“Yer pleasure, sir.”
“A line of the old author. And a candle.”
The man shuffled to the far side of the room and fetched one of the small, smoking pewter lamps and set it down before Morton. He was a dry, balding man, perhaps fifty years old, slight of build and dressed in a loose white smock and threadbare trousers. As he slouched away again Morton looked about himself. When his eyes met those of the two men at the other table, they looked down at their hands. He saw now that another figure-apparently a man-lay motionless on one of the benches along the stone basement wall, one arm trailing down with its knuckles in the dirty sawdust covering the floor. Otherwise the room seemed empty. But Morton sensed other presences, other eyes watching him, and set about discreetly trying to find them.
By the time the barman had finished uncorking the dusty bottle and pouring out his glass, Morton had discovered a pale shape in the shadowy corner below and to the right of the bar. There seemed to be some sort of recess in the wall there, perhaps an old root- or ice-cellar, and peering from its depths there was, he saw now, a small, motionless face.
“Lucy!” harshly barked out the keep in a dry, coughing voice. “Where's that little wagtail? Lucy!”
The small face vanished back into its obscurity and then, moments later, a miniature female figure emerged from behind the wall quite on the far side of the bar. There must, Morton saw, be some connecting passage joining the two places, perhaps only large enough for a child to slip through.
For a child was the owner of the face he had glimpsed, and who now dutifully approached his table, bearing his dram carefully in two hands. Dressed in an utterly filthy dun-coloured scrap of robe, her dust-grey hair chopped short and sticking out in tufts around her head, she looked to be nine or ten years of age. But Morton knew how deceiving such appearances could be, here where a lifetime's knowledge of good and evil could be compressed into a year or two, and where human beings matured quickly, or not at all. The girl set the clouded glass down cautiously before him, and then made an odd awkward dip, a kind of hurried curtsey. Dark, curious eyes looked up at him, set in sharp, strangely knowing features. Then she wheeled and was gone in a little rush back into the gloom beyond the bar.
As his glance followed her, he caught sight of others. Partway up the wooden staircase, three little crouching forms, three more female faces, peering down at him. The instant he noticed them, they scrambled silently upward out of sight.
Henry Morton drew a heavy breath, and drank down half his glass in one swallow. He made a peremptory gesture to the keep, calling him over to the table.
“So,” Morton addressed him in the language of the streets, “this be a nanny-house?” And he inclined his head toward the stairwell.
“It may be. You hanker for a bit of a curtezan, do you? A little kinchin-mort?”
Morton could hardly contain a grimace. “Courtesans” seemed rather a grotesque term for the pitiful little females he had glimpsed on the stairs.
Before he could put another query, however, a new voice spoke, clear and deliberate.
“Guard yerself, Joshua. He's a horney.”
Morton twisted round in anger. It was one of the two men at the other table, the larger, burlier one, who gave him one hard, defiant stare, then looked down again.
“We've a lawful public, here,” the barman protested, backing away. “Drink yer swig and leave us be.” It was true enough. Morton knew that formal justice was largely powerless to stop the overt business of a house like this. The only charge that could even be laid was that of creating a “common nuisance,” and with no one working the sidewalk outside the house, this would be impossible to sustain. But there were other pressures that could be applied.
“Come back here,” he ordered the man, dropping the pretence of being an ordinary customer. “I've some questions for you, and you'll answer them smart if you want to continue vending drink in this parish.”
The tapster edged back, reluctantly. Only a tiny percentage of the tens of thousands of public houses in London actually possessed the required licence. But if an officer suddenly insisted on one, he could, at least for a time, make some misery for a place.
“Last night you'd another gentleman in here,” Morton told him, watching him closely as he spoke. “He was well dressed, in black pantaloons and a dark green coat. He left in a hackney-coach, somewhere around the hour of ten.”
Joshua mumbled something to the effect that he'd served plenty of customers yesterday, and how was he to remember-
“He drank more than was good for him,” Morton interrupted, “and someone from this house helped him into his coach.” Joshua's rheumy eyes flickered over to the other table, to the man who had warned him that Morton was police. The other man stared back impassively now, saying nothing. His companion gazed off as if distracted.
“Plenty of coves as drink too much,” said Joshua.
“Yes, but this man stood out. You don't get his sort often-very finely dressed, like a dandy. I've no doubt you remember him.”
Another flicker of the eyes in the direction of the other table. At the other table, the same impassive stare.
“I don't recollect him. But I haven't always been here, have I?”
“He left by hackney-coach. The driver took him from your very door.” Morton decided to bluff. “He said one of the men who helped him into the coach was the publican.”
He watched the man's eyes, which slid away toward the others. “I don't recollect such a man.”
Morton turned in irritation to the second table.
“What about you two? Did you see the gentleman?”
“We wasn't here yesternight,” responded the burly man.
“No, I'm sure no one was here,” Morton muttered. “And why would that be, I wonder?”
He did not offer to pay for his brandy as he stood, and the keep did not make any effort to remind him of it. For an officer of police to pay for something at a flash house would be to grant it a degree of legitimacy, and neither Morton nor any of his brother officers ever did. An honest house was quite another matter.
“If I were a cully, like some I see here tonight,” he announced generally, “I'd give some serious consideration to my liberty and my livelihood, and to what I might be able to do to help the officers charged to keep His Majesty's peace. I'd take some time, for example, to think over what passed here yesternight, so that I could tell them next time they asked. Because they'll be back to ask again, sure.”
“This here's a lawful house,” objected Joshua. “And Bow Street knows it, even if you don't.”
“I am Bow Street,” said Morton.
To this Joshua grunted unintelligibly and the men at the second table both looked mutely down into their mugs again.
Well, he could get no more from them. He gave his hat a brief, contemptuous brush with one hand, as if to rid it of the contagion of their presence, and went out.