The western end of Buckbridge Street was only a stone’s throw from Oxford Street; not in itself a notorious address, but it was the area that lay beyond the street’s eastern border, trapped between Broad Street to the south and Great Russell Street to the north, which deterred those citizens of a more upstanding character from venturing uninvited into its shadowy maw.
Covering close to ten acres, the St Giles Rookery was a fetid maze of crumbling tenements, roofless hovels, dank cellars, crooked passageways and rat-infested sewers. To law-abiding Londoners it was a filthy, festering sore; a canker eating away at the city’s heart. To its inhabitants – those who were seen as living on the more disreputable fringes of society – it was home. The Hanged Man was a refuge within a refuge.
On the ground floor, dense tobacco fumes rising from the tables had merged with the smoke from the hearth to form an opaque layer of fog which sat suspended between windowsill and ceiling. A hubbub of conversation and coarse laughter filled the room. In one corner, close to the fire, a fiddler – blind in one eye and seemingly oblivious to the din around him – was attempting to scrape out a tune on an instrument in dire need of a new set of strings. At his feet, a small wire-coated terrier rested its head on its paws, while his immediate neighbour, a drunken moll, sprawled half in and half out of her chair, her large, blue-veined breasts spilling like opened sacks of lard from her part-fastened bodice.
Reached by a staircase leading up from the back of the taproom, the first floor was noticeably quieter. At a table next to the rear window, a game of dominoes was in progress. Relaxed and unbothered by the sounds filtering from below, the four players studied the pattern of tiles laid out on the table before them; each man ruminating over his hand and the move he was about to make.
“Jesus, Del, you’ve been lookin’ at those bloody bones for ’alf an hour. How long’s it goin’ to take?”
The speaker, a balding, morose-looking individual with stubbled jowls and a silver ring in his right ear, rolled his eyes towards his other two companions in exaggerated disbelief.
“I’m thinkin’, ain’t I?” the player to his left protested. Of a similar age to the speaker, but with a fuller face and salt-and-pepper hair, he wrinkled his brow as he contemplated his remaining tiles and scratched his chin with the edge of a stubby thumb.
“Well, think faster. God knows, I ain’t gettin’ any younger.”
“You take your time, my son.” It was the bearded player to the speaker’s right who spoke. “Jasper’s only narked ’cos he’s down a bob. If he was up, he wouldn’t be botherin’.”
“Plus he wants us to forget it’s ’is round,” the player opposite Jasper murmured without raising his head. “Mine’s another brandy, when you’re ready.”
“Heard that,” the first speaker responded. “I’ll get ’em in soon as Del here makes up ’is mind.”
“You catch that, Del?” the bearded man said. “Best get a move on.”
“There,” Del said, as he slid his tile across the table and deposited it at the end of the row. “How’s that?”
Jasper stared down at Del’s contribution and then at his own instantly redundant counters. “Double three? Double three?”
“Make that two bob.” The bearded man – whose name was Ned – grinned as he added his own tile to the opposite end of the row. “I were you, I’d get the drinks in afore Del cleans you out. Mine’s a porter.”
As the player opposite him – stocky, broad-shouldered, with a craggy face and close-cropped, pewter-coloured hair – relinquished his remaining tile, Jasper snorted in disgust, regarded the man to his left with exasperation and muttered darkly, “One of these days. One of these bloody days …”
Placing his leftover tiles on the table he rose from his chair. “Right, I’m off to the pisser. Get ’em in. I’ll settle up when I get back.”
“Heard that one before,” Del chuckled as he totted up the score on a ragged scrap of paper. Calculations made, he began to spread the tiles face down in preparation for another game.
By which time Jasper was already out of earshot and heading for the back stairs.
“You want to watch it,” Ned warned. “You wind him up too hard and the bugger’ll snap. Seen Jasper when he snaps. Not a pretty sight. Last time it ’appened, he chewed a watchman’s ear off. He was spittin’ gristle for a week.”
“Nah,” Del said confidently. “Bark’s worse than ’is bite.”
“Tell that to the poor sod who lost ’is ear.”
As the two men traded quips, their companion, seated with his back to the window, remained silent, his right hand curved around his glass. From his posture and calm expression, he looked at ease with his surroundings, though as he surveyed the floor his watchful eyes told a different story. Raising his glass to his lips, his attention moved towards the table at the top of the stairs and the man seated there alone, reading a book.
Sensing he was under observation, the reader looked up and met the grey-haired man’s study with an even gaze. The connection lasted perhaps a second before the grey-haired man’s eyes moved on, scanning the room.
Forger Jimmy Radd was in his usual corner, one hand on his glass of rum, the other resting on the arm of a stick-thin moll with a strawberry birthmark just visible along the curve of her throat. At the counter, hunched in seats made from empty Madeira casks, cracksman Willy Mellows was in deep conversation with Abel McSwain, the local fence, while two tables away a bespectacled, scholarly dressed individual, known to all as The Padre – in reality a physician struck off for gross misconduct – was making notes in the margin of a well-thumbed, leather-bound copy of the Book of Common Prayer, interspersing his scribbles by taking measured sips from the glass of gin resting by his right elbow. Glancing sideways over the rim of his spectacles, he acknowledged the grey-haired man’s perusal with a small nod before returning to his jottings.
Tiles arranged to his satisfaction, Del sat back. “All set.” Frowning, he looked around. “Bugger not back yet? Got a nerve, tellin’ me I’m takin’ my time. All he ’as to do is shake it dry.”
“It was his round, don’t forget,” Ned said.
“Tight sod,” Del said. “In that case, mine’s a large one. That’ll teach him.” Del paused as he glanced over Ned’s shoulder. “’Old up, ’e’s here.”
Jasper’s head had reappeared at the top of the stairs.
“He don’t look too happy,” Ned observed.
It didn’t need a genius to see that Jasper did indeed look, if not in the best of spirits then certainly more than a little distracted. His ascent from the passageway leading to the outdoor privy was slow, almost hesitant.
“God’s sake,” Del muttered sotto voce, “now, what?”
As two men rose into view beyond Jasper’s left shoulder.
At which point Jasper was propelled forward by a hard shove in the back and the duo behind him stepped into plain sight.
Both were dressed for the weather, in wide-brimmed hats and long, calf-length riding coats, the collars turned up. Both coats hung open, revealing a pistol stuck in each man’s belt. The pistols were clearly back-up weapons, as each man hefted a thirty-inch-long Barbar blunderbuss which, prior to that moment, they had been concealing beneath the rainwear. As Jasper went sprawling, chairs toppled and customers scattered, only to become rooted as the gunmen brought their weapons to bear.
“Ah, shite,” Del said, the blood draining from his face.
The grey-haired