Case of the Dixie Ghosts. A. A. Glynn
do Americans congregate in London?”
“Vell, the American Church, Tottenham Court vay, if you means square-rigged, prim, an’ proper Americans—but, knowin’ your trade, I suppose you don’t. I expect it’s Americans more rough around the edges you mean.”
“Two I can identify and there’s a third I can’t, a carriage driver who might not be an American. I don’t know how you do it, but you seem to know what’s going on all over London, though you hardly ever leave Seven Dials, you old rogue.”
“There’s one gaff that’s always gathered a crew of different nationalities, Yankees included,” Setty Wilkins said. “The Blue Duck pub at Chandler’s Stairs beside the river, ’ard by Hungerford Bridge. It’s a pretty low boozing-den. Could be the place to try.”
“Thanks, Setty, only this pair would object to being called Yankees,” Dacers replied.
Setty Wilkins gave him a crooked grin. “So it’s got something to do vith the big rumpus in America and the bunch that fought the Yankees—the coves from Dixie, as I ’ear they calls it? I heard there was some of that sort lurkin’ around the Blue Duck.”
“’Nuff said,” responded Dacers. “I suppose the place is at its liveliest at night?”
“Of course, and it can be no end of a rough shop. So remember that wound you got off Dandy Jem. Watch your step, old culley.”
* * * *
Dacers left Setty’s lair and crossed the broken cobbles again, thinking of the old man’s parting observation, and a sudden cold logic took hold of his mind. Here he was, with a strapped-up knife wound and, while unarmed himself, was seeking one man known to go armed and two others whose potential for trouble was unknown. Why? To deliver a feeble message that they had best behave themselves or the police would be informed. All at once, the whole project appeared ludicrous.
He recalled Roberta Van Trask’s troubled face and the appeal in her eyes as she sought his help. It really was a matter for the regular police, but he had volunteered the limited assistance he could offer, hardly giving a thought to anything but the girl’s beauty and her distress. It was as if he had been mesmerised into it. Then he wondered if he was falling in love with Miss Van Trask.
Dacers, ran his thoughts, Amos Twells had the measure of you when he called you an interfering busybody, and you certainly are a damned fool of a busybody who fancies himself a dashing knight in shining armour. You might be blundering into something that’ll end with you suffering much more than a swell mobsman’s knife wound.
Then his inborn chivalry took hold of him as he recalled the way the girl squared her shoulders and displayed her determination to defend the reputation of her father. He believed Theodore Van Trask to be as honest and devoted a servant of his country as any man, and he was being wronged in some unspecified way. So what could an Englishman who abhorred the use of guns, and who did not own one himself, do but take her side—even if it meant recklessly going up against men with the famous transatlantic penchant for firearms?
Consequently, when another February evening descended and river mists were creeping up from the malodourous Thames, he made his way to the vicinity of Hungerford Bridge and the Blue Duck tavern. Garbed to visit the hostelry described by Setty Wilkins as “no end of a rough shop,” he was in a working man’s suit of fustian with a muffler and a greasy woollen cap. The labourer’s obligatory short clay pipe drooped from his mouth.
Old Setty Wilkins seemed rarely to leave his engraving shop, but it was as if, like some wizard concealed in a cave, he could send his disembodied spirit forth to wander in every region of the great city, even its murkiest and most dangerous nooks and corners, discovering all manner of goings-on. When Setty gave Dacers a tip, it usually proved worth following, and Dacers felt his usual confidence in the old man’s tip concerning the Blue Duck.
It meant searching the margin of the River Thames where a huge sewer laying project and the creation of a vast riverside improvement was under way. Old buildings had been torn down and many more were in process of demolition. There was a confusion of temporary sheds, builders’ machinery, and piles of construction material around the base of Hungerfod Bridge, recently reconstructed to replace one designed by the ingenious Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
He wandered through this dark and entangled scenery and eventually found the Blue Duck in a dogleg of a lane leading down to the river. He heard it before he saw it. A fiddle was scraping and there was a harsh roaring of a music hall song: Champagne Charlie. The building was another huddled relic of a much earlier age, as were so many in London’s riverside region. Feeble yellow lamplight did its best to struggle out of dirty windows.
He moved out of the way as two tattered figures, one with an arm around the other’s shoulder, lurched out of the door warbling in unsure unison:
“Champagne Charlie is me name,
Champagne drinkin’ is me game
I’m the idol of the barmaids
Champagne Charlie is me name.”
Entering the den, Dacers glanced up to read the name of the licensee on the lintel: “Josiah Tooley, Licensed to Retail Beer, Porter, Spirits’ and Tobacco,” and he pushed open a creaking door, allowing a tide of raucous din to gush out. Inside, partially enveloped in a pall of tobacco smoke, was a jostle of roughly-clad men, some labourers, some seamen, many obviously foreign; river boatmen mixed in with garishly-gowned, painted women, plainly “dollymops” operated by the madams of riverside houses of joy. Fiddle and bellowing lungs continued the song.
He pushed his way through the crowd to the bar lined with loungers. Behind it sweated two barmen under the direction of a bald, obese man with a red face, clearly Mr. Tooley.
It was from the landlord that Dacers ordered a glass of grog while aware of mistrusting glances from those lining the bar, and from Tooley himself. A stranger, even one matching much of the clientele in dress, did not go unnoticed at the Blue Duck, it seemed.
Tooley pushed the mixture of rum and water across the counter and, over the din of the customers’ roaring, a new song, addressed Dacers with point-blank inquisitiveness: “Not your usual port of call, this gaff, is it?” His voice was heavy with suspicion, which was also reflected in his small eyes.
“No,” said Dacers. “Just looked in thinkin’ I might spot a cove I’m acquainted with. Seems he might come in here now and again.” There was an authentic touch to his mock Cockney.
“Not a disguised peeler, are you?” asked Tooley, point-blank again.
Dacers gave a dismissive laugh mingled with a touch of scorn. “Not any kind of peeler and never likely to be, but I’m lookin’ for a big bloke, American. with a fair moustache. Matter of business,” he tapped the side of his nose. The gesture, indicating business of a most private and personal nature, was readily understood by Josiah Tooley.
“I see,” said he. “I just don’t want the scandal of an arrest in here. It could give the place a bad name an’ that ’ud be a real disgrace.”
Dacers slyly took in the tough, drunken, and shifty-looking patrons and the over-painted dollymops. “I s’pose you’re right,” he replied without batting an eye.
Tooley said: “Can’t say I knows this bloke you mention, but there’s lots come in here at different times, and I can’t remember ’em all. It’s a very popular house, y’see. An’ very respectable, like I just told you.”
“I sees that,” confirmed Dacers, stone-faced.
Behind Dacers’ back, just visible beyond a phalanx of standing drinkers, hooting a boozy chorus, the door opened and two men entered. One was tall, heavily-built, and with a fair moustache. His companion was shorter, stocky, and with a pugnacious face under a billycock hat of the style favoured by the horse-racing community. Josiah Tooley, looking past Dacers, noticed them and suddenly said: “Well, I hopes you find your man, but I think you’ve been misinformed. He don’t sound like