Free Death at Hungerford Stairs by J C Briggs Page A

matted head, and it was dragging something along. Scrap had shrunk back into his doorway, covering himself with the sack he used for his coat, and his bedding, so that he looked just like a heap of discarded refuse. The thing had shambled by and he had heard the sound of something banging on the stones. Before that he had seen a thin stick of a woman struggling with a man who pinned her against the dripping wall, and tore at her, and pummelled her with his fists until she slid down the wall, and the man lay on top of her. Scrap had huddled back through the hole in his door, but he could hear the man grunting, and the woman groaning. Then there was nothing. In the morning, they were gone.
    Scrap had no sense of time; he heard, without registering the meaning, the distant clocks strike the hours. It was two o’clock in the morning now, and the lane was quiet. He did not know how long he had waited – days, he thought. He was sometimes hungry and always cold, but he had only one fixed idea and that was how to get Poll out. He had talked to a cross-eyed boy who came and went through the blistered door. The boy had no curiosity about Scrap who was just there sometimes and who would give him a penny in return for bread. There were plenty of ragged boys about. This one seemed to live in the ruined garden opposite. He wasn’t always there – out on the scavenge, the boy supposed, but he was all right. The cross-eyed boy was glad to get a penny for the bread – there was plenty of food in the house for a boy who knew just when to filch it from the empty kitchen.
    Scrap was patient. No sense in hurrying the cross-eyed boy. There would be a moment when he could ask to see inside, ask if there were any jobs, ask if he could earn a bit of bread by helping the cross-eyed boy who sometimes came out of the wooden door with more than one sack which he had to take to a house where a mountainous woman with a face like a bulldog’s would pay him. The cross-eyed boy had to take the money back to Nat Boney. Scrap knew it all. He had followed the cross-eyed boy, and he just had to wait for the right time when he could say he had no more pennies, but that he would help with the sacks in which the dogs would twist and writhe. Once, the cross-eyed boy came out with a starved-looking greyhound on a lead which he took to the entrance of a great square lined with white houses where a man in footman’s livery took it and gave the cross-eyed boy a purse in exchange. And if, when he helped the boy with a sack, Poll was in it, then he would seize it and run like the wind. Pity the cross-eyed boy when Nat Boney knew he had lost a dog, but Scrap did not care about that.
    Tomorrow it would be. Tomorrow, he would get in. If the cross-eyed boy did not come, Scrap would go in, and ask for food, a job, anything. There was a woman. He had seen her throwing bits of food to the dogs. He had seen her come into the alley earlier. He had watched her, a girl, really, thin with fair hair scraped back from a long face where a bruise showed livid against the pale skin. In her slate-coloured gown and drab cloak, she had looked sad, he thought, and crushed somehow, and she had glanced behind her as if she was frightened that someone would follow her. She had carried a basket. He had wondered where she was going and if she would come back. She had come back about an hour later, and she had slipped in through the door. Then he had heard the dogs barking and whining, and he had heard Poll, her high, short yaps, distinguishable to him from the others. Perhaps the girl might go out again, perhaps he might slip in as she closed the door, and perhaps he might see where Poll was. He might be able to hide in the yard somewhere, and release Poll, and take her home.
    Home. For the first time in days, he thought of the shop where Eleanor and Tom Brim would be waiting. The memory was sharp as an ache. Did they think he had left them? Not Miss Nell. She would know.
    Somewhere a clock