Free The Thief-Taker : Memoirs of a Bow Street Runner by T.F. Banks Page B

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 herhead, 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