A Christmas Revelation Page 7

  “Gold,” Squeaky replied. “Three men, I think. Definitely two. An older one and a younger. Quarreled. Think they might have killed the third.”

  “Ah! That one. Yeah, I think they did. Stupid, as then they lost the loot. All that for nothing.” Alf said that with satisfaction.

  “So tell me what you know,” Squeaky said. He could not turn back now, but he was not at all sure he really wanted to learn the details.

  “That’s it,” Alf protested, moving away a step.

  Squeaky seized his arm. “No, it isn’t. Names. Dates. How much gold. Where from, and where did they run to?”

  Alf looked at him. “What’s it worth?”

  “Nineteen shillings and sixpence,” Squeaky said slowly and carefully. That was the exact sum Alfred had kept when he should have handed it in—a policeman’s wages for a week.

  Alf paled. He said something under his breath, but Squeaky chose not to hear it. “Truscott and Company,” Alf said reluctantly. “Great Hermitage Street. Other side of the river.”

  “I know where it is. When?”

  “October the fifth. Two years ago, like you said. I don’t know how much. Well over two thousand pounds’ worth. I could live nice for the rest of my life on that!”

  “So could all of us,” Squeaky said with feeling. “Which way did they go with it?”

  “Toward the river. What else?”

  “All three of them?”

  “I don’t know, and that’s the truth.”

  “Where does the woman come into it?”

  “Woman? What woman?” Alf looked totally confused.

  “What time of day was it?”

  “Dunno, ’bout three, I think. They got away and then it got dark, lost them. Don’t know what happened. And that’s all.” He jerked his arm away from Squeaky’s grip.

  Squeaky was inclined to believe him. He let it go. It was a lot more than he’d had an hour before.

  There was no alternative but to go back across the river to the north bank again and find Goldie. As if that would take much doing!

  But was it worth it? What would he discover? That it was one more case of greedy people falling out over the spoils of a theft, hiding the haul, and then killing the one person who knew where it was? Now they were trying again to find it, with the daughter of the man they had murdered. It was both squalid and too easy to believe.

  How could he make that any better for Worm? Should he leave it alone? It was bad enough, and he could only find worse.

  What would they do with Eloise if she found the gold for them? Stupid question. If they had killed her father and she knew it, they would kill her. Too obvious.

  Two hours later, Squeaky was outside the familiar door to the club on the north side of the river, in the small back street. Goldie still owned it, and she lived above. He was nervous. His collar was too tight. His boots pinched. He was neither the man he had been, nor yet the one he wished to be.

  Damn it!

  He banged loudly on the door. He was about to do so a second time when it opened. A small woman stood just inside. At least, she was short, though she was not small in girth. She used to be generously proportioned; now she was just fat. Her hair was a brassy gold that nature had never intended. Indeed, to judge by her dark eyes and beautifully dark brows, nature had probably meant it to be black. In spite of the fact that she was at this moment not very surprised and not very pleased, she still had the remnants of the beauty that had once made her famous. It was there in the bones and the shape of her brows.

  There was sharp memory in her eyes. “Who in hell are you, then?” she said angrily.

  “Losing your memory, are you? Perhaps it’s just as well. I’m willing to lose some of mine, if you like?” Squeaky responded.

  “I don’t care what you do!” she snapped. “Just don’t do it on my front step.”

  “I wasn’t going to.” He pushed her shoulders gently, and she was obliged to step back or lose her balance. He followed her in and kicked the door shut with his heel, but not hard, only sufficiently to allow them both to enter.

  “And what do you want, after all this time?” she said bitterly.

  “Information,” he replied. “What else have I ever wanted?”

  She laughed harshly. “More than you were ever going to get!”

  “Likely more than you have, Goldie. Not more than you once had.” He walked past her into the sitting room. He was startled by how little it had changed. A bit more shabby, perhaps. The lamps were all still the same: colored glass in pinks and golds, flowers painted on them. Fringes that moved if you touched them. The same small tables with the barley-twist legs, and mirrors framed in gold, placed to give the illusion of space far more than there was. Illusion. How much to do with everything was an illusion? All memory, dreams, and wishes.

  How different really was he from Worm, with his silly ideas about Eloise?

  Suddenly he was furious with Eloise, for being so much less than a child thought she was. For himself, he didn’t care anymore whether Goldie was anything or nothing. He wasn’t a child; perhaps he never had been. He couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to know.

  “I want to find out about two thieves—Oldham and the younger one he worked with. Tell me about them and the gold robbery two years ago, at Truscott and Company.”

  She stood with her hands on her hips. “Why do you want to know? I don’t know where the gold is nor does anyone else.”

  “ ’Cos the only one who knows is dead, right?”

  She was surprised, but she tried to hide it. Then, watching his face, she knew she had failed. She shrugged sharply.

  “Tell me about those two,” he insisted.

  She walked over to the couch she favored, close to the fire, and sat down hard. She left him to find his own seat.

  “Nasty,” she began. “Because they’re afraid, inside themselves. Badly afraid.”

  Squeaky sat down very slowly. Nothing made a sound. No letting out of air from a cushion, no rattle or clang of springs, even though more than one of them was broken.

  “Oldham?” She was not asking him, rather calling up memories in herself.

  Squeaky knew it was for effect; she never forgot anything about people. Such knowledge was her stock in trade. It had been what she sold that made her different. Anything physical was thrown in, a foreplay, not the substance.

  Squeaky waited.

  “He wants to be somebody. He wants people to recognize him, remember him, you know…One of those people who only exist if other people know them. Leave him to himself, or pass him by without knowing him, and he’s empty. No one there.”

  Squeaky was beginning to get an idea, only the seed, nothing real yet. But he determined to remember what she had said. “And what about the younger one? What is he afraid of?”

  “No sense of direction,” she said thoughtfully, pushing her lower lip out in a gesture of distaste.

  Squeaky was disappointed. “Doesn’t sound like much.”

  She looked at him narrowly. “Do you know where you are?”

  “ ’Course I do…You mean he doesn’t?”

  “I mean he don’t…belong nowhere. And that’s no use to you. That he has everything exact, that’s part of what upset him so much about losing the loot. They did some kind of trick on him with the place they put the gold. Full of tricks, the whole lot of them.” She said it as if it were an affliction, like having lice.

  “What whole lot?” he asked. “There was an old one and a young one, and the old man that got killed. Who else?”

  “Maybe got killed,” she corrected, her mouth turning down at the corners. “Maybe not. His daughter, Lizzie, or whatever she was called, she’s a tricky one, too. One moment looks like a saint, next moment a tart, a minute after that, a good quiet little nothing as you wouldn’t look
at twice.”

  “Eloise?”

  “Maybe.” Goldie made a grimace of distaste. “What kind of a name is that?”

  The kind of name of someone you want to be, Squeaky thought. He said, “I don’t know. French, maybe?”

  “She’s as English as I am!” Goldie said in disgust. “Puts on airs like she’s some kind of lady, if you ask me.”

  “As English as you are?” Squeaky said. Then as soon as he saw her face, he regretted it. “Or me,” he added quickly.

  She could read him like an open book. She always had. But before, he had been young, and his hunger for some idea of love had made a fool of him. He had looked in all the wrong places. Now friendship mattered more. He smiled back at her to let her know his armor was complete. “So, she’s anything she wants to be, as suits her. In other words, she’s a woman. Got to survive, I suppose.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Goldie said incredulously. “You’re getting old, and soft in the ’ead!”

  “We all get old…at least the lucky ones do. Others die young.”

  “We don’t all get soft in the ’ead,” she pointed out.

  “No. Your ’ead’s still as hard as your heart.” Then, again, he wished he had not said that. He was letting his thoughts out too easily. Perhaps he was getting soft in something! “So, she’s clever…”

  “ ’Course she’s clever, you old fool! Too damn clever by half. She’ll end up getting herself killed. You’ll see.”

  “It was gold, not treasury notes and such?”

  “I already told you!”

  “How long did the old man have it? How long after the robbery did he disappear?”

  “Couple o’ days. I don’t know. What’s it to you, anyway? Why have you really come here?” She looked at him narrowly, suspicious again.

  Because a small boy had dreams that were really delusions…but Squeaky did not want her ever to find that out. It mattered too much. But at the same time, Worm must never think that Squeaky lied to him. That would be a disillusion too far. Life was full of realities that were hard to take. There had to be at least one person who never lied to you, no matter how painful the truth. But he couldn’t say that to Goldie. Damn it, it was hard enough to say to himself!

  “Looking to recall old times, I suppose,” he lied.

  She saw through it straightaway. Time had not been kind to her, and she knew it. And “old times” had not been so good either. Squeaky was not the kind to sentimentalize anything.

  He shrugged. “All right. I’d like to have that gold. It must still be around somewhere.”

  “Good luck, you silly old fool! It will cost someone else their life yet! See if it don’t.”

  Very reluctantly he rose to his feet. If he stayed, he was going to give away something that might matter. The less she knew of his business, the better. “Bye, Goldie,” he said, going to the door.

  * * *

  He saw Worm at breakfast the following morning in the kitchen, with the other staff.

  “Getting close to Christmas,” he said to nobody in particular.

  Worm sat up a little straighter.

  “Got more things to find,” Squeaky went on, quite casually. “Got an idea where I might get some nice gold-colored balls. Take Worm with me.” He thought of adding “to carry them” but had a better idea. “Always works to take a child with you.”

  “You’re a cynic!” Ruby, the kitchen maid, said.

  Squeaky’s eyebrows shot up. “Where’d you learn that word?”

  “From Mrs. Claudine…Mrs. Burroughs,” she corrected herself quickly. She was not in a position to be taking such liberties.

  Squeaky stood up. “Too sharp by half,” he said to Ruby. “Come on,” he added to Worm. “Leave you here, you’d eat all day!”

  Worm jumped to his feet.

  “Where’re we going?”

  “To find Eloise,” Squeaky said quietly, although they were at the back door and well out of earshot of the kitchen.

  “Why? What are we going to do? She didn’t want to come with us. She said so,” Worm pointed out.

  “People don’t always mean what they say,” Squeaky said a trifle sententiously. When he said “people” he actually meant women. He opened the back door and went outside, Worm on his heels. It was a little milder today. Perhaps it would not snow for Christmas after all. Squeaky had mixed feelings about that.

  “What are we going to do?” Worm persisted.

  Squeaky had been expecting the question. “First thing, we’re going to find Eloise. She may be in the same place, and she may not. Then we’re going to ask her the truth about why she’s staying with those two men, and what she means to do. If it’s the gold from the robbery, which they can’t find, or if it’s to pay them back for her father.”

  “And then what?”

  “Depends on what she says.” He was going to have to make it up a bit from here on. “We have to stop her trying to kill them, because they’ll end up killing her.”

  Worm grabbed his hand, pulling hard. “We’ve got to save her! And she wouldn’t kill them! She must want to prove as her father didn’t double-cross them!” There was desperation in his voice.

  Should Squeaky say that they needed to consider perhaps her father did do that? Would Worm want her to face that? And perhaps in her heart Eloise knew it anyway, and the opposite was what she was trying to prove? To get rid of that demon of doubt was her real need. And she was so tense because she was afraid she was wrong? What would she do if she was? Would she ever accept it?

  There was no way to know.

  Everyone has to accept disillusion sometime. Hardly anyone was as good as you believed. He supposed that was what love was: accepting someone the way they were. But nine was not the age to do that, and Christmas was not the time. Maybe the whole Christmas idea was an illusion? But too many people needed it to be real for anyone to hack pieces off it.

  Worm was silent, walking as quickly as he could, skipping a step or two to keep up. But he would not forget, and he’d keep on asking for an answer. Either that, or he’d come to the conclusion that Squeaky was going to lie to him, even if only through his silence. Then all silences became lies, or could.

  “We’ll ask her,” Squeaky said finally.

  Worm seemed satisfied with that.

  But finding Eloise was not so easy. They went back to the house where they had seen her before, but it appeared to be empty. The front room, from what they could see through the windows, looked vacant and dirty.

  “She’s not here,” Worm said miserably. “She wouldn’t leave it like that.”

  “You’re too used to luxury, you are!” Squeaky said, thinking of Claudine’s insistence on sweeping and scrubbing all the time. She kept the clinic like a hospital, or what he supposed a hospital was like. But then, it was a hospital, of sorts, now. “I’m going round the back.” He added, “Maybe she just wants people to think there’s no one here.” He had not spoken to Worm about seeing Goldie, or anything that he had been told. He would rather Worm didn’t know about that. There was no need. Squeaky did not really know why he wanted it kept secret, or, if he were being halfway honest, he did not want to admit it. The more he saw in hindsight, the less he liked.

  “Come on!” he said sharply. “Don’t just stand there!”

  He went all the way round to the back with Worm on his heels. They followed the alley behind the whole row of houses, and up the paved path between the rubbish tip and the outhouse, and to the back door. There was a light on in the kitchen.

  Squeaky glared at Worm and then opened the door and stepped in.

  Eloise was standing in the middle of the floor, a mop in her hand and a bucket at her feet. She looked startled, for a moment afraid, and then she recognized him. She held the mop a little like a weapon, as if she would use it as a lanc
e. It would have been effective at face height, sodden with dirty water.

  “What do you want now?” she demanded.

  Squeaky looked at the mop. “Why don’t you throw that dirty bucket of water down the drain and talk nicely? Worm here thinks you could use a bit of help. I asked questions round, of people I know. I reckon it’s the Truscott robbery your father was accused of. Gold was never found, that right?”

  She stood absolutely still, the mop still in her hands. “What do you know about it?”

  “Two men, maybe three,” Squeaky replied, pulling one of the hard-backed chairs out from under the table and pointing to a second for Worm to do the same. He sat down carefully. “One of them your father?”

  She eased the mop into the bucket and propped it against the wall. “No. He was going to do it with them, then he changed his mind.”

  Or that was what he told her, Squeaky thought. He said, “So who took the gold in the end? They didn’t, or they wouldn’t be after you to tell them where it is. They think that you know.” He looked straight at her. She was a pretty woman, in a quiet way. She had a face you could look at for a long time and still find it good. She had no business to be so attractive, but he would not look for the bad in her, for Worm’s sake.

  She sat down slowly opposite them, on the other side of the table. Suddenly she looked tired, and she avoided Squeaky’s eyes when she answered. “They talked him into it. I don’t know how. He didn’t need the money, not that badly, though business was hard—”

  “What did he do?” Squeaky interrupted.

  “He was a smith. Made things out of pewter. Jugs and teapots and salt dishes. He could make really beautiful stuff.” Her face had a soft, dreamy look, as if she was seeing memories of lovely things created, happy visions of the past.

  Squeaky looked at Worm and then back at her again. Perhaps her father really was an artist. And perhaps not. Better pretend to believe it, anyway. “Sounds good. What went wrong?” he asked.

  “A man commissioned a whole teapot set, hot-water jug, milk jug, everything. Money he paid for it was forged.” She looked on the edge of tears. Real tears? Or self-pity. The story could be true. There was lots of forged money around, from treasury notes through to threepenny bits. Must have been notes. An artist in metal surely wouldn’t be fooled that easily by coins.