“Only a short while before leaving again. Said if I saw you, that she left you a note.”
Brodie nodded as he stepped under the overhang above the alcove. The Mudger, née Cavendish, joined him.
“I’ve seen it like this before out at sea. A big one is comin’. Could be like the one a few years back that flooded up to the Strand.”
“I need to find someone,” Brodie told him. “You might best know where he can be found—Mr. Brown.”
“Brown?” Mr. Cavendish spat out. “He’s a bad sort. You know as well as any that the man can’t be trusted. What might you want with that filthy, lyin’ bugger?”
It seemed the Mudger, known to commit crimes in the past, had no respect for the man.
“Does he still control the docks and the workers there?” Brodie asked.
Cavendish nodded. “As far as I know.”
“Ye know where to find the man?”
“I can put the word out… Is this about the two murders?” the Mudger asked, then, “I know, don’t ask. What I don’t know can’t hurt me. But still, there is Miss Forsythe. You know how she can be, no disrespect meant.”
None taken, Brodie thought. He knew exactly how she ‘could be.’
“She is off with her ladyship this evening. And if you work quickly, there is no need for her to know that I’ve sent ye off to see what ye can learn.”
“Right yer are,” Cavendish replied as he whistled for the hound who suddenly appeared from under the alcove.
“Me hat,” he told the hound, who disappeared once more into the alcove then reappeared with a battered bowler hat in his teeth.
Cavendish grinned as he firmly set the hat on his head, then wrapped the woolen scarf more securely about his neck.
“I’ve been teaching him to fetch. I hear the beasts are right smart that way.”
Brodie could imagine who might have told him that.
“Ye have yer blade?” he asked.
The Mudger patted his jacket. “Where I can get it right quick if I need it. And I have the hound.”
Not the defense Brodie would have preferred that he have where he was sending him.
“Brown will want to know what’s in it for him,” the Mudger reminded him.
“There will be a fee paid once I meet with him, and the information proves out. Not before.”
Brodie glanced overhead the sky.
“If ye canna find the man, get back before nightfall. No one will be about once new storm sets in.”
“As you would say, Mr. Brodie, it’s a fine soft rain.”
The Mudger grinned that gap-toothed smile as he paddled off on his platform, the hound running alongside and then disappeared through the pouring rain.
There was no one on the streets he trusted more than the Mudger. The man had an uncanny ability to change himself from ‘helpless beggar’to fierce enemy that few would want to encounter.
It was a lesson he’d learned a long time ago. The outcome, a draw if it was to be called anything, was a friendship of respect and care. And then there was the immediate bond between the cripple and Mikaela.
Not out of sympathy, because in the way of hers, that sense she claimed to have, she understood from the beginning that Mr. Cavendish would never have accepted it.
And that was another thing, Brodie thought as he put in a call to Mr. Dooley for any information he might have on Brown.
