Page 92 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

I had agreed to it. I had even, God help me, been persuaded of its logic. The logic remained sound. It had not grown one degree more comfortable for being sound.

Ajax lifted his head a full half-minute before I heard anything at all. He came to his feet, ears forward, and went to the library door. Then I heard Dawson’s voice, low, and beneath it, Will’s.

The breath I let go then was not a small one.

I had composed myself by the time the door opened. A man does not greet the safe return of a child he has sent into danger by flinging his arms about, however the impulse may present itself. I was on my feet, which I permitted myself, because Ajax was already at the door, and a man may follow his dog without comment.

“My lord,” Dawson said.

“Dawson.” I looked past him. “Will.”

The boy came in with his color high, his cap askew, and an expression I knew at once for trouble. He had something inside his coat. The coat was moving.

I elected, for the moment, to address the man rather than the coat. “Well?”

“We have your name, my lord.” Dawson set his hat on the side table. “Murphy. Took the better part of the day and three public houses to be certain of it, but there’s no doubt. Ginger. Scar down the cheek. The nose. Goes by Murphy and answers to nothing else. There’s not a publican in Bloomsbury that doesn’t know the face, though few of them care to say so aloud.” He paused. “I had to stand a good deal of gin to loosen the last of it, my lord. I’ll render the account.”

“Render me the man first. The account can wait.”

“He’s hired muscle.” Dawson said it flatly, the way he reported anything that mattered. “Not a thief, not a tough for the sport of it. A man you go to when you’ve a thing wants doing and you’d rather your own hands stayed clean. He’s done work for half the bad money south of the river and a fair portion north of it besides. And—” here he glanced, briefly, at the boy, and chose his words for the smaller ears in the room “—the names that came up most often in the same breath as his were two. A solicitor. And a doctor.”

“Strode and Carmody.”

“The very gentlemen, my lord.” Dawson’s mouth thinned. “A man at the Wolf and Lamb would say nothing at all of him beyond this one thing. Murphy would just as soon open your throat as bid you good evening and think no more of the one than the other. Said it quiet, my lord. Looked at the door while he said it.”

The room had gone very still. Even Will had stopped, the coat clutched to his chest, watching me with the gravity that came over him whenever the talk turned to the parts of the world that had used him hard before he came here.

So. Not a brute who had blundered. Not an accident of the street. A professional, kept on a retainer of fear, who had put his two hands against a woman’s shoulders on a clear afternoon and walked away. And either Strode and Carmody, or maybe both, had paid for Lydia’s murder.

“You did well,” I said to Dawson, and meant the whole of it. “Both of you.”

“The lad earned his share, my lord.” Dawson said it without his customary dryness, which was how I knew he meant it. “It was a crossing-sweeper put us onto the Wolf and Lamb. Boy of about his age. Wouldn’t give me the time of day, but he talked to Will here readily enough.”

It had not been my notion. It had been Dawson’s, and Will’s before it, and I had merely surrendered to it at the breakfast table. I did not correct him. Some victories a man permits the field to record in his favor, and this was not one I had won.

“And what,” I said, turning at last to the coat, “is that?”

Will’s chin came up. The defense he had been preparing all the way home arrived in a single breath. “You said I could choose it, that I could choose a dog of my own.” He drew the thing out of his coat and held it up before him in both hands.

It was a dog. After a fashion.

It was small, although I confess I had imagined something of a more finished sort—a neat terrier, perhaps, of decent breeding and biddable temper, a dog a gentleman’s ward might walk in the square without comment.

What Will held out to me was none of these things. It was a wiry, dun-colored scrap of indeterminate parentage, caked to the elbow in the distinct grey of London gutters, with one ear that stood and one that had given up the attempt, and an aroma that preceded it into the room by some distance and would linger after. It regarded me from Will’s hands with a pair of bright black eyes entirely undaunted by the grandeur of its surroundings, and, having taken my measure, drew back its lip and produced a growl of astonishing volume for a creature that would have fit in my hat.

Ajax, who outweighed it by perhaps eleven stone, took one dignified step backward.

“He was under the cart at the Wolf and Lamb,” Will said. “Nobody owned him. I asked. He bit a man already today.” This was offered not as a caution but as a credential. “Only a little. The man deserved it.”

“He smells,” I observed, “of the Thames at low tide.”

“He’ll wash.”

“He just growled at me.”

“He doesn’t know you yet.” Will gathered the appalling animal closer against his chest, and the growl subsided into a low rumble of provisional truce. “He’s brave. He’s not scared of nuttin.” He looked up at me. Beneath the defiance was the thing I had heard once before on the day he had first named what he wanted and braced himself to be refused it. “You said I could choose.”

I looked at the boy. I looked at the dreadful, valiant, malodorous creature he had carried halfway across London inside his coat, having selected it, of all the dogs in the city, precisely because no one else had wanted it. Because it was small and ferocious and afraid of nothing and had survived alone under a cart by the sheer force of refusing to be got rid of.