The Inquiry Agent Read online

  Then I accepted Mr Soames’s cheque and left Brighton House forever.

  And so, quite predictably I suppose, I ended up playing the Jonathan Wild part in this tale. Billy Tucker was sent to Australia for the rest of his natural life for a crime he did not commit and I bore false witness to make sure it happened. Dainty Dave Smedley died of a wound that I inflicted and I was not punished for it, in fact I was rewarded. I took Mr Soames’s money under false pretences, having blackmailed it out of him.

  And yet, I cannot quite bring myself to regret it. I have no doubt that Billy Tucker would have done me harm if he could. And I did do what Mr Soames had hired me to do and kept his secret until now when it no longer matters. And I cannot imagine this world is a worse place for Dainty Dave’s absence although I am not glad he died.

  Our lives, unfortunately, are not like Mr Dickens’s books. At the end the virtuous are not rewarded and the guilty are not punished as they deserve to be, which is why perhaps we love those endings so.

  I suppose I should be grateful, for always I seem to be numbered among the guilty. In some way, we all are. Life is messy and the endings we find ourselves involved in are not always the satisfactory and distinct conclusions we would have them be. That is simply the way of things.

  A few months later I met Bart Tobin returned from whatever distant place he had been lurking in. He laughed and congratulated me on what I had done to Billy. He seemed to respect me for getting him transported for Bart’s own crimes. Certainly, in the months that followed the folk of The Rat’s Nest treated me as if I was a dangerous man with the power of life or death over them.

  I joined Mrs Marshall and Donald and Rachel by the sea and we made a holiday of it for a few weeks. Rachel’s health improved and when we returned to London I found new lodgings for us. I did not want my children to grow up where Dave Smedley had bled his life out on the floor.

  Mostly I still remember that on our last day in Portsmouth, I stood with the children looking out to sea and thinking that it would be nice if we could live the rest of our lives there, but the money that I had earned from Mr Soames was finite and I knew sooner or later we must always go back to London, for life is hard and a man must work.

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  Wednesday, April 7th, 1841

  Thursday, April 8th, 1841

  Friday, April 9th,1841

  Saturday, April 10th 1841

  Sunday, April 11th 1841

  Monday, April 12th 1841

  Tuesday, April 13th, 1841

  Friday, April 30th, 1841