The Candle Man by Alex Scarrow Read Free Book Online Page A

ground painfully together. ‘Keep yer fuckin’ voice down, Polly,’ he hissed.
    ‘You’re hurtin’ me!’ she whimpered.
    ‘Course I’m fuckin’ hurtin’ you, love, ’cause you keep blabbin’ so loud we’re all gonna end up swinging on rope at the tuck-up fair. So you can either
speak softly, or shut yer trap.’
    She nodded mutely.
    ‘Now . . . tell me what you two did with it.’
    Annie spoke, tapping her clay pipe on the table and dusting the ash off with her hand onto the floor. ‘Like we does every other time. It’s just pieces now. Different
places.’
    ‘Good.’
    ‘An’ what about the woman, Bill?’
    He shrugged. ‘That’s my business. She’s gone.’
    They sat in silence for a while, watching the inn’s patrons from the corner booth. Watching the usual evening’s pattern unfold: working men delaying the moment they have to return
home with one final mug of the wet stuff; a row of tarts propping up the bar, puffing on clay pipes like royal trumpeters blowing a fanfare of smoke.
    ‘Like I told yer, we been paid a pretty penny for this,’ said Bill. ‘A gentleman put his pecker in the wrong place an’ we tidied up his consequences. That’s all
there is to it.’
    ‘We was talking,’ said Annie. ‘Before you turned up.’ She glanced at Polly, who offered her the slightest nod of moral support. ‘Reckon, ’cause you
wasn’t straight up with us, ’cause of that posh street where she was livin’, and on account of the baby not being a newborn . . . we ought to ’ave twice as much as we said
we’d do it for. S’only fair, Bill.’
    He eyed her silently.
    ‘If you’d been straight with us from the first, we would’ve asked for more. That wasn’t just a normal crib-rat.’
    He could hear the wobble of fear in her voice.
    Silly bitch is scared of me.
    Of course she was. She’d watched him nearly behead the woman in the hallway. Watched him do it calmly and professionally, like it was no trouble at all. Like he was cutting himself a slice
of bread from a loaf.
    He casually drew a circle in the spilled beer on the wooden table, taking his time to answer. The thing was, given how much the gentleman was already paying, he could easily afford to double
what those two had asked for. Better still, that locket he’d found – that precious little locket that had fallen from the woman’s clothes, tucked away, something so precious, so
valuable – that locket made this job a whole different thing.
    A different business contract altogether.
    His other hand absently stole into the pocket of his coat, played with the warm, smooth surface of the locket, flicked open and closed the clasp.
    A very different situation altogether.
    He smiled. Why not let these two share a little of the good news? Not that he was going to tell them what he was holding in his pocket, or what it meant, but it wouldn’t hurt for them to
know there was chance of a little more gravy coming out of this pudding if they played along like good girls.
    He was seeing the gentleman tomorrow. An agreed rendezvous in a dark place where matters could be discussed and payment made. Bill had never actually done business with a man who spoke like this
one did, like some duke or lord. Not just posh, but old posh . . . the kind that went back generations, had a coat of arms, went back to olden times.
    He realised if he was going to play games with the gentleman, then he was going to have to play oh-so-cleverly. If he was going to tell him what he’d found on the woman, and that this
little discovery was going to significantly alter the original agreement, he’d better be bloody careful about it.
    Gentleman like that don’t walk around the docks all on his lonesome, does he?
    A gentleman like that most probably had a couple of lackeys tucked away beyond earshot and out of sight, but close enough to jump and chiv him at a sign: the lighting of a match, the deliberate
stroking of a nose.
    And it would be a proper foolish