The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton Read Free Book Online Page A

opposite sex in the same room. (Perhaps the most bizarre example of lodgings of the period was the famous waterfront sailors’ “penny hangs.” Here a drunken seaman slept the night for a penny, draping himself across chest-high ropes, and hanging like clothes on a line.)
    While some proprietors of lodging houses, or netherskens, lived in the area—and often accepted stolen goods in lieu of rent—many owners were substantial citizens, landlords
in absentia
who employed a tough deputy to collect the rents and keep some semblance of order.
    During this period there were several notorious rookeries, at Seven Dials, Rosemary Lane, Jacob’s Island, and Ratcliffe Highway, but none was more famous thanthe six acres in central London that comprised the rookery of St. Giles, called “the Holy Land.” Located near the theatre district of Leicester Square, the prostitute center of the Haymarket, and the fashionable shops of Regent Street, the St. Giles rookery was strategically located for any criminal who wanted to “go to ground.”
    Contemporary accounts describe the Holy Land as “a dense mass of houses so old they only seem not to fall, through which narrow and tortuous lanes curve and wind. There is no privacy here, and whoever ventures in this region finds the streets—by courtesy so called—thronged with loiterers, and sees, through half-glazed windows, rooms crowded to suffocation.” There are references to “the stagnant gutters … the filth choking up dark passages … the walls of bleached soot, and doors falling from their hinges … and children swarming everywhere, relieving themselves as they please.”
    Such a squalid, malodorous and dangerous tenement was no place for a gentleman, particularly after nightfall on a foggy summer evening. Yet in late July, 1854, a red-bearded man in fashionable attire walked fearlessly through the smoke-filled, cramped and narrow lanes. The loiterers and vagrants watching him no doubt observed that his silver-headed cane looked ominously heavy, and might conceal a blade. There was also a bulge about the trousers that implied a barker tucked in the waistband. And the very boldness of such a foolhardy incursion probably intimidated many of those who might be tempted to waylay him.
    Pierce himself later said, “It is the demeanor which is respected among these people. They know the look of fear, and likewise its absence and any man who is not afraid makes them afraid in turn.”
    Pierce went from street to stinking street, inquiring after a certain woman. Finally he found a lounging soak who knew her.
    “It’s Maggie you want? Little Maggie?” the manasked, leaning against a yellow gas lamppost, his face deep shadows in the fog.
    “She’s a judy, Clean Willy’s doll.”
    “I know of her. Pinches laundry, doesn’t she? Aye, she does a bit of snow, I’m sure of it.” Here the man paused significantly, squinting.
    Pierce gave him a coin. “Where shall I find her?”
    “First passing up, first door to yer right,” the man said.
    Pierce continued on.
    “But it’s no use your bothering,” the man called after him. “Willy’s in the stir now—in Newgate, no less—and he has only the cockchafer on his mind.”
    Pierce did not look back. He walked down the street, passing vague shadows in the fog, and here and there a woman whose clothing glowed in the night—matchstick dippers with patches of phosphorous on their garments. Dogs barked; children cried; whispers and groans and laughter were conveyed to him through the fog. Finally he arrived at the nethersken, with its bright rectangle of yellow light at the entrance, shining on a crudely hand-painted sign which read:
    LOGINS FOR
THRAVELERS
    Pierce glanced at the sign, then entered the building, pushing his way past the throng of dirty, ragged children clustered about the stairs; he cuffed one briskly, to show them there was to be no plucking at his pockets. He climbed the creaking stairs to the second