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

floor, and asked after the woman named Maggie. He was told she was in the kitchen, and so he descended again, to the basement.
    The kitchen was the center of every lodging house, and at this hour it was a warm and friendly place, a focus of heat and rich smells, while the fog curled grayand cold outside the windows. A half-dozen men stood by the fire, talking and drinking; at a side table, several men and women played cards while others sipped bowls of steaming soup; tucked away in the corners were musical instruments, beggars’ crutches, hawkers’ baskets, and peddlers’ boxes. He found Maggie, a dirty child of twelve, and drew her to one side. He gave her a gold guinea, which she bit. She flashed a half-smile.
    “What is it, then, guv?” She looked appraisingly at his fine clothes, a calculating glance far beyond her years. “A bit of a tickle for you?”
    Pierce ignored the suggestion. “You dab it up with Clean Willy?”
    She shrugged. “I did. Willy’s in.”
    “Newgate?”
    “Aye.”
    “You see him?”
    “I do, once and again. I goes as his sister, see.”
    Pierce pointed to the coin she clutched in her hand. “There’s another one of those if you can downy him a message.”
    For a moment, the girl’s eyes glowed with interest. Then they went blank again. “What’s the lay?”
    “Tell Willy, he should break at the next topping. It’s to be Emma Barnes, the murderess. They’ll hang her in public for sure. Tell him: break at the topping.”
    She laughed. It was an odd laugh, harsh and rough. “Willy’s in Newgate,” she said, “and there’s no breaks from Newgate—topping or no.”
    “Tell him
he
can,” Pierce said. “Tell him to go to the house where he first met John Simms, and all will be well enough.”
    “Are you John Simms?”
    “I am a friend,” Pierce said. “Tell him the next topping and he’s over the side, or he’s not Clean Willy.”
    She shook her head. “How can he break from Newgate?”
    “Just tell him,” Pierce said, and turned to leave.
    At the door to the kitchen, he looked back at her, a skinny child, stoop-shouldered in a ragged secondhand dress spattered with mud, her hair matted and filthy.
    “I’ll tell,” she said, and slipped the gold coin into her shoe. He turned away from her and retraced his steps, leaving the Holy Land. He came out of a narrow alley, turned into Leicester Square, and joined the crowd in front of the Mayberry Theatre, blending in, disappearing.

CHAPTER 9

The Routine of Mr. Edgar Trent
    Respectable London was quiet at night. In the era before the internal combustion engine, the business and financial districts at the center of the town were deserted and silent except for the quiet footsteps of the Metropolitan Police constables making their twenty-minute rounds.
    As dawn came, the silence was broken by the crowing of roosters and the mooing of cows, barnyard sounds incongruous in an urban setting. But in those days there was plenty of livestock in the central city, and animal husbandry was still a major London industry—and indeed, during the day, a major source of traffic congestion. It was not uncommon for a fine gentleman to be delayed in his coach by a shepherd with his flock moving through the streets of the city. London was the largest urban concentration in theworld at that time, but by modern standards the division between city and country life was blurred.
    Blurred, that is, until the Horse Guards clock chimed seven o’clock, and the first of that peculiarly urban phenomenon—commuters—appeared on their way to work, conveyed by “the Marrowbone stage”; that is, on foot. These were the armies of women and girls employed as seamstresses in the sweatshops of West End dress factories, where they worked twelve hours a day for a few shillings a week.
    At eight o’clock, the shops along the great thoroughfares took down their shutters; apprentices and assistants dressed the windows in preparation for the day’s commerce,