Death and the Running Patterer Read Free Page B

The ‘Fighting Fifth,’ the duke called them. They’re also called the ‘Old, Bold Fifth’ and the ‘Ever-Fighting, Never-Failing Fifth.’”
    The patterer thanked the colonel and walked away. How strange, he thought, how very strange, that Captain Rossi should today profess ignorance of this time-honored custom of bestowing a nom de guerre on a regiment, when only the other day he had boasted of receiving his lieutenant’s commission in, of all units, the 5th. The regiment might be never failing, but the police chief’s memory seemed suddenly less reliable. Or was it? Was there something else at play?
    Dunne discreetly opened a small notebook and, as he had been trained to do by the best thieves in the Bow Street Runners, penciled in a heading, “Persons of Interest,” underneath which he wrote one name: F. N. Rossi.

CHAPTER FOUR

    Whate’er men do, or say, or think, or dream,
Our motley paper seizes for its theme.
    —Juvenal, translated by Alexander Pope (1709)

     
     
     
     
     
     
    N ICODEMUS DUNNE WALKED BRISKLY ALONG BUSTLING GEORGE Street, or the High Street as many still called it—some old settlers still even thought of part of it as Sergeant-Major’s Row. His mind was already occupied with the case. He had held back from the truth about his immediate intentions in his last words with Rossi. Yes, he wanted very much to chase his Jew and talk to the surgeon, but the governor had told him to spy while he worked and he had an obligation to his listeners as well as to his stomach. So he went about his usual routine. He already had copies of the main newspapers— The Australian, The Monitor and The Gleaner —with only The Gazette to pick up.
    Dunne’s first call was, as always, on an Emancipist named Sam Terry, the richest man in the colony. Terry had been transported at the turn of the century for stealing either geese or 400 socks, no one quite recalled.
    Dunne reported to Terry in a rough pub he ran in Pitt Street. There, among other business transactions, Terry took land titles as payment for gambling and drinking debts. Next door he ran a pawnshop for the poor. It was said that he held a fifth of all mortgages, more than the banks themselves, and owned rows of shops and dwellings.
    He was reputed to be worth 50,000 pounds a year—that’s as much as the Duke of Devonshire, marveled the patterer—so he could well afford the five shillings he gave each time to have the papers skimmed for him before anyone else. On this occasion, the dour Terry wanted only the latest shipping movements, commodity prices, news of contracts and property sales.
    Next, Dunne backtracked to call on James Underwood, another former convict. He lived in a stone mansion near the Tank Stream, an infinite improvement, thought the patterer, on serving fourteen years for stealing a ewe. Underwood, too, was prepared to pay for his news, as he was too busy building ships and making gin to read the papers himself.
    Dunne regaled the tycoon with a report of a duel on Garden Island. There had been no death or injury: “The combatants returned to Sydney, perfectly satisfied, in the same boat. The cause of the duel arose from a misunderstanding at cards.” He then finished a selection from “Police Incidents” with the tale of Catherine Wyer, “who was charged by her husband with breaking four pounds’ worth of crockery, picking his pockets and getting drunk on the proceeds and divers other scandalous outrages, to the subversions of all domestic economy. The bench sent her to the factory for one month, and Wyer said he would pay to keep her there.”
    But the item that most caught Underwood’s ear was an announcement that Marr’s Rooms in Castlereagh Street had received a new consignment of English willow cricket bats. Dunne knew that boys at play and often even the men of the two main clubs, the Australian and the military, used bats of ironbark or cedar to slog out their “notches,” still so called because, paper being