The Tick of Death Read Free Page B

along Northumberland Avenue in the direction of the Embankment.
    There, by the Thames, where he and Thackeray had so often plotted the arrest of dangerous men, Cribb pondered his assistant’s strange conduct. Strange —it was unbelievable that a constable who had faced corpses, crocodiles, even naked chorus girls, in the name of law and order should so abandon his principles as to consort with the dynamite party. Thackeray an informer? Thackeray the lion-hearted, the man above all others he would have at his side in an emergency? Monstrous.
    Yet as he stood at the Embankment wall and regarded the river—not the steam-launches and sailing-barges, nor the beguiling glitter of afternoon sunlight, but the water itself below him, turbid and thick with impurities, flowing more rapidly than ever it appeared from a cursory glance across the surface—Cribb decided to re-examine his opinion of Thackeray. It took several more minutes’ contemplation of the water to achieve the detachment to penetrate the layers of loyalty and regard formed in five years. What was then revealed—what he really knew of the man—was so slight that he winced at the realisation.
    He called himself a detective and all he knew about his principal assistant was that he stood six feet tall in his socks, sported a grey beard and was game for anything except educational classes. Exaggeration, perhaps, but not short of the truth. Oh, there were other details—the fondness for melodrama and Kop’s ale, the tender feet and the sensitiveness upon the subject of retirement—but what did they amount to? What grounds had he for believing Thackeray incorruptible? The plain truth was that the section house adjoining Paradise Street police station could be a dynamite manufactory for all he knew. Not once had he met Thackeray off duty. He had no idea whether he was a Home Ruler or a hot gospeller. The man was dependable when it mattered, and that had always been enough.
    He supposed he ought to examine the divisional defaulters’ book. Thackeray’s name would be there, for sure. There was not a constable of any length of service whose sheet was blank. Entries on the defaulter sheet in the first years of service, said the Police Code, will materially reduce the possibility of eventual promotion and selection for the prizes of the Force —so every station inspector took it as his duty to foster discipline among young constables by including their names from time to time in the Morning Report. Nor were the not-so-young forgotten: If a man’s conduct has not been uniformly good, or his incapacity may have been brought about by irregular or vicious habits, the Commissioner will recommend that a lower scale of pension or gratuity be granted to him. In his more bitter moments, when the prizes of the Force seemed too remote to bother over, Cribb would point out that even if one earned a commendation (and there was no regular procedure for that) the only place where it could be recorded was on the defaulter sheet.
    So Thackeray’s sheet would contain the predictable catalogue of misdemeanours—taking off the armlet to obtain a drink from a publican, gossiping on duty, quarrelling with comrades, soliciting gratuities, unpunctuality, and so on—together with a list of the stations he had served in, and perhaps an entry in red ink commending his part in the arrest of Charles Peace in 1878. Cribb doubted if there would be any subsequent entries in red; none of the crimes he and Thackeray had investigated had caused such a stir.
    He thought of going down to Rotherhithe to find out what the Paradise Street contingent knew of Thackeray. There must be someone who had an off-duty drink with him, or lodged in the section house. You could hardly use the same scullery and tin bath without getting to know something about a man. He considered the idea, and rejected it.
    This was his dilemma—the repugnance he felt at being asked to spy on Thackeray, and the necessity of