Jack Maggs by Peter Carey Page A

but to stop and put them on once more. With all this fuss, he almost lost sight of Tobias Oates, and had the writer not begun to sing so free and careless, he might have disappeared into the fog. But then, by Jesus, there came that fine tenor voice, not twenty yards ahead. “Sally in our Alley.” It was a filthy song.
    He had the bastard. He had him easy-peasy. He limped along behind him to Lincoln’s Inn Fields with his shoes torturing him at every step. It was only pain, or so he told himself. He had suffered worse.
    As the song arrived at that place where “Nature’s soft stream was flowing” they came to coal-dark Carey Street. By then they were but fifteen feet apart.
    In Chancery Lane a great lurching galoot of a link boy came rushing up the pavement holding his blazing faggot high into the night. The link boy, all of fifty if he were a day, was providing light for two young gentlemen, who were, in turn, attempting to escort a little whore, and all three of them as drunk as Captain Harry’s horse.
    As Tobias Oates turned to look at the link boy, Jack Maggs stepped back into the doorway of the Great High Court where he found a second whore busy at her trade and not pleased to have the interruption. A moment later Jack Maggs was out in the street again, making himself one of the party with the puffing link boy, boldly sharing the smoky light as far as Theobald’s Road. He was just in time to see Tobias Oates turn off into the darkness.
    Jack Maggs hobbled across the path of a hackney cab, then hip-hopped along Lamb’s Conduit Street. For reward he saw Tobias Oates step up onto the front step of a house. He arrived outside this door in time to hear a heavy bolt slid home into its hasp.
    Then a sudden light flooded through the fog behind him, throwing his own massive shadow on the door.
    “So,” said the man with the lamp. “What’s up here?”
    At first Maggs thought it was a soldier behind the lamp, but it was a bobby, an esclop, a frigging peeler with a fancy coat. Jack Maggs had not seen this type of coat before.
    “You would not want to swap your uniform with mine, for all the tea in China,” said he cheekily. “They give me shoes, the shoes don’t fit. They send me out to walk behind my master, and not even a topcoat to bless myself with.”
    The peeler was a big strong fellow with a face like a potato. The look in his eye, as he held up his lantern, was the same one you see in a policeman who would like to harm you badly, if only he could do it at no risk to himself.
    “Where’s your master?” he demanded.
    “Just went in.”
    “Went in where? I didn’t see no one.”
    The peeler ran his lantern over Jack Maggs again and there revealed the damage done by the journey across the roof, the tumble down the stairs, the subsequent excursion through the drizzle. The Knight of the Rainbow was in a sodden, speckled state.
    “Just went in,” Jack Maggs said, suddenly very sharp indeed. “Right here. Mr Tobias Oates. The author of the tale of Captain Crumley.”
    The esclop pushed his hot lantern a little closer to Jack’s nose.
    “Captain Crumley?”
    “That’s the one.”
    The bobby paused. “Get on home,” he said at last.
    There was no choice. Jack Maggs opened the gate, walked down the steps into the area. There, below street level, he pressed himself flat against the kitchen door, but Mr Peel’s man was not so green. He held up his lantern and peered down after him.
    It was Despair made Jack Maggs try the kitchen door handle, and Fortune decreed it be left carelessly unlocked. He entered Tobias Oates’s house and slid the bolt behind him. Through the kitchen window he could see the bobby’s legs as they walked back towards the front door.
    The village pony was not satisfied—it seemed he was going to knock up Tobias Oates and ask him questions about his footman. Jack Maggs therefore crept up the dark stairs into the hallway, ready to flee out the back if the policeman knocked.
    At first