Page 40 of A Debt Inherited

Kerr considered the counter, the cracked lamp-glass, the way the rules were spoken as if they were already agreed.

“Quiet work,” Kerr said, “is usually the dearest.”

Sykes looked at him then, properly for the first time. “You may do.”

“And if not?”

Sykes shrugged. “Then you won’t be asked again.”

Outside, the fog had thickened into sleet. Kerr drew his collar high, passing the shuttered shops and the drunks asleep in the alleys. The Dials had been rumour that morning. Now it had doorways, lamps, and men with scarred knuckles and serious voices.

Price knew people; his wife, more. It had only taken a word.

He could begin earning something other than ink.

The streets looked unchanged, but the city felt different now—alive, watchful.

He turned the key in his own door on Upper Gower Street and paused at the sound of the bolt sliding home. It was, after all, his house—four walls of inheritance, a hearth, a name. But the silence felt borrowed.

Ruin, he thought, now wore his coat.

* * *

The first errand came two nights later.

Kerr found Sykes at the Forge beside the door. A man lay senseless across the threshold. Sykes motioned Kerr inside, stepping over the inert form.

Kerr edged around the body without letting his boot touch the man’s coat.

“Mind you’re not so dainty when you’re carrying notes,” Sykes said.

Kerr looked from him to the door. He shook his head.

He turned back. A folded note lay between Sykes’s two fingers.

“Rudd’s,” he said. “Narrow door behind the pawnshop. Knock twice, then once. Give it to no one but him.”

Kerr took the note.

“And if he is not there?”

“He’ll be there.”

Sykes turned away, the interview concluded.

Kerr stepped back into the street with the note inside his glove. The man by the door was gone. Rain had left the stones black. The Dials did not sleep; it merely changed occupations: gin-shops emptying into alleys, women laughing under broken lamps, boys slipping through gaps no grown man could follow. A watchman passed at the far end of the lane and looked elsewhere.

Rudd’s pawnshop stood beneath a bowed sign of three gilt balls, dulled by soot. The front shutters had been drawn, but a seam of light showed round the side. Kerr found the narrow door and knocked twice, then once.

A bolt shifted. An eye appeared. “Who sent you?”

“Sykes.”

The door opened.

The man inside was small and spare. His cuffs were white but frayed. His nails were pared close. He looked first at Kerr’s face, then at his boots.

“You’ll be the new one,” he said.