“Hello, sir,” said one of them. “Timothy Plug. This is my brother, Thomas.”
“How do you do,” Lenox said.
“Can we help you today, sir? In the market for anything particular?”
“What are ratty pockets, if I might inquire?”
Thomas Plug frowned. “A gentleman square-rigged like you, I should say, could go without them.”
“Square-rigged?”
“Respectably dressed, sir.”
“But what are they? Just curiosity, you know.”
Timothy Plug took this one. “Pants with extra large pockets running along the sides, for rat catchers to fill with feed, net, water bottle, in short, the entire apparatus of the rat catcher.”
Thomas Plug nodded to indicate that he thought this a satisfactory answer.
Lenox took the least offensive item in his purview off of the shelf — a pink lace handkerchief that looked to be about eight feet across — and paid half a shilling for it. As the Plugs went about wrapping it, no small job, Lenox asked a question. “I say, I wonder whether you two knew Phil Jigg?”
Both brothers froze. “Who might be asking?” one of them inquired after a moment.
“Charles Lenox. I’m looking into his death.”
Thomas Plug went nervously to the door and looked at the street. “You understand,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Lenox, “that we don’t know who killed him. It could have been anybody.”
“Of course,” Lenox said. There was always the danger that someone powerful, one of the minor monarchs of the Dials, had wanted Phil Jigg dead.
“But,” Plug went on, “Jiggs was our friend, you know. We’d like to see some justice done.”
“All too rare around here,” Timothy chipped in.
Lenox nodded. “Can you tell me anything about him?”
Thomas sighed. “He was a nice chap. Never afraid to stand a pint at the pub, but not a drunk or a boaster. Generous, I mean. Bought his clothes here to support us.”
“What did he do?”
“Ah — now he had ratty pockets. He was a rat catcher, wasn’t he. About four times a month the arena has a dog-and-rat show, and Jiggs always used to supply about half the rats. He would wander all over the Dials until he had caught about eighty or ninety of the little fellers.”
Timothy added, “And in between shows, if he ran a bit shy he was a pea-and-thimble man, like.”
“Pea-and-thimble?”
“You know, Mr. Lenox, sir, the fellow with three cups and a pea.”
“Ah.”
Timothy’s pink face quivered. “Poor Jiggs, I’ll say that much.”
“Do you know anybody who didn’t like him, if I may ask?”
“No, ‘course not. I’m dashed if he wasn’t one of the most popular chappies in these parts, Mr. Lenox.”
“Who were his other friends, Mr. Plug?”
Both brothers thought for a moment. “We were the closest to him,” Thomas said at last. “Some of the lads at the Queen’s Arms knew him but weren’t friends, like.”
“Where did he live?”
“Ah — a sad story there, you know,” said Thomas. Timothy nodded. “A right sad story, Mr. Lenox. Three weeks ago a slang cove — a showman, you know, one of these fellows outside the arena offering magic tricks and the like — well, one of these fellows stuck a knife to Jiggs’s throat and made him turn over a whole week’s rat-catching money. Disappeared after that, I can tell you. Jiggs near died of it. Then, next go-round, believe it or don’t, it happened again! A fine wirer, though, no knife involved.”
“Fine wirer?”
“Only the best of the pickpockets receive that precise appellation,” Timothy said knowledgeably, shaking his great pink head up and down.
“What happened to Phil Jigg, then?”
“He was run out of his house. Had to go stay around back of the church. Not a bad deal, though they force you to listen to them sermons, you know.”
“Which church?”
“Rev Tilton’s, it’s called St. Martin’s. Only a few hundred paces in that direction.”
Thomas Plug said thoughtfully, “The lads there might know better than we what his habits have been.”
Lenox nodded. “No idea, then, what happened to him? Enemies, I mean to say, or perhaps somebody whose turf Phil Jigg trespassed on?”
“Phil paid up promptly out of the pea-and-thimble money, I can tell you that,” said Timothy. “And he was valuable to them at the arena. No, I reckon it was something else. Can’t say what, though.”
A short while later Lenox went back out into the street, which was much busier now. He had asked a few more questions, none of which yielded much. Jigg was from the county of Norfolk originally; orphaned early, without knowing whether his parents were alive or dead; raised in an orphanage; didn’t have a wife, a child, or indeed any family of any sort; no, not at all the type to gamble or go into debt; no, never involved in anything criminal. Still, the Plugs had been helpful. Lenox had learned enough to begin looking more deeply into the case.
It was about eleven, and Lenox thought his next step might be to visit St. Martin’s, where Phil Jigg had been staying since he was kicked out of his residence. Perhaps the other habituals there could give him fresher information. He stopped on the way and peered inside the arena, though there was nothing to see and he was rewarded only with a hundred different invitations to play a card game, a hundred different forms of begging. One of them caught his eye in particular, a little girl of ten or so with what appeared to be an awful wound on her leg. Though Lenox knew it was only a piece of meat strapped there, in some way that almost made him sadder. He gave the girl some coins and moved off down the street, thinking he would do an awful lot more good in Parliament than out here searching futilely for facts about a man who seemed almost eerily anonymous even to his closest friends.
St. Martin’s was nicer than the neighborhood it served, a wide, airy, whitewashed church surrounded by dim, narrow buildings. It had a spartan altar and a modest sort of organ in the rear of the nave, as well as some rather pretty scenes from the life of Christ in stained glass. Behind it, according to the Plug brothers, was the long room that transient men either paid threepence or did chores to sleep in, with a large central fire that ran day and night, summer and winter, and cots along its walls. And behind that were the St. Martin’s orphans.
The Reverend Tilton was a tall, thin man with a shock of white hair. He met Lenox in a small but immaculate office behind a door by the chapel. A page (perhaps one of the orphans) had taken Lenox’s card in.
“Phil Jigg?” he said without preliminaries.
“That’s right,” said Lenox. “Did you know him well?”
“I only made Mr. Jigg’s acquaintance when he first began to frequent our refectory here.”
“How long ago was that?”
“I first saw him perhaps ten weeks ago, and then more regularly for the past month.”
“Not before that?”
“He did not attend our services here, no, Mr. Lenox. I have time for little else than the work of the church.”
“Of course, Reverend Tilton, I understand. If I may ask another question — what was Mr. Jigg like?”
“To me he had only just become one of the thirty or so regular inhabitants of the church, so I couldn’t say specifically, Mr. Lenox. I know that he didn’t fall into any sort of trouble while he was staying here, and I know that he was what’s called a ratter, but beyond that not much.”
“Did he pay or work for his bed?”