“What did he mean, Sharpe?”
“D.C.? He's full of it half the time and a no-opinion the other half. The man's double Dutch in his tongue and double-gaited elsewhere! Forget it. If you let him, D.C. will tell you everything opens that shuts and everything shuts that opens.”
Jessica guessed that Sharpe meant the other man spoke with “forked” tongue.
“Filth!” D.C. called out from across the street.
“Common term for cops in England,” explained Richard. “I think he knows I'm trying to get him on charges as a fire-raiser-an arsonist-even as I use him. Interesting past, the man has, actually. Just after returning from the service with his gimp leg, he tried white-collar crime. Was put away for his trouble.”
“Arrested for what exactly?”
“Got 'im for fluffing the books, accounts.”
She and Richard moved on, going right past the Boar's Head. They located a place called the Clockwork Arms, which Richard pointed out had been renovated from a building housing a clockworks and separately an armory. Now an eatery, the place made the most of the brick exterior and solid oak beams. “The weather this time of year? Is it always so balmy and beautiful?” she asked.“Luke's little summer,” he replied, smiling, helping with her chair.
“Luke's what?” the noise of the crowd and the music from a live flutist in one comer whose melodic Celtic music touched something in Jessica's core, running along her spine, made it difficult to focus on Richard's words.
“St. Luke's summer. I suspect you call it Indian summer where you're from,” he explained. “Look, if you don't mind, I have to see to the geography of the house,” he said, and promptly left the table, leaving Jessica to wonder whatever he meant. Then she remembered an earlier comment and realized that he was going to the men's room.
While alone, Jessica took in the sights and sounds of the pub. She caught snatches of conversation and found herself matching oddly strange Briticisms with the word or phrase that might be its counterpart in America. British English and American English proved two entirely different animals.
She overheard people in the pub referring to such things as “between whiles” at Billingsgate Market-a fish market, as famous for its foul language as its fish. She heard some men talking about her at the bar: one called her “an attractive bit of goods.” She heard multiple requests for what appeared the national drink-bitter beers. She heard one woman complaining she hadn't been to Blackpool in decades and wanted to go there to ride the switchback-the roller coaster.
Jessica found something fascinating in every small word and thing and person, and in all the quaint places and place names everywhere she went in London. Even what she'd learned from hanging about Scotland Yard fascinated her. Fingerprints were dabs, handcuffs darbies, police cars- which were blue and white in color had become jam sandwiches or panda cars, while extortion was demanding money with menaces, and rape or criminal assault was euphemistically called being interfered with. A police beat or patch in America here became a manor. To catch a packet meant to stop a bullet. Ever the stiff upper lip people, the British didn't get their walking papers, but rather their marching papers. While American cops were cited for bravery, British cops were mentioned in dispatches.
Gin was mother's ruin, and denatured alcohol in Britain became methylated spirits, and meths were the unappealing derelicts who drank it. While the Mets in America meant baseball in New York City, Mets in London referred to the London police. And a pedestrian walk equaled a pelican crossing. A speed bump posed in London as a sleeping policeman or rumble strip.
In fact the British, aside from being a nation of shopkeepers and the “pudding nation,” had come to be world renowned as the most euphemistic race on the planet. When speaking of being taxed, they put it as suffering an assessment. It appeared they would say anything to keep from cursing, even to abbreviating “God blind me” to blimey… and “God's truth” to 'struth! They much preferred a phrase such as “the best of British luck” said with irony. Even “bloody fool” was abbreviated to b.f. so as to avoid the cursing. She thought it rather hilarious. As a result of the euphemisms, many a word that passed British lips, while not a curse, stood in for one just as well. They had literally hundreds of words that kept them coming up short of calling God's name out in vain.
He's up for the high jump now formed a grim echo of the hanging days, and a mortician in London became a funeral furnisher.
Meanwhile, a penny dreadful, often called a shilling shocker stood in for a dime novel. The false issue of a red herring, ubiquitous and obligatory in any mystery story, here became a Norfolk capon. A literary hack such as the infamous Geoffrey Caine here might be called a nasty or a devil, but so, too were law apprentices.
When Richard returned to the table, he began a tirade about the two arrested as the Crucifying Duo. “A pair of comic book characters if ever there were,” he said, spouting venom.
Jessica tried to get him off the subject, off work altogether. She asked him about the British Museum, what she might find there, but he ignored her, going on about the twosome under arrest for the Crucifier's sins.
Giving in, she said, “I particularly hated the one who led the other by the nose.”
“Oh, that creep Periwinkle is a real Geordie.”
“Geordie? Explain that again, please.”
“A native of Tynsdale-raised with the pigs, maybe. A coal miner for sure.”
“A coal miner? That's rather coincidental.”
“Not at all. Everyone in Tynsdale goes to the mines for work. I've seen their like before. One is a Geordie, the partner a George.”
“A George?”
“Automatic pilot. One's the planner, and he's a weak-minded bastard if ever there was one, and the other goes about on automatic pilot. A Geordie and a George, true criminal masterminds those two, truly fit your profile of the killer, as well, wouldn't you agree?” he facetiously asked. “But then in dealing with Boulte, one must take in the Paddy factor.”
“Well, they are the right age, and they do live with their mothers.” Jessica had heard the term Paddy bandied about in police circles here, referring usually to IRA terrorists, but it had an ethnic edge to it. It meant that the criminal mind often meant the stupid mind, and Paddys-a common Irish name- were criminally stupid. “Is Boulte part Irish?”
“If he is, he wouldn't admit to it.”
London, despite its diverse population and the international flavor of its makeup, remained a haven for racial prejudice, just as Hawaii and other beautiful places around the globe Jessica had visited harbored racial disharmony. Sadly enough it appeared a global fact of life. Here a British racist was known as a racialist. Even now, she could hear Paid jokes being told at the table over her shoulder between calls for the waiter to answer the questions: “Where's the other half.”
“How 'bout the other half?” Both meant the speaker wanted another drink.
“Paki” formed an unpleasant racist connotation in its compactness. Hearing the term several dmes, Jessica asked Sharpe about it. His reply was off-handed, his shoulders shrugged as he said, “Paki-bashing. It's an extremely unpleasant activity here. At its most benign, it begins with jokes. At its most vicious, it ends with roaming gangs-usually a rat's nest of Paddys-looking for and usually finding Pakistanis to beat up.”
“Past a joke is another British expression, meaning something's not funny anymore, but rather intolerable. Most Mets in London simply don't want Paki-bashing on their little patches.”
Someone entering the pub and passing their table said hello to Richard, asking, “And how are you, Sharpe?”
“Not so dusty,” replied Sharpe. “And you?”
“Gain on swings, lose on rounds, you know? Take all due care.” And the man disappeared into the crowd at the bar.