The Body at the Tower Read Online Free PDF Page A

your responsibility to engage a new member for your gang.”
    The workman he addressed – a tall, powerfully built man in his middle thirties – glowered with frustration. “Don’t I know it! But it takes time, that. We’re missing an experienced bricklayer, not some useless apprentice.”
    A muscle jumped under Harkness’s left eye. “I know,” he said in a placating tone. “As I said, I shall do my best.”
    The foreman pushed his way out of the crowd, his face dark with anger. “‘I shall do my best,’” he simpered, imitating Harkness’s tones. “Bloody useless son of a—” His eyes met Mary’s and flared with temper. “What the hell you staring at, boy?”
    She quickly averted her eyes and edged deeper into the pack. So that man had been Wick’s workmate. She wondered if they’d been friends.
    It took a long time for Harkness to give each labourer his directions. When Mary finally presented herself, he stared at her for a long moment with red-rimmed eyes. “Who?”
    Had she not spoken clearly enough? “Mark Quinn, sir. I’m to begin today as an errand boy, if you please.”
    The twitch came again, and he pressed a weary hand to his disobedient eye. “As a general errand boy?”
    Mary tried to look confident. “Yes, sir.” What could have gone wrong? Had someone failed to organize the position? Did she – her stomach plunged at the idea – did she not look the part? A few men nearby had stopped and looked at her curiously as soon as she’d addressed Harkness. Perhaps they could tell, somehow…
    Harkness scrubbed his face abruptly with one hand. “And how old are you – what did you say your name was?”
    “Quinn, sir. I’m twelve.”
    “Quinn. Twelve. And you want work as an errand boy.”
    “Yes, sir.” Mary was beginning to think Harkness very slow indeed.
    “Hmph.” He eyed her speculatively. “Nicely spoken…”
    Damn it all. She’d worked so hard to make her voice gruff and diffident, to get the accent just right, but she’d compromised the role from the start by using the wrong vocabulary. What sort of boy would say “begin” instead of “start”, or “if you please” instead of simply “please”? Five seconds into the job and she’d already made her first blunder.
    Harkness fumbled in his inner coat pocket and pulled out a battered sheaf of papers. “Read that.”
    Burning with shame, Mary took the bundle and read blankly, automatically, from the top. “‘The recasting of the bell by the Whitechapel Foundry is merely the first—’”
    The papers were snatched from her grasp. “Bless me, you can read.”
    Of course she could – and Harkness’s realization made her feel sick. Mary Quinn read fluently, but “Mark” Quinn wouldn’t read or write; he’d be fortunate to sign his own name. And she, of all people, ought to have known that. But she’d been so busy kicking herself for the first mistake that she’d compounded it with a second – perhaps even greater – error. Her pulse thudded and her cheeks were flushed. She was furious with herself, yet terrified of making a third and even greater faux pas . What was wrong with her? No wonder the labourers nearby stared at her.
    Harkness fixed her with another shrewd look. “I ask you again: why are you here as an errand boy?”
    There was nothing to do but to brazen it out. “Sir?”
    “You make a bad job of playing the fool, Quinn.”
    He was right. But she’d try, nevertheless. Mary thrust her hands into her pockets and stared at the ground. “I can’t do anything else, sir. There’s no money for school fees or to buy an apprenticeship.”
    Harkness folded his arms and looked interested for the first time. “For a bright boy like you?”
    “No, sir.”
    “No Christian charity willing to educate you?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Hm.”
    There was a long pause, during which Mary concentrated hard on the toes of her new-but-old boots. Her responses to this personal line of questioning wouldn’t stand