Case of the Dixie Ghosts by A. A. Glynn

Author:A. A. Glynn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: historical mystery, mystery, crime, traditional British mystery, civil war
ISBN: 9781434447265
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2013-01-31T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

THE WATCHER IN THE SQUARE

Old Dr. Alexander McLeish studied the long scar in Dacer’s side from which he had just removed the tightly wound dressing and strapping. “Aye, it’s healed well,” he rumbled in his rich Scottish accent. “Mind, you’ll no doubt continue to get a twinge or two for a wee while yet and you’ll carry that bonny scar to your grave. No harm in that. A few scars suggest a man’s lived an eventful life, as I’ll wager you have in the peculiar business you follow, Mr. Dacers. Now you’re free of the bandaging, don’t do any more business with villains who carry knives. You can expect my bill in the post.”

Septimus Dacers stepped out of his doctor’s premises in Old Holborn, and set off to thread his way through a skein of streets that would take him to Seven Dials and Setty Wilkins.

“The Dials” took its name from the junction of seven straggling mean streets and a pillar bearing seven sundials that, long ago, stood at the point of their meeting. It was a squalid, ramshackle, unhealthy, and dangerous district where disease and crime stalked a maze of decaying streets. Police went into The Dials in groups and never singly. A respectably dressed stranger might lose his watch, his money, or even his whole suit of clothes in an encounter with denizens of The Dials.

Grubby men with hair cropped Newgate style and slatternly women glowered at Dacers from darkened doorways; a baby wailed somewhere; a man and woman were holding a furious, bellowing, and screeching argument behind a broken window; and he was approached by two small ragged boys, pleading: “Give us a penny, guv’nor,” He ignored them, not through hard-heartedness, but if he parted with a coin, a tribe of begging youngsters would emerge from nowhere and swarm around him.

Dacers, who had ventured into many a sector of London’s murky underbelly without fear, felt as uneasy as any man every time he visited Seven Dials, but Setty Wilkins was happy to dwell there for his own reasons, and Dacers wished to consult him this day after his meeting with Roberta Van Trask.

He negotiated the cracked paving and broken cobbles and avoided a dead cat in his path to reach Setty’s ancient dwelling-cum-workshop. He still had half a suspicion that Setty, as the only person who knew he had gone to the Blue Duck, was behind his beating. But he was ashamed of it when he thought of the sterling character he knew to lie under the old engraver’s eccentric front.

He entered the slanted door of the workshop and found Setty sitting on an old wooden box, smoking a clay pipe and reading a “penny dreadful,” one of the cheap sensational publications devoured by young boys, and against which clergymen preached and magistrates railed, alleging their influence was corrupting the morals of the young.

“Vy, it’s Mr. Dacers again!” he exclaimed heartily. “You’re alvays as velcome as the flowers in May, my good sir.”

Dacers nodded towards the printed paper in Setty’s hand.

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