He pulled lightly upon the oars, stroke upon stroke, and his boat skimmed the black water of the Thames. Mayhew was a dredger and this his work, but no commission had ever been so strange. He pondered what it could all mean and how it had come to be. In his Peter boat, shallow-bottomed and easy to row, he often forgot himself entirely. Sometimes he sang or hummed a tune. Sometimes his thoughts just strayed, to happier times before his wife had taken to drink and run away, when his daughter had lived with him. But now she was back after all, and things would be better again ... with this commission.
He remembered Demming. Two nights before, coming out of the fog in a frock coat, a tall toff's hat and shadow for a face, Demming had appeared upon the quay as Mayhew tied up his boat. Gaslight glinted off the gold of Demming's walking stick. He asked after Patrick Mayhew, and feigned surprise when he learned who he was speaking to. "You've a reputation as a dredger," Demming told him. And Demming knew how lean the summer was--so lean that no sane man could have denied his offer: a job of dredging with five hundred guineas paid in advance and a promise of an impossible five hundred more if it proved successful. "Tomorrow night then," Demming said, "I'll meet you here at two." Mayhew remembered how his footsteps faded in the fog but the sound of the stick tapping went on and on.
It seemed to echo in the slap of the water against his squared bow.
The second meeting. Demming had given him the heavy purse as promised. He hadn't needed to count it to know how much it must contain. But in the interim the questions filled with worry had come to plague him, and these had to be cleared up. "This is criminal, what you want me to do," he said over the purse. "Not at all," Demming replied. "It's dredgework that you've done a thousand times before." "Will I need a net or grappling hooks? What is it you want me to find?" Demming paused before answering. His face was plainly visible now in the light of Mayhew's lantern: a long, proud face, pouchy under the eyes, perhaps from drink. A clean-shaven face, a powdered face. "Hooks or nets is a matter for you--I can't say. What you seek is a body. However, the corpse itself hardly concerns me. The man--for it is a man, Mr. Mayhew--stole from me a watch, a family heirloom that is irreplaceable. The mischief that befell him is of no concern. If you find money on him, you may keep it, but you may not turn him in to the police for any finder's fee. I'm paying you quite enough to discourage that. Nor are you to mention him to anyone. Anyone at all." Mayhew thought he understood this: "You kill the fella?" he asked. But Demming hardly balked. "That is none of your business, either. You perform your dredgework, stick to that, and we will get on just fine." This left him believing that Demming had killed a man without knowing that the man carried the stolen watch on his person. An odd oversight, but not an impossible scenario to envision. And it was not much of a crime to refrain from turning the corpse in, not enough of one to overcome a small fortune.
Mayhew listened for a moment to a drunk shouting, somewhere out in the dark, near the passing quay.
Last night on the river. With the half-built Tower Bridge a mangled horror hanging over him, he secured his weighted nets to the boat, then unshipped the oars and began the long, exhausting process. Lights on the ships at dock winked at him. He dragged and hauled nets, dragged and hauled again. His black-tarred sou'wester coat kept the sodden nets from soaking him, but made him sweat twice as hard at the oars so there was hardly a difference. As dawn came up, he called it quits with three shillings worth of coal dredged up but nary a sign of a body.
Then the happiest moment of all in this whole adventure took place. Returning to his house, he found his daughter, Louise, on the stoop. She had come back to him out of the depths of the East End. He listened to the whole sordid story, forgiving her for her sins before he even heard them. She had lived as a whore for nearly a year, keeping with a man in Castle Alley. He had been cruel to her, but she feared, as most of the whores did, the one the papers called "the Ripper," and her hateful prosser was at least protection against that. Soon enough she had turned to drink--ironically, to the same Dutch gin that her mother had loved. She cried as she spoke, and Mayhew held her close; she was his little girl again. He felt the weight of the money in the pocket of his coat, and he dreamed their new life. Soon he would quit the river, carry his daughter away from the squalor of Lambeth. They would take a country house, a small estate--just as soon as he found the body, and the watch.
With renewed vigor at the thought of success, he put his back to it, and the Peter boat skimmed the water like a skater across ice.
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