shadow of britain

Chapter 710 Reunion of old friends

How would a wealthy and idle London gentleman plan his schedule after lunch?

If the weather is bad, heading to the Pantheon hidden between Oxford Street and Regent Street is obviously a good choice.

It is called the Pantheon, but it is actually a building filled with all kinds of small luxury shops. This kind of shopping mall-style building is not uncommon in later generations, but in London in 1834, being able to wander around this fashionable building on rainy days, watching people coming and going, and looking at the rows of shop windows was the preferred pastime for many gentlemen and ladies.

If the weather is nice, Regent Street is obviously a better choice than the Pantheon.

There are bakeries, corset shops, stationery shops, fruit and vegetable shops, opticians, perfume shops, lace shops, candy shops, and of course, guns if you need them, and a one-stop service from coffins to urns.

But Regent Street is not so prosperous all year round. Many businesses on Regent Street only do business for seven or eight months a year.

The reason for this phenomenon is very simple. The prosperity of Regent Street is usually closely related to the opening and closing of Parliament.

When Parliament opens in late January or early February each year, wealthy people return to London from the countryside.

Even the most sporting of souls will return to London before the end of March, when the hunting season ends.

In the following April and May, the opening of the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition heralds the climax of the London social season.

At the end of August, Parliament went into recess and the quail hunting season arrived, so the wealthy class returned to the countryside.

Although some of them would return after the hunting season, many gentry and landed nobles who owned estates in the countryside would choose to stay in the countryside until January of the following year before returning to London.

Therefore, many businessmen and shop owners will choose to close their businesses and take a holiday in early September. Even for those shops that are open all year round, only two or three assistants will remain in the shop starting from September.

These young men didn't even know the prices of their own merchandise. Whenever a customer came in, they could only stare at them nervously with an inexperienced interest.

When there are few customers, even the unscrupulous milk merchants are too lazy to add water to the milk.

It seems that all luxury goods industries have been hit by the tariff war. The sharp drop in customer flow has even made it very difficult for prostitutes to do business.

But unlike Regent Street, which can only do seasonal business, many lesser-known second-hand shopping streets are not fashionable, but their business is not affected by the seasons at all.

These second-hand shops mainly do business with domestic servants, purchasing extra benefits from their employers' homes and then selling these benefits to those in need.

Here, cooks sell the excess food from banquets, butlers deal with the empty wine bottles in the house, and valets and maids sell second-hand clothes given by their masters.

If you are a tourist visiting London for the first time, you will probably think that the shops with "Maritime Store" on the signs sell nautical equipment, but in fact, the shop owners and customers who visit here just don't want others to say that this shop collects junk.

Such second-hand shops are mainly concentrated in relatively less affluent areas, or to be more precise, they are distributed in a large area of ​​London except the West End, and Greenwich's Central Street can be regarded as one of them.

Broken furniture, paper, rags, bones, kitchen utensils, food waste, old clothes, bottles, old books and paintings, small pieces of metal...

Basically anything you can think of could be sold to a maritime store, which would sell the paper it received to merchants to wrap goods, rags were sent to paper mills, bones were used to make soap or fertilizer, food waste was sold to pig farmers, grease was sold to candle makers, and old clothes were sold directly to the poor or to wholesalers.

It was precisely because of the maritime store's broad inclusiveness that Arthur often came to hang out here when he was a young police officer in Greenwich.

Because everyone knows that there must be a lot of thieves with no connections who sell stolen goods in maritime stores, and many maritime store owners are also doing some shady things behind the scenes.

But a few years later, when Arthur returned to Greenwich, he found a new store on Central Street that he had never seen before.

This new store is not like the traditional "maritime store" that is filled with all kinds of old goods, nor does it have yellowed curtains to cover the clutter in the window.

On the contrary, it was almost weirdly clean, the window glass was polished to a crystal shine, but the only thing displayed in the window was a wooden sculpture of a crow carrying a bow and arrow.

Arthur stood at the door and looked at the wood carving for a while. It was definitely not a pleasing decoration. No gentleman would choose to put such a weird object on his desk to show off his taste, and the servants who were short of money would not spend money on such a useless thing.

Arthur took out his pocket watch and checked the time. There was still some time before Dickens and the others invited him to have dinner. With nothing to do, he simply pushed the door open to see what was hidden in this store.

The doorbell rang with a short, dry sound, and a familiar voice came from behind the counter.

"Welcome, may I ask..." The voice paused, sounding as if it was shocked, or as if a stone was stuck in the throat: "What are you looking for?"

As soon as Arthur's boots touched the carpet behind the shop door, he heard a hint of fear behind the greeting.

His eyes swept across the store's furnishings like a knife, and then fell on the face behind the counter.

The old man with gray hair on his temples was hunched behind the counter, wearing a washed-out brown woolen vest with thread-stuffed cuffs that were seriously faded. The wrinkles at the corners of his eyes were squeezed together, one hand was still on the counter, and the other hand was suspended in the air, as if he didn't know where to put it.

"Mr. Fagin?" Arthur said in a steady tone, as if reminding or confirming: "Long time no see."

"Inspector Arthur!" Fagin's voice trembled, as if these words had hit his lungs. "Oh no, you are not an inspector now... I heard that you have been... promoted. Have you become a knight?"

"I'm just a free man now, a man shopping." Arthur walked to the counter and picked up the crow wood carving on the window and started playing with it. "I thought it was something else, a bow and arrow in a crow's nest... Is this store yours?"

"Ah, yes... it's mine." Fagin's mouth trembled, and he forced a smile: "The shop is small and the profit is thin, all relying on old customers to support it." "Old customers..." Arthur chewed the word again and again: "Are you talking about Fred?"

When Fagin heard the name "Fred", he was frightened: "Don't joke, everyone knows that Fred made you sink into the sea. Could he come to find me along the Thames? You... maybe you don't believe it, but you know, when people get old, they often dream at night. Once I dreamed that I was standing on a street with no end. There was no one on the street, only me. I walked with a lantern, and my legs were lame, but I still couldn't reach the end. Suddenly, a door in the sky opened, and a voice floated out from it and said, 'Enough, Fagin, enough.' That voice... I dare not say it is God, but it certainly doesn't sound like a human. It told me that if I don't repent, I have to accompany Fred... accompany him to walk on that street, and I will never finish the journey."

As he spoke, tears actually welled up in the corners of his eyes.

Arthur gently put the crow sculpture back on the counter. "So it was God who gave you a dream. I thought you turned over a new leaf because you were scared after seeing the Jew Solomon being arrested."

Speaking of 'Jew' Solomon, he was definitely the king of the London underworld at that time.

Fred, who died at the hands of Arthur, was merely involved in selling stolen goods, while Fagin's crime was mainly inciting juvenile delinquency.

But Solomon? He was a combination of Fred and Fagin.

Solomon ran a fairly well-structured stolen goods network in London at the time, specializing in purchasing all kinds of stolen goods from pickpockets and then reselling them for a profit. Solomon would even agree on the "needs" of customers with thieves before the items were stolen, which was almost a customized criminal service.

Moreover, compared to Fagin's free-range education of teenage pickpockets, Solomon not only provided temporary shelter and food for the street kids he took in, but also provided them with rigorous vocational training.

After they finish their apprenticeship, Solomon will set performance targets for them. If these pickpockets fail to hand over the stolen goods on time, they will be severely punished.

In the later stages of development, Solomon was no longer satisfied with petty thefts, but began to induce the children to break into houses, commit open robbery, etc.

Because Solomon's criminal behavior was so serious, the government arrested him as early as 1827 and detained him in Clarekenwell Prison in central London on charges of selling stolen goods.

However, soon after Solomon was arrested, he bribed some legal personnel to win bail for himself and took the opportunity to flee to the United States.

The helpless British court had to continue to try his case in 1828, found him guilty in absentia, and issued a warrant for Solomon's arrest.

Just when everyone thought that Solomon was likely to escape legal punishment, unexpected news suddenly came.

Two years ago, the Tasmanian colonial government suddenly announced that Solomon was arrested in its capital Hobart. The reason why Solomon was arrested there was that he wanted to secretly visit his wife who was exiled there.

Fred was killed and Solomon could not escape punishment. These two events obviously had a great impact on the big and small bosses of the London underworld.

Add to that the ever-expanding police force at Scotland Yard, the increasingly professional investigations of the Criminal Investigation Department, and the ruthless behavior of the Police Intelligence Bureau...

All of this makes everyone feel that business is becoming increasingly difficult.

Therefore, many criminal leaders who have accumulated some savings want to take advantage of the current good economic situation to switch to a legitimate business. Old Fagin must be one of them.

Fagin saw that he could not deceive Arthur, so he replied with sweat on his forehead: "Mr. Hastings, I admit my fault. I always remember that you let me go. After Solomon's accident, I washed my hands of the business. I used the money I saved to open this small shop, and I made a living by selling old books, paintings and old things. I never got involved in that business again."

"Maybe, but the crows in your window display don't look like something that can be sustained by legitimate business alone." Arthur looked around the store.

Fagin scratched his head, as if he wanted to explain, but he didn't know where to start, so he could only mutter in a low voice: "The market is not good... People are going to the West End now, not here... I... Occasionally, some friends will send me some small gifts, which is considered... to settle old accounts."

"Friend." Arthur stared at him. "Did you walk in by yourself? Or did you ask someone to find it for you?"

"It wasn't me!" Fagin raised his head and waved his hands. "It really wasn't me. Even the thieves at my doorstep are avoiding me now! Those things were brought by others. I took them because no one wanted to buy them. No one dared to take the job, and they knew I wouldn't say anything. Don't worry, I haven't raised any children to steal things again. That's a thing of the past."

Arthur had no intention of causing trouble for the old man. This old fellow Fagin had indeed done a lot of bad things, and Arthur had once wanted to kill him, but later, considering that little Adam had said a lot of good things about him, Arthur did not pursue the matter any further.

If Arthur hadn't bumped into him by chance today, and if he hadn't wanted to ask a few questions because he wanted to be a policeman, he wouldn't even bother to deal with this old guy who didn't have many years left to live. Who would have thought that this old man said he would retire, but he didn't really wash it clean?
Arthur glanced around the impossibly neat store and asked slowly and mysteriously, "No one comes here for no reason. Don't you think it's a little strange that I came here today?"

"Strange?" Fagin repeated unconsciously, with a tremor in his voice.

"Hmm?" Arthur looked at the wooden sculpture of a crow with a bow and arrow on its back, and smiled. "This crow is quite unique. Look, who would put such an unlucky thing in the middle of a window these days? Old Fagin in the crow's nest, if you are not waiting for someone, then you are delivering a message."

"It's just... it's just a decoration, nothing special..."

Arthur's voice suddenly turned colder. "Fagin, I'm giving you one last chance. You'd better tell me the truth. Have you received any unknown goods recently? I let you go before because Adam pleaded for you and promised me that you would mend your ways. But I didn't expect that not only did you not mend your ways, but you became even worse."

"I ..." Fagin was about to deny it, but the words were choked on his lips.

His gaze was dodging, and accidentally met Arthur's smiling eyes, and he immediately retracted his gaze as if he had been electrocuted.

"How did you know that, old man?" murmured Fagin. "You no longer work at Scotland Yard, did you?"

Arthur leaned against the counter and did not answer directly: "The truth cannot be hidden. Scotland Yard cannot solve this case, so they came to me, a retired police officer, for help."

Fagin's heart tightened, his calves went weak and he almost sat on the ground.

He swallowed and supported himself on the counter: "Damn it! I knew that thing came from an unusual place. If it was easy to sell, they wouldn't have handed it to me directly..."

(End of this chapter)