The Hireling's Tale Read Online Free Page A

her hazel-green eyes. She was forty-one: when she released her curly fair hair from its businesslike pleat and swapped her tailored clothes for a checked shirt and riding breeches she could pass for ten years younger. ‘Was that a good idea? He isn’t exactly Flavour of the Month at The Fen Tiger.’
    Despite its prestigious location The Fen Tiger was a villains’ pub. It had been there since Mere Basin was a stinking sink, nine-tenths derelict, subterranean and all but forgotten between Castle Place and Brick Lane. Ten years earlier a go-ahead council with its eye on a European grant had restored the Basin, turning the warehouses into valuable canal-side properties and opening up the inland waterway to holiday mariners. For years before that the only people using it had been commercial carriers who travelled in convoy with someone riding shotgun on
the first boat. It had been a massive undertaking and, but for the occasional excess with the gold paint, a successful one. Castlemere had been built to serve the canal; now the canal served the shopkeepers and restaurateurs of Castlemere. It would never be a tourist magnet in the way that Cambridge and Norwich were, but a fair bit of money came through Mere Basin during the summer months.
    And a fair bit of it got as far as The Fen Tiger and no further. The place was full of thieves, professional and casual, conmen, cloners of phones, hackers of hole-in-the-wall cash machines and dealers in outboard engines which had fallen off the back of a barge. Shapiro would have been glad to shut it down, but naive magistrates kept believing the proprietor’s protestations, that the nefarious activities of some of his clientele were not his responsibility, and renewing his licence.
    Shapiro shrugged. ‘I’m not sure they hate Donovan any more than they do you and me. Anyway, the wharf’s his backyard - at least they’ll be talking the same language. Anyone else’d need an interpreter.’
    ‘So, shall I do the toms? Have we got a photo yet?’
    ‘Should be ready now,’ said Shapiro. He blew out his cheeks. ‘You’d better warn them this may not be an isolated incident. However she got on to the boat, she was beaten black and blue first. A man who hires a prostitute and keeps her quiet with cocaine while he beats the living daylights out of her does it because that’s how he gets his kicks. He doesn’t ever do it just once.’

Chapter Three
    The fact that a place like The Fen Tiger went quiet when he walked inside concerned Donovan not at all. He was a CID officer, and at any given time about half the Tiger’s clientele were wanted for something. He was quite pleased they considered him enough of a threat to fall silent as he passed: sometimes he felt that the best efforts of all Queen’s Street were as a flea-bite on the hide of Castlemere’s criminal fraternity.
    What bothered him more was that perfectly respectable people, nice decent law-abiding citizens who were more likely to have a sixth finger than a criminal record, also went quiet as he passed. They’d done this since he was about fifteen. At the time, with the cocky innocence of youth, he’d taken it as a compliment, that they recognized him as an individual not to be trifled with. Later he began to wonder what it was they saw that made them mark him and stand back. He wasn’t a dangerous man. He wasn’t violent, or unhinged, or prone to sudden bursts of embarrassing eccentricity. He thought himself a pretty ordinary man on the whole: a bit of a loner, a bit of an outsider, but still an ordinary
decent citizen doing an honourable job. And yet other decent citizens looked at him and moved aside, and he didn’t know why.
    But he didn’t spend much time thinking about it in a place where, on the law of averages, every tenth man would like to put a baling hook in his back.
    Fortunately, with the lunchtime rush yet to start, there were only nine people in the bar. One was the potman Donny Toomes. Donovan didn’t