Scudboat was a big soft-faced man who'd been with the family since before the war and never once been asked to think. Lovelock was younger and thinner and did the thinking for both of them, badly. Neither of them said anything about me being on the round. They just fell in, one either side, the way they'd have fallen in behind Arthur, and I understood that whatever they'd heard about me, they'd been told by Tommy to keep it to themselves.
We started at the Digbeth end at four.
The first shop was the baker. Bell over the door, flour on his forearms, and a look on his face when he saw me that took about a second to travel from surprise to something more careful.
"Mr Shelby."
"Friday's tomorrow," I said. "We're early."
He didn't argue. He counted it out from the till — seven and six, which I knew was right without knowing how I knew — and put it on the counter rather than in my hand. I took it. I thanked him. I did not, at any point, look like a man who'd been drunk on Saturday.
That was the first one.
The second was the same, and the third. A man who mended boots. A woman with the tin under the counter who made me wait, exactly as I'd remembered she would, and who looked at me while she counted like she was checking the change of a coin she didn't trust. Lovelock stood in the doorway and Scudboat stood in the street, and nobody had to say anything, and the money came.
By the fourth shop I'd stopped feeling like an impostor and started feeling like a man doing a job, and by the sixth I'd noticed that nobody had looked at me with anything but caution, and that caution was not the same as respect, and that I'd have to do something about the difference.
The pubs were quicker. A landlord doesn't argue with a Shelby in front of his customers.
That left James.
Kaplan's old pitch was a yard behind the Marquis of Lorne, and by the time we got there it was going dark and the day's racing was over and men were still standing about because it was warmer than home.
James had a table under the lamp and a book open on it and a lad running slips. He was a narrow, tidy man, thirty or so, with a moustache he'd clearly grown to look older and a collar that had been clean that morning.
He saw us come in and his hand went to the book before his face had decided what to do.
"Mr Shelby." He stood. "Wasn't expecting you till—"
"Till Friday. I know." I put a hand on the table, next to the book, not on it. "Two weeks short, James."
"Aye, and I've said, it's been the horses — Cheltenham lot's been running strange, everybody's book's off, ask anyone in this yard—"
"I'm not asking anyone in this yard."
Behind me the men who'd been standing about had stopped talking to each other and started listening to us, and I felt it the way you feel a draught. Scudboat had moved to the yard gate. Lovelock had drifted to the far side of the table where James couldn't see him without turning his head.
"Show me the book."
"It's all in—"
"Then show me."
He turned it round. I looked at it. I couldn't have kept one — not the way James could, not the way the man I was wearing had for three years — but I knew enough to see when one had been got at, and this one had. Sums that had been rounded. A column added twice, once in pencil and once in pen over the top, and the ink figure smaller.
I put my finger on the pen figure.
"That's not what the pencil said."
"I corrected—"
"You corrected it down."
He was looking at my finger. Not at me. He couldn't get his eyes up.
"Mr Shelby, I've a boy at home with a chest, I've—"
"You've a boy at home and you've been skimming a Shelby book to pay for him, and you thought Jack Shelby wouldn't notice, because Jack Shelby's been too pissed to notice anything since Easter." I straightened up. "Is that about it?"
He didn't say yes. He didn't have to.
I knew exactly what I was doing. I knew it as I did it.
I could have taken the book and the money and gone. I could have told Tommy about the boy with the chest and let Tommy decide. That would have been judgement. That would have been what Tommy would've done, or something like it — quiet, and total, and nobody in the yard any the wiser.
And nobody's opinion of me would have moved an inch.
So instead I hit him.
Not hard. I didn't know how hard I could hit — I'd never done it in my own body and this one had been asleep for months. But the hands knew, again, and it landed where I'd meant it to, high on the cheekbone, and he went sideways over the table and the book went in the mud and the lad with the slips ran.
I hadn't frozen. That was the first thing I noticed, standing over him. I'd been waiting to freeze and I hadn't.
"Get up."
He got up. There was a mark on his face already, and his mouth was bleeding a bit at the corner, and he looked at me like I'd turned into somebody else, which was reasonable, because I had.
"How much."
"I— four pound, over the two weeks, I can—"
"Boot."
He stared.
"You've got it in your boot, James. You've had it in your boot since I came through the gate. Take it out."
He took it out. Three pound ten. The rest, he said, was gone, on the doctor. I believed him and it made no difference, because the yard was watching and none of them were listening to the words any more.
Scudboat had come off the gate. I put a hand out flat behind me without looking and he stopped.
Then I took the razor out of my coat.
I barely remembered putting it in my coat. That morning, in the room, going past the washstand — I'd picked it up the way you pick up your keys on the way out, and hadn't thought about it since. It was a straight razor with a bone handle and I opened it with one thumb, and the sound it made was very small and every man in that yard heard it.
"Hold still."
He didn't hold still. Lovelock held him.
I put the blade against his face where the mark was and I drew it down, once, from the cheekbone to the corner of the jaw, and it was not deep, because I did not want him dead or blind, I wanted him marked, and I found — standing there with another man's blood on a dead man's razor — that my hand was completely steady and that I was thinking very clearly and that some part of me was enjoying how clearly I was thinking.
James made a noise. Then he stopped making it, because it was over.
I wiped the blade on his collar and folded it.
"Every Friday," I said, "you'll bring the book to the Garrison and put it in Tommy Shelby's hand, and it'll be right, and if it's not right I'll know, and next time I'll take the eye." I picked the book up out of the mud and gave it back to him. "Tell your boy I hope his chest gets better."
Then I turned round and looked at the yard.
Twenty men, maybe. Some of them had known the man I was wearing since he was a boy. All of them had, for the last few months, known him as the Shelby you didn't have to be afraid of.
Nobody said anything. Then a man at the back put his cap on and left, quickly, and I understood that he was going to the Garrison and that by the time I got there myself the story would have arrived ahead of me and grown a foot.
Good.
We walked back up Digbeth with the day's money in my inside pocket and the razor next to it.
Scudboat said nothing for two streets. Then, in the tone of a man remarking on the weather: "That's more like it, Mr Shelby."
"Is it."
"Been a while."
Lovelock didn't say anything at all. He was looking at me sideways, and it wasn't Scudboat's look, and I filed that away, because a man who's frightened of you is useful and a man who's working you out is something else.
My right hand had started to hurt. Two of the knuckles were split from the cheekbone, and the third was swelling, and I flexed it and felt something grind and thought, that's going to matter tomorrow. Nobody in this century was going to strap it for me.
Halfway back it came.
Not a chime this time. It simply arrived, the way the tab list had, small and pale and certain.
Reputation +35Reputation: 50 / 50Task complete.Reward: £100. 5 Perk Points.
Thirty-five. In one yard, in ten minutes, with a razor.
I'd spent the whole day doing the round properly. Six shops and two pubs, correct to the penny, polite, sober, on time, and it had counted for nothing. The number had sat at fifteen from Digbeth to the Marquis, and then I'd cut a man in front of twenty people and it had jumped by more than double.
It wasn't measuring the work. It was measuring who'd seen it.
I'd guessed that in the room that morning and I'd been right, and being right felt a lot like being told what I was for.
"You all right, Mr Shelby?"
"Fine."
The Garrison was ahead of us with its lamps lit, and somewhere inside it a man with a cap in his hand was telling Tommy Shelby what I'd done, and I walked toward that with my hand aching and my heart going and no idea whether I'd just passed his test or failed it.
I only knew that it couldn't be undone.
And that I didn't want it undone.