CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Tyburn’s Last Victim

In the darkness, in the cold, in the absence of hope, the Gunner dug on.

The scoop and scatter noise had been joined by a new sound, which was a hollow splash as he dug in. The Gunner had dug down into the gravel, below the level of the surrounding water in the tank. He was so deep that he had one leg inside the hole and was bending and stretching as he dug, waist-deep in a gravel-ringed pool of his own excavating.

The tiredness that he was now feeling was a real tiredness, the tiredness of hard work, not the wrong feeling that had been churning inside him in the absence of any distractions. It occurred to him that if he’d put all this effort into trying to dig upward, he might have reached a surface by now. Then again, he might not have. The roof was stone, and shifting a stone to start digging might have ended everything before he’d even begun.

“Could have brought the house down,” he said aloud. The sudden sound of his own voice in the echoing chamber made him pause. He became even stiller as he felt something move around his ankles. It was the water in the pond.

There was the ghost of a current, barely there, but definitely there.

The Gunner didn’t know it, but the current he was feeling was the pull of the Tyburn, one of the lost rivers of London, the one that gave its name to the place where London’s criminals used to be hanged. And now it was exerting its dark pull at the Gunner’s ankles. He didn’t know that, any more than he knew that he was standing in a lost medieval water tank below Marylebone. All he knew was that moving water meant a stream, a stream meant a channel for it to flow down, and a channel might, just might, mean a way out of this rat hole.

If he’d been of a reflective bent, he would have said, like most soldiers, that the ideal way to die was at home in bed, surrounded by great-grandchildren. But since that wasn’t an option, he thought he might as well die trying not to.

He doubled his efforts, and as he bent and shoveled, the urgency of his movements tipped his tin hat into the water in a great splash. It took him a moment to realize what had happened and to retrieve the helmet. And when he did, the obvious hit him.

“Must be getting stupid,” he muttered, and started digging with the hat. Now he really was making progress.

The hole deepened, and he was even able to feel the top of a low arch in the wall beginning to appear. As he dug, he wondered why the hole had been blocked up. It’s the nature of an underground stream, if blocked, to silt up with the debris it washes down, and this was how the bank of gravel in the tank had been created.

But something had blocked the exit pipe from the tank, and as the Gunner’s hat suddenly skidded sideways instead of digging in, he found the reason. He put his hat aside and reached down. His first thought was that it was a tree root. Then it came away in his hand, and he felt it. He had a sudden horrible feeling he knew what it was. He reached into the water and found more pieces. And then his hand tangled in hair.

He carefully disentangled it and shook his hands dry before lighting one of his precious matches.

Although the flame reflected off the surface of the pool, he could see enough to be sure: staring back at him were the two wide-eyed sockets in the skull of a woman. He could tell it was a woman because there was a long hank of dark hair hanging off one side of the skull, and there was a gold ring glinting on a finger bone next to a small bundle. He reached in and moved the bundle and then he realized it wasn’t a woman’s skeleton at all, because another face smiled back at him. It was a crude face, carved out of some kind of stone, but it was unmistakably a doll’s face.

The dead woman was no woman, but a little girl.

He knew without needing to be told that the girl was a glint, and that she was one of the Walker’s victims, possibly even his first.

The little bone hand clasped around the smiling doll’s face did something to the Gunner. It filled him with a murderous blackness, as dark as the chamber as the match guttered out.

“Right, you bastard. Fate or no fate, I ain’t bloody dying tonight. I’m coming after you.”

He lit another match and looked into the small skeleton’s eyes. He didn’t see anything gruesome in the bones and fragments of flesh and clothing that remained. He saw a little girl who had died clutching her doll for a comfort that never came. He imagined the sobs that had filled this stone chamber before she went quiet. His jaw clenched tight.

A statue can’t cry, of course. Everyone knows that. It must have just been water from the splashing as he dug that rolled off the upper curve of his cheek and plopped into the Tyburn below. He reached gently into the water and began to move the bones, laying them softly on the gravel bank in as close to the right order as he could. Despite the growing clumsiness in his hands, he managed most of the time to be as delicate as a father putting his child to bed.

“Sorry, love. I got to move you. But it’s only so as I can have him. And I WILL have him, straight up. I’ll swing for him wherever he is.”