Eight

AS HE WALKED along Church Street toward headquarters, Langton went over the evidence from Redfers’s house. The tide of jostling workers hurrying to offices and jobs carried him along. In the distance, factory whistles announced the start of shifts. The cold morning sunlight gilded the grimy city center buildings, but Langton saw again the dim consulting room and the basement with its empty shelves.

Langton’s rage had subsided to a dull, constant ache, like embers flickering and ready to erupt. He’d trusted Redfers, just as Sarah’s family had trusted the man, their doctor for almost three decades. Redfers had betrayed them all by involving himself in the illicit trade. There could be little doubt of his guilt: the strange electrical apparatus, the imprints of the ranks of jars hurriedly spirited away, the excessive sums of money, the midnight callers. Even worse, the evidence supported the existence of the Jar Boys. Langton knew now that he could fight it no longer—they existed.

For a moment, Langton had wondered if Redfers and Doktor Glass were one and the same. That suspicion had passed. Instead, Langton saw the hands of Doktor Glass behind the murders, directing them, orchestrating them for his own ends. And not without help, since the shelves had spaces for one hundred forty-two jars and the transfer could have taken an hour or more. Langton had asked McBride to question the neighbors; someone must have seen Glass’s men taking the jars away.

As headquarters drew near, Langton wondered how he would break the news of Redfers’s duplicity to Sarah’s parents. He’d interrogated murderers and molesters, anarchists, thieves, and arsonists. Those interviews would be nothing compared to the pain of telling Mr. and Mrs. Cavell that Sarah might have suffered even more than they’d realized. Might still be suffering.

Langton stopped at the foot of the headquarters steps, closed his eyes a moment, and drew a breath. He would do what he had to do. He had no choice.

Inside the building, the desk sergeant called Langton across. “McBride told us to look out for this man of yours, sir. Durham.”

“You have him?”

“We have sight of him, sir. Maybe.”

“Where? And how recent?”

Like a clerk in an accountant’s office, the desk sergeant consulted the massive ledger. “Yesterday evening, sir. Around ten o’clock near the encampment. The constable chased after him but the fella disappeared into the crowd by the gatehouse.”

Ten the night before. Durham could be anywhere by now. If it had been Durham at all. Still, a cold trail was better than no trail at all. “Thank you, Sergeant. I’ll visit the encampment myself.”

“I wouldn’t go alone, sir.”

Langton turned back to the high desk. “Why not?”

“It’s an unruly place, that encampment. They don’t like police or anyone from the Span Company going in there. Especially the closer they get to the bridge’s opening. You might want to take a guide in with you.”

“A guide?” Langton said, smiling. “This is Liverpool, not Africa.”

The sergeant blushed slightly. “Even so, sir, I’d advise it. I drink with a bloke from the Corporation who knows his way around the camp. They don’t mind him so much, sir, seeing as how the Corpy helps with food and shelter.”

Langton hesitated. “Can your friend take me over this morning?”

“I’ll send a lad to ask him, sir,” the desk sergeant said, already waving over one of the yawning office boys.

Upstairs, in his office, Langton wondered about the encampment. As far as he knew, it had started as a few tents and rough shelters to hold the families of laborers working on the Span, men who might be away for weeks at a time as the Span stretched across the Atlantic. The camp had grown as the Span grew. How had it become such a thorn in the Span Company’s side, and a place where policemen feared to patrol? Perhaps the man from the Corporation, Liverpool’s city council, would know.

Langton had almost finished adding Redfers’s details to the case file when he heard a hesitant knocking at the door. “Come in.”

A constable slid into the room, his helmet under his arm. He stood straight and looked past Langton, to the view of Victoria Street. “Inspector.”

Langton struggled to remember the man’s face. He’d seen so many people over the past few days. “You’re…”

“Constable Eames, sir. I was at Hamlet Street. The dead burglar.”

“I remember. How is Mrs. Grizedale?”

Eames blushed. “I have to tell you, sir…I mean, I have to say…”

“Go on, man.”

“Well, you asked me to look after the two women, sir, this Mrs. Grizedale and her maid.”

Langton’s heart jumped. “And?”

“I hailed a hansom, sir, and went along with the two women. The maid told the driver to take us to Toxteth, Upper Parliament Street. I was sitting beside her and noticed how she kept looking back through the window. Then, as we got to Canning Place, she dug her claws into my arm and swore someone was following us. I told the cab to stop, got out, and—”

“They drove on without you.”

Constable Eames looked at the floor. “They did, sir.”

Langton smiled with relief. He’d expected to hear much worse from the constable. “I don’t suppose you took a note of the cab’s number.”

“I’m sorry, sir. What with all the excitement, the dead man and everything…I remember what company it was, sir: Tate and Sampson.”

The largest cab company in the city. “Leave it with me, Eames.”

“I’m sorry for letting you down, sir.”

“You did right to tell me.”

Alone again, Langton leaned back and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t returned home until after four in the morning. Three hours’ fitful dozing had left him more exhausted than before. As he’d shaved, he’d seen Sarah’s medicines in the cabinet: morphine, opiates, tinctures, preparations. And a small brown glass bottle of white pills. Benzedrine, for Sarah’s failing energy.

Tempted to take one, Langton had even opened the bottle. He worried that once he started, he’d never stop. Coffee seemed a less harmful choice. He’d pocketed the pills just in case.

Now, after sending Harry for a flask of coffee, he added the constable’s comments to the file. He didn’t panic about Mrs. Grizedale and Meera; the maid had simply outfoxed Constable Eames since she obviously didn’t trust anybody at the moment. Perhaps that was wise.

Sipping coffee, Langton tried to remember what Meera had said the night before, something about going to her family. Where could she have taken Mrs. Grizedale? Hopefully somewhere beyond the reach of the man who’d sent the killer. Was that same man Doktor Glass?

Another knock at the door, this time a small, wiry man in a faded brown suit and derby hat. “Inspector Langton? The name’s Dowden, sir, Herbert Dowden, from the Corporation. Ted said you needed someone to show you around the camp.”

Ted must be the desk sergeant. Langton shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for coming over, Mr. Dowden. I hope I haven’t interrupted your work.”

“Glad to get out of the office, sir, and into the fresh air. Shall we go over there now?”

Langton grabbed his Ulster coat and went to lock away the case file. Inside his coat pocket, the angular bulk of his force-issue Webley revolver, which he’d taken from his bedside cabinet. As he and Dowden took Victoria Street and then Dale Street toward the Pier Head, Langton said, “I’m surprised that I should need a guide, Mr. Dowden.”

“Oh, I think it’s wise, sir. They’ve taken against the police, just as they took against the Span Company.”

“Who exactly are ‘they’?”

Dowden waited until a tram had trundled past, hissing sparks. “There’s a fair mix of people now, sir. Started out with a few families, wives and children of the men building the bridge. Navvies, masons, metalworkers, drillers, carpenters; the Company needed them all, and more besides.”

As Dale Street became Water Street, the Span emerged from between the buildings like a mountain suddenly appearing between foothills. The rising sun coated the towers and steel cables with gold.

Dowden continued, “She’s a hungry beast, that Span. A lot of the men that worked on her never came back home. The families they left behind felt badly done to: no compensation from the Company, nothing from the government. So they stayed put. The camp grew and grew.”

Langton could see the encampment now as he and Dowden reached the foot of Water Street. Across four wide lanes of traffic, past the pillars and girders of the elevated electric railway—the so-called dockers’ umbrella—lay the camp’s fringes. Tents, many of them ex-military sand-colored cotton, clustered around smoking fires. A rough barricade of recycled wood, metal, and masonry marked the boundary between the temporary shelters and the respectable world outside.

“If you don’t mind, Inspector, we’ll walk along the front toward the Pier Head,” Dowden said, looking for a break in the traffic. “These tents belong to the new folks, the ones just arrived. The old sections are the most important. That’s where the decisions get made.”

Dowden spoke as if the camp existed as an entity in its own right, a city within a city. And the structures behind the barricade, not to say the barricade itself, became more solid, more permanent as Langton and Dowden approached the Pier Head: Wooden shanties replaced tents; cabins of reclaimed driftwood were covered with patchwork tarpaper roofs; even bricks and chiseled blocks of sandstone and granite supported makeshift buildings.

Behind the barricades, burly men with cudgels at their waists patrolled back and forth. Watching. Waiting.

The shantytown camp stood to Langton’s right. To his left, the incomplete shell of the Liver Guaranty Building, a smaller version of a Chicago newspaper office and already a recognizable monument. Steam cranes hauled granite, brick, and steel a hundred feet into the air to the waiting men working so precariously above.

“They reckon half of the Liver Building ended up as walls and roofs in the camp,” Dowden said. “They should have finished months ago.”

Langton had never before realized the full extent of the “temporary” camp. It stretched from Prince’s Dock, to the north, all the way along the Mersey’s banks to the Pier Head and farther south, all along George’s Parade and the Chester Basin, almost to the office of the Span Company. To the west, it seemed to wash up against the foundations of the Span’s massive first tower. It filled the stinking wasteland between the river’s high-tide mark and the busy streets. Tram cars and steam buses wheeled around their terminus yards from the barricades.

Opposite the fine buildings of the Customs House and the Mersey Docks and Harbor Board, the barricades bent inward to form a rough entrance complete with gatehouse. Concrete blocks, set in a complicated pattern and separated by movable iron railings like portcullises, allowed in carts and pedestrians under the scrutiny of gatekeepers.

Here, the immense curving roadway of the Span’s entrance ramp swept above the camp and threw the gatehouse and half of the cabins below into shadow. Langton looked up at the suspended deck of concrete and steel less than a hundred feet above him; it seemed too solid, too massive to remain up there. Logic demanded that gravity pull it to the ground. But engineering defied both gravity and Langton’s eyes; the graceful arc swept up from the Span Company’s concourse and merged with the stone tower. Pigeons and gulls wheeled about the undersides, raucous specks of grey and white against the stone and steel.

And the itinerant camp had erupted beneath this great feat of engineering. “Why doesn’t the Span Company simply get rid of them?”

Dowden stopped near one of the lunch wagons next to the tram stops. “You’ve asked a good one there, Inspector. For one thing, the land they’re on is mostly derelict or common land, or nobody’s sure who owns it. For another, a lot of the families had loved ones who died on the Span; it wouldn’t look too good for the Company if they persecuted them, too. It’d take the shine off the Ninth Wonder of the Industrial World.”

Remembering his meeting with Lord Salisbury, Langton understood. The Company wanted to avoid bad publicity; they didn’t want to alarm their investors or the general public. At least not until the Span opened. “And what happens after the inauguration?”

Dowden stared out across the camp. “I give the poor buggers two, three weeks. Then the Company will send in the troops. Come back then and you’ll see nothing here but rubble and blood.”

That reminded Langton too much of the Transvaal, where the scorched-earth policy had been just that. Villages and farms reduced to embers. Foundations jutting from the black soil like broken teeth. Smoke and rubble and blood.

“Are you all right, Inspector?”

“Just a little tired, Mr. Dowden.”

Dowden led him to the gatehouse, a rough cabin of wood set beside the concrete blocks. A squat, red-bearded man moved away from the group of guards manning the gate. “Mr. Dowden.”

“Mr. Lloyd. You’re well, I trust?”

“As can be expected.” Lloyd looked Langton up and down. “I wouldn’t have thought to see you keeping company with coppers, Mr. Dowden. Disappointed, I am. Fair disappointed.”

“This is Inspector Langton,” Dowden said. “He’s looking for a man wanted for murder. You’ve heard of that fella with his face missing?”

“I have.” Lloyd didn’t change his expression, the same hard, set features as the guards watching the exchange.

“I’ve no interest in the workings of the camp, Mr. Lloyd,” Langton said. “I’m after one man and one man only. If he isn’t here, someone might remember him.”

“We don’t like talking to the police. Almost as bad as the Span bastards.”

“I need your help, Mr. Lloyd. Three men are dead. I don’t want any more on my conscience.”

Lloyd thought for a moment. He looked at Dowden, back to the guards, then told Langton, “Wait here.”

As the man disappeared into the gatehouse, Langton wondered what Purcell or Major Fallows would expect him to do. Probably to burst into the camp with a squad of mounted police. Bash some skulls; break a few bones. And learn exactly nothing. Violence was seldom the best answer although often the first resort.

A booming echoed down as the ramp above him reverberated, sending echoes like distant thunder.

“One of their electric trains,” Dowden said. “Imagine what it’ll be like when the Company’s sending out one every fifteen minutes, fully loaded instead of empty.”

Lloyd appeared from the gatehouse. “I had a word with the committee and if Mr. Dowden vouches for you, you’re to come in. But I’ll be by your side. Agreed?”

“Agreed, Mr. Lloyd.” Langton followed Lloyd and Dowden through the zigzag gates of concrete and iron. As he passed the gang of guards, one of them spat onto the ground a few inches from Langton’s boots. He ignored the taunt and walked on, scanning the face of every man.

The camp’s entrance opened up into a main central street running north–south. Here stood buildings of wood and brick, snug with glass windows and smoking chimneys. Ragged children ran splashing through the mud, their bare feet cracking the ice at the edges of puddles. Women wrapped in shawls watched from doorways or windows. Loafing men leaned against the jury-rigged walls.

It reminded Langton of the old slums in Bootle and Wavertree: families packed together, compressed into a small space, rife with the smells of cooking, laundry, and coal smoke. But whereas the old brick-built slums were a maze of narrow alleys, fetid lanes, and leaning buildings, this camp lay open and horizontal, and perhaps slightly cleaner. Almost as if planned.

“So, this man you’re after,” Lloyd said.

Langton gave a brief description of Durham. Lloyd called over some of the watching men and gave them instructions. As they strode off in different directions, Lloyd said, “They’ll ask around, find out if anyone’s seen him. If he has friends in the camp they’re not likely to admit he’s here.”

“I understand,” Langton said, already wondering if he’d wasted his time. “Durham worked as a guard for the Span Company—he wouldn’t be welcome here, would he?”

When Lloyd didn’t answer, Dowden said, “The people here have to get by, Inspector. Even the young comb the banks of the Mersey, every one of them a little ragazzi mudlark. The adults get to know people, friends of friends you might say, and sometimes the odd bit of cargo might slip out of the docks unnoticed.”

Langton understood. Some of the security guards, as badly paid as the dockers, might look the other way or even supply “unnoticed cargo” themselves.

“The Corporation does what it can to help,” Dowden said. “We donate food; we try to supply clean water stand pipes and even basic sewer facilities. We can only do so much.”

“Tell him why,” Lloyd said, then offered the answer himself: “The Span Company fights everyone who tries to help us. Even the charities. If they had their way, we’d have no water, no coal, no food, nothing. We’d be sitting here rotting in our own filth.”

Langton could understand the Span’s attitude even if he didn’t agree with it. They wanted the camp closed down. He imagined Lord Salisbury looking down from that fine office and seeing this rash of humanity like a blemish on a fine painting.

“This here’s the oldest part of the camp: Bell Lane,” Lloyd said, pointing left down a wide alley. “The Caisson Widows.”

Beyond a rough painted sign fixed to a wall, Langton saw neat houses of wood, tar, and glass. “Caisson Widows?”

“They were the first,” Dowden said. “Their husbands worked on the most dangerous part of the construction: sinking the towers’ foundations.”

“Imagine it,” Lloyd said, skirting a wide scummy puddle. “One thousand and twenty-four towers between here and New York. And for every tower, at least three men dead. At least.”

“What happened?”

Lloyd explained how teams of men plummeted down to the sea- bed inside immense caissons of wood and steel, like bells a hundred feet across. Above them, the support ships pumped down compressed air to keep out the seawater and allow the men to breathe.

“Hard men, they were,” Lloyd said. “I couldn’t do it: hundreds of yards down, with your blood pounding in your ears, hardly able to take a breath. Half in darkness, with only a few electric lights lit. And you’re digging and digging, with the cold sea up to your waist.

“And sometimes the sea would break in; either the pumps would fail or the caisson would tip to one side. Or strange sicknesses would get them; I’ve heard stories of men’s hearts exploding on the way back up to the surface, of blood running from eyes and ears. Or dying days or weeks later, after cramps and seizures that bent them double.”

Lloyd paused and looked back at Bell Lane. “The Company said it wasn’t their fault. Nothing to do with them. The widows got no compensation. Some of them even had to pay for the bodies to be brought back. That’s why they never left here. To shame the Company.”

From what he’d seen and read, Langton doubted that the Span Company suffered much from shame or guilt. Bad publicity, yes; adverse news that might affect shareholders or public confidence, certainly. Not shame.

Even as he thought this, and as he listened to Lloyd’s explanation, Langton searched the faces of the men around him. Some of the men did resemble the fugitive security guard, but Durham had no doubt moved on. His trail had cooled.

A quick shower of hail sent the children cowering into doorways or under eaves. Langton joined Lloyd and Dowden under the tilting porch of a house where a piebald dog watched them from the open door. A man ran along the side of the muddy street, holding his cap on with one hand while the other gathered his sodden jacket closed. He saw Lloyd, veered toward him, and whispered in his ear.

“Any luck?” Langton asked.

Lloyd sent the man away and turned to Langton. “Nothing yet. We get hundreds of new people every week. Mostly steerage.”

Before Langton could ask, Dowden said, “Families waiting to emigrate to America. If they can’t get on the boats, they hope to buy fourth-class steerage on the trains.”

Hope. The foundation of the entire camp, Langton realized. The Caisson Widows and their fractured families hoped for compensation or apology; the newcomers wanted a better life. Langton looked across the muddy, potholed street, through the curtains of hail, and wondered if any of the inhabitants’ hopes would ever be fulfilled.

He focused on a window. A face watching him through the grime, wide-eyed with surprise.

Meera.

Langton took a step forward, then stopped.

“What is it, Inspector?” Dowden said. “You’ve spotted him?”

Langton saw the face pull away from the window. “No. It was nothing. Shall we go on?”

“We’ll try the Bull and Run,” Lloyd said, testing the lessening hail with one outstretched hand.

“Pardon me?”

“It’s their pub,” Dowden said, smiling. “They named it after the Company.”

“Aye, ’cos that’s all we get from them,” Lloyd said. “Bullshit and the runalong.”

As he followed Lloyd and Dowden along a side alley, Langton wondered why Meera had brought Mrs. Grizedale to the camp. Did she have family here waiting to emigrate? Obviously she thought it safe. Either way, he didn’t want to cause them any further trouble or draw attention to them.

A vast groaning and creaking made Langton stop and look up. The complaining echoes of metal under stress sounded like a beast in pain. Langton stared at the underside of the ramp, sure it was about to fall and already bracing his body for the impact.

Dowden touched his arm and said, “She’s just settling on her haunches, Inspector.”

Lloyd said, “It’s worse when the bridge starts singing.”

“Singing?”

“Oh, aye.” Lloyd shielded his eyes and looked upriver. “When the wind comes down the Mersey and hits the Span just right, the whole thing starts wailing and groaning. Restless, she is.”

Langton wondered why men always called large vessels or structures she; perhaps it made them think they could control them more easily.

“See those wires,” Lloyd continued, pointing up to the vertical steel cables linking the road and rail deck to the curving support pipes. “Look like the strings of a harp, don’t they? Sounds like one too, sometimes.”

The Span’s strange “song” accompanied them to the door of the pub, where a surprisingly ornate painted sign swung over the door. Inside, a fug of smoke, coal, and tobacco gripped Langton’s throat. Behind the counter, a thick-armed barmaid in a red shawl smoked a clay pipe. A pyramid of barrels faced a stove that looked as though it had started life as a ship’s boiler, and a horseshoe of morose men sat facing the flames, clay mugs clasped in their hands. They made room for Lloyd and his charges.

Langton warmed himself and accepted a mug of warm ale tasting of cloves. He wondered where the beer barrels had come from. Probably best not to ask. Eyes heavy, he let the heat settle through him as Lloyd and Dowden discussed life in the camp. He sat up when he heard them speak of ghosts.

“It’s just superstition,” Lloyd said, signaling for more ale. “You pack enough people into a space small as this camp, you’re bound to get rumors and strange talk. Bound to.”

Dowden shook his head. “I don’t know, Mr. Lloyd. I wonder if there might be something behind the stories.”

“What stories?” Langton asked, leaning closer.

Lloyd swapped an empty mug for a full one from the barmaid’s tray. “Fantasies, no more. Too many folk with too much time on their hands and too many hopes.”

Langton turned to Dowden, who said, “Some claim to have seen lights around the Span. Like mist or slow steam, but colored yellow, gold, red, or orange. And they reckon they’ve heard children singing in the cables, and crying.”

Lloyd shook his head and smiled. “Oh, Mr. Dowden, Mr. Dowden. You’ve been listening to fancies, tales spun by people a little empty in the head, or by those who see what they wants to. They think the lights are the spirits of their dead husbands come back to see them. They’re nothing like that.”

“So the lights do exist?” Langton said.

Lloyd reconsidered his words. “Well, you see a glimmer or two some nights, I’ll grant you that. It’ll be no more than marsh gas or dust from the uranium docks.”

“I’m not so sure,” Dowden said. “I’ve no wish to gainsay you, Mr. Lloyd, but my mother’s mother was a wise woman back in Donegal and I wonder sometimes if I see a little more than I should. There’s an air to this camp; a feeling of things a little out of kilter.”

Lloyd glanced at Langton, then looked at Dowden as if seeing the Corporation man for the first time. Before he could say anything, the door burst open in a blast of icy air. A gaunt man rushed up to Lloyd and spoke in a hoarse whisper.

“We might have your man, Langton,” Lloyd said, downing his pint and making for the door. “Bob here reckons there’s a newcomer over by the tower shanties that fits your account.”

“You stay here, Mr. Dowden,” Langton said, rising. “I thank you for your help but I don’t want you harmed if this is the man I’m looking for. He’s too keen to use his revolver.”

Dowden plucked at Langton’s sleeve. He checked that Lloyd was out of hearing before he said, “One thing, Inspector. This talk of lights and voices in the night; it’s not the only strange occurrence.”

Langton hesitated, torn between wanting to follow Lloyd and wanting to hear Dowden. “Go on.”

“People disappear,” Dowden said. “The young, the old, even full-grown men. Some say that gangs come for them in dead of night. Most won’t talk about it, but—”

From outside, Lloyd called out, “Langton.”

“I’d like to hear more,” Langton said. “Later?”

Dowden nodded.

Langton left Dowden in the pub and followed Lloyd down the alley, heading west. Water ran down the middle of the muddy track as if drawn to the river glimpsed between leaning shacks; the surface of the Mersey looked like hammered pewter. On either side of Langton, the poorer shacks leaned at disjointed angles, propping one another up like wooden drunks. Wan faces looked out from glassless windows.

Langton checked the comforting weight of the Webley in his pocket. He didn’t want to use it, not with so many people packed tight. In truth, he’d fired a weapon only three times since returning from Africa, but Durham seemed to have no compunction about using his.

“Another old section,” Lloyd said, breathless. “Almost as old as the Caisson Widows’ cabins.”

The ground dropped away as it neared the high-tide mark. The original quay’s sandstone bank, where once boats had docked, fell away to an expanse of foul silt. Here, a rough framework of embedded timbers reached out across the void; lashed together with whatever the camp could scavenge, the precarious roadway connected the shore with the first of the Span’s towers, that immense column jutting from the river. Each stone block of the tower looked larger than a tram.

“We thought the Company wouldn’t dare touch us if we clung onto the tower,” Lloyd said. “But it isn’t the favorite place to stay.”

Langton could understand why; the stench of the river drove straight up through the open timbers. As he walked along the shifting, creaking platform, Langton looked back to shore; a dozen pipes jutted from the bank and spewed sewage and bloodred industrial waste into the water. The reek caught the back of his throat and made him gag. How could anyone live here?

But they did. As he strode after Lloyd, Langton heard babies crying from within the homes built onto and into the framework. Some of the hovels were no more than open wooden boxes nailed to the timbers, while others had doors, windows, chimneys. And the quarters continued right up to the very stonework of the Span tower itself. Up close, the scale of the bridge overwhelmed Langton. Despite logic, he couldn’t escape the certainty it would sink down and crush him. He could almost feel the weight and mass of that thundering concrete and steel above his head.

Bob halted and pointed to a shack perched half on the framework, half over the water. “Mrs. Naylor’s place, boss. The bloke came over yesterday.”

“Stay back,” Langton said. “If it is Durham, he’s dangerous.”

“You’re welcome to him,” Lloyd said. “Only remember that—”

The rough plank door to the shack swung open. Langton pushed Lloyd back and reached for the Webley. Instead of Durham, a ragged woman emerged from the shack and emptied a basin of dirty water over the side. Only as she turned to go back inside did she spot Langton. She yelled once.

Langton crossed the distance in seconds. He shielded the woman and looked around the edge of the door. Bunk beds, no more than planks covered with patched blankets. A woodstove perched on bricks. A wriggling baby, its crib an old drawer. And next to the fire, a man’s muddied jacket that could have been Durham’s.

The wind blew the trailing edges of a dirty curtain through the hole that passed for a window. Langton hesitated before leaning out. The cold river churned and surged fifty feet below him. As he turned to question the woman, Langton heard the clatter of boots on wood; when he ran from the shack he saw Lloyd and Bob but no Durham. Still, the sound of boots on wood, as if someone ran along the length of the framework.

“What’s underneath us?” Langton asked.

“Why, the timber struts of this here platform,” Lloyd said, “with planks running the whole length, unless they’ve ripped them up for firewood. Wait, man.”

Langton had already climbed out over the edge. He hung there for a moment. His hands clutched the splintered wood. Between his swaying feet, the sheer drop to the cold water so far below.

He swung his body like a pendulum until his legs twined about the nearest strut. He let go above and clung to the structure. Like a bridge built by a drunken carpenter, the underside of the platform stretched on either side of him in a jigsaw of mismatched timbers. He ignored the stench from the encrusted pigeon droppings and ducked inside the platform. Disturbed birds flailed and shrieked.

Just as Lloyd had said, a collection of planks ran beneath the bowed underside. Langton batted away the panicking birds and saw the back of a man, crouched running. “Durham. Stop!”

The figure didn’t even look back. Langton sprinted after him, keeping his head down to avoid the crossbeams and jagged nails. He jumped from plank to plank, skidding on the guano.

Then, as Durham reached the end of the platform, the fugitive slipped; an unsecured plank spun away and hit the water with a silent splash, leaving Durham clinging to a crossbeam.

That slowed Langton. He looked to see if the next plank beneath his feet looked secure or loose. “Durham, wait. You’ll never make it.”

Durham ignored him and ran on, then seemed to fall again before he caught himself. He clambered back onto a beam and jumped across a gap. Another few yards and he’d reach the sandstone bank.

Langton raised his Webley. He sighted on Durham and pulled the hammer back, the trigger cold and slippery under his finger. “Durham. I’ll fire. Durham!”

The man square in the Webley’s sight didn’t stop. He reached the sandstone wall of the riverbank and started to climb it.

Langton swore and eased the hammer down. Even though Durham had fired on him, he couldn’t shoot him down like a dog. Instead, he sprinted after him and jumped over the gap left by the fallen plank. He reached the sandstone bank just as Durham clambered up its face not ten yards away. Langton followed him, clinging to the slimy sandstone.

Voices from above as Lloyd and a group of men lowered a rope down the bank.

Durham looked up, then back to Langton. His unwashed, unshaven face contorted with pain or anger, or both. He started to move across the face of the rock like a mountain climber following a seam.

Langton wanted to yell at him, but he needed to concentrate on every move. He tried to find ledges for his boots, crevices or holes for his hands. He pressed his face into rock that stank of sewage. And it seemed that Durham was aiming for one of those sewage pipes nearby; he angled up until the plume of brown water arced out less than a yard away.

Where could he go? Surely he couldn’t climb up a sewer pipe in full spate?

As Langton risked calling out, Durham disappeared. Langton stared at the plume of sewage, then down at the water below. Durham hadn’t fallen. So where had he gone?

Trying to search the spot, Langton leaned out too far. He lost his balance and scrabbled at the rock. His boots skidded and lost purchase. He began to fall. The rope appeared in front of his eyes like a mirage; he clung to it and flinched as the weight of his falling body dragged his hands down the splintered hemp. The burning became cold, raw pain. His blood smeared the rope.

Lloyd and the others dragged Langton up the face of the bank. Despite the pain, despite his body slamming into the riverbank’s uneven surface, Langton stretched out and searched the plume of sewage. And he saw, beneath the gushing jet, a tunnel big enough to swallow a man. From the tunnel’s mouth scuttled a disturbed colony of cockroaches unused to daylight, with almost translucent carapaces.

The edge of the bank drew near. Langton felt himself pulled over the top and onto the cobbles. He lay gasping at Lloyd’s feet. Every muscle screamed out. He stared at his hands, at the stiff hemp fibers embedded in his bloody palms.

“You trying to kill yourself?” Lloyd said. “Suicide, that was.”

As soon as Langton got his breath back, he said, “Thank you.”

“Yes, well. I suppose.” Lloyd waved away the throng of onlookers, saying, “Get on with you, go on. Leave the man alone.”

Langton got to his feet and looked over the edge. “He got away. He climbed into a tunnel down there.”

Lloyd joined him and spat over the side. “Good luck to him, then. I wouldn’t fancy it.”

“Where might it lead?”

“Who knows? Riddled with old workings and tunnels, the riverbank is. Shafts go up, down, across, and inland. He could come out anywhere. If he survives.”