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  The body, which wore a tweed suit, was facedown in the mud, with one arm raised as though trying to hail a carriage. His brown boots were well shod, and though covered in mud were otherwise in good condition. Not the attire of a derelict, thought Abberline. Crouching, heedless of the mud that soaked his clothes, he took a deep breath and reached to the man’s shoulders, grunting with the effort as he rolled him over.

  From above came a ripple of reaction but Abberline had his eyes closed, wanting to delay the moment he saw the man’s face. With trepidation he opened them and stared into the dead gaze of the corpse. He was in his late thirties and had a bushy white-flecked Prince Albert moustache that looked cared for, as well as thick side-whiskers. By the looks of him he wasn’t a rich man but neither was he a worker like Abberline, one of the new middle classes.

  Either way, this was a man with a life whose next of kin, when they were informed, would want an explanation as to how he ended his life in a trench at New Road.

  This was, without doubt—and Abberline couldn’t help but feel a small, slightly shameful thrill at the thought of it—an investigation.

  He tore his gaze away from the man’s sightless open eyes and looked downward at his jacket and shirt. Visible despite the mud was a bloodstain with a neat hole at the center. If Abberline wasn’t very much mistaken, a puncture wound.

  Abberline had seen victims of stab wounds before, of course, and he knew that people armed with knives stabbed and slashed the same way they punched: in quick, haphazard multiples, bomf, bomf, bomf.

  But this was a single wound, direct into the heart. What you might call a clean kill.

  By now, Abberline was vibrating with excitement. He’d feel guilty about that later, remembering that there was, after all, a dead man involved, and you shouldn’t really feel anything but sorrow for him and his family in that situation, and certainly not excitement. But even so . . .

  He began a quick search of the body and found it immediately: a revolver. Christ, he thought, this was a geezer armed with a gun who’d lost a fight with a knifeman. He pushed the gun back into a jacket pocket.

  “We’ll need to lift this body out of here,” he called up in the general direction of the boss men. “Sir, could you ask men to help me cover him and put him in a cart for taking to the police morgue?”

  With that he started to ascend the ladder, just as orders were called out and a team of men began to descend the other ladders with varying degrees of eagerness and trepidation. At the top, Abberline stood wiping his mucky hands on the seat of his trousers. At the same time he scanned the lines of assembled men, wondering if the killer was in there somewhere, admiring his handiwork. All he saw was row upon row of dirty faces, all watching him intently. Others still crowded around the mouth of the cutting, watching as the body was brought up then laid on the flat bed of a cart. The tarpaulin flapped as it was shaken out then draped over him, a shroud, the face of the dead man hidden again.

  By now it had started to rain in earnest, but Abberline’s attention had been arrested by the sight of a smartly dressed man making his way over the boards that crossed the expanse of mud, toward them. Not far behind lolloped a lackey carrying a large, leather-bound journal, its laces dancing and jerking as the lackey tried unsuccessfully to keep up with his master.

  “Mr. Fowler! Mr. Pearson!” called the man, gesturing with his cane and instantly commanding their attention. The entire site quietened but in a new way. There was much shuffling of feet. Men were suddenly studying their boots intently.

  Oh yes? thought Abberline. What have we here?

  Like Fowler and Pearson the new arrival wore a smart suit though he wore it with more style—in a way that suggested he was used to catching the eye of a passing lady. He had no paunch and his shoulders were squared, not stooped with stress and worry like his two colleagues. Abberline could see that when he doffed his hat it would be to reveal a full head of almost shoulder-length hair. But though his greeting was warm, his smile, which was a mechanical thing that was as quickly off as it was on, never reached his eyes. Those ladies impressed by his mode of dress and general demeanor might well have thought twice upon seeing the look in those cold and piercing eyes.

  As the man and his lackey drew close to them Abberline looked first at Pearson and Fowler, noting the discomfort in their eyes, the hesitation in Charles Pearson as he introduced the man. “This is our associate, Mr. Cavanagh, a director of the Metropolitan company. He oversees the day-to-day running of the dig.”

  Abberline touched his brow, thinking to himself, What’s your story, then?

  “I hear a body has been discovered,” said Cavanagh. He had a large scar on the right side of his face, as though somebody had once used a knife to underline his eye.

  “Indeed, sir, it has.” Pearson sighed.

  “Let’s see it, then,” demanded Cavanagh, and in the next moment, Abberline drew back the tarpaulin only for Cavanagh to shake his head in nonrecognition. “Nobody I know, thank God, and not one of ours by the looks of him. A soak. A drunk like the poor soul serenading us over there, no doubt.” He turned his back on the cart. “Marchant! Get these men back to work. We’ve lost enough time as it is.”

  “No,” came a lone voice, and it was the voice of Mrs. Pearson. She took a step in front of her husband. “A man has died here, and as a mark of respect we should suspend the dig for the morning.”

  Cavanagh’s automatic smile was switched on. Instantly oleaginous he swiped his tall hat from his head and bowed low. “Mrs. Pearson, please forgive me, how remiss it is of me to forget that there are more delicate sensibilities present. However, as your husband will attest, we are often the site of misadventures and I’m afraid that the mere presence of a dead body is not enough to prevent the tunnel work’s continuing.”

  Mrs. Pearson turned. “Charles.” In return, her husband lowered his eyes. His gloved hands fretted at the handle of his stick.

  “Mr. Cavanagh is correct, my dear. The poor soul has been removed, work must continue.”

  She looked searchingly at her husband, who avoided her eyes, then Mrs. Pearson picked up her skirts and left.

  Abberline watched her go, noting the look of sly triumph in the eyes of Cavanagh as he went about the business of mustering Marchant and the men, and the sadness in the face of Charles Pearson, a man torn, as he too turned to leave in the wake of his wife.

  Meanwhile, Abberline had to get this corpse to Belle Isle. His heart sank to think of it. There was scarcely a worse place on the whole of God’s green earth than the Belle Isle slum.

  * * *

  Among the men who were at that very moment being urged, cajoled, bullied and threatened back to work by the site manager, Marchant, was a young Indian worker who, though he appeared on the worksheet as Bharat, and if any of the men working beside were curious enough to ask, that was the name he would give them, thought of himself by another name.

  He thought of himself as The Ghost.

  To all outward appearances The Ghost was unremarkable. He wore similar clothes to the other workers: shirt, neck scarf, railwayman’s cap, waistcoat and work coat—though no boots, he went barefoot—and he was a competent, conscientious worker, no better or worse than the next man, and he was perfectly personable should you engage him in conversation, not especially loquacious and certainly not the sort to initiate a conversation, but then again not particularly retiring either.

  But The Ghost was always watching. Always watching. He’d caught sight of the body and by good fortune had been close enough to look before the order was given to evacuate the trench. He’d also seen the drunkard by the trench and in the ensuing commotion had been able to catch his eye, then, as if responding to an itch, he had rubbed his own chest, a tiny insignificant gesture practically invisible to anybody else.

  Then he’d watched as Abberline arrived. He watched Cavanagh come bustling onto the site, and he watc
hed very carefully indeed as the tarpaulin was drawn back and Cavanagh gazed down upon the face of the dead man and hid his look of recognition.

  Oh, he was good. The Ghost had to give him that. Cavanagh’s powers of concealment were almost on a par with his own, but his eyes had flickered briefly as he looked down upon the face. He knew the man.

  Now The Ghost watched as Abberline left on the cart, taking the body to Belle Isle, no doubt.

  He watched as, shortly after Abberline had left, the drunk departed also.

  SIX

  Prince Albert had been dead a year, and though his taste in facial hair lived on, his adherence to decency and good manners had evidently failed to percolate through to the general public. Quite the reverse it seemed; there was a pall that hung over London, dark and malignant. Some blamed it on the Queen’s absence; she mourned Albert still and had taken to the Highlands to do so. Others said the overcrowding was to blame; the terrible stink, the poverty and crime; among them those madmen who thought the best way to solve that problem was by building an underground railway. Still others said that actually it was not the overcrowding that was to blame; rather it was the construction of the underground railway that had thrown the city into disarray. This last group was apt to point out that the underground railway had thus far exacerbated overcrowding by evicting thousands of tenants from their homes on the Fleet Valley, the city’s biggest slum. Which was true, it had.

  Ah, but at least we’ve got rid of the city’s biggest slum, said the first group.

  Not really, scoffed the second group. You’ve just moved another slum into first place.

  Have patience, pleaded the first group.

  No, said the second, we won’t.

  Sitting on the board of his cart, reins held loosely in hand, Abberline thought over how the higher-ups made decisions in the clubs and boardrooms that affected them all. And to what end? For the greater good? Or their own personal benefit? A line from Lord Tennyson’s poem about the Charge of the Light Brigade sprang to mind: “Theirs is not to reason why, theirs is but to do or die.”

  His cart clattered over the rails toward where the tall, spired buildings of Belle Isle appeared like a smudge of dirt on the horizon. Already he could smell the foul stench of the horse slaughterers, the bone boilers, fat-melters, chemical works, firework makers, lucifer-match factories.

  To his left some poor deluded idiot had made a valiant attempt to grow a kitchen garden but it was overrun with sickly weeds that climbed the iron fences sprouting on either side of him. Dirty, barely clothed children were running in the wasteland on either side, lobbing old tin cans at one another, scurrying in the street outside the cottages. Inside each home were rooms and washhouses, and at night the householders and their tenants would cram inside, just as they would at the Old Nichol.

  His cart came past the horse slaughterers. Under the arch went living horses, whose sense of smell and instinct must surely have warned them what lay ahead, and in the factory they would be put to death, then the flesh boiled in copper vats for cat food.

  Outside in the yards men stripped to the waist used sledgehammers to break up bones, watched by ever-present groups of children clad in filthy rags tinged yellow from the sulfur in the air.

  Abberline saw a group of children who had obviously tired of watching men break bones with sledgehammers—after all, it wasn’t an activity with an awful lot of variety—and set up a game of cricket instead. Without the usual equipment they improvised with part of an old bedstead for a bat, while the ball was . . . Abberline winced. Oh God. The ball they were using was the decapitated head of a kitten.

  He was about to shout across to them, to urge them to for pity’s sake use something else for a ball, when he became aware of a child who had wandered in front of the cart, forcing him to pull up.

  “Oi,” he called, waving an irate hand at the young ruffian, “police business. Get out of the bleedin’ way.”

  But the scruffy urchin didn’t move. “Where are you off to, sir?” he asked, taking the head of the horse in both hands, stroking it. The sight softened Abberline’s heart a little, and he forgot his irritation as the boy rubbed his fingertips over the animal’s ears, enjoying the rare intimacy of the moment, boy and horse.

  “Where are you off to, sir?” the boy repeated, tearing his eyes off the horse and turning his urchin gaze on Abberline. “Not to the knackers yard with this one, I hope, say it ain’t so.”

  In his peripheral vision, Abberline sensed a movement and turned to see three other young scallywags climb beneath the fence and come onto the road behind him. Let them, he thought. Nothing of value back there. Not unless you counted a soggy corpse and the tarpaulin.

  “No, don’t worry yourself, son, I’m off to the mortuary with a body on the back.”

  “A body, is it?” This came from the rear, one of the new arrivals.

  A couple more children had arrived by now, a little crowd of them milling around.

  “Oi you, get out of it,” warned Abberline. “Nothing back there to interest you.”

  “Can we have a look, sir?”

  “No, you bloody well can’t,” he called over his shoulder. “Now get out of it before you feel the business end of my truncheon.”

  The first boy stood petting the horse still, raising his face to speak to Abberline again. “Why is the police involved, sir? Did this one meet a sticky end?”

  “You might say that,” replied Abberline, impatient now. “Now stand aside, son, and let me past.”

  The cart bounced and jerked and he was about to turn to admonish the kids who were obviously trying to peek beneath the tarpaulin, ghoulish little sods. Then it bounced again and this time Abberline, irritated and wanting to get the hell out of Belle Isle, shook the reins decisively.

  “Walk on,” he commanded, and if the kid stood in the way, well, that was his lookout.

  He drew forward and the child was forced to step aside. As he passed, Abberline looked down to see the young urchin smiling inscrutably up at him. “Good luck with your body, sir,” he said, touching his knuckle to his forelock in a derisive way that Abberline didn’t care for. In return he merely grunted and shook the reins again, setting his face forward. He went past the rest of the houses to the mortuary gate, where he coughed loudly to rouse a worker who’d been dozing on a wooden chair, who tipped his hat and let him through into the yard.

  “What have we got here?” asked a mortuary worker as he emerged from a side door.

  Abberline had clambered down from the cart. At the entrance, the sleepyhead closed the gates again, behind him the Belle Isle slum like a sooty thumbprint on a window. “Body I need keeping cold for the coroner,” replied Abberline, securing the reins as the attendant went to the rear of the wagon, lifted the tarp, peered beneath then dropped it again.

  “You want the knacker’s yard,” he said simply.

  “Come again?” said Abberline.

  The attendant sighed and wiped his hands on his apron. “Unless this is your idea of a joke, you want the bleedin’ knackers yard is what I said.”

  Abberline paled, already thinking of his encounter with the slum children, the way his cart had shaken; remembering how his attention had been arrested, cleverly perhaps, by the kid nuzzling the neck of his horse.

  And sure enough, when he skidded to the back of the cart and swept back the tarpaulin, it was to see that the body from the trench had gone, in its place a dead pony.

  SEVEN

  Every night The Ghost made the same journey home, one that took him along the New Road and past Marylebone Church. In the churchyard, among the ramshackle and raggle-taggle groupings of headstones was one in particular that he would look at as he went by.

  If the stone was upright, as it was most evenings, that meant no message. If the stone leaned to the right, it meant danger. Just that: “danger.” It was up to The Ghost to work ou
t what manner of danger.

  However, if it leaned to the left, then it meant his handler wanted to see him, usual time, usual place.

  Then, having performed that check, The Ghost began his five-mile walk home to Wapping and his living quarters at the Thames Tunnel.

  It had once been called one of the great wonders of the world, and even at ground level it cut an imposing figure among the surrounding buildings: a spired, octagonal marble building acting as an entrance hall. Entering through doors that were never shut, he crossed the mosaic flooring to reach a side building, the watch house. During the daytime, pedestrians had to pay a penny to pass through to reach the steps down into the tunnel but not at night. A brass turnstile was closed but The Ghost climbed over, just as everybody did. All of the other ghosts, who haunted the tunnel by night.

  Ice had formed on the marble steps that spiraled around the inside of the shaft so he trod more than usually carefully as he descended to the first platform, then to the next, and finally to the bottom of the shaft, the vast grand rotunda, eighty meters underground. Once it had been vast and opulent, now it was merely vast. The walls were dirty, the statues scruffy. The years had had their say.

  Even so, it was still a sight to see: alcoves set into grubby stucco walls. Inside the nooks, curled beneath sacks, slept the people of the rotunda: the necromancers, fortune-tellers and jugglers who in the daytime plied their trade to those visiting the tunnel, the famous Thames Tunnel. Eighth wonder of the world.

  The first of its kind anywhere ever, the Thames Tunnel stretched from here, Wapping, below the river to Rotherhithe and had taken fifteen years to build, almost defeating Mr. Marc Brunel and almost claiming the life of his son Isambard, who had nearly drowned in one of the floods that had plagued its construction. Both had hoped to see their tunnel used by horse-drawn carriages, but had been undone by the cost, and instead it became a tourist attraction, visitors paying a penny to walk its four-hundred-meter length, an entire subterranean industry springing forth to serve them. One that needed policing.