Boot opened his mouth. Maybe he was about to give Ethan the information he required. Or perhaps he was going to tell Ethan where he could stick his threats. Or more likely it was to simply whine that he didn’t know.
Ethan never found out, because just as Boot went to reply, his face disintegrated.
It happened a twinkling before Ethan heard the shot, and he rolled off the body and drew his revolver just as a second crack rang out, and he remembered the girl too late, his head whipping round just in time to see her spin away, blood blooming at her chest, and drop her bucket at the same time – dead before she hit the cobbles from a bullet meant for him.
Ethan dared not return fire for fear of hitting another unseen innocent in the fog. He pulled himself into a crouch, steeling himself for another shot, a third attack from the dark.
It never came. Instead there was the sound of running feet, so Ethan wiped the shards of bone and bits of brain from his face, holstered the Colt and flicked his hidden blade back into its housing, and then leapt for a wall. Boots only just gaining purchase on the wet brick, he shinned a drainpipe to the roof of a tenement, finding the light of the night sky and able to follow the running footsteps as the shooter tried to make his escape. This was how Ethan had entered the rookery and it looked like this was how he was going to leave, making short leaps from one roof to the next, traversing the slum as he tracked his quarry silently and remorselessly, the image of the little girl seared on to his mind’s eye, the metallic smell of Boot’s brain matter still in his nostrils.
Only one thing mattered now. The killer would feel his blade before the night was out.
From below he heard the boots of the shooter clopping and splashing on the cobbles and Ethan shadowed him quietly, unable to see the man but knowing he’d overtaken him. Coming to the edge of a building, and feeling he had a sufficient lead, he let himself over the side, using the sills to descend quickly, until he reached the street, where he hugged the wall, waiting.
Seconds later came the sound of running boots. A moment after that the mist seemed to shift and bloom as though to announce this new presence, and then a man in a suit, with a bushy moustache and thick side whiskers, came pelting into view.
He held a pistol. It wasn’t smoking. But it might as well have been.
And though Ethan would later tell George Westhouse that he struck in self-defence it wasn’t strictly true. Ethan had the element of surprise; he could – and should – have disarmed the man and questioned him before killing him. Instead he engaged his blade and slammed it into the killer’s heart with a vengeful grunt and watched with no lack of satisfaction as the light died in the man’s eyes.
And by doing that the Assassin Ethan Frye was making a mistake. He was being careless.
‘My intention had been to press Boot for the information I needed before taking his place,’ Ethan told the Assassin George Westhouse the following day, having finished his tale, ‘but what I didn’t realize was that Boot was late for his appointment. His stolen pocket watch was slow.’
They sat in the drawing room of George’s Croydon home. ‘I see,’ said George, ‘At what point did you realize?’
‘Um, let me see. That would be the point at which it was too late.’
George nodded. ‘What was the firearm?’
‘A Pall Mall Colt, similar to my own.’
‘And you killed him?’
The fire crackled and spat into the pause that followed. Since reconciling with his children, Jacob and Evie, Ethan was pensive. ‘I did, George, and it was nothing less than he deserved.’
George pulled a face. ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it. You know that.’
‘Oh, but the little girl, George. You should have seen her. She was just a tiny wee thing. Half Evie’s age.’
‘Even so …’
‘I had no choice. His pistol was drawn.’
George looked at his old friend with concern and affection. ‘Which is it, Ethan? Did you kill him because he deserved it, or because you had no choice?’
A dozen times or more Ethan had washed his face and blown his nose, but he still felt as though he could smell Boot’s brains. ‘Must the two be mutually exclusive? I’m thirty-seven years of age and I’ve seen more than my fair share of kills, and I know that notions of justice, equity and retribution play a distant second to skill, and skill subordinate to luck. When Fortune turns her face to you. When the killer’s bullet goes elsewhere, when he drops his guard, you take your chance, before she turns away again.’
Westhouse wondered who his friend was trying to fool, but decided to move on. ‘A shame then that you had to spill his blood. Presumably you needed to know more about him?’
Ethan smiled and mock-wiped his brow. ‘I was rewarded with a little luck. The photographic plate he carried bore an inscription identifying the photographer, so I was able to ascertain that the dead man and the photographer were one and the same, a fellow by the name of Robert Waugh. He has Templar associations. His erotic prints were going one way, to them, but also another way, to the rookeries and alehouses, via Boot.’
George whistled softly. ‘What a dangerous game Mr Waugh was playing …’
‘Yes and no …’
George leaned to poke the fire. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I meant that in many ways his gamble of the two worlds staying separate paid off. I saw the slums afresh today, George. I was reminded of how the poor are living. This is a world so completely separate from that of the Templars that it’s scarcely believable the two share the same country, let alone the same city. If you ask me, our friend Mr Waugh was perfectly justified in believing the paths of his disparate business enterprises might never cross. The two worlds in which he operated were poles apart. The Templars know nothing of the rookeries. They live upriver of the factory filth that pollutes the water of the poor, and upwind of the smog and smoke that pollutes their air.’
‘As do we, Ethan,’ said George sadly. ‘Whether we like it or not, ours is a world of gentlemen’s clubs and drawing rooms, of temples and council chambers.’
Ethan stared into the fire. ‘Not all of us.’
Westhouse smiled and nodded. ‘You’re thinking of your man, The Ghost? Don’t suppose you have any thoughts about telling me who The Ghost is or what he is doing?’
‘That must remain my secret.’
‘Then what of him?’
‘Aha, well, I have formulated a plan, involving the recently deceased Mr Waugh and The Ghost. If all goes well, and The Ghost can do his job, then we may even be able to lay our hands on the very artefact the Templars seek the Piece of Eden.’
4
John Fowler was tired. And cold. And by the look of the gathering clouds he was soon to be wet.
Sure enough, he felt the first drops of rain tap-tapping on his hat, and the engineer clutched his leather-bound tube of drawings more tightly to his chest, cursing the weather, the noise, everything. Beside him stood the Solicitor of London, Charles Pearson, as well as Charles’s wife Mary, both flinching as the rain began to fall, and all three stood marooned by mud, gazing with a mixture of forlornness and awe at the great scar in the earth that was the new Metropolitan line.
Some fifty yards in front of the trio the ground gave way to a sunken shaft that opened into a vast cutting – ‘the trench’ – twenty-eight feet in width and some two hundred yards long, at which point it stopped being a cutting or trench and became a tunnel, its brickwork arch providing a gateway to what was the world’s very first stretch of underground railway line.
What’s more
, the world’s first operational stretch of underground railway line: trains ran on the newly laid rails night and day, pushing wagons heaped with gravel, clay and sand from unfinished sections further up the line. They chugged back and forth, smoke and steam near suffocating the gangs of navvies working at the mouth of the tunnel, who shovelled earth into the leather buckets of a conveyor that in turn brought the spoil to ground level.
The operation was Charles Pearson’s baby. For almost two decades the Solicitor of London had campaigned for a new line to help ease the growing congestion in London and its suburbs. The construction of it, meanwhile, was John Fowler’s brainchild. He was, quite apart from being the owner of remarkably luxuriant whiskers, the most experienced railway engineer in the world, and thus had been the obvious candidate for chief engineer of the Metropolitan Railway. However, as he’d told Charles Pearson on the occasion of his employment, his experience might count for naught. This was, after all, something that had never been done before: a railway line beneath the ground. A huge – no, a gargantuan – undertaking. Indeed, there were those who said that it was the most ambitious building project since the construction of the pyramids. A grand claim, for sure, but there were days that Fowler agreed with them.
Fowler had decided that the majority of the line, being of shallow depth, could be dug using a method known as ‘cut and cover’. It involved sinking a trench into the earth, twenty-eight feet in width, fifteen feet deep. Brick retaining walls were built into it, three bricks thick. In some sections iron girders were laid across the top of the side walls. Others were made using brickwork arches. Then the cutting was covered and the surface reinstated, a new tunnel created.
It meant destroying roads and houses, and in some cases building temporary roadways, only to have to rebuild them. It meant moving thousands of tons of spoil and negotiating gas and water mains and sewers. It meant forging a never-ending nightmare of noise and destruction, as though a bomb had detonated in London’s Fleet Valley. No. As though a bomb was detonating in the Fleet Valley every day and had done for the last two years.
Work continued overnight, when flares and braziers would be lit. Navvies laboured in two major shifts – the change signalled by three tolls of a bell at midday and midnight – and smaller duty-shifts when men would move between tasks, swapping one back-breaking and monotonous job for another, but working, always working.
Much of the noise came from the seven conveyors used on the project, one of which was erected here: a tall wooden scaffold built into the shaft, towering twenty-five feet above them, an agent of dirt and ringing noise, like hammer blows on an anvil. It brought spoil from further along the excavation, and men worked it now, gangs of them. Some were in the shaft, some on the ground, some dangling like lemurs off the frame, their job to ensure the passage of the conveyor as giant buckets full of clay were hoisted swinging from the trench.
On the ground, men with spades toiled at a mountain of excavated earth, shovelling it on to horse-drawn wagons, four of which waited, each with a cloud of gulls hanging over it, the birds swirling and dipping to pick up food, unconcerned by the rain that had begun to fall.
Fowler turned to look at Charles, who appeared ill – he held a handkerchief to his lips – but otherwise in good humour. There was something indomitable about Charles Pearson, reflected Fowler. He wasn’t sure if it was resolve or lunacy. This was a man who had been laughed at for the best part of two decades, indeed, from when he’d first suggested an underground line. ‘Trains in drains’, so the scoffing went at the time. They’d laughed when he’d unveiled his plans for an atmospheric railway, carriages pushed through a tube by compressed air. Through a tube. Little wonder that for over a decade Pearson was a fixture of Punch magazine. What fun was had at his expense.
Then, with everybody still chortling at that, there came a scheme, Pearson’s brainchild – a plan to build an underground railway between Paddington and Farringdon. The slums of the Fleet Valley would be cleared, their inhabitants moved to homes outside the city – to the suburbs – and people would use this new railway to ‘commute’.
A sudden injection of money from the Great Western Railway, the Great Northern Railway and the City of London Corporation, and the scheme became a reality. He, the noted John Fowler, was employed as chief engineer for the Metropolitan Railway and work began on the first shaft at Euston – almost eighteen months ago to the day.
And were people still laughing?
Yes, they were. Only now it was a jagged, mirthless laugh. Because to say that Pearson’s vision of the slum clearance had gone badly was to put it mildly. There were no homes in the suburbs and as it turned out, nobody especially willing to build any. And there’s no such thing as an undercrowded slum. All those people had to go somewhere, so they went to other slums.
Then, of course, there was the disruption caused by the work itself: streets made impassable, roads dug up, businesses closing and traders demanding compensation. Those who lived along the route existed in an eternal chaos of mud, of engines, of the conveyor’s iron chime, of hacking picks and shovels and navvies bellowing at one another, and in perpetual fear of their foundations collapsing.
There was no respite; at night fires were lit and the night shift took over, leaving the day shift to do what men on day shifts do: drink and brawl their way through to morning. London had been invaded by navvies it seemed; everywhere they went they made their own – only the prostitutes and publicans were glad of them.
Then there were the accidents. First a drunken train driver had left the rails at King’s Cross and plummeted into the works below. Nobody hurt. Punch had a field day. Then almost a year later the earthworks at Euston Road had collapsed, taking with them gardens, pavements and telegraph wires, destroying gas and water mains, punching a hole in the city. Incredibly, nobody was hurt. Mr Punch enjoyed that episode too.
‘I’d hoped to hear good news today, John,’ shouted Pearson, raising his handkerchief to his mouth. A finicky thing, like a doily. He was sixty-eight to Fowler’s forty-four but he looked twice that; his efforts over the last two decades had aged him. Despite his ready smile there was permanent tiredness round the eyes, and the flesh at his jowls was like melted wax on a candle.
‘What can I tell you, Mr Pearson?’ shouted Fowler. ‘What would you like to hear other than …?’ He gestured over the site.
Pearson laughed. ‘The roar of the engines is encouraging, that’s true enough. But perhaps also that we’re back on schedule. Or that every compensation lawyer in London has been struck dead by lightning. That Her Majesty the Queen herself has declared her confidence in the underground and plans to use it at the first opportunity.’
Fowler regarded his friend, again marvelling at his spirit. ‘Then I’m afraid, Mr Pearson, I can give you nothing but bad news. We are still behind schedule. And weather like this simply delays work further. The rain will likely douse the engine and the men on the conveyor will enjoy an unscheduled break.’
‘Then there is some good news,’ chortled Pearson.
‘And what’s that?’ shouted Fowler.
‘We will have –’ the engine spluttered and died – ‘silence.’
And for a moment there was indeed a shocked still as the world adjusted to the absence of the noise. Just the sound of rain slapping on the mud.
Then came a cry from the shaft: ‘slippage’, and they looked up to see the crane scaffold lurch a little, one of the men suddenly dangling even more precariously than before.
‘It’ll hold,’ said Fowler, seeing Pearson’s alarm. ‘It looks worse than it is.’
&
nbsp; A superstitious man would have crossed his fingers. The navvies were taking no chances either, and the gangs on the crane scrambled to ground level, swarming the wooden struts like pirates on rigging, hundreds of them it seemed, so that Fowler was holding his breath and willing the structure to hold the sudden extra weight. It should. It must. It did. And the men emerged shouting and coughing, carrying shovels and pickaxes, which were as precious to them as their limbs. They gathered in knots that would divide along regional lines, every single one of them caked in mud.
Fowler and Pearson watched them congregate in the expected groups – London, Irish, Scottish, rural, other – hands shoved into their pockets or wrapped round them for warmth, shoulders hunched and caps pulled tight against the rain.
Just then there came a shout and Fowler turned to see a commotion by the trench. As one the navvies had moved over to look and now surrounded the lip of the shaft, staring at something inside the cutting.
‘Sir!’ the site manager Marchant was waving at him, beckoning him over. He cupped his hands to shout. ‘Sir. You should come and see this.’
Moments later Fowler and Pearson had made their way across the mud, the men parting to let them through, and they stood at the top of the trench looking down – past the struts and buckets of the silent conveyor to the lake of muddy water that had formed at the bottom and was already rising.
Bobbing in it was a body.
5
The rain had eased off, thank God, and the water level in the trench had fallen, but the machines remained silent. With a hand on his hat, Marchant had rushed away to inform his immediate boss, Cavanagh, a director of the Metropolitan Railway, while another man had been sent to find a bobby. It was the peeler who arrived first, a young constable with bushy side whiskers who introduced himself as Police Constable Abberline and then cleared his throat and removed his custodian helmet in order to get down to the business of seeing the body.
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