Phin came up out of a confused nightmare, in which pain had been clenching around his head in throbbing waves. Deep within the nightmare was something about a huge gate clanking down.
He fought against the pain, and forced himself to think what had led to this. He could remember setting off for Linklighters to meet Loretta Farrant – that had only been this morning, hadn’t it? He remembered, as well, that he had been a bit early, but that the restaurant door had been unlocked, so he had gone inside, and then down to the deep cellar. He frowned, feeling the confusion clear slightly. The panel leading to the old Cock & Pye ditch had been open and, incredibly, what had to be a sluice gate was being cranked down. Phin had barely had time to take this in, when he’d realized there was someone beyond the gate – someone inside the dark tunnel, who looked injured. Phin had instinctively gone towards the huddled-up figure, and that had been when a pair of small, strong hands had pushed him, so hard that he had tumbled through the narrowing gap between the edge of the gate and the ground. He thought he had banged his head against something hard and cold, but as he spun down into unconsciousness, he knew he had heard the sound of the gate clanging down into place.
His head was still banging with maddeningly rhythmic waves of pain, but the pain was starting to recede slightly, and Phin tried to see about him. The darkness was thick, but it was not absolutely complete – or perhaps his eyes were adjusting. There was the impression of someone sitting quite near to him. He had just acknowledged this, and he was just realizing it must be whoever he had seen earlier, when a voice said, a bit breathlessly, ‘You’ve come round? Thank God for that, at any rate. Are you all right?’
‘I think so. Who—’
‘Roland Farrant,’ said the voice. ‘You must be Phineas Fox.’
‘Yes.’ Phin managed to add, ‘As introductions go, this has to be the weirdest ever. What happened?’
There was a considerable pause, as if Roland Farrant was working out what to say. Probably, though, he was in pain. He had certainly sounded as if he was.
‘I’m not entirely sure. We were testing the sluice gate – there’s an insurance inspection due. The mechanism jammed and I think Loretta panicked.’
‘Ah,’ said Phin. ‘I thought she pushed me through.’
‘I don’t think so. No, she wouldn’t do that. She was trying to reach up to unjam the gate,’ said Roland, then broke off on a gasp.
‘Are you injured?’ Phin thought they could both be fairly sure that Loretta had pushed him, and he thought it was likely she had done the same to Roland, although he could not imagine why. But that was not the immediate concern. He managed to half sit up, which made his head spin again, but made him feel a bit more in control of the situation.
‘I think I’ve got a broken rib,’ said Roland. ‘I crunched it against the edge of the wall. It’s as painful as hell, but I don’t think there’s any more damage. Have you got a phone? Mine’s on the other side of that hellish gate.’
‘Yes, hold on … Damn,’ said Phin, after a moment. ‘No signal. I suppose we’re too far underground. Wait a minute, I’ll put the torch on – at least we’ll have a bit of light. Can we open the gate from this side?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Roland. ‘I think this whole place was sealed up years ago.’
‘We’d better try, though. Until,’ said Phin, carefully, ‘help comes.’
He made a cautious way to the gate. The ledge was perilously narrow – it would be easy to make a misstep and fall into the yawning channel where the old ditch had been. He got to the gate, although when he shone the phone’s torchlight all around it, he saw it was flush with the wall, and metal plates overlaid the entire frame. There was no switch, no lever, nothing to operate it. Phin, wishing his head was not aching so violently, examined the entire wall again, then returned to where Roland half lay.
‘Nothing doing, I’m afraid.’
Roland, clearly still struggling against pain, said, ‘I didn’t think there would be. The tunnel was closed off – oh, years and years ago. Loretta found out about it, because there were all kinds of Health and Safety regulations she had to comply with. She had to make sure that the place could be accessed and that’s why that panel was built in.’
Phin felt despair close over him. He thought it seemed unlikely that Loretta would get them out; as for shouting, they could shout until they were voiceless, but they would never be heard down here. Toby certainly knew Phin had the meeting with Loretta, but there was no reason for him to wonder where Phin was. But there would be a way to get out – Phin would concentrate on how to do it, and he would not think that he had been lured down here by Loretta Farrant. In any case, he had not been lured at all; he had instigated today’s meeting himself.
Lured. The word scratched against his mind. He frowned, then memory clicked into place. The old verse from the Marble Arch pub had been about London’s old rivers – hadn’t it even mentioned this one? It had certainly talked about luring, though; Phin forced his mind to yield up the exact words. There had been something about only sleeping in beds where you were safe, and about never letting yourself be lured to a ghost river bed, because you could end up dead. The verse slid into his mind.
‘Never be lured to the ghost river beds,
Only sleep in a bed where you’re safe.
In a ghost river bed, you could end up quite dead …’
Then had come the quirky mentions of the old, lost London rivers. Tyburn and the Earl’s Sluice. And this one, of course. The Cock and Pye.
‘And there’s really no use
To try raising the sluice.
Street grids and street grilles will not help your ills,
For you can’t reach the grilles when you’re dead.’
Grilles, thought Phin, sitting up, and wincing from the jab of pain against his temples. Street grids and street grilles. That verse was saying there would be street grids or grilles along those old rivers.
Would there still be grilles from this river that opened on to the streets? For drainage? For maintenance? Phin thought there would have to be, and he had a sudden vivid memory of walking across Harlequin Court with Arabella, and of Arabella getting the heel of her boot stuck in a grille. Was that grille directly over the Cock & Pye? But it did not have to be that one – any grille would do. Because if they could find one, and even if they could not climb through, they could use it to attract attention. They would probably be able to get a phone signal, too.
Phin got to his feet again.
‘Roland – can you walk?’
‘Just about. If I have to.’
‘This might not work out, but we’ve got to go along this tunnel until we see light coming in from overhead.’
‘Loretta said the ditch came out somewhere in St Martin’s Lane,’ said Roland. ‘But it’s anybody’s guess if it still does. And she said the whole tunnel had been sealed. Wouldn’t that mean any grids would have been covered over?’
‘Let’s hope not,’ said Phin.
It was eerie and it was perilous in the extreme to make their way along the narrow ledge. Phin was still fighting the dizziness from having hit his head against the tunnel wall, and Roland was clearly in a good deal of pain from his cracked – or broken – rib. But it had to be done. If they crawled on their hands and feet, they had to find a way of reaching the streets above.
Phin shone the torchlight carefully, praying the charge would last. Several layers below those thoughts, he tried not to think that there would almost certainly be rats down here.
Their footsteps echoed in the enclosed space, and once, when Roland stumbled and sent a shower of small stones skittering into the yawning channel, the sound was magnified a dozen times over. The tunnel curved slightly round to the left after a time, and Phin was just starting to think that a thread of light might be showing from somewhere, and wondering if he dared hope they were approaching a street grid, when Roland said, ‘What’s that?’
‘What? Where?’
‘There’s something lying on the ground up ahead.’
‘What kind of something?’ Phin moved the torch, trying to quell apprehension, because anything might be down here.
‘I don’t know. It’s a sort of huddled shape.’
‘We’ll have to step over it a bit carefully,’ said Phin, shining the torch. ‘Because … Oh. Oh God.’
They both stood very still, staring down at the huddled shape. It lay on the ground, half against the wall, and in the torchlight it was unmistakable. A human head. A human body. The bones black—
‘Black with age,’ said Roland, half to himself, and even as he said it, Phin thought: no, it’s black because it’s been burned. It’s charred.
The nightmare possibilities reared up at once, and he pushed them away, and finally managed to say, ‘It must have been down here for years. Decades.’
‘Yes. Trapped down here,’ said Roland, horror rising in his voice.
A dreadful silence seemed to close down. Phin thought – he knows we’re trapped, because he knows Loretta deliberately pushed him through that gate. She pushed me after him, because I saw what happened.
But I can’t die down here like this, he thought. I won’t. He said, ‘Let’s go on. I still think there could be a grid or something – or that we’ll reach somewhere where there’s a phone signal.’
They stepped over the hunched-up bones with difficulty, Phin going first, then shining his torch back for Roland to follow. Roland was pressing both hands against his chest, and his face was drenched in sweat, and Phin hoped the injury was as straightforward as a broken rib, and that the rib itself had not caused any internal injury.
But now there was no doubt about the tunnel becoming lighter. From somewhere daylight was trickling in, and even if there was not a grille through which they could climb, there would almost certainly be a phone signal. Phin switched off the torch, and tried dialling.
He had never been so grateful in his life to see the stored numbers come up, and to hear, when he tapped out Toby’s number, the ringing tone at the other end.
London, 1890s
Daisy sat on the edge of the circle of people, her eyes fixed on the thin face of the man behind the desk. There had been something called an Appeal following Madame’s trial. Daisy was not entirely clear about the details, but it might mean that a different judge would say Madame’s trial had been wrong – that Madame was not guilty after all, and she could go free. They were here in the Eaton Square house to be told what had happened.
Rhun sat next to her, with Thaddeus Thumbprint on his other side. Cedric had remained at Maida Vale with Joe and the twins.
It was strange to see these two men – Rhun and the distinguished gentleman called Charles – facing one another. It was probably impossible to say which of them had loved her more or which one she had loved more.
‘The Appeal was turned down,’ said Charles, and Daisy felt as if a massive black weight had fallen around her shoulders. ‘I couldn’t save her. I’m truly sorry.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of apology that was so humble Daisy wanted to cry. ‘They ruled that the evidence was clear and couldn’t be overturned.’
‘Baskerville’s statement clinched it, of course,’ said Rhun, bitterly. ‘And the irony is that what she said was perfectly true.’
‘Yes. Scaramel did kill Daisy’s father. Belinda saw her do it. Scaramel was defending Daisy’s brother, of course, but even so … They produced her journal again,’ said Charles. ‘Even allowing for her jealousy, it was as damning as it had been at the trial. She knew about the visit here when we dealt with your father, Daisy. That counted for a lot, I’m afraid.’
‘Are you likely to be drawn in, sir?’ asked Daisy, nervously. ‘Because of how you helped that night?’
‘So far I’ve fought my way clear,’ he said, smiling at her.
‘What Belinda said about there being a cover-up was perfectly true, of course,’ put in Rhun. ‘There was a cover-up.’
‘Yes, but Miss Baskerville only got pieces of the story, and it got twisted. It was very believable, though,’ said Thaddeus. He and Cedric had gone to court each day, and had made careful notes in case there was anything that could be picked up and used for Madame’s defence.
‘I’m afraid a good many of the lawyers – and the judges and the police chiefs – knew about the real cover-up,’ said Charles. ‘That was what tipped the balance, I think. They knew the Ripper had been shut away in The Thrawl – they knew there must have been informants who helped with putting him there, even though they could never pin down the final piece of evidence they needed to charge him.’
‘Identification,’ said Daisy, with a shiver.
‘Yes. So it all made it very easy for them to believe that Scaramel really did kill the Ripper that night. May the evil creature continue to burn in hell.’
‘And because of it, Scaramel will hang,’ said Rhun, bleakly.
‘Yes. Murder’s the crime that can’t be condoned – that’s what the Appeal Court said in the summing-up.’
‘We’re very grateful for all you’ve done,’ said Thaddeus.
‘I haven’t done enough to save her life, though. I suppose the only other thing I could do …’
‘Yes?’ said Rhun, as Charles hesitated.
Charles said, slowly, ‘You hadn’t better take this too seriously and I would probably have to deny I ever even said it – but the only other thing I could do is to see whether the door of a certain cell – and I mean the cell – inside Newgate Gaol could be left unlocked before eight o’clock tomorrow morning.’ He looked at them. ‘It’s the maddest thought in the world, though.’
‘Completely mad,’ said Rhun, staring at him. And then, ‘Or is it?’
Rhun, with Daisy and the Thumbprints, sat in the familiar room in Maida Vale the following day, looking across the dark gardens.
Rhun said, ‘The maddest thought in the world.’
‘D’you think he’ll do it? Get someone to leave the cell door unlocked?’
‘D’you think he can?’ said Cedric.
‘I think he was telling us he’ll try,’ said Rhun.
‘And warning us to be ready,’ nodded Thaddeus. ‘Well, we can be. We can be there – outside the gaol. Rhun, where would you take her? If it were to succeed?’
‘Paris,’ said Rhun, at once. ‘I’m taking the twins back there anyway – they can’t stay in London to hear all the talk.’
‘We’d all come under suspicion.’
‘Oh, yes. But I think it will seem perfectly acceptable for me to take the twins away from London,’ said Rhun. ‘Daisy will come with us to look after them. That, too, would be normal and believable.’
‘What about Joe?’
‘Joe could come with us, too,’ said Rhun. ‘There are one or two artists over there I got to know – people who might help him to get into one of the art schools. It’s what he’d like, I think.’
‘Wouldn’t it look like a kind of mass exodus?’ said Thaddeus. ‘Attract more attention?’
But Cedric came in eagerly at that. ‘Not if there seemed to be a different reason for Joe vanishing,’ he said. ‘We could say he’d disappeared – that we didn’t know where he was. We could even advertise him as missing.’
‘Even put out a news-sheet asking for information about him,’ said Thaddeus. ‘Something about information being sought regarding the whereabouts of the young artist known as Links. That would make him seem unconnected to Daisy and the rest of you,’ he said.
They looked at one another. Then Rhun said, ‘We’ll do it. All of it. I’ll make the arrangements right away. Tomorrow night – or the next night – we’ll all be in Paris.’ He paused. ‘But I don’t know whether we’ll have Scaramel with us,’ he said.