Josh Raines read Isaiah’s letter again, for the second time that day, looking for answers.
He had been wrong; there were addresses in it. Boundary Street—or as it had been, Cock Lane—Spitalfields, Friars Mount, but there was one that seemed to stand out because it was more than just a street, it was a building, too; The Peabody in Rotherhithe from Hitchcock’s unfinished Number 13.
All roads led to Rotherhithe.
It was late. Getting on for midnight. Cross-city traffic wasn’t the best, the last Underground had already rolled through, and he wasn’t about to walk all the way to Rotherhithe, but he couldn’t go home, either. Not while that thing was still out there. A chill ran down the ladder of his spine as he thought about the white wraith with Shepherd’s face and those haunting static-filled recitations that spewed from her mouth. Things were happening. Things he didn’t like and didn’t understand. Reading Isaiah’s letter just left him with more questions.
But if there were answers to be found, then maybe just maybe he had the key. The only way to find out was to go to Rotherhithe and see for himself.
The candle had burned down to a stub while he’d been reading.
He snuffed it out, leaving the shed in darkness.
He didn’t know anything about Hitchcock. He had no idea if The Peabody had been a real building or if they’d used the façade of some old warehouse down by the waterfront to double as the low-income housing project from the movie, and if they had, what were the chances that it would still be there now and not have been converted into some luxury apartments for city boys with more money than sense?
Even five or six years ago it would have been next to impossible to find anything before sunrise. That was just the way it was. A decade ago a mobile phone could barely even be called that, at worst it was a brick, it certainly wasn’t smart, but now he had access to all the information in the world in his pocket, all he had to do was sift through it. Hitchcock was a public figure, and even a lost film of his had to be the stuff of film legend, surely? There were people out there who were experts on this stuff and he had access to them without having to leave the shed.
Josh used his phone to sift through the hits his search returned.
Within a minute he was looking at a grainy black-and-white behind-the-scenes still of Claire Greet and her leading man, Ernest Thesiger. They sat on the steps of what, he hoped, was The Peabody building from Number 13. It appeared to be an intersection in Rotherhithe, but it was hard to really see any details and there were no real landmarks to speak of to help him get his bearings. There was a set of high steps leading up to the door while the footpath curved around the portico of a shop. No, he realized, studying the tiny image. It wasn’t a shop. The signage read: The Ang, the rest of the name invisible as it curved around the façade. He could only think of one kind of establishment that had a “The” like that in their name: a public house. The Angel? The Anglers? Assuming the place hadn’t been torn down during the intervening years—or flattened during The Blitz—there couldn’t be that many pubs in Rotherhithe with “The Ang” in their name, could there?
There was only one way to find out.
Josh eased the shed door closed behind him and used a broken stone to hold it shut. He checked his watch. His mum would be getting back to the house soon. He really should go home to make sure she was okay, and at the very least warn her what she was walking into. He couldn’t imagine how it’d feel finding her entire life turned out all over the floor on the day she buried one of the two men left in her life. But he couldn’t go home. And calling her to tell her what was waiting for her rather than doing it in person, standing side by side with her as she surveyed the damage, felt somehow cowardly, so he called his sister, Alexandra. Lexy. She picked up on the second ring. No hello, just a barked, “Where the fuck are you?” The emphasis heavily on the fuck.
Josh didn’t even try and deflect the question; he ignored it completely and told her, “Sis, I need you to go home with mum. Don’t let her go home alone. Promise me.”
There was silence at the other end of the line. He could hear the cogs in her mind grinding.
“What’s going on?”
What did he tell her? The answer was obvious: as little as possible. Nothing, if he could get away with it.
“Please, just promise me. Don’t let her go back by herself.”
“What’s going on, Bro, you sound weird.”
“I am weird,” he said. He wanted to say that he was good, everything was fine, but he didn’t. “There’s been a break-in. The place is a state. The police are here. I don’t want her going back there alone. She doesn’t need it tonight.”
“Christ. What kind of sick cocksniff robs someone when they’re at a fucking funeral?”
“Welcome to the Rothery. You’ve been gone too long.”
She breathed in sharply. “Okay, I’ll keep her away from there.” Another hesitation, then she asked, “You aren’t trying to find them are you?” She knew him too well, but then that was brothers and sisters the world over, wasn’t it? “Promise me you’re not doing something stupid, Josh.”
“Promise,” he said, and they both knew he was lying.
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t expect you to. I’ll be home soon. Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine.” He killed the call before she made him tell her any more lies.
He walked out of the vegetable gardens, back up the muddy hill, and eventually back out onto the main road. The streetlights weren’t working in this part of the estate, and several cars were almost invisible in the darkness because of it, but unlike a lot of his neighbors Josh had never nurtured the necessary skills that would have allowed him to drive off in one of them without the key.
He kept his head down and walked back toward the edge of the Rothery, hoping to flag down a passing taxi. The night was bracing. He felt the sting of the wind on his face and wished he were better dressed. But at least it wasn’t raining.
Kids far too young to be out at this time of night loitered on the street corner, hands stuffed in pockets, heads down, feet scuffing the pavement. There were half a dozen of them with lightning bolts and other decals shaved into their scalps like the urban equivalent of a peacock’s feathers. A couple of them eyed Josh suspiciously, but none of them moved. On a normal night they would have been intimidating. Tonight, though was anything but normal. They looked exactly like what they were: kids. He passed near enough to overhear what they were saying, but it sounded like a foreign language to him.
It would take ages to walk to Bermondsey, but he had nowhere else to go.
The Rothery was a warren of streets that all fed back toward the green, The Hunter’s Horns and the lightning-struck tree in its heart. Getting out of it felt like a rat trying to work its way back out of a maze after it had snaffled the cheese—something that wasn’t meant to happen. A pair of trainers hung from the arms of one of the lampposts; it wasn’t quite LA with the trainers strung up to mark fallen gang members, more like a bully who’d decided to make some kid’s life hell for a morning. Josh passed a dozen boarded-up windows. Some of the houses had been left empty after a fire in the summer had gutted them. The bricks around the windows were still blackened with soot. There were cars up on bricks where their wheels had been spirited away. England, my England, this green and pleasant land, Josh thought as he crossed the road and made his way toward the real world outside the Rothery.
He saw the back of a red night bus cross the mouth of the housing estate in front of him, and the light indicating that it was pulling in.
He ran after it, barely reaching the doors before the driver could close them in his face and drive off.
Josh paid his fare and made the journey as far as Tower Hill with the drunks and the damned, that entire subculture of London that only came out at night. He sat upstairs at the back, and spent the best part of an hour gazing out of the window. At one point he found himself staring at two young Goths in the relative seclusion of an overgrown cemetery. It took him a moment to realize that they were fucking up against one of the gravestones while across the street a guy filled his car with petrol from the all-night garage. If he’d been a philosopher, Josh might have drawn some kind of conclusions from the juxtaposition, but he wasn’t looking for the ties that bind. He just wanted to get to Rotherhithe.
He rested his forehead against the glass, feeling the vibrations of the old bus as it rumbled down the potholed road.
Drunks stumbled up the stairs, drunks stumbled down the stairs, and the only thing they left behind them was the stench of kebabs. A group of Chinese tourists looked less than impressed in their corporate windbreakers. They talked among themselves animatedly, their voices like birdsong. Josh liked listening to languages he couldn’t understand; without the structure of words and knowing where one ended and another began, the sounds became musical. It didn’t take him long to get caught up in the rise and fall, fall and rise of their strange tongue to the point that he almost missed his stop.
He thanked the driver out of habit and stepped off the bus into the shadow of the Tower. Rather than try and find a connection, he started to walk around the back of the tourist attraction toward perhaps the most famous bridge in the world and crossed the river. There were so many songs about the city, from “Waterloo Sunset”—which was still a few hours away—to “Baker Street” and “London Calling,” and walking across the water it was easy to see what it was about the place that inspired so many artists. He caught himself trying to hum at least half a dozen of them without actually knowing the tunes well enough for anyone to distinguish one from the next, but it put a smile on his face for the first time in what felt like forever and helped pass the half an hour it took to walk to Bermondsey.
Now that he was there he didn’t know where to start looking. It wasn’t exactly a small borough, but given every reference to Number 13 mentioned Rotherhithe not Bermondsey it was safe to assume he could head down to the end of the Jamaica Road and start looking from there.
Jamaica Road could have been any inner-city road in England; it had the same red-brick snakes of terraced houses with the downstairs converted to shops and restaurants, all of the shop fronts covered by roller shutters, the roller shutters in turn covered by fly-posters for upcoming concerts in and around the town. It was a concrete-and-steel version of the old woman who swallowed a fly and didn’t know what to do. There was no one on the street, but unlike the Rothery, Josh didn’t feel like he was taking his life in his hands venturing out alone.
Soon enough he had crossed through Southwark Park and King’s Stairs Gardens and reached the roundabout at the end of Jamaica Road. He was confronted by choices, as he stood facing the water. It wasn’t just a simple case of eeny-meeny, left, right, or straight down to the waterfront, either. Yes, there were three main streets in front of him, but within a hundred feet those three streets became seven, and a hundred feet after that those seven became nineteen as Neptune Street, Albion Street, and Brunel Road fed into the Norwegian mission and the Finnish church and a warren of courts and estates all the way to Surrey Water. A man could get lost trying to track them all street by street, he realized, confronted with the reality of trying to do a predawn grid search of the place. There were too many places to get turned around. He decided to start down by the water for no better reason than it meant there was a clean dead end he could keep returning to as he worked his way along the riverbank.
Josh followed the path down the side of the King’s Stairs Gardens, which were a vast field of black out of the reach of the streetlights. He could make out a few outcroppings of stone that appeared to be some sort of ruin that had been half-excavated. A boat out on the Thames sounded its horn. It had to be one of the most melancholic sounds of the city, encapsulating the loneliness of so many of the people who lived in London in one forlorn note.
After a couple of minutes Josh found himself face-to-face with The Angel pub, which stood all alone against the backdrop of the Thames.
Even isolated from all of the workhouses and other buildings that had been in the grainy photograph with it, Josh knew he was standing in the exact same place Hitchcock had stood when the photographer had taken the photograph of Claire Greet and Ernest Thesiger on the steps. There was something wonderful about that, the way it connected one place and two times. Not, he realized, that it helped. None of those old buildings were still standing, so any hope of walking up to a door and finding The Peabody or some other clue left like a trail of bread crumbs by Boone came crashing down with them. He took a moment to really take in his surroundings; aside from the lonely public house there was a terrace of what appeared to be dockworkers’ tenements on the far side of the green, there was a fairly modern block of apartments or offices, it was difficult to tell, and of course the railed-off section of the Bermondsey wall excavations.
All in all, not very much.
He walked across the street to check out the pub. The sign beside the door told the story of the old building, claiming it had stood in the same place for over five hundred years and hosted the likes of Samuel Pepys; Captain James Cook before his journey to Australia; and Christopher Jones, captain of the Mayflower, who hired his crew from inside The Angel. The place fairly reeked of history. There was mention of an old priory and how the monks themselves had brewed the ale for The Angel. Behind the pub was a stretch of land known as Cuckold’s Point, where the corpses of river pirates had been strung up as a deterrent to the rest of their kind. It was also the starting point for the riotous Horn Fair, where the mores were discarded for the day and women especially could surrender themselves to indecency and immodesty while the men drank and fucked with merry abandon. The legend was that King John himself had given the land to a miller he cuckolded after a hunting trip. That certainly set the tone for the wild fair.
There was no mention of a place called Glass Town, no images of glassblowers or anything else to do with fashioning glass or optics or lenses, nothing that might have linked the place to Isaiah’s letter, and nothing to suggest Hitchcock’s career had begun, if falteringly, on this very spot.
Josh didn’t need to close his eyes to imagine the press gangs working the waterfront and the old wharves or the women dancing with wild abandon, drunk on laughter and lust.
There had been so much life here, and The Blitz had left it a wasteland.
Yet The Angel survived.
The pub was locked up tight for the night.
Josh did a circuit around the building, walking the same steps those condemned pirates must have walked to the gallows, but despite the slightly unnerving thought, it offered no clues. There was nothing that screamed out Boone. He was beginning to doubt himself, or his late-night reasoning at least, but before he gave up entirely and went back home, Josh decided to check one last thing. He walked back around the edge of the priory land, following the rusted railings to the workers’ cottages. He opted to start there because that row of houses offered the most possibilities, or at least he hoped they did. They were the only buildings that could reasonably have been around when Hitchcock filmed Number 13. He was clinging to that, that somehow it all came back to the film, otherwise why would Isaiah have made a point of mentioning it at all?
The first thing he looked for was a number 13, but he was never going to be that lucky.
There were twelve doors on the street, and all of their numbers were even. That was typically English, too, a conspiracy to confuse the hell out of the postal workers. In the absence of a 13 he looked for something else to hang his hopes on, another clue that might have led back to Hitchcock or his family.
Josh half-expected to hear sirens after a few minutes; he couldn’t have looked more suspicious if he tried, moving from door-to-door, checking them and then moving on to the next, but it was late enough that even the nosiest neighbor was asleep.
Each of the doors had buzzers, each buzzer seemingly calling multiple occupancies. Most had names that meant nothing to him. Most. There was one, in the middle of the street, that was more than just a little familiar.
It said: “Lockwood.”
More precisely, it said: Isaiah Lockwood.
It took him a second to realize what was wrong with that, and that second was all he needed to be sure he was in the right place. Isaiah must have secured the place before he changed his name, or used his real name to hide it from his brother, Seth. Or Boone had, and chosen to hide behind his father’s real name. This was it, he realized; Boone’s secret place. Once he opened the door there could be no going back. Everything that had obsessed his great-grandfather and consumed his life was on the other side of the door.
Josh had the key out of his pocket and in the lock before any second thoughts could stop him.
The key turned in the lock.
The door opened.
He went inside.