Amos Legge wouldn’t have called himself a stubborn man: there were simply things he knew and he stuck to them with the same patience he’d give to training a colt. It was one of the principles of his life that everything that was going anywhere had to go on two feet or four hooves. From the start, in this case, he’d concentrated on hooves. The shoe meant Liberty hadn’t gone willingly and, since a woman being carried through the Westminster streets would have been noticed by somebody, that meant a wheeled vehicle. It had seemed at first a comparatively easy task to check what vehicles had been near the Maynards’ house when she had disappeared, and he’d carried it out thoroughly, using his vast network of friends and acquaintances in the horse world, from the merest donkey-cart man and cab driver to the coachmen of the great families of Mayfair. Then he went back and checked again until he was certain that he knew the movements of every horse, pony, mule or donkey that had stirred a hoof anywhere near the house that night. Not all of the journeys were entirely innocent, and he found out things that would have rocked the complacency of several noble families if they’d come to the notice of anybody less discreet than Amos, but none of them had any connection with Liberty’s disappearance. Then it had come to him quite suddenly, while showing a new lad the proper way of combing out a horse’s tail: what about the ones that hadn’t stirred a hoof? The comb had checked just for a moment, and he’d gone on with the lad’s lesson as if nothing had happened but, as soon as it was finished, he tacked up a cob and rode to the Maynards’ house.
Amos had already met the Maynards’ coachman, Daniel, in his investigations, and found him pleasant enough but bone idle. He managed to make looking after two carriage horses and a pony for mowing the lawn seem like a full job of work, and in any case, he left most of it to the boy. When Amos arrived, he was sitting in a chair, smoking his pipe and watching the boy wash the carriage, a neat clarence that would carry four people in decent comfort. He accepted a refill of his pipe from Amos, and for a while they smoked in companionable silence. Amos asked if the family went far in the clarence and Daniel shook his head.
‘Never more than a few miles from home. Him to work in the mornings, her and the young lady for shopping or visiting two or three days a week, then church on Sundays – their church, that is, not this one. He quarrelled with the vicar here.’
‘The evening the lady disappeared, they didn’t have the carriage out?’
‘Of course not. They were entertaining.’
‘That’s what I thought.’ Amos handed over his pouch for another refill. ‘I heard you had a bit of a business with the dogs.’
Daniel nodded. ‘She thinks more of those dogs than most human beings. It would have been as much as our lives were worth if some mongrel had got at the bitch.’
‘So you were all out trying to get her back in?’
‘Yes – bloody nonsense. They should have sacked the girl for letting her get out in the first place.’
‘So you were out in the garden in the dark. What about these doors?’ He gestured towards the high doors of the carriage house, which were open to the sunshine. ‘Were they locked?’
Daniel looked offended. ‘We don’t bother with that. The wife and I sleep over the stables and we’d hear if anybody tried to take a horse and carriage out at night.’
‘’Course you would. What I’m thinking is suppose somebody brought something in while you were all occupied with the dogs and left it in the carriage?’
‘Why would they do that?’ Daniel stared at him.
‘I’m just thinking … if they’d knocked the young lady senseless and wanted to hide her until they could come and take her away when nobody was about, the clarence wouldn’t be the worst hiding place.’
‘That’s just mad,’ Daniel said.
‘Is it, though? If they came back hours later when nobody was around, say two or three o’clock in the morning, they might have carried her to a cart or carriage they had waiting on Millbank. Risky, but not as risky as trying to get her away earlier.’
‘I’d have heard.’
‘A cart or carriage you would, but somebody on foot? She’s not a heavyweight, that lady. Did you notice anything odd about the carriage the next morning?’
‘No. It was all right when I took him in to the office as usual.’ He took a slow draw on his pipe. ‘When I took the ladies out in the afternoon, the young lady did say there was a funny smell inside, but then she’s always complaining about something.’
‘What sort of funny smell?’ Amos tried not to sound too eager.
‘As if somebody had been smoking inside it, she said. Stupid. Nobody would have been.’
‘All the same, do you mind if we take a look inside?’
It looked as if Daniel did mind, but it would have been uncivil to refuse. He signed to the boy to step back and opened the door for Amos to go in. The inside of the clarence was empty and orderly, but Amos wrinkled his nose. Sulphur.
‘There is something. Doesn’t smell like pipe tobacco.’
Daniel put his head inside and sniffed. ‘I can’t smell anything.’
‘Very faint, it is.’ Amos came out and closed the door. ‘Is that a horse rug in the corner there?’ Something dark was crumpled in the dark corner behind the clarence.
‘’Course it’s not. If you think we throw horse rugs round anyhow …’
Amos walked over and picked it up. ‘More like an old bit of blanket. That’s what the smell came from.’
He gave it to Daniel to sniff. The coachman, furious at being caught out in untidiness, turned on the boy. ‘If you’ve been …’
‘He hasn’t done anything. Mind if I take this with me?’ He rolled the blanket up and held it under his arm, mounted the cob and rode away.
Amos had to wait two-and-a-half hours to see Sergeant Bevan. He should have been at Tattersalls buying a good calm hunter for a lady, but the lady would have to wait. He’d walked into the police station after taking the cob back to the stables, told the constable who he wanted to see and refused, without rancour, to give any reason. Various constables had tried again, invited information and offered conversation. But he’d simply folded his long legs in their boots and breeches under the bench in the waiting room, so as not to discommode the life of a busy police station going on around him, and waited without impatience. Sergeant Bevan appeared around mid-afternoon in a quiet interval, and the two police constables on duty straightened up and looked busy. He was in uniform, carrying his top hat under his arm. One of the police constables said something to him, and he looked across at Amos.
‘Mr Legge.’
Amos took it as no more than his due that people should know him, though he’d last met the sergeant three years ago, in Liberty’s company. He stood up and they shook hands. The sergeant was tall, but Amos towered over him by a good six inches, and his gloved hand was swallowed up in Amos’s fist. They respected each other but warily, knowing they’d kept things from each other in the past and would do so again if necessary. Bevan was a London man through and through, and Amos – though London had been kind to him – was a country man to the bone. Bevan led the way past the inquiries desk and into a side room, instructing the constables that they should not be interrupted. At Bevan’s invitation, Amos sat down in a chair that looked only just strong enough to hold him and Bevan settled behind a plain table, much stained and marked with various initials, and mostly badly carved.
‘Well, have you found her?’ Bevan said.
‘I’ve come to ask you that, sir.’
The voice was respectful enough but the calm eyes, locked on Bevan’s, were challenging. ‘I’m afraid we’ve made no progress.’
‘And it’s nearly four days. Have you been looking?’
‘Mrs Carmichael’s description has been issued to all our constables.’
‘In case they happen to spot her in the street, like a lost dog? I meant really looking.’
‘Mr Legge, have you any idea how many people are reported missing in this city in a single day? Several dozen. Usually they’ll turn up in a day or so – fancied a change, annoyed with their wives or husbands, drank too much and lost their way home – any number of reasons. We can’t organize searches for all of them.’
‘She disappeared into thin air with her husband only a few hundred yards away. You can’t say that’s ordinary.’
‘To be honest with you, Mr Legge, few things about Liberty Lane are ordinary.’
Amos nodded. Bevan, like Amos himself, had known her before she was Mrs Carmichael.
‘Any road, I reckon I’ve got more to tell you than you have to tell me.’
Bevan smiled. ‘I thought you might have.’
Amos frowned, not liking the tone. ‘I’ve worked out how they got her away.’ He told Bevan about his search. ‘So the question in my mind was is there some vehicle I’ve overlooked? Then it came to me: what about the carriage that wasn’t going anywhere?’ He unrolled the piece of blanket and spread it on the table.
Bevan sniffed and raised his eyebrows, picked up the piece of blanket and looked at it closely. He raised his head to look at Amos. ‘Gunpowder?’
‘I reckon so. That’s been in an explosion and a fire. See, it’s charred there along the edge.’
‘And you think that has something to do with her disappearance?’
‘I do. They might have gagged her with it or put it over her head. There was no sign of an explosion at the Maynards’ place, so whatever happened came sometime before that.’
‘The artillery fire guns in the park,’ Bevan said. ‘And any man of war would have gunpowder on board.’
‘Do you think the artillery would use an old rag like that for anything? And I hope you aren’t telling me somebody sailed a three-master along the road up Millbank.’
‘So what’s the significance of this?’
‘It might help to look for somewhere where there’s been an explosion of gunpowder in the last few weeks. The police officers on the beat would know, wouldn’t they?’
‘Not necessarily. Just think how full London is of little factories dealing with substances that would make an artilleryman sweat. Matches, cartridges, fireworks, patent fuels, the sort of firewater that turns people blind. We could probably go down any street in south or east London and collect enough assorted chemicals to blow up half of Whitehall.’
‘So you’re not going to look?’
‘We’ll carry out any enquiries we think necessary, Mr Legge. But our resources are limited.’ The conversation seemed to have reached its end but neither man was in a hurry to move. After a while, Bevan spoke in a different, less official tone of voice. ‘I’ll tell you one thing that puzzles me, Mr Legge. Shouldn’t it be her husband coming to see me?’ He looked at Amos, seeing the blood mount in his suntanned cheeks. Amos could hide things well enough, but as an outright liar he was as blundering as a puppy chasing a butterfly.
‘Mr Carmichael is looking for his wife elsewhere.’ He was puzzled by Robert’s secret journey to the Continent but had no intention of sharing it with Bevan.
‘Is he indeed? Do you happen to know where?’
Amos shook his head, looking unhappy. ‘But that’s not the point, is it? Somebody’s taken her and there has to be a reason. I’d have thought it was the police’s job to find it.’
‘Yes, there has to be a reason.’ Bevan had taken the blanket in his hands again and was staring at it. ‘You know, Mr Legge, I never thought we’d seen the last of Liberty Lane. As an investigator, I mean.’
‘She’s not done very much in that line in the last few years,’ Amos said. ‘There’s the children and a house to run.’
‘But she has kept her hand in, hasn’t she? There’s no point telling me she hasn’t because we do hear things.’ Amos was silent. ‘Of course, you’ll know better than I do.’ Bevan was speaking deliberately, almost teasingly looking up from the blanket at Amos. ‘Suppose she was working on a case at the moment and that case required her to disappear for a while. She’d be capable of that, don’t you think?’
‘She’s been taken against her will.’ Amos stated it as a fact, beyond stubborn. He knew very well what Bevan’s eyes were saying – that she might have chosen not to confide in him. He knew that this wasn’t the case, but didn’t intend to waste his breath trying to convince Bevan. ‘The point is if they’d made their plans so well, knowing about the carriage in the coach house and arranging the dog fight, they’re something more than ordinary kidnappers.’
‘Or in some cases it happens that there’s a falling out,’ Bevan said, not looking at Amos now. ‘One partner or the other decides to disappear for a while to bring the other to his or her senses. If Mrs Carmichael were to do something like that, she’d do it thoroughly.’
The blood came to Amos’s cheeks again, this time from anger. ‘It’s nothing like that. For God’s sake, she’s left two young children. She’d never have done that willingly.’
Bevan nodded, but Amos sensed he wasn’t entirely convinced. ‘I may go round to the house again and talk to the coachman. But the Maynard family have been very much bothered by all this and I don’t want to add to the burden if I can help it.’
Amos thought, That means he won’t. He stood up and thanked Bevan in tones that were the nearest he came to sarcasm. ‘Shall I leave the blanket?’
‘If you like. You’ll let me know if there are any developments?’
Amos nodded and walked out, leaving the blanket on the table. He never lost his temper with a horse and seldom with a human, but he’d come closer to it than he liked. He walked into the sunlight and set out towards the park, turning over in his mind his next move.
Tabby waited just inside the door to the garden until the old gardener stumped towards the back of the house. Toby had seen her as soon as she came in.
‘Got the money?’
‘Will she talk to me?’
Toby nodded towards the house. A young woman in a black dress and white mob cap was waiting on the kitchen side of the trellis. When he crooked a finger, she came towards them, taking her time. Tabby summed her up mentally in her first few steps – seventeen or eighteen, pretty and knew it too, dark curls escaping from under the cap, a well-rounded figure, lips that had been kissed a few times by men who thought that’s what servants were for but she’d probably made them pay for it, so that was all right. Probably not an obedient servant or at her age she’d have been promoted from scullery to parlour. Skirt with some carrot scrapings sticking to it and on the short side, showing glimpses of ankle in cotton stockings too expensive for her station, the sort that might be donated by a thoughtful lady to her maid, but Jane was several rungs below lady’s maid, so where had the stockings come from? Altogether, she was a girl who could look after herself, as her first words proved.
‘So what’ve you paid him?’
‘That’s his business.’
‘I expect the same.’
‘Depends what you can tell me.’
‘He says you’re a burglar.’
‘I’m looking for a friend, the one who disappeared the night the bitch got out.’
‘Friend?’ From the tone of Jane’s question, she doubted that a guest of the Maynards would have a friend who looked and sounded like Tabby. Tabby let it pass.
‘You’re the one who feeds the bitch?’
‘I look after the dogs, all four of them. Mrs Maynard dotes on those dogs as much as she does her own children – more, probably.’
Toby had disappeared by then. Tabby and Jane were standing by the strawberry bed. As casually as if she owned the garden, Jane stooped down, picked a large ripe berry and popped it between her lips. Her hands were small but rough and red from her work.
‘And when the bitch is in season, she’s shut up?’
Jane swallowed and nodded. ‘Berengaria’s her name. There’s a big old pantry we don’t use any more, just inside the kitchen door. It’s all done out nicely for her – blankets and cushions better than we get on our beds, a window with a view of the garden, a ball and an old doll she likes to play with. I look in on her several times every day.’ She sounded genuinely fond of the dog.
‘When did you last look before she got out?’
‘About eight o’clock, just after they’d started dinner. Cook has to do her cuts off the joint, same as the family eat. I take them in to her and watch her eat, then give her a walk in the garden while the other dogs are having their dinner, then lock her in for the night.’
‘Lock her in how?’
‘There’s a big bolt on the outside of the pantry door. If you’re going to ask me if I bolted it that night, I know I did.’
‘But she got out.’
‘I didn’t have anything to do with that. I’ve told Mrs Maynard so. She believes me, even if nobody else does.’
‘Could she have got out herself?’
‘She’s clever for a dog, but not that clever.’
‘So somebody else must have unbolted it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know who?’
‘No.’
‘Does anybody have anything to do with the dogs apart from you and Mrs Maynard?’
‘Most days the stable boy or Toby walk the males, but they never have anything to do with Berengaria. I’ve got to go in now – they’ll be missing me. So how much?’
Tabby handed over a crown. Jane looked down scornfully. ‘You might have made it a half sovereign.’
‘I might if you’d told me anything useful.’
‘I told you what you asked, didn’t I?’
Jane swooped on another strawberry then ran off inside. Tabby stood looking after her, admitting to herself that it was true. Jane could have told her more, only she hadn’t known the right questions to ask. It was some time before she realized that she was being watched. Not by Toby, who was bent over, weeding an onion bed. Her eyes went to the greenhouse and cloud shadows sliding over the long leaves of the peach trees inside, and she thought the old gardener might be in there watching. Instead, she saw a sudden shift of bright blue. A woman, or rather a lady in a blue silk dress, was inside among the leaves, looking out. She was tall, with light brown hair caught loosely in a knot at the neck, and her eyes were on Tabby. Tabby expected her to come out and ask what she was doing, but she stayed where she was. Tabby gave her stare for stare and walked over to Toby.
‘Who’s that in the greenhouse?’
Toby spoke under his breath, without looking up. ‘Miss Felicity. Why do you think I’m working all of a sudden?’
‘Who’s she?’
‘The daughter.’
She asked several more questions but he turned his back to her and wouldn’t answer, so she let herself out by the side door.
It turned out that Amos Legge knew more.
‘Two children, there are. The boy, Mr Oliver, he’s at Cambridge, only it’s their holidays now so he’s up in Yorkshire with friends. Miss Felicity’s twenty-one. She broke off an engagement recently. She’s pleasant enough most of the time but she’s got a temper on her. I’ve heard her exchange high words with her mother.’
He was grooming Rancie as he talked, Tabby kicking straw into place in the corner of the box. He’d told her about his discovery of the blanket with the explosive smell and his interview with Bevan. She disapproved of having anything to do with the police.
‘How come you know all this?’
‘From their coachman, Daniel. He’s been with the family a while.’
‘It was strange, the way she looked at me. Why didn’t she just come out and ask who I was, or see me off?’
‘Some folks with servants, they hardly know who they’ve got in the house. She might just have thought you were a new one. So, did you get what you wanted?’
‘I got what I expected. Somebody let that bitch out deliberately, knowing it would start a fight. It was a distraction from what was going on at the front, only somebody would have to know the household well to know about the bitch. The girl, Jane, knows a lot more than she’s saying.’
‘About the kidnapping?’
‘They have to be linked. Same people start the dog fight and send in the message for Mrs Carmichael. Then they grab her.’
‘And put her in the Maynards’ carriage while the coachman and his boy are distracted by the dogs. It’s the planning in this that bothers me – every detail worked out. They want something a lot and we don’t know what it is.’
‘Whatever it is, somebody in this house knows something about it, and I’m going to keep watching until I find out what.’
Tabby walked back to Millbank. When she’d had places to watch for a long time in the past, she’d often called on the more reliable members of the gang of street boys that were the nearest people she had to family. She’d thieved with them, begged with them, fought them for crusts in Covent Garden gutters. Some of them had melted away over the years, several gone to prison, one transported and Drubbin about to go the same way, and one, named Plush, to regular employment as a coal, ashes and empty bottles boy at a Pall Mall club. Still, there were several she could have called on to help watch the Maynards’ house, but she was determined to keep this job for herself, not trusting anybody else. In the early evening, with the household occupied with making dinner or dressing for it, she risked an extra half hour away from the watch. She crossed to the far side of Millbank and bought a mug of tea and a pie from the stalls that had sprung up to cater for the parliamentary workmen outside the gates of the building site, then walked upriver as far as Vauxhall Bridge, keeping on the opposite side from Millbank prison and looking up at the great rectangles of brick, pierced with narrow windows. Some of the more desperate members of the old gang were talking about trying to rescue Drubbin. When that was reported to her, she thought it was wild and probably drunk talk late at night, as useless as children plotting to attack an ogre. It would be impossible to force a way in, and everybody knew that the prisoners were tightly penned in solitary cells. Drubbin would be taking his long sea voyage and there was no help for it. She’d seen their first friend go. Some of the gang had found out what day the prisoners were to be taken out to the ship and were in position before the sun came up, watching the gates. Even on a summer day, an impression of damp and cold clung round Millbank prison and, on that February morning, it had felt as if the cold was rooting their boot soles to the stone paving slabs and their gloveless hands were frozen into fists. They waited a long time, but then everything happened quickly. The gates in the brick cliff were opened and two lines of warders carrying stout sticks formed up from the gates to the river. Then a line of men shuffled out in prison uniform, grey-faced and grey-jacketed, their jackets marked with MP in red – the initials of the prison – and blue woollen caps on their heads. They were prodded along the line towards the river, where two long rowing boats had suddenly appeared. The gang member beside Tabby had called loudly, ‘Good luck Johnny!’ and one of the prisoners had turned and raised a manacled hand in a kind of salute. A warder had caught him with a crack on the arm, not particularly heavy but enough to take the hand down. Talking about it afterwards, they weren’t even sure whether the prisoner had been Johnny or some other man grabbing at a last passing kindness from the old country.
Tabby walked back to the Maynards’ house. That afternoon, before she left for a consultation with Amos, she’d watched from the pavement across the road as their carriage drew up by the front door. After some time, Mrs Maynard, Miss Felicity, two dogs and a middle-aged maid had come down and climbed inside. Mrs Maynard was plump and cheerful, in a brown dress and bonnet and a yellow shawl. Tabby judged that Miss Felicity was what people would call beautiful, in a dusky pink dress, skin as white as house martin eggs, careful curls of hair escaping from a bonnet of pale straw with pink silk ribbons. She’d looked bored and sulky, her eyes down and mouth set in a tight line. They had set off in the direction of Piccadilly, probably paying calls. As Tabby walked past the coach house now, she looked through a crack in the doors and noticed that the carriage had come back. It looked as if nobody planned to go out for the evening. The side door into the garden was not bolted, so she went in and settled under one of the trees in the miniature orchard, watching the back of the house as usual. The family had no young couples who might want to wander in the garden of an evening, and even if Toby woke up and saw her, he’d assume she was simply going about her burglarious ways. The servants were too busy to come more than a few steps from the back door. As the sun went down, the wall cast a long shadow over the garden. Lamplight gleamed from the rooms on the ground floor. The scrape and clash of servants clearing up the dinner things and a sudden burst of laughter, quickly silenced, came from the kitchen. At dusk, the butler, in full black-and-white uniform, came out on the gentry’s part of the terrace and paced solemnly along it twenty times or so, hands linked under his tailcoat, his eyes forward. It didn’t look as if he enjoyed it. Meanwhile, a maid with her head done up in a scarf and a long brown apron over her dress came out of the house with a pail of ashes and emptied them into a metal bin. It was an ordinary household with ordinary servants – nothing to indicate that a woman in full possession of her senses, among members of her family, had been spirited away from there as cleanly as a gull takes a fish. Tabby waited in the garden until the last lamps on the ground floor of the house had gone out and there was just one dim light higher up where the last of the servants was probably going to her bed in the attic. The church clock struck one. She was thinking of going to her bed in the church when something happened.
The hinges on the door to the garden had a creak to them, so soft that you hardly heard it by day, but it was as loud as a pistol shot to Tabby’s ears in the dark. She was on her feet in a moment, moving closer to the path that ran from the garden door to the terrace. The night had turned dull, with clouds over a half moon. She could hear the steps of the person who’d come in padding on the grass, but did not see him until he passed only about a dozen yards in front of her. A man, she was quite sure of that from the build, and a smell – not a bad smell but one that was unmistakeable to her nostrils. Women smelled too, but differently. Quite tall and not old, judging by the way he walked. There seemed to be a kind of swagger about him, in spite of his caution, then she realized that it was a slight limp on his right leg, the sort of limp a man would have had for a long time and learned to manage. Other than that, it was too dark to see. She wondered whether he might be a burglar, but burglars usually worked in pairs. Like her, he was a person at home in the night. She stayed where she was but her eyes followed the dark shape as he went up the steps to the kitchen part of the terrace. The trellis screened him then, so she moved enough to see him walking up to the back door. Then, just like that, he was gone. The only way for him to disappear so completely was by somebody opening the kitchen door and letting him inside. There’d been no knock, no light, no words spoken. Whoever opened the door had been there waiting for him, picking up the slight sound of his steps on the terrace. It could still be a burglary, but somehow Tabby didn’t think so. She went on watching the house. The servant’s candle in the loft went out and no other lights came on. Two o’clock struck. Soon after that, the shape came down the steps to the garden. The cloud was thinner by then, with some moonlight filtering through, so Tabby stepped noiselessly back behind a bush. As he passed, she had a sideways-on glimpse of a pale, beardless face with a prominent nose, certainly no older than thirty. He wore a dark coat and a low-crowned black hat, and wasn’t carrying anything. Then the door hinges creaked again and he was gone. Tabby was out of the door before he’d turned the corner into the square.
He walked towards Millbank without looking behind him. She trailed him past the church and into Millbank, keeping about fifty yards behind. It wasn’t easy at this time in the morning, with the street empty apart from the two of them, but he seemed to have no suspicion of being followed and Tabby made no more noise than a falling leaf. He turned in the direction of Westminster Abbey but, before he got there, he crossed Millbank towards the Parliament building site. At this hour of the morning, the heavy gates that let in the carts were closed. Tabby had looked in a few times by day and seen great piles of stones and timber, mountains of coal, vats and barrels, sheds and workshops. She lost him for a moment, dark against the dark gates, then saw him to the side of them, opening a small door no wider than a man. He disappeared inside and the door closed. She was about to cross the street and follow him when a couple of policemen appeared from near the abbey, coming in her direction. They were strolling slowly and she heard the murmur of their voices, just chatting by the sound of it, nothing urgent. One of them was smoking a clay pipe, the smoke of it coiling up, which was against regulations, but there was no chance of anybody picking up on it at this deserted hour of the morning. Wary of anything to do with the police, even a pair as peaceful seeming as these, Tabby stepped back into the shelter of a bush. They walked slowly past, not noticing. They were talking about a bet. Tabby waited a few minutes after they’d gone past.
The dark was fading to the grey half-light of pre-dawn, and she knew she’d stand out crossing the road if they happened to glance back. Then she darted across to the door the man had used. It opened on a latch and she was inside. Her feet grated on a clinker path. To her right was a lean-to with some kind of machinery inside it, to the immediate left there were heaps of coal, and ahead was a maze of single-storey buildings. Above them all was the unfinished bulk of the tower, dark against the lightening sky. She stood and listened, and heard nothing but the cheep of sparrows and a distant cart grinding across Westminster Bridge. An army of men could disappear in this place, and she cursed the two policemen for making her lose the trail. She thought her man knew the place well. He hadn’t hesitated at the door. All she could do now was work her way round it and hope to find him. At any rate, he wasn’t on the clinker path ahead of her, or she’d hear his steps. He might already have heard hers. She turned left on to a path of trodden earth, rutted from heavy vehicles, and walked as far as the scaffolding round the tower. She stopped there and listened for a minute or so. Again, nothing but the sparrows and two pigeons that hoisted themselves clumsily into the air when they saw her. She wondered if he’d heard the sound of their wings but, as far as she knew, he’d no reason to think he was being followed. He could be half a mile away. She walked on slowly towards the river, passing various buildings that looked like workshops and a parking place for wheelbarrows – dozens of them. The river was pewter coloured, the tide going out. Wooden wharves stretched into the water with hoists at the end of them and lines of flat carts waiting on the landward side. A steamboat went down river, sparks flying up from its funnel. She turned back inland, smelt fire and followed the smell. When she saw a man sitting by a brazier outside one of the huts, she felt hopeful for a moment, but he was only a watchman, bearded and elderly, a dog beside him. The dog must have heard her because it gave one sharp bark, but the man stroked it and said something, and it lay down beside the brazier. She looped round the hut, keeping well clear of it, and found herself suddenly in a crowd of figures, more than lifesize. The nearest one was a bearded warrior leaning on his sword. Next to him was a monk with his cowl thrown back, a woman with long braids of hair and a creature that looked like a dragon, all in pale stone. For a moment, she was fascinated then went tense, listening. She’d caught a sound, possibly a footstep, from behind her, towards the river. She went back to it, keeping well clear of the watchman, and saw a man standing on the landward side of the wharves. Immediately she knew he wasn’t the one she’d followed – he was too short and square. Her man had disappeared and she had no clue where on the site he might be. Still, he was inside somewhere. If he’d gone back to the clinker path towards the gate, she’d have heard him. It was more light than dark now, and the first workmen would be arriving in an hour or so. She wandered round the site, fascinated by the size and complexity of it. It seemed to be a vast and disorderly village, with barn-like wooden structures pressed up against walls of grey stone and two great towers hundreds of yards apart, one nearly finished but the other still a long way to go, smaller workshops with piles of wood or stone outside them and metal tramway tracks that shone in the morning light. Even at this hour, people were awake. There was the occasional watchman, two workmen strolling together, deep in conversation. But no sign at all of her man. He could have gone inside any of the several-dozen huts or workshops she’d passed. She stopped and listened outside some of them but heard nothing. He must know the site well to disappear so completely, and for a while she wondered if he’d known he was being followed and was deliberately hiding from her. She decided not. The likelihood was that he worked here. Why she was so intent on finding him, she couldn’t have explained. It wasn’t so great an event that a kitchen maid had a lover from the building site. All she had was a feeling up and down her spine that there was more to it, and she never argued with that feeling.
In the morning, the dogs were walked as usual, and Mr Maynard was driven to his office. Tabby went up to Toby when he was on his own, tying up raspberry canes. He was nervous still and said she should stop coming there. She had to give him another half-crown to calm him down enough to talk. The case was fast wearing down her little stock of money, but she’d never cared much for saving it.
‘You didn’t tell me Jane has a follower.’ It hadn’t been a difficult deduction. She’d seen all the servants by then and Jane was the only one likely to have a man coming to the back door at night.
‘Not my business. Not yours either.’
‘You must have known, sleeping in the greenhouse like you do.’
‘I sleeps deep and I knows when to keep my ears closed.’
‘How long’s he been coming?’
‘Some time.’
‘Weeks? Months?’
‘Few weeks.’
‘How often?’
‘Twice a week usually.’
‘Always late at night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does Jane know you know?’
‘I said something to ’er once about ’er young man and she threatened she’d ’ave me dismissed, so I never said nothing else.’
It struck Tabby that a scullery maid would be in no position to threaten even a gardener’s boy. Altogether, Jane’s confidence puzzled her. The mere rumour of a follower, even too long a conversation with the milkman or coalman, could mean dismissal for a maid. Tabby’s work had taken her backstairs in a lot of households, and a scullery maid regularly letting a follower into the house at night was something altogether new in her experience. She was tempted to go and question Jane there and then, but decided against it. Next time, she’d follow the man, find out where he came from and who he was. It was hard to wait, even for somebody with Tabby’s patience, but it gave her the first small stirring of satisfaction since Liberty had disappeared to discover some flaw in the Maynards’ well-organized household.