The intersection of Glamis and Redcastle was well east of Whitechapel, not an area I knew well. Locust ran roughly northwest–southeast, and the intersection was one of many in this part of the city not set at right angles. As I stood before the door, I had an unsettled feeling. Not the prickle that helped me anticipate danger, nor the sense that I’d been here before, but a need to orient myself. I backed away from the door and walked the short distance south until I reached the wharf, then I put my back to the river and surveyed the buildings nearby.
The moon cast its pale light on two old warehouses and two in the process of being built. The two old ones were so close together that I might have assumed they were connected if I were standing in a different place. I peered up at their eaves. One was bare; the other had a faded sign, and I came closer to read it. Seeing “HOUG” in faded paint against white, my heart tripped inside my ribs. The rest of the sign had been torn off, but I’d put money on this being Houghton’s old warehouse, and it was just south of the pub. What if they were connected? Tunnels were common in these buildings by the river, especially those built when tea was taxed at such high rates that most was brought in by smugglers.
This deserted warehouse was just the sort of place Finn would take Colin. I needed a way in. I circled the building, finding every lower-floor window boarded and every door bolted.
I ran back to the Half-Moon pub and pushed open the door to find an oblong room filled with acrid smoke from an ill-tended fire. A group of four men played a lackadaisical game of cards at a table wedged into a corner against a canted wall. Along another wall stood a table where a prostitute, whose loose gown suggested she’d once been better fed, stroked the hair of a man who sat sullenly at a table, his beer in front of him.
I approached the bar, where a young man with greasy hair falling over his face looked up from a pot he was mending. He eyed me warily, quick to discern I was police.
“I’m looking for Finn Riley. Is he here tonight?”
“Naw.” His gaze remained steady.
I kept my voice low. “I need to get to Houghton’s old warehouse. Is there a tunnel from here?”
He rocked back on his heel, and this time his eyes darted around the room before he replied. “There was,” he muttered as he bent over the screwdriver and the broken handle. “Houghton’s men came in and bricked it up last month. Go through the kitchen, take the stairs. You can see for yourself.”
I believed him. “I need a lantern,” I said.
“Back there.” He nodded sideways toward a narrow doorway. I strode through it into the kitchen and found a young girl peeling potatoes, one strip at a time, into a bucket. Her jaw was moving, and guilt registered on her face as she stopped. She was probably chewing a piece of raw potato, or perhaps the peel. Peels were more filling, had a way of sitting in your stomach for longer.
I gave her a smile as I lifted the lantern off the nail and fumbled in my pocket for my matches.
“There, sir,” the girl said, and I followed the direction of her finger to a box on a shelf.
I thanked her, lit the wick, and went out the back door into the alley.
Lantern in hand, I walked around the old warehouse once more, side-stepping down the narrow alley between this warehouse and the one beside it, circling the back, and coming around to the front, finding three doors in all. One was down a set of stone stairs, a huge metal door with two padlocks. The other doors’ knobs had been removed, so they could only be opened from inside, and my set of picks was as useless as birdshot against a bulwark. The lower windows were all boarded up securely, with no loose boards. The sides of the building were smooth, with no handholds. The very impregnability of the place gave me a growing sense of urgency. Circling again, I looked for a drainpipe and saw that the two that had previously been at the corners were gone.
Perhaps they’d been reused for Houghton’s new warehouse, but this struck me as odd. If the building was empty, why go to such lengths?
Because it would be a bloody good place to store guns.
I circled the building a third time. By moonlight, I saw the glint of a window above a slanted one-story roof. I could get in through the glass. But how to get up to it? The walls were too smooth, too well maintained for climbing.
However, the warehouse next door was in worse repair. I hurried back to it and peered up. The brickwork was crumbling and gone altogether in parts, but it could provide toeholds. I could get high enough up this wall to turn and jump for the low roof, then climb in through the window. But I’d have to leave the lantern below or I’d likely set myself on fire. I doused it and lowered it to the ground.
Thank God for the moonlight.
I’d climbed this sort of wall plenty in my early thieving days, when I weighed seven stone, but of course it was harder now, weighing five or six more. It took four tries, but I found that by jabbing the toes of my boots in the wall, and finding crevices with my fingers, I could scramble up ten or twelve feet. At last, I was high enough to turn and leap for the canted roof. I landed sprawled on my belly, slipping down the metal shingles, my hands scrabbling for a hold. My fingertips snagged on a rough edge, and a shingle creaked under my weight, but it held. I pulled myself forward, stood, drew my knife from my boot, and ran it along the edge of the glass to pop out the lower center pane. I set it aside, put my hand through, flicked the hasp, and pushed up the lower sash, so I could drop in. I landed with a soft thunk and made my way across the wooden floor that creaked with each step. The moonlight came through two windows, enough for me to see a pair of fire doors at the side with bolts across them and stairs at the far end.
I headed down to the ground floor, feeling my way in the darkness. At the bottom, my hand inched along the wall to the right and found a nail where a lantern might once have hung. Muttering a curse, I slid my hand along the opposite wall and, to my relief, found a lantern, withdrew my box of matches, and lit it. I made a quick circuit of this floor but found no signs of Colin. I continued down to the cellar. The fourth step teetered, and from then on, I stayed close to the wall, testing each tread and holding the banister with one hand as I descended. At the bottom was a door, locked. I took out my small cylinder of picks, unscrewed the metal cap, and drew out the two I usually found most useful.
Crouching down, I slipped them inside the keyhole and began to work away. It took no more than two minutes before I heard the soft, satisfying click. I replaced the picks in my pocket, opened the door, and stepped inside.