The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) (29 page)

Mr Newsome looked around in the perpetual night and realized that he was utterly lost. Only the masonry had changed during their meandering about the
cloacae
of this putrid underworld:
from the ordered, well-cut stone of the larger tunnels to the rotting ancient bricks of their current location. Here, the effluent around their ankles did not appear to flow, but sat stagnating
with an opaque film upon its surface.

‘How is
this
a destination? What do you expect to findhere?’ asked Mr Newsome, watching with considerable distaste as the tosher removed a glove and plunged his hand beyond
the wrist into the mire. Thus submerged, he seemed to grope about the submerged crevices with the greatest of attention.

‘O, you’d be surprised what lurks here among the dung of generations, sir. Whatever gets flushed or dropped or washed away at every house and street up there arrives down here sooner
or later. It’s all here between the bricks where they lack mortar – the older, the better. I dare say there’s a king’s fortune beneath the city if one had the time to search
every inch.’

‘I see nothing but slime and the soil of generations.’

‘Ah, but it is not about what you can see, sir; it’s about what you know. I would expect a man of your profession to be familiar with the notion.’

‘You are indeed a philosopher of the sewers.’

‘Mock me all you like, sir – but you might be surprised what I make in a year by wading in the city’s waste. I might even venture to say it’s more than you
earn.’

‘I have yet to see any evidence of it.’

The tosher ceased his probings of the pestilential brickwork for a moment and looked at his guest, whose uniform trousers were now saturated to the knee, and whose shoulders glistened with
multiple drips of permeating ooze.

‘Imagine this if you can, sir. Metal attracts metal, see, and as the centuries pass, the bits of metal washed here gather in the natural dips and crannies. Thereafter, it corrodes and
fuses – precious matter and base metal altogether. Well, sir, it lies and it accumulates and it swells and it waits for a man like me to come along and pick it up. I have heard of these
conglomerate masses as large and as heavy as a boulder – all amalgamated pins and nails and silver . . . but also gold, which does not corrode, sir. Find one of those tangled rusty masses and
you find the treasure of centuries within it. You just need a hammer to break it open.’

The tosher then went back to his obscene harvest with an emphatic vigour. For his part, Mr Newsome showed that he was unimpressed with the lesson and cast a nervous eye at his pocket watch.
Almost two hours had elapsed since they had left the river.

‘I really do think we should be return—’

‘Aha!’

The tosher’s hand emerged shining wetly in the lamplight and brandished a small object, which he polished on a sleeve.

‘Do you see that?’ he said with evident delight. ‘
Here’s
your treasure, sir! I cannot make out the detail and it is somewhat blackened, but I’ll warrant from
its weight that this is a King James silver sixpence. I have found them before.’

Mr Newsome was incredulous despite himself. ‘King James?’

‘Indeed! And I’ll warrant there’s more besides. Metal attracts metal, didn’t I say? We still have time before the tide . . . and it makes little difference if we miss it.
I have known men stay the night down here – it’s quite safe if you have light and provided it does not rain. Why not get your hands down and see what you can find . . . ?’

His look of disgust said that Mr Newsome did not favour the opportunity. Instead, he again attempted to discern their location relative to the surface. The preponderance of right turns suggested
that they had proceeded broadly east. Could it be that the Tower was above them? Or perhaps the rotting alleys of East Smithfield passed overhead, threatening at any moment to wash a river of
steaming cess down around their knees. In this place, he mused, in the very living bowel of the city, men became mere parasites, picking at the constipated detritus of history.

It was while engaged in such thoughts that something caught his eye: a flickering light glimpsed in another tunnel leading away from where they stood. He tilted his head and thought he heard the
faintest
plash
of sodden footsteps.

‘Did you see that?’ he whispered to the still searching tosher. ‘There was another light in the tunnel there.’

‘Another of my kind, I expect. There are enough of us.’

‘But you said this was undiscovered territory.’

‘Then I advise you to keep quiet and turn your light away from that passage. There’s no need to worry – we’ll be leaving shortly.’

‘I should speak with the other fellow also. Wait for me here.’

‘It is better that you stay with me. You don’t want to be going off . . . sir? Sir!’

But Mr Newsome had set off splashing into the other tunnel, where the light he had seen was becoming dimmer.

‘Ho! You there! Wait a moment if you please!’ he shouted into the vanishing blackness.

His shouts echoed dankly along the sewer and seemed to return to him from both directions. The tunnel was clearly a very old one and became smaller as he strode, forcing him to bend further and
further until he reached a parting of the ways, where four other mouths let forth their gurgling stream into a larger pipe. He stopped, looking back to be sure of his return path. Then the light he
was chasing showed itself again and appeared to be vanishing into a branch from the sewer straight ahead.

He determined to venture only that far before returning to his friend with the wooden map. But as he hurried towards that branch and peered into it, he caught the briefest flash of the person he
was pursuing: the
silhouette
of a hatless head, hair apparently stiff with dirt and a figure of seemingly boyish dimensions . . . the selfsame man who had leaped in handcuffs from the police
galley? He who had loitered at Pickle Herring?

‘Stop! Thames Police!’

Mr Newsome rushed to where he had seen the figure, heedless now of the stinking matter that soaked him to the thighs and splashed across his uniform jacket. Here was
his
treasure, just
out of reach within the subterranean viscera of the city.

‘I said halt!’

Mr Newsome arrived at another nodal point, his own voice still reverberating wetly through the brickwork, and searched once more for the fugitive light. Which tunnel now? There seemed to be no
sign of illumination but his own.

He tried to control his breathing that he might better hear the footsteps of his quarry, but there was none. The man had no doubt extinguished his lamp and paused silently in his flight. Now it
was only a case of who would move first . . . but the tide was ineluctably rising and only one of them likely had the knowledge to escape without aid.

He waited a few more heavy heartbeats, hearing nothing but the constant telluric rumble and the conjoined flow of a thousand foetid streams. Seconds passed into minutes, and still nothing. Time
to make a decision – he had to return.

He kicked the wall in frustration and set back the way he had come. Back along that same tunnel to the place he had glimpsed the figure; back further to where the tunnels divided and then
straight on . . . but which one was ‘straight on’? It had seemed at the time that he had proceeded in a direct line from one passage to the next, but now he faced two that might
qualify. Both looked identical from his vantage point.

‘Hello there!’ he called out to his guide. ‘It is I: the Thames Police inspector. Can you hear me?’

No reply.

‘I say – I am close to you but cannot see you. Could you move in front of the tunnel I previously ventured down? I cannot remember which one it is . . .’

No sight or sound of any human presence.

Grinding his jaw, Mr Newsome selected the sewer on the left and walked down it to the end. But once there, he did not recognize the place in which his tosher had found the silver coin. So,
returning whence he had come, he took the right-hand option and discovered soon enough that the brickwork therein was in a state of partial collapse – quite dangerous, and clearly not the
right tunnel.

He returned to the meeting place of all and determined to take the third tunnel, which, though it seemed not at all to be the one he had originally emerged from, must indeed be the correct
one.

It was not. At least, it brought him to no place that seemed remotely familiar. Indeed, nothing seemed familiar. It all looked the same: the maddening uniformity of the bricks, the perpetually
trickling liquid, the flickering shadows thrown by his chest-mounted lamp . . .

‘Where are you, man?’

His own voice replied: a sound oddly magnified and distorted through the endless masonry roots of the metropolis, a repeating note of creeping panic – a sound to unnerve any man.

He held his breath and strained to hear any indication of his tosher guide: the faintest splash of foot or distant cough. But there was only the constant trickle of liquid and that great
elemental moan of the city throbbing through the brickwork all about him . . .

And then something else.

It came to him from a distance, channelled through the network of ancient and modern cavities: a low, guttural note that seemed half growl, half roar – a sound that could have been an
irregularity of the sewer’s flow . . . or one made by an animal. A large animal.

At this sound, there followed another no less perturbing: that of a thousand unseen rats stirring from their vile crevices into the water, where they squeaked and splashed and scratched in
evident agitation. The sub-city tunnels were alive with it.

Mr Newsome checked his watch with a hand that refused to shake. The river had now risen. The sewer mouth was closed. He was trapped, abandoned: lost beneath the vast, teeming mass of
London’s urban fabric.

He wondered whether the oil in the lamp would last.

The glow of the fire was the only illumination in that modest parlour in Lambeth. It shone in Mr Williamson’s eyes as he sat alone, staring sightlessly into the flames.
His notebook lay open on his knees, and numerous other sheets of paper were scattered on the floor about him. Katherine’s chair – his dead wife’s chair – had been moved from
its accompanying location by the hearth to sit instead beside the wall. It was dark outside, yet the curtains remained unclosed, providing a dim reflection of the man in the window’s black
panes.

Held loosely in his right hand was a tract recently pressed upon him by an earnest young man in the habit of hectoring the crowds outside the theatres of Haymarket:

He crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it towards the fire, where it at once began to uncurl languorously among the flames – a bright heart of combustion even amid the burning coals.
In a moment, it was naught but frail ash.

A sudden knock at the street door startled him from his reveries.

He remained sitting.

Again the sharp rapping at the door and the voice he had hoped not to hear:

‘George – it is I: Noah. I know you are awake; I have seen the firelight through the window. George?’

Mr Williamson closed the notebook with a sigh and made a perfunctory effort to clear some of the papers around him. Still, he did not stand.

‘George?’ came the voice from outside. ‘Are you safe? In ten seconds, I will assume you are being held against your will and must force open the door . . .’

Finally, he stood and ventured into the hall, where he opened the street door to peer out through the crack. He had been prepared to rebuff his visiter, but circumstances persuaded
otherwise.

‘My G—, Noah! What has happened to you?’

Noah Dyson was bleeding freely from a long cut to the forehead above his left eye. His unkempt clothes (an incongruous oilskin
ensemble
) were likewise spotted and smeared with blood
– whether his own or another’s was unclear.

‘May I enter, George? I have important intelligence on the
Aurora
case.’

‘Were you attacked?’

‘It is more complicated than that . . . and I fear that my attacker will soon know your address if he is observing and sees me dawdling on the step talking to a gap in the door.’

‘Yes, yes – I suppose you must come in.’

Noah cast a final look at the street behind him and entered.

‘I will get something for your wounds,’ said Mr Williamson. ‘Pull a seat in front of the fire.’

‘Have you any brandy?’ called Noah, taking Katherine’s chair and settling it before the hearth.

‘I do not keep spiritous liquor in the house,’ said Mr Williamson, returning with a small brown glass bottle and a strip of cotton cloth. ‘This is chymist’s alcohol to
clean your cuts.’