Читать книгу From the Deep of the Dark - Stephen Hunt - Страница 6

This wasn’t the normal quality of residence Dick Tull got to stake out. When you worked for the State Protection Board, the preservation of the realm was more often made in the great slums of the capital, blighted tenements their lowlife inhabitants called the rookeries. Where narrow streets and broken gas lamps simmered with the smoke of manufactories, and alehouse talk ran to rebellion and plots.

In the slums, it was easy to surveil such souls as Dick Tull’s masters suspected of treason. Anyone with a room would gratefully accept pennies from a stranger in exchange for an hour or two at a cracked window overlooking a similarly rundown tenement. Peeping Tom, arsonist, murderer, stalker, State Protection Board officer. Owners hardly cared, as long as the coin provided proved genuine. Parliament’s enemies bred like rats inside the filth and the poverty of the slums. But here? Waiting on the pavement of a well-lit boulevard? A long line of almost identical five-storey townhouses behind Dick, the fine wrought iron gates and high walls of Lord Chant’s residence in front of him on the opposite side of the street. Dick could smell their money; smell it as only someone who had never had any could. From the shining copper spears of the railings to the way manservants would imperiously emerge to greet calling guests.

Bugger the lot of them.

Dick Tull was dressed in the dark frock coat of a hansom cab driver, warming his freezing hands on the brazier at the street’s cab halt opposite his cabbie apprentice. That much of his disguise was genuine. Dick Tull was the master, while young William Beresford was standing in the apprentice’s shoes Dick had occupied some forty years before. Eager and stupid and patriotic. Too dull to realize there had never been any shine in the great game; that he and Dick were just the weight of the manacles needed to bind the common people from getting above their station. Glorified watchmen, protecting the shiny bright railings of these expensive whitewashed buildings from the forces of anarchy. And like all good watchmen, Billy-boy had been set to watch, watch with his keen young eyes.

But what about Dick? What good was it being the state’s muscle, when the muscles were growing old, aged and weak? Dick’s thin hands covered with grey fingerless wool gloves, the ageing skin on his hangdog face almost cracking in the late evening chill. Watching, always watching. Just like the State Protection Board’s motto bid them to: See all. Say nothing.

For most of his life, Dick Tull had been seeing all and saying nothing. And now he could see that he wasn’t just training another fledgling officer in the arcania and tricks of the spying trade. He was training his replacement. And where would that leave Dick? Shivering out in the cold, no doubt, like the old nag clicking its horseshoes at the front of their fake hansom cab. One step away from the knacker’s yard, that’s all Dick was.

While Dick Tull’s cheeks were pale and drawn, frigid under the long side burns, young William Beresford’s cheeks were flushed a rosy red by the cold, his eyes eager and bright. Tull could bring a flush to his cheeks too. He drew out the dented brass hip flask from under his coat and downed a burning slug of its bounty, ignoring the disapproving look from his partner.

‘Just my cover,’ said Dick.

‘There’s a lot of cover sloshing about in there, sarge.’

‘It’ll be a long night,’ said Dick.

And he was relying on the boy’s young eager eyes to memorize the faces of any royalist rebels that might come calling at Lord Chant’s place tonight.

‘Jigger this for a fool’s errand, anyway,’ Dick spat.

‘What makes you say that, sarge?’ William asked.

Dick nodded towards the mansion gates. ‘Why would rebels want to infiltrate Lord Chant’s household? If they wanted to assassinate him, they wouldn’t need to go to all the trouble of getting one of their people into his household, would they? They could just stand out here shivering their nuts off alongside us, and the first time his Lordship came out, well—’ Dick patted the side of his frock coat where his pistol was strapped, ‘—a bullet in the head is a lot less trouble than play-acting as a butler and slipping poison into his nib’s brandy glass.’

‘I hear an old man talking, sarge,’ said William. ‘Where’s your sense of imagination? Lord Chant is a force in the House of Guardians, keeper of the privy something or other. He has the keys to the parliamentary chamber. What if that’s what they’re after? The board ain’t going to want a gang of royalist scum slipping a dozen barrels of liquid explosives under Parliament’s floorboards, are they? Or they could be trying to blackmail his lordship, leverage his connections in the house.’

Yes, the boy had a point. Clever. Ambitious. Well educated. All the things that Dick was not. Give it a couple of years, and if by some good chance Dick was still on the payroll of the board, then he would likely be working for Billy-boy here. If not him, someone just like him. They all got promoted over his head. And here he was, shivering on a rich man’s street, all these years later. The quality giving Dick orders, giving him long, tiring night-time surveillances with added apprentice-minding duties.

At some point in this long dirty trade, Dick had turned around, and when he’d glanced back, his life had passed him by. The worst thing was, in retrospect Dick could gaze back and see all the decisions he’d made, settlements that he could have remade, to nudge his life towards the better. The things he should have said, the people he should have talked to, the paths he should have gone down. There was a trend now in the penny-dreadfuls – cheap fiction from the stationers’ stalls – for what were called counterfactuals, invented histories that could have been, but hadn’t. Dick could see the counterfactual for his own life – a career where he had ended up as a senior board officer, with a fat pension and a big house and a plump happy wife, smiling sunny children waiting for him when he got home. And in that counterfactual, perhaps the Dick Tull in that world was dreaming of a thin, hungry doppelganger of himself, his hair running grey beyond his years, and nothing to return to of an evening except cold rented lodgings in one of the least salubrious parts of town. A shrew of a landlady who spied on him just as he spied on the enemies of the Jackelian nation. It’s never made easy. Not for me.

Dick glanced down the street. As late as it was, the street was still surprisingly empty – only a few street hawkers trying to entice householders’ servants to the doorstep for a final purchase of the day. And it wasn’t just because of the thin white layer of snow and frost painting the cobbles and trees along the road. There was something else stalking the streets of the capital, if the newssheets were to be believed. Vampires. Tales like that should have been confined to the pages of the penny-dreadfuls that were one of Dick’s more faithful companions in bed, but now the Middlesteel press was running with headlines as sensational as their editors’ imaginations. Bodies were being discovered in the capital of the Kingdom drained of every last vestige of blood. In the east of the city where Dick’s humble lodgings could be found, the people were patrolling the narrow streets in gangs of vigilantes – although they preferred to call themselves the ‘city militia’. The Circle help anyone that got in their way. For, like Dick, the Middlesteel mob had never seen a vampire. In fact, until now, nobody who wasn’t a fan of inferior literature had ever encountered a vampire in the Kingdom of Jackals. This presented something of a problem for the rough militia rabble … but one that had not proved insurmountable. With the mob’s usual ingenuity, they were now resorting to the simple expedient of hanging any strangers who had the misfortune to be travelling unrecognized through the streets.

Of course, in a rich area like this, no militia had been formed of middle-class clerks, bankers, merchants and their household staff. The rich didn’t get their hand dirty, that’s what they paid their taxes for. Quite literally. For to be made a Lord in the Kingdom was not a matter of birth now, but a matter of money. The industrial purchase system. The revenue service kept a record of how much tax was paid by each citizen. Passing set amounts over your lifetime would automatically trigger a title … a small amount of tax earning a knighthood, a filthily large amount guaranteeing a dukedom.

‘Here we go, then,’ said Dick, the noise of iron wheels rattling on cobblestones given amplification by the cold night air. Around the corner emerged one of the more recent varieties of horseless carriages. Steam-driven, the carriage was wider, taller and a great deal less elegant than the high-tension clockwork driven vehicles that until recently had been the mainstay of traffic running through the capital’s streets. But that was progress for you. Legislation had been passed last year in Parliament allowing these ugly, cheap, steam-driven brutes to share the road, and now the capital’s crowded passages were filled with the smoke and noise of such things. The press had nicknamed them kettle-blacks and already the omnibus companies had pressed them into service for the conveyance of paying passengers. If Dick had been a real hansom cab driver, he might have been retiring in the next few years, he suspected. Always change. Never for the better.

Pulling to a stop, the vehicle’s stacks melted a few flurries of snow drifting in the air. Down below, a heavy iron door jolted open, spilling yellow gaslight from the passenger cabin out onto the pavement. A hunched figure emerged into the light, a dull brown workman’s coat pulled tight over his frame against the cold, the man coughing in the chill air after exiting the heat circulating from the cabin’s boiler.

Dick Tull peered from the cab halt. Damn my tired old eyes. Is that the man we’ve been waiting for, is that Carl Redlin? Ask the boy. The boy will know. ‘Is that Carl Redlin?’

‘I think so,’ said Billy-boy. Surreptitiously, the young agent used the cover of their hansom cab to inspect the images they had been provided of likely callers at Lord Chant’s house. He located the sheet with their mark’s likeness, excitedly tapped it, and then slipped the sheets back under the flap cabmen used to store their street maps.

Well, then, perhaps there was some truth to this nonsense assignment their masters within the board had assigned them. Captain Twist was an old pseudonym used by royalists when they returned to the Kingdom with mischief on their minds. And now Captain Twist was abroad in Middlesteel again, with his rascally minions scuttling about the city. Dick was surprised. After all, nobody knew better than he did how far the card of the royalist threat was overplayed by Parliament to bolster its popularity. Yet here was a known royalist, Carl Redlin, calling at the residence of Lord Chant.

I should be relieved. Now they’ll pull me off this sodding cold surveillance and put someone on the job who counts. Who would’ve thought it, after all these centuries, Captain Twist and his merry men back in the Kingdom?

In the wall by the side of the gate there was a recess with a wooden handle to pull, and the visitor placed his hand into the niche, gave the handle a tug, then yanked his flatcap down tight as the gates moved back on a counterweight. Their mark didn’t wait for the gates to fully open, he was in too much of a hurry. As soon as there was enough of a gap for him to wriggle through the space he did so, and then he was off, down the path that led up to the white marble-fronted mansion, his footsteps dragging against the gravel. The distant barking of a dog greeted the man as the main doors swung open. Too far away for Dick to see who’d allowed him inside Lord Chant’s mansion.

‘Come on, sarge,’ urged William, ‘we can follow Redlin in. We might be able to see who he’s going to meet if we can get to a window.’

‘Are you joking me, boy?’ said Dick. ‘We haven’t been ordered to do that. Now we know that the rebels have business inside the house, there’s plenty of time to get a man inside on the staff. You don’t want to be spotted creeping around the grounds – someone’s likely to take a blunderbuss to you.’

What was the boy like? Plenty of time for an agent with suitable references – perfectly forged, of course – to be inserted as a member of the household. Eager little sod.

It was obvious that Billy-boy was bridling against the older officer’s orders, but he was the junior man on this watch and while he might be giving orders to Dick next year, tonight he had to bite his tongue and keep his peace.

‘So, what do you propose we do, sarge?’

‘We wait. When he comes out, we’ll follow Redlin, see where he goes. Is that enough action for you for tonight?’

William shook his head in disgust, but Dick was beyond caring what the boy thought of him.

You’ll see, Billy-boy. Give it a few decades, and you’ll be where I am. Making some new young fool bite on the bit while you urge caution and pull your tired bones up into the cab of the hansom, lift your boots up onto the seat opposite, and take a few more hits from the flask you’re keeping warm in your coat pocket.

‘Is that it then? You’re just going to sit up there in the cab and watch?’

‘No,’ said Dick. ‘You are going to watch, I’m going to catch up on my shut-eye now that our mark is safely tucked up over there. Just wake me up when he comes out again.’

Dick reached for his copy of the Middlesteel Illustrated Times. The front cover carried a large political cartoon of the head of the government, the First Guardian, bending over at the beach of a seaside resort while one of the underwater races, a gill-neck, was creeping out from behind the shadow of a bathing machine with a trident-like weapon to poke him up the arse. The politician’s buttocks were painted with the Jackelian flag, and he was reaching for a coin washed in by the tide, while the speech bubble rising from the gill-neck’s mouth read, ‘Now, there’s a fine pair of plums for the picking’.

There was still a furore being raised by the newssheets over the new taxes the great underwater empire of the Advocacy was attempting to levy on Jackelian shipping – innocently crossing international waters, or aggressively trespassing across sovereign territory, depending on whether you were human or gill-neck. But however expensive shipments of plums and other fruits from the orchards of the colonies became, this was one conflict the State Protection Board wasn’t going to be called into to provide intelligence for. There were a lot of foreigners an officer like Dick Tull could mingle with undetected, but lacking scales and the ability to breathe underwater, gill-necks weren’t one of them. Dick folded the pages over his face to mask the glare of the gas lamps. With his liquid winter-warmer circulating through his body, Dick let the tiredness slip over him, the wooden curve of the cab keeping out the worst chilly draughts as he drifted off to sleep.

It hardly seemed any time at all until a rough shaking jolted him back into the cab’s still interior. William’s face was flushed, but not this time, Dick suspected, from the scouring wind of a long wait and the rude health of the boy’s callow constitution. He’s panicked.

‘Our mark out of the big house already, is he?’

‘No, it’s not that.’ There was a look on Billy-boy’s face that Dick had not seen before. It was alarm mixed with confusion.

‘I went over the wall—’

‘You fool! If you’ve been spotted, if you’ve blown this job for us …’ Dick jumped out of the cab, nearly slipping on the pavement’s ice. As he angrily steadied himself, Dick saw that his stumble had been noted by a bookseller a couple of houses down the street, the hawker’s tray of cheap novels covered with a piece of cloth to protect it against falling snow. The bookseller hurriedly looked away, no doubt not wanting to test the aggressive reputation a hansom cab driver carried. There was something familiar about that face, something—

‘No, I’ve not been seen, it’s what I’ve seen, sarge,’ continued the young officer, speaking so fast he was almost choking on his words. ‘I was hiding in the formal garden when Lady Florence came running out, our mark Carl Redlin and Lord Chant close on her heels. They grabbed her, pushed her down into the snow, and then stabbed her with some kind of blade. Both of them. It only took a minute for Lady Florence to die, then they dragged her body back into the mansion and locked the patio again.’

‘That doesn’t make sense!’ coughed Dick, all vestiges of drowsiness vanishing as he realized what he’d slept through.

His mind reeled. Lady Florence Chant, if he remembered their briefing correctly, was a forgettable society beauty, a clothes-horse, well mannered, without a political bone in her body. She didn’t have access to Parliament. Access to her husband’s guest lists for the boring suppers she was expected to host, perhaps. Royalist rebels didn’t risk capture in the capital to help errant husbands murder their spouses, and certainly not by such an obvious route as stabbing. A fall down the stairs, perhaps. A heart attack induced by a crafty poison, maybe. But cold-blooded murder in a garden, run down like a fox to hounds when any neighbour could be staring out from one of the houses opposite?

‘Sense or not, I saw it. We have to do something!’

‘Not us, lad,’ said Dick. He felt the lines of his greying moustache, as he was wont to do when thinking or nervous. ‘We report it back up through the board. They notify the police. Let the common crushers go in there and stir everything up. If we charge into the big house, we’ll tip off any royalist inside that we’re onto them.’

‘I’ll send for the police now,’ said Billy-boy.

‘What if they arrest our mark? We need to follow him back to his nest of troublemakers, not have him locked up in Bonegate jail waiting for the noose.’

‘Didn’t you hear me, sarge? Our mark’s helped murder someone,’ said William. ‘Carl Redlin won’t be hanging around the capital after this. He’ll be gone anyway, whatever we do.’

You’ve got a point, damn your eyes. ‘Put up the sign, then,’ sighed Dick.

The sign that would indicate their horse was lame. The sign that would tell their runner on his next circuit past that they needed to send an urgent message to the board. Getting the police involved in their business, garden-variety crushers from Ham Yard, that wasn’t going to be welcome back in the board, back in the civil service’s draughty offices at the heart of the city. What was the nickname that the other civil servants called the State Protection Board? The peculiar gentlemen. And this business was getting more peculiar by the hour.

Dick Tull made William hang back as the constables summoned from Ham Yard hammered at the door of the mansion.

One of Lord Chant’s butlers opened the door, a curious expression passing across the man’s impeccably haughty face as he took in the ranks of police lined up outside. ‘How can I help you gentlemen?’

‘That would depend now, sir,’ said the inspector standing at the head of the coppers. ‘We have had an account from a neighbour who reported Lady Florence coming to something of an injury inside your garden.’

Indignation mixed with displeasure as the old butler arched an eyebrow. ‘If there had been an accident involving Lady Florence, I can assure you I would have been informed, and shortly thereafter, it would be her ladyship’s personal physician attending our doorstep, not the officers of the Middlesteel constabulary.’

‘That it is as maybe,’ said the inspector, ‘but a report has been made, and our inquiries must follow. Now then, be so good as to fetch Lord Chant.’

‘If it is her ladyship’s health you wish to inquire after, I shall not be troubling his lordship. I shall summon her ladyship, to quicken the removal of your presence and the disturbance you’re creating this evening.’

Her ladyship? He’s in for a shock, then.

Dick Tull angled his neck for a better view of the richly appointed hallway beyond the constables’ peaked pillbox-style caps. So much sodding money. How much wealth had been spent in furnishing the vast space? Alabaster-white figureheads on columns engraved with victory scenes, the ancestors of Lord Chant, their humble tradesmen’s origins unsurprisingly not reflected in the statues’ noble poise, patrician robes hardly suited to the tradesman stock of a factory owner. Dick could feel the warmth flooding out into the night, underfloor heating pipes kept warm by some great boiler in the basement of the mansion, tended by stokers and eating up an expensive supply of shire-mined coal. Such waste, such extravagance. The fuel they were using to heat that hall that would have kept Dick’s lodgings warm for a month.

I should have a hallway like this. Well, let’s see them produce her ladyship. That’ll wipe the superior smile off their man’s face, suck some of the warmth out of Lord Chant’s comfortable life. Fat rich sod. Let’s see how he copes in a prison cell. It won’t be warm inside Bonegate Jail. Nobody waiting on him hand and foot, no summoning breakfast with a pull of a chord by his bedside.

There was one thing that Dick Tull had to say about Lady Florence. She looked good for a dead woman. She certainly looked better than the image of her that he’d seen in their briefing. The daguerreotype hardly did justice to her long curled blonde hair, as elaborate as the gown of pure velvet that curved seductively around her arms and neck, her face as perfect and flawless as the statues she was passing.

‘An unexpected pleasure,’ she smiled as warmly as the heat of the air gushing out into the night. ‘Old Cutler tells me that our neighbours across the road have concerns about my welfare. They are dears, but it was quite a minor slip on the ice in my garden. Nothing apart from a slight mud stain on my dress and the loss of dignity secured from the fall.’ She stopped to indicate a long thin hound with yellow fur lounging around the top of her wide, sweeping stairs. ‘But Brutus does need his exercise, or he makes the most terrible mess in the parlour.’

‘You know that it’s my duty to take the dog outside, your ladyship,’ said the butler, in a hurt tone of voice, as if his personal honour had been offended. ‘Especially in this ugly weather.’

‘Then when would I take my exercise?’ said the woman. ‘I step from door to carriage and from carriage to door. My little darling keeps me company, and we exercise each other. Peace now, gentlemen, since you have taken the trouble to visit, I quite insist that you come inside out of the cold while old Cutler goes down the stairs to cook and fetches up a tray of tea and biscuits. You must warm up before you venture out once more to mind our safety. I certainly wouldn’t want to be bitten by any of those dreadful creatures with their monstrous appetite for blood.’

Dick Tull didn’t need the heat of a mug to warm him, as he held onto the bubbling outrage he was feeling towards one William Beresford. The young officer had made a fool out of him with his tale of Lady Florence’s murder. When the board’s runner had stopped at their cab halt, Dick had needed to confirm Billy-boy’s story, and present it as his own as the senior agent on duty. After all, he hardly could have admitted that he had been snoring off the contents of his hip flask inside the hansom cab when he should have been alert and watchful. It’s never made easy. Not for me.

So, this was the way the ambitious young tyke had found to get back at him. Making him look a fool in front of the board. He glanced around. Billy-boy had vanished. No doubt sniggering all the ways back to the board’s headquarters. What would Dick say to the two new extra State Protection Board intelligencers waiting outside, waiting to see if their mark made a bolt for it? Just a mistake. Sorry about that. A murder? No, it was a fall while walking the dog. It all looks the same when you get to my age. And with a royalist rebel somewhere inside the building, no doubt cultivating contacts on the staff under the guise of being a relative or peddler. If the rebel troublemaker spooked, if he scarpered now, it would be Dick Tull’s head on the block, not the royalist’s.

Old Cutler appeared leading a pair of footmen, two younger versions of himself in black livery, bearing trays jingling with delicate porcelain cups and raisin-encrusted biscuits. Well, there was no need for the night to be a complete waste of time, not now that Dick was freed from young Billy-boy’s disapproving gaze.

With the police constables’ attention focused on the bounty of the unexpected brew, and the serving staff distracted by the presence of the constables, Dick expertly removed a pair of silver candlesticks from the mantelpiece and slipped them inside his great coat. He could tell from the heft of the ornamental showpieces that they were solid silver, nothing cheap about them. They would be worth a pretty penny in the pawnshop off Ruffler Avenue where Dick kept his lodgings. That was the good thing about working for the State Protection Board, he was protected from the sort of questions asked when producing such candlesticks for sale – or even worse, getting the kind of lowball price offered to a common criminal trying to fence his wares. Dick just had to open his leather wallet and flash his silver badge of state, and all questions would gag to a faltering halt in the pawnshop owner’s mouth.

Lord Chant won’t miss it, not with factories full of toilers like me stamping out wealth for him every day. Sweating his workers in this cold, day in, day out. A new pair of silver candlesticks falling into his pockets every hour. Well, these two are for poor old Dick, so thank you, my lord commercial, here’s to you and your fat pockets, padded with more money than you can spend in a dozen lifetimes.

Dick slipped back outside, to the cab halt where the hansom cab should be, finding only a single board officer waiting – with no sign of that sly little chancer, Billy-boy. Their cab had vanished, along with the second agent watching the gates. With a terse exchange of words, Dick discovered that their mark had come out of the mansion gates while he and the constables had been inside the house. Only a couple of minutes ago, the second agent had let their mark reach the end of the street on foot, then the agent casually set off in the hansom cab, taking Billy-boy along in case he needed an extra pair of boots to drop off and follow the mark through the streets on foot. Had the rebel been spooked by the arrival of the police? Pray he wasn’t lost in the narrow alleyways of the capital.

Billy-boy’s done his work well this night. I’ve been royally rogered. He’ll get the commendation for following our mark back to his nest. I’ll be left looking like an idiot. Perhaps he’ll be giving orders to me earlier than I expected, now. Ambitious little sod.

Dick Tull put off the remaining officer’s questions about the constables’ business inside the mansion. Their masters in the board would hear about this night’s tomfoolery soon enough, when the inspector inside the house got back to his warm offices in Ham Yard and started complaining about his time being wasted by the civil service, by the peculiar gentlemen.

Dick stood there for a moment, angrily brooding, as the remaining agent left now that he’d been updated on the surveillance. Dick was about to head off in the opposite direction when he noticed it. Such a small matter, but an obvious thing when spied from afar. The hawker with the bookseller’s tray was still at the far end of the street, and he crossed the street before the departing officer reached him. As casual as you like, crouching by a lamp-post in the shadow of Lord Chant’s high wall and sorting his stock out. In the falling snow.

The hawker had been watching them, coming and going, Billy-boy and Dick, then the extra two bruisers from the board, just a single cab at the halt, with a supposedly lame horse that was suddenly able to follow their mark exiting the mansion. Dick’s frock coat exchanged for a nondescript great coat to blend in as one of the plainclothes’ inspector’s men when the police had turned up. The hawker had been watching the agents, and he’d pegged the peculiar gentlemen for what they really were, and now he was pretending to do a stock-take on the other side of the road so the agent wouldn’t see his face … his face. His face that had been one of the mugs on the sheets of known royalist rebels! Rufus Symons, that was the bogus hawker’s name. A descendent of the old aristocracy, the kind that hadn’t needed to pay an industrialist’s share of taxes to purchase their baronial titles. The forty-second Baron of Henrickshire, in fact. The county didn’t even exist any more, while the fury at being disinherited of its wealth centuries ago still festered on.

But why would a royalist covertly watch his fellow rebels? Did the silly buggers suffer from the same factional infighting that the civil service saw? Only one way to find out the answer to that question, and in its answer, perhaps a chance for Dick to divert the board’s wrath when they brought him in to answer why the capital’s constables had been sent calling on Lord Chant for the sake of a slipped heel in the garden.

Dick headed off in the opposite direction from the hawker and then doubled back on his tracks using the street behind the townhouses, following the rear of the crescent around to where he could catch up with the honourable Rufus Symons. As Dick suspected, once he’d left the cab halt, the fake hawker had wasted no time leaving the scene of his own watch. Symons hadn’t been brave enough to trail the exiting mark, not with his fellow rebel being followed by the secret police – or attempt to warn him, for that matter, that the authorities were following his tracks. But perhaps that merely showed a measure of sensible caution. They were rare creatures, now, royalists – supplanted by the lords’ commercial for centuries, hunted down and vilified with all the sins of the Jackelian nation still lumped upon their heads. You couldn’t blame Symons for wanting to preserve his own skin, whatever his motive for mounting a surveillance alongside the secret police.

Dick hung back from the rebel, not wanting to get too close, the weight of the stolen candlesticks still swinging heavy inside his coat. When he had a moment, Dick changed the coat’s pattern by reversing the garment, warm brown fur on the outside – the kind of garment that might be worn by one of the repair crew of patchers that climbed the city’s towers. He changed his gait, too, a confident strut to match the expandable low-crowned John Gloater top-hat that was now covering his silver hair. There was no longer much of the hansom cab driver about Dick.

It wasn’t difficult to stay out of the rebel’s sight, following behind him and masked by the falling snow at night, the gaps between each gas lamp filled with shifting mists and vapours. It got easier still, once the rich residential district fell behind, pressing towards the heart of the city, where Middlesteel’s streets still had patrons falling out of drinking houses and Jackelians whistling down cabs and climbing into private coaches as they exited theatres and gambling dens. Symons was spry on his feet, doing everything correctly to check if he was being followed. All the little halts and checks, the sudden changes of direction; stopping by the harp maker’s window to snatch a quick look behind him in the reflection of the glass panes. Ducking through the tavern crowd in the Crooked Chimney and out through the drinking house’s back entrance, into the side street where Dick was already waiting. But this was bread and butter to Dick. If he had an art, this was it. Wherever Symons looked, Dick Tull wasn’t, all the way underground to the atmospheric line at Guardian Lenthall station, and then they were both just part of the throng crowding its way onto the platform. When the next capsule shunted through the rubber airlock, Dick waited for the rebel to board, spotting the heap of the hawker’s jacket shrugged off on the platform and being trampled underfoot. Then the capsule’s brass doors swung shut, a slight hiss as its airtight integrity was proved to the instruments on board, before being shunted through the rubber curtain and into the pneumatic tubes, the pressure differential building up until they were hurtling through the airless tunnels like a bullet. There was Symons, now wearing the black jacket of the middling sort of clerk who inhabited the towers of the capital’s counting houses, no sign of his hawker’s tray, his narrow cheeks having acquired a thin pair of spectacles to perch on the end of his nose.

Rufus Symons must have been comfortable that he wasn’t being followed – there were no false exits by the door of the atmospheric capsule as it pulled into the concourses of other stations, no sudden step backs into the carriage as if he had changed his mind about his destination at the last minute. When the rebel did exit, there were enough people moving on and off the concourse that Dick’s own exit didn’t appear contrived.

Just a tired patcher returning home, but where was home? The answer to that appeared to be at the foot of one of the tall hills that surrounded the capital, the city thinning out into a cluster of village-like lanes at its outskirts, a couple of cobbled streets surrounded by shops and homes climbing upwards on a steep incline.

I’ve been here before. On the business of the board, too. When was it?

The feeling of recollection grew stronger as Dick followed Symons up the hill. There were large houses at the top of the hill, he recalled, with their own grounds. Not as expensive as Lord Chant’s, but then this district was too near the outskirts of the city to begin to be considered fashionable. A place for independent thinkers, the kind of person who didn’t care what others thought of them, who valued the view over the pneumatic towers at the capital’s heart, haze rising into the sky from the heated water flowing through their rubberized skins. The sort of soul who had no use for society invites and could see poetry in the venting steam from the mills below curling into the darkening sky, obscuring the collision lamps of airships passing through heaven’s command.

This is where I’d end up if I only had the money for it. If only I could go back in time and take my chances again. A nice clean ward. No thieves rattling my skylight, waking me up in the small hours, sending me reaching for the pistol under my pillow. No drunken singing in the middle of the night from gangs of full-up-to-the-knocker louts falling out of alehouses.

There was a village green at the top of the hill, a duck pond frozen enough that a couple of birds were skating over its surface, using the light spilling out from the crescent of houses and cottages on the other side to try to find a break and a drink of water. Dick’s quarry was heading towards an arched opening in a brick wall on the other side of pond, the wall’s shadow just taller than a man’s height, foliage from an orchard rising up beyond the bricks, and behind that, a single large tower crowned with an illuminated clock face.

Dick didn’t need to see the residence’s name engraved in the brass plate by the entrance, just the sight of the folly rising like a landlocked lighthouse enough to shake the memory of his single visit here years before. Tock House. The State Protection Board knew well the true identity of the man who lived behind these comfortable walls; after all, they had been using it to blackmail him into working for the secret police for long enough. Commodore Jared Black. A royalist who had changed his identity so many times in his life on the run, it was a wonder he still knew who he was. And when he’d finally stopped running, the board had eventually caught up with him and sunk its claws in his tired old flesh. They had turned him and used him to their own ends.

You’re meant to be our asset, Blacky, you old rascal. You had better not be playing both sides of the field. Backsliding with your old rebel friends.

Here was information worth having. But he’d have to tread softly. The commodore was as sly as a fox, and there were always wheels within wheels where he was involved. He might act like a blustering old sea dog, but the man was deadly with a sabre and cunning enough to have survived everything fate and the dangerous, unasked for duties of the board had thrown at him. There were those who played in the great game as masters, and old Blacky was one of them. Double agent, triple? Or more likely only ever on his own side? Dick’d have to play this one right carefully with the brass-buttoned officers back in the board – there were those who wouldn’t take kindly to having one of their prize chickens plucked bare by a lowly officer of Dick Tull’s standing.

Dick patted the side-pocket of his coat where the comforting weight of the two stolen silver candles lay, and then he smiled. I’ll be back for you, Blacky. See if I can’t wipe that smug smile off of your wine-stained lips. Back to squeeze you for the truth of what you, Symons, and all your royalist friends scampering about the capital are up to. You’ve just become my ace card, you sod, and I’m keeping you tucked up my sleeve.