August 1832

I first met the young engineer, and became entangled in the machinations of Dr. Pretorius and the affair of the lost temple, at a seance. For three weeks, fantastic stories of the psychic powers of a young Romanian gypsy woman had been circulating throughout London. It was said that she could relay messages from the dead and speak directly to the hearts and minds of the living, that her revelations and admonitions made women faint and strong men weep. Rank and fashion flocked to witness this latest curiosity; there had been numerous articles and sketches about her in newspapers and magazines, and skits parodying her seances put on in music halls and theatres.

I was newly arrived from Edinburgh, and still wore a black band for my mother and father, but I was also young and full of misplaced confidence. I believed that I knew more about the matter of the dead than anyone living, and was both jealous of and intrigued by this young gypsy's fame; I knew that I must find out if she was a fraud, a rival, or a potential ally and friend.

Her family had rented out the ground floor of a house on the northern edge of the Holborn Rookery, and a large crowd had gathered outside to watch the arrival of visitors to the new phenomenon. The unending procession of wonders that passes through the great metropolis never seems to exhaust the curiosity of its inhabitants; if the city were a theatre, it would never want for an audience, and its angels would see their investments multiply without any of the usual risk. Young women carrying babies or with small children clutching their skirts were begging for alms; unshaven ruffians in battered caps and canvas waistcoats were swigging from bottles; an old woman with greasy unbound hair and a shrewd gaze stood in a doorway, smoking a short clay pipe. There were pamphlet and ballad sheet sellers, orange sellers (the road was littered with the bits of tissue paper in which the fruit was wrapped), and sellers of ginger-beer and fried fish and pies. A crew of beggars lacking an assortment of limbs were got up as sailors in front of a sheet crudely painted with a ship foundering in a tempest. A street preacher stood on a box under a banner held up by his supporters, sweating into the serge of his black coat, his face shining and his fists shaking by his face as he tried in vain to make himself heard above the din. In short, every beastly aspect of humanity was on display, and most of them were in some way haunted, mostly by imps of delirium or the ghosts of dead children with faces like shrivelled apples; one old woman, bent double over a stick, carried a dozen half-formed ghost babies on her back, squirming over each other like blind newborn kittens trying to get their turn at their mother's teats.

It was terribly hot, the close, heavy air laden with the miasma of every taper, candle, whale-oil lantern, and gas mantle burning in London's teeming night. Carriages were lined up along one side of the road, their horses waiting patiently in their traces, grazing from the nose bags strapped over their muzzles; the oaty reek of horse piss was the cleanest smell in the crowded thoroughfare. A pair of constables in black top hats and blue swallow-tail coats stood near a coffee stall, watching the burlesque with a kind of baffled approval, as if it had been unexpectedly staged for their benefit. I joined the knot of well-dressed men and women waiting to gain admittance, paid my florin to a whiskery old rogue who reeked of cheap gin (the grey hair tangled around his face swarmed with flea-sized imps), and followed the others through a dark corridor, hung with cobwebby threads and damp rags that brushed unpleasantly against my face, into a hot airless room not much illuminated by the half dozen candles spiked to the walls. There was a filthy piece of red velvet stretched across the rear wall, a sagging armchair set in front of it, nothing else.

The audience was much as I had expected: a party of young swells in bright waistcoats given to laughter and loud remarks that were far less amusing and original than they supposed; several dignified old women in widow's weeds; a variety of the pale, anxious, recently bereaved. The only person of immediate interest was a white-haired man in an antique jacket and high-collared shirt, with a faint ineradicable sneer on his face and a bright, bird-like gaze that roved around the room. It settled on me for a moment, took note, and moved on. I was pinched toward the back, between a slight young man with the black hair and olive complexion of a native of Southern France or Spain, and a married couple, the woman in black with a veil across her face, her straight-backed husband attempting to seem dignified, but trembling with barely suppressed emotion; it was to his leg that the dead child clung, a stout but wan little thing no more than six years old.

There were other presences in the room—blurred partial shells of the kind cast off in moments of intense emotion, and a foggy, bloated imp that peered out of the black shawl of a sharp-nosed old woman whom I took for one too fond of laudanum—but the little girl was the only true ghost. She looked at me with a kind of wonder, her eyes dark smudges, and asked in a tiny voice only I could hear if I would help her sleep.

I smiled down at her. Like her father, I was also possessed by emotion; a sick anticipation revolved like a ball of hot tar in my stomach.

"I'm so tired," the poor creature said. "I want to sleep and I can't. I'm so tired."

She was too young to know what had happened to her. Like most ghosts, she was frightened and pathetic.

I had an idea that she might prove useful, and said quietly, "Be patient, my dear, and I'll help you sleep for as long as you like. But first, will you help me?"

She gave me a wan smile, and nodded warily. The young man beside me must have heard me talking to her, for he frowned and seemed to be about to ask me a question, but at that moment the grey-haired, imp-infested old man who had taken the admission money limped around the edge of the room, leaning on a stout stick and pinching out all but one of the candles. He took up station in front of the chair, stamped his stick on the floor for silence, and made a long meretricious speech I won't trouble to repeat in any detail, explaining at the end that all questions must be directed through him, and that if anyone would like to contact 'the other side' for the modest fee of just a half guinea, then they should now step forward, and tell him the name of their dear departed.

Since most in the room had come there for that purpose, this took some time. The old man wrote down their requests on a scrap of paper, licking the point of his "permanent" pencil at every other letter, so that his lips were soon stained quite blue. I watched with growing impatience and dissatisfaction, already suspecting that I had squandered a florin to no good purpose. There was nothing of the matter of the dead here; only shabby showmanship and cheap spectacle. The swells passed around a silver flask and nudged each other; the olive-complexioned young man impatiently consulted a pocket watch; the white-haired man and I exchanged a glance, and his smirk grew a fraction, as if he had detected in me some impropriety.

The married couple with the ghost child were the last to murmur into the old man's ear. He licked and wrote, then tucked the pencil behind his ear and struck the floor with his stick. A corner of the red drapery was lifted to admit, with a great swirl of sweet-smelling white smoke, two burly men in collarless shirts and braces, escorting a plump girl of fourteen or fifteen in a plain black dress. She was endeavouring to seem calm, but I saw how her gaze darted around the room, and how she flinched when one of the men took her arm and led her to the chair.

I told the little ghost to go and stand before the lady, and when she showed reluctance to let go of her father said, "Be brave now," and gave her the tiniest pinch of compulsion to thrust her through the crowd.

The remaining candle went out as soon as the plump girl sat down. A woman gasped; the swells tittered. Then someone uncovered a lantern and a ray of light shot across the room, transfixing the gypsy girl's face. Her eyes were rolled back, showing only crescents of white behind flickering eyelashes, but I did not for a moment believe that was why she did not see the little ghost who stood in front of her. Bells rang here and there in the darkness and pale shapes flew through the air. The swells cheered; several of the women emitted muffled shrieks. The gypsy girl's arms and then her whole upper body began to quake. Foam dripped from a corner of her mouth and she suddenly bent double, as if punched in the stomach, and began to chokingly regurgitate into her lap yards of white stuff. The little ghost watched this calmly, once or twice glancing back at me. The smoke grew thicker, defining the angled beam of the lantern. When she had spat out the last of what was clearly meant to be ectoplasm, the girl raised her face to the smoky light, like a burlesque of a blind Pietà, and asked in a croaking, thickly accented voice if there was any spirit who would speak with the living.

I could no longer contain my impatience and disgust, and said loudly, "There is a ghost already here, madam. Perhaps you could point it out."

The audience stirred, trying to discover who amongst them had spoken. The girl repeated her question, like an actor insisting on the script after someone else botches a line or a piece of scenery falls over, and the old man said, "Let the unbeliever leave now, for the sake of those who want to speak with the dead."

My anger was a hot pulse behind my eyes. I said, "If you know anything about the matter of the dead, sir, you would have your daughter describe the poor shade who stands before her."

My eyes were adapting to the darkness. I could see that the two toughs on either side of the girl were looking this way and that, trying to locate me. The little ghost was looking at me too, plainly uncertain that she had done all I had asked of her. The olive-skinned young man stepped close and dug a sharp elbow in my ribs and whispered, more with delight than anger, "What the devil are you about, sir?"

The old man thumped his stick three times on the floor, and said, "There are many spirits here. Let them show themselves."

The bells rang again; again, pale shapes shot through the near dark, crossing the room in one direction and then the other. I whipped the blade from my cane and swiped at one of the filmy shapes; the two toughs must have seen the blade glancingly catch the lantern's light, for they began to move toward me.

I said, as loudly as I could, "This is a fraud, sir! A shameful sham! If she cannot even see the ghost that stands plainly before her, how can she raise any spirits?"

The swells cheered; the toughs pushed through the crowd and took hold of my arms; there was a brief and undignified struggle as they wrestled me toward the door. For an instant, I managed to turn back and catch the gaze of the little ghost and give her the oblivion she so badly desired. One of the toughs tried to wrench my blade from my hand, but I would not let it go, and carried it high before me, with the captured scrap raised above my head like a battle flag. Behind me, the old man was thumping his stick on the floor and saying loudly that his daughter's trance was broken and the session was ended. I shouted again that she was a fraud, that she could not even rid him of his infestation, and then I was borne out of the room.

I suppose that the toughs would have found a quiet spot where they would have taught me a short, sharp lesson, but the young man followed on their heels, loudly protesting at my treatment, and got the attention of the two constables as we all tumbled out into the street. The blue-coats started toward us, and the two toughs, suddenly uncertain, loosened their grip. I shook myself free, and the young man took hold of my elbow and pulled me through the crowd of onlookers. A police whistle squealed hoarsely, people cheered, a flung bottle turned twice in the air and smashed against a wall, and we both ran.

We did not stop until we had put two or three turns of the narrow lanes behind us, and leaned against a wall, out of breath and helpless with laughter.

"I hope, sir," the young man said, when he was able to speak, "that you have good evidence that those people are charlatans."

I showed him the scrap of muslin caught on the end of my blade. "Pulled through the air on wires," I said. "Likewise, wires worked the bells concealed in the ceiling."

"And the stuff she choked up?"

"Muslin also. Performers learn to swallow stuff and bring it back up again. The whole thing was no more than a theatrical trick, got up to gull the desperate and the unwary."

The young man studied me. He was a good foot shorter than me, and slightly built, but was possessed by a restless, barely contained energy. His eyes were very dark, almost black, and his gaze burned with purposeful intelligence. "If it is a charade, then what of you, sir? Are you a journalist from one of the newspapers, sent out to expose it? And if so, are you truly in mourning, or is that arm band as much a sham as the show you so effectively wrecked?"

"I know something of these matters, that's all. And I can assure you that I am genuinely in mourning: for my parents."

My anger had quite gone, although a few imps clung to me still. I brushed my hand through my hair, dismissing them, and felt foolish and ashamed. One of the most important disciplines in the matter of the dead is to learn to control the baser emotions, and in my disappointment and frustration I had let them master me.

"I am sorry to hear of your loss," the young man said, "but I think that you did not come here to contact your mother and father, for you did not step forward and pay the half guinea."

"Neither did you, sir."

"I was cursing myself for a fool as soon as I entered that room. I imagine that anyone who can truly speak with the dead, if there is such a person, needs no theatricality."

"That's very true."

"You mentioned a ghost."

"The couple who stood next to us had lost their first child. I should not have spoken of it. I really should not have spoken at all. Most of the people there were so undone by the loss of a loved one that they were willing to believe in anything, as long as it gave them a little comfort. I took away even that."

The young man studied me for a moment more, and then, as if coming to a decision, suddenly thrust out his hand. "My name is Brunel, sir. Isambard Kingdom Brunel." He paused, head cocked, as if expecting me to recognise the name, then said, "I suppose that I came here because I am also desperate."

I took his hand and told him my name, and thanked him again for his help. "You risked your life in saving mine," I said, "and I will be more than happy to give you any help I can. But I must say that you do not appear to be haunted, or troubled in any way that I can detect."

"I have lost no relation, Mr. Carlyle," Brunel said. "What I have lost is my reputation, such as it is. I came here because of a murder. I hoped—"

A police whistle shrilled, far off; another answered, much closer.

Brunel took my arm. "We'll get out of this," he said. "I will tell you why I came here, and then we'll see if you can't be of some help to at least one poor foolish supplicant."

He hailed a cab under the flaring gas lamps at the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, and after a brief argument with the driver, who swore that he could not travel south of the river because he would find no fare to get him back again, we climbed aboard and rattled away toward Waterloo Bridge.

My new friend was not only an engineer; he was also the son of an engineer. His father, Marc Brunel, had devised an apparatus for tunnelling through soft ground or beneath water, and had won authorization from Parliament and backing from a group of wealthy subscribers to drive a tunnel beneath the Thames from Rotherhithe to Wapping.

"It was an engineering wonder that excited the imagination of Europe," Brunel said, "but it has been blocked up for three years now, owing to the pusillanimity of the damned directors, who took fright after it flooded and let all offers of help slip by them."

The project had got into difficulty from the beginning. Instead of the continuous stratum of strong blue clay promised by the geologists, the Brunels had encountered fissures and fractures where only gravel separated them from the bed of the river. In addition to the fetid conditions, and the consequent toll of "tunnel sickness" amongst the workers, the excavation suffered from two major inundations. After the first, it had taken six months to seal the cavity in the river bed with thousands of bags of clay, pump the water out of the shaft and twin bores of the tunnel, and remove the vast mound of silt which had been washed into the tunnel when it had been breached. Three months later, the river broke through again, and nearly claimed the younger Brunel's life. He grew very animated as he told me every detail of this disaster. He had been working at the face of the tunnel, and was quickly up to his waist in water. A shifting baulk of timber trapped his leg, and by the time he had freed himself and reached the stair at the end of the east arch, his way was blocked by men fleeing from the flood. He was trying to reach the visitors' stair in the west arch when a great wave broke upon him and, amazingly, bore him up to safety.

The rush of the water was, he said, a very grand effect; he would have paid fifty pounds toward the expenses of such a spectacle, and instead had got it gratis. He was laid up for several months after his adventure, and by the time he had recovered his health, work on the tunnel had stalled for lack of funds.

By now we had crossed the river and were rattling through narrow streets lined with grim, shuttered warehouses, and my companion broke off from his story and leaned at the open window, shouting up instructions to the cab driver. We had been travelling for almost an hour—such was the amazing size of the city—and I was beginning to wonder how I would ever find my way back to my lodging house when the cab drew up by a gate in a tall fence of tarred planks. Brunel paid the driver (who twitched the reins of his horse and clattered off in his boneshaker without a backward glance) and hammered on the gate until he woke the watchman.

The gate opened onto a wide square waste, where heaps of bricks and sand and gravel and timbers lay in a great confusion of shadows and moonlight. There was a long low shed beside a rutted road, a tall narrow building of yellow brick with an even taller chimney at one end, and a timber-framed office beside a kind of open-sided byre one might expect to find in some remote Highland field; this rude construction sheltered the opening of the shaft which led down to the tunnel. Brunel unlocked the office and brought out and lit a lantern, sharpening the focus of its lens so that its beam shone inside the rim of the shaft. One half was boarded over; in the other, a cast iron stair screwed down into darkness.

I said, "You would like me to examine the tunnel now?"

"It's all the same down there, day or night," Brunel said, and treated me again to his sharp gaze, and smiled. "I must seem an impatient man, Mr. Carlyle, but once I've set my mind to a plan, I like to strike fast and sure."

"And I am not a man to go back on my word. I said that I would help you, and so I will."

Brunel led the way down the long spiral staircase, and held up his lantern as we came out on a platform of pine planking. The tunnel was much grander than I had expected: a brick floor sloping away into darkness, brick walls leaning back and meeting more than twenty feet overhead in a grand arch, with buttresses at regular intervals, and side arches through to the parallel bore. We scrambled down a ladder and walked along the gentle slope, our footsteps echoing dully on wet, slimy bricks, to the edge of a great wedge of black water that stretched away to a blank brick wall.

Brunel explained that the tunnelling shield his father had invented was bricked up behind the wall, to prevent further inundations. It was, he said, a set of massive cast iron frames, six frames to each arch of the tunnel, each frame divided into three storeys to form thirty-six working cells. Experienced miners had worked in each of the cells, taking away one of the wooden boards that formed the working face, excavating a hand's-width of soil, replacing the board flush against the new face, and moving on to the next. When all the boards of a cell had been extended, the cell was jacked forward; when all the cells had been extended, the shield itself was moved forward. Thus the excavation had proceeded a few inches at a time, with bricklayers extending the arches behind so that only the very edge of the excavation was unsupported.

"It was the narrowest of gaps," Brunel said, "but it was still hazardous, and it was made worse because the directors, damn them, grew impatient and ordered that it should be doubled, to speed up the work. My father and I knew that the ground was treacherous, but the directors insisted on it, and insisted on admitting sightseers too, despite the risk. It was only by great good fortune that the waters broke through when the arch was not full of visitors."

Brunel had been watching me narrowly as he talked. Now he broke off from his discourse and asked if I was feeling quite well.

"There are no ghosts here, sir, if that's why you ask."

"Yet men have died here. Poor Richardson, and Ball and Collins, and the others …"

"The matter of death is not as simple as the penny dreadfuls would have it, Mr. Brunel. You mentioned a murder. Who was it that was killed here?"

"He was not murdered here at all, although I thought … Are you all right, Mr. Carlyle?"

"A curious singing in my ears, and a sense of oppression."

Brunel looked disappointed. "I feel it myself. I have calculated that when the Thames is in full flood, the tunnelling shield had to support upwards of six hundred tons."

A strange compulsion made me walk forward. My boots splashed into shallow water and I was suddenly as thirsty as a Bedouin, and knelt and scooped up a palmful of water and sucked it down. I felt it writhe like a worm in my throat and tasted thick warm blood; at the same moment, the arch of brick above groaned, and I felt, distinctly, that I was in two places at once. I was kneeling in the black water, and I was pressed flat by a great suffocating weight, as in one of those nightmares in which we cannot flee the frightful horror advancing upon us.

Then Brunel was hauling me up by the armpits, and the spell was broken. My right hand hurt like the devil, the taste of blood was thick and foul in my mouth, and the little lake was as choppy as a storm-tossed sea. The arch of the bore groaned again, and Brunel said, "Sometimes the ground above shifts with the tide."

"Something is lost," I said, although I did not know why.

Brunel held up the lantern by his face and studied me and said, "If there are no ghosts, you would make a passable substitute for one, Mr. Carlyle. Let's get above ground, and find something to warm our blood."

Inside the long shed, he poked around in the drawers of a huge desk, pulled out a bottle of brandy, poured generous libations into two tin mugs, fastened my fingers around one, and settled a blanket around my shoulders. The brandy burned through the thick foul taste that coated my mouth and tongue, but my hand still ached—it was as if someone had wrapped a hot wire around the base of the forefinger. Brunel sat in a chair opposite, his hands on his knees and his elbows square, and sipped his brandy and watched me take in my surroundings. The space where we sat had been made over into an office, with the desk at one end of a big, square carpet, and a table and chests with ladders of narrow drawers below racks of pigeonholes at the other. Beyond was a gloomy workshop, with work benches, a lathe and a drill press and other machinery, glass and glazed ceramic carboys in wicker baskets, racks of copper piping and sheet metal, and half-finished or half-dismantled machinery.

I said, "I must apologise once more, it seems."

"You said that something was lost, Mr. Carlyle. Can you tell me what it was?"

"I don't know why I said it. Perhaps you should tell me the rest of the story. Someone was murdered, I believe."

Brunel got up and walked about the perimeter of the carpet for a few moments, fingering a silver circular slide rule he had pulled from one of the pockets of his waistcoat. I was to learn that he was always too full of energy to sit still for long. He had to be up and doing things even while he thought.

"We employed two sorts of labourers," he said. "The men at the face of the tunnel, working on the frames, were skilled miners, my corps d'élite. I would trust them with my life. The rest were mostly Irish navigators, who worked the hand pumps and transported the soil from the excavation. They were good enough fellows, and worked hard and for the most part uncomplainingly, but they were men released from the useful influence of domestic ties, and as a consequence were easily led into temptation, particularly on pay day. They were much given to drinking their pay as quickly as they could, even though we provided beer at the end of every shift, to ease their suffering after working in such difficult conditions."

He was still walking to and fro, his hands shaping expressive gestures in the air.

"On the whole, I found them very manageable, but there were one or two rogues, and one or two frank criminals to boot. One of these was a man by the name of Coffee Joe, so called not for his liking of the reviving bean, but because he was so often in drink that he deserved the sobriquet less than anyone else. I've told you how close we dug to the riverbed. Quite often, small objects dropped long ago into the river would be washed through by small runs of water. Leather shoes, the square nails used by shipwrights, buckles, glass bottles, even a coin or two. Any other man finding such an object would present it to one of the foremen, but Coffee Joe was known to keep his finds. I heard a rumour that he had sold an enamelled dagger handle to an antiquarian for ten shillings, but put it down to envy, and did not dismiss him. He was a hard worker, despite his liking of drink."

"But he found something else," I said. Despite the warm fug of the brandy, the forefinger of my right hand still felt as if it was being slowly amputated.

"That's how the story went," Brunel said, "although I heard about only after the last, fatal flood. Some of the men cursed Coffee Joe, even though by then he had quit the site—he had, in fact, been arrested for his part in inciting a drunken riot in a tavern. The story was that he had taken something which he blamed for a change in his luck. He claimed to be haunted by water. It would bubble up between the flags of the wretched cellar where he had a bed, the spray of public fountains would drench him, pumps would spit mud at him, and so on and so forth. And he had bad dreams, he said, of floods, not just of water—"

"But blood," I said, the taste of that substance for a moment so thick in my mouth that I thought I might choke on it.

Brunel had stopped at the far end of the carpet, and was watching me closely. He said, "When you took that draught of water, and the flood pool grew so agitated, I knew that it was something of the same matter. Is it a ghost?"

"If it is, it is the most potent and undetectable ghost I've ever known."

"And you have known some, in your time."

"I will admit to the acquaintance of a few, Mr. Brunel. What happened to Coffee Joe after he was arrested?"

"He was sentenced to transportation to Tasmania and three years hard labour, and at the end of it he found his way back to London."

"A navigator indeed."

Brunel agreed. "He was found dead just five days ago. One of his former fellows heard of it, and communicated it to me."

"He was, perhaps, drowned?"

"He was found with his throat cut. I spoke to the Inspector who investigated the murder. He said that the cellar in which Coffee Joe's body was found was drenched with blood, and the fatal wound had been so savagely inflicted that the head was almost completely severed."

"This was the same cellar in which Coffee Joe had nightmares of drowning, years ago."

Brunel looked at me, and raised one of his vigorous black eyebrows.

"He travelled halfway around the world," I said. "I must assume that it was because he wanted to find something he had left behind—and where else might a man like him leave it, except in the one place in the world where he could lay his head of a night? And he must have been desperate to find it, because it is against the law for a transportee to return to this country."

"I've thought long and hard about that," Brunel said, "and I must admit that it still puzzles me. I agree that it must have been something he was desperate to find, yet it must also have been of little intrinsic value. He had not sold it, you see, and he was the kind of man who would sell his shoes if he was in need of a drink. But someone else wanted it, badly enough to kill him for it."

"That is why you wished to interrogate his ghost."

Brunel began to walk to and fro again. "The men said that Coffee Joe had put a curse on the whole endeavour, Mr. Carlyle. And the whole thing did indeed go smash and all to blazes after he left. The affair has reduced my father to working catch-as-catch can—he is away at this very moment, surveying the route of a canal near Oxford. And I am in much the same situation. We have never shirked hard work, and we have always faced up to disaster, done what we can to overcome it, and put it behind us. I have done my share of odd jobs, too, and I have my gaz project," he said, gesturing towards the machinery heaped beyond the office space, "although I fear now that all the work I have done on that is no more than the building of a castle in the air. Perhaps our bad fortune was no more than unlucky geology and bad faith on the part of the damned directors. But perhaps there is more to the matter than that."

"What prompted you on this track, Mr. Brunel? You're an engineer. You are not the kind of man who usually becomes involved in the matter of the dead."

"You have a sharp mind, Mr. Carlyle. Yes, I'm sure that I would have dismissed the rumours about Coffee Joe and the matter of his murder if not for one other thing—my own dreams. The work on the tunnel proceeded day and night, and I often caught a few hours sleep in a cot in the office. Toward the end of it, I often had nightmares of floods and collapses, but I paid no attention to them because we all had such nightmares after the first inundation. But a few days ago, the day that Coffee Joe was horribly murdered, the same dreams returned, and have done so every night since." He looked straight at me, with a defiant glare. "There. Now I have told all, and you can believe it, or call me a fool."

"Before I do anything else, I think I must look at Coffee Joe's cellar, and see what I can find there. And for your part, perhaps you should consider dredging the river above the tunnel. I believe that something lying there may provide the key to the affair."

There was a considerable anguish hidden behind Brunel's careless dismissal of his bad fortune and failure, and I saw now why he had hired me. Although he would never admit it, it was a last desperate attempt to revive the fortunes of the tunnel, and thence of himself and his father.

It was too late to make my way back to my lodgings when at last we ran dry of both brandy and conversation, and I slept for a few hours on a cot in Brunel's office while he curled up, like a cat, under his own desk. I had no dreams worth remarking on, and neither did Brunel, who when he woke was as spry as if he had slept twelve hours straight through in a featherbed.

"Perhaps your intrusion somehow ended it," he said.

"If only it was as simple as that," I said.

"I know. You must make your enquiries, and I must make mine, and we'll meet again as soon as we can."

I bade farewell to my new friend, and walked west and then north through the wakening streets. The air was already close and warm. Streams of clerks, shop workers, labourers and porters were walking toward their work places, joining the great river of humanity that flowed across London Bridge into the City, the tramp of their feet shaking the ground quite as much as the carts and coaches rumbling along the main road. In the brightening morning light that shone along the ship-choked river, the thousands of people, all moving in the same direction, all clad in the costumes of their trade, seemed like a carnival parade, and the air was full of conversation and laughter, and cheerful greetings sung out to friends and workmates.

But here and there amongst the tide of the living, like spies and secret agents from some dolorous power, were the dead, walking with bowed heads and shuttered faces, drawn toward their former workplaces by ineradicable habit, unnoticed by any but me.

I escaped the crowds, and the annoying attention of certain of the dead, in a coffee shop, where I enjoyed a fine breakfast of muffins toasted on a sea-coal fire and spread with butter and white honey, a plate of chops and kidneys and pickled onions, and a pot of bitter, strong coffee. Refreshed, and provided with directions by the waiter, I walked through the City and against the slakening tide of people flowing toward it from the new suburbs of Islington and Holloway, to my lodging house in Barnsbury.

It was a fine terrace house of four storeys, built just ten years ago on a rise above the Caledonian Road, with iron railings in front and views north toward the fields and woods of Highgate. The lady of the house, Mrs. Rolt, shot out of her parlour as I entered, and told me that I had missed a caller by just half an hour.

"A strange old gentleman," she said, fixing me with a stern eye. "Perhaps I speak too frankly, but I'm not entirely sure, Mr. Carlyle, if I approve of him."

My visitor had not left a card, but he had made a great impression on the indomitable Mrs. Rolt, a stout woman of middle years whose husband, a solicitor's clerk in the City, was by contrast as meek a man as you could ever wish to meet. She told me that my visitor's name was Dr. Pretorius, and described him in enough detail for me to recognize immediately the haughty, white-haired gentleman who had attended the seance last night.

"He would not state his business," Mrs. Rolt said, "but he did tell me that he would call upon you again. I would prefer it, Mr. Carlyle, that you did not make this house your place of business. Especially if your business involves men of his kind."

"His kind, Mrs. Rolt?"

I was wondering of course, how this Dr. Pretorius had discovered my lodgings, and wondered too what else he might know about me.

Mrs. Rolt said, "He was polite enough, Mr. Carlyle, and he spoke English exceedingly well—too well, if you follow me—but there was something sly and crafty about him. It was as if he was somehow playing a joke on me with his politeness."

"Are you implying that he is a foreigner, Mrs. Rolt? And am I to understand that you believe that any foreigner should not be trusted?"

"I get on well enough with anyone who is straightforward with me, Mr. Carlyle, and I'm afraid to say that this gentleman had something crooked about him, for all his politeness. Pretorius—that's no kind of name at all, not even for a foreigner. How can anyone trust a man without a proper name?"

I found myself apologising for my visitor, and tried to escape up the stairs, but Mrs. Rolt was not quite done with me, asking that I should take care to inform her the next I was going to be out all night.

"I'm afraid it was unavoidable," I said. "A sudden business engagement."

As I said this, I realised with a sudden rush of happiness that I had taken on my first client since I had moved to London.

"Your boots are muddy, and there's mud on the cuffs of your trousers, too," Mrs. Rolt said, not unkindly. "Bring them down when you are ready, and I'll have Jenny clean them for you. I like a clean house, Mr. Carlyle, and a quiet one, too."

"And so do I, Mrs. Rolt."

I had chosen my lodgings precisely because the house was quiet—not in the way Mrs. Rolt meant, but because it was too new to have accumulated much in the way of ghosts. I had tucked moly and rue here and there, to keep out unwanted visitors, and I checked these precautions before I took to my bed and slept for a few hours—one of the disciplines in the matter of the dead is to take rest when one can. It was noon when I rose. I washed my face and hands and changed my clothes. I cleaned my boots myself, but took my muddy trousers down to the basement for the attention of the maid, Jenny. I informed Mrs. Rolt that I had a great deal of business today, so that she should not trouble to lay my supper by if I was late returning, and went out.

It was a bleak, mean place, filthier than any stable, with a ceiling that sagged so low the burly constable had to stoop, and barely lit by a narrow, barred window where a brace of urchins peeked in. A heap of dirty straw and dirtier blankets was piled up along one wall, and most of the flagstones of the floor had been pulled up and flung aside, and the dirt beneath them was greatly disturbed and dug over. It was damp, and stank horribly of unwashed bodies and of rotten blood. There were black bloodstains on the walls and the overturned flagstones. There was also an imp posted in one corner, a vile little thing with a bloated frog's belly and a tiny head that was mostly a pair of pale, protuberant eyes. It squealed in the moment I pinched it out, and left a curious chemical reek in my nostrils.

The constable told me that this squalid cellar, which was not much bigger than the room I rented at Mrs. Rolt's, had been the home of some half dozen people, who slept with the oranges and salt herring and the other wares they hawked in the streets. He added that the inhabitants had all scattered, of course, and it was fortunate for me that the landlord had not yet been able to find anyone to set the place straight so that he could rent it again.

I thought that the imp's malevolence probably had as much to do with the landlord's problem as Coffee Joe's murder. I pointed to the urchins who were watching us through the bars of the little window, and expressed surprise that someone could have been murdered in a room where half a dozen people lived, in the middle of an area so crowded that everyone's business must have been common knowledge.

"This is a hiding place for every kind of rogue," the constable said. He was a saturnine man, with the weary air of someone who has seen entirely too much human rottenness, and he was not much interested in my business, or the murder. "Most of them are Irish, with no liking of English law. We call it the Rookery; they call it 'Little Dublin,' or 'The Holy Land.' We have no witnesses at all, only stories told by two of our informers. They both say it was a Savage that done it, but can't agree to his particulars. One says that he was black; the other that he was more like one of the indians from the South American jungles. The first claims that all his teeth were filed to points, the other that his teeth were mostly gold. And so on. All we know is that he murdered your man and chased everyone out of this room. Have you found something interesting, sir?"

I had been turning over flagstones with the tip of my cane. "I notice that there the bloodstains are only on the top sides of these stones," I said, "no matter which way they ended up. It suggests that the excavations were made by the murderer, after he had killed poor Coffee Joe. He must have spent some time at his work."

"No doubt people were watching at the door and window, and no doubt they saw which way he went when he had finished, but they'll never tell us. Not that it matters, sir. Your man was on the run from the colonies, and this is a murder that saved the time of judge and jury and the hangman."

The constable needed little encouragement on my part to quit the cellar for the slightly fresher air of the court outside. I vaguely heard him shout at the two urchins, but I was already setting out the saucer I had brought with me, and filling it with brandy with the bottle I had bought in the dining-house where I had lunched.

The brandy burned with a bright blue flame, and a festive smell that sweetened the fetid air. I sat back and waited, sucking on a stick of barley-sugar, and presently a pale face leaned, as it seemed, out of the shadows. It was gasping like a newly-landed fish, and rivulets of blood poured from the gaping wound in its throat, splashing and smoking away on the floor, as it craned eagerly toward the fumes rising from the saucer of burning brandy.

"I 'as such a great thirst," it said, over and over, in a wheedling whine. "Just wet my lips a little, mister, and I'll tell you all you want."

It told me anyway, of course, after I compelled it. Like most revenants, it was much confused, but it took only a few minutes to get its story straight. It seemed that Coffee Joe had made his way back to London as soon as he had completed his three years of hard labour, drawn by the thing he had found in the muck in the Thames Tunnel. After he had returned to London, it had taken him several days and a great deal of drink to pluck up his courage, but at last he befriended one of the men who had a pallet in the cellar, and came back with him, intent on disinterring his prize. The revenant had little memory of the man who had followed and attacked Coffee Joe, would only say that it was a powerful fellow who had frightened off everyone else.

"He threatened me very badly, but I fooled him, didn't I? I told him it was under the floor."

"How did he know that you had it?" I said.

"He said his master had heard the story of what I had found, and had seen that I was touched by it. And it's true, mister. My hand has never been the same since I found it—it has hurt me terribly and given me no little trouble ever since. I should have stayed in the colonies, but it tormented me every night, and only gave me rest when I swore to return."

There were more pleas for a little drink to dull its pain, and it grew very sulky when I compelled it to speak plainly, and tell me where the thing was hidden. As soon as it gave up its secret, I relieved it of its suffering and found the loose stone in the wall, and the little parcel, wrapped in a filthy scrap of cloth, in the space behind it.

My right hand began to ache badly and the taste of blood grew thick in my mouth as I unwrapped what Coffee Joe had taken from the Thames Tunnel:

The two bones of a man's finger, blackened by great age, yet still held together by a scrap of skin.