‘Summer. This baby will arrive in July or August, you know. A summer baby. Won’t that be wonderful?’

Thursday January 3rd, 1889

Chapter 31

Swallow had never experienced anything like the cold as he disembarked at the Hook of Holland. It penetrated his greatcoat and the heavy tweed suit underneath, chilling his limbs and torso. It seeped through his fleece-lined gloves to numb his fingers. The freezing dry air from the North Sea cut into his face and neck and ears.

There had been no Paris. And he had not stopped in London, hurrying instead by cab from the Holyhead train terminus at Euston to Paddington, from where the night express to Harwich departed. He had been travelling for eighteen hours when he boarded the packet for the Hook. But at least there was a decent dining mess, and he was glad of a hot stew and two pints of ale.

Mallon’s clerk, Jack Burton, had been brutally direct when he went to collect his tickets, his travel letters and his cash advance.

‘I’m saving the ratepayers nearly two quid on your estimate,’ he told Swallow with unconcealed satisfaction. ‘I made some inquiries and this way is a lot cheaper. And it’s faster, so I’m doing better on accommodation as well. You can forget about Paris and Cologne I’m afraid. It’s straight across to the Low Countries, and then a train to Hamburg and another to Berlin. Less than seventy-two hours in all from Dublin. Bloody amazing, when you think about it.’

Swallow was prepared to acknowledge that Burton’s research was impressive. He did not particularly care about missing London. He had seen most of the sights a year ago when he had escorted the East End criminal Teddy Shaftoe there on his way to the Tower. But he was disappointed about not going to Paris. The new wonder of modern engineering, Gustave Eiffel’s tower, was to open in the springtime, so it was still off limits to visitors. But to view it soaring skywards over the city would have been something.

The train from the Hook to Hamburg was warm at least. Steam pipes carrying heat from the engine were set down low along the carriage walls, favouring passengers seated next to the windows. To his considerable satisfaction, Swallow had persuaded Mallon’s parsimonious clerk to place him in first class for this section of the journey, so the seating was comfortable.

There was just one other passenger in the carriage: a man, perhaps in his thirties, with a black moustache, swaddled in a heavy frieze coat with a dark wide-brimmed hat. Swallow reckoned him for a business type, perhaps a commercial traveller, but since he never spoke, declining to respond to Swallow’s ‘good morning,’ he could hazard no guess as to his nationality. As the train rattled and swayed across the darkened flat countryside, he nodded off into a fitful sleep.