“That’s your final word?”

“Final unto finality.”

Suddenly a thin figure slid up beside Matthew and a dirty face with a mass of black hair topping it grinned at him. “Drink a’ ale, handsome? Then a ride on the pony?”

“The pony?” Matthew asked.

“Yep. My name’s Pony.”

“No, thank you,” Matthew answered, and so moved away from the table while Julian and Britt traded a few further barbs that he was unable to hear. The crowd around the table was getting louder as the roaches were put into a wooden box, the box closed and shaken and then held over the track’s starting point. Matthew figured the bottom of the box was hinged to allow the contestants to fall out upon the track, but he had no desire to see any further nor curiosity to watch the progress of Mongo.

In another moment Julian came up at his side and said, “We’re done here.”

Out in the cold, with the snow blowing around them, Julian said, “Cross the street. We’ll stand in that doorway awhile.”

“Why? Aren’t we done here?”

“We are done in the Garden,” Julian corrected. “Not with Britt. If I know him—and I do, very well—he has never turned down a coin unless it’s for two more. Let’s give him time to lose his shillings on Mongo and then see what he does. Or rather … where he goes.”

They waited in the doorway’s dark as the snow fell before them and the wind took on a high keening note.

In the next ten minutes a few men came into and went out of The Octopus Garden but Julian gave no reaction. At last a tall figure bundled up in a long greatcoat and wearing a floppy-brimmed hat pulled down low upon the head emerged and began striding westward. It was a man who obviously had somewhere important to go, and was sparing no speed even though the wind whipped his face.

“That’s his stride. A bit gangly, like a roach running a race, isn’t it?” Julian said. “Britt’s on the move. So shall we be.”

Nine

Through the white curtains of night Julian and Matthew followed the man called Britt. They trailed at a distance, enough to keep their quarry in sight yet not close enough to trip the game. For block after block Britt went on, at one point his greatcoat seemingly losing its last button and spreading open with the wind like a pair of flapping wings. With one hand he kept the hat on his head, lest it too fly away.

The snow played tricks with measure, but Matthew figured they must’ve travelled half a mile before Britt crossed the street—quickly, in front of a coach whose driver obviously was in a hurry to get somewhere warm—and then descended a narrow set of steps.

“Move!” Julian said to rush Matthew along, but Matthew needed no urging. At the top of the steps they were looking down at an oak door, a pair of green-glassed oval windows and a sign that read The Green Spot. Britt had entered another of the tawdry taverns in what Matthew felt that, beyond the purity of the snow, was an area not so different from the dark bleakness of Whitechapel.