‘She’s not here.’

‘Dyavol da go vzeme.’

‘Stay with him, will you, Georgi? Help is on the way.’

‘Where are you going?’

‘To find the child.’

They looked at each other for a moment. Kotsev seemed about to say something, but changed his mind. He nodded briefly.

‘I understand.’

Then Cooper left him with Brian Mullen, and hurried down to the far end of the shed, tracking the sound of a closing door somewhere ahead. Noises echoed so much inside the mill that it was impossible to move around quietly. But it wasn’t quite so easy to tell what direction the noise came from.

He had no idea of the layout at this end of the mill. Above Cooper’s head, a bridge crossed over the looms to the mill entrance at road level. Ahead of him, a cavernous space gradually revealed itself to be the boiler house. Four black, riveted monsters glinted in his torch beam. Strangely, their upper surfaces were being used to store rabbit hutches.

He climbed back up the steps to a heavy steel door set into the outer wall. It looked like the entrance to a tunnel that would lead to the base of the mill chimney. He supposed someone must once have had to crawl in there to clean out the flue. Cooper paused for a moment, trying to decide between several doors and a series of smaller rooms, cramped spaces after the length of the weaving shed.

The door he chose turned out to be the bobbin room. The floorboards squealed and moved under the pressure of his feet as he entered. It occurred to him that he could be the ghost of Arkwright himself, prowling the mill at night, tracking down a fugitive child apprentice.

One flick of his torch showed Cooper a room like nothing he’d ever seen before. It contained dozens of musty-smelling hessian sacks spilling bobbins on to the floor. There were wooden tubs full of bobbins, bobbins in drawers and hanging on the walls. And above his head there were hundreds more of them strung in bunches – a thick layer of bobbins hanging as if they’d grown from the ceiling, like a strange fungal growth or a thousand stalactites filling every available inch. There were all kinds of shapes, sizes and colours, and they rattled slightly in a breeze blowing from an open door. Cooper could feel the chill striking through the doorway, and knew this must be the passage that led outside to the goyt, and to the river.