“Oh, don’t berate yourself, Mr. Cooper. All the grand families are involved. In sweets and, with the more adventurous families, cigarettes. It’s a system, a network, the weave of the land. Compromise won’t change it.” She rises. “It has been a pleasure talking to you, young man, but it is getting late. Mrs. Grendel will be back any moment and will want her kitchen.”

In response to Livia’s gesture, Thomas emerges from Lady Naylor’s room. He is just in time to cross the hallway, brush past Livia, and disappear unseen.

ф

Dinner is toad-in-the-hole and mash, lies heavy in the stomach. Sebastian comes and leaves again, surprises them with sticky pastries that Charlie has no heart to eat. He remains morose and restless, spends an hour staring through the keyhole at the child. Grendel has found some toys for him, and the little boy sits on the ground, spinning a spindle, before picking it up and smashing it against a wall. It is eerie, watching his anger, with no Smoke rising from his pores.

Later yet, they sit together, Charlie, Thomas, and Livia, blocking the door to the boys’ bedroom with their backs. A teacup stands in front of them, not far from their feet, and a sheet of paper lies spread out on their laps. It is, thinks Charlie, like they are preparing a walking trip into the hills. For the third time now, he bends to study the crude map and for the third time fails to wrest meaning from it, seeing only its surface pattern, nothing else. Line scrawls on a dirty page; turnoffs marked; crossings circled. A map to the underworld. Legible only for the dead.

And to Thomas.

“I think it must be this.” He points, tapping his finger on a row of rectangles, a finger long. “It’s the only place that’s different; and they are in an area quite separate from the rest. And look here, this is the same place drawn in cross section. The rectangles look like they’ve been let into the floor.”

“They might be pools,” Livia suggests, thinking perhaps of the wet docks that played harbour to Mowgli’s ship. “A series of pools.”

“Could be.” Thomas points at another section of the map. “This here is the river. And this here must be an entrance. Tomorrow I will go and find it. If I can match the shape of the riverbed to the map, I should be able to locate the street.”

“What about this then?” Livia asks, pointing her chin at the cup.

“You know what it is,” Thomas mutters. “Soot. Murderers’ Soot. The kind your mother was collecting when I first saw her. The laboratory was full of it.”