He didn’t look back.

Chapter 15

The boy was sitting where he had left him. When he spotted Gunson, he jumped up and held out his hand for the promised coin, his eyes widening as Gunson got closer.

‘Tha’s clarted in mud.’

‘I fell.’ Gunson gave the boy his shilling and swung into the saddle.

He left behind the wrecked riverbank and the people wandering it and took the higher road that would bring him above the wooded riverside hamlet of Little Matlock. Here, the waist of the river was pinched between the steeply wooded valley sides, the banks of the Loxley lined on both sides with mills and forges, workers’ cottages and stone bridges, an industrious area that had sprung up to take advantage of the faster flowing waters. He’d driven Charlotte to Little Matlock in the gig on numerous occasions and talked about how they would one day purchase one of the pretty cottages with the river flowing by at the foot of the garden, a lovely spot in which to enjoy retirement, away from the jumble of grimy streets and factory smells of the town.

Dale Dyke was to have been his last project, the sign off on a long and satisfying career.

Gunson steered the horse down the lane towards the river. It gave onto a wasteland.

He yanked on the reins. This area was known to him like the back of his hand and, much as he might wish it, there had been no wrong turn. Little Matlock had been wiped from the face of the earth.

A mess of broken machinery poked from of a sea of thick mud on the wide slope that fanned up from the river. People stood in groups of three and four on the fringes of it. Two men in stovepipe hats were posing for a daguerreotype, standing grimly to attention on either side of a toothed iron wheel that was partly submerged in the rubble but still dwarfed them. On the other bank, a woman was dragging a sack out of the mud and Gunson saw it was not a sack but a limp body, a mop of lolling black hair, a small child’s narrow chest, and his heart scuttered with the horror of it. The woman sat in the mud and covered the lifeless child with her arms. She stared ahead and made no sound, but the man stumbling towards her was yelling his grief to the sky.

The horse whinnied and he turned her, picking their way back onto the main road. A fire cart with six uniformed men hanging from it rumbled past. Gunson rode on towards the town. He would come to Malin Bridge next.

There was something he was missing, and the rat was busy in his gut.

He stopped on a narrow stretch of road to allow a cart to pass. From here, he had a clear view down to the riverbed.

The realisation swung into his skull like a tilt hammer. The view below was wrong, so fundamentally alien that he had not been able to see the evidence before his eyes. There should be thick shrubs, treelines, dense woodland stretching all the way to the bottom of the valley, to the very edge of the industrial district of town.