St Giles is the worst kind of slum, but if I didn’t want to sleep under the same roof as Crillick it was the only place I could bed down for the night. Sometimes you read things in the papers and know it for a pack of lies, but when they say that the Rookery has more pubs than houses, that poverty forces men and women who don’t know each other from Adam to sleep side by side as many as ten to a room, and that the rats are bigger than the terriers brought in to catch them, it’s all true. It’d been weeks since I’d been back there and, as I crossed over from New Oxford Street, I whistled the tune of the Blackbirds to make them think it was one of their own returning to the roost. The high note, something like the sound the collybirds made at first light, followed by two slow ones, told whoever was listening that I was no intruder, nor yet a mark for them to prey upon. Eustace had taught me that. After what had happened to him, I’d determined that I’d have nothing more to do with the Blackbirds, but at times like this knowing a little of their ways suited me.

This was the longest I’d ever been away from St Giles since that day my mother dropped me off, and for the first time on entering the narrow warren of streets I noticed the smell. Animal fat, sour milk and the ooze of rainwater and God knows what that clogged the gutters. It was disgusting but familiar, and I paused to take three deep breaths in until it no longer affected me. In my best hat and coat, I no doubt looked like a visitor, but the truth was that this was my world, however long I stayed at Northumberland Avenue.

A young child shambled past me, yawning and exhausted from a hard day’s work. Slow as he was, I watched him overtake a woman with a babe on her hip and a bottle in her hand. There was a movement at my side and I batted away the hand of a pickpocket. Sometimes people romanticised this life, as if the poor never stole from each other, but in St Giles anyone was fair game. Strange. Here I could be robbed at any time but I felt safer, more at ease, than anywhere I’d ever been with Vincent.