Y. Lee - The body at the Tower

Be rational, came the inner voice, cool and precise this time. Although he'd seen her in boy's clothing once before, his lack of recognition now was actually a compliment on the excellence of her disguise. And if her features seemed slightly familiar, he would likely assume this was merely in the way that most children seemed – their unformed faces so often all but interchangeable to adults.

It was only at day's end that he showed signs of seeing her as an individual, rather than a moderately useful tool. "Quinn."

She looked up – and caught her breath. He was looking straight at her. "Y-yes, sir."

"Mr Harkness mentioned that you're new to the trade."

She nodded slowly.

His eyes wandered over her roughly shorn hair, the grubby boy's attire. A faint smile curled the corner of his mouth. "What brought you here?"

"Sir?"

"To this site. It's unusual for a lad to find work on a building site without previous experience or connections. You must have impressed Mr Harkness."

"He's been very kind to me."

"I see." His gaze seemed to snag somewhere at the level of her waist – she was holding a roll of drawings – and lingered for so long that she squirmed with discomfort. "What did you do before coming here?"

She hesitated. Part of her wanted to shout, As if you don't know! "Bits of all sorts, sir. Errands. Nothing as you'd call a trade." That was truthful – and vague – enough.

"No. That's quite clear."

She waited, but he didn't elaborate. "Why's that, sir?" she asked eventually.

He nodded towards the scrolls of paper. "Your hands are soft and pale – not working hands." That quarter-smile reappeared, and this time there was a glint in his eyes. "Some might even say lady's hands."

She froze, scarcely able to breathe. Now was the time for a clever, snappy retort, but her wits were paralyzed, too. The best she could manage was to gape at him with her mouth closed instead of open.

James shrugged and made a show of consulting his watch. "Ah – six o'clock. Mustn't keep you, young Quinn."

It took a moment for the words to register. When they did, she was furious. Still, there wasn't a thing she could safely do or say apart from, "Yes, sir."

The blasted man only grinned. "See you tomorrow, laddie." Eleven

There was a bakery in the Cut, not far from Miss Phlox's house. As arranged with Anne Treleaven, Mary stopped there each evening to buy "a plain roll, the brownest you got". Once outside, she tore eagerly into the bread. She was perennially hungry, these days. But tonight at the bun's squishy centre she found a ball of paper the size of a green pea. On it was scribbled an address in Bermondsey, with additional terse directions. It was often difficult to find one's way about dockside areas, owing to the absence of street signs. It took only a moment to commit the directions to memory. Then she dropped the scrap into a particularly nasty puddle, where it was promptly obliterated by the wheels of a passing dray cart.

London was a transitional sort of place in the evenings. Thousands of people had finished their day's work and were now pouring out from the heart of town towards the suburbs: shabby-suited clerks trudging across bridges, weary-looking market traders dragging the last of their wares with them, labourers with toolbags slung across their backs. Yet there were a few bodies tacking their way against the rush. Already, new vendors were arriving to sell coffee on street stalls; to set up the late markets where the last of the day's – and yesterday's, and last week's – meat and vegetables were sold at knock-down prices; and to sweep the streets of a long day's dust and refuse.

It wasn't difficult for Mary to resist the third-rate scraps laid out on the crude stalls that sprang up just outside the Borough Market each evening. But all around her, poor people bargained for slimy vegetables, wormy fruit and rank meat on the grounds that they could afford these and nothing else. She thought of Jenkins knocking back the dregs of sour milk at yesterday's morning tea break, and of the hunger that must be even greater because he'd earned no wages today. The thought made her walk faster.

As she passed Tower Bridge, the stench of the tanneries struck her like a physical blow. Rotting flesh, caustic lime, animal dung – these were the constant perfumes of Bermondsey. They made the Thames itself smell acceptable. Jenkins's address turned out to be a bedraggled little terraced house not a hundred yards from one of the larger tanneries. Outside this strip of houses, a large flock of dirty children clustered near the gutter. They ought to have been playing boisterously, but this group seemed as downtrodden as their surroundings. A few bickered among themselves, but otherwise they seemed too listless to do anything much except sit in the road and watch Mary's passage with glassy, tired eyes.

She rapped on the front door and waited. Nothing. She knocked again, and this time, a voice from within snapped, "Well, what d'you want, then?"

"Please, I'm here to see Peter Jenkins."

There was a long silence. Just as Mary was about to repeat herself, the door jerked open a couple of inches and a pair of bloodshot eyes stared down at her with suspicion. "Jenkins?"

"Yes, ma'am." It was a guess; she couldn't see much through the narrow gap, but the voice was more alto than tenor.

The door opened wider and Mary saw a wild halo of grey hair and a shapeless dress draped over a humped back. "Jenkins be down there," their owner said curtly, jerking her chin towards the interior.

Mary tried not to flinch as the smell of the house – dirty hair, mould, sweat and decay, all compounded with the stink of rot and excrement – embraced her. She trod cautiously; if the street had been dim, the house itself was in near darkness. It took several moments for her eyes to adjust. Eventually, she made out a square wooden hatch towards the back of the house. It opened with a reluctant squeal to reveal a rotting wooden ladder disappearing down into what looked like a cellar.

She paused and looked back over her shoulder for confirmation, but the woman had already lost interest. "Hello?" Mary called down tentatively. In sensation novels, this was the part where the intrepid hero got clubbed over the head only to awake several hours later, bound hand and foot, in the villain's lair. Mary turned her head abruptly – but of course there was nobody.

There was also no response from below, only a faint rustling that might be human. She had a rushlight in her pocket, but it wouldn't do much good here. With an inner sigh, she prepared to descend. Now that she'd come this far, there was no point in turning back.

She was slim and light, but even so she descended slowly, testing each rung before transferring her weight onto it. There were only six rungs before her foot touched earth instead of wood. She stopped again to let her eyes readjust to this new level of darkness. A small grate at the top of the wall nearest the street was the only source of light and air.

"Hello? Jenkins?"

If she hadn't been completely still, she might have missed the rustling noise from the corner.

As it was, she squinted but could see nothing clearly. "Jenkins? It's Quinn."

Silence.

If the rustling had stopped, it probably wasn't rats. "I know you can hear me."

Finally, from the same corner came a petulant sigh – and a voice. "Piss off!"

Mary grinned. Definitely Jenkins. She made her way to the corner by instinct more than anything else.

He was there, lying belly-down on a straw pallet with a hunted but defiant look in his eyes. "I said, piss off! You got no call coming in here where you's not invited."

She ignored this. "I brought you some stuff."

"I don't want it," came the automatic response.