Darren Craske - The equivoque principle

'These boxes have been intentionally placed here. They look as if they've been dragged from the front, according to these tracks in the dirt,' said Quaint to Butter, as he bent down onto his haunches and placed his hand into a crate, pulling out a handful of crushed ice. 'And not too long ago, by the looks of it.'

'Are you sure, boss?' asked Butter. His eyes travelled up the marketplace wall, past the patchwork slates of iron and wood, to the open window. 'It seem a lot of effort. Why he not just go to train, avoid police there?'

'I'm banking on Madame Destine's visions being correct, and that Prometheus was being pursued, so he went to ground,' surmised Quaint, as he pulled at his bottom lip between thumb and forefinger. 'Destine smelled fish, and this place is just about as good a place to start looking as anywhere. Come on, I'll hoist you up.'

'Me, boss? Up there, boss?' asked Butter.

'Of course, man!' said Quaint indignantly. 'Unless you think a little shrimp like you could lift a man my size?'

'Little shrimp? Boss, back home I slay a walrus of eight feet long, after tremendous battle lasted all of day and all of night. It was a spectacle!'

'My offence at the walrus reference notwithstanding, Butter, we don't have much choice, so let's just get going, shall we?' said Quaint, squatting down, and linking his hands together to form a stirrup. 'Allez-oop!'

Around the front of the building, their shadows flitting like tomcats in the night, a collection of assorted ruffians arrived unannounced. Mr Reynolds's little urchin spy had earned himself a hot meal for informing the man of Quaint's intended destination, and with the Bishop's money paying for the hired muscle, the men had congregated outside Blythesgate fish market with the sole intention of causing Cornelius Quaint some grievous bodily harm…

CORNELIUS QUAINT WAS totally oblivious to the gathering that had quietly and speedily accumulated outside the market's main doors. Each of the men was armed with an assortment of knives, chains, metal poles and wooden truncheons, and their faces entertained expressions of people who enjoyed inflicting harm on others. They were not a highly polished mob, these men, hired more for their ferocity than their adeptness with skilled weaponry. They were a means to a very sticky end for Quaint. Grunting like pigs hunting truffles, they held their cauliflower ears and scarred cheeks up against the corrugated metal doors, desperately trying to learn more about their mysterious target.

The man in question was busy climbing down from the open window, inside the market onto the slatted, wooden roof and through a skylight into a dank and dreary office. Many small tables were arranged throughout the room, littered with seafaring charts, bills of sale, maps, scraps of paper and discarded rubbish, and three large cabinets lined up against the far wall. This was the main hub of the marketplace, the manager's office. A small gas lamp had been left alight, giving Quaint and his associate Butter a faint sense of comfort.

'It's going to be murder getting the smell out of my clothes,' said Quaint, giving the lapels of his long dark-grey coat a sniff. 'I daresay Mae-Li at the Chinese laundry in Wapping will want extra for this stench!'

'Boss, look-see here,' exclaimed Butter, who had exited the small office and walked out onto a metal staircase that ran along the side of the office, leading down to the far corner of the building.

From their vantage point, they had a bird's eye view of the whole place. The warehouse below was a vast, desolate area. Used primarily as a place for selling fish goods, it was basically just a skeleton of a building with weight-bearing metal struts placed at various intervals. Wooden beams formed the structure inside, looking just as randomly stitched together as the front of the market. Pools of water, a mixture of seawater and melted ice, covered most of the stone floor, but the warehouse was virtually empty, save a huge, iron container positioned at the far end of the room, and a couple of metal storage sheds, nestled into the shadows of the corners. Great wooden pillar supports were holding a patchwork tin roof upon the building, and a vague semblance of stilted early evening dusk-light seeped between the cracks and gaps of the misplaced wall panels.

The market was frenetic with life the moment the sun came up, with hundreds of tradesmen vying for the best deal on the best catch of the day. Now, it was silent, damp and dark, and the perfect place to disappear. There was an endless amount of hiding places in the vast warehouse, and Prometheus could theoretically be in any one of them, if indeed he was there at all. An incessant hum made itself evident from the dark centre of the room.

'Boss, what is the noise I hear?' asked Butter.

'It's coming from that metal container down there. Seeing as we're in a fish market, it must be some kind of cold storage area; it's difficult to say from up here, but there do seem to be steam emissions spouting from the top.'

'Hiding place?' offered Butter.

'Perhaps. Let me call out and see what happens.' Quaint yelled through cupped hands, his booming voice echoing around the warehouse. 'Prometheus, it's me! It's Cornelius! Are you in here?'

There was no sound, save a gentle drip falling from the roof onto the stone floor.

'Prometheus, if you're here, show yourself,' Quaint tried again. 'Damn it, Butter, I felt so sure he'd be here…Destine's premonition said so.'

'Perhaps he goes elsewhere?' Butter asked Quaint, who was busy scouring the darkness seeking a sign that they were at least looking in the right place.

'I just want some kind of noise, a tap, a rap, something along those lines,' he said.

Down within the dark, prevalent shadows of the warehouse, a metallic clang suddenly resounded. A clear beat of metal against stone.

Quaint and Butter exchanged surprised looks.

'Like that?' asked Butter.

'Uncannily so, my friend…just like that,' answered Quaint.

They both raced as fast as they could to the rickety metal staircase that led from the small office on the second level, down to the ground floor. The darkness enclosed around them instantly, and Quaint suddenly wished that he'd brought the lantern down with him. Now they were on ground level the warehouse seemed to open up in size tenfold, and it was impossible to isolate where the noise had originated from.

'Hello?' Quaint called. 'Prometheus, are you here? Is that you?'

The metal clang sounded out again, this time fainter, located behind Quaint.

'Boss, you think we make better splitting up?' whispered Butter.

'Hmm. Maybe so. The darkness is blinding us. We need to distance ourselves from its grasp. Why don't you take a look down that way,' offered Quaint. 'Go and check that large metal ice box door, see if it's unlocked. It may just be the machinery making a noise, settling itself, for all we know. I'll investigate these sheds at the back here. That's where the noise just came from.'

'No, boss, clang comes from this direction…ahead.'

'You're mistaken, Butter. I think you'll find that it most definitely came from the area near those sheds over there.'

A faint clink of metal came from the direction that Butter was pointing in.

'See, boss?' said Butter. 'It is this way!'

But then another clang reverberated around the warehouse's ground floor, this time coming from the location of the metal sheds, directly behind Quaint.

'These sounds are all around us,' said Quaint bemusedly, squinting into the dark as he walked slowly into the shadowed corner of the warehouse. 'I don't know how that's possible, but I do know it can't be good news.'

'Not for you, it ain't,' said a grizzled voice from the shadows, as its owner brought a heavy wooden stake down onto Quaint's shoulder-blades. With a yell of pain, Quaint hit the ground like a ton of bricks. He rolled over onto his back, scowling into the shadows in the direction of his attacker.