Moriarty

Mortlake nodded and I saw one of the roughs step forward with a shillelagh, which he swung viciously through the air, hammering it into the back of Jones’s head. Jones fell without another word and I realised that I was now alone with the enemy, that they were all around me, and that Mortlake had already turned to me. I knew what was coming. I expected it. But I was still unprepared for the explosion of pain that sent me hurtling forward into a tunnel of darkness and certain death.

EIGHTEEN The Meat Rack

I was almost afraid to open my eyes for I was quite convinced that I must be dying. How else could I be so cold?

As consciousness returned, I found myself lying on a stone floor with a light flickering somewhere close by. I had no idea how long I had been here nor how badly I had been hurt, although my head was still pounding from the blow I had received. I wondered if I had been removed from London. The chill had penetrated right through to my bones and my body was shuddering involuntarily. There was no feeling whatsoever in my hands and my very teeth were aching. It was as if I had been transported to the frozen north and left to perish on an ice floe. But no. I was indoors. It was concrete, not ice, beneath me. I pulled myself into a sitting position and wrapped my hands around me, partly to conserve what little bodily warmth remained, partly to hold myself together. I saw Athelney Jones. He had already regained consciousness but he looked quite close to death. He was sitting slumped against a brick wall with his walking stick next to him. There were sparkles of ice on his shoulders, his collar and his lips.

‘Jones …?’

‘Chase! Thank God you are awake.’

‘Where are we?’ A cloud of white vapour emerged from my mouth as I spoke.

‘Smithfield, I think. Or somewhere similar.’

‘Smithfield? What is that?’

My question answered itself. We were in a meat market. There were a hundred carcasses in the room. I had seen them but, with my senses returning to me only slowly, I had been unable to grasp what they were. Now I examined them; whole sheep, stripped bare, missing their heads, their fleeces or anything that would have identified them as God’s creatures, lying with their limbs stretched out, stacked up in piles that reached almost to the ceiling. Small pools of blood had trickled out and then frozen solid, the colour more mauve than red. I looked around me. The chamber was square with two ladders attached to rails so that they could slide from one end to the other. It reminded me of the cargo hold of a ship. A steel door provided the only possible way out, but I was certain it was locked and to touch it would have torn the skin from my fingertips. Two tallow candles had been placed on the floor. Otherwise, we would have been left in the pitch dark.

‘How long have we been here?’ I asked. It was as much as I could do to enunciate the words. My teeth were locked together.

‘Not long. It cannot be long.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘No. No more than you.’

‘Your daughter …?’

‘Safe … or so I believe. We can at least give thanks for that.’ Jones reached out and took hold of his stick, dragging it towards him. ‘Chase, I am sorry.’

‘Why?’

‘It was I who brought you here. This is my doing. I would have done anything — anything — to get Beatrice back. But it was not fair to bring you into this.’ His words were breathless, staccato, as stripped of warmth as the butchered sheep that surrounded us. It could not be otherwise. Every word, even as it was uttered, had to fight against the biting cold.

And yet I replied: ‘Do not blame yourself. We began together and together we will end. It is as it should be.’

We retreated into silence, conserving our strength, both of us aware that our lives were slipping away from us. Was this to be our fate, to be left here until the blood had frozen in our veins? Jones was almost certainly correct. This had to be a major meat market — and one that was surrounded by cold rooms. The walls that contained us would be packed with charcoal and somewhere nearby a compression refrigerating machine would be grinding away, pumping glaciated — and lethal — air into the chamber. The mechanism was fairly new and we might be the first to be killed by it — not that I could find a great deal of consolation in the thought.

I still refused to believe that they intended to kill us — not immediately, at any rate — and it was this thought that made me determined not to slip back into unconsciousness. Edgar Mortlake had said that there were questions for us to answer. Our suffering now must surely be no more than a prelude to that interrogation. It would end soon enough. With fingers that could barely move, I fumbled in my pockets only to discover that my trusty jackknife, the one weapon that I always carried with me, had gone. It barely mattered. I would have been in no state to use it.