One

'There's the possibility that what happened was restricted to these shores,' Jane said. Hoots of derision. He didn't believe what he had said either, but it was his job to put the option on the table. 'We're running out of places to hide. They're closing the net. In France we might be better positioned. More options. If you were to get on the raft you might find a better life.'

White Beard spat at Jane's feet. 'We might find a worse one, too,' he said. 'You just want us to leave so you can have the tunnels for yourself.'

'I'm not interested in tunnels,' Jane said. 'I'm here to pass on information, that's all. What you do with it is your business. You're looking at eighty miles. Cross the river at Tower Bridge. Head for the A20. Maybe you'll join up with the rest, hundreds of them, before you get there.'

He was turning to leave when someone called out, asking about the others.

'What others?' Jane asked.

'There's more of us,' the voice called. 'In the crossover passages at City Road. The old disused station.'

'Can't you pass it on?'

'You pass it on, pal. It's your job. We're leaving.'

Jane stood on the platform as roughly two-thirds of the platform dwellers hastily packed up their things and streamed by him. One or two shook his hand and thanked him. A man wearing a trilby over a mass of sweaty rat-tails told him he should get going himself and fuck the City Roaders or he'd end up being the last pretzel in the Skinners' snack bowl.

He watched their backs fade through the exit, heard them swearing and stomping and splashing up the escalators. About twenty men remained. Already they were repositioning their gear, seemingly happy with the grand space they had inherited.

'Fucking mugs, the lot of them,' White Beard said. 'Fucking raft? Who'd go out on the sea? I'll take my chances with the Smoke. My grandad lived here in the Blitz. Didn't get a fucking scratch.'

Jane loped down to the end of the platform and squinted into the tunnel's throat. A constant breeze shifted his hair, chilled the flesh of his arms. It was like the final protracted breath of a giant. It carried every scent you could associate with death upon it. It was a stew of bad things, dirty water run from the tap leading directly to the well of your nightmares.

He dropped down into the gulley of sewage and allowed himself to be swallowed.

It wasn't far to the defunct City Road section of the Northern Line tunnel but Jane's constant stumbling on the rails and the fragments of wall collapsing into the passageway lengthened his journey considerably. There were no platforms at the station any more, but candles had been left here too, lighting the way to the passage arches, seemingly hanging in the wall, five feet above the floor. Soot clung to every surface; it was as if everything had been carved from it. The floor seemed to shiver as he hauled himself up from the rails; his hands sank into inches of soft matter. Dead cables slinked around him, hanging from their routers like snakes sleeping in branches, roughly following the shape of the architecture as though they were its preliminary pencil sketches.

Jane called out but his voice died immediately in the granular acoustics. Pieces of unrecognisable machinery lay by the tracks. A dust-veiled sign from the 1940s warned people not to leave their belongings behind after the all-clear. He saw a figure at the central corridor leading to the stairs. A child holding a toy, a stuffed animal. It looked like a lion. The slight figure was wearing pyjamas. He was barefoot. Jane's heart lurched as if it were making a break for freedom. He almost laughed out loud.

'Stanley?' he called.

The figure instantly turned and ran away, as if it had been waiting only for Jane's voice to trigger it. Jane stood in the passageway staring at the skirls of dust the figure had kicked up at the moment of its exit. Not Stanley. Stanley would not be five years old still. Stanley would be wearing a scowl and a hoodie and bumfluff on his upper lip. Stanley would not run away. He'd stand his ground and ask Jane, 'What's it to you, fuckhead?'

Jane took off after him.

He managed a couple of flights before the walls started to move. Figures detached themselves from the murk as if they had animated themselves from the soot. Soon he found himself trying to move through a corridor packed with black flaking bodies. He couldn't think beyond the character of Pigpen in Peanuts, who seemed to be constructed from dirt. All he could see were wild white eyes and teeth; a smell of humus and brackish water. It was as if the shored-up earth, failing now, deep beneath the capital, was shedding ghosts at every turn.