William Monk 15 - Dark Assassin

send them all out into the rain?”
    Scuff smiled so widely it showed his lost teeth. “Yeah!”
    “Imagine it!” Monk replied. “That’s as good as you’ll get. Come on!”
    Hesitantly Scuff obeyed, walking beside Monk until they reached the steps, then hanging back. Monk held the door for him and waited while he took smaller and smaller steps, then stopped altogether just inside, staring around with enormous eyes.
    Orme looked up from the table where he was writing a report. Clacton drew in his breath, caught Monk’s eye, and changed his mind.
    “Mr. Scuff has information for us which may be of great value,” Monk told Orme. “He will give it to us, of course, but it would be pleasanter over a cup of tea, and cake, if there is any left.”
    Orme looked at Scuff and saw a wet and shivering child. “Clacton,” he said sharply, fishing in his pocket and pulling out a few pence, “go and get us all a nice piece of cake. I’ll make the tea.”
    Scuff took another step inside, then inched over towards the stove.
     
    Two hours later Monk, Scuff, Orme, Kelly, and Jones, the men armed with pistols, descended down the open workings and along the sodden bottom between the high walls of Blind Man’s Cutting. As it closed overhead, they lit their lanterns.
    Monk glanced at the sides of the tunnel. The old bricks were set in a close, carefully laid curve, now stained and seeping with steady drips and slow-crawling slime. The smell, unmistakably human waste, was thick in the nose and throat. The skitter of rats’ feet interrupted the slurp of water down the channel in the center. Otherwise there was no sound except their own feet slipping on the wet stone. No one spoke. Apart from the frail beam from their lanterns, the darkness was absolute. Monk felt panic rising inside him almost uncontrollably. They were buried alive, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. He could see nothing but dark, wavering shadows and yellow light on wet walls. The smell was suffocating.
    Perhaps their journey was no more than a mile, but it seemed endless until they met a junction of waterways. Scuff hesitated only a moment before turning to the right. He led the way into a narrower tunnel, where they were obliged to stoop in order not to strike the ceiling. The gangers couldn’t have been this way recently, because the piled-up sludge beneath their feet was deep and dangerous, catching at them, dragging at their feet, holding them back and sucking them down.
    Monk had no idea where they were. They had turned often enough that he had lost all sense of direction. Sounds echoed and were lost; then there was nothing but the steady drip all around them, above, behind, and ahead. It was like endless labyrinths through hell, filled with the odor of decay.
    One of the men let out an involuntary cry as a huge rat fell off the wall and splashed into the water only a couple of feet from him.
    Another half mile and they emerged into a dry tunnel, where the ceiling was considerably higher. There they met a pair of toshers, roped together for safety. They had long poles in their hands for fishing out valuables—or gripping the sides when caught by a sudden current after a rainstorm. They were dressed in the usual tosher gear: high rubber boots, hat, and harness.
    It was Scuff who spoke to them, leaving the River Police in shadows with their lanterns half concealed.
    Then they moved on again, probing the darkness with their feeble lights. The thought made Monk’s stomach churn and his throat tighten: What would happen if they dropped the lamps? They would never get out of here. One day, in a week, or a month, some tosher would find their bones, picked clean by rats.
    The last tosher they had questioned, half a mile back, had said there were people using this old way to get from one part of the city to another. The man they were looking for, whose name no one spoke, was one of them. In the subterranean world there seemed little of either friendship or enmity; it was simply coexistence, with rules of survival. Those who broke them died.
    It seemed an age before Scuff finally led them up a ladder. Their feet clanged on the iron rungs. A few yards later they passed a sluice rushing so loudly they could not hear their own voices. Above, in a dry passage leading to a blind end, a group of men and women were sitting beside a fire, the smoke going up through a hole a little distance away and disappearing into utter darkness.
    A short whispered