someone to find, while Mary moved faster towards her exit. She rounded a corner and came to a halt, blinking as she considered the solid wall before her. The wall couldn’t have sprung up in a matter of minutes. Had she come the wrong way? Then her eyes adjusted and she realized the “wall” was a shadow cast by some scaffolding in the moonlight.
The moon. It had shown itself while she was outside the office, spying on the thief. While most nights she’d have welcomed it, tonight it hampered her escape. Not only did it make her easier to spot, but it changed the appearance of nearly everything on site. Still, she moved with noiseless speed.
A small, open strip of land now stretched between her and the fence. The man was no longer absolutely silent in his pursuit. Was he less certain of his way? Or was he merely allowing her to hear him, hoping that she’d panic and make an error? Either way, he was close behind now. Had she time to cross the unsheltered patch? She glanced about, looking for hiding-places: a heap of rubble, a lean-to containing lumber, the entrance to the tower. None held out any hope of concealment if he followed; all were dead ends.
She drew one last deep breath, not caring if it was audible. This was her last chance. She sprinted with all her strength across the open stretch, her boots ringing clearly against the paving stones. As she dived for the fence, wriggling and kicking through the narrow gap, the boards snagged her clothes and scraped her hips and shins. She tumbled out into the street, laughing silently now as she heard her pursuer struggling and swearing. The wooden plank slapped down into place, possibly clipping him on its way. An adult would never fit through the gap. Not an adult male, at any rate.
She scrambled up and kept running, knowing she was in the clear but impelled by a surge of energy to keep moving, to clear out, to distance herself from that terrifying, exhilarating escapade. She was nearly back at Miss Phlox’s before she slowed to a walk. It was dark night, now; she had no idea what time. Her lungs tingled. The grazed skin of her hips and shins stung. When she let herself in the narrow gate, a sudden deep exhaustion gripped her. The front step, a wide slab of stone, looked wonderfully inviting; she could have curled up right there and gone straight to sleep. Instead, she stumbled up the two flights of stairs and fell into bed, fully clothed, unheeding of Rogers’s lumpy form and deep snores. Within seconds, she was asleep.
Nine
Tuesday, 5 July
Mary didn’t sleep for long. Dawn came early, and with it consciousness. Her eyes popped open and she lay, tense and still, wondering just where the hell she was and who lay beside her. Then, as memory returned, her tension eased a little. The dingy yellowed wall, the scratchy mattress with a valley in the middle, the clatter of carts in the street below – all these were part of her new life in Lambeth. Or, rather, Mark Quinn’s life.
Beside her, Rogers snored at full bore, rolled snugly inside the greasy blanket they were meant to share. He was welcome to it. Mary lay still, watching the weak light – one could hardly say “sunlight”, it was so grey – grow stronger. She felt a knife-like pain deep in her belly. Not hunger, but the desperate need to pass water. Yet she could hardly do so now, with Rogers in the room. Instead, she forced herself to think about yesterday’s events.
Foremost in her mind was the fate of Jenkins. After that beating, he wouldn’t walk properly for days, and there was a good chance his lacerations would become dangerously infected. Yet Harkness had packed him off with the day’s wages and the bland assurance that once recovered, he would again have a place on the building site. But even assuming that Jenkins healed properly and came back to his job, there remained the question of how he was to live in the meantime. Without a wage, without medicines. It was an outrage. The least she could do was try to help him, if teetotalling, cliché-spouting, church-going Harkness would do nothing else. She would contact the Agency today and find out Jenkins’s address.
Harkness’s duty to Jenkins led to the question of his relations with the other labourers. Although Harkness’s building site might officially be