stairway, and beyond it another door, also open; through it, he could see part of a yard and a wooden building. To his right, a door was closed; that was the side where the windows had been bricked up. To his left, a large opening showed where a wall had been pulled out; three men, stripped to the waist, were working over vats of poisonously coloured liquid in there.
Denton walked to the back. The yard was littered with metal castings and wooden boxes; at one side, a workman was hammering sand into one of the boxes. Denton knew enough of manufacturing to see that the box was a mould; the workman was preparing a sand casting. The foundry, he guessed, was still farther back.
He went in again and looked into the big room with the vats. Two of the men were lowering a casting into a vat with a chain hoist. Plating, he thought. Or cleaning. He tried to get the attention of the third man but was ignored; maybe it was the noise of the thudding, ponderous machine, probably a drop forge but sounding like the footsteps of a monster.
Finding no sign to tell him where the Photographic Inventorium might be, he went up another storey. Here, a single door on the left opened on a space the length of the house, undoubtedly made from two or even three old rooms - the cornice changed halfway down; a ragged scar ran across the floor where a wall had been removed. Far down the room, a dark man in a skullcap stood on a small dais, a kind of counter around him. The rest of the room was bins, both along the walls and down the middle. While Denton watched, a young man rummaged in a bin, pulling out bits of lace, studying them, picking out one or two and dropping them into a sack. When Denton moved deeper into the room, he saw a sign behind the dais: A. Gold: Findings, Trimmings and Best Remnants.
‘Mr Gold?’
The man on the dais folded his arms over his chest, cocked an eyebrow. Standing up there gave him an advantage, and he was aware of it. ‘So?’ he said.
‘I’m looking for something called the Photographic Inventorium.’
Gold pointed skyward.
‘You know the man who operates it?’
Gold shook his head.
‘Have you seen him in the last few days?’
Gold shook his head.
‘Thanks.’
Denton went up to the next floor. There, a young man who was planing panels for a door said he didn’t know Mulcahy and wouldn’t recognize him if he fell over him, and he’d seen only one person on the stairs in the last week, and he didn’t know him, either.
‘What’d he look like?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Denton offered a couple of shillings, glad Atkins wasn’t there to see him, and the young man said what did he think he was, a flunkey? ‘I’m a self-employed craftsman; I don’t take charity and I don’t take bribes. You see this here door I’m making? It takes skill. It’s hard work, and not many can do it. And nor can I if you won’t let me be!’ He turned his back and began to run a steel-bodied, rosewood-filled plane across the wood. Denton wanted to linger, the odour of the wood enticing, the artisan’s concentration impressive, but the young man gave him an angry look and he left.
The Photographic Inventorium, Under New Management - no mention of Mulcahy - was on the top floor. Two doors stood up there, silent and closed; the other, if it had an owner, bore no sign. The door to the Inventorium had two hasps, both locked with big Brahma padlocks. Denton knocked and waited and knocked again, but nobody came.
The Inventorium was closed.
The drop forge thudded. The cabinetmaker sawed a plank. Denton tried the other door and called out Mulcahy’s name, but the building, if it knew something, was dumb.
He was up in the part of the building, he thought, where the dormers projected from the steeply pitched hip roof. Yet the stairs, which had moved from the centre to the far side of the house on their way up, here broke off and, like a snake cut in two, continued in a different place. He found them only by prowling the corridor and seeing, right at the back, the walled-in stairway going up. If he was right about how high he had come, these stairs led to the roof.
He went up.
The stairs turned once and ended under a trapdoor that must, he