Jane recalled the satisfaction she’d felt as her knife cut through cloth and flesh, the way she’d put all her strength behind the blow. Men who made their living like that needed to die. Anyone would kill a rat without a second thought.

  Simon had been right. He wasn’t the first. Not even the second. But those others would have left her for dead and walked away smiling. She knew exactly how fragile life could be.

  A question or two in the village and she was climbing the slope to Long Hill Manor. Off to the west a farmer was building a drystone wall in a field. She stopped for a minute, catching her breath on the hill as she watched him work. Picking out one rock from a pile, then another. Miles of them snaking in lines across the hills. How long had that taken? she wondered. More time than she could begin to imagine.

  The farm lay along a rutted track. She stood at the head of the lane. The place felt abandoned. Still, she was cautious, circling around to come at it from the wood on the other side. Appearances could deceive.

  She had no sense that anyone was watching her. Not a soul to be seen, just a pair of rooks on a tree branch; loneliness and the wind were their only companions.

  Birds had made their nests in the rafters of the house. Cobwebs grew thick in the corners, clinging to her dress as she moved through the rooms. It didn’t look as if anyone had been here in years. Across the yard, the barn was slowly folding in on itself as the roof gave way, and the byre held nothing more than a family of mice.

  A pity, Jane thought; the farm would have been an ideal place to hide someone. But the answers to this were all in Leeds. She felt certain of that.

  The kind of men he needed to see didn’t rise early. They preferred the darkness to the light. But he’d kick them out of their beds if he had to. There was more going on than he understood. It was beyond a kidnapping and ransom. Someone had ordered his death. Luck, and Jane’s skill, had kept him alive. Find the man behind it and he’d be able to take Hannah Milner home. After he had his revenge.

  First, though, he spent an hour on the tenter fields, flying a kite with Richard and Amos, smiling as they chased back and forth. It was what he needed, some joy to take away the brooding blackness running through his mind. Simon watched the boys run and laugh, relishing life and loving his twins. Had he ever enjoyed a childhood like that before his parents died? He couldn’t remember now. Clouds covered everything. The first clear picture in his mind was the workhouse door opening and the sour stink as he was pulled inside. Everything before that was blurred and muddled.

  He’d made sure that his sons would never end up there. If he died, there was money for them, and a carefully worded will to see they were looked after. They’d have better lives ahead of them.

  Fat Jack Dommerty was up when he arrived, drinking beer in his parlour and picking at a plate of eggs. He made his money connecting people with each other. He knew the right men for the violent jobs, for broken bones and murder. Give him the victim’s name, pay the proper fee and it would be done. There was no shortage of clients in a town like this.

  Now he sat at the table, flecks of food caught in his thick beard. He was big and bluff, with warm blue eyes and cheeks ruddy from years of drinking. He didn’t look like a man who could arrange a killing with a snap of his fingers. But if a hard man was dead, word would have reached Dommerty’s ears.

  ‘Don’t often see you at this hour.’ He took a swig of ale. ‘Want some?’

  Simon shook his head. ‘Someone died last night.’

  Jack belched and opened his eyes a little wider. ‘I daresay a few did. Anyone in particular?’

  ‘A man who tried to kill me.’

  The man picked something from his teeth with his thumbnail. ‘He didn’t succeed then, unless I’m talking to a ghost.’

  ‘There were two of them. The other ran off.’ He’d keep Jane out of it. The fewer that knew, the safer she was. Dommerty carefully laid his knife and fork on the plate and looked at him.

  ‘What do you want me to say, Simon? You’re alive. One of them isn’t and the other one’s gone. You’ve survived.’

  ‘What do you know about it?’

  ‘I haven’t heard a thing.’ That was surprising. He should have heard by now.

  ‘Who else would be likely to know?’

  Jack reached for an engraved silver coffee pot and poured himself a cup.

  ‘You could try Will Cain. He might be able to tell you.’

  Dommerty’s competitor. It said so much about Leeds that two men trading in death could both make a good living. Like his namesake in the Bible, this Cain had killed his brother. Many years before. Expensive, crooked testimony helped him escape a guilty verdict.

  ‘It wasn’t him. I’d have been able to tell.’ And Simon would probably have been dead.

  ‘Never said it was,’ Dommerty told him. ‘But he’ll probably know.’

  ‘Where’s he living these days?’

  ‘The bottom end of the Head Row.’ He chuckled. ‘His house has a red door. That’s what they tell me, anyway.’

  The Milner business didn’t sound like Cain’s work, Simon thought as he walked through the people thronging Vicar Lane. It was too elaborate, too considered. Cain liked easy targets, work that was done quickly.

  The door had been red once. Now it was spattered with mud and covered with dust, the colour muted, dulled.

  Cain had a thin, feral face, with large, stained front teeth and dark, curling hair that fell over the tops of his ears. A good coat, caught at the waist and flaring over his thighs, tight trousers with a wide, loud check: every inch a dandy.

  His rooms filled the ground floor. The furniture probably came with the place, old and heavy, dark wood that seemed to draw away all the light.

  ‘What it’s worth, Mr Westow?’ Cain asked as soon as they were seated. ‘You’re here with a question, I can see it in your eyes.’

  Simon took Milner’s sovereign from his waistcoat and slapped it on the table.

  ‘You can’t be expecting much of an answer for that.’

  ‘The truth will do.’

  Cain looked down at the coin. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Someone was stabbed last night. He died.’

  ‘Go on.’ He hadn’t taken his eyes off the money.

  ‘Another man was with him. He ran away. I want his name.’

  ‘The dead man was called Turnbull,’ he answered immediately. ‘I’ll have to sniff out the rest.’

  ‘How long will it take?’

  Cain shrugged. ‘Come back in an hour. But it’ll cost you another one of these.’

  ‘Done.’ To have the name would be worth every penny.

  He was as good as his word. Nothing written, just a name whispered after the money changed hands.

  ‘Should I expect to hear of his passing, too?’ Cain asked.

  ‘People live, people die,’ Simon said, and closed the door quietly as he left.

  Jane perched on the wall, waiting for the flood of women to come out on their dinner. Across Mabgate, a man was seated on the ground, his back again a wall. He was so thin he might have been bones tossed into a sack of flesh.

  She waited as an overloaded cart lumbered past, then crossed the road and put a ha’penny in his hand.

  ‘God bless you, miss.’

  ‘What time do they finish?’

  ‘Noon.’ He didn’t look at her. But he didn’t seem to look at anything. Maybe he had a glimpse of a better place than this; she hoped so.

  Nicholson’s mill was as forbidding as a prison. The windows were set high in the walls, the heavy doors firmly closed until the bell tolled. A few seconds later, women emerged like a roaring flood, shouting, laughing, blinking in the light. For half an hour they were free.

  Jane picked a girl around her own age, standing apart, a dazed expression on her face.

  ‘Are they hiring on in there?’

  The girl stared as if she’d spoken in another tongue. ‘Are they—?’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath,’ a woman said as she pushed past. ‘She’s simple, that one. Can’t hear a thing.’

  Jane glanced at the girl again. She was watching them carefully.

  ‘Are they hiring on, missus?’ she asked.

  The woman snorted. ‘Getting rid, more like. At this rate we’ll all be gone in three month.’

  That was news to take back to Simon.

  ‘But the owner will still be rich, eh?’ Jane said.

  ‘Oh aye,’ she snorted. ‘He’ll still have his big house when we can’t pay us rent and we’re out on the street.’

  ‘And I bet he lives somewhere clean and posh, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Chapel Allerton.’ She spoke the words like acid and pushed away.

  The girl had crossed the street and hugged the man. His face seemed to come alive as she tenderly helped him to his feet. Jane stood, gazing at their backs until they turned the corner to Argyle Road.

  She’d found her information quickly enough. Chapel Allerton. And it sounded as if Nicholson had urgent need of a thousand pounds.

  One attacker dead and Simon still alive sent a message to whoever had ordered him dead. Both of them gone and Simon still walking the streets would make it even stronger. No magistrate would come after him; he was certain of that. The bodies would quietly disappear, stripped of everything they owned, as if they’d never existed. This was Leeds.

  First, though, he’d discover who’d given the command to kill him.

  The entrance to the court stood across Kirkgate from the Fleece, an arched opening barely wide enough for a man to pass. Inside, it opened up, ramshackle buildings crammed together around a small yard that reeked of shit and piss. And at the far end, almost hidden, was the place he wanted.

  He climbed the stairs, careful to move silently, a knife already in his hand. At the top, another door, ajar and inviting.

  Simon waited, listening for the tiniest sound – a scuff, the creak of a floorboard, even the sense of someone breathing. Beneath him, the house was alive. Soft noises rose, a man cried out from a drunken dream. But up here there was only silence.

  He edged towards the door, reached and pushed it open.

  The man was lying on the floor. His arms were flung away from his body. Light from a broken window showed the bloody wound on his back. Simon knelt and touched his neck. No pulse of blood, but the skin was still warm; he’d still been alive an hour before.

  The price of failure was high.

  Who? he wondered, watching faces as he walked up Briggate. Who was behind it? Not just the kidnap, but hiring a pair of killers, then murdering the survivor for not completing the job. That required knowledge, a ruthless mind and a deadly arm. The only way to win was to understand what was happening. And he was groping in the dark.

  Simon knew the criminals in Leeds. From those at the bottom who picked a pocket and tried to survive from day to day to the ones at the top, feasting on the profits and rubbing shoulders with the council and the gentry. But he could think of no one with the will to organize this.

  Simon bounced Amos lightly on his knee as the boy gnawed on a piece of bread and dripping. On the other side of the kitchen table, Rosie held Richard on her lap, his body curled lazily against hers.

  Jane bit into a meat pie from the stall on Boar Lane, chewed, and swallowed.

  ‘I couldn’t talk to anyone at Nicholson’s house. I tried to get in twice and they chased me off.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he told her.

  ‘We’re no further on and Hannah’s still missing,’ Rosie said. ‘Can you imagine what she’s feeling?’

  He couldn’t afford to think about that. It didn’t help the search.

  ‘No one followed me today.’ Jane said it with absolute certainty.

  ‘I haven’t felt anyone behind me, either.’ He grimaced. ‘But then I didn’t last night.’

  ‘If we’re not finding any candidates, we must be looking at the wrong men,’ Rosie said.

  Simon stared at her, still jiggling Amos on his knee.

  ‘Perhaps we are,’ he agreed. ‘We’ve gone after the obvious ones and we’ve found nothing.’

  ‘Except two dead men,’ Jane said.

  In his head, he’d gone through every name he could imagine. Examined and discarded them all, one by one.

  ‘They want their money tomorrow,’ Rosie said.

  ‘I know.’ He wasn’t likely to forget. He was aware of every minute that passed. And unless he had a stroke of fortune, he wasn’t going to find Hannah Milner in time.

  ‘What happens then?’ Jane asked.

  Simon gave a bleak smile. ‘We lose. And we don’t earn our two hundred guineas.’

  ‘I’m not giving up on that money,’ Rosie said. ‘There must be a way to find her in time.’

  Jane never wanted to remember. She’d forced all the old things away, shutting them away in the dark corners of her mind. But sometimes … it could be something as simple and innocent as a smell or the tone of a voice, and all the ugliness and pain spilled out again.

  The man was on Bond Street, right on the corner of Albion Street. He stood like a soldier, with his back straight and his head held high and proud. His right arm was missing, the sleeve pinned across his coat like the pictures she’d seen of Nelson. In his left hand he held an old tin mug. A dog lay at his feet, silently watching people as they rushed by.

  ‘Help for a cripple,’ he called out, and it was there, so plaintive, that for a moment Jane had to stop. In the pleading tone she could hear the echo of her father’s voice as he crept into her bed that morning. For a moment, the world stopped.

  She breathed, making herself swallow the bile that rose in her throat. Jane looked at the man again. His eyes were milky, unable to see.

  Her father was part of the past. She’d burned it all, watched it catch fire and flame to ashes. Yet still …

  People pushed around her with the ripe smell of unwashed bodies, jostling, almost knocking her off her feet. Then it passed, her head began to clear. She took a penny from her pocket and dropped it into the beggar’s cup.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, and the dog wagged its tail once.

  Her thoughts were still roiling as she crossed Briggate. At Duncan Street she turned, passing the grandeur of the Post Office before turning on to Call Lane. The beershop was in a yard down from the entrance to the White Cloth Hall.

  Men played dice or cards. One or two glanced up as she entered, then turned back to their games. Mrs Rigton sat by the barrels, watching her customers. The place smelt of smoke and stale beer. But the floor was swept clean, a fire burned in the grate each evening, and she sometimes allowed a little credit to the regulars.

  Jane knew this place very well. She’d slept here every night for one entire winter; without it, she’d be dead.

  She curtseyed to the woman. Mary Rigton smiled and patted the seat next to her.

  ‘Sit down, child. You’re growing so big, you’re almost a woman now. Come on, tell me everything that’s happening with you.’

  ‘There’s not much.’ Jane looked around the room. ‘Nothing changes here, does it?’

  ‘Of course it does.’ She smiled. ‘It’s different every day. You’re just looking at the surface, that’s all. Go a little deeper and it changes all the time. Are you still living with Simon and Rosie?’

  ‘Yes.’ It was Mary Rigton who’d urged her to go there when Jane wasn’t sure.

  ‘Are they treating you well?’

  She thought of the hundred pounds she had hidden away. ‘They are. But I’m here looking for some information.’

  ‘I hardly thought it was a social visit, child.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘You didn’t send in your calling card. Who are you looking for?’

  ‘A man died last night. Stabbed.’

  ‘Catch-All.’

  Jane cocked her head. ‘Who?’

  ‘Catch-All Turnbull. Or Turnwell, maybe. Something like that. I heard it this morning. He was in here a week or so ago, looking for work.’

  ‘Who took him on?’

  ‘I don’t know. He only stopped by for two nights. A quiet man.’

  ‘Could you find out, Mary? It’s important.’

  She considered the request. ‘I can ask. No promises, mind.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She stood. ‘I have to …’

  Mrs Rigton waved her hand. ‘You go, child. You’re always so busy these days. Rush, rush – I suppose that’s the way of the world now. Come back later, I might know more.’

  SEVEN

  When Rosie first told him she was going to have a child, Simon had stared at her, not certain what he felt.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. It seemed impossible. She’d never caught before.

  ‘I hope that’s just shock on your face, Simon Westow.’

  ‘It’s …’ He didn’t know what to say. ‘You’re positive?’

  ‘I am.’ Her smile had been as wide as the world. She wanted children. He … a family would ground him. He’d take fewer chances.

  Rosie had worked with him since he started as a thief-taker. That would have to stop. They’d need a better home than the room they rented. So many things.

  He adjusted. He made the changes. Made arrangements to buy the house on Swinegate at a low price from a grateful client. He became a man of property; something he could never have imagined when he was young. And then the surprise – he became the father of twins. Suddenly life seemed to tower over him.

  But he’d weathered it all. He loved his boys. His business had prospered, especially after Jane’s arrival.

  Until last night, no one had tried to murder him. He’d had his share of fights, he’d needed to use his knife to defend himself. Simon owned his share of scars. Yet never that.

  Who wanted him dead?