Bluegate Fields

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Inspector Pitt shivered a little and stared unhappily while Ser geant Froggatt lifted the manhole cover and exposed the open ing beneath. Iron rungs led downward into a hollow chasm of stone that echoed the distant slither and drip of water. Did Pitt imagine the scutter of clawed feet?

A breath of damp air drifted up, and immediately he tastec the sourness below. He sensed the labyrinth of tunnels anc steps, the myriad layers, and even more tunnels of slimy bricks that stretched out under the whole of London and carried awaj the waste and the unwanted, the lost.

"Down 'ere, sir," Froggatt said dolefully. "That's where they found 'im. Odd, I calls it-very odd."

"Very," Pitt agreed, pulling his scarf tighter around his neck. Though it was only early September, he felt cold. The streets of Bluegate Fields were dank and smelled of poverty and human filth. It had once been a prosperous area, with high, elegant houses, the homes of merchants. Now it was one of the most dangerous of all the portside slums in England, and Pitl was about to descend into its sewers to examine a corpse thai had been washed up against the great sluice gates that closed ofl the Thames' tides.

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