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Sherlock started backing away, heart beating faster. The man was blocking the route out of the arches, but there was bound to be another way, somewhere behind him, in the darkness. Sherlock just had to find it.

The man smiled coldly. He slipped a hand inside his coat pocket, the spikes on his knuckledusters catching on the fabric as he did so. The hand came out again with a bunch of silvery coins held between the fingers.

‘Half a crown for the first person to bring the kid to me!’ he called out. ‘You hear? You can live like a lord for a month on that, if you want. Half a crown, and I don’t even care if anything’s broken. Just as long as he can still answer my questions.’

The air around Sherlock seemed to rustle, as if it had a life of its own. He’d thought that he and the bearded man were alone in the arches underneath Waterloo Station, but the darkness moved, separating itself into five, six, ten small figures. They seemed to step out of the walls and pull themselves out of the squishy ground. They were small – smaller than Sherlock, smaller than his friend Matty – and their skin, where it could be seen through clothes that were more rips than rags, was grey with dirt and grease that had been ground in for so long that it had become a part of them. Children. Tunnel-dwellers, with no families and no way of surviving apart from scavenging in the dirt for things dropped by passing passengers. Their eyes were large and dark, like rats’, and the nails on their fingers and what he could see of their toes were sharp and long and encrusted with dirt. Their mouths were ragged: blistered, split lips stretched tight over diseased gums. What few teeth remained in those mouths were blackened and jagged, like ancient mountains. The children couldn’t even stand up straight: they spent so long scrabbling through narrow tunnels and searching through the mud and slime for dropped coins that they were hunched and bent. Their arms and legs were thin and twisted like branches, but their stomachs were strangely swollen. Straggly hair hung around their faces. He couldn’t even tell which ones were boys and which ones girls: the dirt and the starvation made them look the same. And the smelclass="underline" dear Lord, the sheer stench of rot and decay that poured off them, so intense that Sherlock could almost see the air rippling around them.

How could people live like this, he asked himself as he backed away. There was nothing in their eyes as they moved towards him apart from a voracious hunger. To them, he was nothing but a way to secure the next meal.

His perception kept shifting. For a second or two they were monsters, creatures of the night ready to swarm over him and take him down, and then suddenly they were children, driven to desperate things by hunger. He felt his emotions swing frantically between horror and sympathy. How could people – how could children – be allowed to live like this? It was wrong.

‘You don’t have to do this,’ he said, still moving backwards. The feral children cocked their heads at the words, but he wasn’t sure they’d understood. Or, if they’d understood, that they cared. All they knew was that the big man with the beard would pay riches for Sherlock to be bought to him, and if they had to break Sherlock’s arms and legs to stop him getting away then that was just the way it had to be.

Sherlock had a feeling they’d done worse things, there in the darkness.

He turned to run, but there were four – no, five – of the children behind him. They had appeared noiselessly out of the shadows.

A hand caught at his sleeve. He recoiled, pulling the material from the thin fingers and hearing the fabric rip beneath the sharp nails.

He was surrounded.

In the light that spilt in from the street, Sherlock could see the bulky shadow of the bearded man. And he could hear him laughing.

Desperately he tried to suppress the panic that bubbled up within his chest. He had to think, and think quickly.

Another hand clutched at his elbow. He pushed it away. The skin that he touched felt squishy. Unconsciously, he wiped his hand on his jacket.

In seconds they would be swarming over him. He gazed around, looking for something, anything that he could use to get away.

The wall. His only hope was the arched wall to his left. The feral children were crowding him on all sides, but the way to the wall was clear.

He ran for it, jumping when he was just a few feet away. His feet scrabbled for gaps where the brick had crumbled away, and his fingers managed to get a grip between the bricks higher up. He hauled himself up, feeling the arch curve towards him above his head. He climbed as high as he could. Gravity was pulling at him. Beneath, the feral children were scampering up the wall after him, but the curve of the arch meant that he was now closer to the centre of the tunnel.

He pushed himself away from the wall, partly falling and partly leaping over their heads. He hit the spongy ground in the centre of the tunnel, stumbling but pushing himself back up to his feet. Before the children could work out what he had done, he turned and ran off into the darkness – the only direction he could go.

Within moments he had been swallowed up by shadows. In the distance behind him he could hear the slap of naked feet on moist earth. They were in pursuit.

He kept running, trusting to luck to keep him from hitting a tunnel wall. Either his eyes were growing accustomed to the darkness or there was some light spilling in from somewhere above, or perhaps some phosphorescent moss clinging to the tunnel walls, but he found that he could just make out the edges of the bricks as he ran.

He made out the curved shape of a second arch to one side – a tunnel, joining on to the one through which he was running. He swerved sideways, down this second tunnel. If he had any chance at all to escape his pursuers it was by confusing them, giving them too many options as to where he might have gone. If he just kept running in a straight line they would track him down for sure, and then… well, he wasn’t entirely sure that the promise of a half-crown would overcome their immediate hunger, and their desire to search his pockets for whatever coins he might have on him.

The tunnel ended in a black wall and Sherlock nearly ran into it. Only a momentary change in the quality of the fetid air warned him that there was an obstruction ahead. He stopped abruptly and reached forward with a cautious hand. The wall was about two feet in front of him. If he hadn’t realized in time then he would have collided with it, knocking himself out and leaving himself as easy prey for his feral pursuers.

Was he going to have to go back, try to find his way past them?

A breeze blew on his face, warm and stagnant, but definitely a breeze. Maybe this wasn’t a dead end at all. Maybe it was a junction where one tunnel ended by joining up with another one.

He turned left and started to run, arm stretched ahead just in case he hit the wall. He didn’t – the tunnel extended on towards whatever fresh hell was awaiting him.

A sudden thunderous noise overhead made him flinch. It seemed to go on forever. Rancid drops of water pattered on to his head from the roof of the tunnel. A train, maybe? He was probably beneath the tracks coming out of Waterloo Station.

Perhaps it was a train heading for Farnham, where his friends were. Would he ever see them again, or would he die here, in darkness, undiscovered forever?

He felt his breath catch in his throat. Somewhere up there was a calm, ordered world where well-dressed people walked purposefully back and forth. Up there were blue skies, solid brick walls, firm marble floors and gas lights. Up there was heaven. Down here there was crumbling brickwork trickling with water, ground that was somewhere between solid and liquid, a smell that combined the worst elements of tar, human filth and decaying plants, and despondent children who were little more than animals. This was definitely hell.