Three days had passed since Old George's body was discovered, and Tommy Briggs had learned something about hunger that he had never known in all his years in the Manchester slums. Hunger was not merely an absence of food. It was a presence, a living thing that coiled in the stomach and whispered in the ear and turned every thought toward the single, consuming question of when the next meal would come. The bread and cheese that Old George had left were long gone. The stream water kept him alive, but it could not fill the hollow ache that had settled into his bones.
He had spent the days in the signal box, as Old George had instructed. He watched the railway track, counting the trains that passed—a goods train in the morning, a passenger service in the afternoon, nothing at night. He drew more sketches, filling the margins of the old railway timetable with faces and figures from his memory. He slept in fits and starts, waking at every creak of the old timbers, every rustle of the wind through the heather. And he waited for Old George to return, knowing with a certainty that grew heavier each day that the old man was never coming back.
By the fourth day, the hunger had become unbearable. Tommy knew that he could not stay in the signal box forever. He needed food, and he needed information. He needed to know what had happened to Old George, and whether the men from the estate were still searching for him. And there was only one place where he might find answers.
The Ashworth Estate.
It was madness, and he knew it. Walking into the lion's den was not a strategy; it was a death wish. But desperation had a way of making madness seem reasonable. If he could slip onto the estate undetected, if he could find a kitchen door left unlocked or a pantry window left open, he might be able to steal enough food to last him a week. And if he was very lucky—or very unlucky—he might learn something about the men who had buried the woman in the peat.
He waited until dusk, when the light was failing and the shadows were long. Then he climbed down from the signal box and set out across the moor, following the same path he had taken on that first terrible night. The fog was thinner this evening, a low-lying mist that clung to the hollows rather than a thick blanket that swallowed everything, and he could see the lights of the manor house burning in the distance like a constellation fallen to earth.
He avoided the main drive, which was guarded by a gatehouse and a keeper's cottage. Instead, he followed the course of Gill's Beck, which wound its way through the estate's boundary and passed within a hundred yards of the manor's service wing. The water was cold around his ankles, and the stones were slippery with algae, but the beck provided cover—its banks were overgrown with willow and alder, and the sound of running water masked his footsteps.
He reached the service wing just after seven o'clock. The kitchen was in full operation, the windows steamed over, the air rich with the smell of roasting meat and fresh bread. Tommy crouched behind a stack of empty milk churns and watched the kitchen staff move back and forth, their silhouettes blurred by the condensation on the glass. There were at least four of them—a cook, two kitchen maids, and a scullery girl who couldn't have been older than twelve. They moved with the practiced efficiency of a well-run household, and Tommy knew that he would have no chance of slipping inside while they were working.
But the kitchen was not the only entrance.
The service wing extended to the east, where the ground-floor windows belonged to the estate office—the administrative heart of Sir Reginald's domain. The office was dark, its windows unlit, and the door that led to the yard was half-hidden behind a hedge of overgrown rhododendrons. Tommy circled around, tested the door handle, and found it unlocked.
He slipped inside and closed the door behind him.
The office was a large, wood-paneled room dominated by a massive desk and a wall of filing cabinets. The air smelled of cigar smoke and old paper, and the only light came from the moon shining through the windows. Tommy stood still for a moment, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. Then he began to search.
He was looking for food—a biscuit tin, a forgotten sandwich, anything that might quiet the gnawing in his stomach. But what he found was something else entirely.
The ledger was hidden behind a portrait of Sir Reginald himself, a life-sized painting that hung on the wall behind the desk. Tommy noticed it because the painting was slightly crooked, as though someone had recently moved it and not bothered to straighten it. He pulled it aside and found a recessed panel in the wall, and behind the panel, a leather-bound book that was thicker than any ledger he had ever seen.
He opened it. The pages were filled with names, written in a neat, precise hand. Dates. Places. Sums of money that made his eyes widen. And beside each entry, a small cross marked in red ink.
Tommy was not an educated boy—his schooling had ended when his mother died and his father had put him to work in the mills—but he could read well enough. He read the names: Sir Reginald Ashworth, Lord Charles Pennington, Sir Geoffrey Maitland, a dozen others that he did not recognize but that sounded important. He read the dates: a weekend in March 1951, a weekend in October 1952, a weekend in April 1953. And he read the sums: five hundred pounds, a thousand pounds, two thousand pounds. Fortunes, all of them, paid by men who came to the estate for "sport."
But it was the names written in a different column that made his blood run cold. Names like Mary Beckett. Alice Thornhill. Margaret Finch. Names of women, written in a smaller, less careful hand, as though the writer had been reluctant to record them. And beside each woman's name, a date and a red cross.
Tommy recognized one of the names. Alice Thornhill. A girl from Manchester who had disappeared two years earlier, her face plastered across the newspapers for a week before the story faded and the world moved on. Tommy remembered because she had lived three streets away from his tenement, and her mother had stood on the corner every day for a month, asking anyone who passed if they had seen her daughter.
And here was her name, in a hidden ledger, in the office of a philanthropist who was supposed to be a saint upon the earth.
Tommy's hands were shaking so badly that he could barely turn the pages. He knew he should leave. He should take the ledger and run, take it to the police, take it to the newspapers, take it to anyone who would listen. But the ledger was too large to carry, too conspicuous to hide. If he tried to walk out with it under his arm, he would be caught before he reached the gate.
So he did the only thing he could think of. He tore a single page from the book—a page that contained Alice Thornhill's name, and two others, and the details of a hunt that had taken place in October 1952. He folded the page carefully, tucked it into the lining of his jacket, and turned to leave.
That was when he heard the footsteps in the corridor.
Tommy froze. The footsteps were heavy and deliberate, the tread of a man who knew exactly where he was going and was in no hurry to get there. They stopped just outside the office door.
"The lights are off," said a voice—young, male, unfamiliar. "Sir Reginald said the estate office was always locked after dark."
"Then why are we checking it?" Another voice, older, gruffer. Tommy recognized it. It was Mullins, the gamekeeper. "Sir Reginald's orders. The boy's still out there somewhere, and he might try to break in. Check every door, every window. If you see anything, shoot first and ask questions after."
Tommy looked around desperately. The office had no other door, no window large enough to crawl through. The only hiding place was the gap behind the filing cabinets, and that was barely wide enough for a cat, let alone a seventeen-year-old boy. But there was the portrait, still swung open on its hinges, revealing the recessed panel in the wall. The space behind it was small, but it might be just large enough.
He squeezed into the recess, pulling the portrait closed behind him. The panel was barely two feet wide and three feet high, and Tommy had to crouch with his knees pressed against his chest. The darkness was absolute. He could hear his own heartbeat, thudding so loudly that he was certain the men outside could hear it too.
The door opened. Light from a lantern swept across the office, illuminating the desk and the filing cabinets and the wall where the portrait hung.
"Nothing here," said the younger voice. "Place is empty."
"Check behind the desk," Mullins said. "And the cabinets. He could be hiding anywhere."
Tommy held his breath. The lantern light swept past the portrait, pausing for a moment on the frame. Tommy could see the light through the thin gap between the painting and the wall, a sliver of gold that seemed bright as a searchlight. If either of the men looked closely, they would see that the portrait was not quite flush with the wall. They would pull it open. They would find him.
The footsteps came closer. Tommy could hear Mullins breathing, could smell the tobacco on his clothes. The gamekeeper was standing directly in front of the portrait, not three feet from where Tommy crouched in the darkness.
"There's nothing here, Mr. Mullins," said the younger voice. "The door was locked. The boy couldn't have got in."
There was a long pause. Tommy could feel Mullins's eyes on the portrait, could sense the gamekeeper's suspicion like a physical weight pressing against the canvas.
"Aye," Mullins said at last. "You're right. Must have been the wind that rattled the latch. Come on. We've got the east wing to check before midnight."
The footsteps retreated. The door closed. The lantern light faded. Tommy waited, counting to a hundred in his head, before he dared to move. Then he pushed the portrait open and crawled out of the recess, his legs cramping and his heart still hammering against his ribs.
He did not linger. He slipped out of the office, through the service yard, and back into the safety of the beck. The cold water was a relief after the stuffy darkness of the hidden panel. He followed the stream back to the moor, not stopping until he reached the signal box and pulled the ladder up behind him.
Only then, in the darkness of his hiding place, did he unfold the page he had taken from the ledger and read it again by the light of a match.
Alice Thornhill. October 18, 1952. A thousand pounds paid by a man whose name was written as "Lord P." A red cross beside the entry. And a note in the margin, written in a different hand: "Disposal: west bog, section four."
Tommy blew out the match and sat in the darkness, the paper clutched in his hands. He had proof now. Not just the word of a runaway boy, but proof—names and dates and sums of money, written in the careful hand of a man who had kept a record of his crimes. It was evidence. It was leverage. It was a death sentence, if Sir Reginald ever discovered that it had been taken.
He thought of Old George, strangled in the woods with a poacher's wire. He thought of the woman in the tarpaulin, her pale face and her closed eyes. He thought of Alice Thornhill, who had lived three streets away and whose mother had never stopped hoping. And he thought of Dr. Moore, the sharp-eyed village doctor who had knelt beside him in the signal box and listened to his story without flinching.
She had told him to wait. She had told him she would help. But she did not know about the ledger, or the names, or the red crosses that marked the deaths of women whose only crime was being poor and forgotten. She did not know that the proof was here, in his hands, waiting to be used.
Tommy folded the page again and tucked it into the lining of his jacket. Tomorrow, he would find a way to get it to Dr. Moore. Tomorrow, he would begin to fight back.
Outside, the moor was silent under the stars. And in the manor house, the portrait of Sir Reginald Ashworth hung crooked on the wall, its secret compartment empty, its hidden ledger one page lighter. The philanthropist did not yet know what had been taken from him. But he would find out soon enough. And when he did, the hunt would begin in earnest.
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