“Guy!” Dominica ran across the street, just in time for the front door to be thrown wide. Guy snatched her wrist and pulled her inside. “Come on! There isn’t a moment to lose!”
“What—”
“Shh!”
He dragged her through the dark house into a central, windowless room where a gaslight burned low. A massive black dog sprawled across the bare wooden floorboards, dead in a puddle of spreading blood; Guy had shot it through the skull. In the center of the floor rested a heavy trap door, which Guy pulled up cautiously. Beneath, they found steps leading down into a cellar. “He’s nowhere in the house,” Guy whispered urgently. “He had to go through here. There’s nowhere else he could have gone.”
Dominica dragged out her own pistol, aware that she was trembling violently.
“There’s no lantern,” she muttered, eying the black hole uneasily.
“He had one. Must have. It’s pitch black, down there, but we’ll hear him at the very least, follow the sound.”
Yes, she thought, and he’ll hear us, as well. But they’d come this far and she wasn’t giving up on the story of the century so easily. She gripped her pistol with damp fingers and followed Guy into the cellar, which proved to be no cellar at all, but rather a tunnel through the sewers beneath Wapping. So this is how he did it! Simply popped home to Wapping and vanished beneath the streets! Then, faint with distance, they heard it: the splash of footfalls through the filth in the tunnels. She and Guy, pausing at the base of the stairs, exchanged glances. Then Dominica hiked up her skirts and waded cautiously forward.