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again at Scuff. “Your pa send you to report back to him?”
    “No, sir! ’E thinks I’m at school! But I gotter do something. This in’t right. It’s our river. What kind of a cruise was it, sir? What kind o’ people?”
    The man began to move away from the place where he had been standing. His arm was still around the woman, but his glance included Scuff.
    “Just a pleasure cruise,” he replied. “The
Princess Mary
. Started up at Westminster Bridge and went as far as Gravesend, then back again. Expensive, at least for those attending the party. Very good food, lots of champagne and that sort of thing. Just … just people having fun.” Suddenly his face tightened with fury. “What kind of a madman would want to hurt people like that? Why, for God’s sake?”
    “Albert …” The woman’s hand tightened, dragging his arm down toward her. “The boy doesn’t know. Nobody does. It’s mad … mad things don’t make sense.”
    Scuff wanted to say something that would make her feel better. What would Hester have said?
    “They don’t. But they can’t stop us doing our best,” he told her.
    The man stared at him, but the woman suddenly smiled. It changed her face completely. “I’ll try to remember that,” she promised.
    Scuff smiled back, then left them and started to work his way down the river toward the stretch he knew better. He must find some of the people he used to know before he went to live with Monk and Hester. They were the people who would never tell the police anything, either River Police or the ordinary sort. If the
Princess Mary
had started at Westminster Bridge, then whoever blew it up had got on before that—unless it was one of the people on the cruise. Most likely it was a porter or servant of some sort, what Monk called “invisible people.” But Scuff knew beggars, peddlers, petty thieves, people on the fringes of life—they often walked unseen, but they saw everyone.
    It took him most of the morning to find exactly the right ones. Far more had changed than he could have foreseen. People had grown up; some had gone away, perhaps to sea. Some had died. No one seemed to know him anymore, and the mudlarks—the boys who scavenged on the shore for bits and pieces they could sell, as he had once done—were all strangers to him. And they all looked so small! He had not really thought of it before, but when he remembered how many new pairs of trousers Hester had bought him, he realized he’d probably grown six inches in the last few years.
    Suddenly he felt awkward. They should have grown too, and they hadn’t. He saw one boy with no socks and odd boots, just as he had had. He had been going to speak to him and then changed his mind, feeling self-conscious—no, more than that, guilty. He could give this boy a few pence for a pie and a cup of tea, but what about all the others? Scuff now ate well, whenever he wanted to. Why not them? He had been no different from them, once.
    He walked away along the bank. The wind in his face smelled of salt and fish and the fetid thickness of river mud. A string of barges went past, the lighterman balancing effortlessly.
    Scuff did not know how he ought to feel. How could a few years make him into a different person?
    Just beyond the New Crane Stairs by the West India Docks he found a boy he used to know. He was taller and heavier than before, but the wild pattern of his hair was just the same. He was standing in front of a pile of debris. There were glints of metal and brass in it, possibly something worth salvaging.
    “ ’Allo, Mucker,” Scuff said cheerfully. “ ’Ere, I’ll ’elp yer.” He took part of the weight Mucker was carrying, and his legs nearly buckled under it. Scuff was taller and heavier than he used to be, too, but he was not used to hard physical labor anymore.
    Mucker looked startled. “ ’Oo the ’ell are you?”
    “Scuff. Don’t you remember me?”
    “Scuff?” Mucker’s blunt face twisted with disbelief.