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with me, if you don’t want to.’
    ‘Oh, I’m coming in with you,’ Andrew answered slowly. ‘But God knows why!’
    All that afternoon Manson went about his work fretfully regretting the promise he had given. He was a madman, this Denny, who would, sooner or later, involve him in serious trouble. It was a dreadful thing that he now proposed, a breach of the law which, if discovered, would bring them into the police-court and might even cause them to be scored off the medical register. A tremor of sheer horror passed over Andrew at the thought of his beautiful career, stretching so shiningly before him, suddenly cut short, ruined. He cursed Philip violently, swore inwardly a dozen times that he would not go.
    Yet, for some strange and complex reason, he would not, could not draw back.
    At eleven o’clock that night Denny and he started out in company with the mongrel Hawkins for the end of Chapel Street. It was very dark with a gusty wind and a fine spatter of rain which blew into their faces at the street corners. Denny had made his plan and timed it carefully. The late shift at the mine had gone in an hour ago. A few lads hung about old Thomas’s house at the top end but otherwise the street was deserted.
    The two men and the dog moved quietly. In the pocket of his heavy overcoat, Denny had six sticks of dynamite especially stolen for him that afternoon from the powder shed at the quarry by Tom Seager, his landlady’s son. Andrew carried six cocoa tins each with a hole bored in the lid, an electric torch, and a length of fuse. Slouching along, coat-collar turned up, one eye directed apprehensively across his shoulder, his mind a whirl of conflicting emotions, he gave only the curtest answers to Denny’s brief remarks. He wondered grimly what Lamplough – bland professor of the orthodox – would think of him, involved in this outrageous nocturnal adventure.
    Immediately above Glydar Place they reached the main manhole of the sewer, a rusty iron cover set in rotten concrete, and there they set to work. The gangrenous cover had not been disturbed for years but, after a struggle, they prised it up. Then Andrew shone the torch discreetly into the odorous depths, where on the crumbled stonework a dirty stream flowed slimily.
    ‘Pretty, isn’t it,’ Denny rasped. ‘Take a look at the cracks in that pointing. Take a last look, Manson.’
    No more was said. Inexplicably, Andrew’s mood had changed and he was conscious now of a wild upswing of elation, a determination equal to Denny’s own. People were dying of this festering abomination and petty officialdom had done nothing. It was not the moment for the bedside manner and a niggling bottle of physic!
    They began to deal swiftly with the cocoa tins, slipping a stick of dynamite in each. Fuses of graduated lengths were cut and attached. A match flared in the darkness, startling in its hard illumination of Denny’s pale hard face, his own shaking hands. Then the first fuse spluttered. One by one the live cocoa tins were floated down the sluggish currents, those with the longest fuses going first. Andrew could not see clearly. His heart was thudding with excitement. It might not be orthodox medicine but it was the best moment he had ever known. As the last tin went in with its short fuse fizzing, Hawkins took it into his head to hunt a rat. There was a breathless interlude, filled with the yapping of the dog and the fearful possibilities of an explosion beneath their feet, while they chased and captured him. Then the manhole cover was flung back and they raced frantically thirty yards up the street.
    They had barely reached the corner of Radnor Place and stopped to look round when bang! the first can went off.
    ‘By God!’ Andrew gasped, exultantly. ‘We’ve done it, Denny!’ He had a sense of comradeship with the other man, he wanted to grip him by the hand, to shout aloud.
    Then swiftly, beautifully, the muffled explosions followed, two, three, four, five and