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I told you I didn’t steal nothing, y’ stupid taffy!” the young criminal grumbled, dragging his feet. “Went in the wrong house, is all. Mistook it for me own.”

“You live in a tenement.” John Pembroke paused with the handcuffed thief, a sixteen-year-old named Bob Ikey, in the jaundiced light of a gas lamp. They stood across the street from Manchester’s new town hall, where a police charge office and lockup cells had been installed in the basement. “And since you were just caught trying to escape up a chimney like ruddy Father Christmas, you might want to keep the word ‘stupid’ out of the conversation.”

The boy was indignant. “Father Christmas?” He lifted his wrists to rub his greyhound-thin face against a coat sleeve. “D’ye see a beard? D’ye see a big fur coat? No—I were carrying a sweeping-brush, with a soot cloth over me shoulders. A chimney sweep is what I were!”

“An ingenious disguise,” John said sarcastically. “Except no one has their chimneys cleaned in the middle of the night. And the unholy racket you made was the waking of the entire family.”

The boy rolled his eyes at the mention of the family. “Stupid sods. All o’ them yelling and hallooing for help, when I were the one stuck in the chimney!”

“They’re decent folk, Ikey. You scared them out of their wits. What’s more, housebreaking is a serious crime. It’s at least a year of hard labor you’ll be doing for it.” As John saw Ikey’s aghast expression, exasperation lit his nerves. “Damn it, I told you to find honest work the last time I threw you in the lockup.”

“Thieving’s all I ever been good at, innit.”

“Christ. Listen to me, lad: You’re not good at it. You’ve been nabbed twice this year and it’s only February.”

Ikey hung his head and sighed. “Pembroke . . . put in a word for me with the magistrate like you done before? Ax ’im to go easy on me?”

John was silent for a moment. He squinted against an icy breeze as it shredded into vortices around them. Farther down the street, garments fluttered from lines strung between tenement windows like the tattered sails of a ghost ship.

Three years of nights like this, working as a detective in the most densely populated radius of England. No end in sight. No family waiting at home, and none likely to be when most of his waking hours were spent policing Manchester after dark. He was given nighttime assignments because he could stand it better than most—although lately he wasn’t so sure about that.

John couldn’t remember what kind of life he once might have imagined for himself, but this wasn’t it. Routinely dealing with human beings at their worst. Investigating unspeakable crimes. Seeing more blood and bodies in a week than most people encountered in a lifetime. It would qualify any man for a straitjacket, were he to let himself think about it. Somehow he’d managed to keep it all in a separate part of his head.

But he couldn’t ignore a growing sense of futility. The people he sent to prison came back worse than before. The streets were becoming more dangerous every day. The demands on police were piling up faster than any of them could manage. Lately he had started to feel detached from all of it, which seemed both better and worse.

“If I put in a word for you again, Ikey,” he eventually said, “we both know you’ll take up exactly where you left off. What’s the fucking point?”

“I might take a turn for the better.”

“People don’t change.”

“I might,” Ikey insisted, “given ’alf a chance.” A sheepish grin spread across his face. “Aw, let me go, Pembroke. I’ll never cause no more trouble, I swear.”

John struggled for patience. He was dog-tired, half starved, and cold to the bone. Not to mention covered in soot. His eyes were burning from it, and any attempt to rub them only inflamed them further.

But as he glanced at the police station’s cartway entrance, as dark and open as a yawn, he was reluctant to haul the boy inside.

Whatever spark of hope there was for Ikey would vanish forever once he was thrown in prison, where a hell of tedium had been devised to break the spirits of men who’d already been broken. Hours upon hours spent picking oakum or weaving mats. Or stepping up a massive treadwheel for the greater part of a day—twenty minutes on, ten minutes off—on an endless climb to nowhere. Such punishments were heaped on men for whom daily life was already a punishment.

The boy in front of him would never be the same afterward. If there was anything in him worth saving, it was now or never.

On impulse, John pulled a small leather-bound notebook and pencil from his coat. His hands were stiff from the cold. So many of his gloves had been lost on the job, he’d given up wearing them. He blew a little heat onto his fingers, flexed the joints, and began to write. Out of the periphery of his vision, he saw Ikey open his mouth to say something.

“Shut your gob,” John murmured, concentrating on making his scrawl as legible as possible.

Obligingly Ikey kept quiet and waited, until finally John separated the page from the book and handed it to him.

“What’s this?” the boy asked.

“What you asked for. Half a chance.” John unlocked each handcuff in turn and deposited them in his pocket.

Ikey’s eyes widened in his soot-blackened face. “You ain’t putting me in the clink?”

“No. Pay attention.” John fished a pound note from his wallet and gave it to him. “Come daylight, I want you to go to the train station and buy a ticket for Waterloo.”

Slowly Ikey put the money and folded note in his pocket. “For you?” he asked, befuddled.

“For you, idiot. When you arrive at Waterloo Station, hire a cab to Rivenburgh Carriage Works. It’s in King’s Cross. Deliver that message to the hand of Mr. Rivenburgh himself. He’ll give you a steady job and a place to stay. Whatever work he offers, take it—and for God’s sake, don’t embarrass me.” John paused before adding darkly, “If I find out you pocketed my hard-earned money and never went to Rivenburgh, I’ll throw your arse behind bars before the week is out.” At the boy’s lack of response, he prodded, “Well?”