Fleet Street was the haunt of barristers and journalists, the latter of which were never my favorite sort of people. We fortunately saw none of them tonight. I supposed they had retreated to pubs like the one I'd just left, their day's work finished. Still I kept a wary eye out for one starved-looking journalist called Billings, who last summer had taken to roasting me in the newspapers for my involvement in the affair of Colonel Westin.

We walked all the way down the Fleet to New Bridge Street, then to Blackfriar's Bridge and a slippery staircase that led to the shore of the Thames. As we descended away from the stone houses, the wind took on a new chill.

The river lay cold and vast at the bottom of the steps, lapping softly at its banks and smelling of rotting cabbage. Lights roved the middle of the river, barges and small craft strolling upriver or back down to the ships moored at the Isle of Dogs or farther east in Blackwall and Gravesend.

A circle of lanterns huddled about ten yards from the staircase. "Saw her bobbing there," a thin voice was saying. "Told young John to help me fish her out. Dead as a toad and all bloated up."

As Pomeroy and I crunched over the shingle toward them, a man on the gravel bank turned. "Pomeroy."

"Thompson," Pomeroy boomed. "This is Captain Lacey, the chap I told you about. Captain, Peter Thompson of the Thames River patrol."

I shook hands with a tall man who had graying hair and a sunken face, long nose, and thin mouth. He was muffled in a greatcoat that hung on his bony frame, and his gloves were frayed. But though his features were cadaverous, his eyes were strong and clear.

The Thames River patrol skimmed up and down the river from the City to Greenwich, watching over the great merchant ships that docked along the waterway. Their watermen picked up flotsam from the river, either turning it in for reward or selling it. When they found bodies, they sent for the Thames River officers, although I suspected that some of the less scrupulous sold the poor drowned victims to resurrectionists, unsavory gentlemen who collected bodies to sell to surgeons and anatomists for dissection.