Read Chapter 7: A Second Signal

Rain pattered against the signal box windows, a steady drumming that blurred the world beyond into smears of sodium light and wet blackness. Arthur Phelps sat at his lever frame, logbook open, but his mind was not on the entries. The dry run from yesterday sat in his bones like a chill that wouldn't shake.

Then he saw it.

A slip of paper, folded once, wedged beneath the door's lower hinge plate where the rain couldn't reach. He hadn't put it there. He'd been in that box for six hours and no one had come.

Arthur crossed the floor, lifted the paper, unfolded it. Three words, block capitals, written in pencil:

DON'T TRUST VICTOR.

He turned it over. Nothing. The paper was cheap, the kind sold in any newsagent in South London. The handwriting was deliberately crude—someone pressing hard enough to flatten the pencil lead, disguising their script.

Arthur stood still, listening. The rain. The distant rumble of freight shunting in the yards. The ticking of the station clock on the wall. No footsteps on the stairs, no shadow moving past the frosted glass. Whoever had left it was long gone.

He read it again. *Don't trust Victor.* As if he needed telling. The muscles in his jaw tightened. The real question was who else knew enough to warn him—and why they'd chosen to do it this way.

He pocketed the note, worked the rest of his shift in mechanical rhythm, and when his relief arrived, he did not go straight home. He walked the perimeter of the yard, scanning for loiterers, for faces he didn't know. Nothing. The platforms were thin of passengers; a porter swept water toward a drain; a boy in a railway cap carried a mailbag to the parcels office.

No one paid him any mind.

Arthur stopped at the stationmaster's office on his way out. The night clerk was a wiry young man named Pratt who kept the incident log for the whole district.

"Quiet night?" Arthur asked, leaning in the doorway.

Pratt looked up from a stack of forms. "Quiet as a grave, Mr. Phelps. Why, you expecting trouble?"

"Always," Arthur said, forcing a grin. "Anyone come through the yard tonight who wasn't supposed to be here? Delivery, visitor, anything?"

Pratt frowned, thinking. "There was a telegram boy about an hour before your shift started. Brought a message for the depot foreman." He shrugged. "Other than that, nothing. You lose something?"

"No," Arthur said. "Just being careful."

But the telegram boy stayed with him as he walked out of the station and into the wet London street. Anyone could hire a lad to run a note. It wouldn't take more than a few coppers and a description of the signal box. Which meant the sender was either someone in the yards or someone who'd been watching the yards.

Neither option was comforting.

He turned the note over in his mind as he moved through the crowds toward Bermondsey. Victor's crew had been careful about faces and names. Arthur had met Hughes, the ex-soldier, and Scar and two others whose names he'd deliberately not asked for. But Victor had mentioned reserve men, people held back for the night itself. Could one of them have turned? Or was it someone outside the job entirely?

His fingers brushed the folded paper in his breast pocket. The message could be a trap—Victor testing his loyalty, seeing if he'd come running with the note in hand. That was the kind of thing Victor would do. Plant doubt, then measure the harvest.

But it could also be a genuine warning. And Arthur Phelps had learned long ago that in a world full of loose ends, you held on to every scrap of thread you could find.

He walked past the turning for his lodgings, kept going toward the river. There was a pawnbroker on Tooley Street who kept late hours, a man Arthur had dealt with in leaner times. He pushed open the door, bell chiming overhead.

The proprietor, a bald man with spectacles balanced on his nose, looked up. "Arthur. Haven't seen you in a while." His eyes flicked down to Arthur's empty hands. "Something to sell?"

"No, Sid. Something to buy."

Arthur placed sixpence on the counter. "I need a small screwdriver. Flat head. Fits in a pocket."

Sid raised an eyebrow but didn't ask questions. He turned, rummaged in a drawer, and came back with a four-inch steel driver, the handle worn smooth and dark. "Penny more and I'll throw in a blade guard."

Arthur took it, tested the weight. It was heavy enough to matter, sharp enough to bite if he drove it hard. "This'll do."

He left the shop and stood in the doorway a moment, feeling the screwdriver's weight in his coat pocket. It wasn't a gun. It wasn't a knife. But it was something—a small insurance policy for a man with no other weapons.

Back in his room, Arthur locked the door and sat on the edge of his bed. He took out the note again, held it under the lamp. The pencil marks were still plain. *Don't trust Victor.* He read it until the words burned into his memory, then tore it into strips and dropped the strips into the coal grate, stirring the ashes with the poker until nothing remained.

If Victor searched his room, he'd find nothing. If Victor asked, Arthur would say he had no idea what he was talking about. And if Victor already knew about the note, then Arthur would find that out too—because Victor's face would give it away the next time they met.

He pocketed the screwdriver, banked the fire, and lay down fully dressed on the bed, hands folded behind his head. Thursday was three days away. Three days to figure out who had sent the note, who else among Victor's men might be playing their own game, and how a man with a screwdriver and a cracked pocket watch escaped a crew that had already killed once to keep its secrets.

The rain kept falling. Somewhere down the line, a train whistled. Arthur closed his eyes and listened to the night's steady rhythm, waiting for it to break.

The answer came to him in the small hours, half-formed and unwelcome: if the reserve team was the unknown variable, then the insider—the man with the railway knowledge—was still the biggest risk of all. Victor didn't keep unreliable pieces in play. Every man on that crew had a reason to be there and a leash around his neck. Arthur's leash was Tommy Flynn and his sister's family. Hughes's leash might be money or fear or something else entirely.

But someone on that crew—or close to it—had left a note in a signal box, and that meant either a crack in Victor's armor or a knife already aimed at Arthur's back. Either way, he couldn't trust a single face he'd met that week.

He reached into his pocket, felt the cold steel of the screwdriver, and let the weight of it settle his nerves. Then he turned his mind to the one asset Victor didn't know he had: the truth about the diamonds order. If Thursday went wrong, that knowledge was the only thing that might buy him enough time to run.

The clock on the mantel ticked toward dawn.