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Juliette was right in thinking that the actions of the prostitutes were unusually determined. When the Doctor arrived at the shipyards he found Fitz – coughing up bile and with his face covered in bruises – propped up in a darkened side street, with his back against the wall and, fortunately, nobody else in sight. The Doctor apparently made a great show of checking Fitz’s health, but he was probably even more concerned about the tale Fitz had to tell.

According to Fitz, after Juliette had left him the prostitutes had vanished into the night: but once he’d crawled into the side street, he’d seen other figures heading towards the great reservoir building. Fitz estimated that there’d been six of the men, all sticking to the shadows of the old buildings by the side of the canal, converging on the shipyard.

The Doctor put together the pieces at once. Service records confirm that throughout the ‘Sabbath affair’, the Service’s spies in Manchester were using the local streetwalkers as surveillance agents. The women had been following Fitz and Juliette not just out of spite, but because they’d been paid to. Had they also been hired to rough up Fitz, to distract the Doctor’s people while they made their own plans? If the women did indeed refer to Fitz as a ‘killer’, then perhaps somebody told them he worked for the dangerous courtesans of Covent Garden, whose exploits had already caused several prostitutes to suffer grisly deaths.

As in Cambridge, the Service’s watchers were everywhere, letting the Doctor’s party lead them to Sabbath. Now they evidently felt their prey to be close, as the six hooded rat-catchers were moving in to raid Sabbath’s ship-building operation. The Service intended to get to their rogue agent before anybody else, and the Doctor clearly felt he couldn’t allow that. So it was that Fitz ended up being left in the side street, declaring himself to be well enough, if battered, while the Doctor and Rebecca made their way into the covered dockyard.

If either of them were perturbed by the idea of following half a dozen highly-trained government-funded assassins into unknown territory, then neither of them mentioned it when they came to tell the story later on.

It Awakens

What exactly did the Doctor and Rebecca find in Sabbath’s shipyard? Although getting a straight answer out of Rebecca was always difficult, she later related that there was definitely something under the dock’s canvas roof. When asked why Fitz hadn’t noticed it, all she’d say was: ‘He couldn’t see properly.’

There were no Servicemen to be seen, though. Those few workmen who remained at the site aren’t mentioned in Rebecca’s stories, so either the Service had chased them out or in some way neutralised them. As has already been recorded, there were a number of smaller boats tied to posts around the dock, and when the Doctor arrived several of them were missing, presumably taken by the rat-catchers. The Doctor himself wasted no time in climbing into one, gracefully holding out a hand to help Rebecca before taking to the oars.

And that, says Rebecca, was when ‘the Leviathan woke up’.

Back at the White Hart, trouble was brewing once again. The tavern apparently saw the Doctor as Scarlette’s male protector – ironically enough, even her pimp – just as Scarlette saw him as her elemental champion. Not half an hour after his departure, a group of local women entered, all of them wearing blue and white. It was as if it were a deliberately rehearsed statement, the locals developing a uniform (and in Whig colours, no less) to challenge Scarlette’s. They may well have been from the House of Mother Shaw, a well-known procuress in the area of the docks. For the first few minutes, the blue-and‐white brigade merely stayed on the opposite side of the tavern, eyeing up the competition but saying nothing. Anji and Lisa-Beth buried themselves in their ales and tried to look inconspicuous. Scarlette couldn’t fail to notice Juliette fingering the glass totem, ‘as though the thing were her own’.

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