A Murder in Tanner's Lane

The apothecary died alone in a room bolted from the inside.

Bermondsey, 1889. Edmund Crale is found on the floor of his own back room, the street door bolted, the shutters closed, and a jar of carbolic open on a shelf where it had never stood. Within nine hours the police have his apprentice in a cell. Bridget Fahey is nineteen, carries a key to that door on a cord at her waist, and can’t account for the hour before she found him. She won’t say why, and the reason isn’t the one the lane has settled on.

Detective Inspector Thomas Dunne has a superintendent who wants an accident on the file, a police surgeon who’ll swear to a fall, and thirty years to spend if he crosses either of them. Maud McLellan, home from eleven years in Brooklyn and keeping the boarding house across the way, has no standing beyond being the dead man’s cousin. What she has is a neighbourhood that talks to her and not to him.

Every fact either of them gets, somebody pays for.

Tanner’s Lane made up its mind about the Irish girl before the body was cold. If nobody can explain that room, the lane’s verdict is the one that hangs her.