Young surgeon Dr George Phillips is invited to meet Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Charles Babbage, Charles Darwin and Joseph Bazalgette at an undisclosed location in London, 1857

A meeting of the greatest minds of the age

There the Lazarus Club meets to discuss ideas so unorthodox they cannot be voiced in public, so advanced they will change the course of history

A brotherhood of questionable morality

Meanwhile, mutilated bodies washed up from the murky Thames lead police to Dr Phillips’ door: can he help solve some brutal murders?

A dark and twisted conspiracy

Soon Dr Phillips realises that the Lazarus Club is being used by a member for some evil purpose. Can he discover who in time to prevent an extraordinary invention falling into the wrong hands?

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Prologue

The waterman whistled as he pulled on the oars, his small craft carrying him slowly but steadily upstream along Limehouse Reach. He’d set out from Greenwich, across the river from southern tip of the Isle of Dogs, and then headed north, passing Millwall and pulling on beyond. The trip took in almost three miles of river, and it was his pitch. There were other watermen and other pitches but this was his and over the years he had come to know every eddy, backwash and mudflat and had long regarded it as home.

Pausing for a moment he tugged down the peak of his cap against a shower of rain which for a short while turned the brown surface of the water into a sheet of hammered copper. Around his feet were collected all manner of things: pieces of timber, lengths of rope, cork fenders, bottles, various sodden items of clothing and even a small chair. He didn’t care who they once belonged to; they were his now. He was employed by the bailiff to clear the river of obstacles to navigation but any stray object floating in the water within the bounds of his beat was legally his property once lifted aboard the boat. All very official it was: you only needed to look at his smart blue uniform to see that.

He had been out since dawn and by now had covered half the beat – the ache in his arms and the twinge from his back told him that much. It had been an average day thus far but he was pleased with the chair: the wife could put it by the fire. The boat hugged the eastern side of the channel, where it was out of the way of the heavy traffic but also close to where most of the stuff drifting downstream would naturally be drawn by the current. At low tide much of the floating windfall would be left stranded on the flats, where it would fall prey to the gangs of mudlarks working both sides of the river. There was no such worry now, though, as the tide was at its fullest.

Moored boats were always a good place – sometimes three or four would be tied together, side by side. These tethered flotillas served as traps for anything coming into their path and so the waterman would paddle around them and snag whatever was bobbing against the hulls or caught in the ropes. It was to such a spot that he was pulling now, just on the edge of the shipyard where Brunel’s great ship was being built, side on to the river. The yard also yielded more than its share of treasures – planks of timber, paint pots and lengths of heavy rope. The boats, a skiff and a pair of barges, were moored just fifty yards or so downriver from the yard and so provided the perfect opportunity for a good haul.

Favouring one oar over the other, the waterman manoeuvred the boat to the stern of the stationary vessels and with the long-poled boat hook in hand began to look for floating objects. Wedged between the barge in the middle and the skiff was a length of broken ladder, just long enough, he judged, to be of use again. After some difficulty in pulling it free he stowed it with the rest of the stuff. It was then he heard the noise, a scuffing and scratching interspersed with the odd sharp croak. Using the hook against the stern of the middle vessel, he nudged the small boat a little closer into shore. That was when he saw them.

Two scabrous-looking gulls were perched on something floating in the river but seemingly fastened to the lee board of the shoreward barge. They were squabbling over whatever it was the larger of the two was jealously clutching in its beak. It took the waterman a moment or two to realize that the birds were perched on the back of a dead body, the head having become wedged between the lee board and the hull. The corpse was white as a ghost and entirely naked. With its slender limbs and long hair spread out on the water like a dark weed it could only be a woman – that or a child.

Although he found the nudity distasteful, as he did the vision of two birds fighting over a freshly plucked eyeball, coming across a body in the river caused him little upset. He had, after all, encountered dozens of bodies in his time, many of them suicides who had thrown themselves off one of the bridges further upstream. Quite often they were sucked under almost immediately by the current and dragged downstream, to surface again only once they reached his beat. He had no idea how many of them remained submerged and made it all the way down the river to be expelled into the open sea beyond.

Clearing the river of dead bodies, or ‘floaters’, as they were known in the trade, was all part of his job as a waterman. Indeed, he was paid a small bonus for every corpse he fished from the water and delivered back to the land.

After edging the boat as far between the two barges as the gap would allow, he stood in the prow and used the boat hook to dislodge the birds, forcing them to continue their fight over the morsel elsewhere. Then he used it to lever back the board just enough to allow the corpse to slip free. As it came free the body rolled over on to its back – the usual position for a female floater. It was then that the stench hit him.

The black funk came straight from the charnelhouse and caused him to retch and his eyes to water. He knew from past experience that the sickly-sour smell of a human corpse is just as much a taste as it is a smell, but this was the worst he had ever experienced. This one must have been under for quite some time – retting like flax in the murky depths. When his eyes recovered he was horrified to see a further reason for the noisome stench. Where the chest had once been there was now a gaping chasm, two folds of ragged flesh lying open on either side of it like the pages of a book no one would ever care to read. Catching the hook under one of the armpits, he pulled the fleshy mass toward him, taking care to turn away when he needed to take a breath. What kind of accident could have caused that wound?

Using one of the rags in the bottom of the boat to cover his hand, he took hold of an arm slippery with corruption and pulled the corpse most of the way up the side of the boat before thinking better of it and letting it drop back into the water. There was no way he was going to have that thing on board. Instead he took one of the lengths of rope and looped it around a wrist before securing the other end to the stern.

Perhaps she had come into contact with a ship’s paddle wheel or one of the new-fangled screws? They’d make a mess of you all right. At times you could barely move out on the water, what with so much traffic plying its way backward and forward from the pool of London.

He had tried not to look too hard but now, with her so close, he couldn’t help himself. There was enough of the face left to tell it was a woman and that that was no accidental injury. She’d been carved, deliberately cut open – slit from stem to stern. He’d seen murder before but nothing this bad.

Peering closer, he saw something dark glistening inside, something stirring in the cavity of her chest. Whatever it was began to thrash, sending out spurts of water. Then it sprang forth, uncoiling its sleek black body and launching itself at the waterman. He let out a yell and fell backwards, landing in the bottom of the boat alongside the dreadful thrashing form of the eel. Recovering himself, he tried to get a hold of the writhing creature, but it slipped away and wriggled between the objects in the hull. Eventually he managed to trap it in a shirt and, after wrapping it as best he could, he threw the garment and the eel as far away from the boat as possible. Within an instant the shirt had disappeared beneath the surface as the beast thrashed its way downward, for a while the best-dressed fish in the river.

Returning his attentions to the corpse, he checked his knots and, not being able to resist one last look, ascertained that there had been space for the eel in the poor woman’s chest because her organs – heart, lungs, everything – were missing. Surely to God the eel hadn’t eaten them? He thought he was going to be sick.

Pulling himself together he took a seat and, after pushing away, replaced the oars in their locks. Although the yard was close he thought it better to land his gruesome catch on a quieter part of the shore and so he headed downriver awhile, the body bobbing along behind. As he sat with his face to the stern he had no option but to watch as the pale form of the woman dipped beneath the water with each stroke, only to resurface a moment later. At times the free arm flexed and it looked as though she were swimming, trying to catch up with the boat.

He rowed faster.