He turned around quickly but in the sudden movement his glasses fell to the ground; he stepped forward, without thinking, and broke them. 'Now,' he said out loud, 'Now I won't be able to see him.' And, curiously enough, his feeling was one of relief.
Joyfully he turned down Commercial Road towards Whitechapel; there was a fight in a side alley, and one man was kicking another who had already fallen; a blind woman was standing by the side of the road, waiting to be helped across; a young girl was murmuring the words of a popular song. And then he saw on the other side of the street, going in the opposite direction and towards the church, a tall but indistinct figure who seemed to be drawn to the protection of the shop-fronts and the dark walls of brick. The man's clothes were torn and old; his hair was matted into a slab, like tobacco. Hawksmoor crossed the road rapidly and walked a few yards behind the tramp, but in his nervousness he coughed: the tall figure turned and seemed to smile before quickening his pace. Hawksmoor cried out in alarm, 'Wait! Wait for me!' and then ran in pursuit. Both of them were in sight of the church and the still indistinct figure ran across the grass by its side; Hawksmoor followed but as he ran past the pyramid he collided with a small boy who had been standing in its shadow. And as the boy looked up at him Hawksmoor noticed how pale his face seemed. In that instant of inattention the tall figure had run around the corner of the church and, by the time Hawksmoor had turned it, had already disappeared. He ran back to ask the child if he had seen anything of the fleeing man, but the small park was now empty: the grass and trees had ceased to glow and, in the darkness, they seemed to be crumbling back into the earth. If he did not act now the atmosphere of the church-yard would overpower him and he would be lost: he started walking in the direction of Limehouse for, if there was one place a vagrant might think to hide from a pursuer, it was in the abandoned sites and derelict houses near St Anne's.
He hailed a taxi and took it as far as the Limehouse church; as he stepped out the cold wind caught him in the face and for a moment he sought shelter behind an advertisement hoarding on which could be seen a number of computers floating above the city. Eventually he went towards St Anne's, but then veered to the right and crossed a patch of waste land beside it: the wind blew even more strongly here, since it came directly from the river, and it brought to him the scattered shouts and calls of the meths-drinkers who were a few hundred yards away from him. As he walked forward he noticed the sparks rising above a fire, and when he came closer he could see the dark shapes which were apparently dancing around it. They are happy, he thought, for they do not remember; and then he began running towards them. 'You!' he cried, 'You! What are you doing and what do you want here?' But they did not stop their dancing when he came up to them: it seemed that he was being grabbed, as if to enter the ring, but with a shout he pulled himself free. Then they became still and gazed at him when he questioned them. 'Have any of you seen the one called the Architect? He's one of you. Have you seen him?' They were all old ones, dishevelled and weary now that the spell of the dance had passed. They said nothing but stared into the flames and one of them began to moan. Hawksmoor noticed that the head of a toy bear had been thrust onto a pole, and was lying upon the charred ground. He shouted at them impatiently: 'I am a police officer! Put out that fire now!' None of them moved and so Hawksmoor himself walked into the fire and stamped upon it ferociously until there were only ashes and burned sticks remaining.
'Where is he?' he shouted at them again as they began to retreat from him, 'Do any of you know where he is?' But still they made no noise and Hawksmoor, disgusted at himself for behaving in a manner which he had not foreseen, turned away. As he walked back he called out into the air, 'I don't want to see any more fire, do you understand me? No more fire!'
He found the road which leads down to the river and, wrapping his dark coat closely around himself so that he might withstand the wind, he passed an old tramp who was squatting by the roadside and with his fingers digging into the damp earth. Hawksmoor looked at him closely, but he was not the man he sought. The tramp stared back at him as he passed, and continued staring as he walked into the distance: Hawksmoor heard him shouting out something but the sounds of the river were closer to him and he could not distinguish the words. The muddy water raced beneath his feet and the lights of the city had changed the sky to a transient purple, but he was thinking only of the figure fleeing before him in Spitalfields and of the pale face of the boy as it had looked up at him in the shadow of the church.
And he could not escape these images, as the time passed and the disorder spread. The circulation of the suspect's description, followed inevitably by rumour and speculation in the newspapers, had not materially assisted the investigation of the six murders; it had, in fact, only inflamed the passions of those for whom the description of the tramp seemed to act as an emblem of all that was most depraved and evil. On the first day of the 'photo-fit' being released, there were scores of sightings of the man from all over the country, and the number of such sightings did not greatly diminish until public attention had been diverted elsewhere. More unfortunately, however, a number of tramps were abused or assaulted by gangs who used the excuse of 'the child murderer' to express their resentment at harmless wandering men. One group of small children actually killed one such vagrant: he was sleeping drunkenly on a patch of waste ground, and they set him alight. After these events it became accepted that Hawksmoor had committed an 'error of judgment' in releasing such sketchy details of the suspect -and Hawksmoor's position was made all the more precarious by the fact that, after exhaustive searches and inquiries, no trace of the man had been discovered. It seemed that he had just disappeared -that is, as some of the officers involved in the case used to say to each other, if he ever existed in the first place.
But Hawksmoor knew that he existed and, although he had never mentioned to anyone the night of his pursuit, he knew that the murderer was closer to him than ever. There were even occasions when he believed that he was being followed and, as he lay awake one night, he conceived the fantasy that he too should dress as a tramp in order to surprise him -but even as the idea occurred to him he rejected it, trembling. He took long walks in the evening in order to avoid such thoughts, but he found that he was treading the same paths as before.
There was a time, for example, when he walked into the park behind St George's-in-the-East and sat upon a bench close to the abandoned museum -it had been upon this bench that he had spoken to the father of the murdered child, and glimpsed the illustrations in the book which the weeping man had held in front of him. And as he stared at the trees beside the church he contemplated the calm of a life which itself resembled a park with no people in it -then he might sit and stare at these trees until he died. But his momentary serenity unnerved him, for it seemed to imply that his life was already over.
Each night he came home from his wanderings and held the white notebook in his hands, first bringing it close to his nose in order to savour the slight odour of wax which still lingered upon its stiff covers. He read again each phrase, and then stared intently at the drawings as if they might yield some clue. But they offered nothing and one night, in his anger, he tore the pages from the book and threw them across the floor. When he arose in panic the next morning, he looked down at the scattered sheets and said out loud, 'What rage is this? What fury? Of what kind?' Then he took the pages, smoothed them with the palm of his hand, and fixed them with pins to the walls.