Two days had sufficed for him to learn everything worth knowing concerning the Fleet and how it worked. He had then pissed away nearly a week learning something he ought to have known already: in London, real estate, be it never so smelly and disreputable, was valuable, and jealously looked after. The shambles along Fleet Lane might have seemed unutterably disgusting and mean, but to them who labored in their back rooms and dwelled, or operated brothels, on their upper storeys, they were little kingdoms, and every square foot was looked after as carefully as a statue or flower-patch in Versailles. Daniel knew, as well as he knew that the shortest distance between two points was a straight line, that in the backs of these buildings’ cellars must be drains—the most execrable hair-raising drains conceivable—that communicated with the Fleet Prison’s long-buried ox-bow moat—the same moat whose contents were seeping, through porous walls, into the cellar where the Shaftoes were locked up. But in several days’ hard trying, and phantastickal lying, he was not able even to get past the front rooms of these establishments, much less down into their backs. Those drains were valuable, because they would carry away the objectionable byproducts of certain types of profit-making activities, e.g., butchery and soap-making. Men made livings and supported families on those drains. They found it senseless that an elderly stranger ought to be let in to see these miracles, simply because he voiced curiosity about them. He could have offered money in exchange for a look-see, but this would only have drawn even more attention.