In the poverty-stricken East End of London, it is hard to survive. Young Henry Collins is determined to escape and steals from Genesis Caul, a man whose demonic presence casts a shadow over the city as thick as the fog which cloaks it. Henry's punishment is to first trawl the Thames for the body of a missing man, and then to serve a sentence on the infamous treadwheel in The Steel - the House of Correction in which his father is currently interred. When Caul offers him an alternative, he has to choose: between the life he had wanted to escape, or an eternity on the wheel.