Blood on the Water (2 page)

“We’d better go and speak to the survivors,” Monk said quietly to Orme. “Somebody must have seen something. Big question is—did whoever did it escape, or did they intend to go down with the boat?” He put his hand on Hooper’s shoulder for a moment. Words between them were unnecessary.

Orme set his mug down. “God help us, we really are talking about madness, aren’t we?”

Monk did not bother to answer. He walked out into the night, his face cold again after the warmth of the room. In the clear sky moonlight spread a silver path across the river and the dark debris floating on its surface. He shivered at the thought that the boats still out there were only picking up bodies now, although most of the dead would be trapped in the wreck, settling into mud on the riverbed.

As he moved across the open space toward the dockside he thought of what he must do, and dreaded it. But it was inescapably his job. He was Commander of the Thames River Police. Any crime on the river was his responsibility, and this was the worst incident in living memory. There must have been the best part of two hundred people on the boat. The bereaved would be numerous. At the moment the whole tragedy seemed chaotic, senseless. Where could he begin?

Coleman, one of his own men, approached him in the dark. Monk could hardly see his face, but his voice when he spoke was rough-edged, only just in control.

“Looks like we saved about fifty, sir. Got most of them here on the north bank.” He coughed, his throat tight. “Put ’em anywhere we can.
You could start with that warehouse over there, Stillman’s. A lot of survivors there and they’re making room for more, if there are any. All sorts ’ave come with blankets, clothes, tea, whisky, anything that can help.” He coughed again. “Got half a dozen sent to hospital, too, but I can’t see how they’ll make it. That water’s like to poison you even if you don’t drown in it.”

“Thank you, Coleman.” Monk nodded and walked on. The warehouse was close. He needed to put his emotions aside and concentrate on the questions he had to ask and the answers he needed to know to begin to make sense of this.

He picked his way between the boxes, kegs, and bales outside in the warehouse yard. He went up the step to the cracks of light he could see around the door.

Inside, the warehouse was lit by bull’s-eye lanterns, and there were a dozen or so people lying on the floor wrapped in blankets. Several women were ministering to them with hot drinks and towels, in some cases rubbing their arms and legs, all the time talking to them gently. Only a few glanced up at Monk’s entry. He did not look like a policeman; he was exhausted, unshaven, and dressed in ill-fitting waterman’s clothes.

“My name is Monk,” he introduced himself to a woman carrying towels and bandages. “River Police. We need to find out what happened. Which of these people can I speak to?” he asked.

“Does it have to be now?” the woman said sharply. Her face was gray with fatigue, eyes red-rimmed. There were stains of dirt and blood down the front of her dress.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Before they forget.”

Another, older, woman rose to her feet from where she had been helping a man sip a hot drink. She was strongly built, her clothes so worn they were faded in patches where the pattern had been rubbed off the cloth. In the yellow light of the lantern her face suggested not only weariness but disgust.

“It’s unlikely they’ll forget!” she said between her teeth. “They will probably relive it the rest of their lives!”

“None of us will forget the horror,” Monk answered her quietly. “But it wasn’t an accident. I need to know who did this, and for that I need details only they can provide.”

“Find whoever built the damn boat!” she retorted bitterly, turning away from him and towards a man cradling a broken arm.

Monk put his hand on her arm, holding her firmly. He felt her tense and then pull against him. “It was an explosion,” he said between his teeth. “The whole bow blew out; there was a hole in it you could drive a coach and four through.”

She turned back to him, her eyes wide. “Who told you that?”

“No one. I was on the river, a hundred yards away. I saw it.”

The woman crossed herself, as if to ward off an unimaginable evil. “Don’t keep ’em long,” was the only thing she said.

Slowly Monk went with her from one to another of them, helping her to hold them up, to keep the blankets around them. He refilled cups and mugs with tea and as much whisky as he dared, all the while gaining the halting accounts of what little they knew. There were few facts to be had. Everyone agreed that there had been no warning. One moment they were laughing and talking, listening to the music, watching the lights, flirting, telling jokes. The next there was a deafening noise. Some found themselves in the water almost immediately. Others recalled scrambling across the deck and jumping as the whole boat seemed to heave them off.

Most of them had tales of how they were rescued, the despair as the water washed over them, then the feeling of relief as hands grasped theirs, all but wrenching their arms from the sockets as they were pulled upward, gasping and trying to stammer their gratitude. Others had clung onto wreckage for what seemed like ages until a barge or a ferry made its third or fourth rescue journey.

One man in a torn shirt broke down and wept. He had been on the deck with his wife. The very first shock of the explosion had separated them and he had not seen her again. Monk wanted to offer him some hope, but even before he spoke the words he cringed at how meaningless
they were. After all, how would he have felt had it been his own wife, Hester?

If Hester had drowned then he would wish he had too. Melodramatic? Perhaps. But he could not even imagine the pain of never seeing her again, or touching her, never being able to speak to her, hear her footsteps in the house. Never sharing anything more with her.

He gripped the man’s hand and let him weep, holding on to him as if he, too, were drowning.

All the survivors he spoke to were men, except one. It was more than just greater physical strength that had saved the men rather than the women. It was the complete inability of the women to fight free of the heavy, wet skirts wrapped around them.

From all of the survivors, the story was the same. They could offer no details that could help make sense of the explosion; just the horror of what they had experienced, the darkness and cold and fear that they would die in the water. By dawn there was nothing else to ask, nothing to hear. Monk went back to the station at Wapping to snatch an hour or two of sleep, and to send a message to Hester that he was unhurt.

He found Orme standing before the potbellied stove warming himself as if he, too, had just come in. He straightened up as soon as Monk entered, and moved a little to one side to make room for him.

“Learn anything useful?” Monk asked.

Orme huddled further into his jacket, which was pulled up around his ears.

“No, sir, nothing as I didn’t expect—poor devils. All on deck when it exploded. Everyone agrees it was in the bow. Just blew the whole thing off, but we knew that. Took in water like a scoop.”

“No one saw anybody acting strangely?” Monk persisted. He did not look at Orme’s face. He did not want to see the emotion in it. Only two days ago he had been celebrating the birth of his first granddaughter, wanting to share his happiness with everyone. Now his voice was hoarse, as if his throat hurt.

“No, sir. Too busy having fun, dancing, joking, doing what people do on a cruise.” He took a long breath.

“No one from below deck?” Monk asked. They must keep talking; silence would be worse.

“Not that I saw,” Orme answered. “Apparently there was some kind of fancy party going on down there. Special guests only. Best champagne and food.” His lips tightened. “We’ll get a list of them come daylight. It’ll be bad.”

“I know. Get an hour or two with your head down. We’ll need all our wits when we have to haul the thing up. I’ve never lifted a big one. How do they do it?”

“What?”

“Raise the wreck,” Monk replied. “We can’t leave it there. Next thing you know, someone else’ll run afoul of it and sink as well!”

“I’ll take care of it, sir. We know builders with traction engines. It’ll be slow, but we’ll get ’er up.” Orme looked pensive. “But it’ll move everything inside ’er. Could wash a lot of the bodies out. And there must be a hundred an’ fifty or more trapped below the decks. We’ll have to bury them decent …”

Monk remembered another case he had had, years ago, before he had joined the River Police. The horror of that blind, underwater work still made his skin crawl, but he could not evade it.

“Maybe we should hire one of those diving suits and go down and look at it before we raise it.”

Orme stared at him, his eyes wide with fear.

Monk smiled with a twist to his lips. “I’ve done it before. I’ll go down. We’ve got to see what it’s like, before everything moves.”

“Yes, sir,” Orme said hoarsely. “I suppose we have.”

M
ONK WOKE UP SLOWLY
, his head thumping. He came to consciousness as if rising from a great depth. For a moment he was confused. The light hurt his eyes. He was in his office in the police station. He sat up,
aching all over, memory flooding back like a riptide, bringing with it all the fear and grief he had seen.

Sergeant Jackson passed Monk a cup of tea, hot and much too strong. He took a mouthful of it anyway, then bit into the thick heel of bread offered him. He looked around. The sun was bright through the windows. He realized with a jolt that it was well into the morning, nothing like as early as he had intended to be up.

“What time is it?” he demanded, rising to his feet stiffly, every joint aching. For a moment he swayed, his balance rocky. He was so tired his eyes felt gritted with sand.

“Time to go to the diving people, sir, that is if you’ve still got a mind to,” Jackson replied. He was young, and he looked up to Monk.

Monk grunted, running his hands through his hair and over the stubble on his face. There was no time to think of his appearance now.

“Yes. Right,” he agreed. Better not to think of it, not even to give himself time to think of it, or his nerve might fail him. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was climb into one of those heavy, unwieldy suits with the weighted feet, then have someone lower the helmet over his head with its glass-plated visor. They would screw him in so he breathed through a tube, a lifeline upon which his existence depended. One tangle in that, one knot, and he would suffocate—or if it was severed, he would drown. He must not think of it. He must control his mind lest he panic.

More than one hundred people had died. Quite apart from their families, they themselves deserved justice. He had to discover what had happened to them, who had caused it, and why.

He washed briefly, drank the rest of the tea, and finished the bread. It was fresh and really very pleasant. He could not remember when he had last eaten.

Then he walked out into the sun and across the open space to the steps that led from the dock edge down to the river. The steps were stone, running parallel to the wall, and many of them were now well below the swift-running tide, hidden until low water. Moored up
against them was the boat that would take him down river to where they would anchor while he went over the side in the suit and walked along the riverbed to the wreck.

Of course he would not go into the river alone. No one dived without having someone else to watch, to help, to free you from snags if falling debris crossed your air line, or—just as bad—pinned you down.

He heard the shouts of men, the greetings. He answered automatically, forgetting what he replied even as he said the words.

He went through all the procedures as if in a dream. No one indulged in unnecessary conversation. The business they were about filled their minds. He listened to his instructions as the wind off the water stung his skin, and nodded as they told him step by step exactly what they were going to do and he in turn told them what he needed to see.

Amazingly, everything around them looked exactly the same as usual. Strings of barges, laden with goods, passed them, going upriver with the tide. Ferries plied back and forth from one bank to the other. There were plenty of small cargo or passenger boats, but none was out for pleasure this morning. He saw only one or two pieces of driftwood wreckage floating slowly upstream. There would be far more, farther down, spreading wider and wider from the point of the wreck.

They picked up speed away from the shore. The diving equipment was all laid out ready. They would drop anchor a short distance from where the boat had gone down, and then he would put on the heavy, clumsy-looking suit and helmet. And then there would be no avoiding the inevitable.

Monk stared at the water. It was murky brown, nothing like the dazzling blue sea he saw in the glimpses of memory that came to him now and again, a view sharp for an instant, then gone. Twelve years ago, just after the end of the Crimean War, he had had a serious carriage accident that had knocked him unconscious. When he had woken, his memory had been obliterated. He had not even recognized his own face in a looking glass.

Over time fragments had come back, like a picture painted on something fragile and shattered into a hundred pieces. Some of them
had been painful, glimpses of a self he did not like. Others were good: lost moments from childhood, like the memory of the sea and of boats far in the north, on the coast of Northumberland.

He had learned to live with his loss of memory, and to rebuild himself. It would not have been possible had Hester not helped him. Her faith in him had been the spur to put the pieces together, to keep working at it even when the picture seemed ugly and full of darkness, as opaque as the water now swishing past the bow of the boat. He had come to believe that courage depended on knowing that there was somebody who believed in you.

No matter that the thought of going into that water, creeping his way through the gloom of the river mud and into the wreckage, frightened him; he must do it. Hester believed in him, in his ability to do the right thing, and he must never betray that faith.