The Darkest Hour (20 page)

The quay was designed for wagons to unload directly onto ships; it must have been thirty feet wide. It looked like a canyon in the misty gloom and briefly mesmerized Rossett, who had to force himself to look away and back up toward his only chance of salvation.

Come on, Rossett, move, he directed himself, as he started to gingerly shuffle his way along the brick ledge. He glanced at his feet a few times and finally settled with his left foot half on and half off the ledge, his right pushed tight next to it, calves aching.

Gripping the bottom of the upper brickwork as tightly as he could with his right hand, he slowly straightened himself into a position as close to standing as he could manage.

With his left hand he reached toward the drainpipe, only to find that he fell short by an inch or two.

“Fuck,” he muttered through gritted teeth as he tried to adjust his right hand on the bricks as best as he could without actually letting go.

He paused and took a breath, looking around him for something else to hold on to. For a moment, he considered climbing back into the room, and then decided that even if he wanted to, he probably couldn’t. It would mean leaning out and letting his braced right arm come free. There would be only one winner in that eventuality, gravity, so he decided against it and looked up again at the drainpipe.

“The fucking thing doesn’t look like it’ll take my weight anyway,” he said out loud, as he reached once more with his left arm, every tendon stretched so tight that his ears sang with the strain.

Just a little more . . .

His fingers caught hold of the three-inch pipe.

It felt cold and rough in his hand as he tugged it to test its strength. Surprisingly, it didn’t budge. He guessed that where it extended around the ledge it was secured by more pipework and brackets. Maybe things were looking up.

He stretched as far up the pipe as he could manage, letting his fingers walk up bit by bit, before taking a deep breath and stepping off the ledge.

It seemed to take an age before he managed to grip the pipe with his right hand, and his whole body tensed as the pain in his ribs stabbed at him. His desperate right hand caught just below his left, and he hung like a bell ringer frozen in time for a second or two as he waited for the pipe to give . . .

It didn’t.

He gritted his teeth and grunted through them, and the pain, as he flexed his biceps and managed to lift his body an inch or two higher before releasing his right hand and quickly lifting it over his left, his toecaps scuffing on the bricks as they tried to find a hold. He flexed again, managing to get left over right.

He was moving in the right direction.

This continued four or five times, rhythmically, flex grunt grab, flex grunt grab, as he made his way inch by inch up the pipe.

He could feel the blood pumping through his upper body and his sinews stretching.

He’d climbed plenty of ropes in the army, but never with broken ribs, and never with a wet pipe that was too wide to be gripped easily. His hands ached as they’d never ached before. Little by little he made his way up until finally, his groan was interrupted by an answering groan from the pipe.

Rossett froze as the pipe shifted. From above, some flakes of old metal and grit fell, landing on his upturned face and forcing him to blink his eyes. He hung, not moving, not wanting to stress the old brackets more than they already were. He felt the pipe move again, and he risked ducking his head under his arm to see if he could reach the ledge again.

He couldn’t.

He was maybe twenty inches from the bend in the pipe, and he felt like his arms were going to pop out of their sockets.

As he flexed and pulled, the pipe jerked and more dirt fell down, this time going into his eyes. He felt his feet scrabbling against the bricks again, even though he didn’t think his brain had told them to.

Maybe they didn’t want to die, either?

He didn’t dare move, but the pipe did, a few inches this time. He twisted his head from side to side, looking for a handhold in the brickwork, but there was none to be had. The pipe moved again and suddenly everything seemed quiet as he watched the pipe snake over the ledge, a rigid rope emerging from a cliff face out into the dark.

Rossett thought about Windsor and Leigh. He thought about his wife and young John Henry, and how he missed them. He thought about Jews and Germans and the choices he’d made; he thought about all the dead men, those he’d killed, those he’d helped kill, and those he had held in his hands, comforting them as they went. He thought about Mrs. Ward and a lonely beach, he thought about diamonds and death, and then, finally, he thought about Jacob and how he’d let the little boy down again.

Somewhere on the river another foghorn sounded.

Then John Henry Rossett fell.

Chapter 29

R
OSSETT SLAMMED
THROUGH
the wooden cargo doors and into the cellar like a bomb. The rotten wood seemed to explode around him when he hit, and the three-foot-square cotton bales below felt tougher than the wood that had been above.

He landed on his back and the air concussed out of his lungs as he sank into the bales that had broken his fall. He stared through the broken wooden cellar doors and up into the night sky where he had just been. He tried to reinflate his lungs, but they felt as flat as pancakes, and all he managed was a whistling wheeze.

His whole body seemed numb for a moment, and he wondered if he’d broken his back. Slowly he managed to turn his head to look around the dark space in which he’d landed. Then he focused on his right hand, watching as it rose off the cotton bale and slowly flexed.

He tried to breathe again, and this time a tiny gasp of air made it into his lungs. In the back of his mind, he thanked God for not being so cruel as to let him survive the fall only to die of asphyxiation, as he rolled onto his side and started to cough life back into his battered body.

He lay gasping for a moment before rolling back to look up at the broken hatch doors once again, marveling at his luck. The doors were maybe eight feet square; he’d barely fit through them, let alone noticed them when he’d looked down from the window. The overhang of the window ledge plus the night’s shadows had hidden them from his view. He was glad they had, because if he’d tried to aim for them, he doubted he would have managed to hit them. He realized that the doors were there to allow the unloading of carts into the dock cellars. He remembered them from better times, dotted at intervals around all the warehouses in the area.

The doors were well out of reach above him. If he was going to get out, that wasn’t the way he was going.

Slowly Rossett eased himself off the bales and onto his feet, climbing down three or four of the stacked bales to reach the floor, his body aching from the effort. Halfway down the pyramid of cotton he found the length of drainpipe he’d been clinging onto before the fall. He picked it up and hefted it. It was an unwieldy weapon, but a weapon all the same.

At the bottom of the stack he bent forward and rested his hands on his knees, breathing deeply before looking back up to the shattered doors above and shaking his head. He stood up straight, brushed off the dust that he’d disturbed when he’d landed on the bales, flexed his back, and started to look for a way out.

It struck him that he was out of the interrogation room but still stuck in the building, and he wondered if anyone had heard him fall.

He reached the wall and found it damp to the touch, familiar stone in the darkness. Rossett took out the box of matches he’d taken from the guard and struck one. Holding it up to light his way, he saw a sliding cast-iron door set into the wall opposite him and made his way across to it.

He dropped the match and carried on forward in darkness before finally reaching the doorway. He gripped the edge of the door and was relieved to feel it slide. The heavy fire door moved on its well-greased rollers almost silently. He opened it just far enough to pop his head out and found an empty corridor that seemed to run the length of the building.

The corridor was lit by a yellowing glass lamp set into the far wall. It was half covered in moss and barely lit the entry to another passage that turned off to the left.

Farther under the building.

If he was going to get out, he was going to have to go into the lion’s den first.

Rossett squeezed through the doorway and walked toward the light, straining to hear if anyone was coming as he made his way along the damp corridor. He guessed that it wouldn’t be long before someone found the dead guard upstairs, and it would take them even less time to figure out which way he’d left the room. They’d search high and low for him, literally. He didn’t have long to get out.

He reached the corner and stopped. Leaning against the wall and crouching slightly, he eased half of his head around the corner to peek into the next tunnel. On a chair fifteen feet away sat a docker, snoozing, arms folded, chin resting on his chest. Rossett could just hear the man’s even breathing.

If it weren’t for the old Webley pistol the man cradled in one hand, half tucked into a warm armpit, he would have been just like the tens of other watchmen who were dotted around the docks that night.

Rossett looked at the door the guard was sitting outside. It looked like the one he and Chivers had been behind, except on this side there was a handle.

Without thinking, he raised the cast-iron pipe and charged across the fifteen feet as quietly as he could. When he was a few feet short of his target, some deep-seated instinct caused the guard to open his eyes and look up at the onrushing Rossett.

Rossett looked back into the guard’s disbelieving eyes. The man tried to unfold his arms and raise them in time to protect himself and free the Webley, but the pipe came down with a dull whack, hard on the top of his head.

Rossett raised the pipe to hit him again, but the guard merely slid off the chair, either unconscious or dead. The pistol clattered onto the floor, and Rossett picked it up, eyes on the fallen man. He shook the pistol next to his ear and then opened the breech to find four rounds and two empty chambers. Rossett nudged the guard with his toe, then stepped over him and carried on down the corridor before stopping and staring back at the door. He sighed, shook his head, then put the pipe carefully on the floor, returned to the guard, searched through his pockets. A few coins, an empty wallet, and a set of keys on a chain. Rossett reached around the guard, the age-old trick of the policeman’s search, checking the small of the back, where he found a long thin knife in a leather sheath stuck under the guard’s thick leather belt. Rossett pulled the knife and the sheaf free and then half drew the knife. It was finely balanced and glistened in the gloom of the hallway. It seemed to give off its own light as he turned it in his hands, and he slipped it into his own waistband, feeling the man’s warmth against his back from the blade.

He stared at the man for a second, then flicked through the keys on the chain looking for one to open the door. He got lucky first time, turned the key in the heavy door, and pushed it open.

“Chivers?” he called softly into the darkness. “Chivers? You there?”

“ ’Oo’s asking?”

“Who do you fucking think? Come on, you’re getting out.”

Rossett didn’t wait for Chivers to follow; he left the open door and made his way farther along the corridor. Every twenty or so feet, there was another door, same as the one he’d opened for Chivers. The lack of guards led Rossett to believe these rooms were empty, or possibly being used for their original storage purposes. Either way, he didn’t have time to search them. He looked over his shoulder as he went and saw Chivers walking some thirty feet behind him, clinging to the shadows and his suspicions.

Rossett stopped and gestured for the old man to catch up. Chivers took his time, looking around at the doors as he went.

“What the bleedin’ hell is goin’ on?” Chivers whispered when he finally caught up to Rossett, glancing at the pistol in the other man’s hand.

“We’re getting out of here. Do you know the way?”

“You came back for me?”

“Not exactly. Look, do you know the way out?” Rossett watched the corridor, anxious to keep moving. Chivers remained a short distance away, looking even older and grayer than he had done in the cell earlier. It struck Rossett that the old man didn’t trust him and was suspicious of what was going on. “Okay, I ended up back in the cellar after falling from the upstairs window. I came across your door. I thought you might be able to help me get out.”

Chivers didn’t reply. He looked again at the gun and then back at the guard on the floor.

“Is this a trick?” the old man asked, still looking back to where he’d come from.

“Why don’t you ask him?” Rossett replied as he walked off to find his own way out.

Chapter 30

J
ACOB HAD
FINALLY
drifted into a light sleep. He knew he was dreaming but almost felt that he could open his eyes and see his grandfather smiling and warming some bread in front of the fireplace.

He felt the heat of the fire and squeezed tighter next to his grandfather on the old bed they shared; he loved the old man and wanted to be as close as possible.

Close in his dreams, at least.

The old man disappeared, scared off by all the shouting that started in the room behind Jacob as he lay facing the wall. He squeezed his eyes shut as he listened to the men swearing and the scraping of chairs. He tensed his whole body and waited for someone to grab him, but they didn’t. They just ran out of the room, and Jacob lay silently listening to the boots clattering and getting farther away.

He didn’t know where or why they were going, but he was glad they had gone.

He waited, then turned his head and looked over his shoulder. The room was empty behind him and he rolled off the bed, wrapping the flimsy blanket around his shoulders both for warmth and in a pathetic attempt at protection before creeping to the table. He looked at the half-open door through which the men had gone, then turned to see what food they had left.

There was some bread, cheese, and cold tea. He snatched up the bread and cheese and shoved it in his mouth, then slurped the tea out of the huge enamel mug, sloshing some onto his clothes and the table as he held it with both hands.

Jacob wiped his mouth on his sleeve, padded toward the door, and looked outside. The corridor was empty, but he could hear people shouting somewhere in the building.

He looked back into the room, at the second door on the opposite wall, chewed on his lip for a moment, then crept over to it and put his hand on the knob.

He was going to find his grandfather.