Blood on the Water Read online

  “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.”

  MONK 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.

  They were there. He could see the men on the bank and make out the shape of the engines that would slowly haul what was left of the boat up to where it could be examined, and where it would no longer be a danger to the river traffic.

  It was time to pay attention to the task, to listen, to climb into the suit, and let them bolt the glass over his face, then get into the water, sinking down while it closed over his head. Both his own life and that of his diving companion might rest on his remembering the instructions he was given exactly.

  Obediently he climbed into the suit. He had rehearsed it mentally enough that he moved automatically, almost easily. Only when he felt the cold of the river and the weight of his boots pulling him down did it suddenly shock his senses in a way no nightmare could.

  The darkness was almost immediate. Everything around him was brown, closed in, at once both swirling and shapeless; it was as if he were drifting in mud. The lamp in his helmet seemed absurdly feeble. Then his feet reached the bottom, sinking down as if he had landed on sludge
, not stones. He struggled for a moment to keep his balance, arms out like a tightrope walker.

  He moved his head so the light struck the murk around him. He felt a touch on his arm, and there was another grotesque figure beside him, lumbering and globe-headed like himself. It pointed forward. Awkwardly he obeyed.

  It was only moments before he saw jagged ends of the wreck emerging in the gloom. It gaped like the jaws of some gigantic fish, and where the bow should have been there was nothing. At that instant he would have given almost anything to have backed away and gone up into the light.

  He took a deep breath of the air coming to him through that fragile pipe, and stepped forward.

  He had already visualized what he would see, but nothing prepared him for the reality. The hull had buckled. The floors lay at strange angles. In some places doors hung open. In others they were jammed fast shut. There were eddies of current where the tide was funneled unnaturally. More than once Monk was swept off balance, and realized with something close to panic how easy it would be to fall and become entangled in the debris and his own equipment.

  Everywhere there were bodies, some lying on the decks, some piled on top of each other. Several were jammed in doorways as if they had rushed together to escape, and it had cost all of them their lives. A few here and there—mostly women with skirts floating around them—drifted with the current, bumping blindly into buckling walls. Their dead faces were ghostly pale in the beam of Monk’s lamp.

  Would he find anything here that could tell him what had happened? Any evidence that could implicate someone? The explosion had left the whole front end of the boat raw and wide to the river, flooding the decks and sweeping people off their feet and back into the prison of the lower rooms. The only ones with any chance of escape were those on the top deck. Those at the fancy party below, dressed in their best and smartest clothes, champagne glasses in their hands, were probably dead even before the boat plunged to the bottom. Was that chance, or intention?

  The bodies would be taken out, identified where possible, and given decent burial. Several would be washed out by the very act of raising the boat. Some were already gone and would drift up on the banks in the days and weeks to come. And a few perhaps would never be found, washed out to sea, or snagged forever in the detritus of the deeper channels, eventually to be swallowed by the mud.

  Monk moved forward very carefully, testing his footing, as far into the bow as he dared go. Once he slipped and was yanked back by his fellow diver. His heart was pounding and he forced himself to control his breathing before he choked. As he looked around, he could see what they had already suspected: the explosion had been caused by something placed in the bow deliberately. There were no boilers or other mechanical equipment anywhere near the heart of the destruction. But there was no evidence of what had caused the explosion either, at least in the area they were able to safely walk.

  He signaled to his companion that it was time to go back up again. He had to force himself not to hurry as he made his way back toward the light, and finally up into the air and the day. When he reached the surface he was heaved back onto the deck of the boat and eager hands unfastened his face plate. He breathed in clean air in grateful gasps. When the helmet was unscrewed and lifted off, the width of the sky could have been heaven itself. For all the horror of what he had seen, he was smiling, gulping, almost wanting to laugh.

  “Seen enough, sir?” his diving companion asked, struggling out of his own suit.

  “Yes.” Monk forced himself back to the moment. “Yes, thank you. We’ll tell them to begin getting her up.” He put the corpses out of his mind and concentrated on the fabric of the boat, the hole where the bow had been. The explosives must all have been there. Thinking about it coldly, it was the perfect place to put them. There was nothing dangerous or valuable there, so no reason for any of the crew to be on watch. No chance of an accidental ignition of the charge. It had been not only deliberate, but also clever and very carefully planned.

  But why?

  The exhilaration of surfacing passed and Monk found anger overtaking him again. He thanked the diving crew and asked them to put him ashore at the nearest steps. He made his way back to where Orme was standing with the overseer of the crew that was to raise the wreck. Orme looked exhausted, his face pale, the stubble of his beard adding to his crumpled air. But as always he stood straight, eyes narrowed against the light, pink-rimmed with weariness.

  “Bow blown out, as we thought,” Monk said quietly. “Pretty clean job. Couldn’t see any other damage. People trapped below never had a chance.”

  Orme nodded but did not speak. He was a man who never forced words in where they had no meaning.

  “It’ll take a fair time to get her up,” the overseer said grimly, giving Monk a slight gesture of acknowledgment. “Get the bodies off as we can. Bound to lose some of them as everything shifts inside. Send men after the rest. You just catch the bastards that did this.”

  “We will,” Monk replied, knowing full well that it was a promise he might not be able to keep.

  He watched a few moments longer, then nodded to Orme and turned away. He should not have said they would succeed, but how else did one answer to such an atrocity? “We’ll try”? It would sound as if he thought it ordinary, just another case. It wasn’t. Possibly a hundred and fifty completely innocent people had been drowned in the dark, filthy waters of the Thames. Some of them might never even be found for their relatives to bury. And for what? What end could it possibly serve?

  But someone had to have planted the bomb. Perhaps they had even been paid to do so. And there were avenues along which to search for such a person. There were expert dealers in explosives, such as nitroglycerin. Amateurs did not handle it; it was far too volatile. There was always somebody who had seen something, heard something, who could be pressured to talk.

  Monk walked across the open space toward the street. All around him were warehouses, cranes, men beginning the day’s work of loading and unloading. It was May and the sun was already bright. Six weeks and it would be the longest day of the year.

  One of the first things to look for was opportunity. Who had had the chance to place explosives in the bow of the ship? And nitroglycerin was the most common explosive, but in the last year or two there was also the new Swedish invention of dynamite. It was easy to carry, and needed an ignition device to set it off, so was far less prone to accidents. A few sticks of it would blow almost anything to kingdom come. So that was something to look into as well.

  But why? That was the difficulty, and the key. The motive for whoever had committed such an act of barbarity, and the means by which they had done so.

  He was so lost in his thoughts that he almost bumped into the man coming toward him. The man stopped abruptly to avoid the collision.

  “Sorry,” Monk said. “Wasn’t looking where I was going.” He stepped to the side but the man did not move. Instead, he held out his hand as if to introduce himself.

  Monk was in no mood for conversation, but glancing at the man’s face, he thought he seemed vaguely familiar, as if they might have met casually at some point. He had mild, almost sensitive features and a considerable gravity to him. Perhaps he had lost someone he cared for in the disaster. He deserved civility at least.

  “Monk?” the man asked, but with the tone of voice as if he knew.

  Monk forced himself to be responsive. He was exhausted, cold from the dive, and heartsick from what he had seen. He could not remember when he had last eaten anything except the heel of bread.

  “Yes?” he said calmly, meeting the man’s eyes and seeing pain in them. Yet, the look was not one of personal grief.

  “John Lydiate,” the man replied.

  Monk was startled. He remembered him now. Sir John was commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. Had he come here to find out the progress on the case so soon?

  “Good morning, sir,” Monk replied. “Sorry I didn’t recognize you. I’ve just come up from the wreck.”<
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  Confusion on his face, Lydiate looked over toward the engines, which were now beginning to haul out the sunken hulk of the boat. “Do you mean you were diving?” he asked curiously.

  “Need to see it before everything shifts as they get it out of the water,” Monk explained. “Explosives were placed in the bow. Blew it right out. It went down in less than five minutes.” He had meant to control himself, say it factually, but his voice shook as he saw it again in his mind’s eye, the darkness as the ship plunged and the lights went out, then the screaming, the people he couldn’t help.

  Lydiate was pale. Perhaps he, too, had been up all night, even if not on the river. “You saw it?”

  “I was on the water, about a hundred yards away,” Monk replied.

  “God in heaven!” Lydiate said quietly. It was a prayer, not a blasphemy. “I … I’m sorry.”

  Monk stared at him. It seemed an odd thing to say.

  “It’s an atrocity,” Lydiate went on, now a very faint flush on his face. “Apparently there were quite a few very important people on board, foreigners. The government has …” He hesitated then started again. “They’ve said that because of the international implications we need to be seen to do everything we can. That’s why I am here. They’ve put me in charge. You can stand down; go back to your normal responsibilities on the river.”

  Monk was stunned. He must have misheard what the man said. “It happened on the river!” he said sharply, too tired to be courteous. “The damn thing’s in the river right now!” He waved his arms toward the half-submerged chains, which were dripping as they moved inch by inch, hauling the wreckage up.

  “I know,” Lydiate agreed. “Nevertheless, you are relieved of command. Home Office orders. I’m sorry.”

  Monk started to speak, and then realized he had nothing whatever to say. The decision was numbing, absurd, and also unarguable. If the government had made that decision for political reasons, no matter how idiotic, how unjust or self-serving, it was pointless to argue. And ultimately, it was certainly not Lydiate’s fault that Monk was being relieved of command.