Chapter 30
Chapter
Thirty
Wapping
London gets uglier going east by degrees, so that a man cannot say where the change was made.
The broad streets narrowed. The houses gave out and warehouses took their places, black to the fourth floor with sixty years of coal smoke.
Then the smell came up to meet us and stayed, tar and wet timber and rope and the flat cold breath of the river itself.
And above the roofs the masts began, rank on rank of them, more masts than chimneys.
“Left here,” Mercer said through the panel.
The carriage went round hard enough to put Finch’s shoulder into the side. A grunt was his only complaint.
“A hundred yards. Now right.”
Wapping High Street. The wall of the London Docks on one hand, and the warehouses on the other going down to the water in a solid black rank with gaps between them no wider than a cart. My coachman took us along it at a pace no man should take a carriage over those stones.
I put my head out the window. Three hundred yards behind us on the same street, low and blue and unmistakable, stood the river police station.
“He kept a private stair within sight of Thames Division,” I remarked.
“He kept it four hundred and twenty yards from their steps,” Mercer said. “He used to say it was the cheapest wall in England. Nobody looks under the lamp.” He leaned to the glass. “The next gate. There.”
I was out of the carriage before it had properly stopped.
The gate stood open. The yard beyond it was empty.
Two great doors in the face of the warehouse stood half back on their runners.
A barrow lay on its side in the gateway with a sack of something spilled out of it.
But the strangest thing was nobody stood within fifty yards. Not a watchman, not a boy, not a dog.
“Where are his men?”
“Gone.” Mercer said. “Wages were to be drawn today, paid from an account that stopped existing at half past two this afternoon. Somebody will have gone to the bank at three and come away with nothing. By four every man on this wharf knew it.” He straightened his cuff.
“They did not stay for him. They have never once, in twenty years, stayed for anything but the money. I did tell you.”
I drew the revolver.
“Behind me. Both of you.”
Finch came up on my left regardless, holding his arm across his body, and I did not waste the breath. Mercer had the sense to stay where he was put.
We went into the warehouse at a run.
The warehouse went up three stories inside, stacked to the second with crates and casks in aisles.
Our boots came back at us off the rafters so that we might have been twenty men instead of three.
Sugar somewhere, coffee too, and under both of them a sweetish chemical smell that had no business in a bonded store.
Halfway down the aisle a chair stood out of place on the boards with rope cut from it and left where it fell. Beside the chair lay a twist of dirty cloth.
I have handled a good deal of evidence in three years. I picked that up and put it in my coat. At the far end of the aisle there was daylight, and then the doors, and finally the river.
The wharf ran out forty feet over the water on black piles with weed on them. The tide was on the ebb, brown and sliding, carrying strings of barges down past the tiers. The whole width of the Pool was full of shipping at anchor.
Twenty yards out from the stair, a black steam launch had her helm over and was coming round into the stream.
Smoke stood out of her funnel. Her screw had bitten, the water behind her was white with it.
She was already making three or four knots with the ebb under her, and there was nothing in the world between her and the sea.
She came broadside, and I had a clear look at her deck.
Rosalynd stood aft of the cabin with her wrists bound in front of her and a man’s hand shut round her upper arm. Her hair was down. Her sleeve was torn out at the shoulder seam. And there was a mark along her jaw that I would carry to my grave.
She was not looking at the water, or at the man beside her, or at the shore in general. She was looking for me. She stood on the deck of a launch in the middle of the Pool of London. And she had known I would be standing here.
She got one step toward the stern before the hand hauled her back.
A second figure came out of the cabin. Harcourt. It had to be him. He took off his hat to me across sixty feet of water like a man passing an acquaintance in Pall Mall, put it back on, and turned to look downriver at the way he was going.
My hand came up with the revolver in it and stopped.
Sixty feet, off a wharf, at a moving deck, with her standing four feet from him. I have been reckoned a good shot where nothing shoots back and nothing I love is standing close to a bird.
I put the pistol down.
“You have not finished,” I said, to nobody. “You have begun.”
“Look.” Mercer, at my elbow, pointing along the wharf past the next warehouse. “That.”
Sixty or eighty yards downstream, moored inside a set of dock steps, sat a smaller launch with a gray hull and a blue ensign folded at her stern. Steam feathered off her safety valve in the sun.
“Customs,” Mercer said. “Her officers are inside the tobacco floor and will be an hour at it. Her engineer never leaves her.”
We raced along the wharf toward it.
A gray-whiskered man in shirtsleeves came up out of the engine space with a spanner in his hand and his mouth already open. A second man stood at the stern beside the tiller, younger by twenty years and wearing the dark jersey and peaked cap of a river man.
“Finch,” I said.
He got to the launch first. “Afternoon. Caleb Finch, thirty years off Hermitage Stairs. You’ll know my brother-in-law Tom Pardy that had the coal lighters.
” He held up the ruined sleeve without emphasis.
“That black launch standing down on the ebb has a young lady on board of her, taken out of a shop in Bond Street two hours since at gunpoint. This is the Duke of Steele. The Thames Division will be at that gate inside ten minutes and Chief Inspector Graves of Scotland Yard with them. I’ll swear to every word of this. ”
The engineer looked at the blood, at the revolver in my hand, and last of all at the black funnel standing out beyond the tiers.
“I’ve no authority to give you her,” he said.
“No,” I said. “And I have none to take her. But I am asking you for her, nonetheless. I will make good every consequence of it in writing. There is a hundred pounds in it for you whatever the end of the day looks like.”
“Keep your hundred pounds.” He put the spanner down and reached for the fire door. “I’ve a daughter that age.” He looked aft. “You heard him, Jack. Cast her off.”
The boatman was already moving.
“Get aboard and get for’ard,” the engineer said.
Finch came over the rail worse than he would admit, sat down on the fore hatch, and stayed there. Mercer stepped aboard ahead of me, in plain view, and stood holding the stanchion.
I followed him over. “You could have slipped away back there.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He looked downriver, toward the black launch threading its way through the shipping. “I told you what I wanted.”
“To see him dead.”
His gaze came back to mine. “I need to know he is.”
I turned to the engineer. “Can you catch her?”
He put his head out and took a long look downriver, at the black smoke and the tiers and the barges and the ebb. “She’s a Thornycroft or near enough and she’s two minutes up on us.” He spat over the side. “In slack water, no.”
“We can take something off her through the Pool,” the boatman called from the stern. “She’s got to go round the tiers. I know a man’s water and he don’t.”
“Where’s she making for?” the engineer asked.
“Gravesend,” Mercer said. “There is a steamer for Rotterdam lying in the Lower Hope.”
“Twenty-six mile,” the engineer said.
“Then we have twenty-six miles to catch her,” I said.
The engineer pulled the whistle cord and the steam went up off her in a shriek that brought heads round on four ships at once. The boatman threw off the last line, jumped aboard, and went straight to the tiller.
The engineer dropped back into his machinery. The fire door opened below us, throwing a brief orange glare across the deck, and the beat of the engine quickened.
We went out from the steps slowly, and then took on speed. The bow came round into the stream under the boatman’s hand and the ebb took hold under us. The whole gray length of her put her shoulder down, and the wharf went away behind us and was gone.
Ahead, the black launch ran in between two moored merchantmen. Their hulls closed over her, and for four or five seconds there was nothing out there at all but iron and rigging and brown water.
I have had worse seconds. Not many.
Then the black launch came out beyond the second ship’s bow with her funnel streaming, still going down, still there.
Behind us, over the noise of our own engine, the sound of horses on stone.
Graves came into that yard at the head of a dozen or so mounted men, their coats flying. He pulled up so hard the horse came round on its hocks. He stood in the stirrups staring at an empty wharf and an empty river stair.
I got up on the fore deck, raised my arm downstream, and roared his name across the water.
He saw. The man has never once needed a thing explained to him twice. He pointed at two of his men, then at the warehouse, and shouted something I could not hear. They went off their horses and took up position at the doors.
Graves wheeled his horse and took the rest back out of the gate at a gallop, up the High Street toward the Thames River police station.
Two minutes after that the first police whistle went, and then a second answered it from the water.
The river came awake all down that reach: men on the stairs, a galley putting off, and one after another the Thames Division launches coming out from the pier with their fires forced and their bows lifting.
They fell in behind us in a ragged line. Not one of them was going to be in front of us that afternoon, because I had two minutes to make up and they had four.
Ahead of us, the black smoke streamed out behind the launch, thinning on the wind. I stood at the rail and kept sight of it, not letting go of it for a moment.
“Will she stand?” I asked the engineer, meaning the Customs launch.
He took in the desperation on my face, wiped his hands, and reached for the regulator. “She’ll stand more than you will, Guv’nor.”