Page 81 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

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.