Page 82 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

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.