Page 83 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“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.”

Chapter

Thirty-One

The River

The rope had been put on by somebody who did not intend it to be comfortable. By the time we cleared the Pool, my hands had gone the color of a plum from the knuckles down.

He had put the cloth back in my mouth on the way to the river, but had taken it out when we boarded the black launch. There was no longer anything to be gained by it. I could scream the whole way to the Nore, and the Thames would take the sound the way it takes everything else. Nor could I expect any help from the men aboard. Every man was his.

So I did not scream, but simply stood at the after rail where they put me, with a man on either side and a hand on my elbow.

The engine went on beating under the deck. It never varied. After the first mile, I stopped hearing it and began to feel it instead, up through the boards and into my teeth.

Wapping went by, and then the shipyards, and the whole eastern sky filled up with masts. Colliers three deep at the tiers. A barge going down under a red sail with a boy asleep on the hatch. Somewhere behind Greenwich a hammer was going on iron, one blow and then another, all the way down the reach. If I had been anybody else I should have found it beautiful.

Harcourt stood forward of the wheelhouse with his back half toward me. He’d gone up two steps to the wheelhouse without touching a rail. He stood the roll of that deck and never once put out a hand. He was a man of fifty in good condition who had spent three years telling London he was a man of seventy-odd years who could not manage a staircase. But now in front of me, he was not troubling with his disguise. He had no further use for it.

Not because he had been caught out. Because he was leaving, and one does not pack an old coat.

I looked east and made myself think it through in order. Thinking in order is the only thing I have ever been able to do when I am frightened, and I have never been more frightened in my life.

Chrissie had run. I had watched her run, and she had gone to the right door. And Steele had known, and he had come. Whether he would reach me before the water got wide was another matter altogether. I set that question aside, because there was nothing I could do with it and a great deal I could do with the next ten minutes.

Harcourt came aft and dismissed the men guarding me. “You will have worked out where we are going.”