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Orme stared at him. “Same sorts of people around here,” he said slowly. “Men who fill and empty things, clean up, tidy after us, drive us on land or ferry us on the water. The landsmen investigating the bombing won’t think to seek them out, I bet.” There was frustration in his voice. “You’re going to tell ’em that?” he said.
Monk hesitated, but not because he wasn’t sure what the answer was. He was remembering the river at dusk, the lights of the pleasure boat, then the roar as the bow exploded and the screams that followed. And the darkness engulfing the water as the ship plunged down. He had to force out of his mind the people they had tried to help, and couldn’t because their boat was too full already, too far away, too late.
Orme waited silently, as he so often did, like a ship for the tide.
“Yes, of course I will,” Monk finally said. As he turned around and started walking back across the wooden quay up toward the street, he saw a police sergeant coming toward them.
The man stopped in front of them, glancing at Orme, then back at Monk.
“Sorry, sir,” he said awkwardly. “I know as you’re River Police, but this is still a restricted area, unless you got a reason you need to be here? There in’t no one landed here this last couple of hours, I can swear to that.”
Monk looked at him. The man was perhaps thirty, clean-shaven, eager, and at this moment embarrassed.
“Who did you see?” Monk asked him mildly.
The sergeant looked around. “No one, sir, as I said. Who were you looking for?”
“Who’s that over there?” Monk gestured toward a ferry pulling away southward.
“No one, sir, just the regular ferry to the steps there.”
“And over there?” Monk pointed again, a few yards across the water.
“Lighterman, sir. Going up with the tide. It’s just turned. ’E’d ’ave had to wait or he’d ’ave been battling the current.”
“Exactly,” Monk agreed. “The river is full of invisible people like that. They come and go, and we don’t see them, unless they do something out of character. Is your commander as observant as you
are? Would he notice anyone different, a stranger, out of step with the tide? Or maybe not out of step, not different at all?”
The sergeant’s face blanched in the late afternoon sun. He swallowed. “I don’t know, sir. Do you think it could be a lighterman, or … someone like that who’s behind this?”
“Well, if it wasn’t someone you saw, then it was someone you didn’t,” Monk said reasonably. “Someone who was there, but that you expected to be there, so you didn’t notice him.”
The sergeant shook his head. “I don’t think so, sir. From the looks of it, it’s political. Least that’s what they’re reckoning. We’ve got a line on an Egyptian man. Worked for the caterers. Bit of a malcontent. Always complaining, and expressed some pretty ugly opinions when he wasn’t being too careful. Quite a bit of evidence against him, I hear.”
“Egyptian? On the Thames?” Monk affected to be polite rather than interested.
“World’s getting smaller, sir,” the sergeant replied. “They open up that canal and we’ll be getting to the Indies in a matter of days rather than weeks. No more clipper ships, I reckon. And we’ll miss them. Most beautiful thing I ever saw was one o’ them under full sail. Couldn’t take my eyes off it.”
With a wave of sorrow Monk realized exactly what he meant.
Change was coming. And there was always a price to be paid for it.
He turned and looked at Orme in the waning light, and thought he saw the same understanding in his face, and perhaps also the same sense of inevitable loss. Change comes like a tide, and any seaman knows the tide waits for no one.
“Why would an Egyptian blow up an English pleasure boat on the Thames?” he asked the sergeant.
“No idea, sir,” the man replied. “Not sure that I want to know. Lot of money involved in the canal project, though, an’ Mr. Lydiate says it’ll change all sorts of things for the Egyptians too. Lot of them died building it, that’s for sure. Some say it was in the hundreds!”
Monk nodded. He saw very well the layers of money, influence, lies, and debts that could be connected to the canal project. There were infinite possibilities for secrets and distortion of facts. Perhaps Runcorn was right and none of them would unravel all that lay behind the sinking of the Princess Mary.
MONK ARRIVED HOME SHORTLY after sunset, tired and disappointed. He had passed newspaper shops on the way and even one running patterer—a man who made a living reciting the news in a kind of singsong narrative rhyme, easy to memorize and carrying the essence of breaking events. They all agreed on two things: The tragedy had been an unparalleled evil, and the police were close to finding the man responsible.
“That true?” Scuff asked almost as soon as Monk was through the door. Now that he could read, he was devouring everything current and exciting, as if windows were flying open on all sides with amazing views he had never seen before. “They got someone?” He took Monk’s coat from him and hung it up, all but stepping on his heels as he went into the kitchen where Hester was carving cold roast beef for supper.
She turned and smiled at him, and Monk felt some of his weariness slipping away, like a heavy garment discarded. He could smell hot mashed potatoes and onions frying in the pan, with fine-chopped cabbage stirred into them, a dish commonly known as “bubble and squeak.”
“Looks as if they’re close to arresting someone” he said. He had already made up his mind on the way home that he should tell them. Not to tell them would only make it harder to accept when it was the Metropolitan Police, and not the River Police, who brought some kind of resolution, even justice, to the tragedy.
