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“Raise the wreck,” Monk replied. “We can’t leave it there. Next thing you know, someone else’ll run afoul of it and sink as well!”
“I’ll take care of it, sir. We know builders with traction engines. It’ll be slow, but we’ll get ’er up.” Orme looked pensive. “But it’ll move everything inside ’er. Could wash a lot of the bodies out. And there must be a hundred an’ fifty or more trapped below the decks. We’ll have to bury them decent …”
Monk remembered another case he had had, years ago, before he had joined the River Police. The horror of that blind, underwater work still made his skin crawl, but he could not evade it.
“Maybe we should hire one of those diving suits and go down and look at it before we raise it.”
Orme stared at him, his eyes wide with fear.
Monk smiled with a twist to his lips. “I’ve done it before. I’ll go down. We’ve got to see what it’s like, before everything moves.”
“Yes, sir,” Orme said hoarsely. “I suppose we have.”
MONK WOKE UP SLOWLY, his head thumping. He came to consciousness as if rising from a great depth. For a moment he was confused. The light hurt his eyes. He was in his office in the police station. He sat up, aching all over, memory flooding back like a riptide, bringing with it all the fear and grief he had seen.
Sergeant Jackson passed Monk a cup of tea, hot and much too strong. He took a mouthful of it anyway, then bit into the thick heel of bread offered him. He looked around. The sun was bright through the windows. He realized with a jolt that it was well into the morning, nothing like as early as he had intended to be up.
“What time is it?” he demanded, rising to his feet stiffly, every joint aching. For a moment he swayed, his balance rocky. He was so tired his eyes felt gritted with sand.
“Time to go to the diving people, sir, that is if you’ve still got a mind to,” Jackson replied. He was young, and he looked up to Monk.
Monk grunted, running his hands through his hair and over the stubble on his face. There was no time to think of his appearance now.
“Yes. Right,” he agreed. Better not to think of it, not even to give himself time to think of it, or his nerve might fail him. The last thing on earth he wanted to do was climb into one of those heavy, unwieldy suits with the weighted feet, then have someone lower the helmet over his head with its glass-plated visor. They would screw him in so he breathed through a tube, a lifeline upon which his existence depended. One tangle in that, one knot, and he would suffocate—or if it was severed, he would drown. He must not think of it. He must control his mind lest he panic.
More than one hundred people had died. Quite apart from their families, they themselves deserved justice. He had to discover what had happened to them, who had caused it, and why.
He washed briefly, drank the rest of the tea, and finished the bread. It was fresh and really very pleasant. He could not remember when he had last eaten.
Then he walked out into the sun and across the open space to the steps that led from the dock edge down to the river. The steps were stone, running parallel to the wall, and many of them were now well below the swift-running tide, hidden until low water. Moored up against them was the boat that would take him down river to where they would anchor while he went over the side in the suit and walked along the riverbed to the wreck.
Of course he would not go into the river alone. No one dived without having someone else to watch, to help, to free you from snags if falling debris crossed your air line, or—just as bad—pinned you down.
He heard the shouts of men, the greetings. He answered automatically, forgetting what he replied even as he said the words.
He went through all the procedures as if in a dream. No one indulged in unnecessary conversation. The business they were about filled their minds. He listened to his instructions as the wind off the water stung his skin, and nodded as they told him step by step exactly what they were going to do and he in turn told them what he needed to see.
Amazingly, everything around them looked exactly the same as usual. Strings of barges, laden with goods, passed them, going upriver with the tide. Ferries plied back and forth from one bank to the other. There were plenty of small cargo or passenger boats, but none was out for pleasure this morning. He saw only one or two pieces of driftwood wreckage floating slowly upstream. There would be far more, farther down, spreading wider and wider from the point of the wreck.
They picked up speed away from the shore. The diving equipment was all laid out ready. They would drop anchor a short distance from where the boat had gone down, and then he would put on the heavy, clumsy-looking suit and helmet. And then there would be no avoiding the inevitable.
Monk stared at the water. It was murky brown, nothing like the dazzling blue sea he saw in the glimpses of memory that came to him now and again, a view sharp for an instant, then gone. Twelve years ago, just after the end of the Crimean War, he had had a serious carriage accident that had knocked him unconscious. When he had woken, his memory had been obliterated. He had not even recognized his own face in a looking glass.
Over time fragments had come back, like a picture painted on something fragile and shattered into a hundred pieces. Some of them had been painful, glimpses of a self he did not like. Others were good: lost moments from childhood, like the memory of the sea and of boats far in the north, on the coast of Northumberland.
He had learned to live with his loss of memory, and to rebuild himself. It would not have been possible had Hester not helped him. Her faith in him had been the spur to put the pieces together, to keep working at it even when the picture seemed ugly and full of darkness, as opaque as the water now swishing past the bow of the boat. He had come to believe that courage depended on knowing that there was somebody who believed in you.
No matter that the thought of going into that water, creeping his way through the gloom of the river mud and into the wreckage, frightened him; he must do it. Hester believed in him, in his ability to do the right thing, and he must never betray that faith.
They were there. He could see the men on the bank and make out the shape of the engines that would slowly haul what was left of the boat up to where it could be examined, and where it would no longer be a danger to the river traffic.
It was time to pay attention to the task, to listen, to climb into the suit, and let them bolt the glass over his face, then get into the water, sinking down while it closed over his head. Both his own life and that of his diving companion might rest on his remembering the instructions he was given exactly.
Obediently he climbed into the suit. He had rehearsed it mentally enough that he moved automatically, almost easily. Only when he felt the cold of the river and the weight of his boots pulling him down did it suddenly shock his senses in a way no nightmare could.
The darkness was almost immediate. Everything around him was brown, closed in, at once both swirling and shapeless; it was as if he were drifting in mud. The lamp in his helmet seemed absurdly feeble. Then his feet reached the bottom, sinking down as if he had landed on sludge
, not stones. He struggled for a moment to keep his balance, arms out like a tightrope walker.
