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“You saw it, didn’t you?” Orme said softly. “Something going over the side, in the air one moment, then going down first, before the explosion. What was it? Was it a man?”
“I thought so,” Monk answered. “Which would have to be whoever set it off. There’s no other reason anyone would leap overboard into the Thames. Did you see a boat in the water anywhere near him?”
“The closest ferry could have made it.” Orme clenched his jaw. “Or, of course, maybe it wasn’t a ferry.”
“Then the moment after it would be picking people out of the water, rescuing survivors,” Monk pointed out. “Perfect disguise. What’s a couple more wet and shocked people?”
“The swine!” Orme said bitterly. “No wonder we never found him. Invisible man. Survivors, like anyone else. Where the devil do we even look?”
“With the ferryman,” Monk replied. “God! That’s cold! Blow them into the sky one moment, then the next, stretch out your hands to pull them out of the water, as if you were one of them.”
“D’you suppose he was a real ferryman?” Orme asked, revulsion making his voice shake.
“We’ll have to go back and question all the survivors we can find,” Monk answered grimly. “And the ferrymen we know were there. Go over and over it! Someone will have seen something, or remembered something they didn’t then.”
“You reckon?” Orme’s eyes widened.
“I saw someone,” Monk pointed out. “So did you. And another thing I’d really like to know, who did the police speak to? Did they speak to you? They didn’t ask me what I saw.”
Orme considered it for several seconds, his hand gripping the tiller, keeping the boat facing into the current.
“Odd, that,” he agreed, chewing his lip. “We were there. You’d think they’d try to jog some memory, wouldn’t you? What do you make of this Lydiate fellow?”
“Decent man in an impossible situation,” Monk replied honestly. “But none of us has dealt with a tragedy on this scale, not when it’s a deliberate crime, and the victims are all random and completely blameless. At least as far as we know, it was the ship itself that was the target, or possibly the owners of it. The poor damn people in the water were incidental. They could have been anybody.”
“Do you think the owners had anything to do with it?” Orme said dubiously.
“No. That’s another thing; we’ve had no motive except general hatred of the way England behaved in the digging of the canal. That’s good for whipping up emotion and making everyone believe that in giving evidence they’re being patriotic, fighting the country’s enemies, but it doesn’t make any real sense. Have you ever come across a crime like that before?”
“No.” Orme’s mouth pulled down at the corners.
“Let’s go back to Wapping and start again,” Monk answered, moving back to his seat at the oars. “You and Hooper talk to the ferrymen and bargees. I’ll take the survivors.”
Orme drew in his breath to argue that Monk had given himself by far the grimmest job, then looked at Monk’s face, and fell silent.
IT WAS INDEED HARD. It took Monk two days to find the men left alive from the disaster and trace them to where they were now living. There was one woman who had survived also, but he wasn’t sure if he should cause her further distress. Then, thinking of Hester, he decided that she might be more insulted by being excluded than grateful for the consideration. And it was always possible that she would recall some detail no one else did.
There were seventeen of them well enough to be interviewed, still in the London area, and willing to speak to him. Most remembered little, repeating only what they had already said. Monk sat patiently listening to the pain in their voices, saw the blocked-out horror return, and felt as if he were being pointlessly cruel. The things that were uppermost in their minds were the sense of coldness and suffocation, and the helplessness as they watched their wives, friends, or families sinking in the dark river, fighting for life, and losing.
He feared he was being brutal and he loathed himself for it.
The ninth person he spoke to was a brickmaker’s laborer with powerful arms and a chest like an ox. He still looked faintly bewildered as he recalled the night.
“I can’t ’ardly remember where I was, or what ’appened,” the man said, as if admitting to some deep failure in himself. “One minute I were standing on the steps going up to the deck, next I were in the water an’ I couldn’t see nor ’ear nothing, ’cept cold an’ choking. It were moments before I even ’eard other folks cryin’ out.” His face was pinched with misery and there was a haunting guilt in his eyes.
Monk did not want to press him, but there was no other way to discover if there was anything more to learn. Silence, fear, shame, and pain were all the allies of whoever had done this.
“Who was with you on the boat, Mr. Hall?”
Hall’s face tightened. “My ma and pa. It was a special trip for them. Wedding anniversary.” He breathed in deeply, his massive chest expanding and contracting, but he could not control the tears that slid down his cheeks, embarrassing him for the show of weakness in front of a stranger.
Monk felt bruised himself for his failure to have prevented this, or at the very least to have caught the right man for it. Would an explanation help? An apology? The man deserved it.
“I’m sorry,” Monk said quietly. He wished he could comfort the man by blaming someone else. “It looks now as if Habib Beshara was not the right man. We wanted to catch someone so desperately we weren’t caref
ul enough.”
Hall shook his head slowly, not taking his eyes off Monk’s. “You mean that man in prison isn’t guilty?”
