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FOUR DAYS LATER, ACHING and still wearing the strapping around his ribs that Hester had put on for him, Monk returned to work. After checking in at the Wapping station and speaking with Orme, and then with Hooper, to assess the latest information and relate it to all that they had so far gathered, he went to see Rogers, the ferryman who had so nearly been drowned. He felt guilty because he was now convinced the sinking of the ferry had been deliberate, and the poor man had suffered only because Monk had been his passenger.
Hooper had found the man’s address and visited him a couple of times, at Monk’s request, largely to see if he was safe, and recovering. His house was easy to find and, as Monk walked along the narrow road fronting on the water, he saw Rogers sitting in the tiny garden, his eyes closed in the sun. As Monk drew closer, he noticed the broken arm bound up in a splint and the dark bruises on the cheek and jaw of his pale face. It was apparently still too tender for him to shave and dark stubble dotted his chin.
The ferryman opened his eyes as he heard Monk’s footsteps crunching on the gravel.
“Good morning, Mr. Rogers,” Monk said, stopping in front of him. “How’s the arm?”
“Hurts like hell,” Rogers replied, looking up at him with a bleak smile. “But it’ll mend. Not the first bone I broke. Thing is, I feel so damn useless! Wife has to cut up my food for me, like a baby.”
“I’m sorry.” Monk sat on the bench opposite him.
“Not your fault,” Rogers said, shaking his head very slightly. Clearly the movement still caused him pain. He regarded Monk’s girth, increased by the strapping. “Not much better off, eh?”
“Some,” Monk agreed ruefully. “Got both my arms, with difficulty. And I don’t need to row, although I’d like to. I’m in command of the River Police at Wapping …”
Rogers nodded. “I know. Think I been on the river and didn’t know that?”
“Probably not. The point is I think that we were rammed on purpose, to get me.” He watched Rogers’s face and saw no surprise in it at all. “You knew …” he said quietly.
Rogers pursed his lips. “Pretty sure. I seen nobody on the river that damn clumsy before. Get new people who are awkward sometimes, ain’t used to shiftin’ weight an’ ’ow the boat rocks. But them lot was pretty good at ’andling ’er. Turned fast once they’d rammed us.”
“You saw that?” Monk said curiously.
“Yeah. I remember, ’cos I ain’t never seen that boat before, as I can recall. Saw the stern of ’er. And a picture on it that I’d ’ave known if it were reg’lar.”
Something stirred faintly in Monk’s mind: a recollection of the stern of a boat with something unique painted on it. The whole image was blurry, streaked with the red light of flames in the air. It was the boat he had seen moving away just after the explosion on the Princess Mary, in the four minutes between the eruption of the fire and her final plunge beneath the water.
“What was it like—the picture on the boat?” he asked, his voice cracking as he stared at the ferryman’s eyes. “Describe it!”
Rogers sat motionless. Not even his fingers moved in his lap. “You seen it before?” he said huskily.
“Maybe. What was it like? Describe it as much as you can.”
Rogers concentrated.
“Like an ’orse’s ’ead, with bumps on it, not real. And its body weren’t really there, just neck going inter a sort o’ lump, with a long tail curled in a circle. Something were written inside the circle, numbers I think. Not sure about that. Just saw it for a moment, like.”
“What color was this horse without a body?”
“Pale. Maybe white. An’ … an’ there was something else … can’t bring back what it was …”
There had been a rope around the animal depicted on the side of the boat Monk had seen the night of the explosion, but he kept silent. He didn’t want to prompt Rogers into remembering it …
“It was a rope, I think!” Rogers said suddenly. “Yeah, there was a rope around it! You seen it?”
“Yes! I saw it the night of the sinking, just for a moment in the glare, between the time it exploded and the time she went down. In those minutes the boat was picking up survivors.”
Rogers’s eyes narrowed. “That were quick! Are you sure?”
They sat a couple of feet apart in the summer sun, two men who knew the river. Monk: its crime, its darkness, still learning; Rogers, all his life: its ways, its moods, its people.
There was silence between them. The distant sounds of the river, the shouts, the slurp of water only forty feet away. The crack and clang of machinery could have been in another world.
“That were them, weren’t it?” Rogers said at last. “That boat with the ’orse on it. They picked somebody up out o’ the river before the explosion, didn’t they? An’ then they tried ter kill you—an’ me—’cos you knew summink about them.”
There was no point insulting Rogers by pretending he was wrong. “Yes,” Monk agreed. “I think so. If I draw a rough picture of what I remember, will you tell me if it looks like what you saw?”
Rogers smiled. “Yer’d better. I can’t draw nothin’, one arm’s busted.”
