Blood on the Water (25 page)

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.”

“Your left arm,” Monk observed.

“Yeah. I’m left-’anded.”

Monk took out his notebook and pencil and made a pretty good sketch of the image he had seen for those few moments after the explosion. He turned it round for Rogers to look at.

Rogers’s face paled. “Yeah, that’s it, pretty exact. You get yer men ter find that boat, yer got ’oo sank the
Princess Mary
—an’ all them poor souls on board.”

W
HEN HE RETURNED TO
Wapping Monk told Orme and Hooper about his visit to Rogers, and showed them the sketch he had made. It was Hooper who identified it.

“It’s a seahorse,” he said with interest. “It’s real. Have ’em in the waters of the Caribbean.”

“You been there?” Orme asked skeptically. He liked Hooper, even respected him, but he did not pretend to understand his nature. He distrusted men who told tall stories about faraway places and seemed to have no family or roots that they spoke of. Never mind Hooper’s odd sense of humor.

Hooper gave him a sudden, wide smile. “Long time ago. When I was at sea.” He passed the sketch back to Monk. “We’ll find that boat, unless they scrapped her. Even if they did, someone’ll know who had it. We’re a whole lot closer.”

Orme looked at Monk, his blue eyes narrow, careful. “You still look rough, Mr. Monk. They damn near killed you, not to mention Rogers. Innocent man, an’ it’s all the same to them. But they took a
risk, right out there on the open water, and still almost daylight.” He shook his head. “You never said where you were that day, or the day before. Who’d yer get so close to that they did that?”

Monk hesitated. It had been going around in his mind and he was not yet sure if he wished to tell anyone else. It was ugly, and he was uncertain. And at the back of his mind he was aware how close he had come to being killed. It was dangerous knowledge. He did not want Orme to see how rattled he was, how suddenly the knowledge of death had made life almost unbearably sweet. For years he had avoided such awareness. It was crippling, robbing him of the nerve he needed to do his job.

Orme was still looking at him, almost unblinkingly.

“Someone you respect, sir?” Hooper put it into words. “You don’t want it to be true?”

Monk was startled. He also owed Hooper better than this. “Not at all! I don’t want it to be true because it would go so deep and maybe so far to the top that we’d bring down a lot of people, if we could prove it.” That also was totally true. The rest—the doubts, the knowledge of pain and fallibility—a man fit to lead kept to himself.

“And if we couldn’t?” Orme asked.

“Maybe they’d bring us down,” Monk replied quietly.

Hooper tensed. He was a big man, rangy, usually quiet, but now his anger was palpable in the air. “Can’t let that happen,” he replied. “We can’t let ourselves be beat, or there’s no more decency left. No one’s safe.”

“You’re right,” Monk agreed. “We have to win. Find that—what did you call it—‘seahorse’? Quietly. Find who owns it, who uses it, and be very careful. Remember, they’ve already killed close to two hundred people. They won’t think twice about killing you, if they think they need to.”

Orme drew in his breath to make light of the idea, then changed his mind. Since the birth of his granddaughter, life had become sweeter to him also, and more precious. Nothing was to be taken quite so lightly.

“Yes, sir,” he agreed, and Monk heard the gravity in his voice.

M
ONK HAD RETRIEVED THE
passenger list from the
Princess Mary
again, and was happy to sit down to study it. He was annoyed with himself for feeling so tired, and he was increasingly aware of how persistently his ribs hurt. He was unpleasantly conscious of every breath.

Certainly he worked hard. He had many late nights and early mornings. He was often tired, and far more often than most people, he was cold and wet. Working on the river was arduous and sometimes dangerous. But he was in the best health he had been in his life. He could row all day and be no more than agreeably tired at the end of it. He could always afford to eat, and his house was warm and extremely comfortable. He did not worry about being able to keep it.

Above all, the deep, wounding loneliness that had dogged his half-remembered past, the dark places within himself that he dared not look at, were no longer there. He had done nothing to earn or deserve such wealth. The fear of losing it, of being somehow unworthy, was more frightening than anything his past imagination could have created. No one could deserve such riches, but one could at the very least treasure them.

He had to avoid the thought but it was there in his mind—pervasive, undeniable—that he must take the risks his duty demanded. It was the price of all he valued. Second best was never, ever good enough.

He read the passenger list over carefully, then again, even more carefully. He already knew who most of these people were: ordinary men and women who had saved up to take a river cruise perhaps to celebrate some special occasion—a birthday or anniversary, an engagement, anticipation of a happy future. Could he exclude all the families from suspicion? Most of them came from parts of London close to the riverbank. Their families would be known to neighbors, their lives easily investigated. They were shopkeepers, clerks, petty government officials in town halls, merchants who had done well, good tradesmen.

Hester had told him that there were also street women paid to attend. They must have been for the bachelor groups, and perhaps wealthier men who had not taken wives or fiancées with them. Which among them could have any imaginable connection to the explosion?

Comparing those with the lists of the dead was the place to start. The victims had all been identified and buried. In some cases their affairs had been settled and their circumstances known. He could probably rule out a hundred people that way.

It took him the rest of the day to be certain of his conclusions, and it was well into the following morning before he could look at the remaining fifty-six people and begin to see which among them might have been the intended victim—if that theory were indeed reasonable and not a product of his desperate imagination.

He was looking for wealth—connections of any sort with Egypt or the Middle East in general: investment in shipping, either to own or to use the great cargo vessels that sailed around the Cape of Good Hope to India, China, or the great trading ports such as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Interests in passenger liners must be included, and possibly connections with South Africa and the ports along its coast, which would no longer be used by ships taking the vastly different and faster route through the Mediterranean and the new canal. It was tedious and time-consuming, but he could not afford to miss any detail.

He was so tired his eyes felt gritty, and he was on his fifth or sixth mug of tea, feeling the whole exercise was pointless, when Hooper came in. His face was lined, his shirt grimy and jacket hanging loose, but there was a spring in his step.

Monk looked up at him, the papers sliding out of his hands. Suddenly his mouth was dry. He took a breath, and then did not ask.

“Got him,” Hooper said, his face lighting with a rare smile. “Feller called Gamal Sabri. Egyptian. Been over here for several years, but still got strong connections to the places along the new canal route.”

“For hire?” Monk asked, sitting upright again. “Or for himself?”

“For hire.” Hooper sat down in the seat opposite Monk’s desk,
sprawling a little as if he were too tired to sit up straight. “Nasty little bastard. Got a few other marks against his name, but nothing we could prove before.”

“Can we prove this?” Monk felt his muscles tighten. He could not bear the thought that they might actually know who had sunk the
Princess Mary
and not be able to convict him of it. It was only an idea on the edge of his imagination, yet already he was thinking of ways to get around a lack of proof and still get a legal verdict against Sabri that would withstand any appeal. He despised himself for it. It was frightening that he could entertain the thought so easily. “Are you sure?” he asked Hooper.

Hooper nodded. “Yes, sir. Found the boat. Called the
Seahorse
. Got the painting on the back just like your drawing, but more than that: the bow’s been smashed in and repaired within the last few days. Good job done, but the paint’s still different, and you can see it. It’s for show. Took a good look inside, and it’s been hit pretty hard. Can’t tell at a glance, but you can if you look.”

“How is this Sabri connected to the boat?” Monk was almost afraid to ask. They were all too keen to succeed, he most of all.