Corridors of the Night (10 page)

‘Please, Alfred?’ Mrs Roberts said quietly, choking her voice back.

Another moment’s silence, then Roberts backed away, leaving her to pull the door open.

Hester followed Crow into the small front room, which obviously served for dining and any relaxation they might have. Scuff waited outside. The room was sparsely furnished, but tidy and surprisingly clean. Hester looked around. There were no toys in sight, no books except one, which was thin, with its binding glued back together a trifle crookedly. A child’s book.

Mrs Roberts was bony and her hair lank, but her features were good and she could have been in her early thirties. Poverty and child-bearing had extinguished the light in her.

Crow sat down as if he intended to stay. He indicated one of the other chairs to Mrs Roberts to sit also.

‘You have three children?’ he asked her gently.

Hester waited quietly, watching.

‘Six,’ Mrs Roberts answered, and then when she saw his confusion she added, ‘Eldest’s gone her own way. Youngest are still babes. Thank ’eaven.’ The tears welled in her eyes and she spoke with difficulty. ‘It’s Maggie, Charlie and Mike ’as gone.’

‘Did they all go at once?’

She nodded and the tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘They’re good kids, mister. Maggie specially.’ She gulped. ‘Wot’s ’appened to ’em?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ Crow evaded the answer. ‘But I’ll find out.’

‘Tell me the details, Mrs Roberts,’ Hester asked gently. ‘When did you last see them? What time of day? When did you realise they were gone?’

‘What good does it do now?’ Mr Roberts moved closer to his wife, snarling at Crow, ignoring Hester. ‘You’re not gonna do your doctor thing ter make yourself important over our grief! They’re gone.’

‘’E’s only tryin’ ter ’elp, Alfred,’ Mrs Roberts said desperately. ‘Mebbe they in’t gone for good! Mebbe ’e can find ’em!’ Her voice wavered. She looked from Crow to her husband and back again.

‘Don’t accuse me!’ Roberts said furiously. There was rage in his face, and something else Hester took a moment to recognise. It was a wild, unquenchable pain, and only after staring at him and seeing the dull flush on his skin did she realise it was also guilt. He had not reported the children’s disappearance because he had something to do with it.

He had a wife and five children to feed, and he was in financial desperation. Maybe he had sold the children, possibly even to someone who had promised to feed them. She had seen it before. It was a terrible answer, but perhaps all he had. Sell some, to save the others? It was better than losing them all.

She looked at the woman’s face again and saw the haunted misery in it. She was in such pain she could hardly bear it, and she knew there was no escape.

There was no escape for Hester or Crow either.

‘Mr Roberts,’ Crow turned to the man. ‘I have no interest in trying to prosecute you for whatever you may have done with your children. Their lives now are what matter . . . which you are accountable for! Tell me to whom you sold them, for how much, and what they told you they were going to do with them.’

Mrs Roberts did not even look at her husband. Guilt for the silence was consuming her also, even though she might have said nothing so as to protect him, and therefore the remaining infants.

Slowly and painfully Roberts described the man who had approached him and offered to buy the children, feed and care for all of them, so they could be companions for an elderly lady in hospital, who had no children or grandchildren of her own.

‘And you believed him?’ Crow raised his black eyebrows.

Roberts avoided his wife’s eye and totally disregarded Hester.

‘’Course I did. ’E were a gentleman. Said they’d be fed the best food, regular, and sleep in proper beds. I can’t give ’em that!’

There was no point in arguing. The truth was only too bitterly obvious. Was it a crime? Perhaps. Who would do differently, given such a choice?

Crow stood up slowly. He seemed to be considering saying something more, then changed his mind. He looked beyond Roberts and spoke to his wife.

‘What are their names?’

‘Charlie, Maggie and Mike,’ she replied, staring at him with desperation in her eyes.

‘They’re all right, for now,’ he said. ‘We’ll try to see that they stay that way.’

They went outside into the darkening evening. Neither of them spoke, but Crow touched his hand to Hester’s shoulder for a moment.

Scuff moved into step behind them.

At the same time that Hester, Scuff and Crow were walking along the High Street in the Isle of Dogs, Monk and Orme were rowing easily, smoothly over the water towards the Customs and Excise office in the Pool of London. The evening air was soft, filled with the sounds and smells of incoming tide, salt and tar, river mud, fish.

Around them the hulls of ocean-going ships loomed up in the sunset haze, sails furled and lashed to the spars.

‘Dawn is the only other time as good as this,’ Orme said with a slow smile. ‘Good as it is at home, quiet; long, flat marshes with birds flying over, thousands of them, black against the sky. Sometimes you can hear the creak of their wings, you know?’

‘Yes, I do,’ Monk agreed. ‘It’s a good sound.’

‘I’ll still miss these,’ Orme said ruefully, gazing at the huge hulls resting almost motionless on the flat tide. ‘They’ve been round the world, and back. And my dreams with them.’

‘You can always come up here if you want to,’ Monk reminded him.

‘I’ll think about it,’ Orme replied. ‘That’s what Devon used to say. Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?’

Monk thought back. He could see Devon’s face vividly that last time they met, before Devon took the step down the river with all that terrible death in the hold, and set fire to it, sacrificing himself so they would all be safe.

He had left a request that Monk should replace him in command. Orme had honoured that, and supported Monk through all his early, stumbling leadership trials. Now Orme deserved to step down with honour, and the gratitude of the River Police, and sit by the riverside with his daughter and his new grandchild.

‘I’ll miss you,’ Monk said.

‘For a while,’ Orme agreed with some satisfaction. ‘Hooper’s a good man. But he won’t watch for you the way I did. He’ll push you. Maybe you’re ready for that, now.’

‘I’d better be,’ Monk agreed, but with a sudden chill of loneliness. He could not tell Orme how much he would miss him; it would not be fair to cast that shadow over his retirement.

He dragged the oar a little and Orme lengthened his stroke to pull the boat up to the steps. Monk stepped ashore and looped the rope around the bollard. Orme followed after him.

The plan was already made. They needed only McNab’s co-operation to keep the raid secret from the rest of the Customs and Excise. There was no need for them to confer again.

They walked up the path, across the road and into the Customs office. Monk stated their names and ranks.

‘Yes, sir,’ the man at the desk replied. ‘That’ll be the second door on the right, one floor up, sir.’

Monk and Orme followed the man’s directions up the stairs and knocked on the door with McNab’s name on it. Perhaps that should have told him something. He had never bothered to have a plate on his own door. Everyone who mattered knew where to find him.

McNab obliged him to wait several moments before he answered. He was a stocky man, a little less than Monk’s height, but with a powerful body that strained his uniform into awkward shapes across the shoulders. His hair was thinning and he had it carefully combed.

There seemed for an instant something familiar about him, then Monk dismissed it as being merely that he resembled many others, a type often found in the police, or the army.

Monk introduced himself again, and then Orme.

‘I know who you are,’ McNab replied. There was no pleasure in his voice, no sense of an old colleague met with again. Usually it was Orme who made this connection with the senior Excise officer. Their relationship was not comfortable, but it was easy with use. And yet Monk must surely have met him in the past, in all his years in the Metropolitan Police.

Monk felt a twinge of warning, and ignored it. He could not afford to quarrel with this man. On the river, in particular, they had too many cases in common. He drew in his breath to state his reason for having come.

McNab pre-empted him.

‘I know all about your gunrunning ship,’ he said aggressively. ‘Should by rights be our case. Smuggling is Customs and Excise, as you well know! But this one’ll hit the news, if it’s done right.’ A slight touch of amusement was in his face. ‘Or wrong. They’ll make a meal of that, too.’

It was a long time since Monk had met an old enemy who knew him, but of whom he had no recollection. What was it with McNab? Had they been rivals? Enemies? Had Monk wronged him in some way? He knew enough to know he was not proud of everything in his past, and there were so many ghosts whose faces he did not see clearly, just an impression here and there, a familiar turn of phrase, a reference that struck a chord, and then was lost again.

He was right back in that open, vulnerable place he had been when he first started trying to make his way, blindly; with a past he did not know.

‘Then we had better get it right,’ Monk replied, keeping his temper with difficulty. ‘I am informing you of our plans, as a professional courtesy, and hoping that you will be able to assist us with another boat, and just three or four armed men. These gunrunners have a lot to lose and if they have a good watch out, the battle could be fierce.’

Now McNab’s smile was overly hard.

‘Indeed it could, Mr Monk,’ he agreed. ‘You’d better tell me exactly what you have planned, or we could end up shooting each other! And wouldn’t that be a sad end to such an . . . interesting career.’ He met Monk’s eyes with a brittle smile.

Now Monk had no doubt that he and McNab had known each other before his accident, and perhaps McNab’s dislike of him was founded in genuine wrongs. That was unalterable now, but what must be faced was the possibility that McNab would take out his dislike of Monk on his men as well. It looked very much as if this was his chance for a long-delayed revenge.

Monk would not let his men pay for offences they were no part of, if indeed they existed. And this was far too important and potentially dangerous an operation to allow room for anyone’s personal feelings, justified or not.

‘Then let’s make damn sure it works, Mr McNab,’ Monk said softly. ‘I can’t think you want those guns on the street any more than I do.’

McNab evaded a reply. ‘So let me have the details, if you please?’ He looked at Orme.

Stiffly, Orme obliged.

When Monk got home that night it was far later than he had intended, and he was so tired he had difficulty concentrating. He had partial memories of McNab, but he could not determine if they were recent or not. It was just McNab’s face, angry, his eyes filled with loathing. Had that been real? Or was it tricks of the shadows, and half-recalled emotion?

Hester and Scuff had already eaten, and Monk had bought a ham sandwich from a pedlar along the river-bank. Hester made him a cup of tea and he ate a slice of cake with it. She started to say something to him, but she stopped again, just smiling at him and touching him lightly on the cheek.

‘Go to bed,’ she said gently. ‘It can wait.’

MONK WAS on the river early, well before dawn the next morning. A clear sky was just paling in the east and the shadows were still long melting into one another. At a glance the boat where he sat would have seemed like any other returning from a long night’s patrol, until one noticed that there were three men in it, not the usual two, one for each oar, and another crouched in the stern. They were closely followed by a second heavy, two-man boat also with a third man in the stern. They were picking their way towards the three-masted schooner anchored out in the stream. It was one of the many still laden with cargo, waiting its turn to off-load at one of the docks.

It was Orme who sat in the stern of the first boat, facing Monk, his grizzled face turned downstream, watching the distance close between them and their quarry. The riding lights of the schooner marked its position clearly, but as the darkness faded in the east its masts were black against the horizon and its fat, wide-bellied shape was easy to see.

Monk and Bathurst moved in comfortable unison, guiding the boat through the quickly running tide. The other boat slid just as easily twenty yards away, Laker and Hooper at the oars. If all went according to plan, they would board just as the light was breaking and the dock was visible. They were coming from the west, in the last of the night shadows. If McNab were right, she was carrying smuggled cargo. If it had been brandy or tobacco, Monk would have been happy to leave it to McNab and the rest of the Excise men, but this was a gunrunner, a different thing altogether. A thousand rifles like the one he had seen in the Wapping Station, with ammunition, could start a small war on the streets of London. They could even provoke street battles for their possession the moment they landed.

The River Police were almost in the lee of the schooner now. Monk could feel the difference in the drag on the oar as they were sheltered from the swifter-moving current. He nodded at Bathurst and saw him shorten his stroke so the boat would not swing round.

Monk raised his arm in signal. Orme stood, his balance perfect; the rock of the boat, the movement of wind and tide were second nature to him. He swung the grappling iron and let it fly. It landed, caught the rail, and he pulled it taut.

At the bow of the other boat, Laker did the same and secured the rope.

Bathurst sat back. Monk had given him his orders, no argument. He had to wait with the boats.

Without hesitation, Orme went straight up the rope, pulling himself up the ship’s side and over the railing, grasping at it and heaving himself over.

At the bow rope, Monk could see Hooper’s long figure going up, but more cautiously, hesitating before he swung over.

Monk glanced back, expecting to see Orme at the top, but there was nothing. What had he missed? He peered upwards. Still nothing.