Anne Perry: Blood on the Water

From all of the survivors, the story was the same. They could offer no details that could help make sense of the explosion; just the horror of what they had experienced, the darkness and cold and fear that they would die in the water. By dawn there was nothing else to ask, nothing to hear. Monk went back to the station at Wapping to snatch an hour or two of sleep, and to send a message to Hester that he was unhurt.

He found Orme standing before the potbellied stove warming himself as if he, too, had just come in. He straightened up as soon as Monk entered, and moved a little to one side to make room for him.

“Learn anything useful?” Monk asked.

Orme huddled further into his jacket, which was pulled up around his ears.

“No, sir, nothing as I didn’t expect-poor devils. All on deck when it exploded. Everyone agrees it was in the bow. Just blew the whole thing off, but we knew that. Took in water like a scoop.”

“No one saw anybody acting strangely?” Monk persisted. He did not look at Orme’s face. He did not want to see the emotion in it. Only two days ago he had been celebrating the birth of his first granddaughter, wanting to share his happiness with everyone. Now his voice was hoarse, as if his throat hurt.

“No, sir. Too busy having fun, dancing, joking, doing what people do on a cruise.” He took a long breath.

“No one from below deck?” Monk asked. They must keep talking; silence would be worse.

“Not that I saw,” Orme answered. “Apparently there was some kind of fancy party going on down there. Special guests only. Best champagne and food.” His lips tightened. “We’ll get a list of them come daylight. It’ll be bad.”

“I know. Get an hour or two with your head down. We’ll need all our wits when we have to haul the thing up. I’ve never lifted a big one. How do they do it?”

“What?”

“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.