There was a door down there, but it was boarded shut, big planks nailed across it. No way out.
He turned to head back up the stairs, but a sudden whistle deafened him. The policeman was only a few feet away. Maybe he hadn’t seen where Sherlock had gone, but if Sherlock poked his head up above the level of the pavement then he would be noticed.
A second whistle, further away, and a third. Was the whole of Moscow chasing him?
Approaching footsteps. Just a few seconds and he would be seen.
He looked desperately back towards the blocked door, hoping that there might be a gap between the boards large enough for him to crawl through. Then he noticed an iron manhole cover set into the ground. He threw himself to his knees and tried to pull it up. The manhole cover was heavy and slick with ice, and his fingers were slippery with sweat. He managed to raise it by an inch or so, but it fell back with a loud, dull clang. Desperately he scrabbled at it again. This time, when he managed to prise it up, he slipped his fingers beneath it. If it fell again it might break them.
With his last reserves of strength he pulled the cover up and slid it to one side. A smell of dank earth and sewage rose up, making him choke. The meagre light from the clouded sky illuminated the first few rungs of an iron ladder.
He had no choice. Swinging his legs over the edge, he started to descend. When his face was level with the ground he grabbed the edge of the cover and pulled it back across. There was a handhold underneath, and he managed to pull it all the way across so that it settled into its previous position.
From above, he hoped, it would look as if the manhole cover had never been removed.
His intention had been to stay there in the darkness for as long as necessary, clinging to the iron ladder, but it was not to be. The rungs were mossy and wet, and his fingers had no strength left in them. Just as he heard a set of boots hit the manhole cover and stop, his fingers suddenly spasmed and let go of the rung. He fell into darkness, trying not to cry out.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sherlock braced himself for a bone-shattering landing on brick or stone, but he fell into water. Ice-cold, running water.
It was barely three feet deep. His back touched the bottom and he thrashed his way to the surface, choking and spluttering. He braced himself against the flow, one foot in front of the other.
Darkness surrounded him. He stood up. The cold sapped the warmth and the strength from him. He tried to touch the sides of whatever sewer or drain he had fallen into, but there was nothing. The sound of the water was odd as welclass="underline" it didn’t echo the way it should have done in a brick-lined tunnel.
As his eyes got used to the darkness he realized that there was light down there after all. The manhole cover above him was perforated with tiny holes, through which narrow shafts of sunlight shone downward. Further ahead, and behind, there were similar patches of illumination. Wherever it was that he had found himself, at least he would be able to navigate.
He could see that he was in a fast-flowing stream of water. On either side, about ten feet away, instead of the curved brick walls he would have expected of a sewer or a drain there was a bank of stones and muddy earth that sloped away from him, home to the occasional anaemic weed and tufts of ghostly white grass. At the top of the slopes, a few feet of brickwork supported a brick ceiling that stretched away in front and behind.
Moss dangled in long fronds from the brick ceiling. They looked to Sherlock like the tentacles of some bizarre creature that was blindly feeling for its prey.
A sudden grating noise made him flinch. Directly above him, the manhole cover was being opened. A pillar of bright light shone down on to the muddy water in which he stood. Quickly he splashed a few paces in the direction that the water was flowing so that he couldn’t be spotted.
‘Where is he?’ a whispery voice asked from above. It was speaking in French, but Sherlock detected a strong accent. The man was probably Russian by birth. ‘Did he go down there?’
‘I can’t see him,’ another, gruffer voice, replied in the same language but without the accent. ‘What is this thing – some kind of sewer?’
‘Don’t you know anything?’ the first voice whispered. ‘This is the old River Neglinnaya. It flows into the Moscow River ’bout a mile downstream. It was covered over fifty years ago or more when they rebuilt the city.’
Sherlock looked around. A river rather than a sewer? It made sense. Somewhere upstream it must have been out in the open, but here, for fifty years, it had been locked in darkness.
The Moscow River was just a mile or so downstream. He could make it!
‘He must’ve gone down here,’ the gruff voice said. ‘There’s nowhere else he could have gone. But did he go upstream or downstream?’
‘Downstream,’ the other man whispered. ‘He’ll follow the flow of the water. No point fighting it, after all.’ He paused, thinking. ‘You go down there and follow him. Kill him if you can; let the body rot in the water.’
‘Why didn’t we just grab him in the street?’ the gruff voice asked. ‘Why go through all that palaver with pretending that he was a thief?’
‘Grabbing him in the street would have attracted attention,’ the whispery voice replied. ‘Someone might have interfered. There’re police all over the city. Instructions were to get him out of the way. Having him arrested was the best option, but now he’s out of sight we can make sure he’s out of the way – forever. Now go down there after him.’
‘Are you joking? That water must be near freezing!’
‘You got a better idea?’
‘Yeah – you go!’
The man with the whispery voice snorted. You want to talk to the policeman, you go ahead. He’s not going to listen to you the way he would listen to me – a native – born Russian! And besides, we’ve already established that it was my wallet the kid took. How’s it going to look if I suddenly vanish and you take over?’
‘All right.’ The man with the gruff voice sounded cowed. ‘What are you goin’ to do?’
‘I’ll get this idiot policeman to organize a search above ground, along the line of the Neglinnaya. We’ll meet you at the Moscow River outlet.’
Sherlock’s mind raced. He had to get moving, and he had to start out now, before the thug with the gruff voice started down the ladder!
He moved away, trying not to make any splashes as he moved. The cold water sloshed around his legs, infiltrating his shoes and making his socks squish as he walked. He could smell a rancid odour: it may not have been a sewer that he was wading through, but he had a feeling some people were using it as one.
Behind him he heard noises as the gruff-voiced man slowly lowered himself down the ladder. He must have slipped as well, because there was a sudden shout, echoing off the brick ceiling, and moments later a splash. A wave of water washed past Sherlock, pushing him onward. Inwardly he cheered. Maybe he’d got lucky; maybe the man had drowned! Then he heard a voice spluttering in the darkness, and his momentary good spirits subsided. He was going to have to do this the hard way.
Sensing, rather than seeing, the river bank to either side, Sherlock wondered whether he could climb up it and get out of the water, but he quickly rejected the idea. From what he had seen the banks were steep and muddy. Chances were he would just slide down and into the water, and he’d lose a few minutes of precious time. No: attractive as the option sounded, he had to keep moving through the water. The cold, smelly water.
He realized that he was nearing another manhole cover in the brick ceiling. The weak sunshine trickling through the metal disc would illuminate his shoulders and the top of his head if he wasn’t careful, giving away his position. He moved to one side, closer to the right-hand bank.