He was handed a waterproof lantern with a candle in it.
His suit began to inflate slightly as the air expanded it. Now he appreciated why it needed to be so large on him.
Trace was already below him in the water, almost submerged.
The river closed over his head and in moments he was blinded by gloom. The only contact with Trace and the surface was by rope, and he tried to unscramble what the men had told him: Stay calm. Don’t panic. Remember, you are not on your own. Pull on the rope if you’re in trouble. We’ll get you up.
The pressure built up in his eardrums. He swallowed to clear it.
Gradually his sight cleared a little as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. He could make out the form of Trace, coming towards him, taking Monk by the hand.
With leaden feet just touching the muddy bottom, Monk followed after him.
He lost all sense of time. He was amazed how difficult it was to keep his balance. The tide was far more powerful than he had foreseen, pulling one way and another at him as current eddied and swirled, sometimes going one way at chest height, the opposite way at his thighs and knees. More than once he found himself falling and regained his footing with difficulty. And all the time he was acutely aware that only one thin hose of pumped air supported his life, one thin set of ropes could pull him back to the surface.
The ground sloped up beneath his giant boots. They were on the mud bank. It was hard work trying to climb up it. He was sweating as he went, but his hands and feet were cold. The murky water swirled around his head, a brown, blinding mass.
The dim figure of Trace was still just ahead of him, close enough to hold his hand, but was no more than a deepening of the gloom.
Time seemed endless. He longed for light. This was all an idiotic idea. What had made him think the barge had been sunk, simply because he could find no trace of its going back upstream again? And if it were down here, what did that prove? Only that fraud had been the intention all along. Would it prove by whom? Or who had murdered Alberton?
It was impenetrably dark ahead. How long had they been down here?
Trace was still guiding him along, turning slowly in the water, raising his other arm.
Monk lost his balance again. He should have left this to professionals. Except he could not; he must find this himself, hold the proof in his own hands, see everything there was, miss nothing, destroy nothing.
Still holding Monk’s hand, Trace swung his arm around and pointed. Ahead of them was a deeper murk, blocking off even the swirling brown of the water.
Trace started to move again and Monk followed, agonizingly slowly.
Then suddenly his feet were swept from under him and he felt a hard yank on the ropes. Awkwardly he tried to look down at what had caught him. It was the boards of a sunken wreck.
Trace was climbing up onto an angle of the boat.
Monk went after him. The effort to move made his muscles ache. They seemed to be on a deck, slipping slightly as the bow settled deeper into the mud. Moving hand over hand they found the cabin.
It took a long, slow examination, a foot at a time, holding on to each other, to discover what was inside.
It was Trace who found the crates. It was impossible to tell how many there were of them, but moving with infinite slowness they found at least fifty. Far more than Monk had expected. More like the original shipment to Breeland.
But why here at the bottom of the river and not on their way over to America, or to the Mediterranean?
Monk felt Trace’s hand on his shoulder. He could see almost nothing. There was barely sufficient light to tell which way the surface lay.
He reached out for Trace, then drew back his hand, now numb with cold. This was no time to be foolish.
A hand came after him. Then he felt the rest of the body, a shoulder, perhaps a head. It bumped into his helmet and something covered the glass in front of his eyes.
Hair! Loose human hair in the water! Trace was drowning!
Monk reached up and clasped the arm, trying to pull desperately on the rope at the same time. He must get help! What had happened?
There was no resistance on the arm, no weight! God Almighty! It was loose … just an arm, bloated and almost naked! He could dimly make out where his fingers had sunk into the flesh, like squeezing soft fat.
He felt himself gag, and only just controlled himself from retching. The rest of the body was there, almost whole, huge, disintegrating at the touch.
He saw Trace’s light in the gloom, waving around. Another body floated across his vision and disappeared.
It made no sense. Who were they? Why were they dead? He forced himself to govern his revulsion and move slowly after one of them. Deliberately he felt around until he found the head. He shone his light on it, close up, trying not to look at the unrecognizable features. The bullet hole was still there, not easy to see in the white, half-eaten flesh of the forehead, but plain enough in the splintered skull.
It seemed to take endless time swishing around almost helplessly in the current inside the cramped cabin, bumping into each other, into the trapped and hideous corpses, before they ascertained beyond doubt that there were three men, all of whom had been shot dead.
Trace came right up to him, holding Monk by one arm and touching his helmet to Monk’s. When he spoke, incredibly, Monk could hear him almost as normal.
“Shearer!” Trace said distinctly, waving his other arm, with the lantern, in the direction of one of the corpses.
Shearer. Of course! This abomination was why no one had seen Walter Shearer since the night of Alberton’s death. He had been loyal to Alberton after all. He had followed the barge down here, and been shot with these other two. Were they the ones who had actually committed the murders? Why? On whose orders?
He made a sign of acknowledgment, then turned and blundered out of the fearful cabin and stopped abruptly as his air hose tightened and almost broke. Terror stifled his breath. He was covered in cold sweat. Trace! Of course! He would die down here in this filthy water, alone with his murderer. He would never see light again, breathe air, hold Hester in his arms or look at her eyes.
When Monk left home that afternoon, Hester had tried, at first, to busy herself with domestic tasks. Mrs. Patrick arrived at exactly two o’clock, the agreed time. She was a small, thin woman with crisp white hair full of natural curl, and very blue eyes. Hester judged her to be about fifty years old. She had a strong face, albeit a little gaunt, and a brisk manner. She spoke with a slight Scottish burr. Hester could not place it, but she knew it was not Edinburgh. She had too many memories of that city to mistake its tones.
Mrs. Patrick, neat in a white, starched apron, began to clear up the kitchen and consider what other tasks needed doing: clean and black the small stove, put on the laundry, scrub the kitchen floor, clean out the larder and make a note of what needed restocking, take out the rugs, sweep the floors, beat the rugs and return them, hang the laundry out, and do the ironing from the previous day. And of course prepare the dinner.
“What time will Mr. Monk be home?” she enquired while Hester was sitting in the office out of the way, stitching on a shirt button.
“I don’t know,” Hester replied honestly. “He’s gone diving.”
Mrs. Patrick’s eyebrows shot up. “I beg your pardon?”
“He’s gone diving,” Hester explained. “In the river. I’m not sure what he expects to find.”
“Water and mud,” Mrs. Patrick said tartly. “For heaven’s sake, why would he be doing such a thing?” She looked at Hester narrowly, as if she suspected she had been lied to regarding the nature of Monk’s employment.
Hester was very keen to keep Mrs. Patrick’s services. Life had been altogether much easier since her advent. “He is still trying to find out who killed Mr. Alberton in the Tooley Street murder,” she said tentatively.