I showered and changed my clothes at West End Central but I felt that I could still smell the ancient stink of subterranean London on my skin. MIR-1 was deserted apart from Hitchens, who was sitting at a workstation reading his Peter Ackroyd book. I stared up at the great map of London that covers one wall of MIR-1.
‘Where does it come out?’ I said.
‘What?’ He didn’t look up from his book.
‘This river. The River Tyburn.’ I took a step towards the map. ‘The Tyburn is a tributary of the Thames, right?’
Now he was looking up.
‘Yes.’
‘So it doesn’t flow into the sea,’ I said. ‘And it doesn’t disappear underground. At some point the River Tyburn flows into the River Thames.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Where?’
He quickly pulled his iPad from his saddlebag and found an ancient map of London.
‘The Rocque map of London in 1746,’ he said. And then, ‘Vauxhall Bridge.’
‘So the Tyburn flows into the Thames at Vauxhall Bridge?’
‘Yes.’
‘It will be quicker if we take your bike,’ I said.
Vauxhall Bridge rose up before us as Hitchens tore down Millbank on his old 500cc Royal Enfield with me riding pillion.
Downriver the sun was sinking behind Battersea Power Station. On the far side of the Thames I could see the great tiered building housing MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, at Vauxhall Cross. Hitchens steered his bike in the empty forecourt outside Tate Britain and we left it there.
We found some stone steps that led down to the Thames Path, the walkway that runs along the riverbank. I started towards the bridge, Hitchens struggling to keep up with me.
‘Down there,’ he panted. ‘A culvert.’
I was directly opposite the MI6 building when I saw it. A large round hole punched into reinforced concrete, big enough for a man to stand up in, pouring a shallow but steady stream of water into the Thames. The culvert was one level lower than the Thames Path, and I realised that it was invisible from the road.
‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘That’s the Tyburn?’
I don’t know what I had been expecting.
His breathless voice was behind me. ‘According to Rocque—’
But I was already going down the steps that led right on to the riverbank and so I missed what Rocque had noted in the eighteenth century. I stepped into the culvert and the water covered my shoes. I took another step and peered into blackness. But the concrete culvert looked too modern to mark the end of a river that had flowed here for thousands of years.
Hitchens hesitated at the mouth of the culvert, keeping his feet dry.
‘This can’t be it,’ I shouted, and my voice echoed back to me.
‘What’s that?’
‘I said—’
And then I saw the body.
One arm reaching from the deeper darkness of the culvert. The limb bare, white and – as I edged through the water towards it – I saw the ghastly scars of heroin addiction, the track marks on the limb looking like a child’s join-the-dots game.
Hitchens called out to me. ‘Detective?’
‘This is it!’ I shouted.
I went further into the black hole and the water was deeper here, over my shoes, and much colder. And there he was – Darren Donovan, perhaps ten metres back from the Thames, his cropped head face down in the black waters of the Tyburn.
Then the darkness suddenly rose up and slammed into me, knocking the wind out of me and throwing me backwards against the curved wall of the concrete culvert.
I banged my head hard against the wall and sat down in the water with a thump, the base of my spine smacking against the reinforced concrete.
And then I felt the hands around my throat.
I was thrown onto my back as if I was weightless, the hands never letting go, digging deep into my flesh, their grip tighter now.
Large hands. Strong hands. Trying to kill me, trying to choke the life out of me.
I stared up at the large figure in the darkness, and I kicked out wildly, clawing at the hands around my neck and then raking the thick muscled arms, reaching for where I knew his eyes would be but unable to find them, unable to get even close, all the strength ebbing out of me with every passing second.
Already my breath had stopped. Already the blood had stopped.
‘Detective?’ Hitchens said at the entrance to the culvert. ‘Max?’
The hands let me go.
I was aware of the dark bulky figure splashing towards the light. I tried to call out to Hitchens but found I could not speak. I tried to get up but found I could not move. Sickness overwhelmed me. Far away someone was calling my name.
But I was bone-tired, suddenly far too exhausted to respond, and so I lay back and closed my eyes for just a little while, needing a moment before I got up and went on, my head resting in the ancient waters of the Tyburn.
PART TWO
The CroSS-beam aNd the rOpe
14
I sat on a bench by the Thames watching the sun go down in a blaze of red over Chelsea while a couple of detective inspectors from New Scotland Yard did the hot debrief, the interview that takes place in the golden hour after a major incident. There wasn’t much to tell them but we went over it again and again and again as the sun sunk lower over West London.
‘He was big,’ I said. ‘Freakishly big. Abnormally strong. Tossed me about as if I weighed nothing.’
One of the detective inspectors stifled a yawn. The other one closed his notebook.
‘Funny thing is,’ he said, ‘that when you get dumped on your arse, they tend to get bigger and stronger every time you tell the story. You want us to drive you to an A&E?’
I shook my head.
‘Nothing broken,’ I said, and they both gave me their cocky Scotland Yard grins.
* * *
The press were waiting for me when I arrived at West End Central in the morning.
They were milling around and sucking down caffeine under the big blue lamp that hangs above the entrance to 27 Savile Row, young journalists and older photographers, maybe twenty of them, sent out to collect whatever scraps they could on the story that was dominating the rolling news. They stirred at the sight of me. I recognised Scarlet Bush but I did not stop walking. They all crowded in with their little digital microphones and their cameras and their questions.
‘DC Wolfe? Scarlet Bush, Daily Post. Is it true that you were assaulted when you found the body of Darren Donovan? What’s that mark around your throat, Max? Did the Hanging Club do that to you?’
They followed me inside. A uniformed sergeant, red-faced with irritation, stepped out from behind his desk and began shooing them back. The questions became nastier when they knew I wasn’t going to answer them.
‘Is the Hanging Club doing a better job than the police at cleaning the streets, Max?’
‘How does it feel to be hunting heroes?’
‘What about the victims? Do you ever think about them?’
‘Did you see one of them, Max? Did you see one of the Hanging Club?’
No, I thought. But I know a man who did.
In a quiet corner of MIR-1, Professor Adrian Hitchens sat working with a police sketch artist.
‘No, no . . . those eyes are wrong . . . can you erase that and try again? Could we possibly have another go at the mouth?’
It’s never easy. Anyone who sits down with a police sketch artist has been a witness to a serious crime. They are attempting to recall a face that they saw for only moments, usually during a criminal act that was accompanied by extreme violence. In the case of our history man, he was attempting to remember the face of someone who had come barrelling out of a culvert without warning and knocked him flat on his ample backside.
I nodded to the police sketch artist, a woman around thirty who looked as though she had the patience of a Zen monk. She had probably grown up wanting to be the next Picasso or Edward Hopper.