by Andrew Lane
At each junction Sherlock noticed wooden booths occupied by men in grey uniforms and black helmets. They had swords strapped to their sides. The ones that weren’t actually asleep at their post just looked bored and cold.
Checking his watch, Sherlock decided that it was time he headed back. As he drew level with a side street, he stopped. Someone walking close behind him collided with him. He turned, already apologizing, but the man pushed past him with a muffled curse. At the same time he noticed an animated conversation happening at one of the wooden booths. A man in a heavy coat and a hat with fur earflaps was talking to the policeman in the booth, gesturing wildly with both hands. Sherlock was about to turn away when the man in the furs turned and pointed towards him. The policeman stared darkly at Sherlock.
A shiver ran through Sherlock’s body.
The man in furs appeared to be saying that something had been taken from him. He was gesturing to a pocket on his coat, sliding his hand in and out as if miming the fact that he had been pickpocketed. He pointed at Sherlock again. Sherlock glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone else was around, anyone that the man could have been pointing at, but there was nobody within ten yards.
Sherlock spread his arms wide in a gesture of innocence, gazing at the policeman and hoping the man would just wave him away, but instead the policeman gestured imperiously to him to approach the booth.
Sherlock switched his gaze to the man who had made the complaint. Just for a second, he smiled. It was the smile of a man who had pulled off a particularly cunning trick and was waiting to see the inevitable outcome. When he noticed that Sherlock was watching him the smile vanished from his face like a picture wiped from a blackboard.
Struck by a sudden and very unwelcome thought, Sherlock plunged his hand into his jacket pocket. His fingers closed on an object that hadn’t been there before: something square, something made of leather.
A wallet.
Suddenly it was all crystal clear to him. The whole thing was a set-up! The man who had barged into Sherlock’s back and walked off must have slipped the wallet into his pocket. The other man – the one talking to the policeman – hadn’t been robbed at all, but the moment he had seen the wallet slipped into Sherlock’s pocket he had gone across to the policeman and made his complaint, singling Sherlock out as the thief. And when Sherlock’s pockets were checked a wallet would be found in them, and the man who had made the complaint would undoubtedly recognize it as his, whether it was or not. He would be thrown into prison, and the evidence was completely against him.
This was a nightmare!
The policeman gestured again, more sternly this time. Sherlock’s heart started to race. He could feel sweat gathering damply at his armpits and down the centre of his back, sticking his shirt to his skin. Arrested in a foreign country for theft? He would be lucky if he ever saw daylight again, and that was even assuming that he got a fair trial. Given the clever way the whole thing had been set up, the chances were that every possible way out had been anticipated. They – whoever they were – might have paid off the judge, the jury, everyone. And that was assuming they even had judges and juries in Russia. He had no idea how the justice system worked. He had a feeling, based on things he had read in the newspapers back home, that Tsarist Russia worked on the basis of secret police and people vanishing off the streets and never being seen again.
He could run, but they must have anticipated that as well. He glanced around, trying to work out who in the surrounding throng of shoppers was part of this conspiracy.
To his left, a man in a black coat and fur hat turned his head away when Sherlock’s gaze passed across him. To his right, a teenage boy with a smallpox-scarred face glared sullenly at him, and a woman with her hands inside a fur muffler suddenly took an interest in the tobacconist’s stall she was standing by.
Three people at least. Three people who would stop him if he tried to run.
He desperately scanned his immediate vicinity again, hoping against hope that he would see a means of escape, but there wasn’t one. He wasn’t close enough to any of the stalls to snatch something up and use it as a weapon, and he was pretty sure that nobody near him would come to his aid if he yelled for help.
The policeman was striding across to where Sherlock stood. His sword was by his side but he was swinging a long stick in his right hand. The scowl on his face suggested that whatever Sherlock did he was intending to use the stick within the next few minutes.
A sudden gust of wind bought a smell of spiced tea to Sherlock’s nostrils. He turned his head. The tea seller was moving through the crowd a few steps away.
Without thinking, Sherlock took two steps and shoved the man in the small of the back.
The tea seller sprawled forward, pushing his cart away as he fell. The cart rolled on for a few feet and then hit a loose cobblestone. One wheel jolted upward and the cart tipped over. The silvery urn toppled over. The top flew off as it hit the cobbled street and a flood of brown tea spilt everywhere, immediately turning the snow to brown slush. People jumped out of the way of the steaming liquid. Some of them got splashed, and they cried out as it scalded their legs.
While the three watchers and the policeman were distracted, Sherlock slipped away through the crowd. As he moved he tried to make himself smaller, and to make sure that there was always a group of people between him and the people who wanted him, but there were five of them at least and he couldn’t block all of the possible sight lines as he moved.
A shout went up behind him. It was the policeman! He had seen Sherlock, and he pushed his way roughly through the crowd in pursuit. People stumbled and fell as he lashed out at them with his wooden stick.
Sherlock broke into a run, heading back the way he had come. If he could just lose them for a couple of minutes he could get back to the hotel and warn Mycroft.
A shrill whistle ripped through the air. Sherlock glanced back over his shoulder. The policeman was still in pursuit.
The cobbles shifted unevenly beneath Sherlock’s feet, and he nearly fell over. Catching himself, he looked ahead. There was a wooden booth on the corner ahead of him, and the policeman inside had already emerged and was looking in his direction. He must have heard the whistle.
Ahead was blocked, and so was behind. Sherlock swerved to the right, looking for a doorway or an alleyway through which he might escape. All he saw were shops and brightly painted signs. The colours began to blur as he ran. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
Suddenly an opportunity presented itself: a set of steps leading down to a basement area. Desperately praying that it wasn’t a dead end, that whatever door was down there wasn’t locked, Sherlock ran for the steps. He grabbed the railing at the top, swung round and flung himself down into the bricked basement area.
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 cloud
ed 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 well: 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.
In the weak light that filtered down like solid rain Sherlock could see the rungs of a ladder that descended from the manhole. It was supported at the top, and was probably set into the bed of the river. The rungs and the uprights looked corroded: rusty and damp. For a second Sherlock debated whether to climb the ladder and try to shift the manhole cover from beneath, but he quickly pushed the idea away. Too much could go wrong. His pursuer would see him the moment he stepped into the shaft of light and would just pull him off the ladder. Even if by some fluke he got to the top he might not be able to shift the heavy cover, or if he did he might just emerge into the midst of the search party in the street above. No – like it or not, he had to keep going.
Sherlock’s fingers trailed in the water as he pushed his way through the resisting river. Something brushed against his hand and he jerked it away with a muffled cry. In his mind he imagined it was a rat, swimming through the polluted waters, but maybe it was just a piece of rubbish that had been thrown away through a grating, or a hole in the street. Maybe. But his heart was still hammering like a steam engine and his hands were shaking.
The river bed beneath his feet was uneven and muddy. His feet kept on getting stuck and he had to strain to pull them free. God alone knew what state his shoes were going to be in by the time he got out – if he ever got out. There were plants down there in the water as well, weeds that kept tangling around his ankles and slowing him down even more. He had to jerk his feet forward so that he could break the weeds free of their
roots. He imagined his shoes encrusted with mud and trailing handfuls of weeds behind them as they moved.
The sounds behind him were more regular now: an even slosh . . . slosh . . . slosh as his pursuer moved forward. His breath rasped and wheezed, rasped and wheezed, over and over like a dying machine.
Sherlock strained his eyes against the darkness, hoping he might be able to make out the shape of the outlet ahead of him. He was expecting it to be an arch, or a circular opening, that gave out on to the Moscow River, which he imagined to be a wide stretch of water, probably with bridges over it. He couldn’t see anything, however. The darkness ahead of him was intense and unbroken.
What if the opening was below water level, and above the surface there was nothing but a blank brick wall to mark the point where one river poured into another? What if there was a grille separating the two? What if he couldn’t get through, and had to turn round and try to get past the man who was following him, the man who had orders to kill him? The thoughts rolled round and round his head like marbles, never getting anywhere but colliding and sending shock waves through his brain.
He had to get a grip. He had to concentrate if he was going to survive this.
Something touched his face. He flinched, nearly crying out in terror, but managed to stifle the sound by jamming the back of his hand across his mouth and biting down hard. Whatever it was had felt slimy and cold. He waved his hand around in front of his face. Something wet wrapped itself round his wrist, and he realized with relief that it was just one of the mossy tendrils that he’d seen previously, hanging down from the ceiling. He pulled his hand away and the tendril tore out of the brickwork with a sucking noise.
As he moved off, Sherlock realized that he had lost all sensation in his toes.
All the time, behind him, slosh . . . slosh . . . slosh . . . and the wheezing sound of his pursuer breathing heavily. When he glanced over his shoulder, all he could see was darkness. At any second he might feel a hand close over his shoulder, pulling him backwards, pushing him beneath the surface of the Neglinnaya River where he would drown in absolute blackness and his body would never be found.