“Get out of here. Piss off.”
The child did not move. He stared at Bowman, and seemed incapable of running away.
“It’s in the sewers . . .”
“What? What are you saying?”
“In the sewers. The dead.”
Bowman took a step towards him. For a moment, he had thought he recognised him, but it was not his face that reminded him of something, just the fear in his eyes, the retinas staring at images he could no longer wipe from his memory.
“What are you talking about?”
“I can’t go back there.”
Bowman felt dizzy, and steadied himself. He waited until the whirlwind of blood had calmed down, then approached the little sewer rat. The child was trembling in his overalls and his foul boots, a skinny little sod, skin covered with smallpox scars, twisting a cap in his hands. He was maybe ten or eleven years old and looked like one of those children who could not survive a life spent working underground. Only the toughest got out alive, from those gangs of half-savages, orphaned or abandoned, who foraged through shit in the hope of unearthing some scrap metal. Down in the sewers, those foragers saw almost as many corpses as the constables did. They did deals with the gangs and sometimes fought against them. Even the police had to negotiate with their bosses, with those children who were no longer afraid of anything.
Bowman knew all about it. He too, at that age, had foraged in the sewers of the East End and survived. At twelve or thirteen, the toughest ones were hired by the companies to work on their ships.
The skinny little forager turned his head away, to escape the gaze of this copper who stank of alcohol and vomit. Bowman took the child’s chin in his hand.
“What did you see?”
The child’s eyes were wide open and tears trickled down his cheeks.
“What did you see?”
“I don’t want to go back.”
Bowman put his forehead to the child’s and spoke slowly:
“The strongest survive.”
“Wh . . . what did you say?”
“It’s the war of nature, soldier. You have to go back.”
Bowman tightened his grip on the boy’s chin, provoking a pained grimace, and drops of water fell between his legs. He was pissing himself.
“Let me go. Please. I told you where it is. Let me leave.”
Bowman’s grip grew ever tighter. His hand began to move down to the boy’s neck.
“You’re going to take me down there.”
The child closed his eyes and began to sob. He stammered incomprehensibly and Bowman loosened his grip to let him talk.
“What are you saying?”
The boy opened his eyes again and his gaze seemed to nestle inside Bowman’s; instead of fleeing, he was now trying to take refuge there.
“It’s . . . the sharks? The sharks in the river?”
Bowman let him go.
“What?”
“That’s what you said earlier.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Is it the sharks in the river that did that?”
The boy wiped his snotty nose on his sleeve.
“I . . . I didn’t know there were sharks here, but it makes sense, now you say it. It must be them. Are you really a policeman?”
“Yes. What’s your name?”
“Slim.”
Bowman pushed open the front door of the station, glanced to either side of the street, grabbed the child’s arm and dragged him along the pavement. It had been raining for the past hour now and Wapping High Street had turned into a river.
“Where are we going?”
Slim hesitated. He lifted an arm and pointed in the direction of St Katharine’s Dock, then looked at the policeman with a scar in the middle of his forehead.
“I’ll tell you where it is, but I don’t want to go down there.”
“You have to go back. Walk!”
The child advanced slowly, bumping into Bowman’s legs. The policeman pushed him on each time, to prevent him from stopping. Bowman continued staring through the curtain of rain. The effects of the opium had almost vanished, but he still half expected to see junks suddenly appear from around the corner of the street.
*
They walked alongside the Thames, where water streamed over the mud, tearing off patches of accumulated dung, gradually freeing the shores of their braids of excrement. They could make out the figures of people on Tower Bridge: a crowd of people running and jumping, leaning over the river. The corpse smell was still there, as if bodies were decomposing now in a marshland rather than a desert. The torrential downpour slowed to a heavy, regular rain. The thunder sounded more distant, the storm passing over the city and moving westward up the river.
Slim and Bowman walked past the gallows on Execution Dock. Some children were jumping up and down on the pontoon, sent wild by the miracle of the rain. They were singing and dancing, tearing off their rags, when they saw Slim and the policeman.
“Slim’s been collared! Slim’s been collared!”
“Hang the snitches!”
“Bloody sewer rats!”
Slim walked faster, with Bowman on his heels, as the half-naked children started their hysterical jig again. Gawkers invaded St Katharine’s Dock, and the child and the policemen wove their way between them, drawing closer to the water. The little forager’s boots bumped into Bowman’s steel-capped shoes. The policeman dug his fingers into the boy’s shoulder.
“Keep going.”
“I don’t want to.”
Bowman’s voice grew softer.
“Go on, boy. You have to go back there.”
The child walked forward, lifting his eyes to Bowman, then lowering his head and continuing, repeating the same words over and over: “The sharks. It’s the sharks who did it.”
“Shut up, boy. Shut up now.”
Their clothes sticking to their skin, their legs touching, they moved forward along the jetty. Slim came to a halt at the top of some steps that descended to the dry port: a layer of thick mud covered by an inch or two of water. They waited there for a moment, Slim’s back leaning against Bowman’s belly. Bowman felt the boy trembling in his arms. His fingers tightened.
“Let’s go.”
“Sir, what are sharks like?”
The rain pattered on the jetty and the surface of the water. Bowman closed his eyes.
“They live in the sea, near the coast, and sometimes they swim up rivers to find food. On the Ganges, they attack men who go into the water to say their prayers.”
“What’s the Ganges?”
“A river in India. Over there, the men dress in long red cloths.”
“They pray in the water?”
“Because the river is sacred.”
Slim turned towards Bowman.
“But the sharks still go there?”
“Yes.”
The child thought about this for a moment and looked at the river before him.
“Is the Thames sacred too?”
Bowman turned to look at it.
“No.”
They climbed down the steps and entered a brick tunnel under the jetty, an overflow of the port. At the other end they could see the bed of the Thames. In the middle of the tunnel, a large sewer pipe veered off to the left. Slim entered it.
On each side of the vault, pavements ran alongside the channel where water was beginning to flow again. The sound of the rain had ceased and the heat was there again, imprisoned underground. About a hundred feet ahead of them, there was a well of light, falling from a drain, where the rain poured, vertical and shining and dense. They turned into another subterranean pipe, moving further and further away from the river, deep under the city, going from one drain to another, finding a little light then diving once again into blackness until they reached the next opening. Sometimes, they heard voices, shouts, footsteps on the metal bars above them, which echoed through the pipes. The sewers became gradually narrower, and soon there was not enough room to walk side
by side, so Slim went in front, pushed there by the silent policeman.
“Sir, did you see that in India – people killed by sharks?”
Bowman lowered his head to avoid banging it against the arched ceiling.
“Yes.”
The drains grew smaller and further between. Touching the stone sides of the sewer, they continued through the darkness, broken here and there by another source of light, to which their eyes clung.
“Did they follow your boat?”
“What?”
“How did they come here?”
Rats scurried between their feet and threw themselves shrieking into the mud as the two humans passed.
“No. The sharks stayed there.”
Slim stopped and Bowman felt the muscles in his back tense. The boy turned around. Bowman could not see his face in the darkness.
“It’s impossible.”
The water was flowing quietly in the sewer; far ahead of them, a little stain of light fell onto the mud. The next drain. The child would not move anymore.
“It’s impossible. If there aren’t any sharks here, then who did that? You said it was them . . .”
Slim dropped like a sack of potatoes down Bowman’s legs and huddled against the stone floor.
Bowman stepped over him and kept walking.
They had gone northward through the sewers. They must be somewhere under Thomas More Street and the district that Bowman had been patrolling for nearly five years.
The raindrops fell on the storm drain. He estimated the distance that still separated him from the light – about sixty feet – and started, involuntarily, to count down his steps. An old soldier’s habit, to calculate the distance that separated him from danger. To occupy his mind, as he advanced and the shape that he made out beneath the drain grew more distinct.
3
A ray of sunlight fell on the white sheets. Next to him, on a little bedside table, there was a bottle of syrup, a tray, a spoon and a bowl of soup. His police uniform, newly washed, hung over the top of a chair back. He rubbed his face and slowly his field of vision grew wider: he saw the long dormitory, the beds and other patients, a young nun helping an old man to drink. His belly ached. Bowman reached out a hand towards the bowl of soup, and swallowed a spoonful, which burned his throat and stomach. All his muscles were stiff. He swallowed some more soup and looked up. The nun was standing at the foot of his bed.
“How do you feel?”
Bowman put the bowl back on the table.
“Where am I?”
The nurse approached him and, with the back of her hand, touched his forehead. Bowman drew his head back.
“You are at St Thomas’ Hospital.”
He sat up in bed.
“What happened?”
“Your colleagues brought you here three days ago, after you were found in that sewer.”
“Sewer?”
“You don’t remember? The day of the rain?”
“The rain . . .”
Bowman closed his eyes. In the darkness he saw a point of light, bright drops falling from a ceiling, a shape. He gritted his teeth to stop himself vomiting up the soup he had just swallowed. The nun made him drink some syrup, a bitter-tasting plant-based infusion that soothed the burning in his stomach.
“You’ve been raving. You still need more rest. I’ll come back to see you.”
The nun’s gaze lingered on Bowman’s chest, and he realised he was not wearing a shirt. He pulled the sheet up over his scars. The nurse looked away.
When she had gone, Bowman sat up and opened the window. St Thomas’s was opposite London Bridge and, from where he sat, the city stretched out to vanishing point beneath him. The Thames was still dark but its level had risen. Cranes were moving on the docks, and people walked along the shores past vendors. All over the city, the factory chimneys belched out black smoke, and the smell of coal filled the air. The companies’ boats were moored in St Katharine’s Dock and they had begun their ballet of movements along the river, going both ways around the Isle of Dogs. The curse had been lifted from the capital and Bowman looked out over the rooftops of the city, which had come back to life and was going about its daily business as if everything was forgotten.
But he remembered.
His eyes were fixed on the port of St Katharine on the other side of the river, the warehouses, the sewer tunnels under the buildings.
He drew back the curtain and set his feet on the floor. His legs were weak, his head spun. He put on his clean uniform and his shoes, trying clumsily to move as quickly as possible, as weak as after a bout of malaria. He waited a few seconds – just enough time to get his breath back – then began to walk between the beds.
The young nun appeared at the end of the aisle, her arms loaded with pillows.
“What are you doing? You’re in no fit state to leave. You have to stay in bed.”
When the nurse approached him, Bowman took a step to the side.
“Please, go back to your bed. You mustn’t leave now.”
Bowman backed away then turned and ran to a large staircase. He hurtled downstairs, clinging to the banister.
Outside, he was assailed by the sunlight, the noises, the passers-by. He crossed London Bridge amid a crowd of people who were watching the Thames flow freely again. He walked along the docks, ordering his body to move more quickly.
*
Arthur Bowman entered like a fury into the building on Wapping High Street, passing guards who stood aside for him, and hammered at Superintendent Andrews’ door. At the sound of the officer’s voice, he burst in. Andrews dropped his pipe.
“What are you doing here?”
Bowman felt himself waver.
“What I saw . . .”
“What?”
“The sewer . . .”
He took a step forward, bumped into a chair and grabbed hold of the desk to stop himself falling.
“The corpse . . . I know who . . .”
His eyes rolled back in his head. Andrews stood up, and Bowman fell backwards onto the floorboards.
The superintendent ran to the door.
“Two men. In my office now!”
Two guards rushed in and found Bowman lying on the floor, his legs trembling so hard that his ankles were banging against the floor. His hands and his head struck the wood violently too. He bit his tongue and blood, mixed with spit, trickled from the corners of his mouth. They fell to the floor to immobilise him. One of the policemen tried to loosen his jaws so he would stop chewing his tongue, and Bowman almost bit his fingertip off.
When he came to, he was lying on a table in the guards’ room. Bowman lifted himself up on his elbows and saw Andrews standing in front of a window.
“You had a nervous breakdown. Who let you leave the hospital?”
Bowman turned around so his legs hung from the edge of the table and held his head in his hands.
“Don’t remember.”
“What are you doing here?”
“The sewers . . .”
“You’re still wearing your uniform?”
Bowman did not understand what he was talking about.
“What?”
“You were suspended. You no longer have the right to wear that uniform.”
Bowman looked at him stupidly.
“I don’t have anything else to wear.”
“What were you doing here when the child found you?”
Bowman got down from the table and tried to stand up. In the end, he grabbed a chair and sat down.
“What child?”
“The one who told us you were in the sewer. The one who went with you down there. That’s what he told us, anyway.”
“Told?”
Bowman was slowly regaining his wits. He put a finger in his mouth to his damaged tongue. He wanted to spit on the floor, but instead he gulped down a mouthful of blood and saliva. As if the metallic taste of his own blood had set off an alarm, he waited a few seconds before responding: “I came to see you. To find out
what was happening with the investigation into the supervisor’s death.”
“And then?”
“And then? . . . There was no-one here. I was about to go out when the child . . . I can’t remember his name, but this boy turned up. He said there was something in the sewers.”
Andrews began walking between the tables, pacing around Bowman.
“There’s a lot of talk about this case. The rumours are spreading. No-one has ever seen anything like it in London before and we still haven’t been able to identify the victim.”
Bowman’s mutilated tongue was swelling inside his mouth. He articulated slowly.
“Did you go down there?”
“No. It was O’Reilly who went, along with two other guards. We haven’t found the witness.”
“The witness?”
“That child who came to warn us – the one you said you met here. He disappeared and we haven’t been able to find him.”
Andrews turned around near the window and looked outside.
“When you came in to my office earlier, you were about to say something before you collapsed. You have to talk. It’s in your interests.”
“My interests?”
“Don’t play the innocent.”
Bowman lowered his head before muttering something. Andrews came closer to him.
“What did you say?”
Bowman cleared his throat.
“Cavendish’s mission.”
Superintendent Andrews froze.
“Major Cavendish?”
Sergeant Bowman nodded. Andrews’ voice had gone high-pitched; now, he attempted to control it.
“The Duke?”
Bowman nodded again. The superintendent stammered:
“What are you talking about?”
Bowman made an effort to open his mouth. He did not want to pronounce the words.
“The corpse in the sewer. I’ve seen that before. In Burma. In the forest.”
Andrews screamed:
“Why are you talking about Cavendish? What is this nonsense about a forest? You’re completely mad! Explain yourself before I have you thrown in prison! We found you unconscious next to a corpse in the sewer, Bowman – you are already under a great deal of suspicion. Explain yourself!”
Bowman was paralysed by Andrews’ screaming. The images flashed through his head: from the hold on the Healing Joy to the fishermen’s village, the junk, the monsoon, the attack by Min’s soldiers, the line of prisoners being marched through the jungle. The cages and the guards’ cries. He wanted to cover his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear the superintendent anymore. Instead, he was the one who screamed: “I know who did it!”
Retribution Road Page 10