Like This, for Ever (17 page)

To her left, on the beach where the two Barlow boys had been found, all was in darkness. Only the reflection of lights from Tower Bridge told her where the water ended and the rocks began. Someone walking around down there, wearing dark clothes and moving without light, would not be spotted.

On the other hand, the figure stepping out from the bridge’s
shadow, wearing a light-coloured padded jacket, could be seen very clearly. He or she, it really wasn’t possible to tell, reached the concrete steps and began climbing. Slim, not too tall.

Dana ran, away from the river, heading for Shad Thames, knowing the chances of cutting off the figure in the padded jacket were slim. The streets around Butler’s Wharf were busy, even in February, and she had to dodge her way around more than one group idling along, looking for somewhere to eat.

Ahead, about thirty yards away, was the light-coloured jacket.

‘Hey!’

Several people turned, including the one she was fixated on. Definitely a woman, a little older than she, thin face, hair hidden beneath a dark woollen hat. The face turned away, a group came out of a building and got between them. Dana picked up her pace as much as she could but she was wearing heels and the street was cobbled. She reached the corner and turned.

No sign of the woman.

By the time they reached Deptford Creek, Barney had a sense that several of the group were starting to think this wasn’t such a good idea after all. It had rained persistently since they’d left Bermondsey and all the children had wet hair and damp clothes. On Creekside they chained their bikes to a railing and Barney led them to the tall iron gate.

‘Nobody should be here at this time, but we’ll be on private property so we still have to be careful,’ he said. ‘Jorge, can you give us all a leg over?’

One by one, the children stepped on Jorge’s clasped hands and scrambled over the railings. ‘What is this place?’ asked Jorge, when he’d joined them.

‘Creekside Educational Trust,’ said Barney. ‘They’re a sort of charity that look after the Creek. Be quiet – people live close by.’

The children made their way down the side of the Trust building, past rubbish that had been pulled from the Creek over the years, including several rusting shopping trolleys, and down a path that led through a roughly tended garden. Slowly, the twin towers of the old railway-lift loomed above them.

‘What’s that?’ asked Hatty, eyeing the massive iron structure nervously. In the darkness it looked far bigger than it ever did in daylight, like a mechanical monster leering over them.

‘The railway-lift,’ said Barney. ‘It’s not used any more. In the old days, it would lift train carriages from one track and put them down on the other. This way.’ He led them across the grass until they could see down to the Creek itself.

‘Down there?’ asked Sam, staring down at the narrow, steeply sloping beach that led to the black slick of water. All around them, granite-black buildings loomed.

‘Down here,’ confirmed Barney. As he led the way, he had a sense of the others hanging back. Not that he really blamed them. The Creek was freaky, especially at low tide, especially at night. As they neared the water he stopped.

‘It’s like the friggin’ Grand Canyon,’ said Lloyd. None of the others spoke. They were all staring round at the massive river walls that soared seven metres high in places. Their construction was completely random, adding to the bizarre effect. Originally, they’d been built from vertical timbers, but many of those had rotted away, to be replaced by steel piles, or concrete sheets. There were even patches of brickwork. Dark, dank vegetation sprang from wherever it could, as though, despite man’s best efforts to colonize this stretch of water, nature was determined to claim it back.

Above the walls, three- and four-storey warehouses and dockyard buildings stretched up even higher. The impression was of a dark and narrow tunnel between massive black cliffs.

‘It looks like this because the tide’s low,’ said Barney. ‘When it’s high the water will reach right up to where we’re standing. It can be seven metres deep. That’s why the walls have to be so high. When the tide’s completely out, there’s nothing but mud here. We can go a bit further, but be careful if you’re not in wellies.’

The children crept forward, mainly keeping to the stones and gravel that lined the sides of the beach, only Barney and Lloyd sensibly enough shod to walk through the mud. ‘Yuck,’ complained Hatty, as the mud seeped up over her trainers and into her socks.

‘This is well freaky,’ said Sam, when they had gone as close to the narrow stream as they could. To their left, through the arch of
the railway bridge, they could see the last stretch of the Creek before it joined the Thames. The huge iron lift looked alien and predatory in the poor light.

‘We need to stay together now,’ said Barney, spotting the others starting to drift off and feeling increasingly nervous. He’d never been in the Creek without a supervising adult before, and it had always been impressed upon him how dangerous it could be.

The tall buildings around them kept out just about all light from the surrounding streets and the riverbed was black as pitch. Any of them could fall, get stuck. The tide was on its way back but tide was never the biggest danger in the Creek. Rain was. Heavy rainfall higher up the River Ravensbourne could wash down here at lightning speed, and once you were walking the high-walled channel, there weren’t many escape routes. It would be stupid to go any further.

‘So where was Ryan found?’ asked Lloyd.

Barney looked beneath the arch of the bridge, and then down at his feet.

‘Just about here,’ he said.

‘Aw, Christ,’ said Sam, shuffling backwards in the mud, further up the bank.

‘The thing about the Creek,’ said Barney, ‘is that there’s practically no public access to it. Where we’re standing is one of the few points where people can actually get into it without climbing down a ladder. This is the only beach on the Creek.’

‘This isn’t a beach, it’s a mud bath,’ said Sam.

‘So he must be bringing them by road,’ said Lloyd. ‘If he’d come up the Creek by boat, he could have left Ryan anywhere, couldn’t he? By road, it had to be here.’

‘Can you even get a boat up here?’ asked Harvey, looking at water that didn’t seem more than a foot or so deep.

‘When the tide’s in, yeah,’ said Barney. ‘All the boats where we’re going next sailed up the Creek. In a couple of hours, this spot will be under four metres of water. It’s deeper further in.’

There was a second’s silence, while all the children imagined the deep, narrow tunnel they were standing in filled to the brim with seawater.

‘I’m ready to go now,’ said Sam, who was looking nervously upriver.

‘It comes that way,’ said Barney, pointing under the bridge.

‘All the same.’

‘Thing is, though, even though Ryan was found here, he may not have been dumped here,’ said Barney. ‘Some newspaper reports said that the body was soaked in salt water, which it wouldn’t have been if it had been dumped at low tide. If it was soaked in salt water, that means it was dumped higher up and got washed down.’

‘But dumping bodies at low tide is what he does,’ said Harvey.

‘It’s what he does now,’ said Barney. ‘But what if, the first time, he just wanted to get rid of the body, but then when it was found and there was a huge fuss, he found he quite liked the attention?’

‘You’ve given this guy a lot of thought, haven’t you, young Barney?’ said Jorge.

‘This water is getting higher,’ said Sam. ‘Please can we go now?’

‘Right, we have to go over this gate and through the yard on the other side,’ said Barney. ‘Then we have to climb down a ladder to get to the boats.’

Just before Creekside met the main road, the properties on the river side of the street became working yards and lock-up areas. High walls, higher gates, barbed wire and forbidding signs told them that security was taken very seriously.

‘How do the owners get to the boats?’ asked Sam.

‘They have keys to the gate,’ said Barney. ‘I couldn’t find ours. I tried.’

‘What if there’s dogs?’ said Hatty nervously.

‘There weren’t last time I was here,’ said Barney. ‘Just vans – ice-cream vans, builders’ vans, fish-and-chip vans. Nothing worth having guard dogs for. But if there are, they’ll go for Sam first.’

‘Hey!’

‘Once we’re over the gate, no one can talk,’ said Barney. ‘People live on most of these boats, and they’re not keen on people just wandering through the yard to gawp at them, so we have to be quiet.’

Repeating the process that had got them over the fence at the
Educational Trust building, the boys and Hatty clambered over into the yard.

‘Oh, well skanky,’ said Hatty, looking round. The quarter-acre-sized yard was little more than a car park for vehicles that owners didn’t feel comfortable leaving on the street overnight. Small Portakabins around the outside of the yard suggested that work of some kind went on here, but the general run-down feel of the place indicated that it probably wasn’t work you wanted to enquire too deeply into the nature of. Rubbish and discarded tools littering the ground made plain that no one ever gave a thought to clearing up.

‘I never said it was the Riviera,’ replied Barney.

‘I can’t see any boats,’ said Sam.

‘That’s because they’re still low in the water. Come on.’

The children followed Barney through the yard to the moorings. Like everything else in the yard, the two-foot-wide strip of concrete that edged the Creek bank was strewn with rubbish, discarded tools and scrap metal, and Barney remembered another reason why his dad was often reluctant to bring him.
It’s too friggin’ dangerous for a kid
.

Barney dropped to his knees, the others followed his example and they looked out across the eleven houseboats currently moored in this stretch of the Creek. Music was drifting from one of the boats. If they were lucky, it would mask the sound of them creeping across.

‘This isn’t part of the main channel of the Creek,’ said Barney. ‘This is an offshoot they call the Theatre Arm. Dad told me why once, but I wasn’t listening. Across the water is Lewisham College and there’s sometimes a nightwatchman, so we have to be extra careful.’

‘Which is your granddad’s boat?’ asked Hatty.

Barney pointed to the left. Three large houseboats, at one time fishing boats or dredgers, were moored to the bank. Tied up to them were four smaller boats and, in the third line along, five boats that were smaller still. To get to his granddad’s boat in the third row, the children would have to creep across the ones in between.

‘It’s the yellow one with two masts,’ Barney said. ‘We should go in two groups, tread quietly and not talk. I’ll go first. Who wants to come with me?’

Sam was looking nervously across the line of boats. Dim light shone from several of them. ‘Why can’t we all go together?’ he said.

‘Because you lot can’t keep from talking. All of us together will sound like a herd of elephants, someone will hear us and that’ll be the end of it,’ said Barney.

‘He’s right,’ said Jorge. ‘I’ll come last. Barney, you go with Sam and Harvey, Lloyd and Hatty will follow. If anyone comes, I’ll crow like a cockerel and you can all hide.’

A second, whilst what Jorge had just said sank in.

‘Crow like a cockerel?’ said Lloyd. ‘Won’t that be a bit obvious? I don’t see any chickens round here.’

‘Hoot like an owl then,’ said Jorge. ‘Whatever.’

Barney, Harvey and Sam climbed down the ladder on to the first houseboat. The rain was falling faster and the air was punctuated by thousands of plopping noises. As they made their way around the deck, which could hardly be seen beneath the pots and planters, the sound of a Saturday-evening quiz show drifted out towards them.

‘They have TV?’ whispered Sam, as he followed Barney over the guardrail and on to the next boat.

Barney had been looking carefully at the cabin windows of the middle boat. The curtains weren’t closed and no light shone from below. He nodded at Sam. ‘A lot of them have their own generators,’ he said. ‘No mains power, though.’

‘What about gas?’ asked Sam.

What was this? A lesson in domestic utilities?

‘Calor,’ he said, hoping that would be the end of it. ‘Comes in bottles.’

‘What’s with all the plants?’

Barney raised his eyes to the night sky. ‘They don’t have any gardens.’

A couple of seconds’ silence while Sam thought about that one. Then, ‘Neither do we, but we don’t cover our veranda with plants.’

‘Sssh!’

‘What?’

Barney put his finger to his lips. He dropped into a squat and peered into the water. It was about five or six feet deep, he judged,
and getting deeper every second. It was also moving very fast, not smoothly the way it would in the main river, but sloshing backwards and forwards, swirling and slopping. It was noisy, and yet there’d been something that wasn’t quite …

‘What?’ Sam was looking left and right, and making rude gestures to the group still waiting up on the wall. For crying out loud!

‘Listen,’ Barney mouthed.

A few seconds of silence, then, ‘Can’t hear anything,’ said Sam.

Barney got to his feet. It had probably been nothing.

‘What?’ asked Harvey as they set off again, treading carefully around the front deck of the middle boat. ‘What did you hear?’

‘I thought there was something in the water. Probably just a bird feeding.’

The light grew fainter and the streets of Deptford began to feel a long way away. Barney tried to ignore the uncomfortable feeling in his stomach. The splashing sound he’d heard had been too loud to be a bird, even supposing they were still feeding in the dark.

When they reached the side deck, they could look down on to the yellow yacht in front of them, which seemed smaller and at the same time neater than Barney remembered. He turned back to signal to the others. He had to hope that Lloyd and Hatty would be quieter than he, Harvey and Sam had been. The next two children climbed down the ladder and began making their way towards them.

‘What a pair of dorks,’ muttered Sam.

Lloyd and Hatty were scuttling along the deck of the first boat at a slow run, bent double, glancing to left and right like commandos. At least they were moving quietly, though, and they weren’t stopping to talk. Lightly, they jumped on to the middle boat and ran round to join Barney and the others.