The Thieves' Labyrinth (Albert Newsome 3) (45 page)

A half-open door drew him, the floating wood splinters about it suggesting an earlier scene of action. He entered cautiously and beheld the same space witnessed by Noah just minutes previously.
But Mr Williamson was calmer. He observed the room coolly and saw more: a wooden chair with blood smeared on its back and with a length of twine still tied to one rear leg – evidence of an
interrogation? Had Mr Cullen or Benjamin been tethered here? If so, had notes been made?

He examined the documents on the desk: predominantly vessel manifests, wharf records, shipping lists from
the Times
and completed landing warrants. These he rolled and tucked into an
inside pocket as evidence.

He next tried the drawers and found them locked – an impediment soon overcome with a heavy fireside poker that quite destroyed the lacquered wood and brass trimmings of the drawer fronts.
His hand thus admitted, he groped among more papers and took hold of a book bound in calf skin: a diary.

He turned to the last page and saw with horror his own name written in the regular copperplate script:

He flicked to the previous page and back further, his eyes darting over the lines. It was all there: every meeting, every enquiry, every step he had taken right back to that curious incident
before the steps of the Queen’s Theatre. And not just concerning
his
activity, but also Noah, Benjamin, Eldritch Batchem and Sir Richard – all reduced to
dramatis personae
in another man’s story.

Questions buzzed about his mind. Who was the owner of the diary? What was his interest in these men? What else did he know and how might he use it? Had, indeed, the document been left here on
purpose as a provocation? Only a thorough examination of it would reveal such deeper truths, and there was no time now. The room was clearly full of incriminating evidence.

He paused. Had that been the faintest swish of water? Not the intemperate splashing of the still questing crew, but a stealthy and much closer step.

He took hold of the poker and remained utterly still lest his own movements send out traitorous ripples. A sound of heavy breathing seemed to approach the office. A shadow fell across the
threshold. He raised the weapon in readiness.

And the hairs upon his scalp prickled in chill terror.

There, in the doorway, was the beast sought for so long by Mr Newsome, its great leonine head matted with dirty water and its yellow eyes fixed with lethal intent upon the frail flesh of Mr
Williamson . . .

‘Ben! I can hear you, Ben!’ called Noah as he rushed along the upper gallery towards the apparent source of the clanging noise.

Yet the signal was fading and becoming less frequent even as he closed the distance. Was Ben tiring in his efforts? Or was it that the rising waters were slowly isolating his place of
incarceration? Soon, there was no sound at all.

‘Ben! I am close! Do not stop!’

He halted abruptly. A stone stairway to his left descended into a well of dark water whose surface writhed as if fed from below. The stairs clearly led somewhere: a deeper vault or to the sewers
themselves. And as he watched the murky level rise, he thought he felt a presence there: some living spark, some silent-shrill entreaty that called him closer . . .

Ben?

He plunged into the water – knee-deep, thigh-deep, chest-deep – until his very eyes passed into the cold black realm and his hands groped still lower along a slime-slathered wall.
Blind, deaf and mute, he finally felt his boot strike an impediment. His fingers then found the same flat, corroded surface. A door? He reached unseeing into a pocket and withdrew the knife, using
its heel to rap his presence on the metal sheet.

Silence. Just the pressure in his chest and the water in his ears.

Then a vibrating hammer blow of response: life beyond.

Noah ran frustrated hands over the door and found a knob. He pulled. He pushed. He kicked furiously at the unyielding mass and let forth a bubbling execration. His breath was almost gone. The
blows still sounded from within.

The key?

He jerked it out of his trouser pocket and fumbled cold-fingered to move the escutcheon aside and find the hole. He turned the key. He pulled the door open against the pressure of water. He
reached into the void.

A large black hand grasped at Noah’s from the blackness. Noah seized it and hauled the body out towards the ascending stairs.

Another limb flailed and Noah took hold of a thick wrist, tugging it forcefully from death to life.

And with the final dregs of breath almost gone, he himself staggered heavily up the stairs until his head broke the surface. Merciful air rushed into starving lungs and light once again filled
his eyes.

Benjamin and Mr Cullen were slumped panting and saturated on the upper stairs. Noah waded clear of the water and nodded to them with an easy smile that belied the depth of his relief.

‘Inside . . .’ gasped a dripping Mr Cullen, ‘Eldritch Batchem . . . is still inside.’

Benjamin spoke briefly with his hands.

Noah nodded. ‘If his throat has been cut and he was immobile, then I agree: he is already dead. He is older and less hearty than you two, and all air inside is now certainly gone. We must
think of ourselves and flee while we have the chance. The river is in flood and the secret warehouse is under siege.’

‘A secret warehouse?’ said Mr Cullen.

‘I wonder – do you even know that you are at Frying Pan wharf? No matter – the river continues to invade. We must go to safety above.’

Now knee-deep in water, Mr Williamson had barely moved. The poker remained aloft. His arm was beginning to tire with the effort of immobility. He dare not blink. He dare hardly
breathe.

For its part, the great, shaggy-headed lion observed him with similar stillness. It sniffed the air, flicked its tail, and set forth a lazy pink tongue about its massive chops.

Time telescoped. Waterfalls of filth and the plashing footsteps of the questing crew sounded distantly from the warehouse beyond. Lion and man appraised each other in an expectant
tableau
.

And Mr Williamson’s fear turned gradually to empathy. For all its size and threat, the beast was, in truth, a rather pitiful specimen of its kind: soiled with grime, emaciated about the
ribs, conspicuously missing a large incisor, and utterly bedraggled by its cloacal abode. It clearly no more wanted to be there than he did. If it sometimes roared, it was through imprisoned
despair rather than aggression. If it had indeed torn at the flesh of first mate Hampton’s corpse, it had no doubt been in abject hunger rather than violence.

He slowly lowered the poker to the desk.

As if in acknowledgement of the gesture, the lion blinked, shook its vast head, cast a final proprietorial look about the room and exited almost silently in the same direction it had come.

Mr Williamson slumped with both hands flat on the desk and exhaled deeply, his head downwards in prayer or relief or some darker mortal thoughts. He was in the same posture when a panting
crew-member arrived excitedly at the door.

‘No criminals to be found! Not a single . . . O, are you all right, sir?’

‘Did you not see the lion?’

‘A
lion
, sir? Like in the zoo? I have seen nothing of the kind and I have looked everywhere.’

‘In this very room just moments ago . . . Never mind. Have you explored every possible entrance and exit?’

‘Indeed. There is a gallery above and a couple of passages leading from it down into water – the sewers perhaps. We also found Mr Dyson with two other gents he says are colleagues of
his. One was a terrifying Negr—’

‘I know them. Was there another: a bearded fellow?’

‘No, sir. I have seen no such—’

‘Now listen – you and your fellows are to gather as many ledgers and documents as you can carry from this room and take them aloft with all haste. Do you understand? Where is Mr
Dyson now?’

‘He has already ascended with the others.’

‘Hmm. Well, gather your fellows and get immediately to work in this room.’

‘Yes, sir!’

The fellow ran off to fetch his colleagues and Mr Williamson went out into the warehouse to see sundry cargo bobbing upon the flood. The water was now mid-thigh and rising continually –
more than high enough to drown the insensible and handcuffed Italian . . . their only living witness!

He waded urgently to where the man had lain bound, but could feel nothing with his feet. Had he misremembered the exact position? He submerged his arm to the shoulder in icy black water and
swirled a hand madly about in search of the body.

Nothing. Not a limb nor a garment nor a clutch of hair . . .

Then his fingers touched metal. He withdrew a pistol and tossed it irritably towards the clerk’s office. Plunging in again, he grazed another object and knew immediately from long
experience what he held – a pair of police handcuffs. These he withdrew, staring incredulously at their unlocked mechanism. Was it truly possible that the Italian had been revived by the cold
water at his face and somehow freed himself to escape beneath the surface of the murky pool?

He looked over to where Mr Newsome had lain and saw only water. The corpse had been subsumed. A shiver passed through him: a grim foreboding combined with the river’s chill that seemed to
harrow him quite to the bone.

‘Men – it is time to leave. Take all you can carry from that room. Let us abandon this infernal place to the river . . .’

By nightfall, it was a different city that presented itself to the investigative glare of the gaslights – a city released, a city quite transformed by the inundation of
its ancient flow. At Westminster and Bermondsey, at Tower and Rotherhithe, at Wapping and Shadwell and Limehouse, the shoreline streets were clotted ankle-deep with reeking mud. Cellars were bailed
by bucket; stairs seeped and trickled; ferry piers sagged as prehistoric swamps. Rat corpses and assorted flotsam collected where the ebb tide had eddied.

The entire Port of London had suffered that day: dry goods tainted, buoyant goods lost, loaded barges subsumed where they lay on the banks, and almost every wharf a greater or lesser victim of
the invading flood. Only the diligent work of the Thames Police had prevented a greater catastrophe. It was thanks alone to their readiness and manpower that a great quantity of cargo had been
decisively removed from danger.

That uniformed presence had been particularly concentrated around the many warehouses of Wapping, and notably at Frying Pan wharf. Indeed, a cordon of men seemed to guard the place long after
the waters had departed, standing sentinel with flaming torches as if expecting another assault.

It was perhaps midnight when certain senior officers of the Custom House and the police arrived by steam launch and ventured inside the sealed building. That they later emerged mud-caked and
saturated carrying dozens of dripping bundles seemed to suggest that they had found what they sought.

In fact, daylight would raise more questions than answers, and the meeting that occurred some thirty hours after those momentous events would follow a pattern to which its participants had
become rather accustomed . . .

‘Mr Dyson – I thank you for attending,’ said Sir Richard Mayne, standing to receive his final guest with a firm handshake. ‘I accept that you do so out
of good grace rather than by compulsion.’

Noah nodded a greeting to the other gentlemen in that Scotland Yard office: a sombre-looking George Williamson, and Mr Jackson, Inspector General of Customs, who raised a quizzical eyebrow at
the newly arrived fellow. Was this the ‘agent’ his men had spoken of with combined admiration and mistrust?

‘So, gentlemen – to business,’ said Sir Richard, taking his seat at the large oaken desk that was today covered with water-crinkled ledgers, stained sheets and blotted books. A
smell of the river rose palpably from the material, though it was all now quite dry.

‘As you may know, men of the Metropolitan Police and the Custom House re-entered that remarkable chamber below Frying Pan wharf the night before last to fully document the scale of its
depredations and to settle the issue with legal finality. Before I proceed in that direction, however, I first have a number of questions for Misters Williamson and Dyson.’

The aforementioned two looked briefly and without guile at each other, then back at the speaker. They had already revealed all they knew in the hours following the raid. There was nothing more
to hide.

‘Very well,’ continued Sir Richard, ‘both of you gentlemen reported seeing the body of Inspector Newsome. I have your statements here and they tally in their detail. My
question is simple enough: are you absolutely certain he was dead?’

‘Wait,’ said Noah, sitting forward, ‘am I to assume from your question that no body was recovered?’