wheels, the engine, and the undercarriage flattened themselves against solid brick. But the bus itself was twelve feet up, the same height as the first floor. And on the first floor there was a plate-glass window.
The force of the impact tore the bus off the hydraulic arms. As the gas tank ignited and the undercarriage erupted in flames, the bus itself came free, rammed itself through the window, and slid along the floor of the building. The place was an empty office building. There was nothing inside to stop our progress. Carried by our own velocity, we slid the full length of the floor, and then, with another explosion of breaking glass—exited through a second window on the other side.
But the office building looked out over the River Thames. We landed, not with a crash but a splash. And when I finally found the courage to open my eyes, we were floating gently on the water. We were bruised, shaken, and exhausted. But we were still alive.
We floated the rest of the way. There were roadblocks all over London, but we sailed right past them. Nobody had thought to contact the river police. I was free. Over the wall. But Snape and Boyle were dead.
So what did I do next?
WAPPINGLIES
It’s funny how often the River Thames seems to feature in my life. Once, I was locked up beside it and almost drowned in it. The next time you take a pleasure boat down from Charing Cross pier, look out for a kid dressed in jeans and a baggy sweater floating facedown in the dirty water. It’ll probably be me.
The river took us all the way to Wapping. It’s just as well the tide was going in our direction or we’d have been out of London via Windsor and on our way to Wales. Even so it was quite a journey. Under Vauxhall Bridge and down past the Houses of Parliament, Somerset House, and the National Theatre. Then around the corner and on past Traitor’s Gate and the Tower of London, the redeveloped St. Katharine’s Dock, and almost as far as the Isle of Dogs.
This was East London, the heart of Johnny’s criminal empire. And looking at it in the cold half-light of the early morning, he was welcome to it.
Everything was gray: the sky, the water, the broken hulks of the old barges moored along the banks. The south side of the river was long and flat, punctuated by a tangle of cranes here, a gas pile there, in the distance a forlorn church steeple.
We moored on the north side at a jetty between two warehouses. There was nobody around. There had probably been nobody in those warehouses for fifty years. A derelict houseboat stood firm a few yards away, tied to the bank and somehow resisting the chop and swell of the Thames water. Shivering, we pulled ourselves out of the broken people mover and stood on damp—if not quite dry—land.
“Where do we go now?” I asked.
“Home,” Ma Powers said. Her lips were set in a frigid scowl. Either it was the cold or she didn’t like me. Possibly both.
“East London,” I muttered. “I’d have thought that was the first place the police would expect us to go.”
“Sure.” Johnny slapped me on the back. “So it’s the last place they’ll come looking.”
With Tim bringing up the rear, we hurried off the jetty and between the warehouses to Wapping High Street. And if this was the high street, I’d hate to see what the low street looked like. It was a spiderweb of rusting metal with cranes and scaffolding everywhere. Half the buildings had fallen down. Half of them had only been half built. It was hard to tell which was which. A patchwork of corrugated iron filled in the gaps, old posters clinging on with tattered fingers. There were no pavements. You couldn’t see where the road ended and the gutter began.
We passed through the wreckage and reached another road running off at a right angle. There was a barrier across it with a big sign in red and white: ROAD CLOSED. It was blocked by a slanting wall of scaffolding holding up a row of dirty, decrepit houses. We stopped beside the fourth house. Ma Powers fumbled in her handbag and pulled out a set of keys. She turned one in the lock and we went in. We were home.
Johnny Powers needed somewhere to hole up for a while and he’d chosen a real hole. The house was three stories high, only the third story had collapsed in on itself. The ground floor was one big room with a couch, a table and chairs, a TV set, and an open-plan kitchen. It had been a closed-plan kitchen until the dividing wall had fallen over. Two doors led out—one to a toilet, the other to a bedroom. There were two more bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. You could see the bath through a hole in the ceiling.
“Home sweet home,” I muttered.
“It’s safe,” Ma Powers said.
“Safe?” I tapped the mantelpiece. A chunk of it fell off. “You could have fooled me.”
“The police won’t come looking for us here,” Johnny said. “That’s what Ma means.”
“What about the neighbors?”
“There are no neighbors,” Ma Powers growled. “All the houses are condemned.”
“Yeah—and sentenced and executed, too,” I said.
Johnny turned to his mother and smiled. “Ya made it real nice, Ma,” he purred.
I suppose she had done her best to make it comfortable. There were fresh flowers on the table and homemade cushions on the couch. A circular rug lay on the floor, a few pictures hung on the walls, and she’d covered the windows with net curtains. But it was like rearranging the cutlery after the
The door to the bedroom opened and another guy walked in. He was about the same age as Johnny, thin and with so much acne you could have struck a match on him. This had to be Nails Nathan. He was biting them even as he walked in. In fact, he’d bitten them so far down that he’d started on the fingers. Another few months and they’d have to rechristen him Knuckles Nathan.
“So you made it, Johnny,” he said, smiling nervously and blinking.
“Sure I made it.” Johnny advanced on him. “But no thanks to you, ya sap.”
“I’m sorry, Johnny.” Nails was whining now. He ran his teeth down the side of his thumb and bit at his wrist. “I was sick. I couldn’t drive.” He paused hopefully. “But I fixed the car up for you. I did that.”
“You did good, kid.” Johnny gave him a friendly punch in the stomach. Nails doubled up. “Now fix us some breakfast. And make sure the coffee’s good and strong.”
Tim had been watching all this standing beside the front door. He hadn’t said a word, which was probably the best thing he could have done. But now he sort of staggered forward and sat down heavily at the table. So heavily that another chunk fell off the mantelpiece.
“I don’t believe this,” he said.
“Who is this guy, Johnny boy?” Ma Powers demanded. She was propping up the machine gun in the corner like it was a walking stick and she’d just come back from an amble in the park. “I met him at the airport like ya told me, but I couldn’t get no sense outta him. He went on . . . something about plane spotting.”
Johnny laughed and began to roll himself a cigarette. “Ma,” he said, “ya ain’t met my friend Nick Diamond. He saved my life back in the slammer. That’s his big brother Tim.”
“Tim?” Ma Powers looked at him suspiciously. “What do you do for a living, Tim?”
“I’m a private investigator,” Tim said.
There was a long silence. Nails Nathan dropped a plate. Johnny stared. Right then you could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. Right then I could have cut Tim with a knife. Why did he have to go and tell them that? Why couldn’t he say he was a certified public accountant or a postman or a brain surgeon or something? Snape had told me that Johnny Powers hated policemen. I somehow guessed he wasn’t exactly wild about detectives either.
“A private investigator?” he repeated, narrowing his eyes.
“That’s right,” I cut in quick before anyone could say another word. “Tim investigates”—Nails had turned on a tap to fill the kettle and it was still running—“water! He’s a private investigator of water.”
“What is there to investigate about water?” Ma Powers demanded.
“All sorts of things,” I said. “The amount of chlorine. The bacteria. The . . . um . . . the H.”
