and on toward Canary Wharf and Rotherhithe.
Ali parks the car in a small lane alongside Cannon Street Station. There are seventeen stone steps leading down to a narrow gravel beach slowly being exposed by the tide. On closer inspection the beach is not gravel but broken pottery, bricks, rubble and shards of glass worn smooth by the water.
“This is where they found you,” Joe says, sliding his hand across the horizon until it rests on a yellow navigation buoy, streaked with rust.
“Marilyn Monroe.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“It's nothing.”
Above our heads the trains accelerate and brake as they leave and enter the station across a railway bridge.
“They say you lost about four pints of blood. The cold water slowed down your metabolism, which probably saved your life. You also had the presence of mind to use your belt as a tourniquet.”
“What about the boat?”
“That wasn't found until later that morning, drifting east of Tower Bridge. Any of this coming back?”
I shake my head.
“There was a tide running that night. The water level was about six feet higher than it is now. And the tide was running at about five knots an hour. Given your blood loss and body temperature that puts the shooting about three miles upstream . . .”
Give or take about a thousand different variables, I think to myself, but I see where he's coming from. He is trying to work backward.
“You had blood on your trousers, along with a mixture of clay, sediment and traces of benzene and ammonia.”
“Was the boat engine running?”
“It had run out of fuel.”
“Did anyone report shots being fired on the river?”
“No.”
I stare across the shit-brown water, slick with leaves and debris. This was once the busiest thoroughfare in the city, a source of wealth, cliques, clubs, boundary disputes, ancient jealousies, salvage battles and folklore. Nowadays, three people can get shot within a few miles of Tower Bridge and nobody sees a thing.
A blue-and-white police launch pulls into view. The sergeant is wearing orange overalls and a baseball cap, along with a life vest that makes his chest look barrel shaped. He offers his hand as I negotiate the gangway. Ali has donned a sun hat as though we're off for a spot of fishing.
A tourist boat cruises past, sending us rocking in its wake. Camcorders and digital cameras record the moment as though we're part of London's rich tapestry. The sergeant pushes back on the throttle and we turn against the current and head upstream beneath Southwark Bridge.
The river runs faster on the inside of each bend, rushing along smooth stone walls, pulling at boats on their moorings, creating pressure waves against the pylons.
A young girl with long black hair rows under the bridge in a single scull. Her back is curved and her forearms slick with perspiration. I follow her wake and then raise my eyes to the buildings and the sky above them. High white clouds are like chalk marks against the blue.
The Millennium Wheel looks like something that should be floating in space instead of scooping up tourists. Nearby a class of schoolchildren sit on benches, the girls dressed in tartan skirts and blue stockings. Joggers ghost past them along Albert Embankment.
I can't remember if it was a clear night. You don't often see stars in London because of light and air pollution. At most they appear as half a dozen faint dots overhead or sometimes you can see Mars in the southeast. On a cloudy night some stretches of the river, particularly opposite the parks, are almost in total darkness. The gates are locked at sunset.
A century ago people made a living out of pulling bodies from the Thames. They knew every little race and eddy where a floater might bob up. The mooring chains and ropes, the stationary boats and barges that split the current into arrowheads.
When I first came down from Lancashire I was posted with the Thames Water Police. We used to pull two bodies a week out of the river, mostly suicides. You see the wannabes all the time, leaning from bridges, staring into the depths. That's the nature of the river—it can carry away all your hopes and ambitions or deliver them up unchanged.
The bullet that put a hole in my leg was traveling at high velocity: a sniper's bullet fired from long range. There must have been enough light for the shooter to see me. Either that or he used an infrared sight. He could have been anywhere within a thousand yards but was probably only half that distance. At five hundred yards the angle of dispersion can be measured in single inches—enough to miss the heart or the head.
This was no ordinary contract killer. Few have this sort of skill. Most hit men kill at close range, lying in wait or pulling alongside cars at traffic lights, pumping bullets through the window. This one was different. He lay prone, completely still, cradling the stock against his chin, caressing the trigger . . . A sniper is like a computer firing system, able to calculate distance, wind speed, direction and air temperature. Someone had to train him—probably the military.
Scanning the broken skyline of factories, cranes and apartment blocks, I try to picture where the shooter was hiding. He must have been above me. It can't have been easy trying to hit targets on the water. The slightest breeze and movement of the boat would have caused him to miss. Each shot would have created a flash, giving away his position.
The tide is still going out and the river shrinks inward, exposing a slick of mud where seagulls fight for scraps in the slime and the remnants of ancient pylons stick from the shallows like rotting teeth.
The Professor looks decidedly uncomfortable. I don't think speed or boats agree with him. “Why were you on the river?”
“I don't know.”
“Speculate.”
“I was meeting someone or following someone . . .”
“With information about Mickey Carlyle?”
“Maybe.”
Why would someone meet on a boat? It seems an odd choice. Then again, the river at night is relatively deserted once the dinner-party cruises have finished. It's a quick escape route.
“Why would someone shoot you?” asks Joe.
“Perhaps we had a falling out or . . .”
“Or what?”
“It was a mopping-up operation. We haven't found any bodies. Maybe we're not supposed to.”
Christ, this is frustrating! I want to reach into my skull and press my fingers into the gray porridge until I feel the key that's hidden there.
“I want to see the boat.”
“It's at Wapping, Sir,” replies the sergeant.
“Make it so.”
He spins the wheel casually and accelerates, creating a wave of spray as the outboard engine dips deep into the water and the bow lifts. Spray clings to Ali's eyelashes and she holds her flapping hat to her head.
Twenty minutes later, a mile downstream from Tower Bridge, we pull into the headquarters of the Marine Support Unit.
The motor cruiser
Ali explains how the
