“Hold my boots and water tube and wait here.”
“What if you don’t come back?”
“Then I’m dead.”
“What do I do then?”
Lawrence practically murdered the idiot on the spot. They might be ten paces from death—and Pezzini needed career guidance.
“Do what you fucking like. It’s your life.”
In exasperation he abandoned Pezzini and ascended the path until it curved over the top of the dyke, where he waited. There are few guards who will not cough or yawn, or pace about to break the monotony. All seemed clear. He proceeded on down the slope, conscious of the surface changing from gravel to clay, which yielded a little and was sticky. He could hear waves lapping ahead. Again, he waited. From the darkness came only the creak of the floating pier and the small waves within the Tidal Basin. Surely it was inconceivable there were no guards? The end of the floating pier was not ten paces away. He could not have failed to hear any guards if they were there. They would talk, surely? They could not just stand like marble in this darkness for hour after hour. An unpleasant suspicion occurred to him that the barge was anchored out in the basin. He put the thought aside.
Somewhere in one of the hundreds of books he had read was a field marshal whose principle was not to visualise what might go wrong but rather, to focus all attention on what must go right. That felt like sound advice. His hand gripped about his beauty, he advanced down the slope, toes exquisitely sensitive to contact with the boots of a lurking ultramarine. Instead, the cold sea soaked his feet. A little more exploration and his fingers touched the planks of the floating pier. He listened. The ropes and planks of the pier murmured softly. While he waited, the tide advanced and his feet went numb. The guards must be on the barge itself.
A peculiar sensation of enrichment alarmed him, as if his eyes were suddenly hallucinating all manner of swirls and gleams. It was the moon. The clouds were breaking up and a crescent moon peeked through a gap, casting a thin, milky light on the low horizon of the sea defence running around the Tidal Basin. He checked his tag was tucked under his hat, to stop it glinting.
He tried crawling out along the pier but found his canvas overalls made an dragging noise on the planks. It was actually quieter to stand and tight-rope walk along the edge of the pier to minimise creaking of planks. He thought ahead. The ultramarines were not hard-working by nature. Not even heelers stooped to menial routine. He just could not imagine ultramarines mounting guard duty out here in the open, far from electric lights and central heating. However, they could not possibly leave a barge untended.
Certainly, a barge had arrived and been unloaded by Gang 9 during the afternoon shift. The barge could not have left since then. None of the barges had engines, therefore they could not depart the basin against the tide. So, the barge was still here and it must be guarded.
Lawrence edged on, dead slow and dead cautious. He slid one socked foot ahead and paused, then brought the other foot up behind the first and paused again. He began to hear a soft clapping sound. That was, unmistakably, the sound of rope slapping against a mast—incontestable reassurance the barge was there. He prepared to lunge for a stomach. The midriff is an easy target. A man stabbed there will collapse from shock in a few seconds.
The next pace dropped horribly into thin air. He flailed for balance, almost hurling his beauty far out into the basin, by the slightest margin winning over gravity to take a pace back. He was at the end of the pier. No slapping of waves against the hull. No boots clumping on the deck. No hull.
A nebulous dread gathered in Lawrence’s chest. Something was extremely wrong. He stretched out into the night to touch the steel hull, yet his fingertips met thin air. The barges had a freeboard that should have presented the gunwale at about his head height, yet he was feeling nothing… The sky must have taken pity on Lawrence. The thin moon shone again and glimmered with just enough light to reveal that a few feet out from the pier, a kind of sloping rope ladder emerged from the water and climbed into the darkness.
The simplicity of the truth, the sheer obviousness of it, held him stunned. The barge was on the bottom of the basin. The crew left it with the valves open and the tide simply rose over it. No need to guard a thing. The crew would shut the valves and wait for the tide to rise when they wanted to go to sea.
After the relief of understanding came fear, a terrible and lonely fear that crushed him down. Panic ran off him in streams of sweat. He was going to die. He was going to die by the ghastly way of the marsh people or by the quick way of SMS London’s pistol; he was going to die, for he had lost.
It has to be said of Lawrence that he had a bold heart, whatever his other failings. He blocked the thoughts of death and cleared his mind to a pure white and he held it clear by will power until that surging terror faded. He was not dead yet. There were many hours of the night ahead. Think options. He could wait for the tide to fall and then shut the valves in the barge. Within a few seconds he knew that option was a no-go. The next high tide was almost midday. In any case, the valves were probably locked open,
