CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
How to Fall Out of a River
As the Gunner crawled his way against the flow, he felt life returning to his body in more ways than just the renewed strength. His hands felt like his hands again, not clumsy obstacles at the end of his arms. He could think straighter, too, as if layers of thick cloth had been lifted from his brain.
He wondered if this miraculous increase in wellbeing extended to a lifting of the Walker’s power over his ability to dig his way to the upper air. He flexed his muscles and reached for the roof of the pipe. Somehow the instructions were blocked between his head and his arms, which just stayed where they were and didn’t attack the roof as he had told them to do.
He ignored his disappointment and pushed on.
The dark water-filled pipe seemed to go on forever, and the absence of any visual clues made it even harder to bear. At times he hallucinated that he had become weightless and was crawling on the ceiling of the pipe; other times it seemed that the pipe was moving past him and he was keeping still.
He realized he could fight these disorienting feelings if he concentrated on what his hands were touching on the wall of the tunnel as he went forward, because the texture beneath his fingertips was the one thing that did change. Some of the time it was bricks, some of the time it was long curves of stone or concrete piping. At one stage it appeared to be just clay, and he felt his fingertips leaving a groove as he squirmed forward. He imagined the cloudy trail his hand must be leaving in the clear water, invisible in the darkness.
He had been feeling a brick side to the tunnel for quite a long time, and had just wondered if he could work out how far he was going by counting them as his fingers moved from gap to gap. Then he felt a new texture. It was unbroken by any mortar cracks, so his first thought was that it was more concrete piping; but he quickly realized that it was different. It was metal.
He rapped his knuckles against it, and the answering vibration confirmed his first impression. He moved on for a few paces, and then the implication of that answering vibration hit him: a metal pipe, bedded in the clay of London, would be deadened and sound damped by the surrounding earth. There would be no answering vibration.
The implication was that he was in a metal pipe, and that there was air, not clay on the other side of it. His first instinct was to hit the roof of the pipe, but his hands wouldn’t obey his commands. He kicked the floor of the pipe in frustration.
His boots set off a bigger vibration. He did it again, harder. And then he smiled.
“Didn’t say anything about digging down, did he?”
He turned on his back and hacked the metal-shod heels of his ammo boots onto the floor of the pipe. He sledgehammered them down again and again, and every time, he felt the answering vibration in the wall through his braced fingertips. Every kick of his boots got the same result, and then suddenly the vibration wasn’t there, but a sharp single shock shuddered through the pipe. He had no idea what it meant, but he stomped down one last time with all the power in his body. Instead of the jarring impact of his boots, there was a slight resistance, and then his feet continued downward, through the bottom of the pipe, and he was suddenly falling—
The Tyburn is one of London’s lost, hidden rivers. But it does show itself in one place, and that’s where the Gunner was: it crosses over the Regent’s Canal in an aqueduct disguised as a footbridge, close to the London Zoo, and it was out of the bottom of that aqueduct that the Gunner tumbled, in his own personal waterfall.
He had a moment of elation as he felt the air, and then a jolt of surprise as he depth-charged into the water of the canal. The surprise was, under these circumstances, understandable. Not many people fall out of a river, and even fewer fall out of one river into another.
He pushed off the muddy bottom of the canal and breathed in the night air. He looked back at the bridge out of which he had just fallen, and the liberated Tyburn pouring out of it into the water below. He realized what must have happened, and grinned. Then he lofted the bundle of heart stones onto a footpath and pulled himself out after it. He paused only to put his helmet on, and then he picked up the bundle, vaulted a fence into Regent’s Park, and started running southeast.
He knew it was after turn o’day and that he should be dead. If he wasn’t, it meant someone had stood his watch, and he wasn’t going to waste a minute getting back to Hyde Park Corner to see who it was.
He smiled as he ran.
Because of course his gut told him exactly who it must have been; and where George was would also be his best chance of finding Edie before the Walker got to her.
The glasses chinking in the bundle as he ran were all the evidence he needed to know that once a glint was in the Walker’s grasp, there was no escape.