Black Ice

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sherlock braced himself for a bone-shattering landing on brick or stone, but he fell into water. Ice-cold, running water.

It was barely three feet deep. His back touched the bottom and he thrashed his way to the surface, choking and spluttering. He braced himself against the flow, one foot in front of the other.

Darkness surrounded him. He stood up. The cold sapped the warmth and the strength from him. He tried to touch the sides of whatever sewer or drain he had fallen into, but there was nothing. The sound of the water was odd as well: it didn’t echo the way it should have done in a brick-lined tunnel.

As his eyes got used to the darkness he realized that there was light down there after all. The manhole cover above him was perforated with tiny holes, through which narrow shafts of sunlight shone downward. Further ahead, and behind, there were similar patches of illumination. Wherever it was that he had found himself, at least he would be able to navigate.

He could see that he was in a fast-flowing stream of water. On either side, about ten feet away, instead of the curved brick walls he would have expected of a sewer or a drain there was a bank of stones and muddy earth that sloped away from him, home to the occasional anaemic weed and tufts of ghostly white grass. At the top of the slopes, a few feet of brickwork supported a brick ceiling that stretched away in front and behind.

Moss dangled in long fronds from the brick ceiling. They looked to Sherlock like the tentacles of some bizarre creature that was blindly feeling for its prey.

A sudden grating noise made him flinch. Directly above him, the manhole cover was being opened. A pillar of bright light shone down on to the muddy water in which he stood. Quickly he splashed a few paces in the direction that the water was flowing so that he couldn’t be spotted.

‘Where is he?’ a whispery voice asked from above. It was speaking in French, but Sherlock detected a strong accent. The man was probably Russian by birth. ‘Did he go down there?’

‘I can’t see him,’ another, gruffer voice, replied in the same language but without the accent. ‘What is this thing – some kind of sewer?’

‘Don’t you know anything?’ the first voice whispered. ‘This is the old River Neglinnaya. It flows into the Moscow River ’bout a mile downstream. It was covered over fifty years ago or more when they rebuilt the city.’

Sherlock looked around. A river rather than a sewer? It made sense. Somewhere upstream it must have been out in the open, but here, for fifty years, it had been locked in darkness.

The Moscow River was just a mile or so downstream. He could make it!

‘He must’ve gone down here,’ the gruff voice said. ‘There’s nowhere else he could have gone. But did he go upstream or downstream?’

‘Downstream,’ the other man whispered. ‘He’ll follow the flow of the water. No point fighting it, after all.’ He paused, thinking. ‘You go down there and follow him. Kill him if you can; let the body rot in the water.’

‘Why didn’t we just grab him in the street?’ the gruff voice asked. ‘Why go through all that palaver with pretending that he was a thief?’

‘Grabbing him in the street would have attracted attention,’ the whispery voice replied. ‘Someone might have interfered. There’re police all over the city. Instructions were to get him out of the way. Having him arrested was the best option, but now he’s out of sight we can make sure he’s out of the way – forever. Now go down there after him.’

‘Are you joking? That water must be near freezing!’

‘You got a better idea?’

‘Yeah – you go!’

The man with the whispery voice snorted. You want to talk to the policeman, you go ahead. He’s not going to listen to you the way he would listen to me – a native – born Russian! And besides, we’ve already established that it was my wallet the kid took. How’s it going to look if I suddenly vanish and you take over?’

‘All right.’ The man with the gruff voice sounded cowed. ‘What are you goin’ to do?’

‘I’ll get this idiot policeman to organize a search above ground, along the line of the Neglinnaya. We’ll meet you at the Moscow River outlet.’

Sherlock’s mind raced. He had to get moving, and he had to start out now, before the thug with the gruff voice started down the ladder!

He moved away, trying not to make any splashes as he moved. The cold water sloshed around his legs, infiltrating his shoes and making his socks squish as he walked. He could smell a rancid odour: it may not have been a sewer that he was wading through, but he had a feeling some people were using it as one.

Behind him he heard noises as the gruff-voiced man slowly lowered himself down the ladder. He must have slipped as well, because there was a sudden shout, echoing off the brick ceiling, and moments later a splash. A wave of water washed past Sherlock, pushing him onward. Inwardly he cheered. Maybe he’d got lucky; maybe the man had drowned! Then he heard a voice spluttering in the darkness, and his momentary good spirits subsided. He was going to have to do this the hard way.

Sensing, rather than seeing, the river bank to either side, Sherlock wondered whether he could climb up it and get out of the water, but he quickly rejected the idea. From what he had seen the banks were steep and muddy. Chances were he would just slide down and into the water, and he’d lose a few minutes of precious time. No: attractive as the option sounded, he had to keep moving through the water. The cold, smelly water.

He realized that he was nearing another manhole cover in the brick ceiling. The weak sunshine trickling through the metal disc would illuminate his shoulders and the top of his head if he wasn’t careful, giving away his position. He moved to one side, closer to the right-hand bank.

In the weak light that filtered down like solid rain Sherlock could see the rungs of a ladder that descended from the manhole. It was supported at the top, and was probably set into the bed of the river. The rungs and the uprights looked corroded: rusty and damp. For a second Sherlock debated whether to climb the ladder and try to shift the manhole cover from beneath, but he quickly pushed the idea away. Too much could go wrong. His pursuer would see him the moment he stepped into the shaft of light and would just pull him off the ladder. Even if by some fluke he got to the top he might not be able to shift the heavy cover, or if he did he might just emerge into the midst of the search party in the street above. No – like it or not, he had to keep going.

Sherlock’s fingers trailed in the water as he pushed his way through the resisting river. Something brushed against his hand and he jerked it away with a muffled cry. In his mind he imagined it was a rat, swimming through the polluted waters, but maybe it was just a piece of rubbish that had been thrown away through a grating, or a hole in the street. Maybe. But his heart was still hammering like a steam engine and his hands were shaking.

The river bed beneath his feet was uneven and muddy. His feet kept on getting stuck and he had to strain to pull them free. God alone knew what state his shoes were going to be in by the time he got out – if he ever got out. There were plants down there in the water as well, weeds that kept tangling around his ankles and slowing him down even more. He had to jerk his feet forward so that he could break the weeds free of their roots. He imagined his shoes encrusted with mud and trailing handfuls of weeds behind them as they moved.

The sounds behind him were more regular now: an even slosh… slosh… slosh as his pursuer moved forward. His breath rasped and wheezed, rasped and wheezed, over and over like a dying machine.

Sherlock strained his eyes against the darkness, hoping he might be able to make out the shape of the outlet ahead of him. He was expecting it to be an arch, or a circular opening, that gave out on to the Moscow River, which he imagined to be a wide stretch of water, probably with bridges over it. He couldn’t see anything, however. The darkness ahead of him was intense and unbroken.

What if the opening was below water level, and above the surface there was nothing but a blank brick wall to mark the point where one river poured into another? What if there was a grille separating the two? What if he couldn’t get through, and had to turn round and try to get past the man who was following him, the man who had orders to kill him? The thoughts rolled round and round his head like marbles, never getting anywhere but colliding and sending shock waves through his brain.

He had to get a grip. He had to concentrate if he was going to survive this.

Something touched his face. He flinched, nearly crying out in terror, but managed to stifle the sound by jamming the back of his hand across his mouth and biting down hard. Whatever it was had felt slimy and cold. He waved his hand around in front of his face. Something wet wrapped itself round his wrist, and he realized with relief that it was just one of the mossy tendrils that he’d seen previously, hanging down from the ceiling. He pulled his hand away and the tendril tore out of the brickwork with a sucking noise.

As he moved off, Sherlock realized that he had lost all sensation in his toes.

All the time, behind him, slosh… slosh… slosh… and the wheezing sound of his pursuer breathing heavily. When he glanced over his shoulder, all he could see was darkness. At any second he might feel a hand close over his shoulder, pulling him backwards, pushing him beneath the surface of the Neglinnaya River where he would drown in absolute blackness and his body would never be found.

A thought suddenly occurred to him, and he hesitated.

Maybe he could climb the bank here and wait for his pursuer to go by. As he passed beneath the next manhole cover, he edged across to the side of the river again, where the bank rose up, so that he wouldn’t be seen. He reached up and grabbed a clump of pale grass that he could use to pull himself up.

Out of the shadows, something stepped forward and growled.

It walked on four short legs and its head was triangular, with a pointed muzzle and a skull that flared backwards to two large ears. Its eyes were small and dark, hardly eyes at all, but its lips were pulled back as far as they would go and its mouth seemed overly full of teeth like shards of broken glass. The brown and black hair that covered its body was matted and patchy.

Behind it, three other similar creatures moved forward. Sherlock realized they were dogs, but they were nothing like any dogs he’d ever come across before. They must live down here, he realized, in the dark, generation upon generation, descended from some strays that had found their way into the buried river and living on rats and maybe fish. With nothing to see, their eyes had closed up and ceased to function, but their ears had grown large to replace them. Sherlock suspected that, to them, sound was everything.

For a moment his mind snapped back to the tunnels beneath Waterloo Station and the feral children there. He felt a rush of pity for them, something that he had been too busy to feel when he was trying to escape them. They had been forced to live like wild animals, but at least the dogs here in Moscow had the claws and the teeth to survive. The children had nothing, apart from their intelligence, and Sherlock had a feeling they were fast losing that.

The lead dog wrinkled its nose. It looked like it might be trying to sniff the air, but the smell of decay that rose up like a gas from the river would have made that almost impossible. Its ears twitched as it vainly tried to work out where Sherlock had gone. He was right in front of it, hand extended, but if he didn’t move then it couldn’t hear him.

That, at least, was the theory.

Sherlock’s hand was so cold that he had to clench his fist to keep from shivering, but the numbness was too much to bear and his fingers suddenly twitched. The sound of skin moving against skin, just a whisper to Sherlock, must have been like an explosion to the dogs. The lead one jumped forward. Sherlock pulled his hand away, and the dog’s teeth snapped shut on nothing. Its head jerked back and it began to bark. The other three dogs joined it. The sound echoed and re-echoed through the tunnel.

Sherlock backed off, but the noise he made splashing through the water made his position easy to fix for the dogs.

The lead dog took a few steps and leaped towards Sherlock, jaws agape.

An arm looped round Sherlock’s neck and clenched hard, twisting him around in the water. His pursuer just had time to gloat ‘Gotcha!’ before the lead dog hit him like a cannonball, fastening its jaws on his arm. It wasn’t the target the dog had wanted, but it wasn’t fussy. It bit down, hard.

Sherlock’s pursuer screamed: a high-pitched sound for a man with such a gruff voice. His grip on Sherlock’s throat loosened and Sherlock tore himself free.

In the light that drizzled down from the manhole cover, Sherlock could see his pursuer thrashing back and forth in the water, trying to dislodge the dog. Two of the three others on the bank also leaped. One of them hit the water and dived for the man’s leg, while the other landed on his chest and fastened its jaws around his throat. He fell backwards into the scummy river, arms thrashing wildly.

Sherlock backed away quietly through the water as the remaining wild dog dived in and vanished. For a second he thought about climbing out on to the bank, but there might be more dogs there in hiding. Reluctantly, he pressed on through the water.

Behind him he could hear splashing and grunting, and then just splashing, and then nothing.

Far ahead he could make out a glimmer of light, like an oil lamp hanging in a doorway on a dark night. He pressed forward, water churning in front of him as he hurried along. The light grew brighter, hurting his eyes. It took the form of an arch – an arch through which he could see the grey-blue waters of a greater river crossing the one through which he was wading.

His eyes had grown accustomed to the daylight by the time he reached the arch. It wasn’t barred and there was no grille across the entrance. The Neglinnaya River just poured into the Moscow River from an opening in the banks that ended about a foot above the surface, causing the Neglinnaya to form a small waterfall.

Sherlock edged forward. Holding on to the brickwork with one hand, he leaned out and looked sideways, along the banks of the Moscow River.

It ran between stone walls. If there was any soil, any sand, any ground at all there then it was hidden beneath the surface of the water. Looking up, Sherlock could see that the top of the opening through which the Neglinnaya poured was perhaps six feet below the level of the streets. An iron ladder, flakes of red rust breaking through black paint, led up from just beside the opening. The trouble was, Sherlock knew, that if he went up that ladder he might just end up in the arms of the policeman and the man who had accused him of stealing his wallet.

He looked along the line of the river again, and noticed something that he had missed before: a line where the stones were set back by a foot or so. It seemed to happen every six feet in height: probably an attempt by the architect to ensure that the space above the river got wider the higher it went, maybe to avoid flooding. Whatever the reason, it meant that Sherlock had a way out. All he had to do was edge his way along that line of stones like a man walking a tightrope.

It took him half an hour of careful manoeuvring, during which he almost fell three times into the waters of the Moscow River as it flowed beneath him. He started off wet and cold and ended up dry and frozen, although he wasn’t sure whether that was because the wind channelled by the stone-clad riverbanks had dried him or because the water soaking his clothes had frozen into ice. When he finally found another rusted iron ladder to take him up to the surface he was fortunate enough to see a brazier just a few yards away, full of burning coals. A local Russian man was roasting chestnuts over the coals. For a few kopeks he let Sherlock warm himself beside the brazier.

After half an hour, and two bags of roasted chestnuts, Sherlock felt human enough to head back to the hotel. He was fairly sure that he was safe doing so: nobody had come in that direction along the riverbank looking for him, and as far as he could tell the thugs had discovered him by accident, the way the ones in London had. He waved a grateful thanks to the chestnut vendor and walked off. His legs were sore, he had a headache and his clothes were stiff in a way they hadn’t been earlier, but at least he was relatively warm and dry.

The walk back only took twenty minutes, and by the time he got to within sight of the main doors of the Slavyansky Bazaar Hotel he was sweating with the exertion. The cold Moscow wind pulled the heat from the dampness on his forehead and froze it within moments.

Some kind of altercation was going on at the front of the hotel. A black horse-drawn carriage with no obvious markings or crests had drawn up outside. Instead of being at the sides, the doors were at the back. The driver was wearing nondescript grey clothes and a fur hat, as were the two men who were emerging from the hotel and walking towards the carriage, but the difference between them was that the two men emerging from the hotel were pulling a third man with them. This man was dressed in a well-cut black suit and waistcoat.

It was Mycroft.

He was protesting loudly, and struggling, but Sherlock couldn’t hear what he was saying.

The driver climbed down from his perch and helped the two men push Mycroft into the back of the carriage. The two men climbed in with him and shut the door. It looked as if the driver threw a bolt, locking the door from the outside.

He climbed back and flicked his whip over the horses’ heads. They trotted off, pulling the carriage away from Sherlock.

Sherlock felt his spirits plummet. All he’d been through in the past couple of hours, in the past weeks – it had all led to this: standing alone on the street of a foreign city with his brother being taken away by the secret police. Sherlock tried to find some thread of a plan, some small seed that could be grown into a way of getting Mycroft back, but there was nothing. He literally had no idea what to do next.