The bridge was right in front of me now, filling up the windshield. Tim was whispering something. I think it was a prayer. I slammed my hand down on the controls. My palm hit the black ball at the end of the lever, shifting it forward. I heard a hiss underneath me. The hydraulic arm had come into operation. At the same moment, the whole bus began to sink like the end of a ride in a carnival.
But would it sink in time? There were only a few seconds left.
“Brake, Tim!” I shouted.
We hit the bridge.
We were just low enough to squeeze through. In fact, the mattresses didn’t make it. I heard them as they were torn free from their bindings and dragged along the roof. Looking back, I saw them plummet into the road behind us, right in the path of the leading police car. It swerved to avoid them, mounted the curb, and crashed through the fence, finally crushing itself against a lamppost. Ma Powers gave a short bray of laughter.
“Good work, kid,” Johnny called out.
But it wasn’t over yet. We’d taken out two of the five police cars. That still left three and already they were moving up on us. Ma Powers let off a hail of bullets. I heard a windshield shatter but they kept on coming. Two of them surged ahead. One stayed behind to keep the back of the bus covered.
The road was wider now. The two police cars had edged forward and separated, so there was one on each side, with us sandwiched in the middle.
“Nick . . .” Tim muttered.
There wasn’t much traffic about at that time of night, but looking ahead, I saw a truck thundering toward us. But with the two police cars on either side, we were taking up all the road. Somebody would have to give.
The truck gave. At the last second, with its headlights dazzling us and the blast of its horn deafening us, it swerved away, left the road, and jackknifed into a field. The truck had been carrying eggs. I know because some of them splattered into our windshield. With the horn still blaring, the truck hit a tree stump, somersaulted, and burst into flames. Later I heard that nobody had been killed. But between us we’d cooked up a fifty-thousand-egg omelette.
We were doing nearly seventy miles an hour by now. Ahead of us, cars were vacating the road as fast as they could—and they didn’t seem to care where they ended up. But they weren’t our problem. We were down at ground level. The two police cars were only inches away, racing alongside us. They had rolled down their windows. Two shotguns were pointing at us, one on each side. Two blasts and Tim and I would have more holes than a colander. We couldn’t slow down, not with the third police car behind us. We were going as fast as we could. We were stuck.
I stared at the nearest policeman, watched his finger tighten on the trigger. For a moment our eyes met and we were trapped in a blue-and-white nightmare. There was nothing I could do.
Nothing? At the last second I slammed my hand down on the controls. The bus rose into the air again. Simultaneously, the two shotguns fired. But now we were above them. The bullets passed underneath us. The police car on the left hit the one on the right. The police car on the right shredded the tires of the one on the left. Both cars went careering off in opposite directions.
Four down. One to go.
But it seemed that I’d pushed the lever a little too hard. Something had shortcircuited. We were no sooner up at the end of the hydraulic arms than we were on the way down again. And that was how we continued, up and down like some crazy jack-in-the-box.
“What are ya doing?” Powers called out.
“It’s broken,” Tim cried.
That was the understatement of the year. Sparks were flashing all over the control box. There was a smell of burning rubber and a wisp of smoke crawled into the air. Up and down. I could feel my stomach protesting. It was trying to go the other way.
Then the fifth police car pulled out and began to overtake us. It was the last one left and perhaps the driver thought he could cut us off. Ma Powers opened her handbag, pulled out a spare cartridge, and reloaded the machine gun. Johnny followed her as she staggered forward to get a better aim. The control box was on fire now. The engine was howling at us to stop. The hydraulic arms were creaking and shuddering as they pumped us madly up and down. I reckoned we had only a few minutes left before the whole thing either broke down or blew up.
Those last few minutes happened very quickly.
One moment we were up. The next we were at the same level as the police car. It was edging ahead, about to overtake us. Ma Powers raised the machine gun. Then I saw the two passengers in the backseat.
“No!” I shouted.
It was Snape and Boyle. I had no idea what they were doing there but it was definitely them. I could even swear that Snape winked at me before Ma Powers opened fire. But I was still shouting when the machine gun drowned me out. I saw the windows of Snape’s car frost over in a thousand cracks. I saw the tires cut to ribbons. I saw the mirrors and door handles spin away into the night. The car veered into us, out of control, then swung away. I watched it spiral into the curb. Then it was as if somebody had picked it up and thrown it. It took off, bounced, then cartwheeled into a telephone booth. A few seconds later it exploded.
They were dead. Snape and Boyle were dead. There was no way they could have survived. And they were the only people in the world who knew that I’d been framed. They were my only way out of this mess. And they were dead.
I could have cried. But I didn’t have time.
There was a sharp bend in the road. I heard Tim cry out. I looked up. He was spinning the wheel desperately. But we were going too fast. He’d lost control. Ma Powers dropped the machine gun. Johnny swore. The people mover, at ground level, left the road, sliced through a hedge, and hurtled toward a building. Tim didn’t even have time to slam on the brakes. Traveling at seventy miles an hour, we smashed into the wall.
At least, the wheels did. But by the time the impact came, the hydraulic arms had lifted us up again. The 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.
This is it, I muttered to myself as we rocketed out. Now we’ve got to die.
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 Titanic had gone down. The whole place was a disaster. Dry rot, rising damp, termites, mold . . . the building would have given a surveyor a field day. Sneeze, and a field would be all that was left.
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.”
“The H?”
“Yeah—you know. Water is H2O. Tim has to make sure there’s enough H. He works for the Thames Water Authority.”
“Okay.” Ma Powers shook her head slowly. “Maybe that explains why he’s such a drip.”
The ice had been broken—or at least, the water. Nails laid the table and we sat down to a breakfast of bacon sandwiches, strong coffee, shredded wheat, and grapefruit yogurt. The last two had been suggested by Ma Powers. Without the machine gun she was just like anyone’s mother. I think I preferred her with it.
“Ya don’t look so good, Johnny boy,” she said. “Did ya eat proper food in prison?”
“Sure, Ma . . .”
“Plenny of fruit? Here—have some grapefruit yogurt.”
“I’m okay, Ma . . .”
“Do ya want Mummy to get ya some sugar?”
“Ma . . .”
“Yogurt’s good for you, Johnny,” Nails chipped in, spooning out some of his own.
He should have kept his mouth shut. Johnny suddenly picked up his plastic container and slammed it into Nathan’s face, crumpling it against his cheek. Grapefruit yogurt dripped over his chin and onto his shirt. Ma Powers raised her eyebrows but said nothing. Tim sighed and reached for the shredded wheat. He wasn’t looking too good. I guess his nerves were pretty shredded, too.
But at least Johnny cheered up a few minutes later when he finished his coffee and turned on the television. Breakfast TV had just started and the first thing he saw was his own face, a police mug shot taken a few months before.
“. . . a daring escape from Strangeday Hall late last night. Powers, who was serving fifteen years for armed robbery, is described by the police as unpredictable and extremely dangerous. The public is warned not to approach him.”
The
picture flickered off to be replaced by the newscaster. He was looking out of the screen with tired eyes, trying not to yawn.
“Accompanying Powers in the breakout was a thirteen-year-old known as Nicholas Diamond . . .”
And there I was suddenly on TV. It was the same photograph that had appeared in all the newspapers. Young, innocent, smiling . . . you couldn’t believe all the things the newscaster was saying about me.
“Diamond, arrested only a month ago following the brutal Woburn Carbuncle robbery, is described as violent and ruthless. In fact, if Johnny Powers is Public Enemy Number One, Diamond must now be considered Public Enemy Number Two.
“Police are still looking for Tim Diamond, Nicholas’s elder brother, who may be able to help them with their inquiries.”
Johnny switched off the set.
“They’re looking for me!” Tim moaned. He was staring at the blank screen as if the newscaster was about to climb out and grab him.
“Of course they’re looking for ya.” Johnny grinned at me. “Public Enemy Number Two! Ya moved up in the charts pretty quick—eh, kid?”
“Yeah.” I tried to look delighted. It wasn’t easy. “What happens next, Johnny?”
“Right now ya get some sleep. I reckon we could all do with some shut-eye. Isn’t that right, Ma?”
“That’s right, Johnny boy.”
“Meantime, Nails can go out and get the rest of the boys together. I’ll see them at four. So, Nails . . . ya better get a box of cupcakes or something.”
“Sure thing, Johnny.”
“Good.” Johnny patted me on the shoulder. “Public Enemy Number Two? I like that, kid. It suits ya.”
At last Tim and I were alone.
We were sharing a bedroom on the second floor. It was about as comfortable as the living room. There were two single beds leaning unsteadily toward each other, a chair with three legs, and a wardrobe minus the door. The window looked out onto a construction site behind the house, only there was so much dirt on the glass you could barely see anything.