One arm reaching from the deeper darkness of the culvert. The limb bare, white and – as I edged through the water towards it – I saw the ghastly scars of heroin addiction, the track marks on the limb looking like a child’s join-the-dots game.

Hitchens called out to me. ‘Detective?’

‘This is it!’ I shouted.

I went further into the black hole and the water was deeper here, over my shoes, and much colder. And there he was – Darren Donovan, perhaps ten metres back from the Thames, his cropped head face down in the black waters of the Tyburn.

Then the darkness suddenly rose up and slammed into me, knocking the wind out of me and throwing me backwards against the curved wall of the concrete culvert.

I banged my head hard against the wall and sat down in the water with a thump, the base of my spine smacking against the reinforced concrete.

And then I felt the hands around my throat.

I was thrown onto my back as if I was weightless, the hands never letting go, digging deep into my flesh, their grip tighter now.

Large hands. Strong hands. Trying to kill me, trying to choke the life out of me.

I stared up at the large figure in the darkness, and I kicked out wildly, clawing at the hands around my neck and then raking the thick muscled arms, reaching for where I knew his eyes would be but unable to find them, unable to get even close, all the strength ebbing out of me with every passing second.

Already my breath had stopped. Already the blood had stopped.

‘Detective?’ Hitchens said at the entrance to the culvert. ‘Max?’

The hands let me go.

I was aware of the dark bulky figure splashing towards the light. I tried to call out to Hitchens but found I could not speak. I tried to get up but found I could not move. Sickness overwhelmed me. Far away someone was calling my name.

But I was bone-tired, suddenly far too exhausted to respond, and so I lay back and closed my eyes for just a little while, needing a moment before I got up and went on, my head resting in the ancient waters of the Tyburn.

Part Two

PART TWO

The CroSS-beam aNd the rOpe

14

I sat on a bench by the Thames watching the sun go down in a blaze of red over Chelsea while a couple of detective inspectors from New Scotland Yard did the hot debrief, the interview that takes place in the golden hour after a major incident. There wasn’t much to tell them but we went over it again and again and again as the sun sunk lower over West London.

‘He was big,’ I said. ‘Freakishly big. Abnormally strong. Tossed me about as if I weighed nothing.’

One of the detective inspectors stifled a yawn. The other one closed his notebook.