At South Dock, under the blank face of No. 1 Canada Square, there was a pedalo waiting for them. The posse formed a protective circle around the fugitives, who exchanged hurried embraces with their saviour.
— Wot wil appen 2 U? Carl asked, but the wily cockney only laughed:
— Nevah U mynd, Eyev lastid viss long in Lundun, Eye rekkun Eyel stä ve disstunce.
— Fanks 4 evryfyng! Carl called across the widening watery gulf — but he could not have said whether Terri heard him, for the ebb tide had already caught the frail craft and they were being swept around the Greenwich peninsula beneath the massive curved walls of the Millennium Dome. Within units the Barrier was in sight and the pedalo, like the common shag flying close to the swell that Carl had seen upon his arrival in London, shot between the two central pontoons and out into the Thames estuary. Ahead the foglamp was switching on, its beam dabbing the racing waters with bloody smears, while behind New London — with all its madness and cruelty — sank in their wake.
The Fairway was a three-masted ferry built for speed with long, clean lines. It was armed with twenty shooters for the cut and run of combat on the high seas. The crew were the usual band of rapscallions — chavs, pikeys, coloureds and gafferless dads. Mercifully many of them had been snipped, so even if they could mouth off among themselves, they were prevented from asking the odd pair of Inspectors awkward questions. The gaffer, a hard-faced dad with a wooden leg and long jet-black hair, played along with Carl and Antonë's imposture. He's a freebooter, Böm explained when they were alone in their cabin, he owes no more fealty to the King than you or I.
The Fairway lay off Tilbury another day until the wind was in the right quarter and the tide was on the turn. Then it weighed anchor and slipped downstream. This was a hastier, more purposeful voyage than the long slog the Trophy Room had made up from Bril. With a strong northeasterly wind bellying the privateer's sails, the prevailing westerly currents could do little to hamper it; and with every timber creaking and rope straining, the Fairway carved a deep, white path through the booze-dark sea. The ferry shot along the coastline of Durbi; Nott Bouncy Castle was raised at first tariff on the third day out from London, and the long, low island of Chil sighted before the foglamp dipped at the end of the second.
Antonë Böm spent the short voyage below decks, still immersed in his speculations, covering page after page of his notebook with inky grooves. His fingers were numb, his mental capacities exhausted. The escape was no relief for him, no life after life, but an antechamber that debouched into yet more tense anticipation. By contrast Carl had been returned to the encompassing present, the snuggled-up, cuddled-down now. For on the foredeck stood a large cage, and in it, wounded and wary, was Tyga. To begin with it was bad between them. Upon their reunion Tyga had rejected Carl — a thing the lad had never even heard of a moto doing. Tyga curled his thick top lip and flared his nose flanges. His eyelids dipped, he rolled over on the straw and, in so doing, showed the criss-cross scars of the beatings he had received at the Bedlam freak show.
It took several tariffs of gentle coaxing, Carl moving slowly closer and closer, until he could stroke Tyga's jonckheeres, and then the tale emerged in sibilant phrases: U leff me … Eye hayt U … Heeth thwapped me … Hith thingee … Eye wath thor … the broken-off narrative of vile abuse. The sly kicks and pokes that the chav lads set to tend to the moto had administered gained in frequency and intensity, until the horrific night when the warden had come in and thrust the bottle of jack halfway down Tyga's throat. Then, when the moto was mullered, his arms and legs buckled, the warden used him in dreadful ways.
Carl held the moto's huge head in the cage, which was redolent of the beast's sweet shit. They were surrounded by the creak of the Fairway's rigging, the snap of its sails, the groan of timbers caulked with moto oil. As they gently rocked into reconciliation, Carl felt the hardening muscles of his arms. His hand strayed to his top lip, where last year's transparent down was hardening into stubble. He looked down and in the parting of his Inspector's robe saw the wiry hairs that were creeping up from his wally to his navel. Seven months they had been gone from Ham — the other three motos were dead and Carl was, he realized, irrevocably changed. He held Tyga's head with fierce love as the world turned about the still point of the ferry. Soon Carl would be a dad — there was no stopping it.
The lights of the dashboard twinkled serenely in a screen free of London smog or the orange glow of its countless letrics. The JUN night was warm yet the sea still chilly — and when Tyga's hands and feet dabbled in the water, he struggled, twisting in the offloading sling. Carl was alongside in the Fairway's pedalo. He stroked Tyga's jonckheeres and calmed him, whispering: Cummon, Tyga, nó long nah, Ure goin oam, gonna C yaw wallö mayts, gonna B on Am.
They splashed ashore in a narrow inlet, and the pedalo's crew slung their evian skins and changingbags after them, before shoving off without any further ceremony and heading back to the Fairway. The privateer came about with a cracking of canvas and under a headlight so vast and bigwatt that all its flyspecks were clearly visible. Then it beat off up the sound, heading for the open sea and the mysteries of Úro. The two blokes were left standing by their moto, so near to their journey's end yet utterly abandoned.
They slept that night on the rocky foreshore and were awoken past first tariff by the foglamp burning down on them. Carl cracked open his stinging eyes and saw a few clicks away across the waves the green crown of the isle-driven-by-Dave. Despite all their travails his heart seemed to accelerate, until with a surge it broke from his chest and flew up to join a whiff of golden cloud floating in the pink screen of morning.
They took two tariffs to work their way along the rugged coast. The rocks were even bigger here than those they'd encountered on the westward flight from Nimar — great piles of brick and yok, whole jagged clumps of crete. There were many twisted prongs of irony, and spikes of other corroded metalwork lay treacherous in the shallows. Tyga, denied proper wallowing in Bedlam, had never really recovered from the journey to London. His fresh wounds smarted in the seawater, and his old wounds reopened as he bucketed along. Yet he bore it all with great fortitude — it was enough that he was going home. Carl, for his part, tried to comfort the moto, wading out into the water again and again to cuddle him. But whatever intimacy they had recovered on the Fairway Tyga had repudiated; again and again the moto flipped Carl off with a shake of his massive shoulders, and, turning his pathetic, scarred muzzle seawards he plodded on.
At the beginning of the third tariff, with the foglamp dipping in the screen, they rounded yet another promontory and came, quite suddenly, upon Nimar. The gulls were in tumult. It was the breeding season and the ferociously cawing blackwings and oilgulls were fighting to preserve their nesting sites from bonkergulls that dived down from above to harry them. There was nothing unusual about this dense mobbing, the ever-mutating fractals of wing and beak. Nevertheless, as the travellers drew closer to this feathery riot, Carl saw a sinister focus to their botheration, where the concentration of seafowl was so great that their sharp wings cut the air into wedges of white, grey and black.