General Wolfe still bore the shrapnel scars of a mistimed German bomb. Down there, beyond the Canaletto façade of the Naval College and the grim brick face of the old power station, was that they’d been aiming at; the river and the docks.
Christopher thought of the conkers. Change in a nutshell. How many times had he looked down at that view? When he was a kid and the park had been his playground and refuge, joy and solace, running down to the Cutty Sark pier on a yawning Seventies Sunday when all that was open was the tourist ice cream stand and the old ship herself, looking forlornly at the water from her dry dock and her Scottish figurehead looking for a fight.
He thought of London then, mid-rise and soot-faced from four-star engines and dirty diesels. The bike rides east out into the melancholy flat lands where the clank, clank, clank of the pile drivers sank the footings for the flood barrier.
And he looked now. At the shining towers of Canary Wharf where the lights twinkled like stars in the East, a distant robot train on the light railway, the apartments running east and west down the river’s banks and a cruise ship, vast and white, slowly navigating its tourists towards a hard Victorian stop just below Tower Bridge.
Somewhere, he thought, somewhere between that past and this present lies the riddle and its answer. He straddled both, knew that city, knew the jaded old cow under that all that make up and knew she never really changed.
Christopher and the general were looking at an old friend who had somehow defied the ravages of time; familiar but unrecognisable. They both looked without seeing. The man forever scanning the horizon for a lost city because in it he might find a lost woman.
Darkness was closing in. Of mood as much as anything else. And Christopher hated that. He was not maudlin by nature and so tried to deny the slow seep of past woes much ingress. God knows he’d seen enough misery to know its corrosive effects.
He looked up at the statue still looking sternly out across the Thames and on into the great city as though he could see up every street and down every alley. Because Christopher was, just, still a detective and because an old police TV series catch phrase came unbidden to mind, he winked and said: “Keep ‘em peeled.’
He was smiling to himself as he walked back towards his car. Below, London illuminated like a thousand fishing boats on a coal black sea. They were, for the moment, for the first time in a long time, at ease with each other.
