Not rubbish, a girl. Rolling and tumbling as if she were a canoe riding the rapids. The Thames was a river in spate, the ebbing tide running fast, yet the girl was trying to swim, trying to fight the river single-handedly. But she was too small and the water would be too cold （we call it hypothermia, he remembered Webb saying）。 Frobisher didn’t hesitate or give any sane consideration to what he was about to do. Afterwards, he thought it was the act of a madman, not a hero. He shed his overcoat and pulled off his boots and dived into the murderous river.
He caught up with the girl at London Bridge and they were swept along on a parallel course. She shouted something to him but he couldn’t tell what. He was growing weak, fighting to keep his head above the water—the girl was stronger than he was—but the river was surely too cold for either of them to last much longer. He made an effort to grab her, but they were moving too fast.
Tower Bridge was approaching at tremendous speed and if he couldn’t get hold of her in the next few seconds she would be unstoppable, gone to the marshes, out to sea, lost for ever. He had a sudden clear view of her face and then the water closed over her head. With one last superhuman effort he got hold of her hair and then an arm, and then he rolled her over and got one of his arms around her neck from behind, and with the help now of the current steered them both towards the piers, to the steps, to the Dead Man’s Hole.
They thudded into the jutting concrete. No sign, unfortunately, of the attendant and his grappler. Frobisher grabbed onto a big iron ring that was fixed into the wall and with his last iota of will somehow managed to push and pull them both up onto the platform. He had swallowed half the Thames and now he was coughing it up again. Likewise the girl, choking and hacking as if she had a bad case of the croup. Frobisher could feel his heart racing, about to go out of control. His engine, he thought. Not an ounce of strength left, they both limply lay on their backs. Like a couple of flounders, Frobisher thought.
They came back to life slowly, first the girl, then Frobisher. They had not been unnoticed and soon several people were making their way down the steps and crowding the small space. An ambulance was called for—Frobisher resisted for himself, but he rode with Freda when she was bundled in blankets and loaded into the vehicle. He leant across to speak to her as they rattled along to St. Thomas’s. “How are you feeling now, Miss…？”
“Murgatroyd,” she murmured weakly, her eyes closed. “Freda Murgatroyd.”
Frobisher laughed, a rare sound worth recording, like the nightingale’s song, although Frobisher was no songbird. “People have been looking all over for you, Freda.” She bore no resemblance to the photograph that Gwendolen had given him, but he was sure that he had seen her before. He had seen her everywhere. She was every missing girl in London who haunted his waking hours.
“Did you try to drown yourself, Miss Murgatroyd?” he asked gently as they approached the hospital.
Her eyes flew open. “Kill myself?” A barrage of angry words followed, the gist of which was that a policeman had tried to murder her. Maddox, Frobisher thought, but then she added, “In uniform. He laughed at me.”
Oakes, then. “I will catch him and punish him,” he promised solemnly, but her fury had exhausted her. Her eyes were closed and she gave no sign of having heard him.
* * *
—
Freda was “in surprisingly good shape,” the doctor said, although exhausted. Sleep would cure her, he said. “You too,” he added, taking Frobisher’s pulse. “Too fast,” he declared, and then something about “a man of your age,” at which point Frobisher stopped listening.
A night nurse gave him a change of clothes. “We have a stock for emergencies,” she said. “Second-hand—they come in very useful.” Frobisher wondered where the clothes came from and if the rough fustian trousers, collarless shirt and worn jacket he was wearing had come from the body of a dead man. He caught sight of himself in a mirror in the lavatories and was struck by how he looked like a completely different person. We’re all dead men, he thought, from the moment we come into this world.
He kept watch by Freda’s bed. The nurse told him that she had been given a sleeping draught and wouldn’t wake for hours. His questions would have to wait until the morning. Where had she been? How had she come to be in the river? And, perhaps most importantly of all, where was her friend Florence?
He was ridiculously keen to tell Gwendolen, imagining her astonishment and delight when he presented the long-lost Freda, although he supposed her gratitude would be marred by his failure to produce Florence as well. Still, a bird in the hand.