I arrive at the Harrow Road Police Station just before 2:00 p.m. and pass through a crowded front office where two motorists with bloodstained shirts are yelling about a traffic accident.
Campbell shuts the office door behind me. He looks every inch a chief-constable-in-waiting, with his arms behind him and a face stiffer than shirt cardboard.
“Jesus Christ, Ruiz! Two fractured vertebrae, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen—she could finish in a wheelchair. And where were you? Being run over by a fucking milk truck . . .”
I can hear them laughing down the hall. The worst of the jokes haven't started yet but that's only because Ali is so sick.
Campbell opens his top drawer and produces a sheet of typed paper. “I warned you. I told you to stay out of this.”
He hands me a resignation letter. Mine. I am to retire immediately on health grounds.
“Sign this.”
“What are you doing to find Gerry Brandt?”
“That's not your concern. Sign the letter.”
“I want to help you find him. I'll sign the letter if you let me help find him.”
Campbell grows indignant, huffing and puffing like a pantomime wolf. I can't see his eyes. They are hidden beneath eyebrows that crawl across his forehead, fleeing toward his ears.
I tell him about the ransom letters and the DNA tests, recounting what I've managed to piece together about the ransom drop. I know it sounds far-fetched but I'm getting closer. I just need help to follow the trail. Gerry Brandt had something to do with it.
Campbell shakes his head in disbelief. “You should hear yourself. You're obsessed.”
“You're not listening. Someone kidnapped Mickey. I don't think Howard Wavell killed her. She's alive!”
“No! You listen to me. This is bullshit. Mickey Carlyle died three years ago. Answer me something—if someone kidnapped her, why did they wait three years before sending a ransom demand? It doesn't make sense because it isn't true.”
He pushes my resignation letter back at me. “You should have retired when I gave you the chance. You're getting divorced. You hardly see your kids. You live alone. Look at you! Christ, you're a mess! I used to tell young detectives to model themselves on you, but now you're an embarrassment. You stayed on too long, Vincent—”
“No, don't ask me.”
“You're over the hill.”
“What hill? I didn't see any hill!”
“Sign the letter.”
Turning my face to one side, I squeeze my eyes shut, blinking away the bitterness. The more I think about it, the angrier it makes me. I can feel it stirring in my guts, churning around like the pistons of a steam engine.
Campbell takes back the fountain pen and returns it to his drawer. “You give me no option. I regret to inform you that your commission with the London Metropolitan Police has been withdrawn. The Commissioner has decided you are a liability. He won't let you give evidence under the label of a serving officer.”
“What do you mean give evidence?”
Campbell takes another letter from his desk drawer. This one is a subpoena.
“At ten o'clock this morning lawyers for Howard Wavell subpoenaed you to give evidence at his appeal hearing at midday tomorrow. They know about the ransom demand and the DNA test. They're going to argue that if a senior serving police officer approved the payment of a ransom for Michaela Carlyle we must believe she's still alive.”
“How did they find out?”
“You tell me. They're also applying for bail. Howard Wavell could be out of prison by tomorrow afternoon.”
Suddenly, I understand. My sacking will be part of the damage limitation. I'll be a maverick cop instead of a serving officer.
Breathing dies in the room. Campbell is still talking but I don't hear the words. I'm living ten seconds ahead of time or ten seconds behind. Meanwhile, a phone is ringing somewhere that nobody wants to answer.
23
Sitting low on worn springs in the front seat of the van, I peer through the windshield at the growing darkness. An Elvis doll on a suction cup dances to and fro on the dashboard.
Weatherman Pete is driving, with his woollen hat and walrus mustache. His jaw moves constantly on a wad of chewing gum that he retrieved from behind his ear.
In the back of the van are his four companions, who refer to themselves as “urban explorers.” Barry, a Cockney, has only two front teeth and a complete absence of hair. He is arguing with Angus, a retired coal miner, about which heavyweight champion had the weakest jaw. Opposite them, Phil tries to join in the conversation but his stutter gives the others too much time to interrupt. The only quiet member of the crew is Moley, who sits on the floor of the van checking ropes and lamps.
“It's the last frontier,” says Pete, talking to me. “Forty thousand miles of sewers, some of them hundreds of years old—it's a feat of engineering to rival the Suez Canal, but nobody gives your sewers a second thought. They just purge their poisons and flush them away.”
“But why explore them?”
He gives me a disappointed look. “Did they ask Hillary why he climbed Everest?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“OK. OK. Well these sewers are like Everest. They're the last frontier. You'll see. It's another world. Go down thirty feet and it's so quiet you can hear your pores opening and closing. And the darkness—it's unnatural. It's not like outside where if you wait your pupils dilate so that you can start making out shapes. Down there it's blacker than black.”
Barry leans through from the back of the van. “It's like a lost city. You got streams, culverts, shelters, basements, grottoes, graves, crypts, catacombs, secret places that the government don't want nobody to know about. It's a different world. One layer burying the next, just like rock sediments. Whenever the great civilizations crumble—Egyptian, Hittite, Roman—the one thing they always leave behind is their sewers and latrines. A million years from now archaeologists are going to be digging up our fossilized turds, take my word for it.”
“And a lot more besides,” adds Angus. “We find all sorts of stuff—jewelry, false teeth, spectacles, flashlights, gold coins, hearing aids, harmonicas, shoes—”
“I once saw a full-grown p-p-p-p-pig,” interrupts Phil. “Biggest p-p-p-porker you ever saw.”
“Happy as a pig in shit, was he?” cackles Angus. Barry joins in until Weatherman Pete tries to raise the tone.
“You know what a tosher is?”
“No.”
“Back in the eighteenth century they used to scour the sewers, panning the muck like you'd pan for gold. Imagine that! Then you had your gongfermers and rakers, who cleaned the sewers and repaired them. Nowadays they call them flushers. You might even hear some of 'em working tonight.”
“Why do they work at night?”
“There's less shit flowing.”
I wish I hadn't asked. Ray Murphy's wife had talked about him working as a flusher. Pete explains how teams of six men, with a ganger in charge, clear blockages by hauling silt out through the manholes.
“I know it sounds pretty antiquated but there's some high-tech stuff, too. They got these little boats—more like hovercrafts really—with cameras on 'em that film the inside of the sewers, looking for problems. You got to watch out for 'em. You don't want to get caught down there.”
The van skids to a halt on loose gravel in a deserted parking lot. As the rear doors open, Moley climbs out first and hands me a pair of overalls and waist-high waders. Next comes a safety harness and Sellafield gloves. Meanwhile, Weatherman Pete opens a yellow plastic suitcase and unfurls a retractable aluminum pole with a tripod and wind cups on the top.
“It's a portable weather station,” he explains. “It gives me wind speed, wind direction, temperature, relative humidity, barometric pressure, solar radiation and precipitation. Everything gets fed into a computer.” He opens a laptop and taps the keyboard. “Right now, you have a window of four hours.”
Moley adds a safety helmet and an emergency breathing apparatus to m
y outfit. He scratches his armpits one last time before he shimmies into his waders.
“Any cuts? Cover them up with waterproof Band-Aids,” says Barry, tossing a box toward me. “Weil's disease—you get that from rat urine. It gets into a cut and ends up in your brain.”
He checks my harness. “Let me tell you what can go wrong down there: fire, explosions, asphyxiation, poisoning, infection and rats that can strip the flesh off your bones. Nobody knows we're down there, so we can't guarantee the sewers are vented. There could be pockets of methane, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, benzene, CO2 and gases I swear don't even have names yet. Don't touch your eyes or mouth with your gloves. Stick close to Moley. Nobody knows his way around like he does.”
He clips a gas monitor onto my harness.
Weatherman Pete gives a thumbs-up and Moley levers open a manhole cover, rolling it to one side. Then he lowers a safety lamp down the small circular shaft. Angus and Phil descend first, climbing down the iron rings. I'm squeezed between Barry and Moley.
The sewer is less than five feet high, forcing me to bend, and the air smells of feces and a putrid dampness. The brick walls curve at the sides and disappear into a shallow stream running down the center. Our shadows are distorted against the brickwork.
“Don't forget to put the seat down,” says Angus, urinating against a wall.
Moley looks at me, the whiteness of his eyes glowing in the lamplight. He doesn't say anything but I know he's giving me one last chance to go back.
Weatherman Pete rolls the manhole cover back into place, sealing us inside.
I suddenly feel nervous.
“How is he going to contact us if it rains?”
“The old-fashioned way,” replies Barry. “He's going to pick up a manhole cover and drop it six inches. We'll hear it miles away.”
Angus claps me on the shoulder. “So what do you think?”
“It doesn't smell so bad.”
He laughs. “Come down here on Saturday morning. Friday is curry night.”
Moley has moved off, wading along the stream. Barry falls in behind me, crouching more than most, as his ample frame is buttressed on all sides by the harness. Water swirls around my knees and the sweating bricks look almost silver in the flashlight beam.
“We call these snotsicles,” says Barry, pointing out the stalactites brushing against our helmets.
Despite the cold I'm already starting to perspire. A hundred yards and a permanent shiver sets in. Every sound is magnified and it makes me edgy. I have been trying to weave Mickey into the various scenarios but it's getting harder.
Another part of me thinks of Ali in the hospital, staring at her crippled self in the mirror, wondering if she's ever going to walk again. I started this. I let her come along when she had far more to lose than I did. Now I'm wading in filth and shit and it seems appropriate. When you consider the state of my life, my career and my relationships, I belong down here.
“The place you showed us on the map. We're under it now,” says Barry, his headlamp momentarily blinding me.
I glance up at a large opening and a side tunnel. The burst water main on the night of the ransom drop sent a thousand gallons a minute flooding through the streets and into the drains—enough to carry a ransom; maybe even enough to carry me.
“If something got washed down here, where would it finish up?”
“It's a top-down system. Operates on gravity,” says Angus.
Moley nods in agreement.
“Go-go-go-got flushed away,” stutters Phil.
Barry begins to explain. “These small local sewers feed into main sewers and the waste is then drawn off into one of five interceptory sewers that run west to east—all fed by gravity. The high-level sewer begins at Hampstead Hill and crosses Highgate Road near Kentish Town. Farther south you got two middle-level sewers. One begins close to Kilburn and runs under the Edgware Road to Euston Road, past Kings Cross. The second runs from Kentish Town under Bayswater and along Oxford Street. Then you got two low-level sewers, one under Kensington, Piccadilly and the City; and the other right under the Thames Embankment, following the northern bank of the river.”
“Where do they all go?”
“To the sewage treatment works at Beckton.”
“And the system gets flushed out by rainfall?”
He shakes his head. “The main sewers are built alongside old rivers that provide the water.”
The only river I know that enters the Thames estuary from the north is the River Lea, which is a long way east of here.
“There are heaps of them,” scoffs Angus. “You can't just wish a river away. You can cover 'em over or divert 'em into pipes but they'll keep flowing just the same as always.”
“Where are they?”
“Well you got the Westbourne, the Walbrook, the Tyburn, Stamford Brook, Counter's Creek and the Fleet . . .”
Each of these names is familiar. There are dozens of streets, parks and estates named after them, but I had never equated them with ancient rivers. The fine hairs on my neck are standing on end. You hear stories about secret cities beneath cities; tunnels that took prime ministers to war cabinet rooms and passageways that carried mistresses for rendezvous with kings, but I had never imagined a world of water, unseen blind rivers, coursing beneath the streets. No wonder the walls are crying.
Moley wants us to keep moving. The tunnel goes straight on with occasional vertical shafts emptying into it from above creating mini-waterfalls. Keeping to the center of the stream, our boots slosh through the sediment and cold grayish water. Slowly the passages grow wider and taller and our shadows no longer stoop against the walls.
Tethered together we descend into a shaft and wade silently along a larger sewer. Occasionally we slide down cement slopes, splashing through several inches of stinking water. At other times we near the surface and faint beams of light angle through iron grates.
I try to imagine the ransom, divided and sealed in plastic, being carried through these tunnels, dropping over waterfalls, floating through crypts.
For another hour we walk, crawl and slide. Eventually, we emerge into a cavernous Victorian brick chamber supported by pillars and arches. It must be thirty feet high, although it's hard to tell in the darkness. White-green water seems to boil at my feet, plunging over a waterfall.
Everywhere there are rusty iron gratings and long chains hanging from the roof. A concrete weir, made up of two large spillways, divides the room. Foaming gouts of waste are swept away by a great culvert that intercepts the flow above the spillway.
Below it, down the sliding concrete weir, is a large empty concrete pool featuring huge hinged steel gates with counterweights on the top end to act like levers and seal the doors closed.
Angus sits on the edge of the spillway and takes a sandwich from his pocket, unwrapping the plastic film.
He motions with his sandwich. “That over there is the low-level interceptory sewer. It starts at Chiswick and runs east beneath the Thames Embankment to the Abbey Mills pumping station in east London. Everything gets diverted from here to the treatment works.”
“Why the spillway?”
“Storms. You get a decent downpour in London and there's nowhere for the rain to go except into the drains. Thousands of miles of small local lines feed into the main sewers. First you get a gust of wind and then the whoosh!”
“Whoosh!” echoes Moley.
Angus picks a crumb off his chest. “The system can only accommodate a certain level of water. You don't want it backing up or the politicians would be knee-deep in shit in Westminster. I'm talking literally. So when the water reaches a certain level it spills over the weir and gets diverted through those gates.” He points at the huge iron doors, which must each weigh about three tons. “They open like a valve when floodwaters come roaring over the weir.”
“Where does it go?”
“Straight into the Thames at a good ten knots.”
Suddenly another scenario emerges, swirling around me like the
smell of almonds. The Thames Water foreman described the water main having “blown apart,” creating a tremendous flood. This would have discouraged anyone from following the ransom and could also have served another purpose—to carry the packages over the weir.
“I need to get through those gates.”
“You can't,” says Moley. “They only open during floods.”
“But you can get me there. You know where it comes out.”
Moley scratches his armpits and rocks his head from side to side. My whole body has started to itch.
24
Weatherman Pete produces a high-pressure hose and hooks it up to a tap. The blast of water knocks me back a step. I turn around and around, getting pummeled by the spray.
The van is parked almost directly above an open manhole in Ranelagh Gardens in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The grand hospital buildings, painted by the rising sun, are just visible through the trees. Nearby, at Chelsea Barracks, I can hear the strains of a military band practicing.
These gardens are normally closed until 10:00 a.m. and I don't know how Weatherman Pete managed to get through the gates. Then I notice magnetic mats on the side of his van advertising the City of Westminster.
“I got dozens of them,” he explains, rather sheepishly. “Come on, I'll show you what you want to see.”
Shedding the overalls and waders, we seal them into plastic sacks and load up the van. Moley has changed into his camouflage uniform and blinks into the sunlight as though frightened it might do him permanent damage. The others are drinking tea from a flask and recounting the night's journey.
Piling into the van, I lean over the seat as Weatherman Pete drives along the narrow tarmac paths and waves at a trio of Chelsea pensioners on their morning walk. Pulling through the front gate, we circle the outer walls of the gardens until we reach the Thames.
Parking in the Embankment Gardens, I cross the road to Riverside Walk, overlooking the river. The Thames, caught between tides, smells like perfume after where I've been.
Pete joins me and glances across the brown slick of water. Clambering onto the wall, he hooks his arm around an iron lamppost and leans out over the muddy bank.
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