The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘You really do know everyone,’ Bryant goaded.

  Tamsin ticked the houses off on her hand. ‘Oh yes, there’s the squat at number 45—that’s full of medical students. They’re very polite and keep to themselves, and they can juggle, which is nice, although we do have to talk to them about their music sometimes, not so much the volume as the lyrics, and everyone else is an English professional or foreign, which is always so much harder to gauge, I find. There are mixed blessings at number 4, Omar and Fatima; she’s terribly sweet, he’s—well, taciturn is too kind a word. The Ethiopians at 37 seem pleasant enough but never talk to anyone; the women wear headscarves and produce unusual cooking smells in the summer. The Aysons are at number 39, but they don’t talk to their neighbours, Jake and Aaron, because they’re devout Christians and don’t approve of the boys’ lifestyle. Kallie and Paul are our new arrivals, then there’s Heather Allen, over there in the Chanel suit, but we don’t see much of George, her husband, because he’s often away on business. Apparently she cries a lot when he’s abroad—Lauren can hear her through the grate in the party wall—they’re very much in love, but heaven knows what he gets up to in Ottawa or wherever it is. She used to be in PR but got fired for taking a backhander, thinks nobody knows.’

  ‘Was anyone friendly with Ruth Singh?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Nobody saw anything of her because she never went out. I suppose we’re all a little to blame.’ Mrs Wilton adjusted her frills and looked suddenly tired. ‘I do want everyone to mix,’ she confided, ‘but Jake and Elliot have been huddled in the corner discussing something for the last twenty minutes, which is odd because they normally can’t stand each other. Jake won’t speak to Mark Garrett because the estate agent apparently made some derogatory remarks about gay people to his girlfriend, who promptly told Aaron, because they go to the same gym. Omar sold us our kitchen, but the drawers stick and Oliver can’t bring himself to complain because they’re friends. My husband doesn’t like to make a fuss. Mark Garrett bought Omar’s family store, and promised he’d be careful who he sold it to, but he allowed a betting shop to take over the lease. We already have four bookmakers and two saunas in the high street and there’s still no patisserie, so I had to invest in a bread-maker. It’s all so difficult. I need a drink.’

  Brewer wandered in clutching a Gameboy, the headphones still in his ears. Oliver attempted to remove the device as guests made soothing sounds around them.

  ‘Fat, ginger and private school,’ said Garrett behind his back, ‘poor little bugger.’

  ‘You must be Kallie and Paul,’ Tamsin smiled. ‘That’s Brewer, and he says he’s very pleased to meet you.’

  Let the kid speak for himself, thought Paul. He’s ten today.

  ‘I hope you’re settling into our little street. Oliver tells me you have your work cut out, getting the house back in order.’

  ‘He’s right,’ Kallie agreed. ‘We just don’t have the finances to do it for a while.’

  Tamsin tried not to flinch at the mention of impecuniosity. ‘Ah well, these things take time,’ she offered vaguely in retreat. ‘Do try the brioches, they’re Oliver’s favourite. We had to go miles to get them.’

  ‘How quickly they all appear when there’s drink on the table,’ said Benjamin Singh. ‘Incredible, isn’t it, Arthur? There was no one around when my sister needed help. Ruth rarely saw her next-door neighbours, that’s why she didn’t talk to them. The Allen woman was overbearing, the Egyptian lady was all but invisible. People in this country complain about how wrong it is for a caste system still to exist in India, but they should look at their own behaviour.’

  Bryant regarded the assembly, squashed into the lounge pretending to enjoy themselves, with a misanthropic eye. How little they have in common, he thought, except the desire for upward mobility, an eagerness to turn their little corner of the city into some kind of urban village. They’re waiting for delicatessens and designer opticians, praying for the local tyre factory to be turned into lofts. Then they’ll know the corner has been turned, and won’t be ashamed of their postal address any more. Fifty years ago the streets were filled with smog and working men wasted away from chest diseases. People dismiss their good fortune and instead become more restless than ever . . .

  The rivers of conversation ebbing back and forth across the room were filled with dark undercurrents, the swirl of old rivalries, the scent of bad feelings. Benjamin was right; none of the conversation seemed to involve Ruth Singh. It was as if she had never existed.

  Perhaps you’ve made too much of the matter, Bryant told himself. This is the last time you’re going to see Ben. He’s leaving it all behind. It’s time you did as well.

  14

  * * *

  EGYPTIANS

  What bothered John May more than anything was the location of the building.

  As a teenager he had been warned away from the soot-coated pubs and rough-houses crammed into the roads off the embankment. The area between the river and the railways was traditionally fringed with the poorest homes; here had lived the workers who built the tunnels and arches and laid the tracks, the Thames lightermen, the coalboys and dockers, their women in laundries and sweatshops. Too much poverty, too many people crammed together to survive a Saturday night without drunken fighting. The poor lived in lowlands, the rich on hills; a rule that applied to so many of the world’s major cities. London sloped up from the Thames, to Shooter’s Hill and Crystal Palace in the south, to Hampstead Heath and Alexandra Palace in the north. Crime drifted down to the base, gravity-drawn like the cloacal water sucked into London’s lost rivers.

  He nearly called the whole thing off after Bimsley fell over his second dustbin. The boy was a hard-working officer, but had clearly inherited his father’s strange lack of coordination. The PCU had a long history of apprenticeship: Janice Longbright’s mother had worked there, as had Bimsley Senior. When there were fewer rules to follow, you had to work with people you could trust.

  May’s trick with the Yale lock failed in the jaundiced gloom that passed for London night, and they were forced to climb over the wall, an exercise for which May showed surprising aptitude. Although it was after ten there were still plenty of people on the streets, but no one seemed interested in what they were doing. The light pollution reflecting from the low cloud-base enabled them to see as they picked their way through the rubbish.

  At the end of the passage, they crossed the small square and edged down between a mulberry-tiled gap in the buildings, coming out on to a brick-strewn floor inside the two remaining walls of a warehouse.

  ‘That answers Arthur’s question,’ said May. ‘He told me that every foot of the Fleet had been mapped and explored, that there was nothing left to see. But according to his maps, the buildings around here are at least a hundred and fifty years old. If they’re demolishing this one, they’re clearing a path back to the Fleet that hasn’t been accessible for at least that long.’

  ‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Bimsley, backing around a stack of bricks from which a rat had just dashed.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe we should listen out for the sound of running water.’

  ‘All I can hear is the traffic in Farringdon Road.’

  ‘Follow me.’ May picked his way to the edge of the interior wall, which had been painted an institutional shade of railway green at some time in the 1930s. Between the back wall and the start of the next building was a narrow gap. ‘Want to go first?’ May offered.

  ‘I’m not sure I’d fit down there,’ warned Bimsley. He wasn’t nervous of what he might find, but some of the tiles were broken and he was wearing a decent jacket, having arranged to see some friends later in a West End pub.

  ‘We need evidence of what Greenwood has been hired to do,’ May told him. ‘Don’t think of it as a favour to Arthur so much as trying to close the reaction gap between us and the law-breakers.’

  ‘Oh, very funny,’ said Bimsley, squeezing into the space. Reaction-gap reduction was a training
initiative long touted by the Met to its forces, and was consequently the butt of many jokes. The idea of crime anticipation and prevention was hardly new and not overly successful, but it was well suited to the PCU. At least, thought May, we should be able to manage an arising situation between a convicted fraudster and an easily duped academic.

  ‘Do you think I can get an advance on my wages?’ asked Bimsley. ‘I’m broke.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be,’ replied May. ‘You’re a junior.’

  ‘Yeah, but I’m working overtime.’

  ‘I’ll give you one if you find something.’ May shone the torch ahead. The tiles were covered in the kind of calcified slime he associated with river walls at low tide. ‘It looks like you can get all the way down there,’ he encouraged. ‘Take my Valiant.’

  Bimsley accepted the torch. ‘If I ruin my clothes, I’m going to put in a chit.’ He tried to avoid touching the walls, but couldn’t help it after something sleek and squeaking ran across his boots. His palm came away green.

  ‘What’s that on your right?’ called May. ‘Down by your boot.’

  Bimsley lowered the Valiant. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he called back.

  May had spotted the pale keystone of an arch, and a stone known as a voussoir, part of a curving cornice, mostly obscured by rubble. ‘Pull some of that rubbish away, can you?’

  Grimacing, Bimsley plunged his hands into the pile and dragged back a rotted mattress. It took him several minutes to remove the panels of wood and piles of brick that had silted up against the top of the underground arch, which he saw was staked with iron bars at six-inch intervals. He shone his torch inside. ‘Looks like it goes a long way back,’ he called. ‘No way of getting in there without cutters.’

  ‘If we can’t gain entrance, that means Greenwood hasn’t been able to get inside, either. They’ve probably only just taken the warehouse wall down. That means we’re still in time.’

  ‘Yeah, but in time for what?’ Bimsley pressed his face against the rusted bars, lowering the torch.

  ‘Nothing at all?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Let’s go.’ May began stepping back through the debris.

  ‘Hang on.’ Bimsley crouched as low as the gap permitted. ‘Stinks down here. I think I can see . . .’

  He turned around, flashing his torch along the gap, but May had already disappeared from view. Shining the beam through the bars, he could make out a curving brick wall with weeds protruding from it. At the bottom, below a deep ridge, was a thread of glittering silver.

  ‘I think there’s water, if that’s what you’re—Mr May?’ The circle of light dropped lower, picking up another reflection. Bimsley pushed himself closer and found one of the bars loose. It jiggled in its concrete setting, then dropped down several inches. After a minute or so of further bullying, he was able to remove it completely. The resulting hole was wide enough to ease his head and shoulder through. He raised the torch again.

  He nearly overlooked it because it failed to reflect the beam, but the light picked up something against the wall, a coil of tiny wooden beads fastened together with a strip of leather. Pushing his bulk flat against the bars, he was just able to raise the strand in his fingers.

  But now there were two reflections of light above the bracelet, like small gold coins, bright and flat. It took him a moment to work out that they were eyes, and by that time he had heard the throaty rumble of a growl.

  The dog attacked before he could unwedge himself. It leapt at him, spraying spittle, its jaws desperately snapping shut on his shoulder, biting down hard, its teeth clamping together through the generous padding. Bimsley cried out and fell back as the material tore, and the rottweiler launched itself into the gap. It got halfway through and stuck, wriggling back and forth with its hind legs off the ground until it twisted sideways, falling back into the cavernous cellar.

  He could hear it trying to breach the space again, barking frantically, maddened by its imprisonment, as he stumbled over the chinking bricks toward the alley and the exit.

  Back on the street, Bimsley examined the damage to his jacket. ‘Bloody dog—must be another way in.’ He poked the torn material back in place, then remembered the bracelet. ‘Here, this qualify me for an advance?’

  ‘I don’t know—let me see.’ May raised it to the light and gingerly sniffed. Sandalwood, he thought, santalum album, a popular item of cheap jewellery for those on the hippie trail; the cloying smell stayed for years. A flat bone medallion hung in the centre, an intricate design he couldn’t decipher without his reading glasses, which were back at the unit. He slipped the bracelet into his pocket as Bimsley limped along behind him before departing for the West End, still complaining about his ruined clothes.

  ‘He was shaken, but fine,’ May told his partner the following morning. ‘The dog’s teeth just grazed his skin, but I sent him for a tetanus shot all the same, and he’s going to charge us for the jacket. You think Greenwood put the dog in there? I can get the RSPCA down now.’

  ‘No, don’t do that.’ Bryant was sitting on a pile of encyclopedias, taping together a set of surveyor’s maps. ‘I don’t want anything to alert him. Look at this.’ He waved the tape roll over the far side of the map. ‘That blue line I’ve marked out is the Fleet. It discharges into the river via a bricked tunnel beneath Blackfriars Bridge, at the very point where Roberto Calvi’s body was found on 17 June 1982. He was a senior banker, if you recall, a member of the Italian Masonic lodge P-2. He was discovered hanging there, just about the most unlikely suicide London has ever seen. He’d lost a fortune as the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, owing something like 1.2 billion dollars. The money had been siphoned off and hidden from the IOR, the Vatican bank. Blackfriars Bridge has historic connections with the Freemasons, and it looked as though his assassins were deliberately leaving a warning to others, although the official verdict was still suicide. After continuing pressure to reopen the case, the body was exhumed in ‘92 and was found to exhibit clear evidence of murder. Five years later, prosecutors in Rome indicted four Mafia members. They belonged to the Banda della Magliana, not the kind of people you want to mess around with. The inference that the Vatican hired hitmen to punish their embezzler is unthinkable to the devout, but not beyond the realms of possibility to the rest of us.’

  ‘You amaze me,’ May marvelled. ‘Considering you can’t remember your PIN number or where you’ve left your glasses.’

  ‘This is work,’ Bryant retorted, adjusting his spectacles. ‘Oh, and I’ve read up some more on underground rivers. Did you know that in 1909 the Hippodrome Music Hall in Charing Cross Road staged a water spectacle called “The Arctic”? They built icebergs and placed fifteen polar bears in a giant tank. Guess where they got the water for the display? The Cranbourne, the ancient river that runs right underneath the building. And of course we know that there’s an artesian well beneath the Palace Theatre, because you nearly fell down it once. It seems there are entrances and exits to rivers all over London. Listen to this.’ He raised a leatherbound book and adjusted his reading glasses. ‘ “Until 1960, the garden of 20, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, WC1 contained a trapdoor and steps leading to the stone tunnels of a stream known as the Devil’s Conduit.” And there are dozens of other examples. No wonder Ubeda needs to employ an expert like Greenwood as a tracker.’

  ‘I have something to show you.’ May rummaged in his pocket and produced the broken sandalwood bracelet. ‘Bimsley found it. I thought you’d like to see.’

  Bryant wrinkled his nose and held it away. ‘Probably came from Camden Market. Where did you get it?’

  ‘Our intrepid DC found it inside the sewer inlet, just before the dog attacked him. There’s another way in, but we couldn’t find it. I took your advice and let Bimsley handle the dangerous part.’

  ‘Good. You know you’re not supposed to do anything too strenuous,’ Bryant admonished. ‘Sooner or later you’ll have to start acting your age.’

  ‘If I did that, I’d ne
ver get out of a chair again. It may be nothing, but I thought I might send it to Banbury, see what he can get out of it.’

  ‘Let me take a good look first.’ Bryant’s desk-lamp revealed a little more information about the panel on the bracelet, but he needed a spotlight to see it properly. Dragging an illuminated magnifying stand from beneath his desk, he set the bracelet underneath and studied it through the distorting glass.

  ‘Oh, I think there’s a penis.’

  May looked surprised. ‘I don’t see that. Are you sure?’

  ‘Quite sure. It’s rather faint.’ Bryant slid the bone panel under a sheet of paper and ran a pencil back and forth across the top. ‘See it now?’ He held up the rubbed sheet. ‘It isn’t just any penis, either. I’ve seen this before.’ He had that knowing smile on his face that May had come to dread, the one that said, I know something you don’t.

  ‘Go on, then. You’re dying to tell me.’

  ‘Look at the base. It’s a penis that’s not attached to a body. It’s got wings—you can just make out the traces. See these tall flowers in the background—they’re lotus leaves. And the other ones intertwined—that’s papyrus.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘The lotus flower and the papyrus reed are the symbols of Lower and Upper Egypt. When they’re tied together like this, a new meaning is created, an indication of unity and strength. These are very common symbols, especially when used in conjunction with river glyphs. Rivers feature strongly in Egyptian mythology because life springs from the waters of the Nile. But the penis . . .’ He scratched thoughtfully at his unshaven chin. ‘According to Plutarch, Osiris was killed by his evil brother Seth, who tricked him into climbing inside a coffin which he then cast into the sea. He later ripped the corpse into fourteen pieces and threw them into the Nile. Isis and her sister Nephthys found all the pieces except the phallus, which had been swallowed by a crocodile, and buried them. They gave new life to Osiris, who stayed in the underworld as its judge and ruler. The penis of Osiris is therefore a potent symbol of fertility and rebirth.’