The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Very interesting. But does it have anything to do with Greenwood?’

  ‘It’s an Osiris bracelet representing death as a male and rebirth as a woman. It could simply mean the loss of the sun and the arrival of the moon, or any other great change. The flight symbolism is interesting. A winged penis was a Tudor icon used by the prostitutes of south London, specifically the ones working near the river between Blackfriars and Lambeth.’

  ‘Is the bracelet old?’

  ‘No, it’s probably quite recent. Things like this are still sold all over the Upper Nile. The symbolism is clearly connected with the site of its discovery. The bracelet cord and clasp are unbroken; it didn’t fall off someone’s wrist.’

  ‘I wonder why it was left there.’

  ‘I think we can work that out, John. Old beliefs never die. There’s hardly a building or thoroughfare in London that doesn’t contain a token somewhere in or under its construction. A more interesting question is who left it. We should congratulate Bimsley on his discovery.’ Bryant pinned the bracelet on the wall behind his desk. ‘While you were out in the field, Meera and I did a bit of research. The demolished building you entered was once the headquarters of Carolson Watchmakers, who bought it from a violin manufacturer. We know that violins were first produced from this address in 1835, which would lead me to believe that the building would be listed, despite being invisible from the road. But Meera checked with the council and it appears to be a legal demolition. The site has recently been purchased by a development company, and if Jackson Ubeda is involved, his name certainly doesn’t appear on the company register. All we can really do is wait for Greenwood to return to the spot.’

  ‘Let’s suppose he has a way of getting into the remaining Fleet tunnel,’ May suggested. ‘You said it doesn’t pass beneath any important buildings on its way to the river, but you may be wrong. There’s a discreet bank behind Ludgate Circus, a new one with smoked-glass windows and ram-raid-prevention bars, that deals with fund transfers from the Upper Nile. I think your first idea wasn’t so barmy after all, Arthur. Jackson Ubeda was born in Tennessee, but according to his file he’s of Egyptian extraction.’

  ‘You think he’s about to drop in on an old friend?’

  ‘Or an enemy.’ He helped Bryant gather up the maps. ‘There’s not a jot of evidence, of course, which means we’ll have to hope that Greenwood decides to go spelunking while we can still afford to keep an eye on him.’

  ‘I have a better idea,’ said Bryant. ‘Janice, would you step in here a moment?’

  ‘You won’t be able to bellow at me when they finally put a door on your office,’ Longbright warned. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Tell me, do you own any valuable jewellery?’

  ‘On my salary? Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Well, could we perhaps borrow some for a couple of hours?’

  ‘You nearly got me fired the last time we raided the evidence room. Why?’

  ‘I want you to become a wealthy Egyptian woman for about half an hour.’

  Sergeant Longbright straightened her skirt and wondered if she had overdone the eye make-up. She knew that older married women in Cairo sported the look one saw all around the Mediterranean, gold sunglasses and bright boxy jackets, but she felt like a cross between Cleopatra and Dalida. She was wearing an ostentatious emerald necklace which Bryant had borrowed from a sealed evidence bag, much to Kershaw’s horror. The waiting room of the Upper Nile Financial Services Group was a cool marble sarcophagus. Longbright seated herself between arrangements of dried flowers on plinths, like a bereaved relative waiting to view a corpse.

  She had booked an appointment with the manager, Monsieur Edouard Assaad, explaining that she wished to transfer money from a town near the Sudanese border to an account in London, trusting that he would prefer to speak English rather than French or Arabic. To enter the building, she had been required to pass through a metal detector and have her bag examined, in line with the requirements of banking in Cairo. May specifically wanted to know about the building’s vault, and she was considering how to angle the conversation when M. Assaad arrived.

  He had agreed to meet with Longbright to reassure her that Upper Nile FSG was the secure and sensible choice for a woman of means. Small and almost absurdly neat, from his waxed black tonsure to his freshly polished Oxford toecaps, he shook her hand warmly and ushered her to a side-room lined with crimson tapestries and low cushions.

  ‘I may also wish to deposit a number of valuable items with you,’ Longbright explained as a small silver tray of mint tea arrived. ‘Would that be possible?’

  ‘It can certainly be arranged,’ promised M. Assaad, supervising the ritual of pouring.

  ‘I was given to understand that you have a vault here on the premises.’

  ‘I’m afraid you have been misinformed, Madam. We primarily deal with electronic transactions, but if you wish, we will contact an affiliated company where space in a secure vault may be set aside for you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She wondered if she had failed to observe the rules of formal hospitality, moving too quickly into the discussion of business. Like Bryant, Longbright had never been adept at small talk. ‘I was recommended to you by an old friend of mine, Mr Jackson Ubeda. I assume he is a client of yours?’

  ‘I am sure you would be the first to appreciate that we are unable to divulge the identities of our clients.’ M. Assaad’s gracious demeanour shifted slightly. Longbright could tell that she had made him suspicious. Or perhaps the mention of Ubeda’s name had bothered him.

  She decided to press on. ‘Surely you do have some kind of underground storage facilities?’

  ‘Alas, no. The lower-ground floors were filled in many years ago. There were apparently some problems with damp undermining the building.’

  ‘That’s right, an old river runs near your property.’

  ‘So I have been told.’ M. Assaad was clearly losing patience. ‘Perhaps you would care to see our chief clerk, who will supply you with the appropriate documentation for your account.’ He punched out a number, covering the mouthpiece while he waited for a reply. ‘We have a great many friends and clients in Aswan—I am sure you will find our services invaluable.’

  Well, that was bloody embarrassing, she thought as she waited for a bus in Farringdon Street. I know he saw right through me. More problematic was the idea that the bank had no basement. It meant that Bryant’s line of inquiry was misdirected, and as the matter was not an officially sanctioned case for the unit, it could not go much further. As soon as the Met’s claim on the unit had ended, Raymond Land would be waiting to approve a number of new investigations for them, so there would be no more time to spend on pet projects.

  First Ruth Singh and now this, she thought. The pair of them have only been back at work for a couple of weeks and they’ve already managed to set everyone’s teeth on edge. She would defend Bryant and May against anyone, of course; that was what you did with old friends, no matter how annoying they became across the years. Still, she wondered how long they could continue to follow their own meandering path at the unit without being held accountable. The Home Office demanded results, and they would all have to face the consequences of failure.

  15

  * * *

  RIVERWATCHING

  Kallie was growing quite used to it now.

  As she turned off the hot tap, the sound of running water continued, gurgling and churning somewhere under the floor. She tried to work out if it ran from the back of the house to the front, but there was no telling if what she could hear was a metre away, or ten. She had tackled Elliot Copeland at the party, telling him about her problems with the basement wiring. He had offered to take a look for her, but had so far failed to make good on the offer, forcing her to make do with the battery lamp. Paul had gone to the pub with Jake Avery, the TV producer from across the road, hoping to find out about job opportunities, while she had been left to do the laundry in Ruth Singh’s decrepit washer-dryer.


  And the house was starting to bother her.

  The omnipresent sound of water, the damp patch growing in the wall and the return of the seemingly invincible spiders were minor causes for concern. She could manage without electricity until someone reliable could be found to repair the system. Even having to bury Heather’s cat in her back garden had not fazed her—there was something far less tangible at work within these bricks. The attic echoed with rain, the pipes ticked and tapped with the passage of water, the floorboards stretched and bowed like the deck of a ship. Window frames, dry for so long, now expanded in the wet weather and refused to open or close.

  Sometimes it felt as if a stranger’s eyes were at her back, watching in silence as she moved about the basement. The sensation didn’t occur in the front room or the bedrooms, even though they were the only ones which were overlooked. Something felt wrong inside the building: dead air displaced, events rearranged. It was nothing more than a vague sensation, but she had learned not to overlook such presentiments. She couldn’t explain the feeling to herself, or articulate it to Paul, who had a habit of dismissing such ideas with an impatient wave of his hand. According to him she was simply not used to owning a house. More insultingly, he implied that using a room in which a woman had recently died would always be the source of some kind of female hysteria.

  Then there was what she had come to think of as the Presence. After returning from the party two nights earlier, she’d felt sure that someone had been in the house. Nothing had been conspicuously moved, but the arrangement of items left out in the kitchen looked wrong to her, as though she was viewing them from a slightly altered perspective, as though the miasmic air within the closed rooms had kaleidoscoped, allowing the dust to drift gently and realign itself in alien patterns, like reordered synapses.

  There had been another argument over money, this time because Paul had spent part of his redundancy pay on a laptop computer, when they had agreed to pool their earnings toward the refurbishment of the house. They had never fought this violently before, even when they were sleeping on Neil’s sofa. It felt as though the house was siphoning off their happiness, allowing it to stream away beneath the cold bathroom floor.

  At twenty past eleven she heard the front door open, and found Paul fighting to free himself from his jacket in the hall. ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now,’ he said, with the faint struggle for clarity in his voice that marked him as a man who had drunk more than his limit. ‘Come and sit in the front room.’

  He tugged at her until she sat beside him on the couch. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you.’

  ‘You’re drunk, Paul.’

  ‘Only a bit. I’ve just had a chance to think about you, and I can tell you’re not happy.’

  ‘Let’s discuss this in the morning.’

  ‘Suppose—’ he raised his voice, ‘suppose we had money in the bank, I mean a decent amount, enough to buy a new place.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I was in the pub with whatsname—Jake—he goes hang-gliding in France—’

  ‘What’s this about money? Did he offer you a job?’

  Paul pressed the heel of his hand into his eye, concentrating. ‘Jake hasn’t got anything suitable at his company. He wants me to go hang-gliding with him, you remember I used to—’

  ‘You can’t make money from hang-gliding,’ she told him. ‘Come on, I’ll get you to bed.’

  ‘I can manage.’ He rose unsteadily. ‘Look at this place. We can do better—Jake was talking to the other guy, at the party—’

  She challenged him on the upstairs landing, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I’m not with you. Which other guy?’

  ‘Wait, I have to get this right in my head. Let me get undressed.’ She waited patiently until he was installed on his side of the sloping bed they had borrowed from her mother. ‘The builder guy—Elliot—he knows how we can make some money, but there’s someone else who knows—’ The rest of his thought drained into the pillow.

  ‘Someone else knows what, Paul? You’re not making any sense.’ She knew how he behaved after a few beers. He would fade fast and not remember the conversation in the morning.

  ‘We have to leave the street, Kal,’ he mumbled as sleep started to claim him. ‘It’s not safe to stay . . .’

  Kallie watched the bronzed droplets brushing the windows, and wondered what she was supposed to do. Paul was already snoring lightly, leaving her alone and all too aware that although nothing was really wrong, nothing was quite right.

  ‘What do you think he’s doing?’ May peered through the rain-spotted windscreen, trying to see if any lamplights were showing across the road, but the low branches of the plane tree obscured his view. Bryant had insisted on backing the car into the underbrush surrounding the car park because he didn’t want Greenwood spotting them.

  ‘He’s checking out another underground river.’

  ‘What makes you say that? Don’t tell me you’re developing a psychic link with him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Bryant unglued a sherbet lemon, popped it in his mouth and sank down into the shell of his protective overcoat. ‘I’m basing my assumptions on concrete evidence, right here.’ He withdrew a folded section of map from his overcoat and tapped it.

  May was rattled. ‘I don’t get this. It’s the first time in years that you haven’t tried to drag palmists, mediums, witches, druids or any one of your fringe specialists into a case to prove a point. I thought we’d at least end up with a dowser. But you seem quite happy to sit here and wait for the worst to happen.’

  ‘A dowser’s not a bad idea. I thought you preferred me like this, calm and rational.’ The boiled sweet clattered against his false teeth.

  ‘Yes, I do, but it’s starting to bother me.’

  ‘I don’t have much choice in the matter. At first I presumed that your pal was a total innocent, duped into something nefarious by a dodgy speculator or some kind of burglar. But now I’m starting to think that he’s ready to go beyond the law in order to provide some kind of illegal service.’

  ‘How do you know he’s even breaking the law?’ asked May.

  ‘According to Meera, he’s not requested permission to enter premises, and he hasn’t petitioned the London Water Authority, who have to be officially notified of right-of-way access in the case of underground waterways. You told me that Mr Greenwood was an ordinary penniless academic until his first brush with criminals. My guess is that he’s in some kind of transitional phase. Who knows what he’ll decide to be next? People drift away into all kinds of dark worlds, and sometimes nothing can bring them back.’

  ‘Hm.’ May shrugged. They had seen Greenwood, wearing a yellow hardhat and wrapped in a coil of rope, heading across a piece of waste ground with the Egyptian in tow. The pair of them had vanished inside a boarded-up railway arch.

  ‘Look around you. Know where you are?’

  May scanned the landscape. ‘South of Vauxhall Bridge. The kind of place tourists never see. No Man’s Land.’

  ‘ “Those green retreats where fair Vauxhall bedecks her sylvan seats.” That’s this concreted-over hell-hole. The Vauxhall Gardens were right here, all around us, until 1860. For around two hundred years the area was filled with birds and fragrant flowers, a public garden available to everyone. There were spectacular fountains and illuminations, ornate Italian colonnades, a Chinese pavilion, balloon ascents. In the middle of it all was a sumptuously tiered orchestra house, with groves of multicoloured lamps undulating in the trees.’ The sherbet lemon cracked between Bryant’s teeth like a pistol shot.

  May watched the Nine Elms lorries spraying and shaking around the one-way system. ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘Hogarth drew “The Four Times of the Day” here. Walpole and Dickens, princes, ambassadors and cabinet ministers ate in elegant supper boxes over there. Two centuries of pleasure and happiness.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Eventually the popularity of the gardens created disruptive behaviour, and wardens wer
e posted on the walkways. The admission fee fell as the grounds became run down, the punch was watered, the food dropped in quality. Fights broke out, thieves moved in. The orchestra house fell to bits. Soon it was gone for ever. Now look at it. Why does the blacker side of human nature eventually swamp the good? Why should beautiful things always have to die? Look at those pernicious monstrosities for the soulless rich, the dozens of riverside tower blocks crowding in along the Thames like futuristic slums.’

  ‘You can’t change any of it, Arthur. Wealth attracts wealth. You have to maintain a sense of humorous resignation about the things you can’t change.’

  ‘What a dreadfully woolly piece of advice.’ Bryant had always shown appreciation toward the joys of the past, just as May was attracted by the prospect of the future. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s up to. He’s following the path of the Effra.’

  ‘The Effra?’

  ‘Another of London’s so-called “lost” rivers. He’s just entered a building that was built over the top of it before the start of the twentieth century.’

  ‘First the Fleet, now this. What’s the connection?’

  ‘You might well ask. Perhaps something caused him to give up on the Fleet. Here.’ He unfolded the map and laid it across the dashboard of the steamed-up Mini Cooper. ‘Obviously, the underground rivers of London drain down into the Thames, so this one flows south to north, from Norwood through Herne Hill to Brixton, Stockwell, Kennington and finally here, to Vauxhall. It’s referred to as a stream in the history books, but was apparently wide enough for both King Canute and Queen Elizabeth I to sail on. Considering they lived half a millennium apart, the river obviously had a strong source that kept it flowing. Elizabeth used it to visit Sir Walter Raleigh. Like most of the other rivers, it now exists in a handful of small disgusting ponds, the odd muddy dribble and a few bricked-over sewers. The interesting thing is that Greenwood has gone to the mouths of both rivers, where there would still be Victorian pipework in existence.’