The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘You’re suggesting we had some kind of flash flood, that the water poured into her basement and drained back out, not even leaving a damp spot by the time Bryant and her brother arrived the next morning? It doesn’t seem very likely. Where would the water drain to?’

  ‘Here, to the Regent’s Canal at Camden. We know the canal is topped up by underground pipes coming from the north. We’ve never drained enough of the canal to map what’s down there, and half of the Victorian plans went missing in the sixties—they made very popular framed prints for a while. We’ve had an unusually dry summer, followed by a freakishly wet autumn. I’m wondering if the extreme weather conditions unblocked some of the pipework. It might explain how Mr Copeland died as well. Suppose water suddenly filled that ditch, undermining his truck, then drained away just as suddenly?’

  ‘My partner made a detailed examination of Mrs Singh’s house. He said that apart from one or two odd patches of damp, it was bone-dry. Yet ten hours earlier, it was so full of water that a woman drowned in it? I’m sorry, Mr Wilton, it’s an interesting theory, but a little far-fetched.’

  ‘I knew I wouldn’t be able to convince you,’ Oliver sighed, folding away the map. ‘But you’d be surprised. I know about these things. The movement of water far exceeds anything you can imagine.’

  28

  * * *

  SPOILS OF THE FLEET

  ‘I’m Mr Bryant. Do you remember me?’

  The elderly detective was standing on the Wiltons’ front step with rainwater pouring from the brim of his battered brown trilby. May’s encounter with Oliver Wilton the day before had given him an idea.

  Brewer nodded. ‘You came to our party.’ The boy spoke at the floor. He had the look of a child who had rarely been allowed outside alone.

  ‘I decided to dig up a little local history, part of an investigation, and thought you might like to come along, if you weren’t doing anything. I’d be glad of the company.’

  It was hard to tell whether Brewer was flattered or horrified by the idea. He was probably intrigued at the prospect of accompanying a police inspector, but the pleasure was offset by the embarrassment of being seen with an elderly man. Either way, it had to be more fun than watching other kids have battles in canoes.

  ‘You see, Brewer, I’m starting to think there’s something very peculiar going on around here, and I could really use a little help. I need someone who knows the area, someone who’s been keeping their eyes and ears open. I thought that person might be you.’

  ‘Dad’s at work. Mum’s out. I’m not allowed to go anywhere. And she says don’t talk to strangers,’ said Brewer uncomfortably.

  ‘Oh, you’re not a stranger,’ said Bryant airily. ‘I know a little about you. I saw you at the party, watching everyone. I bet I could tell you something about yourself.’

  ‘You couldn’t.’

  ‘A challenge, eh? I’ll make a deal with you. If I can, you have to give me a hand and put in a full day’s police work with me. I’ll clear it with your mum.’ Bryant narrowed his eyes and studied the boy. ‘I know something you probably haven’t told anyone. You really hate your name. You wish you’d been called something else.’

  The boy’s continued silence betrayed him.

  ‘In fact, it isn’t even your first name.’ From the corner of his eye, Bryant could see the nylon football bag hanging in the hall. The initials printed on it were D.B.W. Nobody was called Derek any more, and middle-class parents were unlikely to have opted for Darren or Dale. Damien had passed the peak of its popularity. ‘Your first name is David,’ Bryant told him, ‘which is good enough for David Beckham, but apparently not for your dad. He wants to move you to a private school, where they play rugby.’ This was a combination of intuition and common sense. Tamsin was Oliver’s second wife, a fair bit younger and more of a trophy than his first. Oliver was clearly trying to pull the boy up a few social rungs to please her. He held down a decent job, was making money, and had mentioned the poor quality of the local schools at the party. On the morning of Ruth Singh’s death, Bryant had seen the boy leaving his house with football boots slung over his shoulder.

  ‘You’ve talked to him.’

  ‘Not since your party, and never about you. Grab yourself a coat, David, while I call your mother. I won’t come in—I don’t want to fill your house with water.’

  Brewer hesitated for a moment. Hanging out with a disreputable-looking policeman could prove dangerous, and would probably get him into trouble with his father. The offer was worth accepting for that reason alone. He scampered off down the hall.

  It was unorthodox, Bryant knew, but he needed some deeper attachment to the residents of Balaklava Street that went beyond question-and-answer, and looking after the boy was a good way of making friends.

  As they splashed off along Balaklava Street a few minutes later, David felt comfortable enough to fall into step beside Bryant. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked.

  ‘First we’re looking up an old colleague of mine who’s moved in just a few roads away. She knows all about the area.’

  ‘Is she a teacher?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Bryant smiled. ‘She’s a witch.’

  ‘What do you think of the new place?’ asked Maggie Armitage with some pride. The doorway of the small nineteenth-century brick building on Prince of Wales Road was illuminated by a garish red neon sign that read: CHAPEL OF HOPE. ‘I got it from the council when the old tenants moved out. Not enough hope in the vicinity, apparently. We’ve been shifted from our eyrie above the World’s End pub in Camden Town.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Bryant. ‘Don’t tell me the landlords disapproved of your pagan gatherings.’

  ‘They turned a blind eye to our midnight madrigals, but drew the line at our attempts to summon Beelzebub. Now they’re planning to build a mall on the site. Have you noticed that every London building eventually becomes a shoe shop? Camden is already the bad-footwear capital of the world. Old gods are no match for new money. But it’s nice to be in a real chapel. I had a bash at deconsecrating the area of worship this morning, but I’ve run out of salt. Spiritual decommissioning isn’t a straightforward process. The guidebooks all differ. Some people say you’re supposed to return the sanctified altar sheath to a church. Others simply recommend a lick of paint. Wendy, our organist, says you can sing hymns backwards over it, but frankly she has enough trouble playing forwards. I think we’ve lessened the aura of sanctimonious monotheism, but we can’t get rid of the damp. And the local drunks have a habit of weeing in the porch. Is that why Christian temples reek of rot, I wonder? Who’s your friend?’

  ‘This is David, honorary junior police officer for today. He lives nearby.’

  ‘Come in.’ Maggie took his hand. ‘Are you a believer?’

  ‘In what?’ asked the boy.

  ‘The darker arts, the lost spirituality of a doomed and wandering humankind.’

  David stared at her as if she was mad.

  ‘Do you at least try to keep an open mind?’

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘That’s the best we can expect these days, I suppose. Come through.’ She led the way between the oaken pews of the dingy main hall to a small paper-strewn office at the rear. Silver chains, icons and baubles hung from her bosom like miniature wind-chimes. Maggie’s eyes closed to crescents when she smiled, which she did often and broadly, revealing strong white teeth. Bedecked in bracelets, with tortoiseshell slides and two pairs of spectacles in her fiery red hair, the diminutive witch was as merry as a Christmas tree.

  ‘What’s that extraordinary odour?’ asked Bryant, sniffing the air.

  ‘My new herbal incense. Can you smell lavender?’

  ‘No, it’s more like burning ants.’

  ‘Oh, that. Yes, something’s living in the rafters. I’ve put down poison, but I think it’s eating through the wood. If only Crippen hadn’t disappeared during the move.’

  ‘How strange. I just found a cat called Crippen. At least, tha
t’s what I named it.’

  ‘Small, black and white, male? Piece missing from the left ear? A bit squiffy-eyed?’

  ‘Exactly so.’ Bryant was delighted.

  ‘Benign fate! You’ve found my familiar. That means his aura is intact.’

  ‘Perhaps, but his toilet training leaves much to be desired. I’ll bring him round later.’

  Maggie handed out some brochures. ‘We’re on a membership drive. If you know anyone who’s interested in the occult and can handle a hod, we need some strong hands to help us restore the place.’ A huge bearded man suddenly lurched into the doorway. ‘I was just making tea for an old friend of yours.’

  ‘Arthur, dear fellow! How delightfully efficacious!’ Raymond Kirkpatrick, English-language professor, gripped Bryant’s hand and pumped it hard. Tall and stooped, he appeared at first to be covered in a light shower of grey dust, and on closer inspection, was. ‘I’m helping Margaret clear out her reliquary. I thought we might find something of epistolary antiquarian value, but so far all I’ve found is several dozen copies of Razzle, presumably tucked away by the choirboys.’

  ‘Professor Kirkpatrick is one of England’s leading experts in semantics and cryptography,’ Bryant explained to the dumbfounded boy. ‘He likes words.’ He decided not to describe the bizarre circumstances that had led Kirkpatrick to be dishonourably discharged from the Met. The professor had once dated a six-foot Zimbabwean girl, who had, to his shame and horror, turned out to be fifteen, false documents having been provided by her parents in an effort to marry her off. The Home Office had branded him a paedophile and arranged his expulsion, and, although the subsequent investigation had exonerated him of everything but poor judgement, Kirkpatrick had become an unemployable outcast. Every time the PCU used him, Bryant logged Kirkpatrick’s invoice under an assumed name. He hated seeing a good mind go to waste.

  ‘Mr Bryant usually brings me his palaeographic conundrums for reinterpretation,’ Kirkpatrick explained, ‘although, alas, I fear his recent reluctance to employ my services suggests that the age of the erudite criminal has passed along with the locked-room mystery, clean public toilets and a quality postal service.’

  ‘I think we have some of the information you’re after,’ said Maggie, pouring ginger tea for everyone as Bryant snatched a recruitment brochure away from David. ‘John told me about the man who died in Balaklava Street, and it doesn’t come as a surprise.’

  ‘Oh, really? Why?’

  ‘Because it appears to be a hot spot of psychic activity. There have always been strange stories surrounding the area.’

  ‘What kind of stories?’

  ‘It’s long been considered unhealthy to live there because of bad humours rising from the ground. In the fifties, it suffered from sudden mists and smogs that sprang up from the drains and vanished just as quickly. It’s in a bit of a dip, you see. A vale. Some are still marked in London, like Maida Vale. Others have been forgotten, like the one in Kentish Town. It’s a very old area. Camden was a late arrival in the neighbourhood, 1791 to be exact, and yet they managed to come up with plenty of local legends, ghosts, witches and murderers. You can imagine how many more myths Kentish Town built up in the preceding centuries.’

  ‘The name is derived from Ken-Ditch,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘meaning the bed of a waterway.’

  ‘The town, combined under its original alias with St Pancras, has been here for well over a thousand years,’ Maggie pointed out. ‘An entire millennium of harmful atmosphere. Don’t forget that it grew up around a rushing river. The water turned mill-blades and provided the lifeblood for its residents. A great many ancient documents refer to the “calm clacking of the mills”. Now all we hear is the wail of police sirens. And the river has long been sealed underground.’

  ‘This lad’s father works for the water board. He knows a fair bit about it,’ said Bryant. ‘Part of the Fleet, yes?’

  ‘From the Saxon fleete or fleot, a flood, or the Anglo-Saxon fleotan, to float,’ Kirkpatrick intoned.

  ‘It runs down to the Regent’s Canal, but nobody’s sure exactly where it flows,’ added Maggie. ‘There’s a run-off around here called Fog’s Well, for obvious reasons. Long gone now.’

  ‘Did you have any luck with my information?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘Your brief was a bit vague.’ She checked her notes. ‘Around 1840, the land was sold off in neat little plots that followed the rivers and meadow boundaries. Forty years later the plans had changed, with more roads and houses being squeezed on to the original layout. According to my contact at Camden Council, in the 1960s the local authority drew up a new design for the area, a concrete wasteland of tower blocks. Thankfully, it never came to fruition.’ She peered over her reading glasses. ‘Honestly, we spend so much time attempting to improve ourselves, taking self-help courses, going to the gym, trying to develop more meaningful relationships with one another, and yet we dismiss the other associations we need to support our fragile well-being.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everyone interacts with their location, Arthur. Where we live helps set the level of our happiness and comfort. The English have strongly developed psychological relationships with the landscape. They travelled so little that accents changed from one street to the next. There’s a famous Punch cartoon showing two locals throwing a brick at a stranger; that’s the nineteenth-century English for you—antipathy to outsiders. These days, our relationships with views, buildings, places, objects and strangers are virtually ignored. As a child, you probably had a place that made you happy—nothing special, a small corner of sun-lit grass where you kicked a ball or read a comic. As an adult, you search for an equivalent to that spot. Can you ever truly find it again?’

  ‘I like to take my kite on Parliament Hill,’ said David. ‘You can feel the wind going round you.’

  ‘There you are.’ Maggie ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘When bureaucrats radically transform an area they remove its markers, damaging scale and ignoring the natural historical landscape. Such an area will quickly become a “no-go” zone, unsafe and disliked by everyone, because we no longer have ways of forming attachments to such a place. When the rivers were covered, we lost something of ourselves. Dreams of lakes and rivers are dreams of calm. No wonder lost rivers hold such mystique. We need to believe that they are still beneath us somewhere, the distant conduits of a forgotten inner peace.’

  ‘She’s been getting like this a lot lately,’ Kirkpatrick warned. ‘Ever since she started her hormone-replacement pills. The rivers are still there, you silly woman, they just built storm drains over the original tunnels. The idea was that the lids could be removed in times of flooding, and water drawn off to prevent it from invading the basements of local houses. I imagine they’re all asphalted over now.’

  ‘No,’ said David. ‘I know where there’s one. You can still get the lid off.’

  ‘Would you like to show me?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘May I remind you that you’re working for the police now?’ warned Bryant. The boy’s mobile rang. ‘It’s my mother,’ he warned.

  ‘Give her to me.’ Bryant waggled his fingers and took the call. ‘He’s absolutely fine, Mrs Wilton, thoroughly enjoying himself. No, of course not.’ He placed his hand over the phone. ‘You’re not wet, are you?’ Then back to the phone; ‘No, dry as a bone, I’ll have him home in just a few minutes.’ He cut her off before she could continue. ‘Now, David, let’s go and have a look at your storm drain.’

  ‘We’re coming with you,’ Maggie told him. ‘Don’t tell us we’re not allowed.’ She knew what Bryant was like. If they were going to poke around sewers, someone needed to keep an eye on them.

  The four finished their tea and set off. ‘You don’t need a dowsing rod to find tell-tale signs of the river’s route,’ said Maggie. ‘Remember how dry it was before this rain started? All the pavement weeds died, but look along here.’ She pointed to a ragged row of spindly plants pushing up thr
ough the paving stones beside the main road. ‘Epiphytes, these are weeds that grow on other plants and live on trapped rainwater. But there wasn’t any accumulated water until a few days ago, and where are the plants they grow on? Give me a hand, David, would you?’

  Stopping beside a ditch dug out for the Electricity Board, they managed to pull up a loose paving stone. ‘Look at that.’ The underside of the slab was covered in dark, slippery moss. ‘It’s a very primitive plant form that feeds on moisture. Something under the street didn’t dry out during the drought. All we have to do is follow the weeds. We have a guide to the river right here at our feet. They say you can plot the course of the London rivers by following the paths of diseases, too. Makes sense, when you think about it. Respiratory troubles are brought on by damp air. You get plenty of that around sewers. Ghost sightings, too. There are more of them near water because of high infant mortality, early deaths and drownings.’

  ‘Sorbus Aucuparia,’ said Kirkpatrick, pointing to the trees that guarded the entrance to the alleyway behind Balaklava Street. ‘One usually finds Tilia Platyphyllos or Platanus Hispanica. But those are a pair of Rowans.’

  ‘Good London trees,’ Maggie agreed. ‘They are able to withstand high levels of pollution and lousy soil, and birds love their berries. They’re strongly associated with witchcraft, of course. Very unlucky to cut one down. There are terrible stories . . .’

  ‘Don’t fill the boy’s head with—’ began Kirkpatrick.

  ‘There’s one ghost story in particular that centres on your street,’ she interrupted. ‘A real ghost story that happened right where you live now.’ Maggie’s natural flair for the dramatic ensured that the boy’s attention was held. ‘This would have been long before you were born, in the early 1950s. It seems there was a penniless young man, a student, who lived in a flat somewhere around here. He was in love with a local girl who worked in a bakery behind the high street. Although neither of them had much money, they were very much in love and were soon engaged to be married. The boy was a talented watercolour artist, and told her they would marry as soon as he could sell some pictures. But he painted subjects that were too morbid. No one wanted to buy drawings of ghouls and graveyards. So he was forced to delay his wedding. The third time he did so, his girlfriend gave up on him and married someone else. The student’s heart was broken. It was said that he went down to the canal, filled his pockets with rocks and sank into the mud. But his body was never found.