The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘So we’re off the Grand Union now?’ asked Meera.

  ‘Oh yes. That was the main waterway between London and the Midlands, built over two hundred years ago, joining the Thames at Brentford. It provided access to the west. Twenty years later, the Regent’s Canal was opened to link it to the docks. This canal goes from Paddington to Limehouse, passing right through the zoo. A dozen locks, two tunnels, fairly good paths all the way, and some funny little lock-gate houses that look like old railway stations, decked in flowers. It’s not as safe as it used to be, though.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve noticed it keeps turning up on charge sheets as a popular murder site. Bodies fished out of the water, rapes, drunken stabbings. With these unlit tunnels you’re asking for trouble.’

  ‘A pity,’ Bryant agreed. ‘There are some rather pleasing architectural surprises to be discovered down here, where the canals bend and open into basins. When I was a nipper I much preferred coming here to the royal parks. Fewer people, just grass and trees, the backs of factories and shiny green water. Now they’re busy building “luxury canalside accommodation” beside the council blocks. Gin mills, garment factories and refrigerated warehouses are all being carved into pretty little boxes, so that the poor can peer into the lounges of the rich. Always a bad idea, I feel.’

  ‘What else is the canal good for now?’ It annoyed Meera that her director wasted so much of his time considering London’s intangible histories. As far as she was concerned, the city’s glorious past was at an end, and all that anyone could do was make use of the remains.

  ‘I agree that barges are impractical in today’s world of mass-production, but London keeps growing; they could prove useful again. The cart-lanes turned into high roads, earth and brick became concrete and steel, but these canals remain as they always were.’

  ‘They’ve stopped.’ Meera held up the tracker. ‘Just up ahead.’

  At the next bend they found themselves in a world of stippled greens and wet browns, patches of sickly lamplight falling through the briar bushes from the streets above the cut. Remaining in the shadows of the tunnel wall, they watched and waited.

  ‘Are you picking anything up on that thing?’

  ‘Here.’ Meera handed him an earpiece.

  Bryant listened. ‘They’re saying something about a cable. Is there enough cable?’

  He heard Greenwood speak. ‘This is too dangerous, he’s telling Ubeda. It’ll bring people running. I should have worked out what they’re up to by now. Think, Arthur, you stupid old fool.’ He listened again.

  ‘Do you see anyone around?’

  ‘No, but there’s bound to be someone at street level—’

  ‘Why is it that academics fall apart when they’re required to do something?’

  ‘You hired me for advice, Jackson. I have no business being here.’

  ‘You get paid when we’ve achieved our goal—together.’

  ‘I didn’t think that meant—’ The sound phased and broke into electronic scatter.

  Meera crept forward and observed for a minute. She picked wet leaves from her jacket as she returned. ‘Come and look. They’re so wrapped up in what they’re doing, they won’t see you.’

  Bryant edged closer. He tried to remember May’s advice about human nature, and studied the two figures before him. What he quickly recognized was the power one man could exert over another. Ubeda was in control; Greenwood was there reluctantly to do his bidding, hunched with cold in the evening’s drizzle, complaining about his instructions because he was frightened.

  The path where they stood passed a low basket-handle arch on its inner side, forming a narrow concrete causeway between two bodies of brackish river. The arch was barred, no more than four feet of it showing above water level.

  The men were dressed in waterproofs, bent beneath the light of a small lantern, absorbed in their task, unaware of the baroque backdrop formed by the shimmering arch. Bryant could have been looking at some artefact of Atlantean architecture, its mass submerged in icy green darkness. It was not hard to imagine towers and steeples beneath the water’s surface. The wall in which the arch’s voussoir was set ended at an odd height; that was what had alerted Greenwood to the presence of another forgotten Fleet tributary. Bryant recalled the information John had gleaned from Oliver Wilton about the various outlets into the canal being subsumed by the rising water table.

  Ubeda and Greenwood lowered themselves chest-deep into the water. The academic was being forced to take the lead, and carried a roll of black wire above his head. They reached the arch’s grille, then somehow Greenwood was inside—a narrow panel of bars had been unlocked and pushed back. Ubeda waited outside, shining a torch into the tunnel. He was holding a chunky metal transmitter clear of the water, with a winking red light on the top, and Bryant realized what he was about to do. He had seen—and caused—enough explosions to know what the result might be. He started to warn Meera that any detonation in such a confined space, however small, would channel out the blast in a fiery column, firing any loose debris like ammunition from the muzzle of a rifle. But it was too late.

  Greenwood was starting to call back in protest. He had changed his mind, and was wading out. He took a step toward his benefactor, and for a moment it looked as if Ubeda would not let him back through the bars. But the matter was settled seconds later, when a dull boom echoed from beneath the arch. Meera and Bryant both saw the flash of light, but their confusion delayed their reactions.

  The young officer was on her way toward the tunnel when fragments of brick jetted out, funnelled by the pressurized air. Greenwood had gone down with a splash. Ubeda had already pulled himself out of the canal, to fall back against the bushes. Bryant felt a stinging pain in his left ear and realized that something had cut it. As the dust cloud was battered flat by renewed rain, Meera threw herself forward and brought Ubeda down with a kick behind his knees that folded him like a collapsing deckchair, cracking his head against the brickwork. As Bryant arrived beside the half-drowned academic, he realized that Greenwood had sustained a nasty injury. A chunk of brick had torn open the left side of his jaw, and he was losing blood. Meera was stronger than she looked. Forking her arms beneath his, she hoisted the academic out on to the path.

  ‘I’m calling it in.’ Bryant dimly heard his own voice through the tintinnabulation of his eardrums. Emergency personnel would have to negotiate the steep banks and railings separating the towpath from the road above. ‘We’re not near an access path,’ he shouted to her. ‘We’ll have to risk moving him, and take him up to the top.’

  Meera was kneeling beside Greenwood, attempting to staunch the flow from his neck. ‘I don’t want you to help me, Mr Bryant, I’m strong enough to do it alone. Just stay here with Ubeda until I can get back. I kicked him pretty hard. I think he’s concussed.’ She gripped Greenwood’s body and dragged him off as a spray of blood soaked her shirt and jacket. Bryant was left beside Ubeda.

  ‘I’m an old man, but I have the strength of the law behind me, so I wouldn’t advise making a run for it,’ Bryant told him shakily, trying to regain his breath and calm his hammering heart. He checked for the gun Ubeda was known to possess, and was relieved to find nothing. ‘I know what you’re looking for. I want to know where you got the explosive material.’

  ‘You can get anything in this city.’ The entrepreneur’s eyes never left Bryant’s face. ‘Anything at all.’ He had the audacity to smile as he climbed shakily to his feet. Bryant suddenly saw the situation as it would have presented itself to an outsider: a rather frail, elderly man with the canal at his back, faced with a determined and possibly lunatic predator. He began to grow uncomfortable. True, the law was on his side and the water was shallow, but these days such odds were too long for Bryant’s liking.

  ‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he warned.

  ‘If you know what I’m looking for, surely you want to see it as well.’ Ubeda began climbing over the shattered bricks toward the blasted entrance to the tunnel. Bryant stumbled
behind him, his left ear singing, as Ubeda dropped back into the oily water and began wading under the arch.

  ‘Come out of there, it’s unsafe,’ Bryant called ineffectually, but now he could see nothing, only hear the splash of water and the soft chinking of loose bricks. Once he heard a single shout of anger and frustration, and knew in that instant that Ubeda’s goal had not been achieved.

  When the collector returned, his arrogance had been swamped by the recognition of defeat. He climbed out of the canal and dropped on to the grassy embankment, closing his eyes.

  ‘Did you really expect to find the vessel after all these centuries?’ asked Bryant.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ubeda told him. ‘My great-grandfather knew of its whereabouts. Everything indicated that it had been washed to the end of a tributary. They were sealing off the rivers, putting in walls and grilles. He said that was where I would find it.’

  ‘An alabaster pot older than Christ? You think it survived intact? How would that be possible?’

  Ubeda opened his eyes and raised himself on one arm. ‘No, of course not. Do you think I’m a complete idiot? Anubis carried the sorrows from one vessel to another. Why else do you think the society existed for so many years?’

  Bryant recalled the broken Anubis statues in Ubeda’s attic. ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he admitted.

  ‘Then you never will.’ Ubeda rose in pain and limped away toward the shadow of the next canal arch, daring Bryant to stop him.

  By the time Meera arrived with reinforcements, the waters beneath the arcade had smoothed to green glass, and Bryant stood alone at the water’s edge.

  37

  * * *

  HOME FIRE

  DC Bimsley was frozen to the bone.

  He stamped his boots on the pavement to bring feeling back to his feet, and tried wriggling his toes inside his cold wet socks, but nothing worked. Even his nipples had gone numb. Chilled rainwater bounced off his shaved head and dripped through the tiny gap between his neck and his collar. On the other side of the river, above a pub in Vauxhall, his pals were at a party hosted by Russian flight attendants, who would be introducing them to girls with cool grey eyes and unpronounceable names. They would be getting themselves into an advanced state of refreshment, slamming vodka mixes and copping off while he paced the street like a common constable.

  Behind him, the blaring light of the hostel seemed as inviting as a country hotel in midwinter. He couldn’t see the point of keeping guard on such a night. In the past two hours, a handful of melancholic men had drifted to the scratched glass of the reception window to collect an overnight pass for one of the overspill hostels in Camden. Two of them, having qualified as ‘being in a condition of dire need’, had been admitted to the overnight dormitory. Depressing as his own situation was, it could not equal the plight of these helpless and possibly unhelpable men. He wondered if Bryant was punishing him for some transgression by giving him such a menial task, and tried to recall whether he had filled in all his paperwork for last week.

  In order to get a quick heat-fix from the convector over the entrance, he kept popping in to say ‘All right?’ to the bored little man at the reception desk; but no amount of foot stamping or arm flapping brought an offer of tea. He tried another tack. ‘Busy tonight?’

  ‘Not too bad,’ managed the clerk.

  ‘You been here long?’ asked Bimsley, desperate to prolong his time under the heater.

  ‘I used to be on nights up the Whiston Road Refugee Centre in Hackney. All Cambodians and Vietnamese, used to living in big families back home and putting all their money in one big pot. Then they come here and the first thing that happens is their kids take off. The families get split up, can’t pay the rent and get kicked out.’

  ‘It must make your job harder, trying to keep track of them all.’

  ‘Everyone’s all over the place, how can you keep track? Kurds in Finsbury, Albanians in King’s Cross, Jamaicans in Harlesden, Colombians down the Elephant and Castle, Ethiopians in Highbury and Tufnell Park—the paperwork’s a nightmare, I can tell you.’

  ‘Forgive me for asking, mate, but why work here at all if you don’t like it?’

  ‘My old man was a right old racist, see, and that was when there were just Caribbeans here—neat little schoolkids, husbands on the buses, wives down the Baptist church on Sundays. He never understood that people are just looking for a place to call home. I suppose if I can learn to make sense of the changes, I’ll never get to be like him.’

  Bimsley had to admit the approach was a fair one. He realized he was propping open the door to let in the rain, and reluctantly bowed back out.

  On the street he drifted back into a fugue state, watching the building without seeing. A wavering light still flickered in Tate’s bedroom: Bimsley supposed that the old man was smoking against the rules, staring at the rain patterns reflected on the ceiling, or perhaps reading by torchlight after curfew, for it was now nearly midnight.

  Had he considered the evidence with more care, he would have recalled the sprinklers set in the ceiling of every bedroom, provided for the specific purpose of preventing accidents caused by a confluence of alcohol and flame. Had he not been so numbed by the rain, he would also have remembered Bryant’s order to check around the building every fifteen minutes for the first hour after the hostel’s front door was locked at eleven p.m.

  The flame in Tate’s room was too large to be from a cigarette. It bounced and flickered, stretching to the walls. No alarm sounded. When Bimsley was finally signalled by the frantic receptionist, who had spotted the fire on his blurry, ancient CCTV monitor, the conflagration was in firm possession of the plasterboard walls with their so-called fireproof coating.

  After the cold of the night, Bimsley at first failed to feel the roasting heat on the staircase; but as he progressed the tar-like smoke grew thicker, the fire stronger, until he knew he would be forced back. The former post-office had been cheaply converted into narrow units that failed to ignite fully but trapped scalding pockets of gas. A bizarrely clad troupe of men shoved past: pyjamas and greatcoats, one in a neon-yellow candlewick bedspread, another in a dressing-gown and balaclava. Someone was on all fours, looking for a bag that probably held all his possessions. If the situation had not been so desperate, Bimsley would have been ashamed to witness strangers in such painful private moments. Instead all was chaos, and he saw that there was no shame for any human being in fighting to stay alive.

  The flames stuck to treated wood and inflammable wall coverings until they combusted. Bimsley smelt it at once: Tate’s room, and indeed the entire corridor, had been splashed with white spirit. A plastic gallon drum was buckling and melding to the sisal hall carpet. The electrics popped as the circuits burned out. Oily smoke rolled across the floor in a poisonous tide.

  Seven men from the second floor were able to make their way to the fire escape; but there were eight rooms, eight occupants. Bimsley kicked the doors wide and shouted out, but the fumes filled his lungs and drove him back, eyes streaming, chest on fire.

  The detective constable acquitted himself bravely, and was taken to University College Hospital suffering from smoke inhalation and minor burns. The clerk and the fire brigade counted heads. The hose-drenched rooms were empty now.

  The blackened eighth occupant, the only man not to leave the building alive, was covered and removed before bystanders could gain an understanding of what had happened.

  38

  * * *

  ELEMENTARY IDENTITIES

  ‘You’re probably wondering why there are no cable-network vans parked in Balaklava Street,’ said Raymond Land with sinister cheerfulness, ‘no breaking news items on London Tonight, no journalists doorstepping the few residents who are still in the land of the living. Two reasons: most of the investigative reporters in the capital are busy trying to find links between footballers and underage call girls, and have so far failed to connect what appears to be a series of random deaths in a north Londo
n backstreet; and DCS Stanley Marsden, whom you may recall has the unenviable task of being your HMCO liaison officer, believes that such tragedies are the result of underpolicing by the People’s Republic of Camden, and that by leaving them to accumulate to epidemic proportions, he will be provided with ammunition for having certain thorn-in-the-side councillors removed and posted to even less salubrious areas.’

  ‘Why can’t he talk normally?’ whispered Bryant, who was doodling in an exercise book like a bored schoolboy. ‘Your chastened cuckold’s going to be all right, by the way. He’ll be in hospital for a while, but his secret’s safe. The shame will leave a bigger scar than the flying bricks.’

  Longbright shot him a silencing look. Land spent his days justifying the unit’s expenditure in long, boring documents, and lived for the chance to belittle anyone who treated paperwork with disdain. No one was more disdainful than Bryant, who had once provided a report written in ink that rendered itself invisible when placed in the higher temperature of Land’s office.

  ‘I can’t hear a word you’re saying, I’ve gone deaf,’ said Bryant loudly. ‘I’ve been injured in the course of duty.’

  ‘Yes, I heard you got blown up again,’ snapped Land. ‘I trust you’re not going to make a habit of it. Do you want to see Doctor Peltz?’

  ‘No I don’t, thank you. He gets cramp writing out my prescriptions as it is. But I do think it would help speed things up if we had more resources at our disposal.’

  ‘You’re in no position to request a larger budget. Whatever else happens in this case, it will only ever be an irritating pimple on the nose of the face that is London’s crime problem. Right now the ground forces are out there trying to cope with the serious gunsters. Do you, in your rarefied little world up here, have any notion of the shit that’s been happening around you in the last three years? Do you have any idea how many armed gangs the Met are coping with right now? I have a partial list here for your edification, Mr Bryant. Our boys are currently tackling the Lock City Crew and the Much Love Crew in Harlesden—six deaths and around a hundred non-fatal shootings so far this year—the Holy Smokes, Tooti Nung, Bhatts and Kanaks over in Southall, the Drummond Street Boys are looking to expand in Camden, the Snakeheads, 14K and Wo Shing Wo are chopping each other up in Soho, you’ve got Spanglers and Fireblades in Tottenham, Brick Lane Massive, A-Team up in Islington, Stepney and Hackney Posses, Bengal Tigers, Kingsland Crew, Ghetto Boys, East Boys, Firehouse Posse and Cartel Crew in Brixton, maybe two dozen other named—that is, official—gangs. For every ethnic group that’s 99 per cent decent and just wants a quiet life, we have 1 per cent that’s pure bleeding evil. Kurds and Turks in Green Lanes smuggling heroin, Jamaicans doing the same in Ladbroke Grove, King’s Cross Albanians running 80 per cent of the city’s prostitutes, the Hunts nicking posh cars in Canning Town, the Brindels and Arifs shooting each other up in Bermondsey, Peckham Boys facing off against their own junior arm in Lewisham, and you can’t just let ’em sort each other out because innocent people get caught in the crossfire. So let’s keep your situation in perspective, shall we? I’m right in thinking, am I not, that you’ve made no advance in the single case you are supposed to be sorting out before Monday?’