The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Maggie? I hope I’m calling at a convenient time. You’re not summoning up dead jockeys for racing tips again?’

  The white witch often conducted séances at around this hour on a Sunday.

  ‘Oh, you’re watching the wrestling. Listen, you’re good with Druids, aren’t you? Dr William Stukeley, resident of Kentish Town near Emmanuel Hospital for the Reception of the Blind— Chyndonax Druida, he had the words engraved over his porch because they were important to him . . . good woman, I knew you’d know.’

  He listened for a minute and rang off.

  ‘Well?’ asked Mrs Quinten, intrigued.

  ‘I’m afraid it won’t mean much to you. It isn’t what I expected at all. Thank you for your time, and for the tea, although I’m not sure about those heartburn-inducing biscuits. Perhaps we could meet again. It’s pleasing to find a kindred spirit. My card.’

  Mrs Quinten looked at it, perplexed. ‘This is a ticket for the rotor at Battersea funfair, priced 1/6d. It expired in 1967.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s an old coat. Try this one.’ He hadn’t made the effort to be charming for quite a while, and was out of practice.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Mrs Quinten, taking the PCU’s number. ‘I hope we meet again.’

  41

  * * *

  ABANDONED SOULS

  Monica Greenwood and John May stood before the statues of conjoined children with penile noses and tried to look shocked, but the effort was too much. ‘I enjoy sensation-art,’ said Monica, ‘but when the sensation wears off you’re left with very little to admire except technique.’

  May knew he should have cancelled their Sunday-afternoon arrangement to visit the gallery together, but had fallen under her spell. Even though he had promised to return to the PCU within an hour, Bryant was unmollified.

  Monica shifted around to examine the statue from another angle. ‘I loved the new British artists at first. Even after Rachel Whiteread had concreted negative space for the fifth time, I still felt there was something fresh happening. But then it just became about money, and left little of abiding interest. I suppose that’s the point; every sensation dies. But why must it?’

  ‘I never had you pegged for a Royal Academy reactionary,’ teased May.

  ‘I’m not. I’ve no interest in the chocolate-box ceilings of Tiepolo, but I’d rather stare at them for a fortnight than one of Damien Hirst’s spin paintings. Do you want me to leave my husband?’

  ‘I hardly think it’s a fit subject for discussion while he’s sitting at home with a bandaged head,’ May pointed out.

  ‘That’s a pretty feeble excuse. His ego took most of the battering. He’ll never change. He’s only worried about his colleagues finding out.’

  ‘Well, I feel guilty. I should have been there to protect him instead of leaving the job to Arthur.’

  ‘What difference would it really have made? Now you have a charge on which to hold Ubeda, assuming he ever surfaces again, and Gareth has been frightened away from illegal activities until the next time someone appeals to his vanity.’

  Monica blew a lock of hair away from her face. The gallery was overheated and bright, hardly the best place for a romantic meeting. ‘I consider myself a modern woman, but just occasionally I’d like a man to make the decisions, John. I spent my entire marriage making up Gareth’s mind for him. Now someone else can have the job. Doing the right thing for everyone eventually makes other people hate you. I want to be free to make a fool of myself.’ She took his hand in hers and held it tightly. ‘You know I would leave him for you.’

  ‘Monica, I—’

  ‘Don’t say something you might regret, John. I know you. You have no guile. You’re honest and enlightened, which makes you very good at your job, and rather desirable. Tell me why you brought me here. If I know you, it’s something to do with your work. Let’s keep the conversation on safer ground.’

  They walked back to the centre of the immense turbine hall of Bankside’s former power station, now the home of the Tate Modern, where an elegant resin sculpture curled and unwound through the agoraphobia-inducing space. May pulled open his backpack and removed the art books. ‘There was a fire in a hostel. These volumes belong to the man who may have started it. If it turns out that he did, we thought they might offer some kind of insight into his motive.’

  ‘It’s not much to go on, is it?’ Monica found a bench near the entrance and seated herself with the books on her lap.

  ‘Arthur wants to call in his loopy art-historian friend Peregrine Summerfield, but I thought I’d try you first. What do you know about Stanley Spencer?’

  ‘Not much. He was named after a balloonist. He fought in the First World War and was a War artist in the Second. Lived in Cookham, beside the river, became fascinated by the concept of resurrection. His paintings are odd, naive and eerie. Some are downright disturbing. He had a bit of a split personality, painting in two distinct modes, his realist pictures and his so-called heavenly-vision paintings. His style was very dynamic—you can see from these illustrations—but there’s a great sense of harmony in the compositions, even though the figures disturb. That’s about the extent of my knowledge.’

  ‘It seems an odd sort of book for a homeless man to lug about.’

  ‘Perhaps not; it could be rather comforting to carry a visual depiction of the Resurrection with you. I’ve never seen these before.’ She opened the first of the matching cloth-bound volumes. ‘Printed back in a time when ordinary men and women might wish to read about English art. Dreadful cheap reproduction, but rather valuable, I’d imagine.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘You don’t find too many records of these paintings and sculptures. A lot of stuff’s vanished now. It wasn’t valued much at the time.’

  May watched as she traced the pictures with her fingers, as if reading messages hidden in the ink. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘They’re by minor artists, certainly, but what makes this set interesting is that all the art has a common connection.’

  ‘Really? I couldn’t see one.’

  ‘No reason why you would, darling. They haven’t been seen for fifty years. I think you’ll find that these pictures were all lost or looted during the Second World War. I’ve certainly never seen them gathered together in volumes like this. Some of them are very peculiar. Naive paintings so often are. An insight into the abandoned soul; amateur artists can develop highly personal visions as a response to their inability to communicate. Pity the second volume is damaged.’

  ‘Show me.’

  Monica allowed the book to fall open at the centre, and he saw that a number of pages had been removed with a knife.

  ‘Check the index,’ he instructed her.

  ‘Hm. The missing pages contained the works of an artist called Gilbert Kingdom.’

  ‘Ever heard of him?’

  ‘Doesn’t ring any bells, but I can give you a few college websites to search. They might be able to help you.’ She took a notepad from her bag and jotted them down. ‘Use my password. You go and solve your crime, I’ll stay with my husband until he’s mended, and then perhaps we’ll talk again.’

  42

  * * *

  SECRET HISTORIES

  ‘Ah, you’re back. Chyndonax Druida,’ said Bryant excitedly. ‘It was carved on the door of William Stukeley’s house in Kentish Town.’ He waited for a response, but there came none. ‘Look, I know it’s demanding, but please make an effort to follow this. It’s really important.’

  ‘All right, then explain.’

  ‘It’s a reference to an urn inscribed in France that was believed to hold the ashes of the Arch Druid of that name, one of the grand masters of Stonehenge.’

  ‘How do you know these things?’ asked May in some exasperation.

  ‘I looked it up in this.’ Bryant raised a moulting paperback entitled The Mammoth Book of Druid Lore. ‘The Victorians believed that the urn itself had a greater purpose. Lord Carnarvon tried to buy it from the French, but of co
urse they wouldn’t sell. There was an immense fascination with Egyptian artefacts at the time. As you know, Carnarvon financed Howard Carter, the discoverer of the tomb of the Boy Prince Tutankhamun, and subsequently died, some believed as part of the “curse”. His supporters thought that the vase was modelled over a much earlier container that had been smuggled out of Egypt.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, let me guess,’ groaned May. ‘They thought it was the original vessel containing all the counted sorrows of mankind.’

  ‘Exactly, well done. So you see, it does exist, and now we have proof that the urn is linked to Kentish Town. Ask me what happened to it.’

  ‘I’ll bite, although I’m sure I’ll regret it. What happened?’

  ‘It was stolen from the Louvre two years after the unsuccessful purchase bid,’ said Bryant with an air of satisfaction. ‘The French government suspected one of Carnarvon’s pals of taking revenge for his death, but they had no proof. So it could conceivably have wound up in this vicinity, hence Ubeda’s need to enlist a local expert like Greenwood in his search.’

  ‘None of which helps us in the slightest when it comes to solving matters of murder.’ May felt old and tired. Bryant was starting to draw the lifeblood from him again, he could feel it.

  ‘You may say that, but I have a feeling that if we find the urn, we find our murderer.’

  ‘Why?’ May all but shouted. ‘Why must the two be connected? They were entirely separate investigations! We have no reason—no reason at all—to assume anything of the kind. Do you realize there’s not a single element of this investigation that’s built on empirical data? Do you have any idea how annoying you are?’

  Bryant’s watery blue eyes widened with boyish surprise. ‘I don’t mean to be.’

  ‘I know you don’t, Arthur. I’m not sleeping well, that’s all. I should go home. Let’s face it, we’ve missed the deadline. We’ve failed.’

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  ‘No offence, but your driving would really put me over the edge. I’ll get a bus.’

  ‘You might want to stay for a while,’ said Janice Longbright, entering the room without knocking. ‘There’s a lady here to see you, Arthur. A Mrs Quinten. She says she has the information you requested.’

  ‘Then show her in.’ Bryant made a half-hearted attempt to smooth down his unruly ring of white hair. ‘How am I?’

  He turned to May for approval, like a schoolboy submitting to a neatness check. May shrugged. It was a long time since his partner had considered his appearance before the arrival of a woman. He smiled to himself. ‘You’ll pass.’

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Nothing. Here’s your lady now.’

  Jackie Quinten looked about her with obvious pleasure. ‘This is nothing like I imagined. Not like a police station at all,’ she beamed. ‘How lovely. It looks like somebody lives here.’

  ‘We do,’ said Bryant. ‘I’m thinking of opening up the fireplace.’

  ‘I miss real fires, don’t you? Worth the effort, I feel.’ She planted her ample rump in the chair beside Bryant’s. Nobody ever dared to do that; it was May’s chair. ‘There’s a lady in our street whose husband is a cartographic restorer attached to the British Library. I went round to borrow their belt sander, and while I was waiting for her to repack her collapsible attic ladder I thought about what you said, about the history of houses and the sort of people who lived in them, and I asked her if she’d ever heard local stories about strange events occurring in or around the flood years, specifically involving death or injury. She remembered a story about an eccentric old man who lived, she thought, in Balaklava Street. At that time the street was pretty rough—the police went around in pairs. The families of the men who had built the railways had prospered and outgrown their terraces, and as they moved out, poorer families moved in. Those families sublet their rooms, and the overcrowding and unemployment brought trouble—you know how it is.’

  May reseated himself, beaming. It looked like Bryant had finally met a soulmate.

  ‘Anyway, some local kids got it into their heads that the old man was hiding a fortune somewhere, and beat him up trying to find its whereabouts. Unfortunately they kicked him unconscious and left him in the street while they searched his house, just at a time when the heavy rains were causing the roads to flood. The old man had fallen into a dip in the road where the cobbles had sunk, and as the water rose over the blocked drains, he drowned. The neighbourhood constables knew the identities of the boys—everyone did—but communities kept close then, and no one was ever brought to trial. Many of the houses in Camden, Somers Town and St Pancras have such odd histories attached to them. Most of the stories are forgotten now, of course.’

  She opened her bicycle pannier and carefully unrolled a plastic-coated sheet of rough vellum, laying it before Bryant. ‘Janet’s husband has a detailed map of the area, made just before the War. He’ll kill me if he discovers she’s lent it out again, so I won’t be able to leave it with you, but we thought there was something on it you might like to see.’

  As there was no more room behind the desk, May was forced to study the map upside-down, which vaguely displeased him.

  ‘As you’ll notice, it’s rather fanciful. I imagine it was designed as a wall-hanging, a gift to a neighbour, rather than an accurate ordnance of the area. This, in particular, is intriguing.’ She traced the ink-line of the streets with her forefinger, arriving at Balaklava Street. ‘Supposedly, the houses on the north side of the street had been constructed on the site of a much earlier dwelling, an old monastery that had collapsed when the Fleet had broken its banks; and even before the monastery, a similar fate had befallen an earlier house. This building belonged to a sect of Druids, and became known locally as the House Curs’d By All Water. Look, it’s marked here.’

  Bryant examined the map. The scrolled calligraphy spread so widely across the street that there was no way of knowing which house now occupied the site.

  ‘Another property was known as The House of Conflagration, nobody remembers why. That’s marked too.’

  Bryant fully expected to see the appellation scrawled across the site of the hostel, and was disappointed to find it written halfway along Balaklava Street. This time, the site could be more accurately discerned. He withdrew a magnifier from his top drawer and examined the markings. ‘Four from the left, three from the right. The buildings haven’t changed, have they?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘Then I know this house.’

  ‘Which is it?’ asked May.

  ‘Number 43. The House of Conflagration belongs to Tamsin and Oliver Wilton. I think we should get Bimsley around there right now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The fire at the hostel failed to take Tate’s life. We don’t have the arson tests back yet, but let’s suppose for a moment that Tate is behind the whole thing. He knew he was being watched, could have switched clothes and set the hostel alight, escaping in the confusion. But this wouldn’t have been part of his original plan.’

  ‘Then what’s his plan?’

  ‘The street is flooding again. When this has happened in the past, strange crimes have occurred. What if he’s taken it into his head to repeat the past? Suppose the House Curs’d By All Water is where Ruth Singh died. This House of Conflagration would have nothing to do with the hostel, but it could well place the Wiltons in danger. Tate may well have burned down one building. Suppose he’s about to do it again?’

  ‘I don’t understand why he would do such a thing. But you’re right, we can’t afford to take any chances.’ May called in Longbright and briefed her. ‘Make a reduced copy of this, would you?’ He handed her the map. ‘Then I want you to take Mangeshkar and Bimsley with you back to Balaklava Street.’

  Bimsley arrived before the others. The rain was heavier than ever now. Water flooded across the cobbles in a swathe, frothing over the congested drains. The front walls of the houses were sodden from their roofs to their bedroom windows, soaking
the shoulders of the terrace. Bimsley jumped the steps and hammered on the Wiltons’ door knocker, but no one stirred inside. He tipped back his baseball cap and looked up at the dim windows. ‘There’s no response,’ he told Longbright. ‘Can you try their mobiles?’

  Bimsley closed his phone and stepped back. He looked about the street. Further down, someone was standing in the bushes on the waste ground, watching him. It was hard to see in the rain, but it looked like Tate. As they saw each other, the onlooker turned and limped off.

  ‘You’re not getting away this time,’ said Bimsley, breaking into a run.

  43

  * * *

  OIL AND WATER

  ‘Blimey, a rare sighting of the lesser-fancied detective, Homunculus Senex Investigatorus,’ said Peregrine Summerfield, scratching his face through his wild ginger beard. ‘Come in before the neighbours see you. Excuse the pyjamas, I prefer to paint in them because of the mess.’ He waved Bryant in with a flick of his paintbrush, dabbing the wall turquoise. Bryant noticed that there was vermilion paint on the ceiling. ‘How the devil did you find me?’

  ‘Lilian told me you were living up here now,’ Bryant explained. ‘I bumped into her a few weeks ago.’

  ‘I hope you were driving a bulldozer. She’s been a proper cow since she walked out. I only own one painting, a small and rather sickly Wols that looks like a regurgitated prawn biriani, but Bauhaus stock is higher than ever and now she’s demanding it in the divorce settlement.’

  ‘I had no idea you liked German abstract art. I don’t suppose there are any clean cups.’ Bryant wandered into the kitchen and ran a kettle under the tap. Every piece of crockery on the draining board was covered with brushes and half-dried blobs of acrylic paint.

  ‘I use plastic ones now, saves on the washing up. Well, you can look upon me and despair. How the once mighty art lecturer has fallen, Ozymandias in Stoke Newington. I haven’t seen you since that business of the vandalized Pre-Raphaelite at the National. You only bloody call on me when you want something.’ Summerfield wiped a brush out on his striped pyjama shirt. ‘What is it this time?’