The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  He was holding a carving knife in his right hand.

  She flicked off the torch and made her way to the back door, checking that it was bolted top and bottom. The opaque-glass panel above the handle was wide enough for an intruder to smash and put his hand through. She dragged a chair from the kitchen and wedged it against the handle, then ran back to the window, staying low. Tate had moved closer, and was brazenly loping up the garden toward the house. A squall of rain hit the window with the force of a thrown shingle. She had forgotten to set her cordless phone back on its stand, and began searching the kitchen for it.

  When she looked back into the wavering darkness, Tate had vanished once more.

  45

  * * *

  ALL THE HOUSES

  Kallie had no intention of running away.

  Let the men in the street do that; it was the women who stayed and fought. This was her home, somewhere she finally belonged, and she would stay to protect it. The more logical you were, the less there was to be afraid of. She took stock of her surroundings.

  It appeared that only the lights were out. The phone was still working. Forcing herself to breathe slowly and deeply, she listened for sounds beyond the river under the bathroom and the falling rain. This time, pride kept her from going for help. Tate was distracted and crippled. She was more than a match for him. She could not pretend to understand what might drive a man to act this way, but so many residents of the metropolis had become lost inside themselves that it was no longer a disease afflicting isolated communities; lunacy had spread to the city.

  She kept a check from the windows; no sign of him—what kind of mad game was he playing?

  Water was seeping in under the back door. Kallie rolled up a bath towel and laid it across the step. Something made her turn in her flight back through the basement hall to the bottom of the stairs; she caught the chiaroscuro of her reflection in the bathroom mirror, illuminated by a single tall candle. How different I look, she thought. A grown woman I barely know. The candle flickered, and in that instant she saw something else. A young man with bare white shoulders peering back at her through the brickwork.

  John May walked back along the darkened street, trying to avoid the sputtering channels from inundated drainpipes. He counted down the houses as he passed them: number 37, the Ethiopians hardly anyone saw; number 39, where the Ayson family was riven by suspicions of infidelity; number 41, where Jake Avery had been suffocated in his sleep; number 43, where Longbright was now on guard with Tamsin and Oliver Wilton, their son impatiently roaming the upstairs rooms of the house, disturbed by the downpour; number 45, the medical students who slept through their days. The swamped waste ground where Elliot Copeland’s body had been found buried in city soil, where Tate had once watched from barricades of plywood and cardboard. The builders’ yard where Aaron had been tempted to betray his partner. So much energy and anger in one small street.

  No sign of Bimsley or Mangeshkar, but he knew they couldn’t be far away. He crossed the road and was about to start back when he spotted their matching black baseball caps. They were rounding the corner toward the alley behind the houses, where the dipped gravel path had become a tributary once more.

  ‘Hey, where are you going?’ he called.

  ‘It’s where Tate normally hangs out, sir. Thought we’d check it.’

  May shone his torch on to the dark tree-lined corridor. ‘There’s nothing you can do back there. I want you to call on every house in this street and check that nothing is wrong. Take a side each. I don’t know how, but he’s tricking us.’

  The two officers separated. May turned off his torch, and dropped back against the dark wall of the alley. Let’s hope he heard that, he thought. I’m going to be here when he makes his move.

  Kallie took a step forward and raised her candle, but the boy did not move. Locks of shining blond hair hung at either side of his face like shavings of varnished wood. She realized that she was looking back at a painting. She had been working too closely in artificial light to spot it earlier. What she had taken for water marks were muted colours.

  From this distance she could clearly make out the top of the boy’s body, set against twists of drowned green branches. He was floating in water, his arms drifting away from his torso, the world submerged beneath him, the victim of some apocalyptic deluge.

  As she drew nearer, she studied the wall more carefully. He was imprisoned behind the thick layer of emulsion with which the wall had been covered. Taking up the scraper, she pushed its tip into the soft ochre paintwork. Three distinct layers lifted off together, and there, staring at her with unnerving clarity, was a single large eye.

  Now something else made sense for the first time. In the original layout of the house, the bathroom had been considerably larger than any other room. Walls had since been removed, ceilings altered, chimneys closed; the bathroom had been repainted and demoted in importance until it had been diminished. Six large hardboard panels covered the alcoves on either side of the chimney breast. They had been painted over several times, so that the screws holding them had vanished.

  In the toolbox beside the bath she found a screwdriver. Cracking the paint from the screwheads was a task of no more than a few seconds, but the threads were rusted and refused to turn. After tearing up the first two in frustrated haste, she switched to the chisel and worked at the join between boards and brick.

  Tying a dishcloth around the head of a crowbar, she inserted it behind the first hardboard panel, bending back the board until it split. The mural behind it ran the entire length of the wall, presumably wrapping itself around the chimney breast. The section she could see was a view downward from a window depicting an extraordinary procession through the streets of London: sorrow, judgement, punishment, death, resurrection. An immense distortion of buildings and people that incorporated such details as gold braid and coat buttons, yet included the curvature of the earth. The top half of one winged figure disappeared behind the next panel.

  Kallie began to realize that this panel would prove impossible to remove without damaging the artwork, so she followed it to the next wall, wondering if the frieze could possibly continue all the way around the room. Choosing a random spot, she gently peeled away the dampest patch of paintwork to reveal the screaming head of a young black woman.

  Dragging the stepladder from the cupboard under the stairs, Kallie climbed up and shone her torch at the ceiling, scratching lightly at it to reveal what appeared to be a bursting storm cloud seen from directly underneath: fat, glistening drops of rain plunging in perspective toward the viewer. It’s the entire room, she thought. I have never seen anything like this in my life.

  The noise of rushing water beneath the house had grown in intensity. She tried to move the bath away from the far wall. The flexible pipes attached to its taps looked as if they would allow it to be moved as far as the centre of the room, but it was far too heavy to budge more than a few inches. Squeezing herself between the bath and the wall, she carefully scraped away another section of paint. This time the image was indecipherable: gingerish strands of weeds, flowers or possibly flames.

  The emulsion flaked away from the hard varnished surface of the extraordinary mural. Feeling something at her feet, Kallie shone the torch down and saw that the spiders were back, thousands of them, tiny and brown, forced up by the rising torrent below. She stamped her boots, scattering them across the floor in rippling waves, and turned her attention back to the wall.

  The red strands were soon explained: they were the floating tresses of a drowned woman, floating pale and serene beneath the green submerged city.

  The doorbell rang, startling her, then rang again. She felt reluctant to leave the painting, as though it might fade away without her gaze upon it, but descended the ladder and made her way upstairs. The silhouette on the glass suggested a tall, broad-shouldered man, clearly not Tate. As she unlocked the door, he stepped inside without waiting for permission to enter. There was a palpable sense of aggression in
his attitude. His face was turned away from the pale light of the street.

  ‘What did you think you were going to do?’ asked Randall Ayson.

  ‘Where did your husband go?’ Longbright asked, looking around.

  ‘I don’t know. This rain.’ Tamsin Wilton barely concentrated on the question. The ferocious deluge had distracted everyone. ‘I don’t see why you have to be here.’

  I’m not so sure myself, thought the detective sergeant. ‘Mr Bryant has reason to believe that you could be at risk, that someone might try to, well, set fire to your house.’

  ‘Fire? I can’t imagine anything catching fire tonight. There’s no power. The electricity company warned us this might happen. Look out there. It’s like the end of the world. Brewer!’ She shouted up from the foot of the stairs. ‘Stop running about like that!’

  Longbright returned to the lounge window and cleared a patch, trying to see Bryant’s Mini Cooper. He appeared to be alone inside. At the far end of the road she could make out Meera standing in a porch, probably conducting another door-to-door check. Something strange was happening out there, and it annoyed her not to be a part of it.

  Bryant poked about in the glovebox and found a chamois leather to clear the windscreen, but water was trickling in through the corners of the passenger windows. He wanted to be with May, but did not trust himself on the sluicing cobbles without his stick, so he sat and fidgeted, frustrated and fed up. Searching about for some useful purpose, he came upon the underground river map that Tate had pressed into his hand. The paper had wrinkled in the damp, so he used one of Tate’s art books to lay it flat and press out the creases. As he did so, a tingling premonition caressed the back of his neck; it was a feeling he had experienced many times before.

  The map, the art book. Pulling his briefcase across from the back seat, he searched for the A4 photocopy Longbright had made from Jackie Quinten’s original. He needed more light. He switched on the radio to illuminate the interior, and manoeuvred the drawing over Tate’s map. It was surfacing now, the idea; a coalescence of everything he had heard and seen in recent weeks. Using the House of Conflagration as a co-ordinate, he slowly rotated the map, then checked the details with the magnifying glass he kept for reading the A-Z. The artwork was fanciful and out of scale, but the outline of the street roughly corresponded to the card, allowing him to pinpoint the properties on either side in conjunction with the Fleet tributary.

  Now he noticed what he had not seen before on the drawing: two other co-ordinates, not words but pictograms placed over sites, one a lumpen creature emerging from the soil, the other a sinister cherub with its bare rump turned toward the viewer, expelling wind. What he had dismissed as decorative patterning beneath the illustrations was tiny calligraphy.

  ‘Blasted eyesight,’ said Bryant aloud, holding the picture closer. ‘House of Foul Earth, House of Poison’d Air.’ He looked at the other two dwellings, the House of Conflagration and the House Curs’d By All Water, and knew that he not only had his four elements, but had located four sites in the street. He was still trying to pinpoint the positions with certainty when the interior light shorted out. The dashboard was streaming with water. Folding the map and the drawing together in his overcoat pocket, he clambered out into the thunderstorm.

  Randall Ayson stood before Kallie with rain dripping from his fists. ‘I want you to tell me exactly what you told my wife.’ It smelled as if he had been drinking rum.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Kallie backed out of his reach.

  ‘Don’t lie to me, woman. You told her I was having an affair. You’ve screwed up my marriage.’

  ‘I did no such thing. You’ve got your wires crossed, Mr Ayson. And I didn’t invite you in.’ She wanted to push him back toward the door, but thought he might strike out at her.

  He took a step closer. Behind him, rain fell from the porch in a silver sheet. ‘She told me that you rang her up to make trouble, and all you’ve done is hurt everyone involved. I’m sorry you’ve got domestic problems of your own, but my marriage is my own damned business.’

  ‘I have not spoken to your wife, not on the telephone or in person, do you understand?’ She spoke calmly and clearly, anxious to move him back to the door. ‘I promise you, I have no knowledge or interest in your personal affairs.’

  He took another step forward into the darkness of the hall. ‘It’s one thing when a woman’s unhappy, but it’s pretty damned pathetic when she wants other people to be unhappy with her.’

  ‘I want you to get out of here right now,’ she shouted, shifting between him and the opened front door.

  ‘Not before you go over there and tell her you were lying. I’m not leaving without your promise.’

  ‘And I keep telling you, I haven’t spoken to her!’ She pushed at his chest, but he raised his hands to bat her away.

  ‘Do you need any help?’ asked Janice Longbright from the doorway.

  ‘John, wait a moment.’

  Arthur Bryant hopped around the flooding gutter and grabbed his partner’s arm to stop himself from falling over. ‘It’s all making sense now. There are four houses. Or rather, there were. It’s what I always said about London homes, we rent them and buy them without knowing who lived there before, or who’ll live there after us. We’re merely curators. It’s not about who they are, Elliot, Jake, Ruth, it’s about where they chose to live. Four houses, four residents, four elements, three deaths, so I thought there would have to be a fourth—my tidy mind at work, you see, always having to align the facts neatly. But the death in the hostel wasn’t part of it. I was doing what you always accuse me of doing, making up behavioural patterns to fit the facts. He’d always known about the houses, there’s no question of that, because he’d watched his father working on them when he was a nipper.’

  ‘You’re talking about Tate?’

  ‘Of course, he was photographed with his father. Tate’s determination to save the houses tipped over into obsession, then madness. He started to tell me when I interviewed him at the hostel, but I didn’t get the full story.’

  ‘I still haven’t got it now,’ May admitted, perplexed.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Kallie, raising her hands defensively as Randall stepped back into the rain. ‘Mr Ayson was just going.’

  ‘We’re calling on everyone to make sure they’re OK,’ Longbright explained. ‘What with the power being out.’

  ‘I’ve seen him again,’ Kallie told her. ‘Tate—he was in the garden and he had a knife. Just a few minutes ago. Then he disappeared. I was trying to call you but the lights went—’

  ‘Leave it with us.’ Longbright leaned back into the street and waved for Mangeshkar and Bimsley. ‘They’ll check your garden. They can’t get any wetter than they already are.’ She held the door open for Randall. ‘I think your wife is looking for you, Mr Ayson. You’d better get back there.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Kallie as she admitted the officers. ‘He was really angry.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I can take care of him.’ Longbright smiled reassuringly. The detective constables trooped downstairs and removed the chair from the back door, stepping into the storm-battered garden.

  ‘You’ve noticed she gives us all the crap jobs,’ Meera complained, climbing the steps to the lawn and shining her torch into the bushes. ‘He’s like a bloody ghost, this bloke. I don’t see why we can’t just—wait a minute . . . I don’t believe this.’ She beckoned to Bimsley with a grin. ‘He’s only got a kitchen stool in here.’ She shone the torch over the black lacquered seat wedged into the muddy ground beneath the bush. ‘Must have reckoned he was in for a long wait. Doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Waiting for her to come home?’

  ‘Normally he’d see a light on. Not today, though. Why didn’t he come for her when she saw him? What kind of murderer travels around with a kitchen stool?’ Meera knew better than to move it, but the angled position puzzled her. ‘He wasn’t even facing the house. He was watching the place next do
or.’

  Her torch picked up fresh splinters of wood from the verdigris-covered fence. A hacksaw line marked a panel cut from the staves. She gave it a kick and it fell in. ‘Looks like he grew tired of shinning over walls and decided to cut himself an escape route,’ she called back. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I don’t like you being here alone,’ said Longbright, covering the mobile to talk to Kallie. ‘Why don’t you go to a neighbour until the lights come back on? Or I’m sure I can get one to come here.’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble, really,’ Kallie protested. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Hang on a sec—Mr Bryant, where are you? I can hardly hear you—’ She turned back to Kallie. ‘Don’t be daft, it’ll only take a minute to get someone, and I’d feel a lot happier.’ She stepped away from the door, talking into the phone. ‘Slow down, I can’t understand what you’re saying . . . No, they’re still looking for him . . . What—?’ She stepped back out into the rain, trying to improve the phasing signal.

  Looking down the inundated street, she saw the detectives in the distance, half-obscured as they moved away through the downpour. ‘It’s no good, I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Hang on—’

  She set off along the street, leaving Kallie alone once more.

  46

  * * *

  IMMERSION

  ‘The sergeant was quite insistent,’ Heather explained. ‘I said you were welcome to come over and stay with me, but she wanted me to come here and look after you. What do you think is going on outside? She wouldn’t tell me.’

  Kallie cupped her hands at the back window and tried to see into the garden, but it was dark now, and the officers seemed to have disappeared. ‘I got scared. Tate was in the garden and it looked like he had a knife. They’re searching for him now. Do you think we’re safe?’