The Water Room

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘Where are you going?’ asked May.

  ‘I have to return to St Pancras Basin, and you’re coming with me. Don’t worry, this time we won’t be getting wet, and at least we can put something right.’

  50

  * * *

  DIASPORA

  They used the river map to locate the entrance, a dank drainage shaft behind a bathroom-accessory warehouse at the back of King’s Cross. But gaining access proved impossible, because the iron hatch covering the shaft had been sealed under new tarmac. Night construction workers covered the area, so the detectives drove to the only other location they had listed, in nearby York Way.

  This proved an altogether easier affair, consisting of a concrete stairway straight down into the basin. Unfortunately, the exit was in the centre of a secure construction compound, to which the detectives could only gain access by showing their police authorization.

  ‘The construction company must know about this,’ said Bryant as they descended the undamaged drain ladder. ‘It’s right on their site.’

  ‘Perhaps they haven’t been granted access yet. You know how long this sort of insurance documentation takes to approve.’

  The great cavern of the basin lay before them. As John May crossed the dripping tiled hall, a distant susurration of alarm suggested that its inhabitants had heard the arrival of a stranger. ‘You know we could get into serious trouble,’ whispered May.

  ‘When you’re old, you can afford to take risks,’ Bryant whispered back. ‘It seems perverse to become more safety-conscious just when you have less to lose.’

  They stopped before a row of slumped bodies. A young East European in a hooded sweatshirt and jeans rested on his haunches, keeping guard for the others.

  ‘Does anyone here speak English?’ May asked him.

  ‘David Beckham,’ smiled the youth. ‘Posh Spice. Lovely Jubbly.’

  ‘I blame tourism,’ sighed Bryant. ‘Those are the three phrases Egyptian boys use when trying to sell themselves as guides at the pyramids. I don’t suppose he knows any more English than that.’

  The boy was put out. ‘I am Amir. I watch television, I speak English good, more words than many English people. I see English television. Absolutely Fabulous.’

  ‘Which means you don’t know how to get through passport control, but you know who Joanna Lumley is,’ moaned Bryant. ‘What a world.’

  ‘What he say?’ the boy asked May.

  ‘He’s being rude, take no notice. How many of you?’ May pointed at the others.

  ‘Maybe fourteen now.’

  ‘Are there any children?’

  ‘No, the children have gone with their mothers. Only men left. The youngest man is ten years.’

  ‘Arthur, I need a word with you.’ May pulled him to one side. ‘We have to tell the immigration authorities. They’ll take care of the boy. I don’t suppose they’re carrying any papers or passports. They’re economic migrants, not political refugees. Apart from anything else, they could be harbouring diseases.’

  ‘Please, John, you’re sounding like one of the more hysterical tabloids. Look at them. If we turn them over, they’ll be sent back or thrown into detention centres. We’ll have betrayed them. What have they had to go through, what have they risked just to get here, living in a sewer?’

  ‘How did you get here?’ May asked the men sitting up in their makeshift beds, watching the conversation in defeated silence.

  ‘Some by truck, some in private boats,’ Amir explained. ‘Police watch Dover but there are fishermen in Folkestone. We come here to meet another man who says he will help us, but he does not come.’

  ‘They’re tearing down all the arches and tunnels around King’s Cross, building the Eurostar terminal, and accidentally opened up the access to the St Pancras Basin from above,’ Bryant explained. ‘Obviously someone tipped off the police, so now they’re watching all the streets, and these people can’t use the way they came in.’

  ‘What about the drain behind Balaklava Street?’

  ‘It would have been too steep to climb back up all the way from here, and now it’s flooded again. You can use the local drainage network between the three streets in Kentish Town, or leave the basin via York Way. But there’s no way of bringing over a dozen people up on to a fenced-off construction site guarded by a copper. Soon the company will start demolishing the tunnels and sinking concrete shafts. It’s probably only the rain that’s been delaying them. These are people who need our help.’

  ‘We could lose everything over this,’ May warned.

  ‘But we could get them out.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it would be difficult. We’d just have to call the security officer to another location for a few minutes. That’s not the question, Arthur. It’s whether we have a moral obligation to do so. We work for the State. Suppose we let them go free, and the first thing they do is rob someone? How would you justify that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ Bryant agreed. ‘But if you hang around in King’s Cross long enough you’re going to get mugged anyway, and besides, they’d be stupid to stay here where the police are watching out for them. They’d have to split up and head off into other parts of the country.’

  May looked nervously at the expectant group. ‘You’re sure there’s no other way?’

  ‘Of course there are other ways, but they’d result in more human misery. If you want a moral obligation, consider that our imperative to protect life should override all regulations set in place by passing politicians. Everyone needs a place they can call home. It should be as fundamental a right as freedom of speech.’

  ‘You cannot act against the law, Arthur.’

  ‘You can when the law is an ass. Time will prove us right. Qui vivra verra.’

  ‘Do you honestly believe that?’ asked May.

  ‘I have to believe it.’

  May sighed. ‘Then let’s do it.’

  They used a couple of Indian lads from the Drummond Street gang who sometimes acted as informants for the unit. Creating the diversion was easy enough, but the detectives had to be sure that the site security guard could be cajoled into lending a hand in what appeared to be a gang confrontation. Amir insisted that they could get everyone out within five minutes, but would need extra time to disperse from the torn-up backstreets of the Cross.

  May watched as they gathered up plastic-wrapped bundles of belongings containing their only possessions—photographs, religious artefacts, a few items of clothing—and milled around the fractured iron staircase at the far end of the basin. The need to hold out hope made them trusting; for all they knew, unscrupulous traffickers could have been rounding them up for mass execution. Amir spoke to each man as he passed, explaining something about the detectives. Several came over and grabbed their hands, murmuring thanks. May shot his partner a disapproving look.

  One old man was wrapped in yards of chequered scarfing. He looked like an Arabic version of Bryant. Shuffling to a stop before them, he held out a Sainsbury’s shopping bag in his arms.

  ‘He says you are kind men,’ Amir translated. ‘He wishes to give you a gift.’

  The old man grinned back, revealing thin pink gums. The boy by his side could have been a son or a grandson; denied a healthy diet, he had already lost the immunity of youth. Bryant could only accept the bag and bow his head in thanks. He watched as they filed to the ladder, patiently awaiting their turn to reach the surface, and saw why such people accepted their fate: they were too weary to do anything else.

  ‘Wait,’ Bryant called, summoning Amir. He held out a small blue card. ‘I almost forgot. Tell your friends to call this number when they reach Birmingham.’ The card read: Division of St James the Elder: Birmingham Coven—Prop. Betty Wagstaff. ‘She’s the daughter of a very old friend. She can get you medical help if you need it.’

  The detectives watched as the last of the immigrants climbed toward the patch of liverish light that was the sky above King’s Cross.

  ‘Twenty minutes,’ said May, c
hecking his watch. ‘That should be long enough for them to get a head start. If this ever gets back—’

  ‘Oh, don’t make such a fuss about helping people. You should be glad it’s not you going out there. It could have been, you know. You’re a quarter foreign, after all.’

  ‘My grandfather was Welsh, Arthur, not East European.’

  ‘That’s worse. They wanted home rule once. They could have invaded us. They might have put checkpoints along Hadrian’s Wall.’

  Bryant sniffed and peered into the Sainsbury’s bag. ‘Pass the torch, would you?’ He shone it inside, then carefully pulled the plastic away to reveal a chipped white vase, six inches high and covered with patches of dried mud.

  ‘What is that?’ asked May suspiciously. ‘It looks . . .’

  They studied the heads of Horus and Anubis painted in black and gold around the top of the vase. ‘Egyptian? He must have found it in the channel when the water was drained.’ Bryant bent closer. On one side, rows of blue-black Nubian slaves were depicted crying into the Nile. On the other, the same slaves were pouring the river into a vase of the same design, as though the pictogram might be infinitely repeated back into the past.

  May’s eyes narrowed. ‘Tell me that’s not what Ubeda and Greenwood nearly lost their lives trying to find. Tell me it’s not the Vessel of All Counted Sorrows.’

  Bryant ran his fingers over the figures, peering at them intently. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said finally. ‘Even though there’s a figure of Anubis. You need Anubis to carry the sorrows from one vessel to another.’ He turned the vase over and studied the base in the torchlight. ‘Liberty’s. A mass-produced replica. I told you the Victorians were big on Egyptiana. I think if we took this to Rachel Ling, she’d tell us about the ritual involving the casting of such a vessel into the waters of the Fleet to protect and regenerate the City of London. Of symbolic value only, but a fitting souvenir of this whole business. I shall give it to Greenwood when his head’s better. Neither he nor Ubeda would ever have found it, because they didn’t know that the Fleet switched to another course in times of high flooding, something an ordinary Water Board employee like Wilton could have told them. Poor old Gareth: the curse of intellect without practical application. Let’s go and find some decent breatheable air.’

  ‘That’s King’s Cross above us,’ May pointed out, ‘not Hyde Park.’

  ‘Perhaps, but for once it will smell as sweet.’

  As Bryant climbed on to the ladder, his foot missed a step and the vase slipped out of his hands. He tried to catch it, but was too slow, and could only watch in dismay as it fell, shattering to pieces on the wet stone floor below.

  May reached down among the ceramic shards and held something aloft in his hand. ‘Actually, I think this may have been what Ubeda was searching for after all.’

  The intricately carved emerald Anubis was the size of a duck’s egg, and would subsequently prove to be three thousand years old.

  Bryant started laughing so hard that he nearly fell off the ladder. ‘Jackson Ubeda’s grandfather placed it inside the vessel as part of the ritual, and in their zeal the acolytes forgot to take it back out. I would love to have seen the look on his face after he tossed it into the river and then realized what he had done. I wonder how many years the family has been searching for it.’

  ‘What are we going to do with it?’ asked May.

  ‘Return it to the Cairo Museum, I think,’ said Bryant. ‘The British did quite enough pilfering for one dynasty. The irony is that now Ubeda has gone into hiding, he’ll never know that his familial duty has been performed.’

  ‘Although I imagine he would have kept the thing for himself, don’t you? Perhaps it took all of this to return it to the right hands.’

  The Anubis was indeed returned, but it stayed—for three glorious days—on the shelf above Bryant’s desk in Mornington Crescent, where he could admire it at close quarters. It kept him in such a good mood that Raymond Land thought he had turned over a new leaf; a notion Bryant happily disabused him of once the jewel was returned to Egypt.

  51

  * * *

  GEZELLIG

  ‘Alma told me I’d find you up here,’ said May, seating himself beside his partner on the bench at the top of Primrose Hill. Bryant was muffled up in the patched brown scarf and squashed trilby he had worn for over fifty years. The frost on the grass looked as artificial as Christmas-card snow. The distant city was soft and blue in the autumnal morning haze, the shade of ceanothus blossoms. It hummed softly, powered by batteries of working men and women.

  ‘I thought you’d join me. Here.’ He handed May a polystyrene cup filled with tea. ‘I was saving you a jam doughnut, but I ate it.’

  May raised the lid and took a tentative sip. ‘I can’t believe you’re making your landlady move house, just to come and look after you.’

  ‘I thought that was what you wanted me to do. Everyone was going on about how upset she was. John, her great pleasure in life has always been to cater to my every whim. The lease on her house in Battersea is running out, and there’s enough room in the new place. Perhaps it’s a bit bigger than I thought. It makes sense for her to move where she can keep an eye on me. I’ve been very nice to her, I bought her a new iron.’

  The converted workshop behind Chalk Farm Tube station had proven too much for him to keep clean, and although Bryant would have been the last person to admit that he hated the idea of living alone, he did, and Alma was one of the few women left in the world who would put up with him.

  ‘I meant to tell you, Raymond Land is talking of expanding the unit after our success in Balaklava Street. He wants us to take on cases for the whole of the south of England, with another unit set up in Manchester to handle the north. He’s really upbeat about the idea.’

  ‘Typical. The one case we’re forbidden from pursuing provides a partially fruitful outcome, and suddenly he wants to franchise the policing equivalent of Starbucks.’

  ‘Just think of it, Arthur. With a decent infrastructure in place we could finally retire.’ The second he spoke, May realized it was the wrong thing to say.

  ‘Does he really think we were successful?’ Bryant gave a disdainful grunt. ‘What about Ruth Singh, and the others who died on Balaklava Street? With all the resources at our disposal, we still couldn’t save them. How is that possible?’

  ‘We saved Kallie Owen’s life,’ said May. ‘And we restored two masterpieces to grateful nations.’

  ‘I suppose those beautiful tiles in St Pancras Basin will be drilled out to carry computer cables. On cold nights I wonder about our homeless men. I checked with Betty; nobody has yet called the Birmingham coven. Do you think we did the right thing?’

  May thrust his hands into his pockets and admired the view. ‘I know you, Arthur. You like the idea of them taking their chances, being masters of their fate, rather than being stranded at the mercy of bloody-minded immigration officers.’

  Heather Allen was awaiting trial for murder, but although the detectives had uncovered motive and opportunity, their evidence hinged on the word of an unreliable witness, who was himself still under suspicion of arson. Perhaps the immigrants could have vouched for Tate, but they had disappeared. It was as Bryant had predicted: everyone of real importance had promptly vanished into the urban labyrinth.

  ‘Did you hear that Kallie’s boyfriend finally came back? Picked up a nice tan, apparently. She chucked him out on the street—for the time being, at least.’

  ‘He wanted his independence.’ May smiled. ‘Our first duty is to protect those at risk. Homeless people arrive every day in the capital, and instead of making them welcome, we shut our doors in their faces. Where will they go, now that the St Pancras Basin is being dug out?’ He settled on the bench and studied the bitter blue sky. Unlike his partner, May had always been attracted to light and space.

  ‘I like my cases with fewer loose ends,’ Bryant complained. ‘I want to know what Ubeda’s up to right now, whether he’s hatching some n
ew way of filching relics in Egypt. And I want a full signed confession from Heather Allen, preferably acknowledging that I was totally correct in my assumptions. There are no open-and-shut jobs any more. Too many extenuating circumstances to take into consideration. It’s a crowded and complicated world.’

  ‘I know what you mean, Arthur. Did I ever tell you why I first became interested in crime?’

  ‘If you did, I’ve forgotten.’

  ‘I was a sickly child and spent a lot of time in bed, so my parents used to give me Agatha Christie books to read. I became addicted to unusual crimes. At the end of each book, someone would always stand up and announce, “It’s very simple, Major Carruthers rewound the vicar’s clock and replaced Lady Home-Counties’ mackintosh in the belfry before hiding the boathook under a tin of caramelized peaches in the fête’s jam tent.” Christie thought she was writing about ordinary people, but the lives of her characters were filled with these arcane rituals, and they had servants, for God’s sake. To me, a poor kid growing up in south London, they all seemed impossibly exotic, and the world was a simple place full of solvable crimes.’

  Bryant nodded in recognition of the memory. ‘I grew up reading about Fu Manchu, Raffles and the Black Sapper. They were even worse, all Limehouse opium dens, fifth columnists, stolen diamond tiaras and “the grateful thanks of a nation”. Of course, we’re virtually the only members of the British police force to have actually read a novel, which places us at a disadvantage. If you’re in public service, it never pays to reveal a sense of imagination.’

  May drained his cup and set it down. ‘I suppose that’s a good enough reason for staying with the unit. Where else are we going to find cases that aren’t just about drunken brawls outside pubs or crackheads stealing from each other? God knows I covered enough of those during the two years we were separated and returned to regular duty. How I hated it.’ The unit had once been disbanded on the orders of Margaret Thatcher until it could provide ways of turning a profit. Nobody wanted to remember those times. ‘What have we got on today?’