Flash Flood (16 page)

Ben stepped in cautiously and carried on, past a wine shop displaying a dusty bottle of champagne as big as a traffic cone. He was so wet anyway, he didn’t notice any difference between walking on dry land and wading. When he got to the end of the street he could head back up to the main road.

Ben had nearly caught up with the figure in wellies. ‘Hi there,’ he called out, but then the man took a step and vanished.

It was as if the ground had swallowed him.

Ben froze. The man must have stepped into an open manhole. Stepped into it and gone straight down.

Ben searched the surface of the water. It swirled around his feet, a parked van, the lampposts, the bollards. There was no sign of the figure he had just seen walking along just moments before. No bubbles, no splashing; nothing rising to the surface. Not even a change in the swirl of the water to show where that manhole waited like an open mouth.

‘Hello?’ called Ben. There was no sound, just the ripple of moving water, claiming the city as its own. Ben’s skin prickled colder and colder. He remembered
being in the pipe, the feel of its walls pinning his arms in. A drain probably wasn’t much bigger. You couldn’t move your arms to keep yourself afloat. You’d go down like a stone. Then be swept away? What a horrible way to die.

It was like the city was a monster turning on its people.

And where was the drain? If he couldn’t see it, how would he avoid it? He’d run back the way he’d come.

No, he couldn’t, he thought. There might be open manholes there as well. He would reach dry land faster if he carried on to the end of the street than if he went back. Statistically there would be fewer manholes that way too.

OK: start walking.

Ben’s body wouldn’t obey him. He couldn’t just play a game of Russian roulette and hope he wouldn’t hit the unlucky spot.

There had to be a way to see them. Was there anything he could use as a guide? And where had the man disappeared? In the middle of the road? In the gutter?

He didn’t know. It had happened so fast.

Ben shivered. He had been standing motionless and
was getting cold again. He had to get moving. He moved one foot forwards, keeping his weight on his back foot, and tested the ground ahead carefully.

The ground underneath seemed stable. He stepped forward and transferred his weight, then put the other foot forward and tested the ground again. So far so good. He was reminded of films he’d seen of people walking through minefields. He just had to keep his head, be sensible and not rush. That man had disappeared, straight down, in the time it took to blink an eye. Ben just had to take it one step at a time. Foot forward, test, transfer the weight. Repeat again, slowly. No rush.

The end of the road was coming steadily closer. Was he at the point where the man had disappeared?

Ben wished he hadn’t thought of that. Somewhere, not far from where his feet were slowly passing, a man had lost his life. His body was probably still warm.

Once Ben’s imagination started, it wouldn’t stop. Once again he saw the bodies floating in the stairwell at Hyde Park Corner, the heads drooping, the shoulders rounded. He imagined the man with his head bowed like that in the narrow pipe.

Get a grip
, he told himself.
It’s not far now
. One step, then another. Soon he would be at the edge. Another step. He just had to take it slowly. He had come this far safely.

Carefully he felt around with his front foot – and this time it carried on down.

He stumbled backwards. There was open space beneath that foot and he’d nearly put his whole weight on it. He froze, his body shaking. He looked at the carpet of grey-brown water and saw a mass of hidden traps.

Helicopters were still buzzing over the water. He’d tuned them out, tuned out the alarms still calling to the wet sky, tuned out everything but his own footsteps. Now the noise clamoured in his ears, stopped him thinking.

He looked up at them. If he waved hard enough, would they swoop down and pick him up? Anything to avoid this tortuous walk.

But of course they couldn’t see him, or if they could, they probably thought he wasn’t in immediate danger.

He had to carry on, but the manhole was in front of
him and he dreaded that awful sensation of his foot going down and down.

He moved across to the side. That was OK. Then he took another step to the side. Surely a manhole couldn’t be wider than two strides across.

He stopped, trying to screw up the courage to go forwards. The end of the street was just twenty metres away and then there would be firm ground.

He felt with his foot. The ground was solid, so he transferred his weight onto it. An irrational surge of adrenaline fired through him, and before he realized what he was doing, his legs were pumping hard, running through the water. It was like a switch had flipped in his brain. Forget the softly-softly minefield approach: he just had to get out. He wasn’t thinking, he was just running crazily.

He reached the dry road and fell forwards onto his knees, his lungs dragging in air.

As José Xavier walked along, he saw that this part of town was full of signs for lawyers’ offices and financial institutions, punctuated by the odd sandwich bar. He was hungry, desperately hungry.

Once he saw the sandwich shops, he couldn’t stop thinking about food. All that time in the pouring rain had taken its toll and his body craved calories just to keep warm. He tried the doors but they had been locked up carefully. People in this part of London obviously didn’t just abandon their premises.

Through the windows of a solicitor’s office he could see a figure moving around inside – a bald man in a
suit; no doubt one of the solicitors. He had a packet of Hobnobs beside him.

José stopped, transfixed by the sight of the biscuits. He wasn’t even aware that he was staring until the man caught sight of him and beckoned to him frantically.

José walked in, careful to keep his policeman’s raincoat buttoned up high, his eyes fixed on the biscuits.

The bald man pointed across to a figure lying on the floor. ‘She’s there,’ he told José. ‘We pulled her out of the basement when it flooded.’

A woman was stretched out on her back. Her clothes were soaked and her black tights had gaping holes in them. Her hair flowed over her face like seaweed. The carpet around her was sodden, as though she was bleeding river water. A man in half-moon glasses was kneeling over her, trying to give her the kiss of life.

‘The police are here,’ the bald man told him, and Half-moon Glasses sat back on his heels looking relieved.

José put his hand out to the man with the Hobnobs. ‘Give me those,’ he ordered.

The bald man handed the packet over. José wolfed four of them immediately. It was the first thing he’d eaten for hours. Better than what was on offer in Snow Hill police station.

The two men looked at him, amazed, as though they’d expected him to give them to the unconscious woman as some kind of miracle cure.

‘She needs help,’ said Half-moon Glasses. ‘We can’t get her to breathe.’

José glanced at the woman. Even from this distance her clothes smelled of sewage. A drain must have flooded into the building. Her skin looked pale and waxy and her lips were blue.

While he’d been taking this in José had eaten four more biscuits. The rain dripped off his uniform onto the floor.

‘She looks dead,’ said José. He wandered through to the kitchen and opened the fridge door. The light didn’t come on – of course – but there was a packet of sandwiches in there from one of the upmarket shops he had passed on the way here. He tore the packet open and took an enormous bite.

The bald man followed him. ‘Aren’t you even going
to look at her?’ he demanded. ‘Can’t you call for help on your radio?’

José straightened up and hit him around the mouth. The bald man crashed to the floor, letting out a grunt of surprise and pain.

In the other room, Half-moon Glasses froze where he was, still kneeling by the dead woman. His eyes were wide and horrified.

By the sink was a bottle of bleach with a trigger nozzle. José seized it and pointed the nozzle downwards at the bald man’s face, like a gun. Just in case he was thinking about trying to stop him getting away.

The bald man understood. He stayed where he was, leaning up on one elbow, his other hand on his bleeding mouth, watching José.

José walked to the door.

Outside, the rain was still tipping down, splashing noisily off the road and the gutters. José put the bleach bottle in his pocket, turned up his collar and went out.

In a back street in Mayfair, Francisco Gomez walked into a repair garage. It was very upmarket – there were no oily patches on the forecourt, as if cleaners
came and scrubbed them away every day. A Mini stood on the inspection ramp, where it had been abandoned in the middle of an MOT. It was rather a modest car for this part of town, Francisco thought, but he guessed the mechanics had taken the Mercs and Jags and scarpered when the disaster hit.

The station had one petrol pump. Excellent: he could help himself to a can while he was here. You never knew when it might come in useful. He pulled the petrol nozzle out of the holder and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. It was probably locked from some central control indoors.

He made his way across to the office. A puffy jacket like the top half of a Michelin man outfit lay abandoned on an office chair. Francisco shrugged off the sodden donkey jacket and put the puffy jacket on. The warmth cocooned his soaking skin.

Now to find the switch to release the petrol pumps.

He found it first go, under the cash register. He pressed it, but still nothing happened. Too bad.

The cash register wouldn’t open either.

Next to it was a phone. He picked up the receiver, but there was no tone. The phones were still out. He’d
done that in every shop he’d been into. Not that he wanted to call anyone: his partner would hardly have been allowed to keep his mobile. Still, it was reassuring to know that no one else was able to talk to each other either.

Francisco went through a doorway into the covered garage area and saw tools lying scattered all over the floor.

He bent down and picked up a tyre iron. That’s what he had been looking for. He looked at the Mini on the ramp. It was a pity he couldn’t get it down – he might have been able to get to Charing Cross a bit faster. He didn’t want José to think he wasn’t coming.

Ben stumbled up to two guys at the door of a shop. ‘Excuse me, is this the way to Charing Cross?’ he asked them. His arms were huddled around his body and he jogged from one foot to another. He was so cold he didn’t want to stand still for a moment.

One of the guys turned round and glared at him, a sledgehammer held threateningly over his shoulder. Ben thought he was going to attack him and staggered slowly backwards, as if there was a five-second delay between his brain deciding to move and his limbs managing to obey.

‘Ha!’ said one of the guys. ‘You been drinking,
mate?’ He pointed along the road. ‘There’s a pub up there if you want some more.’

Ben stared at them. His brain was racing with things to say but his lips wouldn’t work:
I’m not drunk. I’ve never been drunk in my life. I’m thirteen. I’m not drunk, just cold
.

The man turned back to the shop door. A slender diamond necklace glinted in the window, arranged on a black velvet cushion. ‘Give it a good blow here, down in the corner,’ said his friend. ‘They build them with a weak spot so the Fire Brigade can get in.’

His partner aimed the sledgehammer carefully, then whacked the window hard. It disintegrated in a shower of glass. The looters let out a whoop of joy and hurried in, their feet crunching on the glass.

Ben stumbled on. The water was almost up to the main road, and quite deep in the side streets. One block over, a Smartcar glided past in the water, swept along like a paper boat. It caught against a bollard with a metallic thud. Something was moving inside: behind the windscreen he could see a face, the mouth making an O of a scream. It was a little girl in pigtails and a pink shirt. She saw him and waved frantically.
Then the car started moving again, the insistent current pulling it free, taking its helpless passenger with it.

He staggered back down the road: the man with the sledgehammer, he thought. If only he could find him, maybe he could smash open the window and let her out.

He stopped, realizing that it was too late – the car was gone now; they couldn’t reach it. He just had to let go, accept there was nothing he could do.

He turned round and set off again, but all he could think about was that child’s face, her pigtails shaking as she called out to him. She had seen him and thought he could help. Now what would happen to her? He felt responsible.

A little further along he saw a shape at the water’s edge; it was catching on the road and then pulling away again with the rhythm of the tide slapping on the tarmac. He ran across to it. If he couldn’t help the little girl in the Smartcar, maybe he could help here.