The Water Room (27 page)

‘She’s been getting like this a lot lately,’ Kirkpatrick warned. ‘Ever since she started her hormone-replacement pills. The rivers are still there, you silly woman, they just built storm drains over the original tunnels. The idea was that the lids could be removed in times of flooding, and water drawn off to prevent it from invading the basements of local houses. I imagine they’re all asphalted over now.’

‘No,’ said David. ‘I know where there’s one. You can still get the lid off.’

‘Would you like to show me?’ asked Bryant.

‘It’s a secret.’

‘May I remind you that you’re working for the police now?’ warned Bryant. The boy’s mobile rang. ‘It’s my mother,’ he warned.

‘Give her to me.’ Bryant waggled his fingers and took the call. ‘He’s absolutely fine, Mrs Wilton, thoroughly enjoying himself. No, of course not.’ He placed his hand over the phone. ‘You’re not wet, are you?’ Then back to the phone; ‘No, dry as a bone, I’ll have him home in just a few minutes.’ He cut her off before she could continue. ‘Now, David, let’s go and have a look at your storm drain.’

‘We’re coming with you,’ Maggie told him. ‘Don’t tell us we’re not allowed.’ She knew what Bryant was like. If they were going to poke around sewers, someone needed to keep an eye on them.

The four finished their tea and set off. ‘You don’t need a dowsing rod to find tell-tale signs of the river’s route,’ said Maggie. ‘Remember how dry it was before this rain started? All the pavement weeds died, but look along here.’ She pointed to a ragged row of spindly plants pushing up through the paving stones beside the main road. ‘Epiphytes, these are weeds that grow on other plants and live on trapped rainwater. But there wasn’t any accumulated water until a few days ago, and where are the plants they grow on? Give me a hand, David, would you?’

Stopping beside a ditch dug out for the Electricity Board, they managed to pull up a loose paving stone. ‘Look at that.’ The underside of the slab was covered in dark, slippery moss. ‘It’s a very primitive plant form that feeds on moisture. Something under the street didn’t dry out during the drought. All we have to do is follow the weeds. We have a guide to the river right here at our feet. They say you can plot the course of the London rivers by following the paths of diseases, too. Makes sense, when you think about it. Respiratory troubles are brought on by damp air. You get plenty of that around sewers. Ghost sightings, too. There are more of them near water because of high infant mortality, early deaths and drownings.’

‘Sorbus Aucuparia,’
said Kirkpatrick, pointing to the trees that guarded the entrance to the alleyway behind Balaklava Street. ‘One usually finds
Tilia Platyphyllos
or
Platanus Hispanica
. But those are a pair of Rowans.’

‘Good London trees,’ Maggie agreed. ‘They are able to withstand high levels of pollution and lousy soil, and birds love their berries. They’re strongly associated with witchcraft, of course. Very unlucky to cut one down. There are terrible stories . . .’

‘Don’t fill the boy’s head with—’ began Kirkpatrick.

‘There’s one ghost story in particular that centres on your street,’ she interrupted. ‘A real ghost story that happened right where you live now.’ Maggie’s natural flair for the dramatic ensured that the boy’s attention was held. ‘This would have been long before you were born, in the early 1950s. It seems there was a penniless young man, a student, who lived in a flat somewhere around here. He was in love with a local girl who worked in a bakery behind the high street. Although neither of them had much money, they were very much in love and were soon engaged to be married. The boy was a talented watercolour artist, and told her they would marry as soon as he could sell some pictures. But he painted subjects that were too morbid. No one wanted to buy drawings of ghouls and graveyards. So he was forced to delay his wedding. The third time he did so, his girlfriend gave up on him and married someone else. The student’s heart was broken. It was said that he went down to the canal, filled his pockets with rocks and sank into the mud. But his body was never found.

‘Some time later, the people in your street started seeing him whenever it rained. He would materialize through the downpour, and walk with his dripping mud-covered head bowed low, mourning his lost love. This continued for some years, until the flood of 1959, when the underground river burst from its tunnel and swamped the street. What do you think happened?’

David shook his head, mesmerized.

‘The boy’s corpse surfaced through the water. It had been washed up from the canal due to the unusual currents caused by the terrible winter storms. Once his body was properly laid to rest, his ghost was at peace, and it was never seen again.’

‘I’m not sure you should be telling the boy this sort of thing,’ said Kirkpatrick in some alarm.

‘Perhaps we could get back to facts.’ Bryant rapped his walking stick on the pavement irritably. ‘Where’s this drain of yours, lad?’

David stopped in the middle of the alley and kicked at the mud with the heel of his boot. ‘It’s around here. The rain’s washed a lot of earth loose.’

Bryant peered out from under his hat to get his bearings. They were standing at the back of Kallie’s garden wall. David was crouching beside an oblong indented iron plate. ‘I don’t know how it opens.’

‘I do,’ said Bryant. ‘It needs a special instrument, shaped like a T, with a hook at one end.’ He thought back to Meera’s report about the disappearance of Tate. She had assured him that the tramp had too much difficulty walking to have run the length of the overgrown ginnel. He was small enough to hide inside a bush. Suppose he had hidden inside the drain until the coast was clear? It would mean that the device he’d used to open it must be hidden somewhere in the alley.

The misted rain, drifting in the half-light of the afternoon, obscured the interiors of the brambles that bordered the rear gardens. He pulled out his pocket torch and shone it around their feet. ‘David, I wonder if you might reach in there for me and take out that metal rod.’

The boy crouched low and pulled the rusted shaft free. Inserting it into the lid of the drain was a simple matter. One hard push levered the top off. Bryant’s torch illuminated a larger hole within, at least four feet square, accessible by an iron-rung ladder set into the wall. One side appeared to lead off to a tunnel.

‘I can get down there,’ said David. ‘Easy.’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ Maggie warned. ‘I’m getting uncomfortable vibrations.’

‘What does that
mean,
exactly?’ asked Kirkpatrick. ‘You get vibrations every time a bus goes past.’

Maggie cocked her head on one side and thought for a moment. Rainwater ran in rivulets down her plastic hood. ‘I sense nothing evil, just sadness and loss. A great melancholy.’

‘It’s hardly surprising,’ Bryant pointed out. ‘Some poor homeless old man having to hide in a drain every time someone spots him in their garden. Can you feel anything else, Margaret?’

Maggie placed her hands on her forehead and began to hum gently.

‘Oh, don’t encourage her,’ Kirkpatrick complained. ‘She’s going for an Oscar. There must be so many violent vibrations emanating from the London streets, I don’t know how she manages to get through the day without imploding.’

When they stopped arguing and looked around, they realized that the boy had gone.

‘David!’ called Bryant, panicked. ‘Where are you?’

‘It’s all right—I’m down here.’

‘Good God, get back up here at once! Your parents will crucify me.’ He shone his torch into the hole.

‘He’s been down here, all right,’ the boy called up. ‘There’s a sort of nest made out of old newspapers, and empty KFC boxes. It’s very smelly.’

‘Come on out before you catch something,’ called Bryant, unable to climb down and follow him.

‘Wait, chuck me down your torch.’

It was too late to repair the damage now; the boy was already down there. ‘At least give me your other hand so I can hold on to you.’ Bryant guiltily passed him the light.

‘It looks like the tunnel goes all the way to the end of the street,’ David called back. ‘And there’s another one branching off. I’m going to take a look.’

‘You are most certainly not,’ snapped Bryant, struggling down to his knees. ‘Come back up at once. This investigation is at an end.’

David’s head and shoulders suddenly appeared in the drain. He was smeared with green mud, and highly excited. ‘It’s fantastic! You can go all the way along, but it looks like there’s an iron grille at the end.’ Maggie and the professor hitched him under the arms and dragged him up. David grinned at them, suddenly voluble. ‘Is this how you normally solve crimes? I thought it was all about asking people for alibis, like on telly, not going down tunnels. I thought you just shouted at suspects in little rooms, but this is great. Can I come out with you again tomorrow?’

‘One word about this to your mum and I will put you in a little room and shout at you,’ warned Bryant. ‘Let’s get you cleaned up back at the chapel while I tell Mrs Wilton you’re on your way home.’

‘I wanted to read you something,’ said Maggie, once they were seated in the oak pews of the Chapel of Hope, waiting for David to scrub himself clean. She pulled open a heavy leather-bound book. ‘Listen to this: “The word ‘Flete’ also refers to a special limited place, coined thus by the Templars, who owned land on the Flete at Castle Baynard.” The Baynard Castle pub is still there on the spot. The area around it is a sacred place. In 1676, during the widening of the Fleet Ditch, they dug up fifteen feet of rubbish deposited by the residents of Roman London. Silver, copper and brass coins, two brass Lares, one Ceres, one Bacchus, daggers, seals, medals, crosses, busts of gods and a great number of hunting knives, all the same size and shape. It’s always been a sacred site, don’t you see? For over a thousand years, it was where worshippers went to make offerings to pagan gods.’

‘You’re talking about some form of sacrifice,’ said Bryant, lowering his voice as the boy came back.

‘That’s right. I’m wondering if they might have practised human sacrifice here.’

‘But what bearing could that possibly have on modern-day events?’

Maggie’s smile suggested she knew more than she would ever tell. ‘Old religions never completely die out, Arthur. They find new ways to stay alive. And sometimes their participants have unwitting parts to play.’

29

MURDERERS

‘What on earth were you thinking of?’ said John May. ‘He’s only ten years old, for Heaven’s sake.’

‘Oh, come on, John, he was thoroughly enjoying himself. Look at the things we used to get up to as kids. It did the boy good to get away from his Playstation for a while. He hardly speaks to his parents.’

‘You told his mother you’d be ten minutes, not hours. She’s been screaming at us all morning. It’s not so much that you took a child with you and allowed him access to a dangerous place—although God knows what would have happened if there had been a flash flood, those drains can fill up in seconds and he could have been swept away—but that you took Kirkpatrick with you.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Bryant, genuinely puzzled.

‘He’s registered as a sex offender, Arthur! You took him for a stroll with a child on police duty—are you out of your mind?’

Bryant was genuinely shocked; the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. ‘Kirkpatrick had the misfortune to be duped into near-marriage with an under-age girl. The case was thrown out of court. I can’t help it if they kept his details on file. I happened to bump into him, and he tagged along with us. Maggie was there too.’

‘Oh good, so you had a witch with you as well.’ May rubbed his hands across his eyes. He had always known that looking after his partner was a full-time job.

‘I made sure I had his mother’s permission,’ said Bryant plaintively. ‘I got the boy home safely.’

‘All right, but suppose Raymond had found out? We’d all have been for the bloody high jump.’

‘I take your point. I’ll be more careful next time.’

‘There won’t be a next time, Arthur. What will it take to make you act in a responsible manner?’

‘Reincarnation?’ Bryant noticed the workmen sitting in the corner brewing tea. ‘What are they still doing here?’

‘Something to do with the computer cables under the floor,’ May explained. ‘They cut through them with a rotary saw, and now they can’t put the boards back down until a technician has repaired the damage.’

He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The few detectives he knew outside the PCU thought he was mad, still working with this crazy old man. Sometimes Bryant’s behaviour was positively Victorian. Thank God the investigation hadn’t required someone to climb a chimney—he would have sent the boy up first. They could only pray that David Brewer Wilton didn’t tell his parents the complete truth about his day, otherwise there would be hell to pay.

At least, he decided, they would be able to close the case by the weekend and start fresh on Monday. He had bent over backwards for Bryant, exploring every avenue and finding nothing, because there was clearly nothing more to find. Sometimes the circumstances surrounding those who died alone encouraged Bryant to hunt for an esoteric cause. Perhaps he felt a need to make their deaths mean something more. Perhaps he was thinking of his own eventual fate. Bryant’s irascibility had prevented him from growing close to many people. He had no surviving relatives: Nathalie, his bride-to-be, the love of his life, had died long ago, and he had never been able to bring himself to marry. There weren’t many who would miss him—besides, he had already had one funeral in the past year, and his mourners might be reluctant to turn out a second time.

May looked down into the wet street at Mornington Crescent, watching the slow ebb of traffic on the one-way system. At one level, the nature of dying had changed little since the War. Families still gathered at bedsides to say their farewells; few were truly prepared when the time came, but it seemed to him that too many people died alone. The relaxing moral strictures that had freed families could sometimes turn independence into profound and devastating loneliness. Were the young couples out there truly happy with their freedom, or did some part of them secretly long for the ordered lives of their grandparents?
Now you’re thinking like an old man,
he told himself.
Offer to buy Arthur a pint and stop being so maudlin.
‘Come on, Arthur—you too, Janice,’ he called out, ‘we’re going to the Pineapple.’

Kallie saw the three of them across the crowded bar: Bryant in his baggy scarf and squashed trilby, May erect and smartly suited, Longbright with her extraordinary movie-star hair, ledge-like bosom and heavy make-up.

She and Heather Allen had come over to meet Jake Avery for a drink, but he was already a quarter of an hour late. The producer was working on a new BBC sitcom, and had warned them that he might be held up if rehearsals overran.

‘Those detectives are back again,’ said Heather unenthusiastically. ‘What do they expect to find around here?’

‘They’re locals. They’re probably off duty.’

‘That type never goes off duty. I don’t like being watched all the time. They have no right to treat us like suspects.’ Heather was prone to exaggeration when she was upset, and tonight she was as tense as a cat on a wire, chewing her nails and stubbing out half-smoked cigarettes.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Kallie. ‘You’re a bundle of nerves.’

‘George came back this afternoon and picked a fight with me over the divorce settlement, before heading off to stay with his new girlfriend at the Lanesborough. Do you know how much that place is a night? He’s never taken me there. I didn’t get married for love, Kallie. I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I wanted security, and now he’s pulled that rug from beneath me. What am I supposed to do, just go quietly?’ She raised her head and looked around. ‘Where the hell is Jake? Why do men think women will always wait for them?’

‘The traffic’s probably bad. A lot of roads are flooded.’

Heather would not be mollified. ‘I’m not going to hang around for him.’ She drained her tomato juice. ‘I’ll go to the gym and run for a while.’ She swung her bag on to her shoulder. ‘Tell those damned people to stop spying on us.’

Intrigued, Kallie went over to join the detectives.

‘We meet again,’ said May, ‘and in rather more convivial circumstances.’

‘Is this your local?’

‘Not really, but I like the unusual mix of types you get in here.’

‘As opposed to the unusual types you’ve been interviewing in our street.’

‘Oh no, they’re fairly usual. You remember Sergeant Longbright and my partner Mr Bryant?’

‘Of course.’ She shook their hands. ‘Thanks for sending your officer round. Did she have any luck?’

‘We know the hostels where Tate is registered,’ explained Bryant. ‘It’s just a matter of waiting for him to turn up. We should be able to take him in shortly and have a word with him. I hope you won’t be troubled again.’

‘I don’t think he meant any harm, but it was unnerving, being watched like that.’

‘It’s not nice for a young woman alone in a house. I mean, with your boyfriend being away.’ May shot Bryant a look that silenced him.

‘I don’t mind being in an empty house,’ Kallie admitted, ‘but this rain is so depressing. I miss Paul, I wish he’d come home. He sends postcards from all over Europe—I just want him to get the travel bug out of his system and come back to me.’ She hadn’t meant to mention him, but realized she was with good people who were used to listening, and suddenly needed to talk. There was something so peculiarly old-fashioned and comforting about them, as though they belonged in the crepuscular sooty gloom of King’s Cross and St Pancras, between the shunting yards and brown-painted pubs filled with bitter-sipping railwaymen. Sergeant Longbright resembled the photographs of Ava Gardner she had seen in old movie magazines, but was kind and approachable. Bryant was the key, of course, the one who held them together in lopsided camaraderie. You could go to them with a problem. Perhaps this was how all police once were.

‘I’m sure he’ll come back to you when he’s ready,’ said Longbright. ‘Some men get a fire in them that has to be allowed to burn itself out.’

‘We were just discussing forgotten murderers,’ said Bryant, in a terrible attempt to change the subject. ‘I suggested Tony Mancini, real name Cecil England, unjustly forgotten in my view, very big at the time, though.’

‘The Brighton Trunk Mystery,’ May explained, a little embarrassed.

‘A good example of the dangers of jumping to conclusions,’ Bryant forged on. ‘His mistress, Violette, was a vaudeville artiste turned prostitute. He sent her body to his house in a trunk. The Crown suggested that he had beaten her to death with a hammer, but it was likely that she fractured her skull falling down the stairs under the influence of morphine. Found not guilty. Yet ten days earlier, another trunk had turned up at Brighton railway station containing a woman’s severed torso: victim and murderer never identified. Were the cases connected? If the Peculiar Crimes Unit had existed then, would we have uncovered new evidence?’ He gulped his beer, blue eyes glinting above hoppy brown bitter, just a little mad.

‘The thirties were a rich time for sensational murder,’ May explained. ‘The level of moral snobbery was outrageous, but far worse in Victorian times, so I’d have to pick George Joseph Smith, the “Brides in the Bath” murderer. He was born in Bow in 1872—’

‘Near me,’ interjected Bryant. ‘I was a Whitechapel boy.’

‘—spent most of his childhood in a reformatory and emerged with that strange emptiness of the soul one still sees in disappointed youths. Proceeded to marry gullible women and steal their savings before deserting them—he ditched one in the National Gallery—then moved on to drowning them in a zinc tub, but his refusal to vary the method of execution led to suspicion and capture.’

‘Personally, I always felt for Ruth Ellis,’ said Longbright, stirring the lemon in her gin and French. ‘If her affair with Blakely had occurred a few years later, neither of them would have acted as they did. If ever a woman was a victim of her time, it was Ellis. She thanked the judge for sentencing her to death, did you know that? Even the gallows seemed preferable to her miserable existence.’

‘Oh yes, there have been some interesting deaths in London,’ said Bryant with relish. ‘Did you know that Peter Pan threw himself under a train at Sloane Square? Peter Llewelyn Davies had been adopted by J. M. Barrie, and was the model for Barrie’s fairy-tale hero, but he got sick of fans asking him where Neverland was and chucked himself on to the live rail.’

‘Is that true?’

‘Absolutely.’ Bryant crossed his heart with a finger.

‘Aren’t there any interesting modern murderers?’ Kallie asked.

‘Oh, a few,’ sniffed Bryant, ‘but nothing to write home about. We’ve handled most of the decent cases. Motivation has changed, of course. Victims still become trapped in the same debilitating circumstances, but now there’s so much money swilling around that there are other ways to solve your problems. Get a divorce, have an abortion, take some pills—there’s less of a stigma.’

‘I suppose it’s easier to solve a crime since the discovery of DNA.’

‘New technologies will never explain the actions of desperate people,’ said Bryant. ‘They were using fingerprints to catch murderers in twelfth-century China.’

‘How did you become so interested in crime?’

‘My grandfather was one of the first constables on the scene when Martha Tabram died,’ Bryant explained. ‘The previous summer had been the hottest on record. The streets were alive with rats. The following August, all hell broke loose. He used to frighten the life out of us with the story. Tabram was stabbed thirty-nine times. Her body was discovered in George Yard, off Whitechapel High Street. These days she’s usually discounted, you see. Mary Ann Nichols is the first universally accepted victim in the canonical order, but the old man didn’t believe that. Inspector Abberline himself thought there were six murders. Others in the force reckoned there were as many as nine. Only five are undisputed. Even back then, there were so many Jack the Ripper theories that the case became lost in them. The few surviving files that had been kept in some order by the Met weren’t opened until 1976, long after my grandfather died, but he never stopped trying to understand it, and I suppose his curiosity was passed on to me.’

‘I can’t believe I’ve known you all these years,’ said May with no little indignation, ‘and you’ve never told me that.’

‘There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,’ said Bryant annoyingly. ‘Come on, whose round is it?’

They sat in the corner, a group of four at a small circular table with their drinks neatly arranged before them, and talked late into the evening.

30

LETHAL WATERS

Bryant had not walked the length of Hatton Garden in many years. He was pleasantly surprised to find the area still sheltered from the rain by broad-leafed lime trees, resistant hybrids that could withstand destruction by aphids and exhaust fumes. It felt like a street upon which you could loiter and have an interesting conversation. Sheltered by shop canopies, the jewellers, gold and diamond merchants stood proprietorially in their doorways, calling to each other across the street. The windows were filled with loops of gold, spotlit treasure chests of gleaming bullion.

Checking the note in his hand, Bryant searched for street numbers, hoping that Maggie had given him the right address. A scuffed brass plaque on a recessed door read:
The London River Society.

‘Seven to the north, seven to the south,’ said a small, attractive Chinese girl, stepping ahead of him to fit her key into the lock and push back the front door. He hadn’t heard her approach.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Rivers. Isn’t that what you want to know? It’s what people
always
want to know, how many major lost rivers there are in London. Don’t ask me why, but that’s their first question. The easy answer is fourteen—the truth’s more complicated. Isn’t it always? I’m Rachel Ling. Mrs Huxley told me to expect you, Mr Bryant. Would you like to come in?’ She flicked the lights on as she walked through. ‘Sorry it’s so cold, the central heating hasn’t come on yet.’

Bryant hadn’t expected to find himself inside a Chinese restaurant. He was surrounded by red silk lanterns, curling dragons stamped from gold plastic, tall-backed ebony chairs set at circular tables.

‘I know what you’re going to say,’ warned Rachel. ‘Everyone says the same thing. But we have to find a way to pay the bills. It would be better to have a Jewish restaurant in this area, but my mother’s better with noodles than
matzoh
balls, so it’s Jewish-Chinese. We do a very good kosher pressed duck. Please, take a seat.’ She sat at one of the large circular tables, interlocking her hands to reveal red lacquered nails that complimented the décor. ‘Any friend of Dorothy Huxley is a friend of the society. What do you want to know?’