Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

Now she heard the sound quite clearly, running-no, rushing water. It seemed to be coming from the right-hand adjoining wall. She hadn’t met the people on that side. Heather had told her that their names were Omar and Fatima. What could they be doing that would make such a noise? It wasn’t a tap, more like a set of them, all turned on at once. The sound had volume and depth. Coupled with the noise of the heavily falling rain, the sense of precipitation seemed to enclose the house entirely.

She shone the torch around the bathroom, and wished she hadn’t. The fittings were cheap, a bilious shade of avocado that had been popular in the seventies. Only the bath was white enamel, and there was a good chance that it had feet, those French ball-and-claws that could look nice if they were cleaned up. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been boxed in with corrugated hardboard. She thought of her parents’ house and remembered the craze for boarding over bannisters, sinks, door panels, any decoration that smacked of Victoriana. The house had probably had a dozen makeovers, each according to the prevailing taste of the times, each leaving a residue of personality in a crust of paint.

The Swiss army knife she had used on the packing cases was still in her back pocket. Cross-legged on the cold parquet floor, she unscrewed the six chrome-topped pins holding the bath’s front hardboard panel, then dug the tip of the blade under its base. The board groaned as she flexed it, then split and came loose. She bent back the sheet until it lifted free, and was horrified to find that she had released hundreds of tiny brown spiders from their penumbral home. They scattered in every direction, over her legs, across the floor, up the walls, fleeing the torchlight. She leapt to her feet and shook out her hands in revulsion, dusting them from her clothes, feeling the tickle of legs everywhere, imagining more than she could see.

Jumping out of her jeans was the best idea, but scattering the spiders with bright light would have been better. She headed for the safety of the bare bulbs in the hall, leaving behind the churning noise of water. This, she thought, is what owning a house is all about. It’s going to take some getting used to.

May could hear something odd. It sounded like ‘We are the Ovaltinies, happy girls and boys. .’ But of course it couldn’t be; that radio jingle had surely vanished before the Second World War. He glanced at the new mobile phone on Bryant’s desk and realized that the music was emanating from the earpiece. Arthur was even humming along as he fussily rearranged books on the mantelpiece. After all these years, he still had the ability to make May feel as if he was going mad. How the hell did he do it? More to the point, how did he bend radio waves from the past to transmit them through modern technology?

‘Can you hear anything unusual?’ he asked tentatively.

‘I was thinking,’ replied Bryant, failing, as usual, to answer a simple question. ‘This fellow, this friend of yours, he’s simply selling his services, no?’ He poked longingly at the bowl of his pipe and eyed the No Smoking notice above his partner’s head, reluctantly returning the briar to his top pocket. ‘Academic information is a valuable commodity. I don’t suppose the Museum of London pays very much. You can’t begrudge him earning a little freelance.’

‘My dear chap, I don’t begrudge him anything. Far from it,’ said May, as Longbright cleared a space on the desk and set down two mugs of strong Indian tea. ‘The city wouldn’t survive without its grey economy. I don’t even like him. He’s an arrogant bore. I just want to know what he’s up to.’

‘Even someone as stupid as Raymond Land will notice that a lecturer coming into a chunk of money hardly warrants sending two new recruits to sift through his rubbish bins. He could have won a bet on a horse, or have taken on a second job as a minicab driver.’

‘Raymond’s in the building,’ warned Longbright. ‘His golf’s been cancelled because of the rain. Don’t let him hear you call him stupid again.’

May waited until the sergeant had returned to her office. ‘You don’t understand, Arthur.’

‘Then explain it to me.’

‘I’ve known Gareth Greenwood for years. I’m surprised you haven’t run across him, because he does guided walks too-the Late Victorians on alternate Friday evenings, Port of London first Sunday morning of the month. Surely you must cross over each other.’

‘There are hundreds of guides, half of them unofficial,’ said Bryant testily. ‘I don’t know them all. Do go on.’

‘Greenwood is a brilliant academic with a Master’s degree in early modern history. It’s his wife who’s worried about him. Monica called me a few days ago to tell me he’d taken an assignment through someone he met at the museum. He’s being paid a considerable amount of money to perform some kind of illegal task, half up-front, half when it’s completed. It’s dangerous, too; he made out a will last week.’

‘How does she know all this?’

‘He’s an archetypical academic, vague and rather remote-you could fire a gun while he’s reading and he wouldn’t notice. She dropped him off at the Barbican last Friday and realized he’d left some papers in the car, so she went after him. He was being met by some dodgy-looking character who was handing him wads of used notes and giving him instructions about what he had to do. Gareth’s been in trouble before, you see. It wasn’t his fault the first time, he was just a little naive. A friend of one of the museum’s patrons offered him a rare piece of London sculpture. Greenwood didn’t check its provenance or he would have known it was stolen. Outdoor statuary was never registered very strictly. It’s only in recent times that the collectors’ black market for large items has opened. The statue was one of a pair of Graces that had stood on Haverstock Hill for over a century. Greenwood had walked past it every day on his way to the Tube, but didn’t recognize it when it was offered to the museum. His colleagues were sympathetic, and did what they could. Well-meaning academics have a history of unwitting involvement with fraud, blackmail and robbery. Whatever one might think of him as a person, Greenwood’s one of the finest experts we have in this city-I’d hate him to make another mistake. He refuses point-blank to discuss this new business with his wife, and she’s very worried.’

‘So you asked Meera and Colin to go through his bins. Really, John, you’re giving Raymond Land ammunition to take back to the Home Office. Couldn’t you just have had a quiet word with him?’

‘No, that wouldn’t be possible,’ said May uncomfortably. ‘We were sort of rivals, and he’s still a bit, you know, angry with me.’

‘No, I don’t know. What sort of rivals?’

‘Well-the lady he married. I sort of met her first, and meant to break it off when she met Gareth, but neither of us got around to telling him, and then it sort of came out at a bad time.’

‘Wait a minute, all this is about a woman?’ Bryant fought hard to stop himself from laughing. ‘What is it with you and married women? How long ago was this?’

‘June 1978.’

He tried to prevent it, but the laugh escaped. ‘That’s over twenty-five years ago. You’re not telling me he still bears a grudge.’

‘Academics are capable of bearing grudges until the day they die. Obsession is in their nature. Anyway, we’re not exactly being worked off our feet here, Arthur. I want to keep Mangeshkar and Bimsley busy. You know that if no work gets sent our way, the Met will end up using us on their cases by default, and when that happens the unit will be closed down for good.’