Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

Perhaps you’ve made too much of the matter, Bryant told himself. This is the last time you’re going to see Ben. He’s leaving it all behind. It’s time you did as well.

What bothered John May more than anything was the location of the building.

As a teenager he had been warned away from the soot-coated pubs and rough-houses crammed into the roads off the embankment. The area between the river and the railways was traditionally fringed with the poorest homes; here had lived the workers who built the tunnels and arches and laid the tracks, the Thames lightermen, the coalboys and dockers, their women in laundries and sweatshops. Too much poverty, too many people crammed together to survive a Saturday night without drunken fighting. The poor lived in lowlands, the rich on hills; a rule that applied to so many of the world’s major cities. London sloped up from the Thames, to Shooter’s Hill and Crystal Palace in the south, to Hampstead Heath and Alexandra Palace in the north. Crime drifted down to the base, gravity-drawn like the cloacal water sucked into London’s lost rivers.

He nearly called the whole thing off after Bimsley fell over his second dustbin. The boy was a hard-working officer, but had clearly inherited his father’s strange lack of coordination. The PCU had a long history of apprenticeship: Janice Longbright’s mother had worked there, as had Bimsley Senior. When there were fewer rules to follow, you had to work with people you could trust.

May’s trick with the Yale lock failed in the jaundiced gloom that passed for London night, and they were forced to climb over the wall, an exercise for which May showed surprising aptitude. Although it was after ten there were still plenty of people on the streets, but no one seemed interested in what they were doing. The light pollution reflecting from the low cloud-base enabled them to see as they picked their way through the rubbish.

At the end of the passage, they crossed the small square and edged down between a mulberry-tiled gap in the buildings, coming out on to a brick-strewn floor inside the two remaining walls of a warehouse.

‘That answers Arthur’s question,’ said May. ‘He told me that every foot of the Fleet had been mapped and explored, that there was nothing left to see. But according to his maps, the buildings around here are at least a hundred and fifty years old. If they’re demolishing this one, they’re clearing a path back to the Fleet that hasn’t been accessible for at least that long.’

‘So what are we looking for?’ asked Bimsley, backing around a stack of bricks from which a rat had just dashed.

‘I don’t know. Maybe we should listen out for the sound of running water.’

‘All I can hear is the traffic in Farringdon Road.’

‘Follow me.’ May picked his way to the edge of the interior wall, which had been painted an institutional shade of railway green at some time in the 1930s. Between the back wall and the start of the next building was a narrow gap. ‘Want to go first?’ May offered.

‘I’m not sure I’d fit down there,’ warned Bimsley. He wasn’t nervous of what he might find, but some of the tiles were broken and he was wearing a decent jacket, having arranged to see some friends later in a West End pub.

‘We need evidence of what Greenwood has been hired to do,’ May told him. ‘Don’t think of it as a favour to Arthur so much as trying to close the reaction gap between us and the law-breakers.’

‘Oh, very funny,’ said Bimsley, squeezing into the space. Reaction-gap reduction was a training initiative long touted by the Met to its forces, and was consequently the butt of many jokes. The idea of crime anticipation and prevention was hardly new and not overly successful, but it was well suited to the PCU. At least, thought May, we should be able to manage an arising situation between a convicted fraudster and an easily duped academic.

‘Do you think I can get an advance on my wages?’ asked Bimsley. ‘I’m broke.’

‘You’re supposed to be,’ replied May. ‘You’re a junior.’

‘Yeah, but I’m working overtime.’

‘I’ll give you one if you find something.’ May shone the torch ahead. The tiles were covered in the kind of calcified slime he associated with river walls at low tide. ‘It looks like you can get all the way down there,’ he encouraged. ‘Take my Valiant.’

Bimsley accepted the torch. ‘If I ruin my clothes, I’m going to put in a chit.’ He tried to avoid touching the walls, but couldn’t help it after something sleek and squeaking ran across his boots. His palm came away green.

‘What’s that on your right?’ called May. ‘Down by your boot.’

Bimsley lowered the Valiant. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he called back.

May had spotted the pale keystone of an arch, and a stone known as a voussoir, part of a curving cornice, mostly obscured by rubble. ‘Pull some of that rubbish away, can you?’

Grimacing, Bimsley plunged his hands into the pile and dragged back a rotted mattress. It took him several minutes to remove the panels of wood and piles of brick that had silted up against the top of the underground arch, which he saw was staked with iron bars at six-inch intervals. He shone his torch inside. ‘Looks like it goes a long way back,’ he called. ‘No way of getting in there without cutters.’

‘If we can’t gain entrance, that means Greenwood hasn’t been able to get inside, either. They’ve probably only just taken the warehouse wall down. That means we’re still in time.’

‘Yeah, but in time for what?’ Bimsley pressed his face against the rusted bars, lowering the torch.

‘Nothing at all?’

‘Nope.’

‘Let’s go.’ May began stepping back through the debris.

‘Hang on.’ Bimsley crouched as low as the gap permitted. ‘Stinks down here. I think I can see. .’

He turned around, flashing his torch along the gap, but May had already disappeared from view. Shining the beam through the bars, he could make out a curving brick wall with weeds protruding from it. At the bottom, below a deep ridge, was a thread of glittering silver.

‘I think there’s water, if that’s what you’re-Mr May?’ The circle of light dropped lower, picking up another reflection. Bimsley pushed himself closer and found one of the bars loose. It jiggled in its concrete setting, then dropped down several inches. After a minute or so of further bullying, he was able to remove it completely. The resulting hole was wide enough to ease his head and shoulder through. He raised the torch again.

He nearly overlooked it because it failed to reflect the beam, but the light picked up something against the wall, a coil of tiny wooden beads fastened together with a strip of leather. Pushing his bulk flat against the bars, he was just able to raise the strand in his fingers.

But now there were two reflections of light above the bracelet, like small gold coins, bright and flat. It took him a moment to work out that they were eyes, and by that time he had heard the throaty rumble of a growl.

The dog attacked before he could unwedge himself. It leapt at him, spraying spittle, its jaws desperately snapping shut on his shoulder, biting down hard, its teeth clamping together through the generous padding. Bimsley cried out and fell back as the material tore, and the rottweiler launched itself into the gap. It got halfway through and stuck, wriggling back and forth with its hind legs off the ground until it twisted sideways, falling back into the cavernous cellar.

He could hear it trying to breach the space again, barking frantically, maddened by its imprisonment, as he stumbled over the chinking bricks toward the alley and the exit.