Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘First the Fleet, now this. What’s the connection?’

‘You might well ask. Perhaps something caused him to give up on the Fleet. Here.’ He unfolded the map and laid it across the dashboard of the steamed-up Mini Cooper. ‘Obviously, the underground rivers of London drain down into the Thames, so this one flows south to north, from Norwood through Herne Hill to Brixton, Stockwell, Kennington and finally here, to Vauxhall. It’s referred to as a stream in the history books, but was apparently wide enough for both King Canute and Queen Elizabeth I to sail on. Considering they lived half a millennium apart, the river obviously had a strong source that kept it flowing. Elizabeth used it to visit Sir Walter Raleigh. Like most of the other rivers, it now exists in a handful of small disgusting ponds, the odd muddy dribble and a few bricked-over sewers. The interesting thing is that Greenwood has gone to the mouths of both rivers, where there would still be Victorian pipework in existence.’

‘So if he’s not looking to rob a bank,’ asked May, ‘what the hell is he after? Could it be something in the tunnel itself?’

‘Buggered if I know. Let’s go for a beer.’

‘I’m starving,’ May complained. ‘Couldn’t we eat?’

‘I’m not indulging your fetish for fried-chicken outlets. We can go to the upstairs bar of the Union Jack for a curry and some decent bitter. We’ll be able to keep an eye on Greenwood from there.’

‘What if Raymond Land calls?’ worried May. ‘He’ll want to know where we are.’

‘Oh, I can run rings round Raymond,’ Bryant assured him. ‘His father was a jellied-eel merchant from Cable Street, don’t tell me he’s sophisticated enough to see through one of my ruses.’

‘All right-but we drop everything if Greenwood comes back out. And if he’s carrying something he didn’t have when he went in, I’m going to arrest him.’

‘Absolutely, good idea,’ agreed Bryant, who knew exactly how to get his own way.

Someone had been in the house. Kallie was sure she had shut the door of the front room before going out. Unnerved, she waited in the shadowed hall, staring at the inch-wide gap between jamb and frame.

‘Hello?’

No answer. What did she expect? That a burglar would announce himself? In the last few days a bitter smell of damp had begun to hang in the air, as though the rain-mist from the grey cobbled street had found a way to invade the house. But now it had been replaced by the odour of male sweat. She entered the other rooms one by one, and found that both the attic skylight and the basement garden door were still locked. No windows broken, no other way in or out.

Checking the bathroom, she noticed that the strange brown patch in the wall had dried and vanished overnight. None of it made sense. She returned to the front room and gingerly pushed at the door, letting it swing wide. Inside, nothing was disturbed. The stripes left on the carpet by her vacuum cleaner were unmarred by footprints.

She decided that a stray draught must have pulled open the internal door, but it didn’t explain the smell of sweat. New things were beginning to bother her. The turn in the basement stairs, permanently in shadow. The back window, against which the branches of a dead wisteria tree tapped and scratched like something from a children’s book of witches. Worst of all was the great bathroom that seemed impervious to warmth or light, that bred hairless brown arachnids in its moist recesses and became stained with impossible patches of mildew that spread like cancer, only to recede and disappear before she could prove to anyone that she had not imagined such a thing.

Since the rain had begun to fall virtually without a break, the house had become wet. Sheets and blankets felt damp to the touch. The floorboards and window frames flaked varnish. Plaster felt soft and crumbly beneath the peeling wallpaper. It was quite obvious that Paul didn’t believe her, and nor did Heather, who had begun breezing in for coffee, expecting to be waited on. She had taken Heather to the basement to hear the sound of rushing water, but her neighbour had insisted she could hear nothing, and even went so far as to suggest Kallie’s mind might be playing tricks on her.

She wanted to rent industrial dryers and paint everything white, to let in sun and heat, but they were too short of money to do anything that would make a difference. The monthly mortgage repayment would keep things tight, and according to the papers it was likely to rise soon. Perhaps she shouldn’t have taken Heather’s advice. Even at school, her friend had never been without money. She had rented her first flat in a square just off the King’s Road, and had met her future husband at a polo match, for God’s sake. She and George ate in expensive restaurants, spent their weekends in Paris and Rome, never felt the need to check their bank balances. .

A white towel lay crumpled in the centre of the bathroom floor. It had definitely been folded on the rack beside the bath, she was sure of it. Paul was away in Manchester again. He’d told her he was going to argue his case for compensation, but had already started spending his redundancy. She wanted to talk, but his mobile had been switched off for hours. Why, what was he doing? Whenever they spent more than three days in close company they quarrelled, but she missed his absurdly inappropriate enthusiasms, his innocent longing for the freedom of youth. The house was less forgiving without him, as if it would only seek to press its peculiar aura when his insouciance was not there to temper it.

The bathroom tap shuddered and clanked when she twisted it. She was about to start washing her hair when the front-door knocker boomed through the house.

Jake Avery was immediately apologetic when he saw her dressing-gown. ‘I’m always getting people out of the bath,’ he told her. ‘I should have called first, but I don’t have your phone number.’

‘Then I’ll give it to you,’ she promised, ushering him in. ‘I was only going to wash my hair because there’s nothing on TV. I’ll make us some tea.’

He seated himself awkwardly on one of the mismatched kitchen stools and looked around. ‘It’s coming along nicely in here.’

‘Thanks. I’m doing it by myself-Paul’s hopeless with DIY.’

‘You should get Elliot in from number 3. He’s good as long as you keep him off the booze. He painted and rewired our place, and now he’s laying the front yard for the builders’ merchant at the end of the street. You know, the piece of waste ground old Garrett was trying to get his hands on? It’s going to be a car park.’

‘I don’t think Mr Copeland is interested in the job. I’d like to take a couple of walls out and stop the rooms looking quite so Victorian.’

‘Yeah, Paul told me your plans.’

‘Did he?’ I wish he’d tell me, she thought. ‘You two had a bit of a boozing session the other night.’

‘Yeah, we got a bit pissed. Sorry about that.’ He didn’t sound contrite. ‘I realize now that I don’t talk often enough to my neighbours. We all work so hard that we’ve no time left for social niceties when we get home. I mean, I give money in the street to professional charities I’ve never even heard of, and yet I’m too tired to bother with the people who live next door. That’s not right, is it? Paul told me how you two met. It sounded kind of romantic.’

‘Paul has a way of sexing up every story. You have to take him with a pinch of salt.’

They had spent twenty minutes together inside a ghost-train car that had broken down in Blackheath funfair. She had been sitting with her girlfriend Daniella, debating whether to leave the car and risk walking through the cuprous gloom, when Paul had loomed out from a graveyard tableau and made them both scream. The happiness of that memory had been undermined by the fact that Daniella had died a month later, hit by a delivery van while riding her bike home late one night. No one had ever traced the driver. You could fill every square of the city’s map grid with the stains of hidden tragedies.