Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘It’s not her dying, you understand, I’ve been expecting that. But something is wrong, you’ll see.’

‘What are you doing these days?’

‘Both my daughters finally married. I said to them, “Don’t wed Indian boys, they’ll make you have babies instead of careers,” but they wouldn’t listen to me, so I fear there will be no more academics bearing my name. I retired from the British Library when it moved to King’s Cross, but I’m still lecturing on pagan cults.’ Benjamin had once provided the unit with information allowing them to locate a Cornish devil cult. ‘You know, I had asked Ruth to move in with me, but she was too independent. We never got on well with each other. I wanted her to wear one of those things around her neck, a beeper, you know? She refused. Now look where it’s got her.’ This time, Bryant noticed, Mr Singh’s tissue came away damp.

The little Nissan turned a corner and came to a stop.

Balaklava Street was a surprise. It was cobbled, for a start; few such thoroughfares had survived the most recent invasion of property developers, and only an EEC ruling had prevented London’s councils from ripping up the remaining streets. The pavement consisted of velvety flagstones, the kind that were pleasurable to roller-skate over, and ran in a dog-leg that provided the road with the appearance of a cul-de-sac. Commuters rarely used it as a rat-run and casual pedestrians were infrequent, so a peculiar calm had settled across the roof slates, and it was quiet in the way that London backstreets could often be, with the traffic fading to a distant hum and the rustling of high plane trees foregrounded by birdsong. Deep underground, passing Tube trains could be faintly detected, and only the proliferation of parked cars suggested modern times.

Bryant opened the car door and eased himself out with the help of the hated walking stick that May had bought for his last birthday. He noted that the framework of the street’s original gas lamps still stood, although they had been rewired for electric light. There were ten terraced yellow-brick houses, five on each side, before the road skirted a Victorian school that had been converted into an adult-education centre. Opposite, at the end of the road, a parched patch of waste ground was backed by the car park of a kitchen centre and a chaotic wood joinery, the triangle forming a dark corner where youths could play football by day and buy drugs at night.

At this end of the street, beyond the terraces, someone had dumped an old sofa, a dead television and some fractured chairs against a wall, creating an al fresco lounge. The walls of the school had been daubed with luxuriant graffiti and stencilled slander, marked with the initials IDST (‘If Destroyed, Still True’). Around the next corner was a van-repair centre, a hostel and a block of spacious loft apartments. Different worlds abutted without touching.

Mr Singh slipped a disability permit on to the dashboard. ‘I have to use this,’ he explained, ‘Camden has zoned all the streets and they’ll tow me away otherwise, the greedy cash-grabbing bastards. They’ve no respect for a decent educated man. What are their qualifications, I’d like to know?’

Bryant smiled to himself. Benjamin was still confusing culture and commerce, even though it was twenty years since they had last met. ‘Number 5, you say?’ He waved his stick at the littered front garden. Although it appeared relatively prosperous, the street had obviously seen better times. The houses had been amended with white porches, sills and railings, probably Edwardian additions, but these had started to corrode, and were not being replaced. Each house had two floors above the road, one floor below. It was starting to spit with rain, and the front steps looked slippery. At Bryant’s age, you noticed things like that.

Mr Singh had trouble with the keys. He seemed understandably nervous about going back into his sister’s house. Bryant could detect a sour trace of damp in the dark hall. ‘Don’t touch anything,’ he warned. ‘I shouldn’t really let you lead the way, but-well, we still do things differently at the PCU.’ He tried the lights, but nothing happened.

‘They disconnected Ruth after she refused to pay the bill,’ Mr Singh explained. ‘She was getting-I wouldn’t say crazy; difficult, perhaps. Of course, we were raised by oil-light, because our grandmother retained fond memories of her home in India. But the basement here is always dark, and the stairs can be treacherous. Wait, there are candles.’ He rattled a box and lit a pair.

Bryant saw Mr Singh’s point as they descended. ‘You found her down here?’ he asked.

‘This is the puzzle, as you will see.’ Mr Singh entered a shadowed doorway to the left of a small kitchen. The size of the bathroom took Bryant by surprise; it was disproportionately large, taking up more than half of the basement. The old lady was tiny, as dry and skeletal as a long-dead sparrow. She was seated on a large oak chair, her booted feet barely reaching the floor, her head tilted back on a single embroidered cushion draped over the top rail, her hands in her lap, touching with their palms up. The position looked comfortable enough, as though she had simply dropped back her head and died, but Bryant felt this was not a place where one would naturally choose to sit. There was no table or stool, nowhere to place a light, nor were there any proper windows to look out of. The chair was a piece of furniture on to which you would throw your clothes. Ruth Singh was dressed for going outside. She was even wearing a scarf.

‘You see, this is all wrong,’ said her brother, turning uncomfortably in the doorway. ‘It doesn’t seem at all natural to me. It’s not like her.’

‘Perhaps she came down to get something, felt a pain in her chest and sat down for a moment to regain her breath.’

‘Of course not. Ruth had absolutely nothing wrong with her heart.’

That’s why you came to see me, thought Bryant. You can’t accept that she might just have sat down and died. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said gently. ‘People often pass away in such small, unready moments.’ He approached the old woman’s body and noted her swollen, livid ankles. Ruth Singh’s blood had already settled. She had been seated there for some hours, probably overnight. ‘Doesn’t seem to be any heat in here.’

‘It’s been hot for so long. There’s a storage heater for the winter. Oh dear.’

Bryant watched his old colleague. ‘Go to the back door and take a deep breath. I think it will be better if you wait outside while I take a quick look at her. It isn’t really my job, you know. I’ll only get told off for interfering.’

The room was cool enough to have slowed Mrs Singh’s body processes down. Bryant knew he would have to bring in Giles Kershaw, the unit’s new forensic officer, for an accurate time of death. The rug beneath the old woman’s boots looked wet.

‘There’s no one else left now, just us,’ murmured Mr Singh, reluctant to leave. ‘Ruth never married, she could have had her pick of the boys but she waited too long. She shamed her parents, being so English. All her life she was fussy and independent. My sister was a headstrong woman, my daughters are not. It seems the generations can no longer teach each other. Everything is out of place.’ He shook his head sadly, pulling the door shut behind him.

The room was so still. It felt as if even the dust in the air had ceased to circulate. Bryant drew a breath and gently exhaled, turning his head. Watery light filtered in from an opaque narrow window near the ceiling, at the pavement level of the bathroom. Perhaps it had opened once for ventilation, but layers of paint had sealed it shut.

Ruth Singh looked as if she could have died watching television, were it not for being in the wrong room, and for the odd position of her legs. She had not suffered a heart attack and simply sat down, because her hands were carefully folded in her lap. Something wasn’t right. Bryant absently stroked the base of his skull, leaving the nimbus of his white hair in tufted disorder. With a sigh, he removed a slim pack from his pocket and separated a pair of plastic anti-static gloves. He performed the obvious checks without thinking: observe, touch, palpate, listen. No cardiac movement, no femoral or carotid pulse, bilateral dilation in the clouded eyes. The skin of her arm did not blanch when he applied pressure; it was cold but not yet clammy. Setting the candle closer, he slipped his hand behind her neck and gently tried to raise her head. The stiffness in the body was noticeable, but not complete. At a rough guess she had been dead between eight and twelve hours, so she would have passed away between five-thirty p.m. and nine-thirty p.m. on Sunday night. Kershaw would be able to narrow it down.