Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

‘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.’

‘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.’