Christopher Fowler - The Water Room

Meera was kneeling beside Greenwood, attempting to staunch the flow from his neck. ‘I don’t want you to help me, Mr Bryant, I’m strong enough to do it alone. Just stay here with Ubeda until I can get back. I kicked him pretty hard. I think he’s concussed.’ She gripped Greenwood’s body and dragged him off as a spray of blood soaked her shirt and jacket. Bryant was left beside Ubeda.

‘I’m an old man, but I have the strength of the law behind me, so I wouldn’t advise making a run for it,’ Bryant told him shakily, trying to regain his breath and calm his hammering heart. He checked for the gun Ubeda was known to possess, and was relieved to find nothing. ‘I know what you’re looking for. I want to know where you got the explosive material.’

‘You can get anything in this city.’ The entrepreneur’s eyes never left Bryant’s face. ‘Anything at all.’ He had the audacity to smile as he climbed shakily to his feet. Bryant suddenly saw the situation as it would have presented itself to an outsider: a rather frail, elderly man with the canal at his back, faced with a determined and possibly lunatic predator. He began to grow uncomfortable. True, the law was on his side and the water was shallow, but these days such odds were too long for Bryant’s liking.

‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he warned.

‘If you know what I’m looking for, surely you want to see it as well.’ Ubeda began climbing over the shattered bricks toward the blasted entrance to the tunnel. Bryant stumbled behind him, his left ear singing, as Ubeda dropped back into the oily water and began wading under the arch.

‘Come out of there, it’s unsafe,’ Bryant called ineffectually, but now he could see nothing, only hear the splash of water and the soft chinking of loose bricks. Once he heard a single shout of anger and frustration, and knew in that instant that Ubeda’s goal had not been achieved.

When the collector returned, his arrogance had been swamped by the recognition of defeat. He climbed out of the canal and dropped on to the grassy embankment, closing his eyes.

‘Did you really expect to find the vessel after all these centuries?’ asked Bryant.

‘You don’t understand,’ Ubeda told him. ‘My great-grandfather knew of its whereabouts. Everything indicated that it had been washed to the end of a tributary. They were sealing off the rivers, putting in walls and grilles. He said that was where I would find it.’

‘An alabaster pot older than Christ? You think it survived intact? How would that be possible?’

Ubeda opened his eyes and raised himself on one arm. ‘No, of course not. Do you think I’m a complete idiot? Anubis carried the sorrows from one vessel to another. Why else do you think the society existed for so many years?’

Bryant recalled the broken Anubis statues in Ubeda’s attic. ‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he admitted.

‘Then you never will.’ Ubeda rose in pain and limped away toward the shadow of the next canal arch, daring Bryant to stop him.

By the time Meera arrived with reinforcements, the waters beneath the arcade had smoothed to green glass, and Bryant stood alone at the water’s edge.

DC Bimsley was frozen to the bone.

He stamped his boots on the pavement to bring feeling back to his feet, and tried wriggling his toes inside his cold wet socks, but nothing worked. Even his nipples had gone numb. Chilled rainwater bounced off his shaved head and dripped through the tiny gap between his neck and his collar. On the other side of the river, above a pub in Vauxhall, his pals were at a party hosted by Russian flight attendants, who would be introducing them to girls with cool grey eyes and unpronounceable names. They would be getting themselves into an advanced state of refreshment, slamming vodka mixes and copping off while he paced the street like a common constable.

Behind him, the blaring light of the hostel seemed as inviting as a country hotel in midwinter. He couldn’t see the point of keeping guard on such a night. In the past two hours, a handful of melancholic men had drifted to the scratched glass of the reception window to collect an overnight pass for one of the overspill hostels in Camden. Two of them, having qualified as ‘being in a condition of dire need’, had been admitted to the overnight dormitory. Depressing as his own situation was, it could not equal the plight of these helpless and possibly unhelpable men. He wondered if Bryant was punishing him for some transgression by giving him such a menial task, and tried to recall whether he had filled in all his paperwork for last week.

In order to get a quick heat-fix from the convector over the entrance, he kept popping in to say ‘All right?’ to the bored little man at the reception desk; but no amount of foot stamping or arm flapping brought an offer of tea. He tried another tack. ‘Busy tonight?’

‘Not too bad,’ managed the clerk.

‘You been here long?’ asked Bimsley, desperate to prolong his time under the heater.

‘I used to be on nights up the Whiston Road Refugee Centre in Hackney. All Cambodians and Vietnamese, used to living in big families back home and putting all their money in one big pot. Then they come here and the first thing that happens is their kids take off. The families get split up, can’t pay the rent and get kicked out.’

‘It must make your job harder, trying to keep track of them all.’

‘Everyone’s all over the place, how can you keep track? Kurds in Finsbury, Albanians in King’s Cross, Jamaicans in Harlesden, Colombians down the Elephant and Castle, Ethiopians in Highbury and Tufnell Park-the paperwork’s a nightmare, I can tell you.’

‘Forgive me for asking, mate, but why work here at all if you don’t like it?’

‘My old man was a right old racist, see, and that was when there were just Caribbeans here-neat little schoolkids, husbands on the buses, wives down the Baptist church on Sundays. He never understood that people are just looking for a place to call home. I suppose if I can learn to make sense of the changes, I’ll never get to be like him.’

Bimsley had to admit the approach was a fair one. He realized he was propping open the door to let in the rain, and reluctantly bowed back out.

On the street he drifted back into a fugue state, watching the building without seeing. A wavering light still flickered in Tate’s bedroom: Bimsley supposed that the old man was smoking against the rules, staring at the rain patterns reflected on the ceiling, or perhaps reading by torchlight after curfew, for it was now nearly midnight.

Had he considered the evidence with more care, he would have recalled the sprinklers set in the ceiling of every bedroom, provided for the specific purpose of preventing accidents caused by a confluence of alcohol and flame. Had he not been so numbed by the rain, he would also have remembered Bryant’s order to check around the building every fifteen minutes for the first hour after the hostel’s front door was locked at eleven p.m.

The flame in Tate’s room was too large to be from a cigarette. It bounced and flickered, stretching to the walls. No alarm sounded. When Bimsley was finally signalled by the frantic receptionist, who had spotted the fire on his blurry, ancient CCTV monitor, the conflagration was in firm possession of the plasterboard walls with their so-called fireproof coating.

After the cold of the night, Bimsley at first failed to feel the roasting heat on the staircase; but as he progressed the tar-like smoke grew thicker, the fire stronger, until he knew he would be forced back. The former post-office had been cheaply converted into narrow units that failed to ignite fully but trapped scalding pockets of gas. A bizarrely clad troupe of men shoved past: pyjamas and greatcoats, one in a neon-yellow candlewick bedspread, another in a dressing-gown and balaclava. Someone was on all fours, looking for a bag that probably held all his possessions. If the situation had not been so desperate, Bimsley would have been ashamed to witness strangers in such painful private moments. Instead all was chaos, and he saw that there was no shame for any human being in fighting to stay alive.