The Water Room (39 page)

INTO THE UNDERWORLD

‘No answer,’ said May, peering through the brass letterbox. ‘There’s someone home, though.’

‘How do you know?’ Bryant tried to hunch in beneath the shallow porch.

‘There are lit candles all over the place. You wouldn’t go out and leave them burning, would you?’ He turned his ear to the letterbox and listened. ‘I can hear water.’

‘Yes, it’s pouring down the back of my neck right now,’ Bryant complained impatiently.

‘No, splashing water, downstairs. My God, what is that noise?’

‘The river’s breached the basement. That does it—we have to break the door down.’

May looked at the front door in some alarm. ‘I don’t know whether I can.’

‘The wood’s older than our combined ages, it’ll have a spring-weight in the wall and a single Yale lock holding it shut. Get out of the way.’ Bryant pushed his partner aside and raised his shoe. He would have fallen backwards down the steps if May hadn’t caught him.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, let me. This is a woman’s job.’ Longbright appeared behind them. On the third kick of her steel-tipped boot, the lock popped open. They squeezed into the hall and headed for the stairs, flashing torches to the floor below, and saw water pouring from beneath the door of the bathroom.

Heather tried to hold herself upright and reach the door as the glaucous Fleet-water swirled and shoved around the room. The level was no higher than her knees, but the floor was now too slippery to gain a foothold.

The sound of the front door slamming back sounded above her. As she watched Kallie slide from her grasp and become submerged in the breached river, she felt no distress in knowing that her friend would drown. Where better to fill your lungs than here, watched by the watery corpses of those who had faced a similar fate? She stared up at the calmly floating figures revealed on the walls, the pale bodies of drowned acolytes welcoming their ancient gods, and felt suddenly glad to be leaving behind her own distress. The weight rising from her came as an immense relief. Someone else could take over the responsibility now.

Heather barely noticed the female police sergeant who dragged Kallie free. She didn’t even complain when May threw a bath towel around her shoulders. The burden of the Water House, and its terrible possession of her, had begun to wash from her heart, leaving her pure and free again, an innocent child. She smiled tightly, looking from one old face to the other, knowing that she would tell them nothing, for there was no longer anything left to tell. They would never know what she had been through, and without her testimony there was no proof.

She was safe at last.

Longbright laid Kallie’s body on the stairs and squeezed filthy water from her chest, breathing air into her lungs. ‘She’s fine,’ the detective sergeant called up the stairs. ‘She’s swallowed quite a bit, though. She’ll need shots.’

‘John, stay here with Janice. Try and get the women dried off and warmed up while they wait for an ambulance. I’ll meet you later.’ Bryant rose and gripped the bannisters, climbing unsteadily over Kallie’s body.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ asked May.

‘Tate’s opened the conduit between the canal and the house. That’s why the water is in direct contact with the basement wall, because the river Fleet runs behind it whenever the channel—the Prince of Wales Causeway—is used. He’s changed the path of the water. I’m going after him.’ Bryant didn’t look overly keen on the idea.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said May. ‘You’re not up to it. I’ll go with Bimsley.’ He turned to climb the stairs, but Bryant scurried on ahead.

‘Come back! You are absolutely not going down a sewer at your age, with your legs. The very idea!’

‘You need me. You can’t predict my mind. You know it never follows logical routes. You’ll be too sensible.’

‘Then I’ll just have to compensate for you not being there by thinking rubbish,’ warned May.

‘You don’t know where he is, but I have a good idea. Besides, I had the presence of mind to wear my waterproof long johns, which is more than you’re doing. I always said if anything happened to us we’d go down together. If we don’t get Tate tonight, we’ll have nothing. Look at the state of that woman downstairs, look at her eyes—they’ll get a doctor to say she’s unfit to stand trial. Is that what you want? For once in my life I’m not at all cold, and I’m coming with you.’

Accepting that winning an argument with Bryant was as likely as finding a tobacconist’s shop at the top of Everest, May gave in gracefully, and chased his partner up the stairs. They met Bimsley in the street.

‘What about getting Oliver Wilton to help?’ asked May as they headed toward the alley. ‘He knows how the system is routed.’

‘Only from above ground,’ said Bryant. ‘He’s a technician. It’s not the same as seeing the world from underneath the street. Besides, the unit couldn’t be responsible for his safety. We know Tate’s down there because he’s just re-routed the water flow. The system can be reconfigured by manipulating valves, but once the channels start to fill the power of the river becomes too great to reach them, and we’re having the heaviest rainfall in thirty years. But I’m betting there’s an overflow route, one that can be opened by high water pressure.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘An escape route; this level of flooding probably switches the largest channels. The bigger the conduit, the greater the volume of water passing through it, the more pressure it will exert. It’s a track-switching system that only gets fully tested to its maximum level every few decades. Tate used a junction-rod to clear a dry path for himself through the tunnels,’ Bryant explained. ‘He made the necessary changes, then waited for the water level to rise to the point when it would re-route to a high-volume shaft. I think one of its side effects was to put pressure on the basement wall of number 5. He explained the process to me; he even gave me a map, but we couldn’t follow it because of the rain. He wanted me to understand.’

‘Then why didn’t he simply tell you what was going on?’ May asked.

‘I don’t think he’s capable of explaining the full story to anyone, of why he was there and what has happened to him. How long has he been living on the street? Do you have any idea what that does to a person?’

The alley was under several inches of water at one end, but the raised area around the grating was virtually dry. The lid had been removed and cast aside. Bryant pointed to the iron rod sticking out of the turntable at the bottom of the shaft. ‘You see?’ he crowed. ‘He’s kept this path free for himself, and now he’s gone down to follow the re-routed channel. We’re going to lose him if we’re not careful.’

‘Could you explain what’s going on, sir?’ asked Bimsley, fighting to stay balanced in the shifting mud.

‘Later,’ Bryant promised. ‘Help me down.’

‘Are you sure it’s safe?’ Bimsley asked.

‘At the moment it’s still passable. The volume can rise at an incredible speed in times of heavy rainfall, but it also runs away fast. There are emergency drains which open to reduce pressure. I’m more worried about what will happen if it stops raining.’

‘Why?’

‘The levels will fall and switch from the overflow conduit back to this route. Which means these smaller corridors will become inundated once more.’

‘How long have we got?’ asked May.

‘That depends. The channel will take Tate directly to the St Pancras Basin, but if the rain eases up, the tunnels could switch back in just a few minutes.’

‘Then we should go overland.’

‘We have no way of tracking him from above, and to do so would be to miss the entire point. I think he wants us to follow him down there. We need the final piece to this.’

‘Then I’ll tell Janice and Meera to follow above ground, and keep us apprised of the weather conditions.’

‘How will we know where Tate’s gone?’ asked Bimsley, reluctantly lowering himself into the steaming drain.

Bryant smiled and held up his river map. ‘He left us a guide. Let’s get going.’

The first two tunnels were dry and easy to negotiate, but by the time they reached the third, it had been joined by another channel from a different tributary, this one bringing in floating islands of animal fat from a riveted lead pipe. The stench of rotted meat and sewage caused Bimsley to throw up his lunch over a blocked drain.

‘The construction of these tunnels is remarkable,’ Bryant enthused. ‘Look at this metalwork, you don’t find craftsmanship like that any more. And the decoration—why would anyone bother to put a neoclassical bay-leaf-garland motif around an arch that no one will ever see? That’s Victorian pride for you.’

‘Jesus, there’s bloody great big rats down here.’ Bimsley hopped on to one foot and banged his skull on the ceiling, shattering calcified stalactites as a bedraggled squeaking creature with matted fur shot past him.

‘Don’t be such a baby,’ said Bryant, turning the map around. ‘John, we need to concentrate all our lights, please.’

They forked left at a pair of yellow-brick arches coated in slender black tree roots.

‘We must be under Prince of Wales Road, heading toward the Regent’s Canal by now. Look, there are plaques.’ May pointed to the conduit’s brass nameplate bolted into the wall, a subterranean echo of the street names on the roads above.

Bryant’s torch-beam fell on what appeared to be a bundle of rags. ‘Tate’s jacket. He wants us to follow him.’

‘For the life of me I don’t understand why,’ said May.

‘Oh, he’s been waiting for this since the rains began.’

‘Does Mr Bryant know something we don’t?’ asked Bimsley, confused.

‘Mr Bryant
always
knows something we don’t,’ May admitted. ‘We’re going to need inoculations after this.’

‘Perhaps, but we’ll have learned something new.’ Bryant shone the torch over the tunnel arch. A wider channel ran crossways, like the junction of an arterial road. Shallow, cleaner water was flowing fast through it. ‘I don’t weigh very much. Think we can get across that?’

‘Hang on to me. Bimsley, you’re the heaviest, lad—you lead.’

The trio clutched each other’s hands and waded out, but Bryant was nearly pulled off his feet. May and the detective constable yanked him to the other side like parents controlling a recalcitrant child.

‘Look at this.’ May pointed to the wall beside them. ‘One of your fail-safe conduits.’ He slapped his hand on the riveted steel panel, layered with grease and grooved at its base to shift around a matching steel arc, like the flood gate in an underground station. Behind a grille at the top, water was rushing away into darkness. ‘If the water rises too high, it’ll come over and re-flood this tunnel, creating a run-off.’

‘Some of these tunnels look dry,’ Bimsley pointed out.

‘I don’t think we’ve reached the part of the system designed for peak flooding yet,’ said Bryant. ‘We’ll know it when we see it.’

From here the floor sloped downwards, and they found themselves going deeper. ‘According to this, there’s an emergency escape drain above us, but I don’t see it.’ May waved his torch about.

‘There,’ said Bimsley, illuminating a narrow round shaft far above them. ‘It looks like the ladder has rusted away and fallen in.’

‘That’s reassuring.’

Following the map to the St Pancras Basin, they turned into a narrower ramped tunnel with slender iron platforms on either side. ‘This is part of the system newly exposed by the flood switches,’ said Bryant. ‘Look at the walls.’ They showed clear signs of long-term immersion. Strangely, the stone floor beneath their feet was less slippery, and the air smelled healthier. ‘Nothing’s had time to stagnate here. It’s probably been kept full just coping with the natural run-off of freshwater from Hampstead Heath and the other high areas above the city. It isn’t wide enough to cope with severe flooding, but it’s fine for everyday use. Wonderful workmanship; not a stone out of place. Beautiful bevelling.’

Bimsley’s radio crackled, making him jump. ‘The rain’s easing up,’ warned Longbright. ‘You’d better start heading for the nearest exit.’

‘We must be nearly there.’ Bryant waded on ahead. ‘The light is less dense.’

He was right. A faint sickly glow changed the colour of the walls before them, but as they approached, they found themselves entering a network of claustrophobic culverts, each one barred at the end.

‘We’ll have to turn around,’ May warned. ‘This one’s a dead end too.’

‘Interesting,’ said Bryant, seemingly unconcerned that they might be swept away at any minute. ‘I’m assuming that Tate is down here looking for something that has been unexposed for some thirty years, and I would have thought that this was the most likely place for him to be. The tunnels fill to their highest level, then empty, washing everything out this way.’

‘There’s no sign of him.’

‘He must have left some kind of trail. Keep looking around.’

‘Bimsley, how long since it stopped raining?’

‘Twelve minutes, sir.’

‘The levels will be falling. We should try to find an exit. Call Longbright and find out where the nearest drain shaft is, would you?’

Bimsley tried his phone, but failed to locate a signal. ‘No response. We’re in pretty deep ground.’

‘So we’re on our own. I wouldn’t fancy our chances of climbing those slopes back up. We’ll have to go on,’ said May.

‘
Very
interesting,’ said Bryant approvingly. ‘The Fleet was choked off by the expanding metropolis, but its waters still ran, albeit at a fraction of their former power. And at the highest flood levels, the water would fight to find a way around the obstacles. The system is beautifully simple when you think about it. The engineers knew the floods were cyclical over decades, so they allowed for the Fleet to return by a series of self-controlled gates that can only be opened by a specific volume of water. Under such conditions, the river cuts a path all the way through the local district conduits to form a single united flow heading to Camden Town and Clerkenwell, following the old route just as it used to, before emptying out into the Thames.’

‘Yes, Arthur, and as soon as the level drops and the weight recedes it will switch back, leaving us, all too literally, I fear,
dans la merde
. So can we push on?’