The Water Room (15 page)

Sometimes it felt as if a stranger’s eyes were at her back, watching in silence as she moved about the basement. The sensation didn’t occur in the front room or the bedrooms, even though they were the only ones which were overlooked. Something felt wrong inside the building: dead air displaced, events rearranged. It was nothing more than a vague sensation, but she had learned not to overlook such presentiments. She couldn’t explain the feeling to herself, or articulate it to Paul, who had a habit of dismissing such ideas with an impatient wave of his hand. According to him she was simply not used to owning a house. More insultingly, he implied that using a room in which a woman had recently died would always be the source of some kind of female hysteria.

Then there was what she had come to think of as the Presence. After returning from the party two nights earlier, she’d felt sure that someone had been in the house. Nothing had been conspicuously moved, but the arrangement of items left out in the kitchen looked wrong to her, as though she was viewing them from a slightly altered perspective, as though the miasmic air within the closed rooms had kaleidoscoped, allowing the dust to drift gently and realign itself in alien patterns, like reordered synapses.

There had been another argument over money, this time because Paul had spent part of his redundancy pay on a laptop computer, when they had agreed to pool their earnings toward the refurbishment of the house. They had never fought this violently before, even when they were sleeping on Neil’s sofa. It felt as though the house was siphoning off their happiness, allowing it to stream away beneath the cold bathroom floor.

At twenty past eleven she heard the front door open, and found Paul fighting to free himself from his jacket in the hall. ‘I thought you’d be asleep by now,’ he said, with the faint struggle for clarity in his voice that marked him as a man who had drunk more than his limit. ‘Come and sit in the front room.’

He tugged at her until she sat beside him on the couch. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you.’

‘You’re drunk, Paul.’

‘Only a bit. I’ve just had a chance to think about you, and I can tell you’re not happy.’

‘Let’s discuss this in the morning.’

‘Suppose—’ he raised his voice, ‘suppose we had money in the bank, I mean a decent amount, enough to buy a new place.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was in the pub with whatsname—Jake—he goes hang-gliding in France—’

‘What’s this about money? Did he offer you a job?’

Paul pressed the heel of his hand into his eye, concentrating. ‘Jake hasn’t got anything suitable at his company. He wants me to go hang-gliding with him, you remember I used to—’

‘You can’t make money from hang-gliding,’ she told him. ‘Come on, I’ll get you to bed.’

‘I can manage.’ He rose unsteadily. ‘Look at this place. We can do better—Jake was talking to the other guy, at the party—’

She challenged him on the upstairs landing, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I’m not with you. Which other guy?’

‘Wait, I have to get this right in my head. Let me get undressed.’ She waited patiently until he was installed on his side of the sloping bed they had borrowed from her mother. ‘The builder guy—Elliot—he knows how we can make some money, but there’s someone else who knows—’ The rest of his thought drained into the pillow.

‘Someone else knows what, Paul? You’re not making any sense.’ She knew how he behaved after a few beers. He would fade fast and not remember the conversation in the morning.

‘We have to leave the street, Kal,’ he mumbled as sleep started to claim him. ‘It’s not safe to stay . . .’

Kallie watched the bronzed droplets brushing the windows, and wondered what she was supposed to do. Paul was already snoring lightly, leaving her alone and all too aware that although nothing was really wrong, nothing was quite right.

‘What do you think he’s doing?’ May peered through the rain-spotted windscreen, trying to see if any lamplights were showing across the road, but the low branches of the plane tree obscured his view. Bryant had insisted on backing the car into the underbrush surrounding the car park because he didn’t want Greenwood spotting them.

‘He’s checking out another underground river.’

‘What makes you say that? Don’t tell me you’re developing a psychic link with him.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Bryant unglued a sherbet lemon, popped it in his mouth and sank down into the shell of his protective overcoat. ‘I’m basing my assumptions on concrete evidence, right here.’ He withdrew a folded section of map from his overcoat and tapped it.

May was rattled. ‘I don’t get this. It’s the first time in years that you haven’t tried to drag palmists, mediums, witches, druids or any one of your fringe specialists into a case to prove a point. I thought we’d at least end up with a dowser. But you seem quite happy to sit here and wait for the worst to happen.’

‘A dowser’s not a bad idea. I thought you preferred me like this, calm and rational.’ The boiled sweet clattered against his false teeth.

‘Yes, I do, but it’s starting to bother me.’

‘I don’t have much choice in the matter. At first I presumed that your pal was a total innocent, duped into something nefarious by a dodgy speculator or some kind of burglar. But now I’m starting to think that he’s ready to go beyond the law in order to provide some kind of illegal service.’

‘How do you know he’s even breaking the law?’ asked May.

‘According to Meera, he’s not requested permission to enter premises, and he hasn’t petitioned the London Water Authority, who have to be officially notified of right-of-way access in the case of underground waterways. You told me that Mr Greenwood was an ordinary penniless academic until his first brush with criminals. My guess is that he’s in some kind of transitional phase. Who knows what he’ll decide to be next? People drift away into all kinds of dark worlds, and sometimes nothing can bring them back.’

‘Hm.’ May shrugged. They had seen Greenwood, wearing a yellow hardhat and wrapped in a coil of rope, heading across a piece of waste ground with the Egyptian in tow. The pair of them had vanished inside a boarded-up railway arch.

‘Look around you. Know where you are?’

May scanned the landscape. ‘South of Vauxhall Bridge. The kind of place tourists never see. No Man’s Land.’

‘ “Those green retreats where fair Vauxhall bedecks her sylvan seats.” That’s this concreted-over hell-hole. The Vauxhall Gardens were right here, all around us, until 1860. For around two hundred years the area was filled with birds and fragrant flowers, a public garden available to everyone. There were spectacular fountains and illuminations, ornate Italian colonnades, a Chinese pavilion, balloon ascents. In the middle of it all was a sumptuously tiered orchestra house, with groves of multicoloured lamps undulating in the trees.’ The sherbet lemon cracked between Bryant’s teeth like a pistol shot.

May watched the Nine Elms lorries spraying and shaking around the one-way system. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Hogarth drew “The Four Times of the Day” here. Walpole and Dickens, princes, ambassadors and cabinet ministers ate in elegant supper boxes over there. Two centuries of pleasure and happiness.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Eventually the popularity of the gardens created disruptive behaviour, and wardens were posted on the walkways. The admission fee fell as the grounds became run down, the punch was watered, the food dropped in quality. Fights broke out, thieves moved in. The orchestra house fell to bits. Soon it was gone for ever. Now look at it. Why does the blacker side of human nature eventually swamp the good? Why should beautiful things always have to die? Look at those pernicious monstrosities for the soulless rich, the dozens of riverside tower blocks crowding in along the Thames like futuristic slums.’

‘You can’t change any of it, Arthur. Wealth attracts wealth. You have to maintain a sense of humorous resignation about the things you can’t change.’

‘What a dreadfully woolly piece of advice.’ Bryant had always shown appreciation toward the joys of the past, just as May was attracted by the prospect of the future. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s up to. He’s following the path of the Effra.’

‘The Effra?’

‘Another of London’s so-called “lost” rivers. He’s just entered a building that was built over the top of it before the start of the twentieth century.’

‘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.

16

PHANTOMS

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.’