The Water Room (22 page)

She stood at the counter vacantly waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the drizzle through the rear window, and turned away to find some biscuits. When she turned back, the face jumped from the glass and made her scream.

How long had he been standing in the garden, watching her? She ran to the back door and searched for the key, fumbling it into the lock, running out and almost sliding over on wet ceanothus leaves. He was pushing his way up the garden, into the big bushes at the end, a figure with a hobbling gait that dropped him from side to side like a sailor crossing a deck. Moments later the bushes stilled, the branches falling back in place. But she had recognized him.

She headed back into the house and began searching for the number John May had given her.

23

A NIGHT OUT FOR SERGEANT LONGBRIGHT

‘I recognized his face,’ Kallie explained. ‘His eyes were so sunken, and yet you could see such pain in them. I felt sorry for him.’ She showed Longbright how the man had climbed out of her garden. ‘He’s the local tramp. He used to sleep over on the waste ground, but I guess when the land was dug up he was forced to move. I don’t know where he is now.’

Longbright’s shopping trip had been cut short by Kallie’s phone call to the unit. As she sounded upset, the sergeant had agreed to cover for May and stop by Balaklava Street. ‘There are a couple of hostels in the neighbourhood. I can check those. You don’t have a name, or even a nickname?’

‘No, but Tamsin Wilton at number 43 would know. She told me to watch out for him. She says he’s harmless, and he was only staring at me through the window, but it made me jump.’

‘Well, he was on your private property, where he had no right to be, so I’ll look into it. The problem with most of the hostels is that they only allow users to stay overnight. It pushes homeless people back on to the streets, and puts them in the way of trouble.’

‘I certainly don’t want to get anyone into trouble,’ said Kallie quickly. ‘He’s been living rough for a long time. I guess now the workshop is expanding its premises, he’s been displaced. He wasn’t doing any harm.’

‘That won’t be how everyone sees it. The average life expectancy of a homeless person is forty-two. Someone dies on the streets of London every five days.’

‘Doesn’t anyone treat them?’

‘The homeless can’t be registered by GPs. Most people can stand about a month of sleeping rough before long-term problems set in. They often start as sofa surfers, sleeping on friends’ floors prior to becoming homeless.’

‘God, I did that just before getting this place,’ said Kallie.

‘Then you know how easily it can happen. The statistics are depressing. Forty per cent of all homeless women are victims of sexual or physical abuse. Something as simple as a divorce can be enough to force someone into the open air. So let me see what I can turn up on this bloke. He must be pretty nimble if he could scale that wall.’

‘He was crippled in some way—his right side, I think, both the arm and the leg. So I don’t know how he managed to do it.’

Longbright saw her point; the wall was almost five feet high and covered in dense black bracken. The back gardens fitted together to form an oasis of ponds and bushes, partitioned by brick walls and wavering grey wooden fences. Entrance to one garden could only be gained by crossing several others. The school playground at the end of the street was bordered by a high wall, and there were no rear gates to the overgrown alley behind.

Longbright replaced her notebook in her jacket. She just had time to catch the Oxford Street stores. She was determined to make Bryant pay for sending her to a lap-dancing club.

‘There was one other thing,’ said Kallie. ‘There was talk of Mrs Singh being sent threats, racist stuff. I was clearing out the cupboard under the stairs, and found this.’ She dug in her pocket and produced an old audio cassette. ‘It’s from her answering machine. I played it back. There’s only one message, but it’s pretty nasty. I thought it might be helpful.’

Tonight,
thought Janice Longbright,
you will be Grace Kelly.
She turned to the side and pulled in her stomach, checking the mirror.
OK, Grace Kelly’s heavier sister.
Longbright was in her early fifties, and had inherited her mother’s love of old movie stars. Off duty she dressed the part, coming out somewhere between Ava Gardner and Jane Russell, and still looked damned good. She had left it too late to train for the stage, and had found herself joining the police instead, just as Gladys had before her. Inside her was the actress who might have made the big time, if only times had been easier.

Janice stared at her stomach and sighed.

She resented being used as some kind of fishing lure on an investigation that was clearly in breach of the unit’s case remit, but was perversely starting to enjoy herself. She had purchased a black dress, a distant carbon of the original design—the unit was paying, after all. The high heels made her too tall and prevented her from walking with anything resembling a normal gait, so she abandoned them for something plainer. May had provided her with a photograph of Jackson Ubeda. There was an undeniable urban elegance; darkly complexioned, his shaven head hid the effects of male pattern baldness. He looked as though he would wear cufflinks.

She felt uncomfortable entering the club premises alone, because men were here with one purpose: to behave badly around women. In her mother’s day, it had been considered a good thing for a man to place a woman on a pedestal; but this was not what had been intended. The foyer was as garish as a child’s drawing, black-light, zebra-skin and pink neon, exuding ersatz sophistication to men who were unfamiliar with the notion of restraint.
I bet the blokes who come here would love to work in tall buildings and drive overpowered cars in town,
she thought, smiling to herself.

Along the industrial-steel runway that protruded into the main room like a late-eighties video set, a pair of unnervingly upbeat latex-thonged girls dropped and flexed before the drinkers. The preference here was for female extremes: big hair, long legs, hard breasts, fat attitude. She had imagined that the audience would be raucous and dangerously playful, overweight schoolboys hiding their sexual discomfort with jibes and dares, but was surprised to find many groups almost ignoring the dancers. Workers huddled in urgent clusters, jacketless, arguing office politics, holding the kind of intense discussions that had been pumped up to nonsense level by chemical stimuli. Private rooms hosted the stag nights, keeping aggressive behaviour out of the main room. She couldn’t entirely blame the clientele; the work-hard, play-hard ethic had invaded everywhere.

Longbright knew at once that Ubeda would not be found near the stage. She asked a hostess to check the booking, and was sent to a private bar on the first floor. He was seated alone, drinking something with a lot of leaves sticking out of it. She required a pretext for approaching him without drawing suspicion, but after wracking her brain and failing to come up with anything original, settled on a direct approach.

‘Do you have a light?’

He withdrew a slim silver Cartier and flicked it, then looked at her in puzzlement. ‘Do you have a cigarette?’

‘No, I don’t smoke.’

Ubeda did not look happy about having his reverie interrupted. ‘Then what do you want?’

‘I’ve seen you before.’

‘That’s because I’m usually here.’ Now he appraised her. Longbright hoped that the softer lighting was working in her favour. ‘I’ve never seen you before.’

‘Well, I’ve definitely noticed you. We share something special in common. Let me buy you a drink.’ She summoned the bargirl, pointing to Ubeda’s glass. ‘Two of whatever he’s having. It looks like it has a hedge in it.’

‘Two Gold Mojitos.’
All the staff in here are women,
Longbright noted.
There was probably something like this on the same site three hundred years ago.

‘What’s in it?’ she asked.

‘Rum, mint, molasses, but you switch the soda water for champagne.’
Interesting accent,
she thought.
Possibly Alexandria. Dead eyes. They’d watch someone being hurt without flinching.

‘I do know you,’ she persisted. ‘You were at the British Museum the other day, in the Egyptian gallery.’ Another tip from Greenwood’s wife. She hoped it would work.

‘I wonder what made you single me out from so many visitors.’ His smile revealed matching gold eye teeth, like some Monte Carlo version of a pirate.

‘You stand out. Besides, it’s mostly grazing tourists. I can spot someone with a real interest in artefacts a mile off.’

‘I’ve been known to look in from time to time,’ he conceded. ‘What were you doing there?’

The drinks arrived. Longbright took a sip, then another. She was a large woman, and could drink most men under the table, but reminded herself to be careful; she was dealing with a man who carried a firearm. ‘I’ve a friend who works at the museum—Gareth Greenwood,’ she said casually. ‘I was meeting him for lunch at the Court Restaurant and saw you.’

He was watching her carefully now, choosing his words with deliberation. ‘Then it seems we do have someone in common. He is an acquaintance of mine. But I presume you already know that.’

‘Actually, no, I didn’t.’

He leaned closer, then a little too close for comfort. ‘What exactly is your interest in my affairs? I wonder if—oh, I
wonder
. . .’

She saw the unveiled accusation in his eyes. He knew that someone had been to his offices, and had connected her with the act of trespass.

‘Mr Ubeda, I’ll level with you. I know who you are because you’re a familiar face to sellers of antiquities. Your interest in Anubian statuary is common knowledge to us all.’

He sipped his drink and smiled. ‘I know all the dealers in London, Paris, New York and Cairo. I don’t know you.’

‘There’s no reason why you would. It’s my job to find potential clients before they can find me.’

His impatience with her was burning through to anger. ‘You’re saying you have something to sell. I’m not some easy mark waiting to be sold a crappy chunk of hieroglyph smuggled from the Valley of the Kings. There’s more necrobilia circulating on the black market these days than there is left in those limestone hills. I have friends working on every excavation gang, and you’re going to tell me you have something no one’s seen.’ He stopped to light a cigarette. She remained silently watchful, knowing that he would continue because he was a collector, and collectors needed to transmit their zeal to others.

‘The necropolis of the New Kingdom has been steadily robbed for the last three and a half thousand years,’ he told her, ‘from the interment of Tuthmosis I to the arrival of Howard Carter—sixty-two tombs and there’s nothing left. Carter was as big a liar and cheat as the rest of them. Take a look at what remains. Merneptah, Amenhotep, Siptah, Sethnakht, a few chambers filled with pretty little bas-reliefs to amuse the waddling tourists. Relics sell because everyone wants to touch the past, but the past makes no sense if you smash it up to make a quick sale. It’s robbed of all purpose and life. It will only mean something if its mythical power remains intact. There’s nothing of interest left in Thebes.’

‘What about KV5?’ she asked quietly. Bryant had briefed her on the most recent developments in Egyptology. In 1994, an American archaeologist named Kent Weeks had discovered the valley’s biggest tomb to date, the burial site of the fifty-two sons of Rameses II. Excavation was still continuing.

‘It’s been over ten years. No treasures have been discovered there.’

‘But thousands of artefacts have been recovered from the debris, pieces of great importance.’

The jet eyes remained too still. ‘Now. . . I think you’re trying a little too hard.’

She was about to shift her stool back a little, but he was too fast for her. His hand had slipped around her neck, his index finger looping beneath her gold chain. As he twisted, the chain tightened. Anyone glancing at them would think he had embraced her.

‘Forget Thebes, tell me about this.’

It had been Arthur’s idea to thread the central panel of the sandalwood bracelet on to a neck-chain, in the hope that Ubeda would notice it. ‘It has a special meaning for those of us who are prepared to keep searching,’ she said, thinking
I deserve an Academy Award for this
.

He let the bracelet panel fall from his fingers. ‘The seeds of regeneration springing from ancient waters. How quickly we forget our own creation myths. Look down there.’ He nodded to the gyrating dominatrices of the blue-lit stage. ‘The artificial pleasures of a civilization in decline.’

‘Then why do you come here?’

‘I own the place.’

I should have been told that,
she thought, wincing inwardly. No wonder he was so deeply in debt. How many thousand square feet did he have to maintain here?

‘And you want to sell me an Anubis. Do you have a genuine interest, or are you merely a vendor?’

‘I find the myth fascinating.’

‘In what way, I wonder.’

‘The rituals, mostly—the Opening of the Mouth, the Lake of Offerings, the Weighing of the Heart.’ She congratulated herself on remembering that protective ceremonies guided the dead to their afterlives. The Opening of the Mouth allowed for the reawakening of the senses. Anubis weighed the heart against the Feather of Truth. If it was found to be heavier, it was fed to the monster Ammut.

‘Well, those rituals have always been popular with a certain kind of buyer,’ he said disdainfully. ‘There are countless other rituals, less spoken of.’

‘Of course. I imagine many still continue, and they all require ceremonial artefacts.’ It was like prospecting for oil, testing each area and hoping for a strike, but she saw his eyes betray a faint interest. ‘People look in the wrong places. As you say, the key treasures of Thebes have all been disseminated. They could be anywhere, even here.’

He was watching her intently now. That was the wonderful thing about collectors; there was always a way to their hearts.

‘Of course, they would have been carefully hidden. Beneath the city, perhaps. In the water.’ She had played her last card, and could only wait in silence while he considered her.