The Water Room (24 page)

‘OK, I see him.’ A figure could be discerned inside a large elder bush. Meera ascended three steps to the small sodden lawn. It was hard to see any detail through the gloom of the overhanging ceanothus. The garden was so enclosed and dense that she could have been stepping into the green underwater murk of a pond.

‘I need to talk to you, Mr Tate,’ she said briskly, raising her hands in a gesture of friendship. ‘Please, come on out.’

His movement was so sudden that she started. The bush shook violently, spraying rainwater as he twisted about and dropped low. The last thing Meera wanted was to plough through wet undergrowth in semi-darkness, but she instinctively shoved her way in between the leaves.

Suddenly he was pushing away fast, bending and cracking the branches. She heard the thud of his boots hitting the fence, saw him scrambling over with ease, even though it was clear that he only had the use of his left arm and leg. He’d either been born with the affliction or the injury was old: his movements were practised and agile. She remembered a young heroin addict on the Peckham North estate who had lost a leg after passing out in a crouching position down the side of a club toilet, cutting off his blood supply. Afterwards, he moved as if the limb was still in place: Phantom Limb Syndrome. The mind still worked when the body failed.

Her jacket was caught on rose thorns. She yanked her sleeve free and ran for the fence, taking it easily, keeping her eye on his retreating back as he leapt the next divider, turning the back gardens into a mud-spattered steeplechase.

This time he swerved and dropped over the low brick wall at the rear, into the narrow alley that separated Balaklava Street from the road behind. She was no more than a few feet behind him, vaulting in his wake, slipping and scrambling to her feet, but the dim brown corridor of the overgrown path was deserted. There was nowhere he could have gone. She fought her way to one end, then back to the other. Nothing in either direction, not even any footprints in the muddy track.

Meera returned to the bush where the tramp had been hiding. The centre of the elder had been hollowed out and shielded with branches to form a small hideaway. The earth inside was trampled flat, and several squashed cigarette ends lay in the mud at her feet. A familiar green and gold tin lay on its side. She picked it up, shining her pocket torch across the metal surface, and saw the macabre image of a dead lion with a swarm of bees feeding from its stomach. The label read ‘Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness.’ An emptied can of Tate & Lyle Golden Syrup. At least she now knew how the old man had got his nickname.

She looked back at Kallie shivering in the doorway.
Home is meant to be the one safe place,
she thought. Meera had grown up in the tower blocks behind Archway, and knew what it felt like to lie awake in bed, listening for every small sound.

‘I’m in no rush,’ she said, taking Kallie’s arm and leading her back into the house. ‘My colleague’s waiting outside. He wanted me to have dinner with him. Let’s send him off for a takeaway.’

25

UNDERCURRENTS

Raymond Land straightened his golf-club tie, checking his appearance in the steel plate bolted into the green tiled doorway, then swiped his security card through the slot. As he walked into the partially unveiled entrance of the PCU headquarters, he resolved to put a stop to the rumours circulating the force about his unit. It was said that Bryant and May were already up to their old tricks, that they were sending their staff off on wild-goose chases around the capital, that their bad habits were resurfacing to infect a new generation of staff. What he saw as he entered the unit gave him no cause for encouragement. Detective Sergeant Longbright was packing away an evening dress.

‘What the devil do you think you’re doing, Longbright?’ asked Land.

‘I’m still a woman, sir,’ Janice snapped. It was the first time she had taken a break since her arrival at eight that morning. She had just wanted to take one last look at the dress before it went back. Bryant had refused to cover the price, demanding that she return it. This attitude was to be expected from a man who had never paid more than ten pounds for a shirt. The black satin slipped beneath her fingers, a mockery of the wedding dress she would never wear. Her longtime partner owed more allegiance to the force than to any mere woman. Ian Hargreave thrived in the undertow of interdepartmental politics, preferring to catch up with her two evenings a week, after work, when they were both tired and irritable. Longbright would sit in his kitchen eating Chinese takeouts direct from the containers. She glared angrily at the acting head, daring him to complain.

Land hastily moved on down the corridor. Amidst the newly purchased equipment in the unit’s crime lab, he found Kershaw and Banbury tinkering with an oven tray full of wet sand and a toy truck. ‘What on earth are
you
two up to?’ he asked.

‘Giles is explaining the physical dynamics of accidental death,’ Banbury explained, not at all clearly. ‘My territory, really, but Giles got there first.’

‘So this is your doing.’

‘Mr Bryant gave me the idea. It’s all right, I’ve got a job number for it.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ Land asked the wall as he passed on. At least Bimsley seemed to be doing something useful, scanning reams of figures on his computer, but Meera Mangeshkar was lying on the floor. She scrambled to her feet as Land entered. ‘Sorry, sir, spot of yoga—put my back out last night.’

‘On your own time or in the course of duty?’

‘Duty, sir. Apprehending a suspicious character.’

‘You booked him?’

‘No, sir. Vanished into thin air. Literally. Quite impossible, I know, almost as if he flew away, but there you are.’

They’re all mad,
thought Land.
This is Bryant’s doing. He’s tainted them with his lunacy. John’s marginally more rational. I’ll appeal to his common sense.
He headed for the detectives’ room.

‘We’re running on the spot. Or in my case, walking very slowly.’ Bryant threw his files down on the desk. ‘Land wants me to fill in a unit activity report before lunchtime. If you have any bright ideas about how to take up so much blank space, I’d welcome them. God, it’s hard to work with that racket going on outside. What’s going on?’

May sauntered to the window and looked down into the street. ‘There are a pair of drink-addled skinheads throwing beer cans at each other outside the Tube station,’ he remarked off-handedly. ‘There’s a young woman with a baby, screaming at her boyfriend and slapping him around the head. A couple of men from the council are digging up the pavement with drills. The Water Board’s gouging a hole in the middle of the road. Oh, and two van-drivers are having a shouting match at the lights. To which racket were you referring?’

‘Why are the urban English so vocal nowadays?’ Bryant wondered. ‘Go to Paris, Madrid, Berlin, even Rome, you don’t get this kind of behaviour. It’s Hogarth’s picture of Gin Lane all over again.’

‘Arthur, you used to sound your age. Now you’re sounding several centuries old.’

‘What’s wrong with that? One of the great pleasures that used to come with senior citizenship was the right to be perfectly vile to everyone. You could say whatever you liked, and people excused you out of respect for your advanced years. But now that everyone is in touch with their emotions and says exactly what they feel, even that pleasure has been taken away. Is there nothing the young haven’t usurped?’

May had to listen to this sort of thing at least once a week. He still believed in the redemptive power of the nation’s youth, despite his partner’s diatribes against them. The contrary thing about Bryant was that, in his own way, he set great store by the capital’s younger population. Some of the unit’s most useful collaborators were under twenty.

The phone rang. Longbright was warning them of Land’s impending visit. ‘Raymond has heard that we’re still using unit resources to check out your academic adversary,’ cautioned Bryant. ‘He wants to close up all investigations in which we have a personal interest so he can stick us with the embassy thing.’

‘Is that the business I heard him mentioning to Janice?’ asked May. ‘Some fellow the new Dutch consul was seen chasing across Russell Square at two in the morning? It should be fairly obvious what that was about, even to the Home Office. Says he was after a thief. I suppose that’s a tad more believable than the Welsh secretary reckoning Jamaican boys on Clapham Common were asking him out to dinner at midnight. Janice, would you come in here?’

The detective sergeant stuck her head around the door. ‘I’m not dressing up again—the frock is going back and I’ve returned the jewellery. You can do your own undercover work from now on.’

‘Are you sure you’ve told me everything?’

‘Sorry, I forgot to mention that it was too tight under the arms.’

‘Your sarcasm is unappreciated. What did you say to Raymond?’

‘Nothing. He was asking about my time-sheets. I know he’s suspicious about our continued surveillance of Ubeda. What are you going to do?’

May had been able to keep the case on their official records because the protection of Greenwood, as a government-think-tank adviser, could conceivably come under the jurisdiction of the unit. However, as the academic didn’t appear to be in any danger, and wasn’t bringing his colleagues into disrepute by pursuing what appeared to be some kind of esoteric hobby in his spare time, May had no justification for continuing to maintain surveillance.

‘Look,’ said Bryant, ‘I’ve got Longbright’s notes from her conversation with Ubeda, so why don’t I follow it up in my spare time?’

May knew all about his partner’s offers of help; they came with riders, like insurance contracts. ‘What do you want in return?’ he asked.

‘Keep talking to the residents of Balaklava Street for me, would you? I don’t trust them.’

‘Which one in particular don’t you trust?’

‘Any of them. Somebody knows something they’re not telling. Ask yourself some questions. Tate, the tramp, why was he watching the girl? I must admit I always found the image on the side of that treacle tin damned odd. After all, the stuff’s made from sugar, not honey, so why are the bees there? No one’s managed to interview the couple who live right next door to her, Omar and Fatima—I don’t seem to have last names for them, and it’s not good enough. The medical students, what do they know? That rather smug family, the Wiltons, they must have seen something. And I want photographs of everybody, preferably caught off guard. Even murderers smile when they know they’re having their picture taken, and that’s no good.’

‘I’ll do what I can—’

‘Land’s creeping around the building checking on everyone; it’s not very conducive to crime detection. He can’t play golf because it’s raining, and the last thing he wants to do is go home to a houseful of moaning women, three ghastly daughters and his dreadful wife, so he mooches about making life miserable for everyone else. He’s got the charm of a rectal probe, and no social skills to speak of, so nobody wants to go for a drink with him. Let’s face it, dogs have more to look forward to in later life—at least they can go to the park and roll in shit.’

‘Ah, Raymond, we were just talking about you,’ said May hastily.

Land stood in the doorway, fuming. Bryant had decorated the area around his desk exactly as it had been before the fire. Statuettes of Gog and Magog, voodoo dolls, his beloved Tibetan skull, books with reeking singed covers rescued from the conflagration, some odoriferous plants that lay tangled in an earthenware pot—tannis root, probably, marijuana, certainly—an ancient Dansette record player scratching and popping its way through Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’, papers and newspaper clippings everywhere, a half-eaten egg-and-beetroot sandwich dripping on to a stack of uncased computer disks.

‘I thought we’d agreed to keep the new offices clean and spartan, moving toward a paper-free environment,’ said Land weakly. There the senior detectives stood, side by side, working as a team against him, undermining his confidence with knowing looks. ‘I thought that having been given all this nearly-new equipment, you’d give a thought to changing your methodology. Instead I find the place more like the set of
Blue Peter
than the offices of a specialist crime unit. Well, it’s got to stop. HO is sending us a number of inactive cases it would like cleared up as soon as possible, so I want the decks completely clear by the end of the week.’

‘Oh, come on, Raymondo,’ smiled Bryant, knocking out his pipe on the side of the waste bin and blowing noisily through it. ‘You know we’ll sort the outstanding workload in our own time.’

Land’s face reddened. ‘I think your time’s run out. I want you to pack up this business in Kentish Town, for a start. You’re probably going to get a verdict of accidental death, you know. You’ve come up with no useful evidence whatsoever. The case wasn’t even assigned to you.’

‘Look here, Raymond, if there’s going to be a fundamental sea-change in the way we work—the way we’ve always worked, I might add—’ here he nodded conspiratorially at May—‘I think you should give us some official guidelines and a bit more warning.’

‘You’ve had about thirty years’ warning, Arthur, don’t come the old acid. I mean it—closed files and clean desks. Your new regime starts first thing on Monday.’ He slammed the door hard as he exited, hoping to leave behind a positive impression.

‘We finally get an office door and he tries to knock it off its hinges,’ sighed Bryant, packing his pipe with a handful of dried leaves. ‘From now on, we’re going to have to hide our tracks more carefully.’

‘Arthur, you have to explain why you’re so convinced there’s something going on in Balaklava Street.’

‘That’s not so easy.’ Bryant dropped into his chair and recklessly lit the pipe. ‘It’s the kind of neighbourhood that looks utterly mundane, but there are undercurrents and subcultures in London that hardly anyone is aware of—people who live entirely outside the law. Who knows who you might meet? Mental patients from St Luke’s walk the streets with demons dwelling behind their eyes. I suppose the whole thing interferes with my notions of home. Threaten that and you damage something very fundamental to your well-being. Kallie Owen had no real personal difficulties before she moved in, it’s not in her character to attract trouble. She’s inherited someone else’s bad karma, buying a house from a murdered woman. We’re seeing reactions to some buried situation known only to one or two people. This runs much deeper than we can imagine.’

‘I hate it when you talk in riddles,’ May complained.

‘I only do it because I don’t fully understand the meanings myself, but it’s there in front of me, I know that. Just as I know there will be another attempt on a life. Whoever committed these crimes is more confident now, because we’ve failed to get close enough to be a threat. You’ve seen this kind of behaviour before, John, don’t pretend you haven’t.’

‘Like it or not,’ May warned, ‘we need to repay Raymond’s faith in us. We have to start afresh, Arthur, and if we can’t do it, then it’s time to go. I don’t need to spell out what will happen if either of us are forced into retirement.’

Bryant wasn’t used to being lectured. He regarded May sceptically through the cloud of illicit smoke that had transformed the office into a Limehouse opium den. ‘I suppose you’re right. Raymond has been a thorn in my side longer than I can remember, but he’s always fought for us. Perhaps we do need to change our approach. If we’d had more staff, I’d have searched the entire area door to door. As for your pal Greenwood, we should have pulled him in and put the fear of God up him, and that would have been the end of that.’

‘Then let’s have one last try. You find out what Greenwood’s up to. I’ll talk to the residents of Balaklava Street. And we must keep looking for Tate. Somebody has to know something.’ He caught a look of pain crossing Bryant’s face. ‘What is it?’

‘My greatest fear is that we’ve found something rare—a killer hidden in plain sight.’

‘It’s the kind of case you would once have dreamed of, Arthur.’

‘Not any more,’ he told May. ‘Death stands too close to me.’ Bryant felt a chill in his bones that no amount of warmth could dispel. The time was coming when he would no longer understand the way of the world, and then he would cease to have a purpose. Murders were tests, and solving them was the only way of staying alive. Explaining the murders in Balaklava Street would provide more than a stay of execution; it would extend their life spans, and give them a reason to continue. Although he was tired, Bryant set to work once more.

26

NAVIGATION

There was no other library like it in London.

In place of the usual plaques reading ‘Romantic Fiction’, ‘Self-Help’ and ‘DIY’ were signs for Eleusinian and Orphic Studies, Rosicrucianism and Egyptian Morphology. While the books gathered under its roof were far too esoteric for general public consumption, the collection was too incomplete for scholastic study.

Most of its contents were a bequest from Jebediah Huxley, the great-grandfather of Dorothy Huxley, the library’s present and doubtless final custodian. Under the conditions of the bequest, the collection could only be dispersed and the building sold with the approval of the last surviving family member. Dorothy had no living dependants, and was in her eighties. Greenwich Council was itching to get its hands on the small redbrick Edwardian block, tucked in permanent dank shadow beneath the concrete corner of a flyover in the south-eastern corner of the borough. Here, swirling litter and glaring skateboarders warded off all but the hardiest visitors. Rainwater sluiced from the flyover on to the roof of the building, dripping through brickwork, rotting floorboards and spreading mildew into the damp-fattened books with wet fingers of decay.