The Water Room (19 page)

‘Then let me at least give you some money.’ Heather was still peering through the streaked glass. Kallie had forgotten how much her old friend thrived on the misfortunes of others. It seemed an odd trait in someone who could be so generous. Everything about Heather was schizophrenic. Her unpredictable behaviour had probably helped frighten poor old George into a belated bachelorhood.

‘Could you get a decent French dry white? I think we’re going to need chasers. And plain Pringles.’

Some things never change,
thought Kallie as she grabbed her coat and headed out into the downpour.
She always manages to get away without lifting a finger, and does it so sweetly.

Heather returned to the window of her front room, and gazed through the rain to make sense of what was happening across the road.

The soil had an elastic quality that pulled it from his shovel, and now the rain was turning the ground to mud. Distant thunder sounded, an industrial cacophony that tumbled about the buildings, trapped in whorls of pneumonic cloud. So far, Elliot’s labours had turned up a cache of tough yellow Victorian housebricks, as good today as the moment they had cooled in the mould. They were highly prized by developers offering properties constructed from reclaimed materials, and would fetch a good price. There were old floorboards, too, leached of their oils and twisted with perpetual damp, but still ripe for resale. He was stacking them in the cabin of the truck when he felt the man’s eyes on him, a prickling of his back that told him someone was watching.

It was almost dark now, and the light on the corner had still not been replaced. Looking up, all he could see was the empty street, the figure of a young woman—Kallie, the pretty new neighbour who had purchased number 5—vanishing into the next road, and the tall rustling bushes that bordered the waste ground. He moved behind the truck to dig again, just for five more minutes. It was hard to stop, knowing that there might be some other treasure waiting to be unearthed. The pit left by the bricks had already filled with dense brown liquid, as if fed by some unseen river. He wanted to jump down and continue digging, but was worried about losing his work boots in the mire. The back wall of the hole was already collapsing as the water took it, undermined from below.

He stopped and glanced back at the bushes just in time to see the branches close. It wouldn’t be kids, they couldn’t be torn from their terminals on sunny days, let alone on wretched nights like this. Something in the water surfaced for a moment, just long enough to give him hope. There was no way of avoiding it; he had to lower himself into the cavity and use his hands to search. There was nothing harmful in London soil, just soot and stones kept long from the light.

He didn’t see it, but he would have heard, if only thunder hadn’t bellowed the air once more. The first stone fell into the churning water with a plop, not enough to draw him from the task of finding what he’d seen. He groped deeper, feeling some small metal item slip from his fingers. He bent and reached again, his fingers closing over something that pricked him. A child’s badge:
I Am 10.
He tossed it back into the water in disgust. Moments later, the thick dank earth cascaded about him in a quicksilver torrent, pouring from above as if the world had collapsed upon itself, the pickaxe-broken concrete slabs skimming on plumes of soil as they slid from the diagonal bed of the truck, gathering lethal speed in their fall. One sizeable piece fractured his neck from behind, sending him face-down into the shallow swamp. He gasped in shock, drawing only the slippery loam-clouds of the ditch into his throat as earth and stones surged down with a terrible stifling weight, pulling him over, choking out his life in a grotesquely mechanized premature burial.

In his final moments, the thought flew by that he might be preserved in the city’s compacted dust and clay, to lie for ever in the fields beneath, truly a man of the soil.

20

SEEING AND BELIEVING

Arthur Bryant stood at the edge of the waste ground in his sagging hat and baggy black mackintosh, looking like a cross between a collapsed umbrella and an extremely decrepit vampire. ‘Have you found anything?’ he called.

‘Insofar as I have no idea what I’m searching for,’ said Giles Kershaw, ‘not a dicky bird.’ The young forensic expert’s exquisitely enunciated English grated on Bryant, who was taking perverse pleasure in having him stand thigh-deep in a water-filled ditch in the pouring rain.

‘Why don’t we let him come back when things have dried out a little?’ John May suggested.

‘Because there’ll be nothing left by that time. Look around you.’

Bryant was right. A steady torrent of rainwater was passing over the waste ground, carrying detritus down the slope of the street toward a blocked-up drain, swirling it into scummy pools. The area in front of the builders’ merchant formed a rough triangle at the junction of the road. Elliot had succeeded in breaking up the surface concrete and tarmac, and had dug down below layers of compacted brick to rich fulvous earth, removing entire sections which he had loaded on to his truck. It must have taken him all day to do so; the truck had been half-f when it had shed its load.

‘Mind you, according to Blake, everything exists for ever,’ said Bryant. ‘Matter is like experience, it accumulates and remains, albeit in unrecognizable forms.’

‘That’s not much help right now, old chap,’ replied Kershaw, ladling another shovelful of muck on to the bank. ‘There’s been so much rebuilding around here that there’s only rubble near the surface. The actual topsoil doesn’t start until about three feet down.’

‘It’s good-quality stuff, though,’ said May. ‘My gardener says London soil is very rich.’

‘That’s because it’s full of shit,’ called Kershaw. ‘Manure from horses, pets, cows, chickens, sheep, and rotted vegetables that have passed through human digestive tracts. This whole city is built on shit.’ He dragged a brick out of the hole and threw it to the side. ‘And it’s coming in over the tops of my waders.’

‘There’s more rubble under Kentish Town than there is in places like Hampstead or Chelsea,’ Bryant told them. ‘Poor areas get knocked about, while wealthy boroughs are preserved. The amount of social upheaval around here ensures an almost continual disturbance of the ground. You can come out now, Kershaw. I don’t suppose you’ll find anything in there.’ They gave him a hand up.

Elliot’s body had been zipped and loaded, ready for a trip to the Camden morgue, but the instrument of his death remained at the site, its rear offside wheel wedged half over the inundated water pit in which the builder had been discovered. Bryant checked that his plastic overshoes were still in place, and approached the front of the vehicle. The driver’s door was wide open. The truck had tilted slightly, but surely not enough to disgorge its entire load. Housebricks lay all over the churned ground.

‘Pawprints,’ warned Kershaw. ‘Don’t touch the handle.’

‘I’m not an idiot.’ Bryant hooked it with the end of his walking stick and peered inside. ‘What a mess. There’s mud everywhere. Bricks on the floor.’

Kershaw joined them. ‘Looks like he got them from the site. They’re covered in the same earth.’

‘Worth something, decent bricks?’

‘I suppose so.’ Kershaw climbed carefully into the passenger seat. ‘There’s an awful lot of mud in here.’

‘How did this happen?’ asked May, examining the truck’s dirt-caked tyres. ‘He was working in the pit, the rear bank gave way behind his back, undermining the stability of the truck, it shifted to the left and shed half a ton of earth and bricks.’

Bryant’s derisive snort was enough to suggest that he did not agree.

‘What, then?’

‘Even if the very small shift in this vehicle’s stability had been enough to send earth cascading out of its back, it would surely have occurred at a slow enough speed for this fellow to get out of its way. And besides, look at this.’ He led the others to the rear of the small lorry and thumped his stick against the back flap. ‘Do you see that swinging back and forth? No, because it’s on a safety catch. It can’t swing open just because the vehicle’s at an angle, otherwise it would do so climbing every steep hill. The catch had to be taken off, and to do that you have to raise the flatbed.’

He returned to the cabin. ‘Look at that.’ He pointed to the fat red punch-button on the dashboard. ‘Even if he had left the lorry with its engine running, someone would have needed to push that in order to raise the bed and release the rear panel. You’ve seen how loads slip. The mound would have stuck for a while as the floor tipped, then it would have poured out in one grand slide. Imagine: Elliot is shin-deep in the hole, pulling out his precious bricks. He’s bending down or simply resting over his shovel. The rain and thunder are cacophonous, more than enough to drown out the noise of the rising flatbed. A more familiar rumble makes him look up. The mud is sucking at his boots, hindering his escape. The concrete and brick comes down in a deadly wall. Mudslides kill people all the time. Did you see the size of the wound on the back of his head? Let’s hope it was quick.’

‘You realize what you’re saying?’ May said. ‘That someone climbed into the cabin and punched the button.’

‘Yes,’ said Bryant.

‘It probably has to be held in while the flatbed ascends, as a safety measure. You take your hand off and the pistons go back down. I bet it makes a warning beep, too.’

‘Try it,’ Bryant suggested.

‘Let me do it, I won’t smear the prints.’ Kershaw reached in and gently twisted the truck’s ignition key. With the engine running, he tried raising the flatbed pistons. ‘No warning beep,’ he called back. ‘Might have been once. Don’t suppose this crate has passed a legal MOT in years.’ The empty scotch bottle on the floor of the cabin caught his attention.

‘What was so important that he had to work in the middle of a storm?’ asked May. But his partner was already stumping off into the rain, his coat flapping about him like a trapped bat.

Heather’s leather sofa was as cold and slippery as a frog-pond. The two women sat beside each other listening to Mr May’s questions. It was nearly midnight. Heather worried a nail and glanced out of the window, as if expecting to witness the whole thing again.

‘I’d like to get some accurate times on this,’ said May. ‘Miss Owen, you came over to visit Mrs Allen at what time this evening?’

‘It must have been around seven p.m. I don’t call on people between seven-thirty and eight because of
Coronation Street
.’

‘I watch the soaps too, I’m ashamed to say,’ Heather admitted.

‘We decided to have a drink, but there was nothing in the house, so I volunteered to go to the off-licence.’

‘You did this as soon as you arrived, or a little later?’

‘Later. I should think it was around seven-twenty.’ Kallie was intrigued. She’d seen detectives barking at witnesses on TV, and was almost disappointed to be treated with such casual civility.

‘You didn’t know that Mr Copeland was working over the road?’

‘I think he might have been working there yesterday,’ replied Heather. ‘I’m only vaguely aware of it because there’s always something going on over at the Bondinis.’

‘That’s right, I’d seen him too,’ agreed Kallie.

‘I’m sorry—the Bondinis?’

‘The brothers who own the builders’ merchants,’ Heather explained. ‘I looked out of the window and made some comment about him working in the rain.’

‘And there was someone with him,’ added Kallie.

‘Did you recognize them?’ asked May.

‘It was hard to see clearly,’ said Heather. ‘It was definitely a man, though. They sort of looked like they were arguing.’

‘How could you tell that?’

‘I don’t know—maybe they were just talking, but it was something to do with the way they were standing.’

‘Then what happened?’

‘I went out to the shop,’ said Kallie.

‘Did you pass Mr Copeland?’

‘No, I walked on the other side of the road. His side was partially flooded. The drains were blocked.’

‘And you didn’t look back at him?’

‘I don’t remember doing so. It took me another couple of minutes to reach the main road.’

‘Where did you have to go?’

‘Just to the supermarket on the corner. There was a bit of a queue, so I waited there, paid and came back.’

‘How much time would you say elapsed between when you set out and when you returned?’

Kallie thought about choosing the wine and the vodka. ‘Maybe ten minutes. But as soon as I came around the corner I knew something was different.’

‘How?’

‘Because where Elliot had been digging, there was now a mound of earth and rubble. I thought he must have quickly filled in the hole, but it seemed unlikely, because why would he have dug it out? I remember thinking it was more likely that he was removing the earth to ready for pouring concrete or something, so that the machine shop could extend their property. As I drew alongside, I went a bit nearer. There was mud everywhere and I didn’t want to ruin my shoes. That was when I saw the tip of his hand sticking up.’

‘I’m sorry, it must have been an awful experience for you.’

‘Not really,’ Kallie admitted. ‘In a funny sort of way it didn’t seem real.’

May found such honesty surprising. ‘Mrs Allen, you say you saw it happen.’

‘I looked back out of the window, but I wasn’t watching the whole time. It was raining very hard. There wasn’t much to see. Then I noticed that the bed of the truck was tipped up, and that the earth had slid out. I couldn’t tell what had happened to Elliot.’

‘But you didn’t go out there to check?’

‘I didn’t have any shoes on. Besides, why would I? I suppose I just assumed he had finished and was in the truck, or had gone home out of the rain. I don’t know, I didn’t think anything.’ She kept her face turned toward the window, hardly daring to move. If she caught their eye, they would know she was lying. She had seen it all—the slide of earth cascading down over him, the concrete blocks knocking him to his knees and then on to his face. She should have run but could make no move. The sight of the fast-filling hole was appalling, fascinating.