Death Watch

Monday, 6 September

The SDM crew had that Monday-morning feeling, so that when the foreman, Joe Beadle, lifted the manhole cover, the stench of the air they’d all soon be breathing made them choke. It was always bad like this in hot, dry weather. The storm-drain system, which took rainwater off the streets and out to sea, was almost empty, so anything down there that shouldn’t be down there had time to rot between the tides. And the rats moved in and out of the sewerage system, rivers of them, following some phantom piper.

The crew’s job was storm-drain maintenance – SDM. They swept out the channels, checked the brickwork vaulting for cracks and settling, then cleared the gratings which stopped anything too big being brought into the system from the sea. There were twenty miles of storm sewers under Lynn, a lot of it medieval. So they had jobs for life, the three of them, and they never complained to anyone but each other, because the money was good and they spent half their time drinking tea, or at the greasy spoon by the dock gates. And they set their own hours, because they had to work between the tides, which was why they were here now, at just after six.

Trance, the kid they’d taken on a year earlier from

But he was young – just seventeen – and they needed a gofer, and someone to send down the narrow vaults. Trance took one last look along the narrow street they were in, full of closed shops, and lowered himself athletically into the hole, searching with his boots for the metal rungs of the ladder. Then he jumped, and they heard a splash, but there was no bass note, nothing to indicate depth. Beadle clapped once. ‘Well done, kid.’ He turned to Freeman, who was black, but the life underground had robbed his skin of its sunny lustre so that he looked grey, like a dead fish. ‘You next.’

Beadle, last down, pulled the cover closed and they were in the dark until the torches came on – and then they were in their world, and despite the stink, they felt better. Trance whistled, picking up rubbish with a grip on a stick, popping it in a black bin liner. They walked at a steady pace, Freeman searching the curved brick arch of the tunnel for signs of cracking, ticking boxes on a clipboard that hung from a lanyard on his belt. Beadle checked a map in a cellophane wallet. The tunnel they were in was Victorian and ran for nearly 400 yards parallel with the quay. Overhead they could feel the early rush-hour traffic, a visceral rumble which made their guts vibrate. A thin trickle of water ran at the centre of the channel, but the rest was dry, the bricks stained and bleached by the daily inundation of salty seawater.

Beadle checked his watch: 6.04 a.m. They had two

Trance’s torch beam shone directly ahead, not strong enough to reach the distant sharp turn. The rats, uncannily, were always on the edge of the light, a faint shimmering movement, retreating as the men advanced. But the noise was there if you listened for it, a feral, high-pitched chorus, just on the borderline of the inaudible. Trance used the pick-up stick to bag a few dead rats, a supermarket bag, and the shreds of a shell-suit. They trudged on, all of them smoking now, the turning in the tunnel coming into view, a graceful 90-degree angle in arched brick. They regrouped and Beadle poured coffee – black – because the milk always went off in the summer and anyway the acrid, unadulterated caffeine helped take away the taste of salt on their lips.

Now they were at the elbow-turn they could see the tidal grid, a perfect half moon exactly the same shape as the tunnel, beyond it the pale glow of daylight in the channel of the Purfleet. But it wasn’t a perfect grid, it never was, because the tide brought flotsam in, which stuck in the metal grating, so that the little squares of light were often fogged. One day they’d found the rotting carcass of a dog on the grid, and there’d been mattresses, and fishing buoys, and the flesh of a basking shark. Jessop – the supervisor back at the depot – had worked on the SDM crew in the seventies, and he said once a coaster had gone down on the sands in the Wash and the

They trudged forward and the rats funnelled away into the channels which fed the main sewer, giving up the ground to the crabs which scuttled out of the mud of the Purfleet. For the crew this was the worst bit, and the main reason they wore the heavy boots, so that when the shells cracked with every step it didn’t feel so immediate, so like a killing. But even then they avoided the larger specimens: green-shelled shore crabs a foot across which made an odd hollow tumping sound when they scuttled, the carapace rocking on the brick floor. Trance began to sing, something tuneless and angry. Beadle smoked manically, chalking up a code on the wall to prove they’d been down.

Trance waded through the clicking, snapping crabs until they were twenty feet from the grid. But it was Freeman who made them look. ‘Well,’ he said, loosening the bandanna he always wore around his neck. ‘It was bound to happen one day.’

Almost exactly at the centre of the semi-circle of the grid was a human body, spread-eagled like a sky-jumper, left hanging by the tide.

‘Fuck,’ said Beadle, fumbling for his mobile. He looked round, then unfolded a map. They all shuffled forward to get a better look. It was a man, in jogging pants and a T-shirt that looked too big. The face had been pressed up to the grid and by chance the mouth filled one of the open squares so that they could see teeth, and a dark gullet, but the lips were colourless. He was hanging there

‘Weird,’ said Trance, a smile widening as he imagined himself telling his mates that night at the Globe.

But they couldn’t really see any detail because the body was up against the light, a silhouette, the light beyond blinding now that the sun had risen, and was bouncing off the water. Outside, on the distant quayside, they could hear the sounds of everyday life: a car alarm, seagulls, a buzz of muzak.

‘Why’s it moving?’ said Beadle, stepping back, catching his heel and falling. It was a nightmare, to be down there in the crabs, thrashing, feeling their shells and legs, unable to get a hand down to the brick floor. He felt a fool but he screamed, and went on screaming, until Freeman and Trance helped him up, hauling him by the arm, laughing.

Then they all looked again. And it was moving, because the crabs had latched onto the skin as the water level fell, and now they were stranded up there, although every second or two a few would fall. It was like when they’d been kids, and you dangled rotten bacon over the dockside and waited for the crabs to latch on, but when you pulled it clear of the water you always lost some, dropping off, plopping into the water.

So many crabs had clung on that the edges of the man were moving against the light, like he was an animated sketch, shivering in the light.

Freeman kicked one of the crabs up in the air so that it hit the wall with a crack. But Trance waded forward because he’d seen the wristband drop. He picked it up – and saw that it bore three stencilled letters…

MVR.