The Water Room

39. GOING UNDER

Kallie reread what she had written, then highlighted a sentence and deleted it. After three further deletions, there was virtually nothing left of the email, at which point she knew it would not be sent.

She had no way of knowing whether Paul was still checking his hotmail account. Perhaps he had moved on, heading further south to the sun, only to become lost among the travellers who passed lifetimes searching for themselves in shadowless landscapes. She was already starting to forget certain things about him. If he decided to return, she would consider her plan of action, but nothing would ever be the same between them.

At least the house was becoming more presentable. Fresh paint and paper had brightened the rooms, and with the fee from a new modelling contract she would be able to afford a new kitchen in the basement. An electrician had provided plans for a runway of halogen bulbs that would bring much-needed light into the lower-ground floor.

The basement bathroom still needed work, but something stopped her from tackling the job. Dampness lived on in its corners like the shadows of a persistent illness. On some mornings, she could see her breath in the room’s cold spots. The spiders had returned, despite all her efforts to dislodge them, and a patch of parquet remained permanently slick with icy sweat. Until she could bring herself to tackle the problems, she would continue to stay out of the room as much as possible.

The doorbell made her jump. As Kallie opened the front door, Heather pushed past her excitedly. ‘He’s back!’ she called. ‘Look in your garden, I saw him a moment ago.’

‘Who? The old man?’ For once, Kallie was almost glad to see her neighbour. At least she provided a distraction from her own problems.

‘Can you believe it? He’s right where he always stands, inside that bush-you should really cut it down.’ She peered from the back landing window, wiping the glass. ‘Damn, I can’t see him, but he was there. I was trimming shallots over the sink and looked up. Goes to show the police are telling us lies.’

‘What do you mean?’ Kallie asked, searching for signs that Tate had returned to the garden.

‘I immediately rang the Peculiar Crimes Unit and spoke to Sergeant Longbright. She told me the old tramp had died in a fire at his hostel. But if he’s dead he must have a twin-although I do think he’s wearing different clothes now. What could have happened?’

Kallie was taken aback, less by the news than by Heather’s attitude. With little else to focus her energies on, she had lately become the eyes and ears of the street, watching and listening with a hysterical intensity that disturbed Kallie.

‘Either the police know and are lying to us for some reason, or he got out of the building somehow,’ said Heather. ‘This means we can’t rely on them for help, don’t you see? I’m sure that disgusting, sinister old man is behind it all. You could be in danger, and the police aren’t willing to do anything about it. They’ll see you murdered in your bed first, like poor Jake.’

‘We could all be in danger, Heather.’

‘He’s in your garden, don’t you understand? It’s you he wants. Why don’t they do something more to protect us?’

‘How can they unless they know what they’re dealing with?’ asked Kallie. ‘They haven’t a clue. It’s like when you report a burglary; you never expect to get your stuff back. I was just about to make some tea. Stay and have one.’

‘I can’t stop long.’ Heather reluctantly left the window.

‘Does he never come into your garden?’

‘Oh, I’ve seen him there once or twice, but he seems far more interested in you.’

‘That’s comforting.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t mean to frighten you. I mean, this is having an effect on all of us. Randall Ayson’s wife is threatening to leave him, did you hear? Everyone says he’s been having an affair, and he’s supposed to be a born-again Christian. Which means that the only people down this street who are still in stable relationships are Omar and Fatima, despite the fact that she can’t have kids and he’s desperate to be a father, and that horrible property developer, Mark Garrett, and his girlfriend, who of course will never get a wedding ring out of him, and the Wiltons, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Oliver wasn’t playing away. Brewer’s been telling his father he wants to be a policeman, but Oliver wants him to become a lawyer.’ She paused for a breath. ‘Have you heard anything more from Paul?’

‘Nothing. He seems to have vanished off the face of the earth.’

‘Men! What is it that requires them to turn into teenagers for the whole of their thirties? Nobody ages gracefully any more. Whatever happened to pipes?’

‘Mr Bryant smokes one.’

‘Well, there’s a limit. He’s short enough to be my grandfather. I honestly believe that if women could learn to read an A-Z in a moving vehicle we’d have no need of men at all. Have you thought of moving out?’

The question, tacked into part of Heather’s random thought process, caught Kallie by surprise.

‘No, of course not. What do you mean?’

‘Only that with all the trouble in the street, and Paul taking off, you might prefer something in a smarter, safer area. I mean, the attacker is clearly someone who lives in the neighbourhood, and he’s still at large, isn’t he? So there’s no telling who might be at risk.’

‘You’re the one who thought this would be a good idea in the first place.’

‘Yes, but that was before everything started to go wrong.’

‘And before George left you,’ Kallie prompted. ‘Why haven’t you considered moving?’

‘Oh, I probably will once the divorce is finalized. I have a wonderful lawyer-very cute, Jewish, married at the moment but I’m working on it.’

‘Heather, you are terrible.’

‘Which reminds me, George is coming round this afternoon.’ Heather glanced at her watch. ‘I need to get back home to practise my living-in-poverty routine.’

Although Kallie had never met George, she had formed a mental image of him, so she was surprised to discover how much older than Heather he was when his black Mercedes drew up in front of their house a couple of hours later. An elegant suit could not disguise the fact that he was out of condition, sporting the kind of sclerotic complexion she associated with hill-walkers and coronary thrombosis. She tried to dismiss the image of him creeping around a Paris apartment in his dressing-gown, and concentrated on clearing the last of the paint tins from her cupboards instead.

As she worked, she thought of Heather’s parting remark-‘still at large’-and tried to avoid looking toward the basement bathroom.

The Sunday-morning downpour did little to dissuade the tourists from packing out the markets in Camden Town, but the area around Mornington Crescent Tube station remained becalmed. Rain pattered on to the hornbeams and hawthorns in Oakley Square, and the rose bushes were bowing their heads in contemplation of finer weather. With just twenty-four hours to go before Raymond Land’s deadline, the staff at the PCU were to be found at their desks, despondently clearing paperwork.

‘I don’t think Mr Bryant likes me,’ said Giles Kershaw. ‘I’ve tried to be as helpful as possible.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry about it,’ May consoled the young forensic officer. ‘He’s like that with everyone: hateful until you get to know him, then merely difficult. He’ll get used to you. We never had an independent forensic expert before. Oswald Finch always handled everything, animate and inanimate. Arthur used to say he was in charge of General Debris and Criminal Fallout. He didn’t mean to bypass you. What have you got there?’

Kershaw carefully unzipped the clear plastic bag on his bench. ‘Dan Banbury’s sorting out some anomalies in the crime-scene log, so he passed me Tate’s belongings. Nothing in the room survived, but from the look of it there wasn’t much beyond a few syrup tins. I nipped over to the hostel for a quick rummage, and found the lockers on the ground floor intact. I called to get permission to open them, but some health-and-safety jobsworth refused to give me the go-ahead without Dan present, so I got one of the firemen to accidentally drop his crowbar on it.’

‘Oh, I think Arthur is soon going to like you,’ smiled May. ‘His sense of civic responsibility is tempered with a similar impatience.’

‘Then I think he might be pleased with this.’ Kershaw pulled out a set of small cloth-bound books. ‘Tate’s sole possessions, according to the clerk. Very particular about them, his “special” books, he had an arrangement to leave them permanently in his locker-said he was worried that the water would get at them. He liked to check that they were safe every time he stayed over.’

‘Have you looked at them yet?’

‘I’ve only done an external examination. I should tell Dan-after all, he’s the crime-scene manager.’

‘Don’t worry, we don’t stand on formalities around here. May I?’

The first three blue cloth-bound volumes matched, and made up a somewhat random history of English painting. The edition had been published in 1978. ‘The printing is cheap,’ May told Kershaw. ‘Poor-quality paper, and half of the colour plates are out of register.’

At the back of each volume he found a photograph of the author, presumably in his late thirties, prematurely haggard in the way of so many young men who were children during wartime. The fourth book was a volume on the life and works of Stanley Spencer, published in 1987. ‘I need to show these to Arthur,’ he explained. ‘One of his regular contacts is an art teacher. I’ll bring them back.’

‘Think this stuff might be useful?’

‘It just makes me wonder; we assumed Tate got his nickname from the syrup tins. What if he didn’t? What if it was something to do with the Tate Gallery?’

‘So what?’ Kershaw packed away the rest of the material. ‘Forgive me, I’m still getting to grips with how you chaps work. You all seem to avoid the obvious routes. I mean, most killers are known to their victims. Shouldn’t you be out there interviewing friends and relatives, asking for witnesses?’

‘The interviews and witness appeals have been covered by Mangeshkar and Bimsley,’ May explained. ‘I think we’re far beyond pedestrian procedures now. You and Banbury have turned up nothing useful at any of the sites.’

‘Yes, sorry about that. I was sure we’d get something from Jake Avery. I mean, a man murdered in his own bedroom. According to Dan, it’s the room that generates more static than any other in a house because it’s occupied for half of every twenty-four-hour period, lots of different fibre-attracting surfaces and fabrics. But that’s part of the problem: there’s a surfeit of material from different sources. The wardrobe’s in the bedroom, so every item of clothing in the building has passed through it. I’m not saying that somewhere in amongst all that fibre residue there isn’t an alien skin flake, but we haven’t found it yet. Edmund Locard, the French forensic scientist, said that every contact leaves a trace. That may be, but reading them is the problem. We’ve got partial bootprints on the downstairs floor that don’t match any footwear found in the house, and that’s about it. We did a vacuum sweep from the carpet at the edge of the bed, but there was nothing of any size there. I’m trying to get a fibre selection from the bedroom on to a light microscope-no chance of getting body particles from Avery’s face near an SEM, as the only one in the area is in for repairs and there’s a horrendous waiting list. I’ve done the doors and window-ledges, and drawn a blank. What bothers me most, I think, is that Balaklava Street has become a blighted spot, what with murders, fires, missing bodies and drownings all within the space of a month, while you and Mr Bryant drift off down the investigation’s most obscure side-alleys at the slightest provocation.’

‘Is that how it looks to you?’ May asked.

‘It’s just that-well, people outside the unit keep asking me questions. They make fun of me. They don’t see what we’re hoping to achieve.’

‘You’ll get used to that,’ May promised. ‘Outsiders never understand how we work. They’re too busy following guidelines and checking results tables. Balaklava Street is far from being an especially blighted spot. There are now over a dozen Murder Miles in London.’

‘How does one qualify for status as a Murder Mile?’

‘You need six murders in the same road over a six-month period. Hackney, Kentish Town, Peckham and Brixton have qualified many times over. Arthur remembers Hackney as a town of wide empty streets and neat family houses bordered by marshlands. Now people throw rubbish from the balconies of tower blocks into crack alleys, and overdosed corpses lie in their apartments undiscovered until the council comes to redecorate. But. .’ May tapped his pen on the streetmap before him. ‘The events in Balaklava Street have a rarer quality: they’re premeditated. We think that whatever happened there began as an accident, then became a plan, and is now in a state of improvisation. When plans become extemporized, people make mistakes. But we can’t afford to wait for an error when lives are at risk.’

‘So what are you going to do?’

‘Arthur and I have been investigating this from separate angles. I think the only way we’ll find the answer now is to combine our strengths.’

‘You’ll have to be quick. Land’s bringing in something new tomorrow, and reckons he’s taking every other file out of the building. That means he’ll turn your findings over to the Met, and you’ll never get the case back.’

‘Believe me, I’m aware of that.’ May threw the last of the witness statements into a box and sealed it. ‘It’s not all that’s at stake. Arthur’s going through one of his periodic lapses of self-confidence. He says if he can’t sort this out in time, he doesn’t deserve to remain at the unit. This will be his final case.’