There were odd noises outside: a ceanothus rattling with fresh rain in the garden, dead laburnum leaves dropping on to the yellowed roof of the leaking lean-to conservatory. Inside, too, the pilot light of the central-heating system flared up with a pop that made her jump, pipes ticked as steadily as grandfather clocks, floorboards creaked like the decks of a galleon. The basement light switches didn’t work, and it wasn’t worth trying to clean by torchlight.
A dead woman’s house—worn cups and saucers, a drawer full of odd items of cutlery, another filled with string, bags, three-pin plugs and out-of-date discount vouchers, perished rubber teatowel holders from the seventies. Alien smells in the cupboards—packets of cardamom, juniper, custard powder, spills that were bitter and blackly sticky. Brown L-shaped marks on old linoleum where something heavy and ferrous had once stood and overflowed.
At ten-thirty she sat down in the ground-floor lounge to unpack linen and the handful of chipped china ornaments that had belonged to her grandmother. The street was preternaturally quiet, but now she could hear something. Setting down an armful of sheets, she rose and listened.
The sound of running water.
A steady susurration of rain, cataracts rushing through gutters, swirling into zinc funnels, precipitating through plastic pipes, racing across the bars of a drain. The crepitation was steadily rising to a crescendo.
She climbed the stairs to the floor above and walked into the second bedroom: no light bulb in here. The damp wood of the window frame had swollen so much that she couldn’t budge it. The sound was softer beneath the roof, so it couldn’t be loose guttering. Collecting her torch from the hall, she clicked it on and ventured into the basement. They would take out the non-supporting walls, she decided, repair the conservatory and bring more light in from the raised garden. The bathroom was absurdly large for the house. She supposed a parlour had been converted, yet it seemed odd to have had a parlour with only a single tiny window, high and crossed with bars, little more than a skylight looking out at street level.
Now she heard the sound quite clearly, running—no, rushing water. It seemed to be coming from the right-hand adjoining wall. She hadn’t met the people on that side. Heather had told her that their names were Omar and Fatima. What could they be doing that would make such a noise? It wasn’t a tap, more like a set of them, all turned on at once. The sound had volume and depth. Coupled with the noise of the heavily falling rain, the sense of precipitation seemed to enclose the house entirely.
She shone the torch around the bathroom, and wished she hadn’t. The fittings were cheap, a bilious shade of avocado that had been popular in the seventies. Only the bath was white enamel, and there was a good chance that it had feet, those French ball-and-claws that could look nice if they were cleaned up. Unfortunately, the whole thing had been boxed in with corrugated hardboard. She thought of her parents’ house and remembered the craze for boarding over bannisters, sinks, door panels, any decoration that smacked of Victoriana. The house had probably had a dozen makeovers, each according to the prevailing taste of the times, each leaving a residue of personality in a crust of paint.
The Swiss army knife she had used on the packing cases was still in her back pocket. Cross-legged on the cold parquet floor, she unscrewed the six chrome-topped pins holding the bath’s front hardboard panel, then dug the tip of the blade under its base. The board groaned as she flexed it, then split and came loose. She bent back the sheet until it lifted free, and was horrified to find that she had released hundreds of tiny brown spiders from their penumbral home. They scattered in every direction, over her legs, across the floor, up the walls, fleeing the torchlight. She leapt to her feet and shook out her hands in revulsion, dusting them from her clothes, feeling the tickle of legs everywhere, imagining more than she could see.
Jumping out of her jeans was the best idea, but scattering the spiders with bright light would have been better. She headed for the safety of the bare bulbs in the hall, leaving behind the churning noise of water. This, she thought, is what owning a house is all about. It’s going to take some getting used to.
10
* * *
THE UNDERGROUND MAN
May could hear something odd. It sounded like ‘We are the Ovaltinies, happy girls and boys . . .’ But of course it couldn’t be; that radio jingle had surely vanished before the Second World War. He glanced at the new mobile phone on Bryant’s desk and realized that the music was emanating from the earpiece. Arthur was even humming along as he fussily rearranged books on the mantelpiece. After all these years, he still had the ability to make May feel as if he was going mad. How the hell did he do it? More to the point, how did he bend radio waves from the past to transmit them through modern technology?