‘Academics are capable of bearing grudges until the day they die. Obsession is in their nature. Anyway, we’re not exactly being worked off our feet here, Arthur. I want to keep Mangeshkar and Bimsley busy. You know that if no work gets sent our way, the Met will end up using us on their cases by default, and when that happens the unit will be closed down for good.’
‘They wouldn’t do that. They approved the rebuilding programme in record time.’
‘It would have happened anyway, because this site is valuable police property. Have you heard talk about a new style of police shop for the Camden area?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s one of the Home Office’s pet ideas, a drop-in community centre staffed by casually dressed officers who liaise with local community leaders. And it’ll sell products licensed to the Metropolitan Police, to interest the kiddies. That’s what they’re saying this place is going to become, some kind of Disney police store, just as soon as they’ve got us out.’
‘Raymond wasn’t happy about my involvement with Ruth Singh,’ reminded Bryant, ‘so we can hardly afford to have your lecturer—’
‘It took them just a few minutes, Arthur. Meera found something. Look.’ He flattened out the crumpled receipts. ‘Greenwood just spent several hundred pounds on climbing equipment— high-tech stuff.’
‘Perhaps he’s taken up mountaineering.’
‘Don’t be daft, he’s in his sixties and has a bronchial condition.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Is it really any business of yours?’
‘He has some specialist classified knowledge. The kind of knowledge that could be open to abuse.’
‘I thought he taught history.’
‘I was thinking of his particular field of interest. Rivers. Specifically, the underground rivers of London.’
Bryant’s interest was aroused. ‘That’s different. The culverts still run through very sensitive areas. Under Buckingham Palace, for example, and virtually under the Houses of Parliament.’
‘Really? I thought they had all dried up long ago.’
‘Not at all. The entire subject is open to misinterpretation, of course. It’s a murky area of London interest; not only are the size, geography and number of the city’s rivers up for dispute, but there is very little left to see, and no accurate way of comparing the present with the past. Consequently, one ends up tracking filthy dribbles of water between drains and across patches of waste ground.’
‘Then why bother studying them at all?’
‘Because just as the old hedgerows shaped our roads, so did the river beds. They created the form of London itself. They are the arteries from which its flesh grew.’
‘Since when were you an expert?’ asked May, surprised.
‘I was going to do an overground guide tour tracing the route of Counter’s Creek. That one’s followed by a mainline railway line all the way from Kensal Green to Olympia, Earl’s Court and the Thames. We studied quite a few, but abandoned the idea because of the difficulty of getting groups around the obstructions. The Westbourne river still surfaces as the Serpentine, you know. Many of the original river beds are mixed in with the Victorian sewer system now. There’s something undeniably magical about the unseen parts of the city, don’t you think? The roofs and sewers and sealed public buildings, the idea that a different map might emerge to chart previously unimagined landscapes.’
‘I agree up to a point. But if there’s nothing left of these rogue rivers, I don’t see why someone would pay my old rival for information about them.’
‘I didn’t say there was nothing left. Most of them were bricked in. The best-known missing river is the Fleet, which starts on Hampstead Heath, going down through Kentish Town, diverting past us to St Pancras, then to Clerkenwell and Holborn, and out to the Thames just past Bridewell. It was also known as the Holebourne, or the stream in the hollow. They used to say it was a river that turned into a brook, a ditch and finally a drain. The Smithfield butchers chucked cow carcasses into it, and it was used as a toilet and communal rubbish dump for centuries, so it kept silting up and becoming a public health hazard. I think it was finally bricked over in the mid 1800s, but that’s the point—most of the rivers ducked underground at various locations and were provided with brick tunnels, but that doesn’t mean they dried up. Look at the Tach Brook, for example. It’s still there, running underneath car parks and public buildings in Westminster. When I was a nipper, I used to climb down the viaduct and muck about beside the water that flowed out into the Thames from Millbank. Underground engineers still have to be wary of such channels, because they know their excavations could be destroyed by them.’