The Water Room(49)

‘What do you think he’s doing?’ May peered through the rain-spotted windscreen, trying to see if any lamplights were showing across the road, but the low branches of the plane tree obscured his view. Bryant had insisted on backing the car into the underbrush surrounding the car park because he didn’t want Greenwood spotting them.

‘He’s checking out another underground river.’

‘What makes you say that? Don’t tell me you’re developing a psychic link with him.’

‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Bryant unglued a sherbet lemon, popped it in his mouth and sank down into the shell of his protective overcoat. ‘I’m basing my assumptions on concrete evidence, right here.’ He withdrew a folded section of map from his overcoat and tapped it.

May was rattled. ‘I don’t get this. It’s the first time in years that you haven’t tried to drag palmists, mediums, witches, druids or any one of your fringe specialists into a case to prove a point. I thought we’d at least end up with a dowser. But you seem quite happy to sit here and wait for the worst to happen.’

‘A dowser’s not a bad idea. I thought you preferred me like this, calm and rational.’ The boiled sweet clattered against his false teeth.

‘Yes, I do, but it’s starting to bother me.’

‘I don’t have much choice in the matter. At first I presumed that your pal was a total innocent, duped into something nefarious by a dodgy speculator or some kind of burglar. But now I’m starting to think that he’s ready to go beyond the law in order to provide some kind of illegal service.’

‘How do you know he’s even breaking the law?’ asked May.

‘According to Meera, he’s not requested permission to enter premises, and he hasn’t petitioned the London Water Authority, who have to be officially notified of right-of-way access in the case of underground waterways. You told me that Mr Greenwood was an ordinary penniless academic until his first brush with criminals. My guess is that he’s in some kind of transitional phase. Who knows what he’ll decide to be next? People drift away into all kinds of dark worlds, and sometimes nothing can bring them back.’

‘Hm.’ May shrugged. They had seen Greenwood, wearing a yellow hardhat and wrapped in a coil of rope, heading across a piece of waste ground with the Egyptian in tow. The pair of them had vanished inside a boarded-up railway arch.

‘Look around you. Know where you are?’

May scanned the landscape. ‘South of Vauxhall Bridge. The kind of place tourists never see. No Man’s Land.’

‘ “Those green retreats where fair Vauxhall bedecks her sylvan seats.” That’s this concreted-over hell-hole. The Vauxhall Gardens were right here, all around us, until 1860. For around two hundred years the area was filled with birds and fragrant flowers, a public garden available to everyone. There were spectacular fountains and illuminations, ornate Italian colonnades, a Chinese pavilion, balloon ascents. In the middle of it all was a sumptuously tiered orchestra house, with groves of multicoloured lamps undulating in the trees.’ The sherbet lemon cracked between Bryant’s teeth like a pistol shot.

May watched the Nine Elms lorries spraying and shaking around the one-way system. ‘You’re joking.’

‘Hogarth drew “The Four Times of the Day” here. Walpole and Dickens, princes, ambassadors and cabinet ministers ate in elegant supper boxes over there. Two centuries of pleasure and happiness.’ Bryant sighed. ‘Eventually the popularity of the gardens created disruptive behaviour, and wardens were posted on the walkways. The admission fee fell as the grounds became run down, the punch was watered, the food dropped in quality. Fights broke out, thieves moved in. The orchestra house fell to bits. Soon it was gone for ever. Now look at it. Why does the blacker side of human nature eventually swamp the good? Why should beautiful things always have to die? Look at those pernicious monstrosities for the soulless rich, the dozens of riverside tower blocks crowding in along the Thames like futuristic slums.’

‘You can’t change any of it, Arthur. Wealth attracts wealth. You have to maintain a sense of humorous resignation about the things you can’t change.’

‘What a dreadfully woolly piece of advice.’ Bryant had always shown appreciation toward the joys of the past, just as May was attracted by the prospect of the future. ‘I’ll tell you what he’s up to. He’s following the path of the Effra.’

‘The Effra?’

‘Another of London’s so-called “lost” rivers. He’s just entered a building that was built over the top of it before the start of the twentieth century.’