‘Follow me.’ May picked his way to the edge of the interior wall, which had been painted an institutional shade of railway green at some time in the 1930s. Between the back wall and the start of the next building was a narrow gap. ‘Want to go first?’ May offered.
‘I’m not sure I’d fit down there,’ warned Bimsley. He wasn’t nervous of what he might find, but some of the tiles were broken and he was wearing a decent jacket, having arranged to see some friends later in a West End pub.
‘We need evidence of what Greenwood has been hired to do,’ May told him. ‘Don’t think of it as a favour to Arthur so much as trying to close the reaction gap between us and the law-breakers.’
‘Oh, very funny,’ said Bimsley, squeezing into the space. Reaction-gap reduction was a training initiative long touted by the Met to its forces, and was consequently the butt of many jokes. The idea of crime anticipation and prevention was hardly new and not overly successful, but it was well suited to the PCU.
‘Do you think I can get an advance on my wages?’ asked Bimsley. ‘I’m broke.’
‘You’re supposed to be,’ replied May. ‘You’re a junior.’
‘Yeah, but I’m working overtime.’
‘I’ll give you one if you find something.’ May shone the torch ahead. The tiles were covered in the kind of calcified slime he associated with river walls at low tide. ‘It looks like you can get all the way down there,’ he encouraged. ‘Take my Valiant.’
Bimsley accepted the torch. ‘If I ruin my clothes, I’m going to put in a chit.’ He tried to avoid touching the walls, but couldn’t help it after something sleek and squeaking ran across his boots. His palm came away green.
‘What’s that on your right?’ called May. ‘Down by your boot.’
Bimsley lowered the Valiant. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he called back.
May had spotted the pale keystone of an arch, and a stone known as a
Grimacing, Bimsley plunged his hands into the pile and dragged back a rotted mattress. It took him several minutes to remove the panels of wood and piles of brick that had silted up against the top of the underground arch, which he saw was staked with iron bars at six-inch intervals. He shone his torch inside. ‘Looks like it goes a long way back,’ he called. ‘No way of getting in there without cutters.’
‘If we can’t gain entrance, that means Greenwood hasn’t been able to get inside, either. They’ve probably only just taken the warehouse wall down. That means we’re still in time.’
‘Yeah, but in time for what?’ Bimsley pressed his face against the rusted bars, lowering the torch.
‘Nothing at all?’
‘Nope.’
‘Let’s go.’ May began stepping back through the debris.
‘Hang on.’ Bimsley crouched as low as the gap permitted. ‘Stinks down here. I think I can see. .’
He turned around, flashing his torch along the gap, but May had already disappeared from view. Shining the beam through the bars, he could make out a curving brick wall with weeds protruding from it. At the bottom, below a deep ridge, was a thread of glittering silver.
‘I think there’s water, if that’s what you’re-Mr May?’ The circle of light dropped lower, picking up another reflection. Bimsley pushed himself closer and found one of the bars loose. It jiggled in its concrete setting, then dropped down several inches. After a minute or so of further bullying, he was able to remove it completely. The resulting hole was wide enough to ease his head and shoulder through. He raised the torch again.
He nearly overlooked it because it failed to reflect the beam, but the light picked up something against the wall, a coil of tiny wooden beads fastened together with a strip of leather. Pushing his bulk flat against the bars, he was just able to raise the strand in his fingers.
But now there were two reflections of light above the bracelet, like small gold coins, bright and flat. It took him a moment to work out that they were eyes, and by that time he had heard the throaty rumble of a growl.
The dog attacked before he could unwedge himself. It leapt at him, spraying spittle, its jaws desperately snapping shut on his shoulder, biting down hard, its teeth clamping together through the generous padding. Bimsley cried out and fell back as the material tore, and the rottweiler launched itself into the gap. It got halfway through and stuck, wriggling back and forth with its hind legs off the ground until it twisted sideways, falling back into the cavernous cellar.
He could hear it trying to breach the space again, barking frantically, maddened by its imprisonment, as he stumbled over the chinking bricks toward the alley and the exit.
Back on the street, Bimsley examined the damage to his jacket. ‘Bloody dog-must be another way in.’ He poked the torn material back in place, then remembered the bracelet. ‘Here, this qualify me for an advance?’
‘I don’t know-let me see.’ May raised it to the light and gingerly sniffed. Sandalwood, he thought,
‘He was shaken, but fine,’ May told his partner the following morning. ‘The dog’s teeth just grazed his skin, but I sent him for a tetanus shot all the same, and he’s going to charge us for the jacket. You think Greenwood put the dog in there? I can get the RSPCA down now.’
‘No, don’t do that.’ Bryant was sitting on a pile of encyclopedias, taping together a set of surveyor’s maps. ‘I don’t want anything to alert him. Look at this.’ He waved the tape roll over the far side of the map. ‘That blue line I’ve marked out is the Fleet. It discharges into the river via a bricked tunnel beneath Blackfriars Bridge, at the very point where Roberto Calvi’s body was found on 17 June 1982. He was a senior banker, if you recall, a member of the Italian Masonic lodge P-2. He was discovered hanging there, just about the most unlikely suicide London has ever seen. He’d lost a fortune as the chairman of the Banco Ambrosiano, owing something like 1.2 billion dollars. The money had been siphoned off and hidden from the IOR, the Vatican bank. Blackfriars Bridge has historic connections with the Freemasons, and it looked as though his assassins were deliberately leaving a warning to others, although the official verdict was still suicide. After continuing pressure to reopen the case, the body was exhumed in ‘92 and was found to exhibit clear evidence of murder. Five years later, prosecutors in Rome indicted four Mafia members. They belonged to the
‘You amaze me,’ May marvelled. ‘Considering you can’t remember your PIN number or where you’ve left your glasses.’
‘This is work,’ Bryant retorted, adjusting his spectacles. ‘Oh, and I’ve read up some more on underground rivers. Did you know that in 1909 the Hippodrome Music Hall in Charing Cross Road staged a water spectacle called “The Arctic”? They built icebergs and placed fifteen polar bears in a giant tank. Guess where they got the water for the display? The Cranbourne, the ancient river that runs right underneath the building. And of course we know that there’s an artesian well beneath the Palace Theatre, because you nearly fell down it once. It seems there are entrances and exits to rivers all over London. Listen to this.’ He raised a leatherbound book and adjusted his reading glasses. ‘ “Until 1960, the garden of 20, Queen Square, Bloomsbury, WC1 contained a trapdoor and steps leading to the stone tunnels of a stream known as the Devil’s Conduit.” And there are dozens of other examples. No wonder Ubeda needs to employ an expert like Greenwood as a tracker.’
‘I have something to show you.’ May rummaged in his pocket and produced the broken sandalwood bracelet. ‘Bimsley found it. I thought you’d like to see.’
Bryant wrinkled his nose and held it away. ‘Probably came from Camden Market. Where did you get it?’
‘Our intrepid DC found it inside the sewer inlet, just before the dog attacked him. There’s another way in, but we couldn’t find it. I took your advice and let Bimsley handle the dangerous part.’
‘Good. You know you’re not supposed to do anything too strenuous,’ Bryant admonished. ‘Sooner or later you’ll have to start acting your age.’
‘If I did that, I’d never get out of a chair again. It may be nothing, but I thought I might send it to Banbury, see what he can get out of it.’
