‘Oh yes. That was the main waterway between London and the Midlands, built over two hundred years ago, joining the Thames at Brentford. It provided access to the west. Twenty years later, the Regent’s Canal was opened to link it to the docks. This canal goes from Paddington to Limehouse, passing right through the zoo. A dozen locks, two tunnels, fairly good paths all the way, and some funny little lock-gate houses that look like old railway stations, decked in flowers. It’s not as safe as it used to be, though.’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed it keeps turning up on charge sheets as a popular murder site. Bodies fished out of the water, rapes, drunken stabbings. With these unlit tunnels you’re asking for trouble.’
‘A pity,’ Bryant agreed. ‘There are some rather pleasing architectural surprises to be discovered down here, where the canals bend and open into basins. When I was a nipper I much preferred coming here to the royal parks. Fewer people, just grass and trees, the backs of factories and shiny green water. Now they’re busy building “luxury canalside accommodation” beside the council blocks. Gin mills, garment factories and refrigerated warehouses are all being carved into pretty little boxes, so that the poor can peer into the lounges of the rich. Always a bad idea, I feel.’
‘What else is the canal good for now?’ It annoyed Meera that her director wasted so much of his time considering London’s intangible histories. As far as she was concerned, the city’s glorious past was at an end, and all that anyone could do was make use of the remains.
‘I agree that barges are impractical in today’s world of mass-production, but London keeps growing; they could prove useful again. The cart-lanes turned into high roads, earth and brick became concrete and steel, but these canals remain as they always were.’
‘They’ve stopped.’ Meera held up the tracker. ‘Just up ahead.’
At the next bend they found themselves in a world of stippled greens and wet browns, patches of sickly lamplight falling through the briar bushes from the streets above the cut. Remaining in the shadows of the tunnel wall, they watched and waited.
‘Are you picking anything up on that thing?’
‘Here.’ Meera handed him an earpiece.
Bryant listened. ‘They’re saying something about a cable.
He heard Greenwood speak. ‘
Meera crept forward and observed for a minute. She picked wet leaves from her jacket as she returned. ‘Come and look. They’re so wrapped up in what they’re doing, they won’t see you.’
Bryant edged closer. He tried to remember May’s advice about human nature, and studied the two figures before him. What he quickly recognized was the power one man could exert over another. Ubeda was in control; Greenwood was there reluctantly to do his bidding, hunched with cold in the evening’s drizzle, complaining about his instructions because he was frightened.
The path where they stood passed a low basket-handle arch on its inner side, forming a narrow concrete causeway between two bodies of brackish river. The arch was barred, no more than four feet of it showing above water level.
The men were dressed in waterproofs, bent beneath the light of a small lantern, absorbed in their task, unaware of the baroque backdrop formed by the shimmering arch. Bryant could have been looking at some artefact of Atlantean architecture, its mass submerged in icy green darkness. It was not hard to imagine towers and steeples beneath the water’s surface. The wall in which the arch’s
Ubeda and Greenwood lowered themselves chest-deep into the water. The academic was being forced to take the lead, and carried a roll of black wire above his head. They reached the arch’s grille, then somehow Greenwood was inside-a narrow panel of bars had been unlocked and pushed back. Ubeda waited outside, shining a torch into the tunnel. He was holding a chunky metal transmitter clear of the water, with a winking red light on the top, and Bryant realized what he was about to do. He had seen-and caused-enough explosions to know what the result might be. He started to warn Meera that any detonation in such a confined space, however small, would channel out the blast in a fiery column, firing any loose debris like ammunition from the muzzle of a rifle. But it was too late.
Greenwood was starting to call back in protest. He had changed his mind, and was wading out. He took a step toward his benefactor, and for a moment it looked as if Ubeda would not let him back through the bars. But the matter was settled seconds later, when a dull boom echoed from beneath the arch. Meera and Bryant both saw the flash of light, but their confusion delayed their reactions.
The young officer was on her way toward the tunnel when fragments of brick jetted out, funnelled by the pressurized air. Greenwood had gone down with a splash. Ubeda had already pulled himself out of the canal, to fall back against the bushes. Bryant felt a stinging pain in his left ear and realized that something had cut it. As the dust cloud was battered flat by renewed rain, Meera threw herself forward and brought Ubeda down with a kick behind his knees that folded him like a collapsing deckchair, cracking his head against the brickwork. As Bryant arrived beside the half-drowned academic, he realized that Greenwood had sustained a nasty injury. A chunk of brick had torn open the left side of his jaw, and he was losing blood. Meera was stronger than she looked. Forking her arms beneath his, she hoisted the academic out on to the path.
‘I’m calling it in.’ Bryant dimly heard his own voice through the tintinnabulation of his eardrums. Emergency personnel would have to negotiate the steep banks and railings separating the towpath from the road above. ‘We’re not near an access path,’ he shouted to her. ‘We’ll have to risk moving him, and take him up to the top.’
Meera was kneeling beside Greenwood, attempting to staunch the flow from his neck. ‘I don’t want you to help me, Mr Bryant, I’m strong enough to do it alone. Just stay here with Ubeda until I can get back. I kicked him pretty hard. I think he’s concussed.’ She gripped Greenwood’s body and dragged him off as a spray of blood soaked her shirt and jacket. Bryant was left beside Ubeda.
‘I’m an old man, but I have the strength of the law behind me, so I wouldn’t advise making a run for it,’ Bryant told him shakily, trying to regain his breath and calm his hammering heart. He checked for the gun Ubeda was known to possess, and was relieved to find nothing. ‘I know what you’re looking for. I want to know where you got the explosive material.’
‘You can get anything in this city.’ The entrepreneur’s eyes never left Bryant’s face. ‘Anything at all.’ He had the audacity to smile as he climbed shakily to his feet. Bryant suddenly saw the situation as it would have presented itself to an outsider: a rather frail, elderly man with the canal at his back, faced with a determined and possibly lunatic predator. He began to grow uncomfortable. True, the law was on his side and the water was shallow, but these days such odds were too long for Bryant’s liking.
‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he warned.
‘If you know what I’m looking for, surely you want to see it as well.’ Ubeda began climbing over the shattered bricks toward the blasted entrance to the tunnel. Bryant stumbled behind him, his left ear singing, as Ubeda dropped back into the oily water and began wading under the arch.
‘Come out of there, it’s unsafe,’ Bryant called ineffectually, but now he could see nothing, only hear the splash of water and the soft chinking of loose bricks. Once he heard a single shout of anger and frustration, and knew in that instant that Ubeda’s goal had not been achieved.
When the collector returned, his arrogance had been swamped by the recognition of defeat. He climbed out of the canal and dropped on to the grassy embankment, closing his eyes.
‘Did you really expect to find the vessel after all these centuries?’ asked Bryant.
