Creatures of the Pool (29 page)

“She isn’t, so I have to.”

“I know. I know.” Repeating this makes me aware how little else it’s true of. “Let me know if she turns up,” I say. “I’ll be back soon.”

As I lower the mobile the driver says “Are you in a rush?”

Only to contact the police, and I shouldn’t put it off; suppose my parents are still near the house? Perhaps my mother is trying to stop my father from wandering, unless she has succumbed to it. I resent having to take time to say “Why do you ask?”

“If you’re not I’ll just get a wash. I’ll knock it off your bill.”

She means the car wash by the road ahead, where once there was a pond. “I can use my phone in there, can’t I?”

“I won’t be stopping you.”

I key the police number as the taxi turns off Islington. I’m waiting for the switchboard to connect me when the driver
inserts a token in the slot and moves the car forward to await the machinery. “When I was a kid,” she says, “I used to call this going under the water.”

The gantry advances and begins to spray the taxi, solidifying the dusk that the clouds have brought forward. The windows are swimming by the time a voice says none too positively “Yes?”

“Sergeant Maddock?” Since this proves unproductive I offer “Sergeant Wrigley?”

The promotion doesn’t seem to please him. “No trace yet,” he says.

“Yes there is. He phoned not much over an hour ago.”

“From where?”

“He was at the house.”

“Took your time, didn’t you? What’d he say?”

I’m distracted by someone who must work in the car wash. The windows are virtually opaque with soap now, so that I can see only a blurred shape near my side of the taxi. “I didn’t speak to him,” I say. “My mother did.”

“And he said what?”

“I don’t know.” Three massive brushes close around the vehicle to wipe away the soap, revealing nobody. “She went out,” I say. “All I know is he definitely called from the house. He’s the only one who could have got in.”

There’s silence except for a soft thud against the window at my back. It’s a brush. As the apparatus starts its return sweep the policeman says “We’ll come and have a word.”

“Is that necessary?” Since he apparently feels this doesn’t deserve an answer I say “I’m on my way home, but—”

“That’ll do us.”

I would say more if it weren’t for the sight outside the taxi. The spray is blurring the glass again, but I’m almost sure that a figure is standing utterly still outside my window, within reach if it were to extend a long arm. The water has lent it some qualities; the head looks wet, and its rounded outline and vague features seem as uncertain of their shapes
as the turbulence on the window. Surely just the water is distorting the squat figure, but when I say “I’ll be out of here any moment” it feels akin to a wish.

As the spray droops and the pipes glide away with a farewell hiss I realise that the policeman has cut me off. I peer through the window while a blower reduces trickles to drops and lines them up in the process of raking them off the glass. Long before they’ve gone it’s plain that nobody is near the vehicle. It’s cruising out of the car wash when the driver says “You could imagine all sorts in there.”

Even if she’s reminiscing about her childhood, I feel compelled to ask “What sort of thing?”

“That’d be telling.”

I’m less anxious to know than I am to be home, but a tailback halts us on the flyover behind the library. The central barrier prevents us from taking another route. I can’t even pay and walk, because there’s no pavement. Surely Lucinda will ring if she has any news. The trinity of traffic lights controlling the junction at the end of the flyover releases vehicles two at a time, and at last we pass the obstruction. Half the road at the foot of Cheapside is flooded and has been coned off. Is Waterworth watching the thoroughfare revert to its historical state? Someone’s at his office window, turning the glass grey with breath.

Two minutes later I’m outside my door. “Call it ten,” says the driver.

I add a pound and let myself in. The pen in the inkwell seems eager to communicate as I run to the stairs. I’m not sure why I should be in such a hurry—at least, until I hear a man’s voice beyond my door. As I twist the key I’m able to believe he’s my father. I’m stepping into the hall when I realise he’s a policeman, but that isn’t why I falter. He’s talking about Operation Ripper.

As I leave the photograph on my desk Lucinda calls “Is that you, Gavin?”

“Who else is it going to be?” I do my best to leave this behind by demanding “What was that about the Ripper?”

“We weren’t talking about him.”

I don’t know why she should laugh, and I’m further thrown to see that the other person in the room commandeered by boxes is Maddock. He’s seated at the table and drinking from a glass of water. His flat undented nose and indeed his face in general still look like invitations to a fight, so that I’m provoked to ask “Where’s your cousin?”

He lingers over a gulp and puts the glass down beside a document. “Who’s been blabbing?”

“Careful you don’t spill that on there. Who do you think?”

“I’m asking you,” says Maddock, leaving the glass where it is. “You want to be careful what you stick your snout into.”

He won’t daunt me, especially not in front of Lucinda. I cross the room and move the page away from him. “It was your cousin who opened his mouth. He didn’t need much coaxing from me.”

It’s clear I could have phrased this better, which may be why Lucinda intervenes. “It was ripple, Gavin.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Operation Ripple. I thought you might be interested.”

An audience might find it comical that Maddock and I have the same response, though his is harsher. “Why?”

“It was on the news. There were dawn raids around the docks and up in Marsh Lane and Aigburth. The Marsh Lads
and the Eggy Gang have been fighting over drugs that are shipped over in containers. That’s why there were all the shootings in the spring.”

Having grasped that she’s referring to the season, I’m left to wonder “What’s that to do with me?”

“Marsh Lane was as far as the High Rip went, wasn’t it? And the Eggy Gang meet on some waste ground down by the river at the end of Maybrick’s road. I thought it sounded like material for you.”

“First I’ve heard that’s why you asked,” says Maddock.

“It isn’t why you came, is it?” I remind him. “Have you still not traced my father’s mobile?”

“Show us someone that’ll do it quicker.”

I’m on the edge of mentioning the Frugone salesman when Lucinda says “Is it likely to take much longer, do you think, Inspector Maddock?”

I’ve no idea whether she has established his rank or elevated it to placate him, and his scowl isn’t telling. “His signal’s down the last I heard. Might be dead.”

“We know where he was an hour ago,” I protest, “and now my mother’s with him surely they’ll be easier to find.”

“Maybe they don’t want finding.”

“I’m absolutely sure my mother will. Just because my father called her—”

“You don’t know that,” Maddock says not far short of triumphantly. “You got it before. You tell him.”

Lucinda takes a moment to look apologetic. “Don’t we only know somebody called from the house, Gavin?”

“Someone who didn’t have to break in, so it had to be him.”

“Unless it was Gillian. Could she have phoned to say where she was and not wanted to talk to the machine?” When I don’t immediately argue Lucinda says “Did you find any sign of Deryck at the house?”

“Not that he’s been there recently, no.”

“So all you know is his wife went out this afternoon,” says Maddock, “and already you’re calling us again.”

“You can understand why he’s concerned,” Lucinda says. “The situation with his father and now not knowing where his mother is or what frame of mind she’s in.”

“He’s still got you, love. Maybe you can calm him down. We don’t like him wasting our time.”

As Maddock stares at me hard enough to revive a twinge from Whitechapel I blurt “Aren’t you doing that by coming here?”

His stare doesn’t relent, and I won’t slacken mine, even when Lucinda murmurs “Gavin…”

“How long would you suggest I leave calling you next time?”

“If you don’t hear something,” says Maddock, “just wait and remember what I said.”

“I don’t think you’re being entirely reasonable,” Lucinda tells him.

“You wouldn’t want to see me when I’m not, love,” Maddock says and stands up. “Thanks for the water.”

I follow as he loiters in the corridor, frowning at the sodden documents. “You want to get her to tidy up a bit,” he advises. “Never know who’s going to come visiting.”

He halts again outside the door. “I’ll see myself down,” he says and produces what I take to be his version of a grin. “Watch out you don’t end up sunk in the tunnel with this weather.”

For various reasons I’m disinclined to respond, but I say “Which tunnel?”

“The Mersey one. The Queen’s hole. Didn’t they tell you when they sold you your digs? It goes right under you.”

He means Queensway, the road tunnel that goes underground close to the upper reaches of the Pool and leads beneath the river to Birkenhead. The best I can do in the way of a parting shot is “Where’s your car today?”

“Don’t need a car to get to the bridewell.”

His thick neck seems to grow yet more undeveloped as he drops out of sight stair by stair, and then I listen to his soft
but heavy tread until a door brings it to an end. As I return along the hall Lucinda says “Has he gone?”

“I made sure.”

“What a, I honestly don’t know what to call him. No wonder you’re on edge with somebody like that investigating.”

“I should be. I ought to be out searching.”

“Would you like me to drive? It’d cover more ground.”

“How can you? Somebody needs to be here.”

Presumably she realises my harshness is directed at the situation, not at her, because she says “I meant I could drive around by myself.”

“Can I borrow your phone first?” I don’t want to block mine, but the precaution seems to be redundant; there’s silence from the house and just my father’s message on his mobile. “Call me,” I tell it. “Just please call.”

“So shall I go?” Lucinda says. “I’ve made dinner. A big casserole. I found some nice fish.”

“Thanks. I’d be in a worse state without you,” I say, which seems comprehensively inadequate. “A lot worse.”

The afterthought earns me a wry smile and a swift hug. I listen until I hear the door to the basement shut behind her—I’ve never noticed how much it sounds like the street door—and then I watch from the window as her headlights crawl up into the premature twilight. As the beams swing away a pale object appears to dodge back into the abandoned offices—a reflection, of course. I wash Maddock’s clammy glass, which seems to rouse my thirst, so that I have to fill one for myself. I’m rather more than sipping from it as I switch on the radio in time to hear the latest bulletin.

My father isn’t included, and it’s too soon for my mother. The final item relates to a study conducted by researchers at the oldest Liverpool university, demonstrating that the emotions of the subjects—Liverpudlians—display patterns very similar to waves and tides in the Mersey. It sounds more like a story than a study, and the newsreader jokes about taking water with it. As the presenter of the evening show begins
an interview with the curator of an exhibition of objects washed up on the Mersey shore—a stone knife, an ancient medallion depicting an eroded shape walking on water, a skull so distorted by the actions of the river that its species has yet to be identified—I shut off the radio and look for distraction. My father’s research is all I can find.

The table is strewn with information about Joseph Williamson. During a period of just over thirty years he lived in no fewer than six of the houses he built above his tunnels. Some of the houses were at least as deep as they were high, four storeys with four basements. The historian James Stonehouse described some of them as “built as if by a blind man who felt his way.” At least one contained a room with no door or windows, and the chaplain of the local blind asylum lived in the first house Williamson built. The blind had their own Liverpool church, and I’m reminded that members of the congregation used to pray to be saved from activities only they could hear beneath the church, originally located behind the Empire theatre in Lime Street and later housed in Hope Street, by the margin of the Moss Lake. My mind is chattering with history once more, and I drain the glass to have an excuse to go and refill it. Soon enough I’m back to Williamson, however.

I know he lived in the cellar of the last house he inhabited, dying of water on the chest ten years after he lost his wife. Stonehouse wrote that a tenant heard “very unaccountable and strange” noises beneath her house, but I haven’t previously encountered the suggestion that Williamson began tunnelling because of sounds he’d heard beneath his own first cellar. Another tenant complained of damp in her house and was startled soon afterwards when a head appeared through the floor. It must have belonged to one of Williamson’s army of workmen, some of whom surprised the diggers of a Victorian railway tunnel by appearing from an unsuspected subterranean passage. Still, I can do without imagining how an intrusive head might look.

My father has underlined sentences from Stonehouse. A woman who met Williamson in the street described him as “not walking but stumping.” His habitual outfit might have belonged to a tramp. He referred to his father as “the greatest rip that ever walked on two feet,” though how else would the elder Williamson have walked? Some of the tunnels led to “yawning chasms, wherein the fetid stagnant water throws up miasmatic odours.” Why would the builder have left these sections accessible while bricking others up as soon as they were excavated? Stonehouse says that Williamson seemed “driven to play the explorer and yet fearful of his goal.” He never let anyone tour the excavations, a point my father has underscored twice, until in the year before he died Williamson gave a letter of authority to a physician. “Dr. Watson is not to be interrupted in his walks on my premises, either on the surface or under the surface.” It was signed J. W., E. H., beside which my father has scribbled “Eh?” and “One for Sherlock.” Williamson believed that his employees “worked all the better for their throats being wetted.” Stone from the excavations was used for building his houses and St Jude’s Church on the ridge, midway between the highest of his tunnels and my parents’ house.