Whispers Under Ground (Rivers of London 3) (26 page)

‘You can let go of me,’ I told Reynolds. ‘I can stand on my own two feet.’

Reynolds let me up, my feet skidded on the floor and I had to lean at a forty-five-degree angle just to avoid being swept away. The water was up to my waist. According to Kumar the water was probably a combination of snowmelt and unusually heavy rain in the North London catchment area.

‘How long have we got?’ I asked.

‘Cave systems can fill up very quickly and this is a system that been purposely designed to fill up as fast as possible,’ said Kumar.

‘I don’t think it’s a good idea for us to stay down here,’ I said.

‘You think?’ said Reynolds.

We decided that, mad gunman notwithstanding, we probably couldn’t push our way upstream even if we wanted to.

‘There’ll be street access further down,’ said Kumar. ‘We should let the current wash us along until we reach one.’

I looked at Reynolds, who shrugged.

‘Let’s do it,’ she said.

So Reynolds got behind me and grabbed my shoulders, Kumar got behind her and grabbed hers and on the count of three we all lifted our feet and let the current sweep us down the sewer pipe.

The water was above the halfway point and running faster than a mountain stream. In case you’re wondering, I’ve kayaked down a mountain stream – it was a school trip and I spent a lot of time underwater. As the guy at the front I was doing that again now – only the water wasn’t as clean. In the absolute black, Kumar’s glowstick didn’t do much more than texture the darkness and add to the sensation that we were hurtling out of control.

‘Oh great,’ I screamed. ‘Now we’re a bobsleigh team.’

‘It’s the luge,’ yelled Kumar. ‘It’s only a bobsleigh if you’ve got a bobsleigh.’

‘You two are insane,’ shouted Reynolds. ‘There’s no such thing as a triple luge.’

Between duckings I glimpsed a patch of grey. I opened my mouth to yell ‘Daylight’ and then really wished I hadn’t when I got a mouthful of diluted sewage.

It was another intersection. I saw an alcove with a ladder and lunged – only to be swept past, with my fingers centimetres from the metal. My foot hit something underwater hard enough to pitch me over and the world’s first-ever Anglo-American Olympic sewer luge team broke up.

I slammed into another thing that was at least vertical and made of metal, and then something else caught hold of my ankle.

‘Are you holding onto me?’ I shouted.

‘Yes,’ gasped Reynolds. ‘And Kumar’s holding onto me.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Because I think I’ve found a ladder.’

20

Holland Park

T
he thing about absolute darkness is that you end up doing things very carefully, especially after the first time you nearly brain yourself on a concrete cross-beam. So when I reached the top of the ladder I felt around myself slowly – I had come up through another floor hatch, I thought. There were no lights visible in any direction.

I made a werelight, which revealed a rectangular concrete room with a high ceiling and a shadowy doorway at the far end.

‘I can see a light,’ said Reynolds from below.

‘Just a moment,’ I said.

I fixed the werelight to the ceiling with
scindare
in the hope that Reynolds would mistake it for a light fixture, and climbed out of the hatchway onto the gritty cement floor, freeing it up for her.

‘About time,’ said Reynolds.

I reached down to help her up. She was shivering and her hands were freezing. She crawled clear of the hatchway and flopped over onto her back breathing heavily. Kumar followed her up, staggered a few steps, and sat down heavily.

‘A light,’ said Reynolds, staring at the ceiling. ‘Thank God.’

We could still hear the water rushing away below us.

I gingerly undid my coverall and felt my chest. The Metvest was still intact but there were three holes in the nylon covering. They were ragged with blackened edges – like cigarette burns. Something dropped from my chest and pinged off the cement floor. I picked it up – it was a pistol-calibre bullet.

‘That’s odd,’ said Reynolds, who’d sat up to take a look. She held out her hand and I dropped the bullet into it so she could examine it more closely. ‘Nine millimetre. It’s barely deformed at all. Are you sure this hit you?’

I winced as I felt the bruises under the vest. ‘Pretty certain,’ I said.

‘This one must have gone through the water first,’ she said.

I found it remarkably easy not to tell her that it was more likely that the bullet had been slowed by the magical force field I’d conjured up.

‘I don’t know what happened to the lamps,’ said Kumar. He’d detached his helmet lamp from its bracket and was prising off its back.

‘Maybe they’re not as waterproof as we thought they were,’ I said.

Kumar frowned down at the lamp, but LEDs, like most solid-state technology, look the same whether they’re broken or not. ‘Never happened before,’ he said and gave me a suspicious look.

I looked away and noticed that Reynolds was still shivering.

‘Are you cold?’ I asked.

‘I’m freezing,’ she said. ‘Why aren’t you?’

I explained that we were wearing wetsuits.

‘They didn’t have those at the embassy thrift store,’ she said. ‘I had to make do with Marine hand-me-downs.’

I’d like to have asked what had brought her into the sewers in the first place, but her face had gone very pale. I’m not privy to the media policy directives of the Metropolitan Police, but I suspected that from a public relations standpoint a dead FBI agent would be way more embarrassing than a live one.

‘We need to find somewhere for you to dry off.’ I said. ‘Where’s your backup?

‘My what?’ she asked.

‘You’re an American,’ I said. ‘You guys always have backup.’

‘Times are hard,’ she said. ‘And resources are limited.’ But she looked away when she said it.

Ah, I thought. She’s playing
that
movie – the one where the pen-pushers block the hero from getting involved and she goes rogue to solve the mystery herself.

‘Does the embassy know you’re down here?’ I asked.

‘Never mind me,’ she said. ‘Where’s your backup?’

‘Never mind backup,’ said Kumar. ‘Where are we?’

‘We’re still in the sewers,’ I said. ‘We just need to find a way out.’

‘What are our options?’ asked Reynolds.

‘Well, we have hole number one,’ said Kumar. ‘The ever-popular floodwater relief sewer. Or we have a dark and mysterious doorway.’ He struggled to his feet and went over to peer inside.

‘I vote for the doorway,’ said Reynolds. ‘Unless it goes back to the sewers too.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Kumar. ‘I’m not an architectural prodigy like Peter here but I’m pretty certain this is part of the Underground.’

I looked around. Kumar was right. The room had the cement and concrete squatness that I associated with the mid-twentieth-century sections of the Underground. The late Victorians went for brick and the modern tube stations are all brushed concrete surfaces and durable plastic cladding.

Kumar stepped through the doorway. ‘It’s a stairwell going down,’ he said. ‘But it’s going to be a bugger to navigate without lights.’

‘I’ve got an emergency light,’ I said getting up. I nudged Reynolds with my foot. ‘On your feet, Marine,’ I said.

‘Ha ha,’ said Reynolds, but she dragged herself up.

Kumar stood aside as I stepped into the doorway and, keeping my back to Reynolds, made myself another werelight. It revealed a spiral staircase with wooden banisters and a metal core.

Definitely London Underground, I thought.

‘See,’ said Kumar. ‘It used to go up but it’s blocked off.’

Crudely bricked up with breeze blocks, in fact.

‘Could we break through?’ I asked.

‘Even if we had the tools,’ said Kumar, ‘we don’t know if the top of the shaft is still open. They often just plug them up when an old station site is redeveloped.’

‘Down it is, then,’ I said.

‘How are you doing that?’ asked Reynolds suddenly from behind me.

‘Doing what?’ I said as I started down the steps, increasing my pace.

‘That light,’ said Reynolds. ‘How are you doing the light?’

‘Yes,’ said Kumar. ‘How are you doing that?’

‘It’s just a plasma ball,’ I said. ‘It’s just a toy.’

She turned and walked back into the room. She was, I realised, checking the werelight on the ceiling to see if it looked the same. Why couldn’t I have got a stupid FBI agent? I asked myself. Or, if not stupid, then at least someone stolid and law-abiding – then she wouldn’t even be down here.

I proceeded down the stairs in the hope of forestalling any explanations.

‘I’m not sure I like that fact that we’re going down,’ said Kumar.

‘At least we’re out of the sewers,’ I said.

‘Have you smelt yourself?’ said Kumar. ‘We’re taking the sewers wherever we go.’

‘Look on the bright side,’ I said. ‘Who’s going to complain?’

‘Useful toy,’ said Reynolds. ‘Does it come with batteries?’

‘That reminds me,’ I lied. ‘What made you come underground in the first place?’

‘If I recall correctly,’ said Kumar, looking at her. ‘You owe us an explanation.’

‘His mom showed me his emails before I flew over,’ she said. ‘He talks about being involved in London’s underground art scene – “literally underground” he says in one.’

‘That’s it?’ I asked. ‘For that you climbed into the sewers?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she said. ‘There was the forensics work you people did on his boots. That showed he’d been walking in the sewers.’

‘It’s a big system,’ said Kumar.

‘That it is,’ said Reynolds, who was obviously enjoying herself now. ‘But I did a survey of the manhole covers in the vicinity of the victim’s house and what do you know, one of them was much looser than the others. Had fresh marks around the edge – I suspect from where someone had used a pry bar on it.’

‘You were looking to break Zachary’s alibi, weren’t you?’ I said. ‘See if he sneaked past the cameras using the sewers.’

‘Amongst other things,’ said Reynolds. ‘How far down do you think this is going to go?’

‘If it descends to the same level as the Central Line,’ said Kumar. ‘It could be as deep as thirty metres.’

‘That’s a hundred feet,’ I said.

‘This may come as a surprise to you Constable Grant, but I am conversant with the metric system,’ said Reynolds.

‘Can you hear that?’ asked Kumar.

We stopped and listened. Just on the cusp of hearing I detected a rhythmic pounding, more a vibration in the concrete than a sound.

‘Drums,’ I said and then because I couldn’t resist it. ‘Drums in the deep.’

‘Drum and Bass in the deep,’ said Kumar.

‘Someone’s having a party,’ I said.

‘In that case,’ said Reynolds, ‘I’m so glad I dressed for it.’

The base of the stairway would have been familiar to anyone who’s ever had to schlep down the stairs at Hampstead, or any other deep-level tube station. At the bottom was a grey-painted steel blast door that, much to our relief, creaked open when me and Kumar put our shoulders to it.

We stepped into what I at first thought was an empty tube tunnel, but which I realised a moment later was too big for that – twice the diameter, about the same as a standard platform tunnel. The concrete forms which lined the walls were free of the usual tile cladding, but there was a flat cement floor that was shiny.

I know where we are,’ said Kumar. ‘This is the deep-level air-raid shelter at Holland Park.’

‘How do you know that?’ I asked.

‘Because it’s a deep-level shelter and the nearest one is Holland Park,’ he said.

Back at the start of World War Two the authorities forbade the use of the Underground as an air-raid shelter. Instead Londoners were supposed to rely on hastily built neighbourhood shelters or on the famous Anderson shelters which were basically rabbit hutches made from corrugated iron with some earth shovelled on top. Londoners being Londoners, the prohibition on using the Underground lasted right up until the first air-raid warning, at which point the poorly educated, but far from stupid, populace of the capital did a quick back-of-the-envelope comparison between the stopping power of ten metres of earth and concrete and a few centimetres of compost, and moved underground en masse. The authorities were appalled. They tried exhortation, persuasion and the outright use of force but the Londoners wouldn’t budge. In fact, they started to organise their own bedding and refreshment services.

And thus in a cloud of official disapproval the Blitz spirit was born.

A couple of thousand preventable deaths later, the government authorised the construction of new purpose-built deep-level shelters constructed, according to Kumar, using the same techniques and machines as the tube system itself.

I knew all about the shelters at Belsize Park and Tottenham Court Road – it’s not like you can miss the huge fortified concrete pillboxes that marked the ventilation shafts – but I’d never heard of one at Holland Park.

‘There used to be a top-secret government agency down here,’ said Kumar. ‘Only I heard they got relocated to Scotland.’

The opposite end of the tunnel was far enough away to be in shadow. I was tempted to brighten my werelight, but I was getting worried about the amount of magic I’d been using. Dr Walid’s guidelines, endorsed by Nightingale, were that I should refrain from doing more than an hour of continuous magic if I wanted to avoid what he called thaumatological necrosis and me and Lesley called cauliflower brain syndrome.

‘They did a good job stripping this place then,’ I said. It was completely empty. I could even see where light fittings had been prised out of the concrete walls. The bass rumble was louder, but it was hard to tell from where it was coming.

‘This is the intersection,’ said Kumar.

You could see the circular outline where a tunnel of similar size to ours had formed a crossroad and then been walled off with concrete and cement. There were four doors on each side, two at our ground level and two halfway up the wall servicing a floor level that had either been stripped out or never installed.