asked Meera.
‘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. Is there enough cable?’
He heard Greenwood speak. ‘This is too dangerous, he’s telling Ubeda. It’ll bring people running. I should have worked out what they’re up to by now. Think, Arthur, you stupid old fool.’ He listened again.
‘Do you see anyone around?’
‘No, but there’s bound to be someone at street level—’
‘Why is it that academics fall apart when they’re required to do something?’
‘You hired me for advice, Jackson. I have no business being here.’
‘You get paid when we’ve achieved our goal—together.’
‘I didn’t think that meant—’ The sound phased and broke into electronic scatter.
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 voussoir was set ended at an odd height; that was what had alerted Greenwood to the presence of another forgotten Fleet tributary. Bryant recalled the information John had gleaned from Oliver Wilton about the various outlets into the canal being subsumed by the rising water table.
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