seen anything like this in my life.
The noise of rushing water beneath the house had grown in intensity. She tried to move the bath away from the far wall. The flexible pipes attached to its taps looked as if they would allow it to be moved as far as the centre of the room, but it was far too heavy to budge more than a few inches. Squeezing herself between the bath and the wall, she carefully scraped away another section of paint. This time the image was indecipherable: gingerish strands of weeds, flowers or possibly flames.
The emulsion flaked away from the hard varnished surface of the extraordinary mural. Feeling something at her feet, Kallie shone the torch down and saw that the spiders were back, thousands of them, tiny and brown, forced up by the rising torrent below. She stamped her boots, scattering them across the floor in rippling waves, and turned her attention back to the wall.
The red strands were soon explained: they were the floating tresses of a drowned woman, floating pale and serene beneath the green submerged city.
The doorbell rang, startling her, then rang again. She felt reluctant to leave the painting, as though it might fade away without her gaze upon it, but descended the ladder and made her way upstairs. The silhouette on the glass suggested a tall, broad-shouldered man, clearly not Tate. As she unlocked the door, he stepped inside without waiting for permission to enter. There was a palpable sense of aggression in his attitude. His face was turned away from the pale light of the street.
‘What did you think you were going to do?’ asked Randall Ayson.
‘Where did your husband go?’ Longbright asked, looking around.
‘I don’t know. This rain.’ Tamsin Wilton barely concentrated on the question. The ferocious deluge had distracted everyone. ‘I don’t see why you have to be here.’
I’m not so sure myself, thought the detective sergeant. ‘Mr Bryant has reason to believe that you could be at risk, that someone might try to, well, set fire to your house.’
‘Fire? I can’t imagine anything catching fire tonight. There’s no power. The electricity company warned us this might happen. Look out there. It’s like the end of the world. Brewer!’ She shouted up from the foot of the stairs. ‘Stop running about like that!’
Longbright returned to the lounge window and cleared a patch, trying to see Bryant’s Mini Cooper. He appeared to be alone inside. At the far end of the road she could make out Meera standing in a porch, probably conducting another door-to-door check. Something strange was happening out there, and it annoyed her not to be a part of it.
Bryant poked about in the glovebox and found a chamois leather to clear the windscreen, but water was trickling in through the corners of the passenger windows. He wanted to be with May, but did not trust himself on the sluicing cobbles without his stick, so he sat and fidgeted, frustrated and fed up. Searching about for some useful purpose, he came upon the underground river map that Tate had pressed into his hand. The paper had wrinkled in the damp, so he used one of Tate’s art books to lay it flat and press out the creases. As he did so, a tingling premonition caressed the back of his neck; it was a feeling he had experienced many times before.
The map, the art book. Pulling his briefcase across from the back seat, he searched for the A4 photocopy Longbright had made from Jackie Quinten’s original. He needed more light. He switched on the radio to illuminate the interior, and manoeuvred the drawing over Tate’s map. It was surfacing now, the idea; a coalescence of everything he had heard and seen in recent weeks. Using the House of Conflagration as a co-ordinate, he slowly rotated the map, then checked the details with the magnifying glass he kept for reading the A-Z. The artwork was fanciful and out of scale, but the outline of the street roughly corresponded to the card, allowing him to pinpoint the properties on either side in conjunction with the Fleet tributary.
Now he noticed what he had not seen before on the drawing: two other co-ordinates, not words but pictograms placed over sites, one a lumpen creature emerging from the soil, the other a sinister cherub with its bare rump turned toward the viewer, expelling wind. What he had dismissed as decorative patterning beneath the illustrations was tiny calligraphy.
‘Blasted eyesight,’ said Bryant aloud, holding the