sit in the front room.’
He tugged at her until she sat beside him on the couch. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you.’
‘You’re drunk, Paul.’
‘Only a bit. I’ve just had a chance to think about you, and I can tell you’re not happy.’
‘Let’s discuss this in the morning.’
‘Suppose—’ he raised his voice, ‘suppose we had money in the bank, I mean a decent amount, enough to buy a new place.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I was in the pub with whatsname—Jake—he goes hang-gliding in France—’
‘What’s this about money? Did he offer you a job?’
Paul pressed the heel of his hand into his eye, concentrating. ‘Jake hasn’t got anything suitable at his company. He wants me to go hang-gliding with him, you remember I used to—’
‘You can’t make money from hang-gliding,’ she told him. ‘Come on, I’ll get you to bed.’
‘I can manage.’ He rose unsteadily. ‘Look at this place. We can do better—Jake was talking to the other guy, at the party—’
She challenged him on the upstairs landing, folding her arms across her chest. ‘I’m not with you. Which other guy?’
‘Wait, I have to get this right in my head. Let me get undressed.’ She waited patiently until he was installed on his side of the sloping bed they had borrowed from her mother. ‘The builder guy—Elliot—he knows how we can make some money, but there’s someone else who knows—’ The rest of his thought drained into the pillow.
‘Someone else knows what, Paul? You’re not making any sense.’ She knew how he behaved after a few beers. He would fade fast and not remember the conversation in the morning.
‘We have to leave the street, Kal,’ he mumbled as sleep started to claim him. ‘It’s not safe to stay . . .’
Kallie watched the bronzed droplets brushing the windows, and wondered what she was supposed to do. Paul was already snoring lightly, leaving her alone and all too aware that although nothing was really wrong, nothing was quite right.
‘What do you think he’s doing?’ May peered through the rain-spotted windscreen, trying to see if any lamplights were showing across the road, but the low branches of the plane tree obscured his view. Bryant had insisted on backing the car into the underbrush surrounding the car park because he didn’t want Greenwood spotting them.
‘He’s checking out another underground river.’
‘What makes you say that? Don’t tell me you’re developing a psychic link with him.’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ Bryant unglued a sherbet lemon, popped it in his mouth and sank down into the shell of his protective overcoat. ‘I’m basing my assumptions on concrete evidence, right here.’ He withdrew a folded section of map from his overcoat and tapped it.
May was rattled. ‘I don’t get this. It’s the first time in years that you haven’t tried to drag palmists, mediums, witches, druids or any one of your fringe specialists into a case to prove a point. I thought we’d at least end up with a dowser. But you seem quite happy to sit here and wait for the worst to happen.’
‘A dowser’s not a bad idea. I thought you preferred me like this, calm and rational.’ The boiled sweet clattered against his false teeth.
‘Yes, I do, but it’s starting to bother me.’
‘I don’t have much choice in the matter. At first I presumed that your pal was a total innocent, duped into something nefarious by a dodgy speculator or some kind of burglar. But now I’m starting to think that he’s ready to go beyond the law in order to provide some kind of illegal service.’
‘How do you know he’s even breaking the law?’ asked May.
‘According to Meera, he’s not requested permission to enter premises, and he hasn’t petitioned the London Water Authority, who have to be officially notified of right-of-way access in the case of underground waterways. You told me that Mr Greenwood was an ordinary penniless academic until his first brush with criminals. My guess is that he’s in some kind of transitional phase. Who knows what he’ll decide to be next? People drift away into all kinds of dark worlds, and sometimes nothing can bring them back.’
‘Hm.’ May shrugged. They had seen Greenwood, wearing a yellow hardhat and wrapped in a coil of rope, heading across a piece of waste ground with the Egyptian in tow. The pair of them had vanished inside a boarded-up railway arch.
‘Look around you. Know where you are?’
May scanned the landscape. ‘South of Vauxhall Bridge. The kind of place tourists never see. No Man’s Land.’
‘ “Those