ripe for resale. He was stacking them in the cabin of the truck when he felt the man’s eyes on him, a prickling of his back that told him someone was watching.
It was almost dark now, and the light on the corner had still not been replaced. Looking up, all he could see was the empty street, the figure of a young woman—Kallie, the pretty new neighbour who had purchased number 5—vanishing into the next road, and the tall rustling bushes that bordered the waste ground. He moved behind the truck to dig again, just for five more minutes. It was hard to stop, knowing that there might be some other treasure waiting to be unearthed. The pit left by the bricks had already filled with dense brown liquid, as if fed by some unseen river. He wanted to jump down and continue digging, but was worried about losing his work boots in the mire. The back wall of the hole was already collapsing as the water took it, undermined from below.
He stopped and glanced back at the bushes just in time to see the branches close. It wouldn’t be kids, they couldn’t be torn from their terminals on sunny days, let alone on wretched nights like this. Something in the water surfaced for a moment, just long enough to give him hope. There was no way of avoiding it; he had to lower himself into the cavity and use his hands to search. There was nothing harmful in London soil, just soot and stones kept long from the light.
He didn’t see it, but he would have heard, if only thunder hadn’t bellowed the air once more. The first stone fell into the churning water with a plop, not enough to draw him from the task of finding what he’d seen. He groped deeper, feeling some small metal item slip from his fingers. He bent and reached again, his fingers closing over something that pricked him. A child’s badge: I Am 10. He tossed it back into the water in disgust. Moments later, the thick dank earth cascaded about him in a quicksilver torrent, pouring from above as if the world had collapsed upon itself, the pickaxe-broken concrete slabs skimming on plumes of soil as they slid from the diagonal bed of the truck, gathering lethal speed in their fall. One sizeable piece fractured his neck from behind, sending him face-down into the shallow swamp. He gasped in shock, drawing only the slippery loam-clouds of the ditch into his throat as earth and stones surged down with a terrible stifling weight, pulling him over, choking out his life in a grotesquely mechanized premature burial.
In his final moments, the thought flew by that he might be preserved in the city’s compacted dust and clay, to lie for ever in the fields beneath, truly a man of the soil.
20
* * *
SEEING AND BELIEVING
Arthur Bryant stood at the edge of the waste ground in his sagging hat and baggy black mackintosh, looking like a cross between a collapsed umbrella and an extremely decrepit vampire. ‘Have you found anything?’ he called.
‘Insofar as I have no idea what I’m searching for,’ said Giles Kershaw, ‘not a dicky bird.’ The young forensic expert’s exquisitely enunciated English grated on Bryant, who was taking perverse pleasure in having him stand thigh-deep in a water-filled ditch in the pouring rain.
‘Why don’t we let him come back when things have dried out a little?’ John May suggested.
‘Because there’ll be nothing left by that time. Look around you.’
Bryant was right. A steady torrent of rainwater was passing over the waste ground, carrying detritus down the slope of the street toward a blocked-up drain, swirling it into scummy pools. The area in front of the builders’ merchant formed a rough triangle at the junction of the road. Elliot had succeeded in breaking up the surface concrete and tarmac, and had dug down below layers of compacted brick to rich fulvous earth, removing entire sections which he had loaded on to his truck. It must have taken him all day to do so; the truck had been half-full when it had shed its load.
‘Mind you, according to Blake, everything exists for ever,’ said Bryant. ‘Matter is like experience, it accumulates and remains, albeit in unrecognizable forms.’
‘That’s not much help right now, old chap,’ replied Kershaw, ladling another shovelful of muck on to the bank. ‘There’s been so much rebuilding around here that there’s only rubble near the surface. The actual topsoil doesn’t start