hated seeing a good mind go to waste.
‘Mr Bryant usually brings me his palaeographic conundrums for reinterpretation,’ Kirkpatrick explained, ‘although, alas, I fear his recent reluctance to employ my services suggests that the age of the erudite criminal has passed along with the locked-room mystery, clean public toilets and a quality postal service.’
‘I think we have some of the information you’re after,’ said Maggie, pouring ginger tea for everyone as Bryant snatched a recruitment brochure away from David. ‘John told me about the man who died in Balaklava Street, and it doesn’t come as a surprise.’
‘Oh, really? Why?’
‘Because it appears to be a hot spot of psychic activity. There have always been strange stories surrounding the area.’
‘What kind of stories?’
‘It’s long been considered unhealthy to live there because of bad humours rising from the ground. In the fifties, it suffered from sudden mists and smogs that sprang up from the drains and vanished just as quickly. It’s in a bit of a dip, you see. A vale. Some are still marked in London, like Maida Vale. Others have been forgotten, like the one in Kentish Town. It’s a very old area. Camden was a late arrival in the neighbourhood, 1791 to be exact, and yet they managed to come up with plenty of local legends, ghosts, witches and murderers. You can imagine how many more myths Kentish Town built up in the preceding centuries.’
‘The name is derived from Ken-Ditch,’ Kirkpatrick pointed out, ‘meaning the bed of a waterway.’
‘The town, combined under its original alias with St Pancras, has been here for well over a thousand years,’ Maggie pointed out. ‘An entire millennium of harmful atmosphere. Don’t forget that it grew up around a rushing river. The water turned mill-blades and provided the lifeblood for its residents. A great many ancient documents refer to the “calm clacking of the mills”. Now all we hear is the wail of police sirens. And the river has long been sealed underground.’
‘This lad’s father works for the water board. He knows a fair bit about it,’ said Bryant. ‘Part of the Fleet, yes?’
‘From the Saxon fleete or fleot, a flood, or the Anglo-Saxon fleotan, to float,’ Kirkpatrick intoned.
‘It runs down to the Regent’s Canal, but nobody’s sure exactly where it flows,’ added Maggie. ‘There’s a run-off around here called Fog’s Well, for obvious reasons. Long gone now.’
‘Did you have any luck with my information?’ asked Bryant.
‘Your brief was a bit vague.’ She checked her notes. ‘Around 1840, the land was sold off in neat little plots that followed the rivers and meadow boundaries. Forty years later the plans had changed, with more roads and houses being squeezed on to the original layout. According to my contact at Camden Council, in the 1960s the local authority drew up a new design for the area, a concrete wasteland of tower blocks. Thankfully, it never came to fruition.’ She peered over her reading glasses. ‘Honestly, we spend so much time attempting to improve ourselves, taking self-help courses, going to the gym, trying to develop more meaningful relationships with one another, and yet we dismiss the other associations we need to support our fragile well-being.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everyone interacts with their location, Arthur. Where we live helps set the level of our happiness and comfort. The English have strongly developed psychological relationships with the landscape. They travelled so little that accents changed from one street to the next. There’s a famous Punch cartoon showing two locals throwing a brick at a stranger; that’s the nineteenth-century English for you—antipathy to outsiders. These days, our relationships with views, buildings, places, objects and strangers are virtually ignored. As a child, you probably had a place that made you happy—nothing special, a small corner of sun-lit grass where you kicked a ball or read a comic. As an adult, you search for an equivalent to that spot. Can you ever truly find it again?’
‘I like to take my kite on Parliament Hill,’ said David. ‘You can feel the wind going round you.’
‘There you are.’ Maggie ruffled the boy’s hair. ‘When bureaucrats radically transform an area they remove its markers, damaging scale and ignoring the natural historical landscape. Such an area will quickly become a “no-go” zone, unsafe and disliked by everyone, because we no longer have ways of forming attachments to such a place. When the rivers were covered, we lost something of ourselves. Dreams of lakes and rivers are dreams of calm. No wonder lost rivers hold such mystique. We need to