Lost - Michael Robotham [121]
“You got a problem, Missy?”
“Make them stop,” she wailed, with her hands clamped over her ears.
He didn’t seem to hear her. “You want to feed the birds?”
“The ducks,” she sobbed.
“You want to feed the ducks?”
Mickey howled again and the pigeon man raised his eyebrows. He could never understand children. Taking her hand, he went in search of a park attendant or the girl’s mother.
A policeman was already approaching. He pushed through the crowd and took in the scene. “I want you to let her go,” he demanded.
“I’m looking for her mother,” explained the pigeon man. Spittle clung to his tangled beard.
“Just let the girl go and step away.”
By then Rachel had arrived. She swept Mickey up, held her tightly, and the two of them tried to out-hug each other. Meanwhile, the pigeon man had his arms stretched wide on the back of a park bench, while the policeman patted him down and searched his pockets, spilling birdseed onto the grass.
Mickey didn’t ask to feed the ducks again. She didn’t go to the park and soon she stopped going outside Dolphin Mansions. A year later she saw her first therapist.
The children’s book that Timothy found in Mickey’s cubbyhole in the basement was about five little ducks who go out in the world and return home again. Mickey knew from experience that not all little ducks come back.
32
Weatherman Pete brushes milk foam from his mustache and motions toward the river with his paper cup. “Sewers are no place for little girls.”
His van is parked up on a boat ramp in the shadow of Putney Bridge where eight-oared shells skim the surface of the river like gigantic water beetles. Moley is asleep in the back of the van, curled up with one eye open.
“Where could they have kept her?”
Pete exhales slowly, making his lips vibrate. “There are hundreds of places—disused tube stations, service tunnels, bomb shelters, aqueducts, drains … What makes you think he’s hiding down there?”
“He’s scared. People are looking for him.”
Pete hums. “Takes a unique sort of individual to live down there.”
“He is unique.”
“No, you don’t get me. You take Moley. If he disappeared down there you wouldn’t find him in a hundred years. You see he likes the dark, just like some people prefer the cold. You know what I mean?”
“This guy isn’t like that.”
“So how does he know his way down there?”
“He’s going from memory. Someone showed him where to hide and how to move around. A former flusher called Ray Murphy.”
“Saccharine Ray! The boxer.”
“You know him?”
“Yeah, I know him. Ray was never really the genuine article as a boxer. He took more dives than Ruud van Nistelrooy. I don’t remember him working down the sewers.”
“It was a long time ago. After that he worked as a flood planner.”
A slow sweet smile spreads across Pete’s face like jam on toast. “The old HQ of London Flood Management is underground—in the Kingsway Tram Underpass.”
“But there haven’t been trams in central London for more than fifty years.”
“Precisely. The tunnel was abandoned. If you ask me it was a bloody silly place to have a flood emergency center. It would have been the first place under water if the Thames broke its banks. Bureaucrats!”
The Kingsway Underpass is one of those strange, almost secret, landmarks you find in cities. Tens of thousands of people walk past it and drive over it every day with no idea it’s there. All you can see is a railing fence and a cobblestone approach road before it disappears underground. It runs beneath Kingsway—one of the busiest streets in the West End—down to the Aldwych, where it turns right and comes out directly beneath Waterloo Bridge.
Weatherman Pete parks his van on the approach road, ignoring the painted red lines and NO STOPPING signs. He hands me a hard hat and pulls out a construction sign. “If anyone asks we work for the council.”
The remnants of the tram tracks are embedded in the stones and a large gate guards the entrance to the tunnel.
“Can we get inside?”
“That’d be illegal,” he says, producing