Lost - Michael Robotham [76]
A chill wades through my skin like it’s five o’clock in the morning. The Professor says coincidences are just two things happening simultaneously, but I don’t believe that. Nothing twists a knife quicker than fate.
19
The Thames Water truck is parked halfway down Priory Road, facing south into the low sun. A foreman is standing beside it, sucking on a cigarette. He straightens up and adjusts his crotch. “This is my day off, it had better be important.”
Not surprisingly, he looks like a man with nothing more important to do than play billiards with his mates at the pub.
Ali makes the introductions and the foreman grows more circumspect.
“Mr. Donovan, on September 26 you repaired a burst water main in this street.”
“Why? Is someone complaining? We did nothing wrong.”
Interrupting his excuses, I tell him I just want to know what happened.
Crushing the cigarette under his heel, he nods toward a dark stain of fresh bitumen covering thirty feet of road. “Looked like the Grand fucking Canyon, it did. Half this road got washed away. I ain’t never seen a water main rupture like that one.”
“How do you mean?”
He hitches up his trousers. “Well, you see, some of these pipes have been around for a hundred years and they’re wearing out. Fix one and another one goes. Bang! It’s like trying to plug a dozen holes when you only got ten fingers.”
“But this one was different?”
“Yeah. Mostly they break on a join—the weakest point. This one just sort of blew apart.” He presses his hands together and springs them open. “We couldn’t reseal it. We had to replace twenty feet of pipe.”
“Any idea what would have caused a break like that?” asks Ali.
He shakes his head and adjusts his crotch again. “Lew, a guy on our crew, used to be a sapper in the army. He reckoned it was some sort of explosion because of the way the metal got bent out of shape. He figured maybe a pocket of methane ignited in the sewers.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Nope. Used to happen a lot. Nowadays they vent the sewers better. I heard about something similar to this a few years back. Flooded six streets in Bayswater.”
Ali has been walking up and down the road, peering between her feet. “How do you know where the pipes are?” she asks.
“That depends,” says Donovan. “A magnetometer can pick up iron and sometimes we need ground-probing radar, but in most cases you don’t need any gizmos. The mains are built alongside the sewers.”
“And how do you find those?”
“You walk downhill. The whole system is gravity fed.”
Crouching down I run my fingers over a metal grate covering a drain. The bars are about three-quarters of an inch apart. The ransom had been wrapped very carefully. Each package was waterproof and designed to float. They were 6 inches long, 21⁄2 inches wide and 3⁄4 inch deep … just the right size.
Whoever sent the demand must have expected a tracking device. And the one place a transmitter or a global positioning system can’t operate is below ground.
“Can you get me down in the drains, Mr. Donovan?”
“You’re joking, right?”
“Humor me.”
He rocks his hand back and forth. “Since 9/11 they been right edgy about the sewers. You take the Tyburn sewer—it runs right under the U.S. ambassador’s residence and Buckingham Palace. The Tachbrook goes under Pimlico. You won’t find ‘em on maps—least not the maps they publish nowadays. And you won’t even find the records in public libraries. They took ‘em away.”
“But it still must be possible. I can make an application.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Might take a while.”
“How long?”
He rubs his chin. “Few weeks, I guess.”
I can see where this is going. The vast, moribund wheels of British bureaucracy will take my request and pass it between committees, subcommittees and working groups where it will be debated, deliberated upon, knocked about and run up the flagpole—and that’s just to decide a form of words for the rejection.
Well, there is more