Lost - Michael Robotham [87]
Moley wants us to keep moving. The tunnel goes straight on with occasional vertical shafts emptying into it from above creating mini-waterfalls. Keeping to the center of the stream, our boots slosh through the sediment and cold grayish water. Slowly the passages grow wider and taller and our shadows no longer stoop against the walls.
Tethered together we descend into a shaft and wade silently along a larger sewer. Occasionally we slide down cement slopes, splashing through several inches of stinking water. At other times we near the surface and faint beams of light angle through iron grates.
I try to imagine the ransom, divided and sealed in plastic, being carried through these tunnels, dropping over waterfalls, floating through crypts.
For another hour we walk, crawl and slide. Eventually, we emerge into a cavernous Victorian brick chamber supported by pillars and arches. It must be thirty feet high, although it’s hard to tell in the darkness. White-green water seems to boil at my feet, plunging over a waterfall.
Everywhere there are rusty iron gratings and long chains hanging from the roof. A concrete weir, made up of two large spillways, divides the room. Foaming gouts of waste are swept away by a great culvert that intercepts the flow above the spillway.
Below it, down the sliding concrete weir, is a large empty concrete pool featuring huge hinged steel gates with counterweights on the top end to act like levers and seal the doors closed.
Angus sits on the edge of the spillway and takes a sandwich from his pocket, unwrapping the plastic film.
He motions with his sandwich. “That over there is the low-level interceptory sewer. It starts at Chiswick and runs east beneath the Thames Embankment to the Abbey Mills pumping station in east London. Everything gets diverted from here to the treatment works.”
“Why the spillway?”
“Storms. You get a decent downpour in London and there’s nowhere for the rain to go except into the drains. Thousands of miles of small local lines feed into the main sewers. First you get a gust of wind and then the whoosh!”
“Whoosh!” echoes Moley.
Angus picks a crumb off his chest. “The system can only accommodate a certain level of water. You don’t want it backing up or the politicians would be knee-deep in shit in Westminster. I’m talking literally. So when the water reaches a certain level it spills over the weir and gets diverted through those gates.” He points at the huge iron doors, which must each weigh about three tons. “They open like a valve when floodwaters come roaring over the weir.”
“Where does it go?”
“Straight into the Thames at a good ten knots.”
Suddenly another scenario emerges, swirling around me like the smell of almonds. The Thames Water foreman described the water main having “blown apart,” creating a tremendous flood. This would have discouraged anyone from following the ransom and could also have served another purpose—to carry the packages over the weir.
“I need to get through those gates.”
“You can’t,” says Moley. “They only open during floods.”
“But you can get me there. You know where it comes out.”
Moley scratches his armpits and rocks his head from side to side. My whole body has started to itch.
24
Weatherman Pete produces a high-pressure hose and hooks it up to a tap. The blast of water knocks me back a step. I turn around and around, getting pummeled by the spray.
The van is parked almost directly above an open manhole in Ranelagh Gardens in the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea. The grand hospital buildings, painted by the rising sun, are just visible through the trees. Nearby, at Chelsea Barracks, I can hear the strains of a military band practicing.
These gardens are normally