Low Water · Chapter 1

Dry Room

It rained in Calder the way other cities had weather: all the time, and from the top down. It fell first on the Lift, where the towers stood on the old high ground and Morrow-Kade, which owned the rain, kept its shoes dry. It fell on the Shelf, on the offices and the tram lines and the long blue coats of CivicGuard. And it came down at last on the Sump, where most of it ended up, and where five million people lived on their second floors because the first floors belonged to the sea.

Between the Sump and the sea there was the wall. Everyone in Calder could tell you how high it was. Nobody could tell you how long it had left.

Rook came down the outside stair from his office at seven, as he did every evening, and counted the steps, as he did every evening. Forty-one. Iron, slick, the rail worn smooth by other people’s hands. In four years they had never once come to forty-two, which was more than he could say for most things in the Sump.

Lin Ha’s noodle bar was steam and yellow light and the smell of broth. At the far end of the counter sat a threader he half knew, a big quiet man with a November tan, which meant he had been somewhere with a sun. Eight years ago the whole city had watched a woman open a door in the air. Now Morrow-Kade sent people through doors like that for a living, and they came home brown and quiet, with something not quite right in their hands, and nobody asked where they had been. It was not polite. It was not wise either.

‘Idris Mattock’s come back different,’ Lin Ha said, and put a bowl in front of him.

Rook picked up his spoon. Ginger, bone and star anise; the same broth she had made every night for as long as he had lived over her head. He had eaten it in better moods than this one and worse.

‘Different how?’

‘He thanks me now.’ Lin Ha wiped the counter where it did not need wiping. She was a small square woman of fifty-six with forearms like rope and spectacles pushed up into iron-grey hair, and she had spent thirty-one years as a structural engineer for the Sea Wall Authority, until Morrow-Kade bought the Authority and decided it did not need structural engineers any more. She had never told Rook the rest. He had never asked. It was one of the reasons they got on. ‘Eleven years, that boy has sat at my counter. He never once said thank you. Not rude. Just Idris. Now every time. Thank you, Lin Ha. Like a man in somebody else’s house.’

‘Contracts change people.’

‘Contracts make them shake.’ She nodded down the counter at the big threader, whose hands were around his bowl as if it were the only warm thing left in the world. ‘They don’t make them polite.’

‘Maybe he met a nice girl on the other side.’

‘He has a nice girl. Senna. Twelve years married.’ Lin Ha took his empty glass and refilled it with tea he had not asked for. ‘I’m not hiring you, Rook. I’m telling you. There’s a difference.’

‘Is there?’

‘Yes,’ said Lin Ha. ‘I don’t pay.’

He finished the broth. Outside, the rain had found the gap in the awning that it found every evening, and was running down the window in long grey threads. Across the cut, a public screen on the side of a tenement was showing the Morrow-Kade sunrise, blue-green and tender, over the words Building Tomorrow. Someone had thrown a bottle at it once. The screen had shown the sunrise through the crack for a year and a half until the franchise sent a man to fix it, and the man had fixed the crack and left the bottle where it lay.

Rook paid in scrip, three notes, each with the same small sunrise in the corner. Lin Ha folded them away into her apron without looking at them.

‘Thank you, Lin Ha,’ Rook said.

She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. ‘Don’t you start.’

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At eleven minutes past three in the morning, in a pumping station at the north end of the Sump that had been bricked shut for twenty-two years, a flood sensor that nobody remembered was still wired to anything registered water.

It registered it for four seconds. Then it registered nothing at all.

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Lin Ha came up the outside stair at half past eight with her coat on over her apron, which Rook had never seen before in four years, and knocked on his door with the side of her fist.

‘They want me at Skerry Lane,’ she said. ‘You’re coming.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘CivicGuard. The Authority. Everybody.’ She was already going back down. ‘Bring your coat. It’s the north end. It’s always worse at the north end.’

It was. The rain at the north end of the Sump came off the sea at an angle, as if the wall were only a suggestion, and the walkways there were older and narrower and the water under them was the colour of strong tea. Skerry Lane pumping station stood at the end of a spur where three cuts met, a square brick building with a slate roof and a chimney that had not smoked in Rook’s lifetime. CivicGuard had put a launch at the end of the spur and two constables in blue coats on the walkway, and somebody from the Sea Wall Authority in a yellow waterproof was standing in the rain with a tablet held against his chest, looking at the building as if it had insulted him personally.

Above the door, on the wall of the tenement opposite, a public screen was showing the sunrise.

The door of the pumping station was not a door any more. It was a rectangle of newer brick inside the old brick frame, and in the middle of it, at head height, there was a steel plate, rusted brown at the edges:

SEALED BY ORDER. SEA WALL AUTHORITY. L. HA, ENGINEER.

Somebody had cut a hole in the wall to the left of the door, a ragged gap knocked through the old brick with a breaker, big enough for a man to climb through stooping. Light came out of it, white and flat. So did a sergeant.

Rook knew him a little. Ottley: a long, tired man with a long, tired face, who had been a constable when Rook was a sergeant and had stayed one for years after Rook left, until somebody had promoted him out of embarrassment.

‘Mr Rook.’ Ottley looked from him to Lin Ha and back. ‘I asked for the engineer.’

‘You got her,’ Lin Ha said. ‘He’s carrying my bag.’

Rook was not carrying anything. Ottley let it go. He had let a great many things go in his time, and he had the face to prove it.

‘Flood sensor went off at three,’ he said. ‘Four seconds. The Authority’s system flagged it, because it’s an Authority sensor in a building that’s supposed to be dry as a biscuit, and some bright lad on the night desk sent a man out. The man looked through that grille,’ he nodded at a rusted ventilation grille high on the side wall, ‘and didn’t like it, and called us. We came in through the side. Not the door. Nobody’s touched the door.’

‘What did he see?’

Ottley looked at Lin Ha. ‘I need you to tell me nobody could have got in there.’

‘Then let me look,’ said Lin Ha, and went in through the hole in the wall before anyone could stop her.

Rook went after her.

The pumping station was one high square room with a gallery round three sides of it, and the great iron housings of the old pumps standing in the middle like the boilers of a drowned ship. The Authority man’s lamps had made it as bright as an operating theatre. It smelt of cold brick and old oil and something else underneath that Rook could not at first place, something clean and sharp and out of place, like the smell on a coat when somebody came in from a long way off.

The floor was dry. Not damp, not drying. Dry. Pale grey concrete, dusty in the corners, with a drain in the middle of it under a rusted iron grating.

In the middle of the floor, between the pumps and the drain, a man lay on his back with his arms flung out.

He was perhaps forty. Dark hair, cut short. Work clothes: canvas trousers, a thick jumper unravelling at one cuff, heavy boots. His face was grey-white and slack and peaceful, and his clothes were soaked through, dark with water, and his hair was plastered to his head. A thin crescent of pale sand had been left on the concrete around him, as if the tide had come in and laid him there and gone out again through the drain and taken everything with it except the sand.

Lin Ha did not look at the man for long. She looked at the door.

She went to it and put her hand flat on the inside of her own brickwork, and moved her hand along the courses, slowly, and then down, one course at a time, with her lips moving. Rook knew what she was doing. He had done it himself on a thousand staircases. He waited.

‘Thirty-four courses,’ she said at last. ‘Stretcher bond, with a header every sixth. That’s mine. My mortar. I mixed it too wet that day, it was raining, there’s a lip on every joint where it slumped.’ She took her hand away. ‘Nobody’s been through that door in twenty-two years, Rook. Not in. Not out.’

‘The grille?’

‘A cat couldn’t get through the grille.’

‘The roof.’

‘Slate on boards on joists. You’d hear it from the Lift.’ She looked up anyway. The roof was whole. ‘The drain goes to the pump sump and the sump goes through a non-return valve to the cut. Water can get out. Nothing gets in. That was the point of it.’

Rook went and crouched by the body, on the side away from the sand, and looked at the face for some time.

He had not known Idris Mattock well. But he had sat at the same counter as him on and off for four years, and before that he had seen him on the walkways, and in a hundred bars, and once, years ago, as a skinny boy of seventeen in a holding cell at the Quay Lane station, crying because he had been caught with a sack of copper pipe that was not his. Rook had let him go. He let a lot of boys go in those days.

It was Idris’s face. The scar through the left eyebrow, where a hook had caught him on the fish dock at fifteen. The nose, broken and set slightly to the right. On the back of the right hand, a small faded tattoo of a gull, done badly by a friend with a needle and a bottle of ink.

On the third finger of the left hand, there was no ring.

‘That’s Idris Mattock,’ Lin Ha said, behind him. Her voice was very flat.

‘It is,’ said Ottley, from the hole in the wall. ‘Except it isn’t. I sent a lad round to the Mattocks’ at half past seven. Idris Mattock opened the door himself in his vest and asked what was up.’ He took his cap off and wiped the rain from the band and put it back on. ‘So I’ve got a dead man who’s Idris Mattock, in a room nobody’s been in for twenty-two years, dry as a bone and wet as a fish, and I’ve got Idris Mattock at home eating his breakfast. You can see why I wanted the engineer.’

Rook stood up. His knee told him about it.

‘Cousin?’ he said.

‘No cousins. No brothers. His mother had the one, and she’s dead.’ Ottley looked at the body with something that was almost resentment. ‘I’ll call it misadventure. Unknown male. Somebody’s double. It happens.’

‘Does it?’

‘It does now,’ said Ottley, and went out into the rain to call the launch.

They carried the man out through the hole in the wall on a stretcher under a grey sheet, and lowered him into the launch, and the launch went away down the cut towards the Shelf with its blue light turning. On the tenement wall opposite, high above the water, the screen went on showing its sunrise and its two words, patient and enormous, over everything.

Lin Ha stood on the walkway in her coat and apron and watched the launch until it was gone.

‘You were right,’ Rook said.

‘About what?’

‘Idris.’

‘I’m not right,’ Lin Ha said. ‘I’m frightened. It’s not the same thing.’ She turned her collar up. ‘Go and see your doctor. I’m going to open. People still have to eat.’

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