It was gradually beginning to grow light when Gemma and Jim Feather and a team of five radar specialists set out from the Crane’s Drains building in two white vans with the crane symbol on the side.
The clouds were so low that they could hear the constant stream of planes thundering on their way to land at Heathrow airport in the west, but they couldn’t see them.
Gemma had prepared a map of the five abandoned cesspits that were connected with the local sewers, based on the map used by the nineteenth-century night-soil company. Several of the houses on Mr Clarke’s original map had been demolished or bombed during the war, so she had updated it to show any houses or shops or blocks of flats that had been built in their place.
They drove first to the large early-Victorian house on the corner of Talfourd Place. Gemma had already contacted the owners and asked for permission to survey the back of the property, and so the GPR team unloaded their radar equipment and carried it around to the garden.
‘I hope this ain’t no yeti hunt,’ said Jim Feather, as he and Gemma followed them through the garden gate.
‘It could be, Jim. But I don’t know. I have such a strong feeling about it, that’s all. I kept asking myself where would I hide, if I was one of those children, and I was down in the sewers?’
‘If I was a kid, I’d never go down in the sewers in the first place. I grew up above ground in Lewisham and that was bad enough.’
‘I tried to put myself in their place, that’s all.’
‘Well, respect to you for that. I can’t even begin to imagine what it must be like to be living in a sewer with a bonce the size of a medicine ball or half my guts hanging out.’
It took the best part of an hour to survey the garden. The cesspit was still there, under the ground, but it had been completely filled in with topsoil, and all the GPR team could find was a hoe with a broken handle and the skeletons of three cats, which had presumably been buried by their owners when they died.
‘All right, on to the next one,’ said Gemma.
The next disused cesspit was located at Carlton Grove, on the corner of Peckham High Street. It had once been the site of an imposing house, which between the wars had been converted into eight flats. In the summer of 1943 it had been badly bombed and then demolished, and eventually it had been rebuilt as a four-storey block of flats with a Sainsbury’s mini-market underneath it.
Luckily for Gemma and the GPR team, the street level behind the mini-market had been left open for the residents to park their cars, so they were able to roll their radar scanners over the garage floors.
Again though, they found nothing. The blurry outline of the cesspit was still visible on their radar screens, but during the construction of the flats, it had mostly been filled in with concrete and rubble from the demolished house, to act as foundations.
Jim Feather said nothing as they climbed back into their van, but Gemma could tell what he was thinking. Waste of bloody time, this is.
The third house was further away to the east, in Tranquil Vale, Blackheath, overlooking the grassy heath and the spire of All Saints’ Church. This was an imposing five-bedroomed mansion built in 1829, with a tawny brick façade and a white-pillared porch. Although it was currently empty and up for sale, Gemma had been in touch with the estate agents, and they had given her permission to survey the rear of the property where the cesspit had been located.
‘I should’ve brought a flask of tea, shouldn’t I?’ said Gemma, clapping her hands together and shuffling her feet to keep warm.
‘I should’ve brought a full English breakfast,’ said Jim. ‘I’m so bloody hungry I could eat a baby through the bars of a cot.’
They watched as the GPR team systematically wheeled their instruments up and down the garden, which was laid out with octagonal rose beds and a vegetable patch and a circular patio with a sundial, although it was all beginning to look neglected and overgrown. A fine rain started falling, and still the invisible planes kept thundering overhead.
After about twenty minutes, the leader of the GPR team called out ‘Gemma!’ and beckoned her. He was a short bald-headed man with enormous tortoiseshell spectacles, which gave him the appearance of a cartoon character.
Gemma and Jim crossed over to the other side of the garden.
‘What is it, Norman? Don’t tell me you’ve found something.’
Norman pointed to the video screen attached to the handles of the ground-penetrating radar scanner.
‘See for yourself. The cesspit’s all covered over, but it’s never been filled in with soil or rubble, not like that last one at Carlton Grove. Now, see the breach in its left-hand side? That gives direct access to and from the main Blackheath sewer. I’d say that it was broken into when the sewer was first built, either by accident or on purpose.’
The other four members of Norman’s team were now gathered around them, and they were all watching Gemma intently to see what her reaction was going to be. Norman turned the radar scanner around through ninety degrees, and then he said, ‘There. Is this what we’ve been looking for?’
Gemma leaned forward, shading the screen with her hand so that she could see it more clearly. Along the right-hand side of the cesspit, at least twenty small figures were heaped up, their legs and arms intertwined with each other. The radar couldn’t show them in perfect detail, but it was obvious that some of them had oversized heads and others had distorted bodies and awkwardly angled legs. On the video screen, they had the appearance of a nest of grasshoppers.
None of them was moving, so Gemma could only assume that they were sleeping. Or – if they weren’t sleeping – that they were dead.
‘Yes,’ she said to Norman. She needed to take a moment to steady herself. ‘This is exactly what we’ve been looking for. Well done.’
Jim Feather took a look and sucked in his breath. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘What do we do now? We can’t just leave them there, can we? But they’re not really our responsibility, are they? I mean, without splitting hairs, Crane’s Drains are only contracted to take care of public sewers and storm drains – not disused cesspits on private property.’
‘Jim – these are the children who attacked us. These are the children who took Martin away so that he could have his legs cut off and his eyes pulled out. That’s if they are children, which I’m beginning to doubt. They’ve made it impossible for us to carry out our contract and maintain the sewers, so – yes, we are responsible for them, in a way. Responsible for getting rid of them, anyway.’
‘So do we dig down and haul them out? And then what do we do with them?’
‘No, we don’t dig them out,’ said Gemma. ‘That cesspit is at least two metres deep, and the moment they heard us digging, they’d probably try to escape through the sewers. God alone knows where they’d find to hide themselves then.
‘The first thing I’m going to do is call Detective Sergeant Patel and tell her that we’ve found them. We’re going to need police officers, aren’t we, and probably first-aiders too. Then the best way to get them out of there would be to approach them through the sewer, the same way they got in there. I noticed that there’s manhole access on the far side of the heath.’
‘You don’t think there’s any danger of the same thing happening like it did at Southampton Way?’ asked Jim Feather. ‘Sewage blasting out, and us all getting chopped to bits?’
‘I don’t know, Jim. I hope not. We’ll need to stay hyper-alert, that’s all. If there’s any sign of flooding, or wind, or the lights going funny, we’ll have to get out of there fast. But this is much higher ground than Southampton Way and it’s only about two hundred metres from the manhole to the cesspit. And we can’t just leave those children in there. There’s no way.’
‘If you say so,’ said Jim Feather. ‘If it was up to me, I’d brick them up and fucking forget about them.’
*
Jerry was in the kitchenette of his flat in Tooting, frying himself two eggs, when his phone played ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’.
‘Jerry? It’s Jamila. She’s found them.’
‘Oh, yeah? Who’s found what?’
‘Gemma Bright. That hunch she had about cesspits – she was right. She took out a team of ground radar specialists early this morning, and she’s found where the children are hiding. They’re in a disused cesspit under a house on the edge of Blackheath. She thinks there must be at least twenty of them.’
‘Blackheath? That’s posh. At least they’re not hiding anywhere downmarket.’
‘She’s still out there now, with her radar team. She says the children look as if they’re asleep, but she’s keeping a watch on them to make sure they don’t wake up and make a run for it. Her suggestion is that we go down the sewer from the nearest manhole and bring them out from the cesspit the way they got in.’
‘Oh, no. Not down the sewer again. And if there’s twenty of them – Jesus, we’re going to need at least two dozen uniforms to back us up… plus paramedics, in case any of them are sick, or put up a fight and get injured, plus at least two buses, or vans. And what are we going to do with them, once we’ve got them all out? Every one of them has some kind of special need or another, and that’s putting it mildly.’
‘I know, Jerry. But I’ll be contacting DCI Walters right away, to get it all set up. We need to do this as soon as possible.’
‘I’m supposed to be picking up Alice this morning.’
‘I’m sorry. You will have to put her off.’
‘Great. The ex is going to love me even less than she does already. And Alice has been looking forward to it for a fortnight.’
‘I’m sorry. But DCI Walters will expect us to be there, and it’s imperative that we are. The MIT may be in overall charge, but this is our investigation, after all – yours and mine.’
‘To be honest with you, sarge, I never believed that Gemma would actually find them. But there’s something else we need to think about. What happens if everything goes green again, and that smoky cloaky hoody thing shows up and starts throwing keys at us and tearing us all to bits?’
‘I don’t know, Jerry. But we’ll never understand what this is all about unless we do everything we can to confront it. Look – I’ll meet you at the station at ten. DCI Walters should have been able to get most of the task force together by then.’
Jerry’s eggs were becoming crisp and burned around the edges, and his kitchenette started to fill with smoke, so he quickly lifted the frying pan off the hob. ‘Okay, sarge, okay. I’ll see you then. By the way, did you manage to find out what that song was all about – “come up you shadows and come down you crows” or whatever it was?’
‘Not yet, no. I googled it, but I couldn’t find anything that matched.’
‘I told you. She couldn’t have heard it right – that’s if she heard it at all and it wasn’t just a figleaf of her imagination.’
‘Never mind. I will see you later. I am truly sorry about your access visit with Alice, but I am afraid such disappointments are part of the job.’
‘Tell me about it. I knew I should have been an accountant.’
‘Jerry – you can’t even work out the tip on a restaurant bill.’
‘Well, maybe a golf pro. Or a masseur. I wouldn’t have minded being a masseur.’
‘Try to be early, if you can. We’ll have a great deal of preparation to do.’