Through all the occult jurisprudence since then, chasing things down and banging them up, that sort of fuckity vigour was what she had always seen as being police. The lack of it in him was what had made Collingswood impatient with, if amused by, Billy Harrow.
With a pitch inside, Collingswood considered the possibility that Baron was not sure what to do. She thought about that. She examined that as carefully as if it were something she had picked off the floor and was trying to identify. Officers walked around her where she stood-she was there long enough. Some of them didn’t even give her an odd look. Collingswood, you know.
She stood near the dispatch room, so she was the first FSRC officer the messenger saw to give word to. It was she, then, who shoved open the door on Baron sitting folded-armed staring glumly at his computer, hung to the doorframe with one hand like a kid on a climbing frame, and said, “Ask and you receive, boss. Currently hospitalised. But it’s info.”
IT WAS A SHITTY DAY, ALL SODDEN DRAB GREY AIR AND A SULKY wind as irritating as a child. Despite that Marge spent the morning outside, in the Thames Barrier Park. She trudged in drizzle through the waveform topiary, past miniature football pitches. That morning she had cried a long time about Leon, and it had felt like a last time. She had finished, but it was as if the sky had not.
Marge suspected that she did not have a job anymore. Her boss was a friend, but her repeated nonanswering of his messages must have put him in an impossible position.
It was not as if she felt confused. It was not as if she felt driven, precisely, overtaken, losing her mind, anything like that. It was just, she thought, that she could not concentrate on anything else. She was not hysterical. It was just that having discovered that London was not what it was supposed to be, having discovered that the world had been lying to her, she had to know more. And she still had to know what had happened to Leon.
Not that he was alive. She knew that ridiculous sputtering message in bad light must be true.
Which brought her here, to this little sculpted grassland by the river’s defences. There at the notional mouth of the river, by the industrial lowlands of Silvertown, the piers of the Thames Flood Barrier squatted in the water like huge alien hives, like silver-carapaced visitors. Between them chopped brown water, and below that water in the slime of the river’s bed ten gates hunkered, ready to rise.
It was a long way round to the foot tunnel in Woolwich, but Marge had the whole day. She could see the barrier control building rise from the roofs of the south bank. She thumbed at her phone.
Christ Jesus it was depressing, she thought, this part of the city. She took the route by City Airport and under the river, huddling into her coat. She did not check the details she had printed out: she knew them by now. The information had been hard to winkle out of her online informants but not that hard. It had taken wheedling and guile but not quite as bloody much as it should have done if you asked her. As she’d been able to tell, yes, these were “secret” bulletin boards, but plenty of their members were just bursting with pride about what they knew. It was all I’ve said too much, and You did not hear this from me.
From who, you fucking prick? Marge had thought at that particular disavowal. All I know is your screen name, which is blessedladee777 if you fucking please, so please just get on with it.
Pre-armed by the cult-collector with the terms “floodbrother,” and the location of “the barrier,” it had taken a couple of days, but no more, to uncover a little bit more information. This time it was a place of work and an affiliation, the outlines of a system of belief.
Marge finished her cigarette. She shook her head and jogged on the spot for a bit, then came rushing into the Thames Barrier Visitors’ Centre. The woman behind the reception desk stared at her in alarm. “You have to help me,” Marge said. She made herself gabble. “No, listen. Someone here calls themself floodbrother, yeah online. Listen, you have to get them a message.”
“I, I, what, what’s their name?”
“I don’t know, but I’m not crazy. I swear. Please, this is a matter of life and death. I mean it, literally. There must be a way of getting a message to everyone who works here. I’m not talking just about the Visitors’ Centre, I’m talking about the engineering. Listen to me, I’m begging you, I’m begging you.” She grabbed the woman’s hand. “Tell whoever here’s nickname’s floodbrother, just say that, that there’s a message from Tyno Helig. He’ll understand. Believe me. Tyno Helig, got it?” She scribbled the name on a scrap. “I’ll be waiting. I’ll be in Maryon Park. Please.”
Marge stared into the woman’s eye and tried for some insinuatory sisterly thing. She wasn’t sure how well it went. She ran out and away, until she had turned a corner, at which point she slowed and wandered calmly along Warspite Road, past the roundabout to the park.
The weather was too different and too bad to jog much reminiscence, but she looked around until she was pretty sure she had found a spot recognizable from the film Blow-Up. She sat as close to it as she could. She watched everyone who came in. She fingered the little flick-knife she had bought, for whatever useless good it would be. She was banking rather on daylight and passersby. Marge wondered whether she would know if her quarry entered the park.
In the event, when, after almost an hour, her call was answered, there was no question at all. It was not one person but three. All men, they strode urgently along the little paths, looking in all directions. They were big, athletic guys. They wore identical engineers’ uniforms. The oldest, at the front, was gesturing to his two companions to fan out. Marge stood: she would feel safer facing all three of them than one. They saw her immediately. She closed her hand around her knife.
“Hi,” she said. “I’m Tyno Helig.”
They hung just a little back. Their fists were clenched. The front man’s jaw worked with tension.
“Who,” he said, “are you? What the hell are you doing? You said you had a message?”
She could see his contradictory emotions. Rage, of course, that they should be discovered and outed at work, when they were in mufti. Rage that they should be mocked like this, their faith scorned, as she could see him think surely this must be. And yet, as well as that anger, wrestling with it, excitement. She recognised that little bastard hope. “What’s your message?” he said.
Her plan had worked, then. Tyno Helig, no person but a place: one of the sunken kingdoms, the Welsh Atlantis. That, she had thought, making her plan, should intrigue them. “Who are you?” the man said.
“Sorry for misleading you,” she said. “I needed to get you out. I’m sorry”-she hesitated for a second, but sod it, she was too tired not to piss people off-“this isn’t about your aspirational tidal wave. I have a question for you.”
The man raised his clenched fist to his head, as if he would hit himself, then suddenly grabbed her by the lapels. His companions crowded them, shielding them from others’ view. “Our what?” he whispered. “You have a question? Do you know who we are? You better start convincing me not to drown you. Do you know who we are?”
SHE HAD AN IDEA, YES. OUTRÉ BELIEFS WOULD KEEP CROPPING UP IN her researches. She had trawled around hard enough for the info.
The Communion of the Blessèd Flood. The rainbow, she gathered from some furtive online theologian, wasn’t a promise: it was a curse. The fall didn’t come when the first couple left the garden: all that was some ghastly prerapturous dreamtime of trials. What happened was that God rewarded his faithful with eventual holy rains.
Mistranslation, she had read. If what Noah, Ziusudra, Utnapishtim or the same figure by any other name had been told to build was a ship, why did the Torah not say so? Why was his ark not an oniyah, a ship, but a tebah-a box? Because it was built not to ride the waves God sent, but to move below them. History’s first submarine, in gopher wood, three hundred cubits long, travelling the new world of God’s promise. It harvested the meadows of kelp. But those chosen for the watered paradise had failed, and God had been wrathful and withdrawn the seas. That landscape of punishment was where we lived, exiled from the ocean.