Whispers Underground by Ben Aaronovitch

Author:Ben Aaronovitch [Aaronovitch, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781625676078
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

15

Bayswater

The British have always been madly over-ambitious and from one angle it can seem like bravery, but from another it looks suspiciously like a lack of foresight. The London Underground was no exception and was built by a breed of entrepreneurs whose grasp was matched only by the size of their sideburns. While their equally gloriously bewhiskered counterparts across the Atlantic were busy blowing each other to pieces in a Civil War they embarked on the construction of the Metropolitan Line knowing only one thing for certain – there was no way they were going to be able to run steam trains through it.

Experience with the established long tunnels of the mainline railways had proven that, unless you liked breathing smoke, you wanted to get through the tunnel as fast as possible. You certainly didn’t want to stay in there permanently, let alone stop at an equally enclosed station to take on passengers. So they tried pneumatic tunnels but they couldn’t maintain a seal. They tried superheated bricks but they weren’t reliable. They burnt coke but the fumes from that proved even more toxic than coal smoke. What they were waiting for was electric trains, but they were twenty years too early.

So steam it was. And because of that the London Underground was a lot less underground than originally planned. Where the tracks ran under an existing roadway they put in steam grates and, wherever the tracks didn’t, they tried to leave the roof off as much as possible. One such ‘cut’ famously existed at Leinster Road where, in order to hide the unsightly railway from sensitive middle-class eyes, two brick facades were built that seamlessly replicated the grand Georgian terrace that had been demolished to dig it. These fake houses, with their convincing but blind painted windows, became an endless source of humour to the kind of people who think making minimum-wage pizza delivery guys go to a false address is the highest form of wit.

Everyone knows about Leinster Road, except perhaps minimum-wage pizza delivery guys, but I’d never heard of any fake houses west of Bayswater Station. Once you knew what you were looking for they were easy to spot on the satellite view of Google Maps, although their nature was somewhat disguised by the oblique angle of the aerial photograph. Me and Lesley talked our way into one of the flats above the shopping arcade on the Moscow Road, which had a good view over the back of the house where Kevin Nolan had delivered his greenery. From there it was obvious that, while the buildings were less than a full house, they were more than just a facade.

‘It’s like someone only built the front rooms,’ said Lesley.

Where the rear rooms and back garden should have been there was a sheer drop to the track bed six metres below.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But why?’

Lesley dangled the keys she’d confiscated from Kevin Nolan in front of my face.

‘Why don’t we go find out?’ she said. She must have detached them from Kevin when we put him in a car to send him off to AB to be interviewed.

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