A shape that shouldn’t be there
It lay at the deepest point of the canal’s western bend, still half-buried in the black silt that centuries of city living had deposited there. At first glance, it looked like a pipe — an industrial casing, perhaps, something left behind by construction crews who’d never come back for it. But pipes didn’t have rounded portholes. Pipes didn’t have rudder fins.
Declan crouched at the water’s edge and peered down. The canal bed was now exposed enough to walk on carefully, and he could see the full outline of the object emerging from the mud like a fossil coming to light. It was approximately fifteen metres long, in riveted steel, dark green-grey beneath the silt, pocked with rust but structurally intact. There was no question what it was.
“That’s a submarine,” Priya said, as though saying it out loud might make it less true.
Declan didn’t answer immediately. He was already thinking about who to call, and more pressingly, what on earth a submarine was doing at the bottom of a canal that was, at its widest point, barely twenty-two metres across.
