For the Good of the Town

Chapter One: Last Friday in October

Alan Atkinson had walked the leat so often that he could have done it blind, and that night he very nearly had to.

The rain had gone past weather and into something else. It came off the moor in sheets that hit the hood of his coat like handfuls of gravel, and the beam of his torch stopped dead eight feet in front of him, as though the dark had been bricked up. He walked the towpath with his shoulder to the wind, counting the gratings the way he always did — three above the mill, two below — and at each one he knelt and pulled the weed out with his hands because the rake was no use in that current.

Below him the River Ryne was not a river anymore. It was a noise.

Twenty-six years he had been lengthsman for the Ryne Valley drainage board. Before that he had been at the mill, and before that he had been a boy who fished for sticklebacks in the same water. There were men in Harbrook with letters after their names who could tell you what the catchment did in theory. Alan could tell you what it did. He knew that when the rain came in from the west and sat over Grindle Edge for six hours, the river rose in the town three hours later, and that when it came in from the south-west and the ground was already full, it rose in one.

It had been coming from the south-west since Wednesday.

He reached the gate at Fuller's Cut at twenty past ten. The cut was the old mill leat, a straight stone channel dug out three hundred years ago to take water off the Ryne, run it under the wheelhouse and let it back into the river a mile downstream. The mill had gone. The cut had not. It had one job now, and the job was written on a laminated sheet in the drainage board's operations file: at a gauge level of one metre ninety at the Bridge Street board, the gate at Fuller's Cut is to be opened slowly, over a period of not less than forty minutes, to bleed floodwater into Chapel Meadow, which will store it and release it downstream of the town.

Slowly. That was the word that mattered. Open it slowly and the water crept out across the meadow like a spilled drink and stayed there and did no harm to anyone. Open it fast, with a high head behind it, and it did not creep. It ran. And on the far side of Chapel Meadow, where the ground fell two feet in a hundred yards, were the back yards of Chapel Row.

Alan shone the torch at the gauge board on the wheelhouse wall.

One metre ninety-four.

He took out his phone with his back to the wind and rang Kenneth Cooper.

The authorisation was Kenneth's to give. It had not always been that way. It had become that way four years ago, after a farmer downstream sued the board over a flooded silage clamp, and the solicitors decided that no gate should be moved in the Ryne valley without a named officer authorising it in writing, and the named officer was Kenneth Cooper, Director of Environment and Regeneration at the borough, and clerk to the drainage board. Alan had said at the time that it was daft, that a gate needed opening when it needed opening. He had been told, pleasantly, that it was about liability. Everything was about liability now.

The phone rang out. He got the voicemail — Kenneth's voice, warm and unhurried, giving office hours.

"Alan Atkinson, Fuller's Cut. Gauge is one ninety-four and going. I want to open. Ring me."

He waited three minutes. Longer than that and he'd have been standing still in the rain for nothing. He rang the out-of-hours duty number and got a woman in a call centre in another county who asked him to spell Harbrook twice and said she would pass a message to the on-call manager.

"Who's the on-call manager?"

"It says here Mr Cooper."

At five past eleven he rang again. At quarter past he rang the office landline, knowing it was empty, listening to it ring in a dark building above the square for the sake of doing something. At twenty past he stood with his hand flat on the cold iron of the winding wheel and thought seriously about opening it anyway.

He should have.

He would think about that for the rest of his life, in the way that a man thinks about a step he did not take on a stair he has climbed ten thousand times. He was not a coward. He was fifty-eight, and he had a mortgage with nine years left, and he had been disciplined once in 1999 for moving a penstock without a docket, and the memory of sitting in that room with his cap in his hands had lodged in him deeper than he ever admitted. And there was a laminated sheet, and a named officer, and everything was about liability.

So he waited, and the gauge went to one metre ninety-nine, and then it went past the top of the painted board altogether, and the Ryne came over the lip of the cut and ran across his boots, and the sound in the dark changed pitch.

His phone lit up at twenty to midnight.

"Alan." Kenneth Cooper, slightly breathless, somewhere with voices behind him and the clink of cutlery. "Sorry, I've been at the regeneration dinner over at Netherfield, phone was in my coat. What's your level?"

"Over the board."

A pause. "Over?"

"Over the top of the board, Kenneth. There is no number. It's in the cut and it's coming over the sill."

"Then open it. Open it now. I'll note the authorisation as eleven-fifteen."

Alan stood still for perhaps two seconds with rain running off his chin.

"Say that again."

But the line had gone, or Kenneth had gone, or the wind had taken it. Alan put the phone in his inside pocket, put both hands on the wheel, and began to wind.

He wound it slowly. He tried. He got four turns out of it and the pressure behind the gate took the rest, snatching the wheel through his palms so hard it burned the skin off two fingers, and the gate came up like a mouth opening, and the cut filled in a breath.

He had seen a lot of water in twenty-six years. He had never seen anything like what went down Fuller's Cut that night. It did not look like liquid. It looked like something solid being poured. It hit the bend by the wheelhouse and stood up against the wall and threw a wave of brown water and sticks and a fence panel clean over the parapet, and then it was gone past him into the dark towards Chapel Meadow.

Alan ran.

He was not a runner. He went along the towpath with his torch swinging, and the light caught the meadow as he came out of the trees, and Chapel Meadow was already gone. There was no creeping. There was a sheet of moving water four hundred yards wide with the tops of the hawthorns sticking out of it, and it was not sitting. It was travelling. It crossed the meadow in the time it took him to get halfway along the hedge, and then he heard it reach the back walls of Chapel Row: a long, low, grinding thump, like furniture being moved in an upstairs room.

Lights were coming on in the terrace. He could see them in a line, one after another, the way you'd see a fuse burn along a wire. Somebody was shouting a name. A car alarm started and drowned.

Alan got to the top of the row at four minutes to midnight and stood at the end of Chapel Street where the tarmac went under, and the water was already up to the sills of the parked cars, and it was still rising, and there was nothing in the world he could do about it.

Up the hill behind him, the market square was dry. The Georgian fronts, the church, the bank, the Weavers' Arms with its lights still on and its last customers arguing about the rain. Dry as a bone. It would be another hour before Barry Pickering went down to his cellar and found eight inches over the floor and started swearing.

The square had been saved. That was what the meeting would be told, afterwards, and it was true.

Alan stood at the waterline with his hands bleeding and watched the town he had looked after all his life divide itself along a line he had just drawn.