Bel looked at him incredulously. ‘That has to be the dumbest question of the day. What do you think?’ She waved her hand at the rainy street outside. ‘Look at it out there. It’s more like the tropics than London. Of course they should have more green policies. They should have had them twenty years ago. Look, we shouldn’t have called it global warming — it sounds too nice. Warm is comfortable, warm is cuddly. Well, global warming isn’t comfortable or cuddly; it isn’t even warm. The polar ice caps start melting. Then the Gulf Stream no longer protects us. You know what it’s like in New York in winter? Freezing. Miserable. You know what it’s like in Siberia in winter? Don’t even go there. That’s what this country will be like if the Gulf Stream stops coming our way. The last thing it will be is warm.’
An official wearing a conference organizer’s badge stepped forward from the wings. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that was Dr Bel Kelland from the environmental organization Fragile Planet. Now we’ll break for lunch.’
Bel picked up her papers and moved away from the lectern. The audience were already on their feet, heading resolutely for lunch. Bel could feel their relief as they were finally released, like school children waiting for the lesson to end. She felt irritated with them, but didn’t have time to indulge it. She had to be somewhere else. Ben would be arriving soon.
She hurried off the stage and started to make her way towards the doors at the back of the room. She zipped along a row of seats, trying to get ahead of the lunch crowd, and ran into a journalist with a scraped-back ponytail who was holding out a Dictaphone.
‘Dr Kelland, would now be a good time for our interview?’ Her manicured finger was hovering over the record button.
Bel looked at her watch. ‘Not really. I’m rushing to meet my son. Send me an e-mail at the office.’ She pressed a business card into the journalist’s hand, pushed aside some chairs and nipped through to another row.
She was nearly at the door when a man in a baggy dark suit intercepted her. His greying hair stuck up like a backcombed badger.
‘Hi, Clive,’ she said. Clive Brooks worked in the Department of the Environment.
‘Bel. Terrific speech.’ He folded his arms across his chest and stroked his chin, as if he had all the time in the world.
Bel looked at her watch irritably. She knew he wouldn’t have liked her speech at all. ‘Sorry, Clive, I’ve got to rush.’
‘We’re just on our way to a briefing with the Prime Minister of Canada. He’s asked to meet you.’
Bel was genuinely surprised. ‘I’d love to, Clive. Can you arrange it? Only I’ve got an appointment.’
‘He’s flying out tomorrow. It’ll have to be now. A car’s taking us to the Cabinet Office. You can hitch a ride with us if you want.’
That stopped Bel in her tracks. She didn’t get offers like that very often. The decision was made in an instant. She got out her phone. ‘Give me five minutes. I’ve just got to rearrange something.’
Bel walked out to the foyer, found a quiet corner and dialled. ‘Cally? Can you do me a favour? Ben’s coming down and I’m stuck in a meeting. Can you amuse him for a while?’
A few minutes later, she turned and made her way back towards Clive Brooks. As she did so, she noticed that the floor was becoming ever more wet and slippery. It was as if the rain was slowly coming in, on people’s shoes, on their umbrellas, on their dripping coats. Like a tide slowly creeping into the building.
The Thames Barrier was a huge structure. The gap between each of the silver-coloured hoods was as wide as the central deck of Tower Bridge, to allow ships to pass through. The hoods themselves stood on solid concrete islands. Each was as tall as a five-storey building and was coated with steel. But the crashed container ship was also a giant. Its living quarters were even taller than the steel shells and its prow had crushed the metal like a car running over a drinks can.
Two rescue boats were making their way away from the crash site. They looked like tiny specks tossing about on the rough water.
Inside the control room, the engineers were trying to handle the emergency. Warning lights blinked on the operating console. On the wall was a Perspex diagram of the barrier; it was covered in lights and every one of them was winking red.
The duty controller was getting a radio update from the rescue boats outside. ‘We’ve got the crew off and the captain’s on his way to hospital but we can’t move the ship. She was carrying a full load. It’s going to take about ten tugs to pull her away. Over.’
‘Well, get started,’ replied the controller, exasperated. ‘What are you waiting for? Over.’
‘We’ve only got four tugs,’ came the reply. ‘We’ll have to get in extra from Canvey Island. Over.’
‘Get them as fast as you can. It’s high tide in less than an hour. Over.’
An engineer in a yellow site hat and reflective safety vest was talking to the Meteorological Office on a mobile. With his other hand he was gesturing at the Thames Barrier controller.
The controller understood. He spoke to the team in the rescue boats. ‘Mind out of the way, we’re going to try raising the gates again.’
‘Roger. Over and out.’
The controller nodded to the chief engineer at the control console, who hit the switch again. A great noise came from outside, like a giant machine starting. Outside on the river, in three of the four navigation channels, the giant steel gates began to rise out of the water. One by one they locked into position, in a carefully planned order so that they wouldn’t disrupt the fast-flowing current and cause problems for shipping further up the river.
In the fourth navigation channel, next to the wreckage, there was a harsh grinding sound, like metal tearing.
The chief engineer shook his head and pressed another switch. The gates began to lower again. He turned to the controller. ‘It’s no use. Gate One doesn’t move.’
‘Can’t we raise it manually?’
‘No. The whole mechanism is smashed. It’s just not responding.’
The engineer in the yellow reflective vest told the liaison officer at the Met. Office what had happened. ‘The mechanism is completely crushed … No, not all the gates, just one of them.’ A little pause, then he put his hand over the mouthpiece again and spoke to the room. ‘They say, can’t we just raise the other gates?’
The controller’s response was instant. ‘No. Give me the phone … Hi … Yes, this is the controller. We can’t raise the gates if one of them doesn’t work.’
The man at the Met. Office sounded frustrated and worried. ‘We’ve had eight inches of rainfall in the past twenty-four hours. The same amount as fell in Boscastle before the floods there. We need the barrier. You’d better raise as much of it as you can.’
‘Listen, I’m an engineer and I’m telling you it won’t help — it will make it worse. It will force the water through the smaller opening, making it run faster — like putting it through a funnel. It also means that if we did — heaven forbid — get a flood, it would be even more destructive. We’re better keeping the whole thing open and trying to get the repairs done as soon as possible.’
The Met. Office man made an exasperated noise. ‘Can’t we get a crane to raise the barrier? It’s high tide in less than an hour.’
‘There isn’t a crane that can lift it.’
‘There must be. There are marinas up the Thames with boat yards. They have cranes for lifting boats into dry docks.’
‘A normal pleasure boat weighs a couple of tonnes. The Thames Barrier gates weigh three thousand seven hundred tonnes each. That’s the weight of more than twenty double-decker buses. They’re so heavy they had to be built in situ.’
The liaison officer tutted again. ‘In that case, I’m calling the Department of the Environment to tell them we’ve got an emergency — a Code Red situation.’ He rang off.