Free The Yellow Glass by Claire Ingrams Page B

Even the sight of the shrew-coloured Hillman
Minx didn’t dampen Tamang’s enthusiasm.
    “I hope you don’t mind sitting in the back, Mrs
Upshott?”  
    He held the door open for Kathleen, before he jumped in
next to me and began to fiddle about with his little box of tricks.   After which, he gave us a short description
of what the box did (well, as short as Tamang could ever make it, which wasn’t terribly short at all), before rolling
down his window and leaning forward in his seat, little box to the fore.   He looked like a small boy on Christmas
morning.   I switched the engine on and
began to glide towards the rear garage wall, to where I was reasonably sure the
entrance to the slide was hidden; a ventilation duct the only clue as to its
whereabouts.   We drove past the Aston
Martin and then past a jacked-up Land Rover and then straight past the exit to
the anonymous Waterloo backstreet where HQ was located.
    “Oy!”   The
mechanic had seen us and spurted out of his cubby hole.   “Where d’you think you’re going?”
    “Christ, I hope that thing works, Tamang,” I said,
between gritted teeth, “because we’re heading right into the bloody wall.”
    And we were; we drove straight at the wall, like a
drill into mortar.   Kathleen stifled a scream,
ineffectively.   Then, just when it seemed
like we were about to get our heads smashed in, Tamang pointed his box and
pressed his thumb down, hard and . . .   ‘Open Sesame’!     The wall swung
open, proving to be a steel door behind a single layer of bricks, and we shot
through into a dim, narrow tunnel.   Tamang turned around to aim his box through the rear window and the door
promptly swung shut again.   I screeched
the car to a standstill.   For a moment we
sat in complete and utter darkness, before I switched on the interior
light.   Somewhere, water dripped on
stone.  
    “How about that!” Tamang crowed.   “It works!”   He turned to Kathleen in the back.   “My distance controlling device works, Mrs Upshott!”
    Kathleen’s grey look had returned, but she mustered a
smile for him.
    “Fabulous.”
    “It works on a similar principle to the controls they
use to open garage doors in America, you see.   They are also developing such devices for use on television sets, for
those people who are so unbelievably lazy as to wish to change channels without
getting up from their chairs.   Can you
believe that?”   He raised his eyebrows.   “But I’ve been applying the technology to
lights and, indeed, all electrical circuits.   The difficult part is making it universally applicable and that was
where I was less than one hundred per cent certain of the response . .”
    I let him burble on for a bit and then I switched on
the headlights.
    We gazed down the slide and I pointed the Hillman’s
nose down.   There was nowhere to go but down.   It was more of a bricked pipe than anything
else, a perfect circle of bricks with a mere foot of air between the car and
the wall at all points.   If we’d been in
Kathleen’s Austin Princess we’d never have squeezed through - we’d have jammed
like a cork in a bottle.   It was clear
that we were inside one of Joseph Bazelgette’s Victorian sewer pipes.   It was slick with running moisture - not
sewage, I hasten to add - and the walls were striped green with moss and algae.   I wondered whether melting ice from the
February freeze had drained down through the slide and been trapped with
nowhere else to go, for a small stream ran along the pipe, glinting in the headlights.   It was a cold, disorientating place to
be.  
    Kathleen tapped my shoulder.
    “Let’s make a move, shall we Tristram?   I’d rather not sit here any longer than I
have to.”
    “Absolutely, darling.”   I took a deep breath.   “Are we all
set?”  
    Tamang nodded, vigorously, beside me and I caught my
wife narrowing her eyes in the mirror.  
    “Then let’s go!”   I slammed my foot to the