Carla pointed at the screen. The camera was off, but the image hadn’t vanished. Something pale and finger-shaped was pressing against the lens from the other side.

She drove away as the first bells of St Albans Cathedral began to ring. In her rearview mirror, the pie shop looked peaceful again. But her hands were still cold. That hum hadn’t come from the pipes. It had come from beneath them—from a drainage company’s worst nightmare: a job that wasn’t about water at all, but about what lives in the dark when the water goes away.

The man on the phone had described the problem as “a bit of a gurgle.” By the time Carla Vance arrived in her commercial drainage truck, the “gurgle” had turned into a slow, greasy flood creeping across the floor of St Albans’ oldest pie and mash shop.

She didn’t need to hear more. As the owner of Vance ClearFlow , the go-to commercial drainage company in St Albans, she’d seen this before. The city’s drainage was a patchwork quilt of Roman ingenuity, Victorian ambition, and 1970s botch-jobs. And this shop sat directly above a forgotten branch of the Verulamium sewer—a line so old that her maps marked it only as “uncertain.”

Then she poured herself a strong coffee and waited for the next “gurgle.”

She switched off the camera and grabbed the high-pressure jetter. “Terry, I need you to clear the shop. And call that vicar friend of yours.”

“Yeah?”