The screen on the dispatch tablet glowed green at 3:17 AM.
Leo lifted the heavy iron lid. The stench hit him—not the usual rotten-egg sulfur, but something metallic. Old. He shone his torch down into the abyss. The pipe was a six-inch clay sewer, installed during the Victorian era when Wakefield was still a wool town. drain jetting wakefield
Leo turned off the pump. The silence was deafening. The screen on the dispatch tablet glowed green at 3:17 AM
He polished the chalice with his sleeve. An angel was engraved on the side, still beautiful despite the grime. Leo turned off the pump
“December 12, 1893. The Wakefield & Barnsley Union Bank has collapsed. The rich flee, leaving the rest to starve. I cannot let them take the silver from St. Mary’s. I have hidden the chalice and the alms dishes in the only place the bailiffs fear to tread—the main sewer line beneath Westgate. Let the filth of the city guard what is holy.”
Leo “The Hose” Hargreaves sighed. He’d been a drain jetting technician in Wakefield for eleven years. He’d seen congealed lard like white marble, wet wipes that formed concrete, and once, a family of frogs living in a downspout off Westgate. But nothing— nothing —prepared him for the phone call.
Over the next two hours, he ran the camera snake first. The pipe was a disaster—roots, calcified grease, and at the very bottom, a dark mass that the camera’s light barely penetrated. Leo calibrated the jetter to its maximum pressure. 3,000 PSI. Water heated to near boiling.