Washland: The Marrowdyke Level, Book Three: 3

The Marrowdyke Washland Extension will put four thousand hectares of fen under water and hold it there for ever. It will take nine houses, three farms, and a tenancy signed in 1961. Alma Setchell designed it, costed it, and put her name on every page, and she has spent twelve years unable to say what it is actually for. At the public inquiry it comes down to a single question, and Katherine Asplin KC asks it on the fourth day. Why this site, when three cheaper ones exist on empty ground? Alma has the answer. It is the thing she has never written down - and the trap is exact. Establish the site's national importance and Historic England must consider protecting it. Protection means consent is needed before anyone may flood it. Consent has no precedent and takes years the funding does not have. And protection has never once reached the drainage that is destroying it, because drainage is not works on a monument. Tell the truth and they are protected to death. Stay silent and nine households lose their homes without ever being told what for - breaking the only promise she ever made to the one man who trusted her. There is no third option. She spends four years looking. On the tenth morning of the inquiry, seventeen people from three parishes put their names down to speak. None is represented. None stands to gain. Several stand to lose a great deal. WASHLAND is the conclusion of The Marrowdyke Level: a horror novel about consent, evidence, and a thing that survived four hundred years precisely because nobody ever wrote it down. Book Three of three. Begin with RODDON.