He arrived in a van that smelled of coffee and honest work. His partner, a quiet woman named Shiv, uncoiled a camera snake like she was handling a prized fishing rod. Within ten minutes, they’d found the culprit: a collapsed clay pipe from 1962, slowly choked by tree roots and decades of congealed cooking fat.

The first result was a family-run company called Thamesway Drains. Their tagline read: We’ve seen worse. Probably this morning. She called at 7:15 AM. A man named Pete answered on the second ring, sounding like he’d already been up for two hours.

The old farmhouse on Mill Road had a secret. Not a ghost in the attic, but something far more stubborn: a drain that groaned like a dying animal every time Clara ran the washing machine.