Phobia

by Dean Crawford

  The scent drifted into the darkened realm of Jayden Nixx’s consciousness, coming it seemed from far away on the fringes of the universe, a fetid odour that clung to the air like an infection. She coughed, shuddered, her world spinning crazily in an immense darkness as the foul stench coated the back of her throat.

  She couldn’t open her eyes, but she could hear a sloshing of water that echoed around her, bouncing back and forth. She realised that she could not move her limbs, everything numb and heavy. She swayed gently back and forth as she struggled to comprehend where she was and what was happening.

  Slowly, with immense effort, she managed to open her eyes.

  Black water shimmered below her as it sluiced past a pair of boots that forged their way along a narrow, brick tunnel. The pungent scent of raw sewage poisoned the air, and she hacked out a membrane–tearing cough as she tried not to throw up.

  She realised that she was aloft, her body carried by a powerfully built man who bore her weight as though she were nothing more than a coat thrown over his shoulder. She could see his big, heavy boots crashing through a foul soup of human waste and churning water, the curved walls of the tunnel draped in sickening strings of biological debris. The rancid odours were like a living thing all around her, and she would have cried out in disgust were she able to command her body to move, but she could do nothing other than emit a feeble groan.

  The man carrying her did not respond, but she felt him turn his head slightly, aware now that she was conscious. Jayden tried to lift her head, but it bore down with the weight of ages, forcing her to examine only the lower portions of the tunnel through which they moved. The walls were built from perfectly tiled patterns of carefully interwoven brickwork, and she dimly recalled the labyrinth of Victorian sewers that weaved beneath the city streets, hundreds of years old. The churning water sent a pulse of fear through her guts, especially this water, laced with a toxic microbial soup of faecal sludge.

  The man trudged on, and as she struggled to make her limbs respond so memories fluttered through the field of her awareness as her senses began to reconnect themselves: she had been at the pub, and then she had felt ill, decided to leave, and then…

  Jason.

  She tried to speak his name, wondering whether he had in fact gone back on his word. He had been beside her when she had put her code in the security lock at the entrance to her apartment, so he could have seen the code and got inside the building, but then how had he got into her apartment so quickly? Only her friend Amanda had a spare key for emergencies. Jason had said they were going to call in on her, make sure she was okay, hadn’t he?

  ‘Jason?’

  The name came out as a whisper, drowned out by the fetid water swirling below her. She could hear more of it crashing nearby, and she felt a wave of fear swell up inside of her as she realised where they were.

  ‘Jason?’

  This time, her voice was louder, and she sensed that the man had heard her because he hurried his pace through the water. She twitched her fingers, felt life coming back into her body as whatever drug had been put into her drink began to wear off. The nausea and the dizziness began to fade a little and she squirmed on the man’s shoulder, trying to get off.

  The man slowed, the sound of falling water louder now as he turned inside the tunnel and eased out into a chamber that was square rather than oval. She felt herself being hefted up, and then suddenly she was turned physically upright as though being held like a baby, two big hands beneath her armpits, and was pinned against a cold, damp wall, her feet still six inches above the water. More water spilled down the wall onto her hair and back, this time from above, and she twisted instinctively away from its icy touch as it trickled down her spine.

  She tried to reach up for the man’s face and claw at him, his features concealed beneath a hood, the only light a small clip–on torch that the man wore on his belt that reflected off the water in shimmering halos. The man turned his face away from her hands, then he dropped her down.

  Jayden landed in six inches of foul water and she shrieked in horror, looked down to see her bare feet consumed by raw sewage sluicing through the chamber. One of her hands was gripped and wrenched upward, and before she could stop him, her wrist was clamped inside a tight metal manacle that was bolted into the old brick walls.

  ‘No!’

  Some of her strength returned and she swiped at his face with her free hand, her nails trying to claw his skin. The man batted her hand aside, grabbed it and pinned it against the wall as he pushed it toward another manacle. She screamed and twisted, her voice echoing like a banshee wail down the subterranean tunnels that branched off from the chamber

  The man pinned her in place against the wall, looming over her, his strength far too great as he locked her wrist into place. His face was close to hers and on impulse Jayden lunged forward and sank her teeth into the skin of his jaw with primal savagery.

  The man wrenched himself away from her bite as Jayden tasted metallic blood on her tongue. One big hand swiped sideways in the faint light and cracked across the side of her skull with enough force to snap her head sideways and crack her temple against the cold brickwork.

  ‘Bitch.’

  The word was hissed in the darkness, laden with rage. Jayden tried to spit at him, but he reached up and one giant hand smothered her lower face. He pushed her head back against the wall with a dull thud, stars whirling in front of her eyes as he reached into his pocket and grabbed a length of fabric that he then rammed into her mouth and tied around the back of her head.

  Jayden’s rage withered as he stood back and looked at her. In the faint reflected light of the torch, she saw the shape of his features, and with a startle she recognised him. Water trickled onto her head and she looked up to see a metal gantry nearby, beyond which was a vertical shaft with a manhole cover at the top. The light of the sky glowed faintly through small holes in the manhole’s iron surface.

  Jayden looked back at the man, and he slowly lifted off his hood. He spoke, his voice surprisingly soft for such a large man.

  ‘Your time has come,’ he said, his voice echoing in the abysmal darkness.

  Jayden managed to keep her eyes on him, to show no emotion, but she was shaking now as the icy cold water cascaded down her back. The mess swirling around her feet made her guts clench as the man turned away from her. He waded through the water to the far side of the chamber, where Jayden could now see a series of thick cables running along the sewer walls and disappearing off down another tunnel.

  ‘Optical fibres, telecommunications,’ he said, his voice audible above the water crashing from a smaller sewer tunnel to her left and plunging into the chamber. ‘Makes sense to route them through here, rather than dig new tunnels for them. They’re going to come in handy.’

  She watched with grim interest as the man produced a camera, and then he spliced into one of the cables and wired the camera into it. He taped the wires closed, and set the camera on a mount that was screwed into the nearby brickwork. Jayden knew without a doubt that this had all been prepared in advance, although she could not fathom why on earth somebody like this would go to such lengths to… To what? To kill her?

  The man turned, and Jayden could see that the camera was now pointing at her, a little red light glowing in the darkness. The man pulled his hood up as he sloshed his way back to her side, smiling in the faint light.

  ‘The weather’s going to get worse today,’ he said, and then his smile widened. ‘Much, much worse. These tunnels can’t handle the amount of water that’s going to fall on the city, so you know what happens then?’

  Jayden’s guts turned to slime as tears sprang from the corners of her eyes and she began shaking her head. She knew what he meant, but it was all that she could do to beg for him not to leave her here. The man leaned closer.

  ‘They flood,’ he said. ‘Right up to street level.’

  Jayden began coughing on her gag, her heart hammering inside of her chest as the man went on, app
arently oblivious to her mounting terror.

  ‘The water management companies like it when the sewers flood,’ he said. ‘The force of the water cleans out the older sections of the sewers, kills all the rats. It provides a service. Normally, workers check the sewers routinely, but they won’t for a while due to the rising water levels, the work is just too dangerous.’

  He leaned against the wall and touched her cheek. Jayden jerked her head away from his gloved hand.

  ‘You’re going to be okay,’ the man said. ‘It’s never as bad as you think it’s going to be. Trust me, I’ve seen it all before; you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. You’ll soon be at peace.’

  The man leaned in and gently kissed her on her cheek, and then he turned and strode away into the myriad, stinking tunnels of London’s bowels. Jayden tried one last terrified shriek through her gag, but the nearby crashing water easily drowned her out. The last flickering light from the man’s torch vanished into the darkness. She looked down at her feet, entombed in the fetid sludge, and noticed that the water had already risen an inch. She looked up, squinting into the water cascading down through the drain cover far above her, and she knew that the promised rainstorms hadn’t even really got going yet. There was no escaping it – she knew that she was going to die here.

  14

  Honor walked into the Incident Room with Danny alongside her, in time to see DS Hansen put down the phone and offer her an uninterested glance. DI Katy Harper was at a desk near the front of the room.

  ‘Anything?’ Harper asked as soon as she spotted Honor.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ Honor replied. ‘We think that he was there, but we’re waiting for the examiner to process the scene. CCTV from the pub opposite the premises might help, but given the busts on St Magnus and Southwark, I doubt it.’

  Harper sighed as she removed her spectacles.

  ‘Mitchell should be back soon with the autopsy report on Amber Carson, not that it’s going to tell us much that we don’t already know. I’m hoping for a stray hair, DNA, anything that could give us a lead on the killer’s identity. The media’s going wild with this, they’re going to want to hear everything from you as soon as you can.’

  Honor sighed and rubbed her temples. ‘I don’t have a damned thing to offer them, boss, you know that. Unknown male, probably from the city, hunts victims based on their phobias. That’s it. We tell them that, we’re basically admitting we’ve got nothing.’ ‘Use your imagination,’ Harper snapped, her voice quiet but taut with frustration. ‘Baffle them with bullshit, just say enough to keep them off our backs. The briefing is

  scheduled for this afternoon.’

  DI Harper turned and hurried away, leaving Honor standing in the IR wondering what the hell she was going to do next.

  ‘Boss, you need to see this.’

  Honor turned, hope blossoming in her heart as she hurried to Samir’s desk and saw him staring pensively at his computer monitor.

  ‘I think I’ve got something.’

  Honor moved to stand behind him, and saw that he was watching footage from bars that had been frequented by both Sebastian Dukas and Amber Carson on the nights before their murders.

  ‘I wondered if we might get lucky and pick up the same guy on both pub security cameras,’ he said. ‘I reckoned it was better to go back to the last moments that we know both victims were alive and see what shows up.’

  Honor watched as Samir pointed to two camera feeds that were on his monitor: his left hand pointed to a figure in the bar in which Sebastian Dukas spent his last night, while his right pointed to a figure in the bar in which Amber Carson spent her last night.

  Honor leaned closer. In both images, a man was standing beside the bar with a pint in his hand, surveying the pub. Frustratingly, he was positioned in such a way that he could not be easily identified, and the grainy nature of most security cameras meant that it was hard to distinguish his features, but there was no doubting that he was the same man: Honor could tell by both his physical size and also the way that his posture in both footage images was the same, and he seemed to be wearing the same kind of boots and hooded top.

  ‘Both of these are from the nights of the two murders?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yep,’ Samir agreed, clearly excited for sourcing a possible lead in the case at such an important time. ‘This guy could be a regular who just haunts the same spot, but we have footage from outside too. Check this out.’

  Samir selected another video feed, this one from a camera showing the Crosse Keys main entrance and exit. To Honor’s delight, she realised that Samir must have been sitting on this for a while, gathering further evidence to support his assertion that the man in the footage was acting in ways that in a murder investigation would not be considered normal.

  ‘In both pubs, and on both nights, he walks into the pub with his hood up,’ Samir said, gesturing to the screens. ‘It’s been damp the last few nights, fair enough, but he always seems to manage to keep his face hidden from the cameras on the inside of the pubs too. Look here.’

  Honor watched as Samir switched to interior footage of both pubs, running them alongside each other. The man walked into the bars, pulled his phone from his pocket and checked it while walking to the bar and ordering a drink. Then, the man moved to stand in a position where he could barely be seen by the cameras.

  ‘Okay,’ Honor said, thinking fast, ‘but he’s just going into a pub for a drink. It’s not enough to put this guy’s likeness out there to the public.’

  ‘Not normally, no,’ Samir agreed. ‘But look how he checks his phone.’

  Honor peered at the two reels of footage as Samir wound them back and replayed them. For a moment, she didn’t notice it, but then suddenly it leaped out at her.

  ‘He uses opposite hands,’ she said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Samir nodded, ‘he’s always using whichever hand allows him to not reveal his face to security cameras inside the pubs, turning away from them.’

  Honor stood upright and thought for a moment. The man in question must, by his actions, have known where the cameras in both pubs were to be able to conveniently position himself away from their direct line of sight on both occasions.

  ‘Okay, he must have scoped the bars out prior to the nights of the killings,’ she said. ‘Can we get anything from the security footage in the days prior to the attacks?’

  ‘I’m already on it,’ Samir replied, ‘but both bars don’t open until around ten o’clock, and both only keep their camera footage for about a week before it’s recorded over. It’s gonna be a tight squeeze to get anything else on this guy before the press conference, and if he knows when they clear their footage, he could have scoped the bars out a month before these images were shot.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ Honor insisted, and then a thought hit her. ‘How come we didn’t see this guy before?’

  ‘Because I was always watching the victim’s movements before their deaths, not the rest of the crowds in the bar. We suspect that both victims had their drinks spiked in pubs before their deaths, right? So, whoever did it must have been close to them.’

  Honor nodded, knowing well how victims of date–rape drug attacks often had their drinks spiked by deftly–handed rapists armed with tiny pills that could sink invisibly into bottles and glasses without being noticed. Then, all the rapist had to do was hang back and wait for their victim to gradually be overcome by the drugs, follow them, and pounce when their victim was unconscious.

  ‘Watch the bar,’ she said. ‘See if we can catch this guy anywhere close to the victims when they’re buying drinks, or when their friends are. If we can see anything happening, this could actually be our guy.’

  ‘Will do,’ Samir agreed.

  Honor patted him on the shoulder. ‘Good work, detective.’

  Samir beamed as Honor hurried out of the IR and back to her own office, her mind now working overdrive as she thought about how to get the information into her briefing. This really could be somebody wh
o was involved in the case, a first shadowy glimpse at their elusive killer. Or, as was so often the case, it could be coincidence, a random event, and they would be identifying, questioning and perhaps accusing an innocent victim.

  Her desktop monitor pinged, and she saw that Samir had sent her copies of the images. She opened one immediately and zoomed in, squinting at the image in an attempt to figure out who the man was. His large build made him stand out a little against the crowd, something that he was obviously attempting to conceal, always positioning himself away from the action.

  ‘Boss?’

  Honor looked up to see Danny Green as he gently tapped on her open door and walked in. He had a few sheets of printed paper in his hand and tossed them onto her desk. Each was a statement from a high street bank, and each detailed monetary transactions going back three months for Wheeler Construction Company Limited, based in Southwark.

  ‘Gary Wheeler?’ Honor asked. ‘Didn’t he alibi out?’

  ‘Sure, he did,’ Danny replied. ‘Fellow workers put him in a pub in the square mile the night of Sebastian Dukas’s murder. Thing is, that doesn’t rule him out as having committed the crime after leaving the pub, for which time we have no solid evidence of his story about going home being true.’

  Honor leaned back in her seat as she cast her eye over the financial records. ‘So, what’s the story with his bank?’

  ‘I got the Cyber Griffin section to do a run–through on Gary Wheeler’s business and personal accounts, routine check to make sure there was nothing that we should be suspicious about. You can see by the figures that what his business turns over and what he makes each month on three personal accounts don’t come close to adding up.’

  Honor scanned the lines, and saw the discrepancies immediately: Wheeler’s company was turning over a high–five figure–per–month income, with expenses taking a large chunk out of that each month to leave around four thousand, but his personal income was swelling by up to six or seven thousand per month.