by Tim Weaver
Healy took a drag on the cigarette.
‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly.
‘We need to go and see the girl.’
‘But first we need to do something else.’ He took a last drag on the cigarette and then flicked it out into the night. It fizzled out instantly. ‘We need to go in here.’
‘To the station?’
He nodded.
‘Why?’
‘To talk to the patrolman who found Drake’s phone.’
‘Why?’
‘Because he got spooked.’
‘About what?’
‘Says he found it, just sitting there on the platform, at one in the morning.’
‘So?’
‘So, why did no one spot it while the station was open?’
I looked at him – and he nodded once when he saw I’d made the connection.
‘Because someone put it there after the station closed.’
57
The patrolman was a guy called Stevie O’Keefe, and his Irish heritage appeared to begin and end at his name. He had dark, Mediterranean skin, even darker eyes and a jet-black Elvis quiff. At a guess I would have put him in his late forties or early fifties.
Healy had arranged with the Jubilee line’s general manager for O’Keefe to take us down after hours. It was an irregular request, one Transport for London would probably have been keen to avoid given the security precautions they’d put into place since 7/7, but Healy had used the badge as a way in, and then peppered what came after with regular mentions of the Snatcher. I remembered the worst bits of Healy well, all the anger, the aggression and the fight, but he could play the game with the best of them. If he needed to turn down the volume, adjust his tone, come in softly, he could do that too.
We moved through Westminster station in silence. None of the escalators were switched on at night, so we used them like staircases, and then emerged into the turbine hall, a vast cathedral of stone and stainless steel, full of criss-crossing pillars. Westminster was the Tube’s deepest ever excavation, and the journey to the Jubilee line saw you drop one hundred feet in a matter of seconds. Even then you weren’t done: the Jubilee platforms were built one on top of the other, the westbound the deeper, and by the time you got to the bottom, you were more than thirty metres under the earth. Down with the devil, I thought, recalling something an old colleague on the paper had once said. Back when they’d first carved the Tube out of the earth in the 1860s, people were scared it might wake Satan himself.
It was a weird feeling heading through the building’s spaces and not passing anyone, but more unsettling was the complete lack of sound: I’d read about people like O’Keefe, how they spent their lives walking through darkness and quiet, but I’d never appreciated silence, never fully understood it, until we got down to the line.
At the platform, O’Keefe hesitated briefly. Transparent screens had been erected all the way along, which – during the day – would slide back once the train was in the station. They were closed now and, beyond them, it was hard to make out the line without the help of a torch. ‘I found it there,’ he said quietly, pointing to the last of the screens.
‘On the platform, at the end?’ I asked.
O’Keefe just nodded.
‘Are you okay?’
He glanced at me. ‘Sure.’
His eyes flicked across my shoulder, along the platform towards the other end. I followed his gaze. The night lights were on but they barely seemed to make a difference. I turned back to O’Keefe, his eyes on the opposite tunnel. At the surface, when he’d first been introduced to us, he mentioned that he’d been a patrolman for twenty years, that he’d walked deep-level stations on the Northern and Central lines, and yet – as we stood on the platform – it was like this was his first time down here.
‘Stevie?’
He glanced at me.
‘You sure you’re okay?’
His eyes came to rest on the right-hand tunnel, close to where he’d found Drake’s phone. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, his voice more even now.
I glanced at Healy and gestured for him not to say anything. ‘Stevie, I need to know what’s going on.’
He ripped his eyes away from the tunnel. ‘Huh?’
‘Is something bothering you?’
‘No.’
‘What happened when you found the phone?’
He looked between us, then back to the tunnel. Healy rolled his eyes at me, out of sight of O’Keefe.
‘It was just …’
‘What?’
He glanced at me again. ‘Normally there’s work going on in most of the stations,’ he said, the torch at his side. ‘ “Engineering hours” and all that; when the trains aren’t in service. Between one and five in the morning, there’s staff all along the line, all through the night, people repairing, cleaning, making sure everything’s okay. They were down here all last week when I came through, but when I found that phone on Thursday night, there was no one. There was no scheduled work.’ He paused and looked at me, his face half lit by the lamps above us on the platform. ‘It was just so quiet, and kind of …’
He trailed off and turned back to face the tunnel.
‘Kind of what?’ I asked.
‘I’ve been doing this twenty years,’ O’Keefe said, his fingers tapping out a nervy rhythm on the flashlight, ‘but that night I found the phone, it felt different.’
‘Different?’
Healy’s eyes narrowed. Suddenly he was interested again.
‘We get tons of lost property down here,’ O’Keefe said. ‘People drop all sorts of things and don’t realize. But that phone … it was like it had been placed there.’
‘Like someone had put it there deliberately?’
He didn’t reply.
‘Stevie?’
‘Yeah, like someone had put it there.’
‘Where was it exactly?’
We moved towards the end of the platform, level with the last plastic screen on our left. On our right, attached to the wall, was a white bench. ‘It was on there,’ he said, pointing to the bench. ‘Just placed on top.’
‘Could have fallen out of someone’s pocket.’
‘Could have,’ O’Keefe said, but he didn’t sound convinced, and I could see why: the benches, dotted from one end of the platform to the other, were almost oval-shaped, built for leaning against. If a phone dropped out of someone’s pocket by accident, the angle of the bench wouldn’t stop its fall. It would bounce right off and hit the floor.
‘Did you see anyone else in here that night?’
He shook his head. ‘No.’
I turned to Healy. ‘Are the Met checking CCTV?’
‘We’ve put in a request for the footage,’ he said, and then stepped towards O’Keefe. ‘Can we get down on to the line?’
O’Keefe jolted, like he’d suddenly been pulled from a dream, and brought a set of keys away from his belt. He selected the one he wanted, manually unlocked one of the screens and backed away. As if he doesn’t want to go first. Both of us noted it, Healy glancing at me, before we dropped through the space and down on to the line. O’Keefe followed, more hesitancy in his stride, and as soon as his feet landed on the blackened concrete of the line, he stood there frozen, just staring into the tunnel. Something in him had been knocked out of kilter. He was a brassy, confident kind of guy – I could read that in him, right from the off – but he was showing none of that now.
‘So what felt different about Thursday night?’ I asked again.
O’Keefe paused, as if unsure how to articulate himself. The only sound, the only movement, was his fingers on the torch. After a while he looked at me, his face framed by the light from the platform. ‘It was like you could feel something bad down here.’
58
The tunnel was about thirty feet across and about the same high, or maybe it just looked that way. It was hard to tell for sure. There were no lights on anywhere in front of us, except for a faint glow on one of the walls further down
– perhaps a quarter of a mile on – which I assumed was from the platform at Waterloo, out of sight beyond the curve of the tunnel. Every so often we’d pass a red light on the left-hand side, a marker next to it, but the lights weren’t built to illuminate, just to be seen. Once we’d passed them, they returned to the dark, as if swallowed whole by it.
After about five hundred feet, against the continual silence, I started to hear the very faint sound of dripping water. We were passing right under the Thames, and through some small space, some crack somewhere, a trace of it had found its way down.
O’Keefe swept his torch along the wall closest to us, picking out endless brickwork and thick electrical cabling, braided together like lengths of hair. Healy shone his torch off in the other direction, to the fixings and markers, and as our lights framed the wall, I saw a space, about six feet across, with a metal grille pulled across it. It looked like it led through to an adjacent tunnel. I stepped closer and as I did O’Keefe directed his flashlight at it.
‘The Last Walk,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘That’s what they call it.’
‘Where does it go?’
‘Runs all the way under the river.’
Healy moved in alongside me.
‘People still use it?’ I asked.
‘No. It hasn’t been used for years. They closed it off when they put the deep-level line in here. Before that, it was used as a transportation tunnel, bringing things in under the river and over to the other side.’ He paused, eyes fixed on the grille. ‘And before that, right back at the start, it was used to take bodies to the morgue at St Thomas’ Hospital.’
‘The Last Walk,’ Healy said quietly.
O’Keefe looked at me. ‘A lot of people reckon the old stations in east London are the ones with the ghosts. But this place …’ He stopped again. There was no humour in his face, not a hint of amusement or self-deprecation. ‘It’s got a feel.’
Healy smirked, reacting in the same way I would have done if I hadn’t have seen O’Keefe’s face. But once O’Keefe turned to look at him, Healy’s smile dissolved and we all stood there, those last words echoing along the blackness of the tunnel.
‘Can I borrow your torch?’ I said to O’Keefe. He handed it to me and, as I moved across the tracks, stepping over the lines, I shone the flashlight through the grille to the space on the other side. The mix of light and shadows created patterns in the darkness of the foot tunnel, drifting across its walls, but it was only when I was standing right on top of the grille, looking through it, that I could see it was ajar.
I called Healy over and, as he approached, I pushed at the metal grille. It shifted slightly – juddering like a door stuck in its frame – and then squeaked backwards.
‘Is this supposed to be open?’ I said to O’Keefe.
‘No,’ he said, barely audible, from behind me. There was alarm in his voice and, when I remembered what he’d told us earlier, I realized why: every step we’d taken into the tunnel, every noise we’d heard, every entrance that was supposed to be closed, had further confirmed his uneasiness. It was like you could feel something bad down here.
Healy moved in beside me, and as I shone the flashlight into the foot tunnel, I could hear the drip of water again, and a very faint sound, rhythmic and soft. Above us, somewhere out of sight, people were working on the subsurface lines, cleaning the Circle and District. I passed through the grille, ducking under the frame and into the foot tunnel, and immediately the temperature dropped. On my right the tunnel ran parallel to the line, heading back in the direction of Westminster. On my left, it curved under the river, tracing the Jubilee. There was little definition to anything. Up close I could see brickwork and on the ground – uneven; scored and gouged by age – the floor was still marked by the wheels that had once passed along it.
Healy ducked into the tunnel, and then O’Keefe followed gingerly, pausing half in, half out of the entrance. I could see clearly what was going through his head. When I glanced at Healy I saw he looked disconcerted too, and, as I was about to try and put into words the sinking feeling I was starting to get in my guts, something made a noise.
I stood, eyes fixed on the darkness.
‘What?’ Healy said.
I held the flashlight up above my head and pointed it along the tunnel, back in the direction of Westminster. ‘Stevie,’ I said quietly, keeping my eyes on the beam as it carved off into the depths of the tunnel. ‘We’re just going to have a look down here.’
‘I’m not supposed to leave you,’ he said.
‘It’s fine. We’re just going to walk a little way along.’
‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asked, and we both turned to look at him. What he really meant was, I don’t want to stay here. I glanced at Healy again and then back to O’Keefe, and it was clear that we both saw the same thing: a man who had spent his life walking the line, reduced to this: panicked and edgy, maybe even borderline paranoid.
‘Why don’t you head back up?’
He studied me, then Healy, then asked for one of the torches. Healy gave him the weaker one. ‘It’s fine,’ I said again, and this time he nodded, seemed almost relieved, and backed out from the grille. Seconds later, he’d returned to the tracks on the Jubilee line.
Seconds after that, he was gone from view.
59
The foot tunnel was dead straight, no deviation, no change of direction, the same uniform brickwork unfurling either side of us, the same stone floor beneath our feet. I thought, for a moment, about all the bodies that must have travelled this route, about the horse-drawn carts that must have come this way, their flatbeds home to the dead; and, as I did, a faint breeze picked up. It passed across us, almost through us, but – even after it was gone – a trace of it remained, like a murmur. O’Keefe had talked of ghosts, but it wasn’t ghosts. It was something real, as if the place had absorbed its past. Every act. Every drop of blood.
We moved on.
After about two minutes, the flashlight picked out something further down, and I realized it was a staircase, knocked into an alcove on the left side of the tunnel. It wound upwards in a steep spiral, a blistered handrail coiling around the steps. I got under it and shone the beam up through the middle. Sixty feet up, at the top of the steps, I could see a red door with EXIT printed on it. Healy walked on, using his phone for light, and, about thirty feet further down, stopped. Beyond him was a wall, painted white. The tunnel had been bricked up.
I started up the stairs. They were relatively new, but the metal was still stained and discoloured, and the paint on the handrail flaked against my fingers. In the quiet, our footsteps echoed against them, the noise carrying off into the space below as the walls closed around us. Suddenly it was like being inside a crawl space. At the top, the alcove widened into a platform, about ten feet across, and there was the red exit door.
I tried the handle.
The door popped away from its frame, revealing a narrow room, dark on either side, and a second door directly opposite, partially lit by an emergency exit sign. On both sides were a series of cardboard boxes, stacked on top of each other. It reminded me of the famous deep-level facilities on the Northern and Central lines: former air-raid shelters, turned into storage units after the Second World War. There was no break in the boxes. No gaps. I stepped further in, past the edge of the door frame.
There was a musty smell, like old paper. Healy came in behind me and I heard him sniff the air. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, leading the way across the room towards the second door. When we got there, he placed his fingers around the handle and looked back at me. ‘If you haven’t got anything to cover your hands with, keep them in your pockets.’
The best I had were the sleeves of my jacket, and although his tone pricked at my anger, I knew where the words had come from: he was off reservation, working from nothing but a gut feeling; I was the guy he’d invited along, the non-cop, the man who had looked his boss
in the face and lied about Sam Wren. He was minimizing risk.
No prints. No trail.
He pressed the handle of the door down and pushed it open.
In front of us was another tunnel, partitioned from top to bottom. On one side was a second set of stairs, which, I imagined, would take us back up to the subsurface stations. On the other was a doorway. No door frame. No door. Just the space for one.
We inched forward, and as we did the storage room clicked shut and it was like the smell of paper, of age, disappeared instantly. In its place came something tangy and awful, like overripe fruit. I directed the torch through the doorway ahead. It was an old bathroom. Even from where we were standing I could see the cubicles, two of them, both stripped of everything, leaving only the toilets, shapeless and broken. Big basins were attached to the wall next to them, a splashguard above that. As we got level with the entrance and shifted the torch around inside, I could see another set of cubicles. I put a hand to my mouth and nose and zeroed in on the one furthest away from us, the only one with a door still attached.
There was blood on the floor inside.
Healy, still ahead of me, made for the cubicle. When he got there, he pressed his fingers to the door, ready to push it open. But then he seemed to hesitate. He glanced at me. There was no fear in him, no dread, no sense that he couldn’t handle this moment as a professional. This wasn’t about that. This was about a circle closing; about one part of his life joining up with the next. This was about spending nearly eight months away from the bodies – and about the last one being Leanne.
He swallowed, and then pushed the cubicle door open.
It squeaked on its hinges, and in the darkness – lit only by the beam of a torch – it felt like something shifted around us. Like the whole room turned a degree, awoken from its slumber. The smell was horrendous. Dense and gummy, filling the spaces around us so quickly it was like being suffocated. I moved in behind him, and against the silence could suddenly hear flies, above our heads, inside the cubicle, at our feet.
