Vanished dr-3

by Tim Weaver

  My mind turned back to Fell Wood, to the old line, to the staffroom. And then more images flashed inside my head: Pell with the prostitute, beating her and raping her, and the man – momentarily caught in the mirror’s reflection – sitting there calmly, legs exactly parallel, watching it all play out.

  ‘You want the truth?’ I asked.

  He studied me. Didn’t reply.

  ‘I don’t honestly know what I think about Sam.’

  It was the first time I’d admitted it out loud, the first time I’d even really admitted it to myself. I’d never seen Sam as a killer, and still struggled to see him as one now. Nothing I’d pulled out of the earth, in any part of his life, pushed me in that direction. But I’d seen men – good men – shackled to forces much darker than them; and then I’d seen the things those men were prepared to do, either because they wanted to, or because they were forced to. And in Sam’s life there was Adrian Wellis and Duncan Pell. Both of them out there, somewhere. One a trafficker. One a hunter and a rapist.

  ‘He might be working with someone,’ I said.

  Healy frowned. ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know how exactly. I don’t even know if I really believe it. I’m putting all this together as I go along, but …’ I stopped and looked at him. A part of me still didn’t trust him not to take what I had and run back to Craw with it. He was trying to reboot his career, after all. But as I stood there, I noticed the look in his face, the loneliness and frustration, and realized the biggest part of him was still out there on his own – and, ultimately, that was the part of him I had to take a chance on.

  ‘Your unsolved …’

  A change in his face. ‘Spane?’

  ‘Yeah, Leon Spane. I think I know who really killed him.’

  I told him about Duncan Pell, about Leon Spane, about the CCTV footage I’d studied and the DVDs I’d had to sit through. I told him about the girl and her connections to Adrian Wellis, about what I’d found out at the old line, and then about the man watching Pell and the girl in the videos. I didn’t offer any theories, because Healy could see where this was headed, and, afterwards, I started to wonder if I’d given him too much. But as he lit a second cigarette, I realized it was too late anyway. It was out there, in the space between us, and whatever he chose to do with it wasn’t going to make much of a difference to me.

  I was finding Sam Wren either way.

  I looked out to the river, black and swollen, a wall of rainwater cascading down from Victoria Embankment. ‘What sort of person is comfortable doing that?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sitting there, watching Pell rape that girl.’

  Healy shrugged. ‘Someone who was just like Pell.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Is that person Wren?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why he’d sit there and watch a woman get beaten and raped. I don’t know why he’d choose not to intervene. I don’t know how he’d get into that situation in the first place. If – just for a minute – we’re assuming he’s the one taking these men, then this woman isn’t even his fantasy. This is Pell’s.’

  ‘So they’re working together.’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘You’re still not certain that Wren’s involved?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never seen him as a killer.’

  ‘What about if Pell’s doing the killing for him?’

  ‘It’s a stretch.’

  ‘Is it?’

  He meant the CCTV footage of Pell beating Robert Stonehouse to a pulp on the floor of Gloucester Road station; harassing and bullying Spane, pushing him and kicking him; and he meant the station on the old line. Its smell. Its unseen history. Me being attacked in the tunnel.

  ‘Pell’s a soldier,’ Healy said. ‘He knows how to kill.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘He could be taking the men for Wren.’

  ‘But Pell’s into women.’

  ‘So maybe he’s taking women too.’

  ‘But that’s my point: who are these women? The Snatcher’s left behind a trail, however slight. There’s no trail leading to any missing women. And what about the girl on the DVD? She’s alive. She’s in hospital, but she’s alive. If Pell wanted her dead, if this was part of the plan and some kind of reciprocal arrangement – if Sam’s helping Pell and Pell’s helping Sam – why let her live? Why rape her repeatedly, expose your identity on film and then hand her back to Adrian Wellis?’

  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’Ke
efe, 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.