by Tim Weaver
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.
The body was in the toilet, feet in the dry bowl, legs and arms folded into itself, so – at first – it just looked like a ball of clothes. It was obvious why it had been placed like that: so no one could see it from outside. As I moved the torch over it, I could see it was a man, and his head was forward, chin against his chest, tucked in against himself in the same way as his arms and legs. Above him, a thick pipe connected the toilet to the raised black cistern. The man had been tied to the pipe to hold him in place, rope looping around his midriff and again around his neck and legs, keeping him in a ball, keeping him positioned exactly where he was. I traced the torch along his body, trying to see how he’d died.
‘There,’ Healy said, realizing what I was doing.
He was pointing to a tear in the man’s clothes, close to his ribcage. It was a deep knife wound, dried black with blood and squirming with insects. And as I moved the torch again, I saw more stab wounds, two in each leg, bigger and even deeper than the other one, there to stop him from getting up and walking away. He’d been put down, but not killed. His death had come over the next few hours. I wondered if he’d cried out for help, and if he had why no one had heard him. But then I caught sight of the edge of his face, and spotted duct tape. It was covering his mouth. He’d died in complete silence.
‘Body’s a day old at least,’ Healy said.
I took a step left, trying to get a clearer look at his face. I thought back to O’Keefe telling us there was something bad down here, and then noticed the man’s skin: there were tiny grazes all over it, like he’d been sliced with a blade.
Or with shards of glass.
‘I know him,’ I said.
It was Adrian Wellis.
60
As I’d expected, the stairs on the other side of the partition took me back up to the Circle and District lines. Healy said he would give me ten minutes before calling it in to Craw. I moved through the empty tunnels and up to the ticket hall, where Stevie O’Keefe was waiting with the station supervisor. Neither of them said much, but I got the feeling O’Keefe had been read the riot act for leaving us unattended on the line, and I also got the feeling he didn’t particularly care. As I sidestepped a series of questions from the supervisor, I looked across at O’Keefe and saw a strange kind of acquiescence in him: an acknowledgement that he’d done the wrong thing, but that he couldn’t bring himself to be down there. He offered to walk me out, and the supervisor – barely communicative by the end – just shrugged and watched us go.
As we walked, I thought about Wellis. He’d died the way he’d lived. He’d died a death he deserved. But even if I loathed everything he stood for, without pause, and knew that the world would be better off without him, it was hard not to look at a man in the aftermath of such a death and not feel troubled by it.
‘I have an old friend,’ O’Keefe said, as I tuned back in. ‘Gerry. He does the same job as me on the Circle. We meet down on the Jubilee platform sometimes. Just a little routine we have. For some company, you know? Normally Tuesdays and Thursdays.’
I nodded and smiled, but my thoughts were already moving on to where Healy and I went next.
‘I just chatted to him,’ O’Keefe went on. ‘We were supposed to meet in our usual spot on Thursday, down on the platform, but Gerry never turned up.’
O’Keefe stopped walking. I stopped too out of politeness.
‘Thing is, he said he did turn up there.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Jubilee platform – where we were tonight.’
I frowned. ‘I’m not sure I follow.’
‘Gerry got there before me on Thursday, to the Jubilee line. Normally we just have a coffee and a chinwag. He brings the flask, I bring the conversation. It can get lonely down on the tracks all by yourself.’ O’Keefe stopped and looked at me. ‘But when Gerry got down to the line, he said he kept hearing this noise, like a beeping. A
nd when he followed it, he realized it was the phone.’
‘Wait, he found the phone before you?’
‘Must have done.’
‘So why didn’t he pick it up himself?’
‘He said it was on the actual track itself.’
‘Beyond the screens?’
‘Yeah. He said he opened up the screens and got down on to the line, but when he got down there he started feeling …’ Another pause. ‘Started feeling strange.’
‘Ill?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not ill.’
He meant Gerry was like him. He meant they’d both felt something had been off that night in the dark of the station and its tunnels. Gerry didn’t even have it in him to reach down and pick up the phone. He’d just backed up and walked away. Minutes later, O’Keefe had arrived and picked up the phone himself. But he didn’t seem to realize what else he’d said, the bigger revelation: that when Gerry had found the phone, it was on the track itself. When O’Keefe had found it, it was on a bench, on the platform, in plain sight. As if it had been placed on the track originally to make it look like an accident, to make it look like just another piece of lost property. But then, when Gerry had failed to pick it up, it had been deliberately moved again, to ensure it was found the second time.
And there was only one reason to do that: to make absolutely certain the police were pushed in Sam Wren’s direction.
I knew then that the Met wouldn’t find anything on CCTV, because the cameras went off as soon as the station shut up for the night. Whoever had left the phone on the track had definitely been inside the station after hours. Whoever it was had to have felt comfortable here, had to have known the Tube, its lines, its tunnels. And, to me, there wasn’t much doubt about who that person was.
Duncan Pell.
61
The next morning I woke to the sound of my phone buzzing on the bedside table. I pulled myself out of sleep and grabbed it. The number was withheld.
‘David Raker.’
‘Raker, it’s me.’
Healy. I could hear the soft sound of cars in the background, and the occasional voice passing. He was in a public phone box. ‘You all right?’
‘I’m eating shit for last night.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Craw. She’s so far up my arse, she’s practically in my fucking throat. I can’t go for a piss without her giving me the eye.’ He paused, a sigh crackling down the line.
I looked at my watch. Five past nine. ‘What did she say?’
‘About what?’
‘About Wellis.’
A pause. ‘I didn’t call it in.’
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
‘If I call in Wellis, it turns into a shitstorm on a hundred different fronts,’ he went on. ‘I have to explain what I was doing down there, I’d have to pretend I don’t know who Wellis is, would have to dream up some story for Craw about no one else being with me, despite O’Keefe and that station supervisor seeing you come in and go out.’
‘And if it gets out that Wellis is dead –’
‘Eric Gaishe isn’t gonna be scared about talking any more.’
The only reason Gaishe remained silent was because he was terrified of Wellis’s reach. With Wellis out the way, and if he had any sense, Gaishe would start angling for a deal, because he knew the clients just as much as Wellis. And that would eventually lead the Met to Duncan Pell.
‘Then we’re no longer ahead of the curve,’ I said quietly. ‘So if Craw doesn’t know, why’s she on to you?’
‘She knows something’s going on,’ he replied, and I remembered how she’d been when she’d come to the house. She was smart – even Healy’s lies were struggling to protect him.
‘You need to give her something.’
‘If I give her something, she’ll know I’ve been withholding.’
‘I know. But it’ll take out some of the heat.’
I could hear a sharp intake of breath, as if his teeth were gritted. ‘Fucking Davidson. He’s the reason she’s like this. He’s just there, putting ideas in her head.’
‘About what?’
‘About you and me.’
‘There’s nothing you can do about that. We did what we did last year, and there’s no going back. But we did it for the right reasons, remember that.’ I paused, letting that settle with him. His daughter, the man who had taken her, those were the right reasons. ‘You could take a bullet for Davidson right now and it wouldn’t make any difference.’
Silence.
‘There’s something going on with him,’ he said finally.
‘With Davidson?’
‘Yeah. He doesn’t say anything to me now.’
‘As opposed to?’
‘As opposed to baiting me every bloody day. If they’d left me alone, I wouldn’t have tried to shut them down. But since Sallows got the boot, Davidson’s hardly said anything to me. Not directly. It’s like I don’t exist any more.’
‘You exist. He must have some other plan.’
‘Like what?’
I was about to say I didn’t know, but then I recalled something in Healy’s face the day before, a hint of sadness, of suppression. I thought at the time that it might be a secret he was keeping, unrelated to the case.
‘You got any chinks in your armour?’ I asked.
‘What do you mean by that?’
He’s not going to play ball. ‘I mean, have they got anything they can come at you through? Davidson’s not going to outsmart you on police work, but he’s not stupid. I’ve met Craw. She’s clever. Watchful. She’s not going to have her head turned by a guy like him. She doesn’t care about the crap he’s spinning for her. Maybe she’s watching you more closely, maybe she isn’t, but if she is it’s not because of him, it’s because you’ve set off alarm bells in her head about something. Spun a lie she doesn’t believe.’
‘She thinks you and me are working together.’
‘Do you think that’s all it is?’
Another small pause.
‘Healy?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said eventually, and as I looked down at the phone I felt a bubble of anxiety. Not for me. I could handle it if the police turned up on my doorstep, if they found out I’d completely disregarded their wishes and continued to search for Sam Wren. It was Healy I felt uneasy for. He was lying to me, the only person he could trust, and if he was lying to me, it meant he had something he was willing to protect. And in my experience of him, that meant he was planning on doing something stupid.
‘Be careful, Healy.’
‘About what?’
‘About whatever you’re protecting.’
He didn’t respond. The line drifted a little, and I could hear more cars. A horn. He was calling me on a public phone so there was no trace of contact between us. It had been the same every time: every call to me had been from a random central London number. It was so typically Healy: on the one hand, he had the clarity of purpose not to leave a trace of himself; on the other, it was likely he was harbouring some rash and foolish plan.
‘You still want to find your man?’ he said after a while.
‘Of course I do.’
‘Then meet me at King’s College Hospital at twelve.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s where the girl on the DVDs is.’
62
King’s College Hospital was sandwiched between Coldharbour Lane and Denmark Hill, about two and a half miles south of the river, and it was a building I didn’t have a single good memory of. In my days as a journalist, one of my sources had bled out in A&E after being stabbed in the chest. Then, four years later, Derryn and I had sat together in the oncology department, waiting for a second opinion we hoped would change the course of our lives. It didn’t. The second opinion was the same as the first, except delivered with none of the tact, and when we left, we left the hospital system for good and she died six months later. I hoped my third time would be better, hoped it would bring some
small glimmer of light – but given what I’d seen on the DVDs of Pell, and how the girl had looked when I’d found her in Adrian Wellis’s loft space, I wasn’t holding out much hope.
Healy was waiting in the car park at the rear of the campus. As I swung the BMW into a space, I killed the engine and watched him in the rear-view mirror for a moment. He was scanning his surroundings, eyes everywhere, trying to see if anyone had followed him here. He probably had good reason to be suspicious, but there was a look on his face, a mixture of anguish and paranoia, which he’d have to lose if we were going to get anywhere with the girl.
We walked across the car park, light rain drifting from right to left, and headed inside. The corridors were cool and smelt faintly of boiled food and industrial-strength cleaner, even though every window and door was open for as far as the eye could see. The intensive-care unit was on the other side of the campus, so we followed the signposts through the bowels of the hospital, neither of us talking, just moving silently from one end to the other. About twenty feet short of the ICU front desk, Healy took me aside and brought me up to date.
‘She opened her eyes for the first time yesterday,’ he said, ‘but she’s still pretty screwed up. Cheekbones and nose were smashed in, and one of her ears has been torn. Plus she has all the cuts and bruises you’d expect a woman to have after being kept in a loft and raped repeatedly by a couple of fucking animals.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Marika.’
I nodded, and let Healy lead the way.
Marika Leseretscu was at the end of a long ward, the smell of food and cleaning products giving way to the oppressive tang of sickness. Outside her door stood a young, uniformed officer, an empty seat next to him with his hat perched on it and his jacket over the back.
