Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3)

by Jay Stringer

  She waved the moment away. “He just reminded me of you.”

  I used my keys to cut into the side of the carpet and used that beginning to tear a patch loose around the corpses. Then we rolled the rest of it, clothes and all, into a bundle in the center of the room.

  After all that, we took a break, sitting on the cold tiles in the bathroom and letting the steam from the shower roll around us. I closed my eyes and could feel my body telling me to stay right there, that everything would be fine if I just didn’t move. When I opened my eyes, Laura was smiling. She broke out into a nervous laugh.

  “What the fuck are we doing?”

  I touched her foot with mine; it would have been sweet if we weren’t both flecked in blood. “What else would you have been doing that’s more interesting than this?”

  She shrugged, and turned to stare into the shower for a while, a distant look in her eyes. Once again I realized what an asshole I could be. Laura turned up dressed up nicely with an overnight bag, and I leapt to the assumption it was because she’d imagined I’d been calling her for a hookup. It hadn’t occurred to me that the city had probably thousands of other guys who, frankly, had better odds than her ex-husband.

  Had she dropped other plans to help me?

  “Come on.” She slapped my leg as she rose to her feet. “Let’s get it done before we get too settled.”

  Laura fetched her bag from the hall and dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt, and old trainers. I had only the clothes I’d come in.

  “Now we need to get these out of here,” I said.

  I hadn’t had a chance to frame my next question before she said, “Your car. Definitely your car.”

  We started with Tony, who looked the lighter of the two. Taking an end each, we lifted his dead weight between us, and carried him out into the hallway. I kicked the fire escape door open, and we carried him into the stairwell. Laura was struggling under her end of the weight, and had to keep adjusting her grip, but she didn’t want to show it. Being on the third floor meant six short flights of stairs, and we dropped him three times, each time pausing and holding our breath, waiting for someone to come and see what the noise was.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, the exit door led to the rear parking lot. It was operated by a push bar and I knew that opening it would trigger the only alarm in the building that actually worked. Gaines had insisted on keeping it active, both because she wanted to stop people from getting in without us knowing, and because it looked good to health and safety officials. The small blinking light above the door reminded us what would happen if we tried to leave. The only other way out was to walk in the other direction, through a small lobby that led past the reception area and the bar, where a few people were drinking watered-down booze and eating microwave meals charged at restaurant prices. Below the ground level exit was one very last half flight of stairs. Next to it I spotted a closet door. Leaving Laura with the body, I walked down and forced it open, the small lock giving easily under my weight. The space stored an assortment of mops and buckets. We shoved them aside and put Tony in there and went back up for Jellyfish.

  He was heavier and took longer. This time I suggested something different to take pressure off Laura, and we stood him upright between us, like a drunk. With the majority of his weight on my shoulder, we made decent progress down the stairs. Everything went well until we were on the first floor, when my leg started to scream at me and my knee buckled. I fell into the wall beside me, and Jellyfish slipped from us, falling face-first down to the next landing in a loud and graceless belly flop.

  We heard a door open and close in the hallway above us, and footsteps begin padding toward the stairwell.

  Laura shot me a level look and moved quickly to drag Jelly to the top of the next flight of stairs. Then she shoved him roughly down the first couple of steps and left him face down. That position made him look as if he was reaching for the top step. I went up and reached the landing above just in time to see the door to the stairwell open.

  A man in a rumpled business suit stepped through the fire escape door, sleep in his eyes. Salesman, banker, insurance rep. Whatever life he lived, it was one that had led him to The Hound in Wolverhampton rather than the Radisson in Birmingham. He’d have a list of disappointments and defeats all of his own, but a modest life didn’t equate a dishonest one, and I still had to assume he’d dial 999 if things looked suspicious. He didn’t step all the way into the stairwell, leaving his back foot in the corridor and holding on to the door as if it were a life raft. He really didn’t want to be here; this was only a courtesy check after a ruckus, an obligation in case someone was hurt.

  He looked at me and blinked. “Everything all right?”

  “I dunno, mate. I heard the same as you.” I looked down to where Laura was sitting stroking Jellyfish’s hair, whispering in his ear. “You all right, love?”

  She looked up with an expression I’d seen too many times—an exasperated wife. “Fine. Sorry, guys. My husband, he never knows when to stop.”

  I smiled at the businessman—two conspirators, laughing at the married couple.

  I needed to speak up before the businessman started to think he was in charge of the situation. “Need any help? He looks a little out of it.”

  He looked at me to say, Should we mention the nakedness? I gave him wide eyes, saying, I know, right?

  Laura took a few steps up onto the landing so she could stand and look up at us, and waved us away. “Honestly, it’s fine. Sorry to bother you guys. He’s just playing dead. He’ll get up in a minute, and then the silly twat’ll realize he’s naked again. Really, you go back to what you were doing. I’m used to this.”

  She played the part well. I didn’t want to think about where she’d done her training. The businessman had the out he was looking for, the excuse to go back to being in his room alone and not having to care about anybody else. I led by example and started climbing the stairs toward the next floor up, heading to my imaginary room. As soon as the businessman shut the door behind him, I turned back and joined Laura beside Jellyfish’s body.

  “You were awesome.” I said and, despite the situation, she couldn’t keep the childlike excitement out of her eyes.

  We stowed Jellyfish on top of Tony, and went back for the carpet.

  Somehow it’s easier to haul two dead humans down six flights of stairs than it is to carry a roll of carpet. It took us twenty minutes of scraping, grunting, and stumbling to get it down. And even then, it was too big to fit into the maintenance closet. We leaned it up across the closet door, hoping nobody would smell it too closely.

  “Next plan?” Laura was breathing heavily, and I didn’t think either of us was going to be able to carry the load much farther. I led her back up to the room, and we pulled the hotel information binder from the bedside table. It listed room service details, the channels for the TV that didn’t work, and the fire evacuation details. It showed that the main assembly point for staff and guests was at the front of the building, in the guests’ car park, rather than the employee space where my car was parked. I pointed at the map, and Laura nodded. “And if we leave it a couple of minutes, then anyone leaving through our stairwell will have made their way around the front.”

  I handed her my keys. I’d traded cars a couple of times since our marriage had ended, but she said she knew which one was mine. After we agreed she’d have it at the fire exit in five minutes, she headed down. I watched the minutes tick away on the screen of my mobile phone. When it was time, I slipped out into the hallway and broke the glass of the fire alarm, setting the whole building ringing with panic and confusion.

  I walked slowly down the rear fire escape, letting others overtake me on their way out, including my businessman friend. By the time I reached the bottom, everyone had either gone through the lobby or out through the rear escape and round the building. The fire escape door hung open, its alarm no
longer our worry.

  Laura backed my car right up to the door, popping the trunk before climbing out to help me. She’d already put the backseats down, clearing more room. We slid the two bodies in first, laying them facedown lengthways, with their heads behind the front seats and their toes sticking out the end of the car. We had to force their legs and push them into unnatural positions to make them fit.

  Once they were settled, we lifted the carpet, and were just trying to figure out the best way to fit it in as we heard the sirens of the fire engines around front. We only had seconds before firemen would be in here checking the building, and we both panicked a little, losing our grip on the carpet and letting it fall to the ground between us. It unraveled a little as it fell, and I realized this had worked in our favor—it flattened out from a roll to a messy pile of carpet. We folded it over and forced it into the back of the car, on top of the bodies, and slammed the trunk shut.

  I peered in through the car windows. Bits of flesh were on show, but only if you knew what you were looking for. All a casual eye could see was a pile of carpet, and it was too dark for any stains to be visible. I closed the fire escape door behind us and walked round to the driver’s side, taking the keys off Laura and getting into the car.

  Laura was just about to slide into the passenger seat beside me when we were bathed in the flashing lights of a police car. Two uniformed officers pulled up in front of us in a marked car, blocking our exit.

  I fixed my eyes on the blue lights as they strobed across the hood of my car and avoided looking up at the cops blocking our path. I held to the same logic as a child ignoring the monster under the bed.

  Ignore it, it’ll go away.

  Ignore them, they’ll go away.

  I heard one of them step out of the patrol car and start toward us, and I swore under my breath to a god I’d stopped believing in a long time ago. Before Laura could finish cursing, she was out of the car and walking around it to greet the uniform. I cranked my window down a few inches as quietly as I could to listen in.

  “M’am.” The uniform clearly recognized her.

  “What’s up, boys?”

  “Attending the fire. We were driving past when we heard the fire engine and saw all the people out front. Then, as we were pulling off the road, we saw movement round the back here and thought—”

  “Good instincts. Well done. But everything’s okay.”

  I felt both officers fix their eyes on me, then at the load in the car behind me. If they recognized me then they would know my connections and we’d be done.

  Laura must have felt she was losing them too, because she stepped in close and whispered something I couldn’t hear. The young uniform straightened up, nodded, and turned back to his car. He had a terse conference with his partner. Then the two of them belted up and the car engine started. They reversed away as Laura slid into the passenger seat beside me. They offered us a quick nod before pulling around to the front of the building.

  “Fuck you.” Laura repeated her new favorite greeting. She was staring at the dashboard, keeping her eyes away from me for the time being. “My name’s all over this now.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  “I said this was an operation. You’re a police informant, and we were meeting here when we got made. The fire alarm is to cover us as we get you out.”

  “Wow, you thought that up on the spot?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “That’s a huge lie, I mean even by your—” I thought better of the cheap dig. “I mean, you know, couldn’t you just say you were meeting your ex-husband for a bit of rough, and it’s a secret, so when the alarm went off we snuck out the back?”

  She looked up now and shook her head. “Really? I have to put up with enough innuendo as it is, with guys trying to turn everything I do into some kind of sexual rumor, and you want me to give them something like that to talk about?”

  “They bought it?”

  “They’re young cops. Young guys. They all want to be the star of the movie. They’ll hold on to that like it makes them Serpico. Plus, I told them they could check with the super if they didn’t believe me.”

  “But what if they talk to him?”

  She smiled and shrugged, fastening her seatbelt. “I’ll tell him I was meeting my ex-husband for a bit of rough and we snuck out the back way when the alarm went off.”

  “Plan.”

  I pulled the car out onto the road and joined the slow traffic that was rubbernecking the fire engines. The ring road was made up of several lanes of traffic that wrapped around the city center like a concrete moat.

  “Okay,” Laura brought us back to the task at hand. “But what’s our current plan? Or do we just drive around the ring road until we get arrested?”

  “That’s one option.” I offered her a smile but it was a one-way gesture. “Or how about we drive out to Dudley. The caves beneath the castle are good. There’s one that’s still open.”

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  I didn’t answer, keeping my eyes fixed on the road. I felt her leaning forward in her seat to try and look into my eyes, but I didn’t turn. After a while she leaned back in her seat and copied my stance, letting the drone of the tires cover for things neither of us wanted to talk about.

  I turned off the ring road and headed towards Dudley. We drove past Casa Mia. Neither of us turned to look, but I knew we both wanted to. We passed closed-down factory units that had been turned into half-finished and totally abandoned retail units, and pubs that were still doing a good trade. Some of them had football banners waving from first-floor windows; others had the orange Sikh flags for Vaisakhi.

  This scenery slowly gave way to suburbs with square, sensible houses which in turn gave way to bigger and more expensive homes and quieter roads. The process then started to work in reverse as the outskirts of the city gave way to those of its neighbor.

  In a previous life, Dudley had been a mining town, whereas Wolverhampton had been more about factories and industry. Like every other relic of the years when coal boomed, Dudley had been left to fall apart while Wolverhampton had gotten the grants for retail and urban renewal schemes, and it had recovered some while Dudley had been left to limp on its own. Boarded-up council houses and cheap fast-food shops lined the road, along with the most betting shops I’d ever seen outside of Glasgow.

  In the distance, atop a hill, was the dark shape of the town’s ruined castle. It was more from memory and imagination that I could make out its silhouette; it was too dark and too far away, and even as we drew near, it remained an indistinct blur. The grounds of the castle had been converted into a zoo, and sometimes if you caught the right wind at night you could hear one of the animals call out in the darkness. When I was a child, my mum had told me the zoo had once kept a killer whale in the moat of the castle, and that had sounded like the coolest thing I’d ever heard. As an adult I found out the whale had died not long after it had come to the midlands.

  I pulled onto the side of the road at the base of the castle hill at the only spot that was familiar to me, and looked up at a large metal gate and CCTV cameras looking down toward us.

  “Shit.”

  Laura peered up at the cameras and then at the dark shapes of the construction site beyond. “Not what you were expecting?”

  I shook my head. Last time I’d been here a broken fence had been the only thing between me and the dirt road that led through bushes toward the castle hill. Which was exactly where we needed to go now, to find the holes that led down to the mine shafts beneath the town, most of which were flooded. Ideal places to get rid of unwanted problems. I’d come here to do that once before, and it was a memory that no amount of pills would chase away.

  “Okay,” Laura said. “So plan A is shitty. I could have seen that coming. Don’t you guys have people to take care of these things for you?”
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  “Yes, that was plan A. We have a whole team of people who take care of these things for us, but the man who arranges it is naked and facedown in the back. Until I know if anyone helped set him up, we’re on our own. This was plan B. And now I’m looking for a plan C.”

  “Oh.”

  I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel and peered again at the fence, wondering if I could see a better spot to sneak in farther down, or if I’d pulled in at the wrong place.

  Then Laura surprised me yet again.

  “Come on.” She pointed out through the front window. “I know a place we can use.”

  Laura motioned for me to drive on in the direction we were facing, then take the next right onto Tipton Road. The route took us past the Black Country museum, an open-air visitor center to which many local historical buildings had been moved brick by brick. You could take tours of the houses or an old mine shaft, and be told how life had been lived before the wars. We’d been a few times when we were married.

  Across from the museum was an abandoned hospital. It had survived two world wars and several recessions, only to be closed by the bean counters a few years ago after NHS budget cuts. Now it sat empty and dark, with weeds sprouting through the concrete and a metal fence surrounding the site, keeping people out. Laura pointed for me to pull into its driveway, but the gates were locked and barricaded in some places by concrete blocks large enough to stop cars from getting through. I eased the car up onto the curb as far as I could without hitting the fence, to leave room for the traffic to continue on past behind us.

  “What do you think?” she said. “All hospitals have morgues.”

  I glanced at Laura. “Yeah, and people look in them.”

  “This place seem like it gets many visitors?”

  “Right now? No. But it’s not like people have forgotten it’s here. At some point people will go in and look around. Buildings like this don’t stand empty forever.”