The Haunting of Bleeding Heart Yard (Quigg)

by Tim Ellis

‘Any favourite places she liked to go. Maybe from a holiday, or from her childhood?’

  ‘We never went on holiday.’

  ‘You were the worst,’ Lucy said. ‘Everybody goes on holiday. Didn’t you go camping?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about trips to the Science Museum, Longleat, London Zoo, Legoland, the Tower of London . . . ?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Quigg. You should be shot for crimes against fatherhood, or maybe something a bit more painful. What do you think, Duffy?’

  ‘A lot more painful. Don’t think I’ll let you . . .’

  Lucy slapped him on the arm. ‘Nor me.’

  ‘Do you know where Caitlin spent her childhood?’

  ‘A small place called Fairlight Cove on the East Sussex coast, I believe.’

  ‘Did you ever go there with her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about when you got married, who did she invite from her side of the family?’

  ‘No one. She said there was no one left. It was a quiet registry office marriage. My mum, and my work partner at the time – Louis Windle – came along to act as witnesses, but that was it.’

  ‘Honeymoon?’

  ‘We couldn’t afford one. And anyway, I recall we had a big murder investigation on at the time.’

  ‘I can’t believe you, Quigg,’ Lucy said. ‘No wonder she threw you out.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What about her schools in Fairlight Cove? The university she attended? The jobs she had?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Did she go to university?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Surely she was working when you met her?’

  ‘Yes, I think she was.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  Lucy laughed. ‘Come on, Quigg. Give him something.’

  He screwed up his face. ‘She became pregnant shortly after we met and gave up work.’

  ‘Which was?’ Duffy chipped in.

  ‘Oh, yeah! She said she worked in public relations.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Crankshank asked.

  Lucy grunted. ‘It’s like getting blood out of a stone.’

  ‘I saw something once – a business card with her name on it and Lancer Communications. There was a telephone number, but I don’t remember it.’

  ‘Lancer Communications,’ Crankshank said. ‘That’s something at least. We’ll check the usual – bank accounts, credit cards, schools for Phoebe, mobile telephone records and so on.’

  ‘Don’t forget the Child Support Agency.’

  Crankshank seemed surprised. ‘You’re still paying maintenance for Phoebe?’

  ‘Yes . . .’ He stood up, walked over to the cupboard where he kept his financial records and rooted out a bank statement. He scanned down the entries until he found the monthly payment to CSA and said, ‘Yes, here it is.’

  ‘You’re being robbed,’ Crankshank said as he wrote down the details of the line entry.

  ‘Everybody thinks that except the CSA. They’re of the opinion that it’s perfectly acceptable to take forty percent of a man’s blood, sweat and tears and give it to his ex-wife.’

  ‘For bringing up his child.’

  ‘A flimsy excuse.’

  Chapter Ten

  Bored wasn’t really an adequate word to describe the feelings of numbness in her head. Quigg was a fucking rogue and Rodney Crankshank was about as exciting as a wet weekend. She wandered along the corridor to check whether Gatekeeper had got anywhere with the messages or the Twitter names.

  There were three emails sitting in her inbox. Two were rubbish. One was from Gatekeeper, but it had nothing in the subject dialogue box. He must be excited at cracking the codes, she thought.

  She opened his email. There was no message, but he’d provided a link to a video – she clicked on it.

  Her screen filled with streaming machine code and she lost control of the system.

  ‘Fucking crap!’ Her fingers moved at superhuman-speed across the keyboard pressing a myriad of key combinations, but all to no avail. Somebody else had taken control of her system. How the fuck had they bypassed her security measures? What was Gatekeeper thinking of sending her a fucking Trojan?

  Nothing she tried would let her back in.

  She’d been frozen out.

  Her webcam began flashing. It was sending her real-time image to somewhere.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  Her heart was thrashing about.

  She was just about to pull the plug when the screen came alive.

  A man’s head appeared.

  He was wearing a ski mask.

  ‘Hello, Tornado Jane,’ he said with a thick foreign accent. He could see her as she could see him.

  ‘Who the fuck are you? Where’s Gatekeeper?’

  He bared his teeth and moved out of the camera angle. ‘He’s here.’

  She’d never seen Gatekeeper before, and he’d never seen her. They’d met on a site for computer geeks and become online friends.

  The man on the screen was probably in his late twenties, morbidly obese with triple chins, long greasy hair, a straggly beard and a rag stuffed in his mouth.

  ‘Gatekeeper!’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

  Tears leaked from his staring eyes.

  Something silver and shiny flashed across the screen and took off Gatekeeper’s head.

  ‘Fuck!’ She fell backwards off her chair.

  The webcam followed the head as it bounced on the floor and rolled across the carpet like a bowling ball leaving a trail of slimy blood in its wake.

  The ski mask covered head reappeared and said, ‘You’re next, bitch.’

  Her screen went blank for a moment, and then her system re-booted itself.

  ‘QUIGG!’ she screamed at the top of her voice.

  ***

  She wished she hadn’t bothered saying she’d stay and help out. Emilia had directed her to find a couple of things in piles under one of the desks, but other than that she’d been bored out of her fucking skull. The old woman poured over books, scraps of paper and old documents, mumbled like an inmate and completely ignored her.

  It was eleven twenty, and she was wondering if she should go back to the stationhouse and get some sleep. The trouble was, Quigg had stolen her fucking car and it was a bit late for travelling on the underground.

  Not for the first time, she heard a noise reverberate from somewhere in the building, but this was different. Were there other people here? Was the place full of cleaners? Security staff? Students trying to pass exams? Or professors attempting to keep one step ahead of the students? ‘Are we on our own up here?’

  The professor ignored her.

  She wandered out through the outer office and into the corridor. The place was as old and creepy as a haunted house. Had they been locked in? Were there ghosts or . . . other creatures in the building? She should have checked these things before agreeing to stay.

  As she leaned over the metal balcony she saw two shadows – with ski-masks on – climbing the stairs.

  Fuck!

  She ran back into the professor’s office and shut the door.

  ‘Where’s the key?’ she hissed.

  ‘No key.’

  ‘There’s two men with masks on coming up the fucking stairs.’

  ‘Einsatzgruppen,’ Razinsky spat, hurrying to the far wall where she pressed something that Kline couldn’t see. A section of the wood-panelling clicked open like a door into another universe. ‘Quickly – in here.’

  They just managed to slip into the space behind the wood panel and pull it closed before the office door crashed open.

  ‘Come out, come out wherever you are,’ a thick foreign accented voice said.

  Light from the office stabbed through two pin holes in the wood panelling.

  Kline stuck her eye against one of the holes, and guessed she wasn’t the first to do so. Somebody had stood where she was standing and peered through the
spy hole – what were they looking at? A murder? A secret liaison between a man and a woman? Soldiers carrying out the King’s orders?

  A second man walked into the office.

  ‘They’ve gone,’ the first man said.

  The second man gave a whistle as he examined the work the professor had done on the pin board. ‘The old hag has been busy,’ he said. ‘Find them. There must be another way out, and then we’ll torch this place.’

  The first man began knocking on the wood.

  Kline knew it wouldn’t take him long to find the hidden panel and force it open.

  ‘Come,’ Emilia whispered, and took hold of her wrist.

  Without the pin pricks of light they were plunged into darkness as they shuffled sideways along a passageway.

  She needed to call Quigg, but realised that her phone was in her jacket pocket, and her jacket was hooked over the back of the chair in the office. Fuck! She also had a small LED torch on her key ring, which was also in her jacket pocket.

  ‘Have you got your phone with you?’ she asked Emilia.

  ‘In my handbag in the office.’

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Exactly. In Yiddish we say, “Dreck”. It sounds much better in English.’

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘I do not know. I found the panel twelve years ago late at night when I was on my own working. I said to myself that I should explore what lay behind it one day, but one day never comes. Then you forget, and it is twelve years later and you are running for your life again.’

  ‘What do you mean - again?’

  All the time Emilia was talking they kept moving towards the main building.

  Kline was following the professor. It sounded as though neither of them knew where they were going.

  The passageway was just wide enough for her to stand with her arms by her sides, twist them and touch the walls with the palms of her hands. She could feel the rough brick, the cracks and the mortar with both hands. There was no smell of damp, and it was dry underfoot. In fact, as they shuffled along the passageway, the dust thrown up by their movement stuck to the back of her throat and the roof of her mouth. She hoped there was an oasis up ahead.

  ‘They took us out of the camp one day in 1945,’ Emilia continued. ‘I remember, it was so very cold. There were patches of snow on the hard ground. The sun shone brightly in the sky, but it wasn’t warm. We didn’t have far to walk. A long deep pit had been dug the previous year for some reason . . . I remember wondering at the time if the Germans had known all along what would happen and this was why they’d had men dig it.’

  They reached a dead end, but there were steps upwards.

  Carefully, they ascended and reached another passageway. Now, they were moving parallel to the quadrangle and were on the fifth floor inside the walls of the main building.

  ‘When we reached the pit, which was about half a mile from the camp, we were told to take off all our clothes and kneel down on the edge where the soil had been heaped up. When I looked down, I could see that the bottom of the pit was already covered with naked frozen bodies.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Exactly. I was resigned to my fate – we all were by that time. In the three years I had been at Treblinka I had suffered beyond anything you can ever imagine. It was my time to go, and in a way I was looking forward to joining my family . . .’

  ‘Here we come,’ a man’s voice echoed through the labyrinth of tunnels.

  The men had obviously found a way in.

  The faint whiff of smoke reached them.

  ‘They’re burning all your hard work,’ Kline said.

  ‘They are fools. Do they not think I would have copies? I have copies of everything, and the connections I have made are all inside my head and I have taken photographs of those connections – everything is in a safe place.’

  ‘What will happen to your work if . . . ?’

  ‘. . . If I die?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I have helpers, students . . . they will carry on my work.’

  ‘Earlier, you said these men were the Einsatzgruppen – surely they are all dead by now, or old men?’

  ‘Others have taken their place. They call themselves the Order of the Black Sun, but they are SS-Totenkopfverbände – Death’s Head soldiers – all the same.’

  ‘What are they doing here? Why are they after you now?’

  ‘It is because of what you have found – the number.’

  ‘I don’t understand. How could they know?’

  ‘There is someone who works with me – an assistant called Andriy Tauber. He came to me with the highest credentials, but now I know he is one of them. You English have a good saying: He was too good to be true.’

  ‘What about . . . ?’

  ‘We’re coming,’ the man’s voice was closer now. ‘Can you smell all your useless work going up in flames, bitch?’

  Kline took a deep breath and was about to tell the bastards to, ‘Fuck off’, but Emilia put a hand over her mouth.

  ‘No, that is what they want – hurry.’

  They came across another panel that opened into the main library – Emilia opened it.

  ‘Leave it open, they might think we have gone through.’

  ‘But aren’t we . . . ?’

  ‘No, we will not escape that way. There will be more Einsatzgruppen downstairs to prevent us from escaping – they always hunt in packs. Our only chance is to stay inside these passageways. They did not know about them – that is to our advantage. If we keep going down, I am sure we will find a way out. I have been at the university for over thirty years, and I have heard lots of rumours about these secret passages. There is a Roman bath down in the basement, which used to be a cistern that fed the Queen of Denmark’s fountain – the water must come from somewhere. Below that, there is an abandoned tube station called Aldwych. Yes, we will find our way out down there – trust me, I have done this before remember.’

  ‘You were telling me about kneeling down on the edge of the pit.’

  ‘It is a long story.’

  ‘We have time.’

  ‘So we do.’

  ***

  Quigg had convinced her it was a hoax – and maybe it was. Maybe Gatekeeper was stupid enough to think something like that was funny. If he did – she was going to fucking kill him! He certainly had the wherewithal to take control of her system. But if that were the case, why hadn’t he followed up with a, “Ha, ha – got you!”. There’d been nothing. It was as if the whole thing had never happened. It was as if she’d imagined the whole fucking thing.

  She was lying in bed nursing a mug of lukewarm coffee. Quigg had offered to untie her knots by fucking her stupid, but she wasn’t in the mood. Not in the mood! There was a fucking first. She was always in the mood.

  Not only was she worried about Gatekeeper, but she was also worried about herself. Was someone coming to kill her? But it wasn’t just her anymore – or was it? Maybe she had a little Quigg inside of her. Still no period – not even the sniff of one.

  She’d sent Gatekeeper a dozen emails, but he wasn’t responding. Why? Where the fuck was he? All he had to do was send her one measly email to let her know he hadn’t lost his head over all of this.

  It was either true or it wasn’t. If it wasn’t true, then Gatekeeper would be at the other end laughing his cock off and pissing her off no end. If it was true, and Gatekeeper was a headless corpse, then they were coming after her.

  She switched the light off and tried to sleep, but it would have to be a cold day in Hell for her to get any sleep after what she’d seen. She switched the light back on and went back to her computer. It didn’t take her long to find the site where she’d become friendly with Gatekeeper: geeksagogo.com. She logged on using her old online name of Uptown Girl and jumped into the forum with both feet.

  Uptown Girl: Hey! Anybody there?

  Reptile: You gotta be kiddin me?

  Uptown Girl: Hey, Reptile! Long time.

 
Reptile: Understatement! It’s been like a millennium!

  Uptown Girl: I see you’ve learnt to spell while I’ve been away.

  Jazz: He may be able to spell now, but he can’t do anything about his ugliness.

  Reptile: I have other assets.

  Jazz: Yuk!

  Uptown Girl: Hey, Jazz! How’s your mum?

  Jazz: Gone.

  Uptown Girl: Sorry!

  Jazz: Yeah.

  Hurricane Joe: So, what brings you back to the fold?

  Uptown Girl: I heard you had smiled, Joe.

  Hurricane Joe: It’s a fucking lie.’

  Uptown Girl: I need to find Gatekeeper.

  Jazz: He’s been on here a few times recently.

  Uptown Girl: No – I need to find him. I think he’s in trouble. Anybody got any ideas?

  Raccoon: What do you mean, “In trouble”?

  Uptown Girl: He was doing a job for me. Now I can’t contact him.

  She didn’t want to admit that someone had taken over her system, or what might have happened to Gatekeeper. It might have scared them off, and she needed their help.

  Hurricane Joe: Maybe his system has crashed.

  Uptown Girl: I’ve done all the maybes. Any physical location? Any idea of a real name?

  Jazz: His first name is Ian.

  Baroness: His last name is Frampton.

  Uptown Girl: You people rock. No address?

  Wriggler: You sure you want us to post his address on here?

  Uptown Girl: It’s important.

  Wriggler: I know where he lives.

  Uptown Girl: And?

  Wriggler: He’ll kill me.

  Uptown Girl: If I’m right, he won’t be in any fit state to kill anybody. What’s the address, Wriggler?

  Wriggler: East Barnet – 73 Woodfield Drive.’

  She wrote the address down on the top page of the cheap Jumbo notebook she always kept by the side of her computer.

  Uptown Girl: Got a postcode for the satnav?

  Jazz: Satnav! Get you.

  Uptown Girl: I’ll be driving a Mercedes.

  Reptile: In your dreams.

  Wriggler: EN4 9LE

  She wrote that down on the page as well, ripped the page out of her notebook and re-wrote the address on the next page – just in case Quigg had to come to her rescue – although that would be a first.