“Sounds like you're Canadian, from the western side I think, perhaps Vancouver?”
“Good guess. My name's Sandy by the way. I've been in London so many years my accent's almost disappeared, except when I get together with my sister. How did you know?”
“Deciphering people's origins is a hobby of mine.”
“Are you some kind of researcher?”
No, she thought, since you ask, my father was an expert at deceit and mind games, and a calculating killer, and he off-loaded all his specialisms to me.
“You're not the usual type who deals with Dante, you seem nice. So if you don't mind me giving you some advice, just remember, tomorrow's another day. Whatever happened in there, don't let it get to you,” Sandy said.
“Mr Jones gave me some very bad news.”
“He often does that to people.”
Sandy switched on the laptop and walked off. The audience were fixated on Roxy. Bathing in an erotic ambience for a few hours must be effective in washing away the stresses and strains of people’s everyday lives. Roxy proved herself to be a classy dancer, acrobatic and able to steam it up belly-dance style, with a continuous snaking of her hips which sent sinuous, sexy ripples travelling up her body. With moves like that no wonder the audience were riveted. Kal felt herself returning to reality. Felt her mind and body reconnecting, having made the decision to continue. To get up and keep struggling, keep fighting. Keep living. She turned her attention to Dante’s memory stick.
She knew she’d hit rock bottom. What more dreadful evidence could there be? More shots depicting the bodies of her father’s victims? Flipping the stick in her fingers, she plugged it in. She didn’t even have the force of will to prepare herself.
The stick contained a copy of the police file on David Khan's death. The same one Spinks examined. The file detailed how David Khan’s motorbike had left the road. He’d been ejected and slammed into the ground. The motorbike’s smashed remains were captured, along with tyre marks and an estimated trajectory of the bike and the body. She read the investigating officer's report and specialist accounts, including the inventory of her father’s fatal injuries – rupture of the aorta, rupture of kidneys and spleen and shear forces sufficient to sever the cervical from the thoracic spine. The officer had scribbled a hand-written question in the margin of the typed notes. It read, 'All perfect. Except helmet?'. Just as Spinks reported.
Photographs illustrated the placing of the helmet alongside her father's body. All concurred that for it to land there would have been impossible, and though the medic stated David Khan may have survived perhaps up to two minutes, it was deemed impossible for him to have removed it himself and no trace of any other presence at the scene had been recovered, despite painstaking efforts.
Why Dante had given her this file she didn’t know and right now she didn’t care. She committed the details to memory, drained her glass and, as Roxy began working on discarding her final garment, Kal left the club without looking back.
Chapter Fifty
She must get back to the sanity of Marty and LeeMing.
The Soho streets were thronging. It was around six thirty in the evening, and scents of Chinese food hung in the air. People were already heading for the Chinatown restaurants. Employees from all parts of London, Chinatown residents and an amazing mix of tourists, all mingled in the labyrinth of streets.
Kal hurried down Wardour Street. Up ahead, a young woman stood at the corner, studying her mobile phone. The woman had a quizzical expression as she rotated the small screen from side to side - probably a lost tourist. When Kal walked past, the young woman looked up.
“Excuse me, could you help with directions?”
The woman was alone, in her early twenties, wearing a leather jacket and jeans.
The last thing Kal wanted to do was stop. She wanted to get home and curl up in a ball. Except it took strength to resist, it took strength to be assertive and out-spoken, and she didn’t have anything left. So, for once, she gave way to passivity and politeness, and took a quick glance at the screen.
“Where are you heading?”
“I'm meeting a friend in Covent Garden and I can't work out which way to go,” the young woman said.
“This is the east side so you need to head in this direction.” Kal indicated with her arm. “You're not far from Covent Garden, it's a ten-minute walk.”
“Thanks, oh wait, before you dash off, do you know if I'll be able to buy theatre tickets there?”
“If you want a last minute deal you should head for the official ticket kiosk in Leicester Square. From here, go down to the end and take a...”
Part of her sensed danger and her abdominals tensed as she caught a swift, awkward movement behind her and to the right. She gave the girl tourist a hefty shove to safety, as, coming with force from behind, someone smashed into Kal’s shoulder, causing her to pitch forward. She landed against a shop doorway, breaking her fall with the flat of her arm, using the momentum from the break-fall to twist around. Clinging to her jacket, the man who'd heaved into her now apologised profusely.
He got to his feet and hauled her upright and out of sight, a hard object jammed into her ribcage. She knew it was a gun.
Kal clocked a second man who held the girl tourist by the arm. A woman passer-by stopped, and gave the man holding Kal’s arm a hard stare. The woman wore a smart suit. Kal guessed the woman was on her way home after work, and her antennae had picked something up. The woman kept her distance, her attention flickering between Kal’s face and the man who held her arm and she looked at Kal for a sign, any small signal there was a problem. Kal watched the woman inflate her lungs, ready to shout for help. Only with a gun at her back, and one perhaps trained on the girl tourist, Kal couldn't take the chance. So she kept her face neutral. The woman hesitated, then carried on walking, and Kal recognised reluctance in the woman's steps. Londoners could always spot something amiss. It came from living amongst the masses.
Her assailant increased the force in his grip and an inward spiral of energy gathered in her centre, ready to unleash and throw him off. Then she stopped herself, because the second man now moved his forearm across the tourist’s throat.
“Smile,” he said to the girl, “like I'm your boyfriend.”
“Co-operate,” the man hissed in Kal’s ear, “now stand up straight and act normally.”
If she fought back, it would be difficult to keep the girl safe. Wiser to wait for a clearer opportunity where she could take out both assailants at once. So she complied.
“Not so smart now, are we? You're coming for a little walk with us.”
From his build and the way he held his body, Kal guessed him to be the first man she'd attempted to ambush. The time when the teenagers interfered.
They were propelled off the main drag and into an alley. Unfortunately, not the alley with Dante's club and his South American bouncer, but one which ran behind a row of restaurants. A line of bins straggled the narrow passage, ready for waste from the restaurants. As they walked deeper down the alley, Kal hoped for a distraction she could use to her advantage. But no back doors flew open to scurrying kitchen personnel throwing out trash. No one rushed outside for a five-minute break. Maybe the men had paid off the restaurant managers. The syndicate had vast influence - probably one of the paedophiles owned most of Soho.
Luckily, the girl tourist remained calm and Kal knew she must act quickly and neutralise both men, because wherever they were going, it certainly wouldn’t be ending well.
The buildings either side of the alley prevented much sunlight reaching the ground, which meant the paving underfoot was slippery, with a thin layer of accumulated damp and slime. Good. That’s what she would use in her favour.
She waited for the girl to pass in front so that she could keep her in her field of vision. Readying herself, Kal counted the seconds before she launched her attack and then there came a sudden sting at her neck and everything went black.
***
; She awoke groggy and feeling sick. She was hanging from her wrists, with her arms yanked upwards, her back against a hard surface. Her toes brushed the ground, giving her no purchase to take up the strain tearing her shoulders. Her wrists burned and Kal peered upwards and saw them tied with a thick rope and the rope attached to an iron ring. The ring was embedded in a bare, brick wall. The fog in her mind kept pushing her to phase out.
They must have pumped her with chemicals. She must use the burn of the rope to work against the effect. So she ground her wrists against the bindings. It made her feel like vomiting and it increased the pain and her adrenalin levels, cutting through the fog.
She was alone in a lit chamber. The chamber had a cavernous, subterranean feel to it, with brick walls and a brick ceiling, high and curved, much as you'd find in a chapel. Bricks formed the flooring too, red, oblong, London building bricks. The chamber lay bare save for a solitary wooden chair. The air smelled dank. Kal recognised the smell and as the fog descended and her mind drifted, she couldn't place it.
So she ground her wrists again, bringing back the nausea, her arms numb and the tendons in her shoulders screaming. No, the faint smell wasn't seaweed. Something similar. More rank. She half expected to hear the drip of water, although listening carefully there was no sound at all. The mind fog started to roll in again and she fought it off.
At that moment, she heard footsteps, and as the sound reverberated from the domed ceiling, the answer came to her. She was in the sewers, London’s Victorian sewer network.
The two men who’d accosted them in Chinatown strolled towards her, each step grating on the brick flooring. Kal studied their faces. The man who'd slammed her against the window drew up the lone chair to sit in front of her.
“It's so difficult to judge the dosage required to knock someone out and we often overestimate, I'm glad you've revived at last.”
He didn't give a nasty smile and he didn't gloat. In fact, his face displayed no emotion whatsoever, his demeanour remaining business-like. This was a normal day's work for him. He was a professional, just like LeeMing said.
“Where's the girl?” Kal asked.
It sounded like a croak - the inside of her mouth was so dry. Yes, she’d certainly been here some time.
“Don't worry, you've got more important things to worry about than the little 'tourist'.”
On that last word the man raised a hand, tweaking his forefingers twice in the air to indicate italics.
Shit. Of course. The girl had been part of the set-up. She’d been with them.
He leaned forward and opened his other hand. On it lay two silver hoops. The jewellery looked so slight against his meaty palm. One of the hoops was snapped off at the top, where the ear-attachment would usually be. A terrible sensation crept into Kal’s guts and her bowels threatened to turn to water.
With all her will power, she fixed her face into a groggy expression. Let her eyes blur so that all he'd see was her straining to focus. He stood up and jabbed his hand right up under her nose.
“Recognise these? We ripped them off the dead body of that black friend of yours.”
“Don't know who you mean.”
“Yes, you do, and she put up quite a fight. A spirited one she was, wouldn't stay down, fought like a mad woman. Strong too. Marty King she was called, remember her now?”
Fear swept through Kal. She let herself hang.
“My point being,” he tossed the earrings aside and they landed with a metallic plink onto the brick flooring, “that she's now out of the picture.”
Kal kept her eyes downcast. One of the earrings had landed at the seam of the wall where a small amount of debris had collected in the crack. Alongside the silver hoop, something else caught her attention. It was a fragment of material, tiny, no bigger than a thumbnail. A torn scrap of orange silk, of a bright, unmistakable hue. Identical to the material of one of her mother’s favourite dresses. The sudden discovery swept away the effect of the drugs. Her whole body began shaking, and inside her, the wings of the pale blue butterfly fluttered weakly. Kal couldn’t tear her eyes away from the orange fragment. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.
“How much of that stuff did you pump her with?” the man snapped to his partner.
She clocked the shift in his body position - telegraph, combat fighters called it. A subtle movement, usually of the trunk or side of the body, that precedes a brutal action and signals, or telegraphs, an attacker's intent. She braced her abdominals as the full-force of his hand impacted the side of her face. She swung suspended from the iron ring.
“Wake up sleeping beauty, we've got work to do.” He addressed his colleague over his shoulder. “Are the waterworks ready?”
“Ready and waiting, Klaus,” the second man replied.
Klaus lifted her chin with his hand. His skin smelled of disinfectant. Maybe he was an obsessive compulsive type. Washed his hands at every instance.
“Listen up. We want answers. Your mother left information and we want to know where you've stashed the copies. If you co-operate then we won't need to use force, will we?” An impatience tinged his tone. “Do you know what I think?”
She heard the scrape of the chair as he kicked it back across the floor.
“I think you're a very clever girl, but you know what, like it or not you're going to tell me the location of that information.” Klaus nodded at his partner.
In the distance, she heard a sound like the wind in the trees. Or the rush of water.
“This part of the network is kept dry by a control system of locks and a mere tweak of a computer can send a deluge to flood the whole sector. Just holler nice and loud when you're ready to talk.”
The two men exited back the way they’d come, disappearing inside a dim archway. With her mind now clear, she recognised it as the entrance to a tunnel and she watched their legs and feet disappear as they climbed an iron ladder embedded in the wall. An oily rush of water flowed out of the mouth of the tunnel and cascaded into the chamber, gallons and gallons of water pumping in each second. The sound of splashing filled the air, and the bottom rungs of the ladder already disappeared under the flow.
Chapter Fifty-one
The debris at the crack became caught up. The tiny scrap of orange whirled in an eddy and floated for a few moments before it got swept away. Her eyes followed its path. Her mother’s dress. Marty’s earrings. Fear had her in its grip, threatening to trap her in shock and horror. No, she must keep going. Fight for herself. Fight for them. The water formed an ever deepening pool.
The chamber filled rapidly. The water was already rising up her calves. The chair fell with a splash and was washed to the side. Soon it would be floating on its back.
The Chalkhill butterfly stirred. She mustn’t give up hope. There was always hope. Kick your mind back on line. Find a way out. Work at it. You can still save them.
Whichever man had tied her wrists had done an excellent job because Kal couldn't work any slippage. She searched the room for any sharp object she might use. There were none. Now the freezing water reached her knees and seeped upwards towards her thighs. Should she call them back? She was helpless trussed like this. Could she manipulate them into cutting her down? Could she scheme and lie and worm a chink of an opening in their armour to give herself a chance? Studying the chamber, she realised it wasn't a dead end because although the water flowed in, it also flowed out somewhere hidden behind her and to her left. She twisted as far as she could and caught sight of a second tunnel. A surge of water swept into its dark mouth. The chamber was connected to the sewage network.
The water swirled around her waist. Soon it would lift her off her feet. Kal twisted again to examine the tunnel behind her, and as she did, the back of her hand scraped against something sharp. She peered upwards. A rusty metal bolt protruded from the wall. The iron ring she hung from was attached to a large, iron plate. Four metal bolts attached the plate to the wall and one of them protruded. Perhaps it had never been properly embedded, and the
person who'd attached it had lost patience and left the last bolt sticking out. With her weight dragging her perpendicular she would never have reached it. With the water buoying her up, she had a chance.
She must wait until the water lifted her. Control her panic. Control her despair. Stay disciplined. Wait. When the oily surface reached her chest, Kal trod water and as she raised her body upwards, the tension let out of her arms and blood rushed back into her shoulders. She gritted her teeth, ignoring the agony as her circulation resumed in torn tendons and starved muscles. She must try to cut through the rope before it got wet.
Rotating herself in the water, she placed her wrists against the rusted edge of the bolt. She sawed backwards and forwards. The rusted thread was jagged. It cut through the strands and they frayed off one by one. The water was now so high she could brace herself with her feet against the wall to put strain on the rope and get more force against the cutting edge. At last the bindings gave way and Kal flopped into the cold water.
Which escape route? She must choose wisely before the men came back to find out why she hadn't called for help. If she went up the ladder, she'd encounter them on their way down. Could she handle them? Perhaps - but it would be close. She was weakened. Maybe it would be better to take her chance in the second tunnel. Surely it would lead somewhere? Though complex and running beneath the whole of London, the sewers weren't dead ends because that would defeat their purpose of channelling away the waste. It was a gamble. She knew she wasn’t just physically weakened but mentally weakened too, and she allowed the orange scrap to pull her mind with it down the second tunnel. The tug of water flowed that way. It must be flowing to an exit. Wouldn’t it be her best bet?
She made a quick decision and went it, kicking out with her legs. As she entered the second tunnel, it became quickly dark. Then absolutely and totally pitch black. How would she locate an escape route if she were blind? Reaching her arm above her head, Kal tested for the roof. Her hand didn't make contact. She must hope the water didn’t reach the top and cut off the air.
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