Mirabelle breathed in the brine and iodine that lingered under the walkway, the structure framed by barnacles and straggling fronds of seaweed. Someone had carved their initials into the paintwork. TW loves DRB. Down here, it felt as if the pier itself was pushing down on her – an ominous, heavy weight from above. From below you couldn’t see the candyfloss signs, the striped canopies and the rows of electric lights. A blast of carousel music snaked downwards, sounding further away than it was. Panther found a piece of wood that had been washed up and cheerfully picked it up in his mouth and padded behind her.
At the end of the stones, she realised that she had seen the wooden doors before but never thought about them. The beach stretched off to the right and left, miles in both directions. Standing here, the doors seemed to be at the centre of something – an apex. Mirabelle felt the sting of suspicion. There were three entrances built into the head of the pier, right under the road. Each was painted in faded red paint. All of them were locked. Behind Mirabelle, the deckchair attendant had disappeared, finished for the afternoon. She checked left and right but there was nobody to see what she was up to, so she took out her lock picks and decided to start on the door furthest to the right.
The first door opened on to a spiral staircase which, she realised, connected to the pier itself. There was an office somewhere. Perhaps it had something to do with that. She closed the door, locked it again and moved on. The middle door opened into a large storage cupboard, containing casks of cleaning fluid, netting and coiled rope. She eyed a dusty shelf where two large torches were stowed and decided to take one of them. She checked it worked properly, sliding the switch on and off twice. Then she moved on. The third door opened on to a concrete chamber with a further door on the other side. Panther put down his piece of wood and barked in its direction. He looked hopefully up at her, his brown eyes trusting.
‘In for a penny, eh?’ Mirabelle said. ‘Come on then.’
She switched on the torch and closed the outside door behind them so she could work without being disturbed. Panther jumped up, excited, and she batted him away. The lock on the interior door was tricky – heavy and multi-levered, it took her a couple of minutes before she finally felt the mechanism turn. ‘Well, boy,’ she said. ‘Are you ready, then?’ The door creaked as she opened it on to a dark passageway and the smell hit her straight away – so rancid that she felt her gullet tighten as if it were locking. It wasn’t chemical exactly. It didn’t smell of one thing – more a mulchy, stomach-turning richness. She wondered if it might engulf her. As she stood up, Panther came to heel, and together they stepped into the long chamber, which disappeared out of the torch’s reach. Panther seemed markedly more enthusiastic than Mirabelle felt. She must be underneath the road now, she thought, right at the bottom of Old Steine.
The corridor ended at a metal ladder, drilled into the concrete floor and descending into a void. She wondered if this was some kind of huge air-raid shelter. She hadn’t visited Brighton until after the war was over, but there must have been public shelters – somewhere to go if you were on the pier when the sirens sounded. What had people done? The torch’s beam disappeared into the darkness as if it had been swallowed. She peered over the edge, unable to make out the bottom of the ladder. With resolve, Mirabelle picked up the dog and managed to attach the torch to the waist of her skirt. Panther’s tongue, hot and wet, licked her cheek as she began to climb down, counting eighteen rungs. At the bottom it was wet beneath her feet and the smell was stronger. Ahead there was a brick-lined chamber, she realised, that opened in four directions, as if it was the apex of a maze. She thought about going back to the surface and getting in touch with somebody. She wasn’t sure she should tackle this alone. But then, who would come and help, how would she explain what was on her mind and, she told herself, what else did she have to do this weekend? The police were busy enough as it was.
Smartly, she snapped the lead on to Panther’s collar.
‘All right, boy,’ she said, more to comfort herself than him as she popped him back on to the ground.
In situations like this it was important to be logical. She decided to start from the right and investigate each of the openings in turn. It was like exploring a cave when she was a child, although here the walls weren’t stone but a bewildering spiral of pale bricks that made distance difficult to judge. As she set off down the first opening, the passage branched, left and right, and the ground became wetter. Panther barked again and the noise reverberated. Ahead there was the sound of running water. Mirabelle followed it into a wide, circular opening. It was like joining a river. She shone the torch downwards and realised that it wasn’t a river at all; she was standing in a sewer – rather a grand one. She remembered reading somewhere that, during the war, resistance fighters had lived in the labyrinthine sewers beneath some of Europe’s major cities, but she’d never thought about where Brighton’s waste disappeared to.
She gagged. The mud-brown tide swept past her feet and disappeared under a wall. Ahead it was like a highway, the groove in the ground tear-shaped, so that it carried the water along. The ceiling was higher than she’d have imagined. You could live down here, she told herself, reluctantly. Perhaps. If she remembered correctly, the resistance fighters had survived for years. She was, she realised, already getting used to the smell.
Panther shared none of Mirabelle’s foreboding and dragged her forward with the lead taut, his instinct as a tracking dog kicking in. Mirabelle smiled. It was hardly the ideal Saturday afternoon, but if Bad Luck Bone had the key to this place, she could see how it could be useful. Bad Luck Bone had been a disposal man, after all. Those were the words Jinty had used, and she reasoned bodies left here would degrade quickly in the dampness and they needn’t block the main run of sewage – the rivulets of the underground maze were wide. In fact, she decided, the sewage would help get rid of the evidence. She wondered suddenly what Chris would make of her theory – he was the one who would know the likely state of the remains. But he was gone. If she was right, there’d be another police doctor to help, she told herself, trying not to think of him.
She wondered how far the sewers stretched? She’d been walking all afternoon above ground but she seemed to have lost track of herself quickly down here without a familiar landmark. She looked over her shoulder, but there was no sign of the pier, where she’d started. She wondered how long she had been walking? Was she even at the limits of Georgian Brighton yet, where the Victorian houses began to take over? She visualised the streets that ran from the bottom of the pier, but she couldn’t comprehend the scale of them in comparison to the path of the sewer.
The torch lighting the way ahead of her, she slowed, still moving forward and entering another star-shaped chamber with more tributaries running in all directions. She pulled Panther to a halt and spun round. This was a spider’s web. There was no saying the individual tunnels even corresponded to the streets above. She turned again and realised with a stab of concern that she couldn’t remember which tunnel she had entered by.
‘Oh dear,’ she said under her breath, as she tried to remember a story about Minotaurs and lost maidens that lingered on the fringes of her memory. It was too late for skeins of thread, anyway. She put a hand on Panther’s head and patted him gently.
The main thing was not to panic. That was always the best advice. However, it was easier said than done. The walls and entrances looked startlingly similar to each other, the pattern of the bricks was mesmerising and she had no proper light, only the torch’s beam. Mirabelle crouched. ‘Come on, boy,’ she said to Panther, keeping her tone light. ‘Which way is home?’
Panther nuzzled her shoulder and tried to pull her in the direction they were already going, but she knew it definitely wasn’t that way. She stumbled as she pulled him to heel and the bottom of her skirt dipped into the sludge. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ The material felt damp and heavy as it rubbed against her skin.
Panther barked once more and kept trying to pull her o
nwards. ‘I suppose,’ Mirabelle said out loud as she figured it out, ‘there must be manholes.’ She’d seen them on the streets, but now she couldn’t remember where. It was odd, she thought, how disorienting it was below ground. She knew Brighton’s streets well, but not in total darkness, without the advantage of being able to see the distance from the pier or the Pavilion or the sweep of Old Steine. Reluctantly, she decided to let the little dog have his way. As she followed him she cast the torchlight upwards on to the concave ceiling above, which ran in a disconcertingly smooth arch.
It took a few minutes, but the excitement she felt when she spotted the circle of metal above her head was worth it. The bricks leading upwards were staged to create a built-in ladder. These sewers must have been constructed a century before, but whoever designed them had been clever.
Panther began to whine because she had pulled him to a halt. Mirabelle picked up the little dog smartly, his filthy paws scrabbling against her cashmere sweater. She wondered if she would ever get the smell out. Panther was bucking furiously now. He kept barking and squirming so it was impossible to hold him in place and keep the torch steady. Mirabelle put the animal back on the ground and he tried to set off once more, further along the same tunnel. Dogs, of course, loved strong smells.
‘No,’ she tugged his collar. ‘Heel.’
Then Panther executed an operation she wouldn’t have thought possible. He slipped his lead and, in a matter of seconds, disappeared on his own into the darkness. Mirabelle hesitated. She checked, fleetingly, upwards. If there was one manhole, there’d be another, she told herself, and she imagined Bill’s face on Monday morning if she had to tell him that Panther was lost underneath the city, missing in action. She couldn’t let that happen. She cursed the offer she’d made to take the dog over the weekend. Bill made looking after him seem easy.
‘Panther,’ she called, crossly. Somewhere ahead, the dog barked. The acoustics underground were strange. He sounded miles away, as if his bark had been carried towards her on the wind in a wide-open space. ‘Panther,’ she called again, and began to follow him into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Essential are: something to do, something to love and something to hope for
Bill was considered an expert on the training of animals but, Mirabelle decided, some hours later, he had done no job at all on Panther. She kept catching sight of the dog ahead, splashing delightedly through the filthy detritus as he ran towards her, but she couldn’t quite catch him. She gave up calling his name. He would not come to heel. Slowly, she lost hope she’d ever catch up in the darkness, but then she’d hear him bark and push herself to follow the sound, and now and then she was rewarded with a glimpse of him, disappearing joyfully down one tributary and on to another main artery of the system, where he would bark encouragingly again. There must be miles of these passageways, she realised, reaching the very fringes of town. Miles and miles of them.
She was tired, hungry and cold when she caught up at last, lunging in the half-darkness and dropping the torch as she managed to grasp hold of his collar. He barked as if trying to shout her down. ‘No,’ she said firmly, picking up the torch. She no longer even considered what she must look like, or made any attempt to keep clean, as she reattached the leash and made sure the collar was tight enough to hold the dog in place. When she stood up the darkness crowded in. The bulb faltered. The torch must have got wet. ‘Oh no,’ she said, her voice breaking in desperation as the light guttered.
She switched it on and off but the sewer remained in darkness, so she shook it and tried again. ‘Panther,’ she complained. ‘This is your fault.’ The dog was still trying to pull her onwards and she stumbled after him in the dark. Then she had an idea. She reached out to feel the wall, keeping her hand on the bricks as they moved onwards. Perhaps she would feel a ladder. Eventually there would have to be one.
Several years ago, Mirabelle had rescued Superintendent McGregor and Vesta from an underground cellar. It had taken a while for Vesta to recover. She said she had lost all sense of time. Mirabelle understood that better now. She felt exhausted. It must be getting late. She tried not to think about the articles she’d read about archaeological investigations in Egypt. Howard Carter discovering Tutankhamun’s tomb. Damsels bricked up as a form of punishment.
Getting hold of herself, she pulled Panther to heel and fed him a biscuit from her pocket; then she bit into one of the biscuits herself, patting the dog’s coat as she made herself chew and swallow it. At last, she wound the leash around her wrist and sank on to the ground. The wider tributaries had a walkway running down the side. The ground was damp beneath her but Panther snuggled into her body and Mirabelle felt the dog’s hot tongue licking her hand. Things would look better, she hoped, once she had rested.
When she woke, Panther was breathing deeply next to her, out for the count. She sat up and checked her grip on the leash and then tried the torch once more, but it still wasn’t working. Determined not to give up, she decided to take it apart and slowly, by touch, she placed the components one by one, on her lap. The batteries were icy and slightly damp. She dried them on the lining of her jacket and reassembled the component parts. The torch flickered momentarily and then cut out again. Mirabelle shook it. She tried once more but it remained dead, so she twisted off the head and, once more, removed the batteries. This time she blew sharply up the barrel to try to dry it out, and slowly reassembled it, fumbling over the barrel. It still didn’t work. Panther stirred and gave a little sigh. Mirabelle rested her head on the brickwork and waited. Her leg ached from where she had fallen earlier. At length, the dog stirred. ‘Hello there.’ Mirabelle stroked his coat. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ She sounded, she realised, more optimistic than she felt.
She got to her feet and tried to decide on a direction. She turned on the torch again. This time the light flashed, cut out and then shone once more. Mirabelle found she was laughing. The light didn’t make all that much difference, she realised. There was nothing to see. A river of sewage. A tunnel with no identifying features. But it made her feel better. Panther pulled on the leash. ‘Steady,’ she said, but she allowed him to lead. He was refreshed by his rest and bounded ahead. Mirabelle tried to keep up. He strained, wanting to lead her into another side tunnel. ‘No,’ she said firmly, pulling him back. ‘We should keep to the main tributaries.’ The ladders, she reasoned, were more likely to be placed on the larger sewers.
Panther was insistent, however. Mirabelle flashed the torch ahead down the cut-off, and what she saw stopped her in her tracks. On the left-hand side of the tunnel there was something caught in the filthy stream – a small piece of material. Clothing perhaps. She followed Panther, who sniffed it appreciatively and picked it up in his mouth. Mirabelle held out her hand and Panther delivered. It was only then she realised it was a nurse’s cap, just like the one that Nurse Frida wore. When she turned it over, the word ‘Taylor’ was sewn inside on a piece of muslin, almost obscured by the filth it had been sitting in.
Mirabelle flashed the torchlight further down the tributary. ‘Rita,’ she called. ‘Sister Taylor. Are you there?’ There was no reply. She hadn’t really expected one. She put the cap into her pocket and tried not to think how gruesome it was.
‘Go on,’ she said encouragingly to Panther, who continued ahead. The smaller tunnel connected to another and then another. The dog could be leading her round in circles, for all she knew, but Mirabelle stumbled on, the torch cutting in and out like some kind of fairground ride.
It was in the moment when it flashed brightest that Mirabelle saw the body. A wave of sadness washed over her as the light flickered; the only sound was the sewage guttering as it flowed across her feet. Sister Taylor had been dumped alongside the remains of another two or three people, all of them so decomposed it was difficult to tell. Rita Taylor was only distinctive because of her dark blue uniform, which was flecked with detritus from the stream of sewage and an inky smear of what, Mirabelle realised, was b
lood. Chris Williams would be able to tell what exactly had happened, but it looked as if her flesh was decomposing more quickly than her clothes. Mirabelle peered. The bodies were, she thought, all women, but she might be wrong. She’d have to describe this to someone, eventually. When they got out. If they got out.
Panther wagged his tail enthusiastically. The smell must be dreadful, Mirabelle thought, but she couldn’t sense it. Still, she bent over and vomited into the passing flow. Bad Luck Bone had dumped them here. Poor Sister Taylor. Mirabelle knew she couldn’t do anything – carrying the bodies was out of the question. There was no way to mark the spot. But she knew they were here now. She tried not to notice the creeping sense of horror that was overtaking her. This was a responsibility.
‘Come on, boy,’ she said. ‘We have to get out of here.’
Not much further on, the torch faltered again. This time the onslaught of darkness didn’t even break her stride; she just kept one hand on the brickwork and stumbled on. It might have been a mile. It might have been less or more, but when she felt bricks protruding from the wall, her heart sang. Her fingers fumbled above and below and, sure enough, they formed a ladder, just as before. Directly above, a pinprick of light twinkled through a tiny hole in the metal disc, like a star in a far-off constellation. Mirabelle scrambled to pick up Panther and secure the torch in her waistband, then she felt her way up the frets one by one. Halfway there, the torch dropped with a clatter, but she left it. At the top she tucked the dog under one arm and held him tightly as she pushed hard against the manhole. It wouldn’t budge. She tottered momentarily, trying to find her feet, and gave it another try, but the metal was too heavy.
‘Help,’ she called. ‘Help.’ She banged her fist against it so hard her knuckles began to bleed.
Indian Summer Page 29
