Sacrifice (2 page)

Green?

A coloured candle, maybe? A paper lantern?

Ernshaw halted as a figure flitted past the doorway on the other side.

‘Hey,’ he said under his breath. Then louder: ‘
Hey!
’

He dashed forward, with baton drawn and angled across his shoulder.

When he entered the chamber, nobody was there, but he saw that the odd-coloured light had been caused by a sheet of mouldy green canvas fastened over a window. A stairway – an indoor fire-escape, all rust and riveted steel – dropped down through a trapdoor; while a secondary stair rose up to the next level, though this was very narrow, scarcely broad enough for an average-sized man to climb it without turning sideways. He peered up, spying a ray of feeble daylight at the top. When he listened, he heard nothing, though it wasn’t difficult to imagine that someone was lurking up there, listening back.

‘Alan?’ someone asked.

Half-shouting, Ernshaw spun around.

Rodwell gazed at him from the trapdoor, in particular at his drawn baton.

‘Have you …?’ Ernshaw glanced back up the stair, listening intently. ‘Have you been up here once? I mean, have you been up already and gone back down for any reason?’ Rodwell shook his head as he rose fully into view. ‘Thought I saw someone, but …’ The more Ernshaw considered it, the less substantial that ‘figure’ seemed. A shadow maybe, cast by his torch? ‘Could’ve been mistaken, I suppose …’

Rodwell also glanced up the next stair. Without speaking, he ascended it, just about able to slide his big body between its encroaching walls.

Ernshaw followed, discomforted by the tightness of the passage. The floor at the top of this had been partitioned into small rooms and connecting corridors. Even fewer of the windows on this level were boarded, but there were less of them, so a sepulchral gloom pervaded.

Before they commenced exploring, Rodwell lifted a dust-caked Venetian blind and peered down into the yard below. It had occurred to them both, somewhat belatedly, that if this was some daft but elaborate ruse to create a diversion by which to steal a police vehicle, they’d be left with an omelette-sized egg on their faces. However, the van sat unmolested; the snow around it unmarked. From this height, they could see further afield into adjacent streets, or what remained of them. Most of the rows of terraced housing on the south side of Kemp’s Mill had been demolished, but even with the recent snowfall, the parallel outlines of their old foundations were still visible.

There was no sign of anyone around. The nearest habitations were two blocks of 1970s flats about three hundred yards away, beyond a mountain of snow-covered scrap; only one or two lights – the garish neon of Christmas decorations – twinkled from their windows.

‘
2376 from Three?
’ the voice of Comms crackled from Rodwell’s radio.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, dropping the blind back into place.

‘
Anything from Franklyn Road yet?
’

‘No offences revealed at this stage. Still searching, over.’

‘
Message from Sergeant Roebuck, Keith. Don’t waste too much time there. If it’s just some kids messing around, leave it. There are other jobs piling up
.’

‘Roger, received.’

‘That it, then?’ Ernshaw asked hopefully.

‘No,’ Rodwell replied.

They ventured along a central passage, peeking around the first door they came to, seeing what had presumably once been an office. In the middle of it, weak daylight illuminated a single filing cabinet from which a ton of paperwork had overflowed. Ernshaw entered, scooping up some of the documents: work rosters yellowed by age; dog-eared time-and-motion sheets. He tossed them away, moving through the next doorway into another identical office. Sometime in the past, vandals had scribbled slogans all over the walls in this one.

‘Kids have been in here, alright,’ he said. ‘Dirty little buggers too. Seen this … “My little sister gave me my first blowjob. She’ll do you too for a fiver.” There’s even a fucking phone number. “Every day I wank into my mum’s knickers – now she’s pregnant again. Oh shit.”’ Getting no response, he turned.

Rodwell had not come into the room with him.

Ernshaw went back to the door and glanced into the office with the filing cabinet; Rodwell wasn’t in there either.

‘Keith?’ he said.

A footfall sounded behind him. He whirled around – to find that he was still alone. But on the far side of the room another door stood ajar.

Hadn’t it been closed previously?

Ernshaw approached it, suddenly suspecting that someone was in the next room. Baton drawn again, he yanked the door open – entering yet another deserted corridor, the contents of more gutted offices spilling into it from adjoining doorways.

‘Keith?’

Still there was no reply.

Ernshaw proceeded forward. At the extreme end there was another stairway, but when he reached this, it was only short and led up to a closed door, beyond which a crack of bright daylight was visible.

‘Keith? You up there, mate?’

Again, nothing.

He ascended slowly, body half-turned so that he could watch both in front and behind. At the top, the door swung open easily and Ernshaw entered the most spacious office he’d seen to date – a good forty foot by thirty – the sort of palatial residence an MD might once have inhabited. It possessed several large windows, all intact, none covered by planking or sheets of green canvas. The walls were even papered, though the floor contained loose boards, several of which had warped and sprung. There was no furniture; just a scattering of broken bricks and, in one corner, rather curiously, a wheelbarrow rimmed with hardened cement, a pick and sledge-hammer standing against it.

But none of this captured Ernshaw’s attention as much as the strange object on the farthest side of the room.

He walked forward.

It appeared to be a section of new wall; a seven-foot-wide rectangle rising almost floor to ceiling. The paper and plaster had recently been torn away, and the ancient stonework beneath demolished; new, yellowish bricks had been mortared into the resulting cavity. But what
really
caught his eye hung in the middle of this: a sheet of white paper with a message emblazoned on it in startling crimson. The paper was fresh and new; when Ernshaw took it from the wall it had been fixed there with Blu-Tack, which proved to be soft and obviously new as well.

The message had been printed by a modern desk-jet of some sort. It read:

Ho Ho Ho

Ernshaw’s short-cropped hair prickled. This sign could easily be more empty-headed idiocy from the local scrotes. But there was something about it – probably the fact that it was clearly a recent addition to this neglected pile – that made him think it might be significant. He stepped backward, examining the wall again. It had definitely been constructed more recently than the rest of the building. At its base, two lumps of tapered black wood protruded through a tiny gap under the bricks; some builder’s device, no doubt, to keep the whole thing level.

A hand tapped his shoulder.

Ernshaw spun around like a dervish. ‘Fuck me!’ he hissed.

‘What’s this?’ Rodwell asked.

‘Will you stop sneaking up on people!’ Ernshaw handed him the notice. ‘Dunno. Found it pinned to the wall.’

Rodwell stared at the wall first. ‘This brickwork’s new.’

‘That’s what I thought. Well … they’ll have done all sorts of jobs over the years, to keep the place serviceable, won’t they?’

‘Not in the last twenty.’ Rodwell glanced at the notice, then back at the wall again. ‘This is a chimney breast. Or it was. Probably connected to one of the outer flues.’

‘Okay, it’s a chimney,’ Ernshaw said. ‘Bricking up an old chimney isn’t much of a criminal offence these days, is it?’

Rodwell read the notice a second time.

Ho Ho Ho

‘Jesus … Christ,’ he breathed slowly. ‘Jesus Christ almighty!’

Moving faster than Ernshaw had ever seen him, Rodwell threw the paper aside and dropped to one knee to examine the two wooden stubs protruding below the brickwork. Ernshaw leaned down to look as well – and suddenly realised what he was actually seeing; the scuffed toes of a pair of boots.

Rodwell grabbed the pick and Ernshaw the hammer.

They went at the new wall as hard as they could, and at first it resisted their efforts – but they pounded fiercely, Rodwell stopping only to call for supervision and an ambulance, Ernshaw to unzip his anorak and throw off his hat. After several minutes grunting and sweating, mortar was bursting out with every impact – then they were loosening bricks, extricating them with their fingers, guarding their eyes against flying chips. Piece by piece, the wall came down, gradually exposing what stood behind it – though the aroma hit them first.

Ernshaw gagged, clamping a hand to his nose and mouth. Rodwell worked all the harder, smashing away the last vestiges of brickwork.

They stood back panting, wafting at the dust, retching at the stink.

‘Good God!’ Rodwell said as he focused on what they’d uncovered.

Though it stood upright, this was only because it had been suspended by the wrists from two manacles fixed above its head. It had reached that stage of early putrefaction where it could either have been a shrivelled corpse or a wax dummy, its complexion somewhere between sickly yellow and maggoty green. It had once been an elderly man – that much was evident from the scraggly white beard on its skullish jaw, plus it was bone-thin, an impression only enhanced by its baggy, extremely dirty garb. This consisted of a red tunic hanging in foul-smelling folds, trimmed with dirt-grey fur, and red pantaloons, the front of them thick with frozen urine, their cuffs tucked into a pair of oversized wellingtons.

It was not an unusual experience, even for relatively new bobbies like Ernshaw, to discover corpses in a state of corruption. Not everyone handled it well, though Ernshaw usually had – until now.

He laughed. Bizarrely. It was almost a cackle.

‘S-Santa,’ he stuttered.

Rodwell glanced at him, distracted.

‘Fucking Santa!’ Ernshaw continued to cackle, though his glazed expression contained no mirth. ‘Looks like there was no one nice waiting for him at the bottom of this chimney. Only naughty …’

Rodwell glanced back at the corpse as he recalled the words on the sign –
Ho Ho Ho
. He noticed that a red hood with a filthy fur trim had been pulled up over the wizened, hairless cranium.

‘Christ save us,’ he whispered. The corpse wore a tortured expression, its eyes bugging like marbles in a face twisted into a rigid, grimacing death-mask. ‘This poor bastard was walled up in here alive.’

If it was possible for a newsagent billboard to shriek, this one did.

Detective Sergeant Mark ‘Heck’ Heckenburg observed it through the driver’s window of his Fiat while he waited at a traffic light. Homeward-bound commuters darted across the road in front of him, muffled against the February evening. Much of the heavy winter snow had cleared, but dirty, frozen lumps of it lingered in the gutters.

Heck eased his Fiat forward, glancing continually at his sat-nav. Milton Keynes was a big place; it comprised about two hundred thousand citizens, and like most of the so-called ‘new towns’ – purpose-built conurbation designed to accommodate the overspill population after World War II left so many British cities in smoking rubble – its suburbs seemed to drag on interminably. After half an hour, the entrance to Wilberforce Drive appeared on his left. He rounded its corner and cruised along a quiet, middle-class street – though, in the current climate of terror, all these streets were quiet after nightfall, particularly in towns like Milton Keynes, so close to the M1 motorway.

The houses were semi-detached, nestling behind low brick walls or privet fences. All had front gardens and neatly paved driveways. In the majority of cases, cars were already parked there, curtains drawn. When he reached number eighteen, Heck halted on the opposite side of the road and turned his engine off.

Then he waited. It would soon get cold, so he zipped up his leather jacket and pulled on his gloves. Eighteen, Wilberforce Drive seemed almost impossibly innocent. A snug pink light issued through its downstairs window. A child’s skateboard was propped against its garage door. There was even the relic of a snowman on its front lawn.

Heck took his notes from the glove-box and checked through them. Yes – eighteen, Wilberforce Drive, the home of Jordan Savage, thirty-three years old, a married man who managed the local garden centre for a living. The homely environs made it altogether less menacing a scene than Heck had expected. It would be easier than usual to walk up the path and rap on the door here – this wasn’t the sort of place where cops normally got their teeth knocked out. But Heck was still nervous that he might be on the wrong track.

Not that he would ever know sitting behind his steering wheel. But before he could open the car door, another door opened – the front door to number eighteen. The man who stepped out could only be Jordan Savage: his solid build and six-foot-two inches made him unmistakable; likewise his shock of red, spiky hair. No doubt, up close, those penetrating blue eyes of his would be another give-away.

Savage was wearing jeans, a sweater and a heavy waxed jacket. As Heck watched, he moved the skateboard aside, took a key from his pocket and opened the garage door. There was a vehicle inside; a green Mondeo Sport. The registration mark checked out as well. It was the same car the Traffic patrol had become suspicious of and had stopped that dank October night. The Mondeo’s engine rumbled to life, its headlights snapped on and Savage eased it down the drive. If he noticed Heck seated in the car opposite, he gave no indication, but turned right along Wilberforce Drive, heading for the junction with the main road. When Savage was a hundred yards ahead, Heck switched his own engine on and followed.

Tailing a suspect was never easy, especially when you were doing it unofficially – but Heck had performed this task dozens of times. Once they were on the main road, he stayed about three cars behind – not too close to attract attention, but close enough to keep a careful eye on his target. Even so, after two and a half miles, when the Mondeo suddenly veered left onto what looked like another housing estate, he was taken by surprise.