Strangers (34 page)

She dismounted, removed her helmet and tucked it under her arm, and quietly explained the situation to Des as she approached the playground gate. His tinny response, which she could barely hear because she couldn’t risk taking the phone from her pocket, went something like: ‘
Take it slow and easy.’

Lucy did so, opting to cross the sandpit rather than follow the flagged path around it, as that would hush her footsteps – though of course, on reflection it felt like a pointless safeguard. Whoever this guy was, he’d know that a motorbike had pulled up behind him.

Lucy halted when she reached the grass again. The slumped figure was ten yards in front.

‘Hello?’ she said. ‘Can I ask what you’re doing here?’

The figure didn’t move, let alone reply.

Lucy advanced, warily. ‘I should advise you I’m a police officer.’

Still no response.

‘Careful chuck!’
came Des’s tinny voice.

‘I’m actually
the
police officer,’ Lucy said. ‘The one you’ve been wanting to speak to.’

The figure was now only five yards away, yet in the absence of light he was still only vaguely discernible. She recalled that disguised voice on the phone. Was it possible … was it conceivable that he was actually a
she
?

Wild thoughts flashed through her mind: crime scene photos of mutilated male faces; healthy skulls hammered out of shape; hair matted with blood and bone fragments.

‘I don’t appreciate the way you’ve gone about this,’ she said, every muscle tightening. ‘But given that this is a serious issue I’m prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt …’

She was three yards short of him when a motion-sensitive arc-light at the top of a pole in the middle of the playground exploded to life. Lucy jumped, and spun halfway around.

Belatedly, she glanced back to the bench.

What she’d thought had been someone sitting there was nothing more than a bin-liner tied at the neck with twine and, by the looks of it, packed with rubbish.

‘Shit!’ she said under her breath.

‘What’s happening?’
Des asked from her pocket.

‘Nothing.’ Inadvertently, she spoke aloud. ‘Misidentification.’

‘Where are you, chuck?’

She lowered her voice again. ‘Where I’m supposed to be. On the playground.’

‘I’m coming round there.’

‘Negative, Des. Stand by … he may not be done with me yet.’

She pivoted three hundred and sixty degrees, but thanks to the safety light saw nobody else there. However, as she walked back towards the gate, her eyes fell on the pillar box across the road – and the white envelope lying on top of it.

She hurried over there.

As before, the front of the envelope was inscribed:

PC CLAYBURN

When she opened it, it contained a single sheet, printed:

8.30

EMPORIA SUBWAYS

COME ALONE OR NO DICE

Again, this gave her approximately twenty minutes to get back to the town centre. She could only imagine what Des’s view would be, and she received it with both barrels when they next had a conflab, though as before they had to do this under a pretence of not knowing each other, Lucy sitting astride her bike alongside his open driver’s window while they waited at a red light.

‘So it’s back across the borough again,’ he said in a tone of deep dissatisfaction.

‘He obviously wants to make certain I’m coming alone,’ she replied.

‘Lucy … he’s a witness who doesn’t want his name in the papers. This is a hell of a lot of trouble to go to for that.’

‘Well, what do
you
think he’s up to?’

‘Either he’s got a bit more in mind than giving you a statement. Or …’

‘Or what?’

‘Or it’s someone ripping the piss.’

She almost glanced round. ‘Why would someone do that?’

‘You tell me … you’re the one who’s made enemies in CID in the past.’

She was stunned. ‘You don’t mean one of our lot?’

‘Who else knows you’re on the taskforce?’

‘Someone would send me all the way round town to even a score for something that happened four years ago?’ she said. ‘Seriously?’

‘More likely to have a laugh,’ he replied.

‘I thought Operation Clearway was strictly for grown-ups.’

‘Tell that to the guy who christened you “the Ripper Chicks”. I know plenty fellas in this job who’ve never grown up, and so do you.’

‘So what do you propose?’

‘Bag that letter along with the other one, take them both back and log them into evidence. If it is someone fucking about, let them shit themselves, wondering whether forensics’ll turn up their dabs.’

‘Can I make an alternative suggestion?’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Go on.’

‘That we proceed to the Subways, check out this one last lead, and if that’s a load of cobblers too, we do exactly what you’ve just said. Des … suspicious though this is, we can’t
not
try to see what’s going on here? How would we sleep tonight?’

The light changed and they proceeded side-by-side to the next intersection, where another red brought them to a temporary halt. Lucy wasn’t actually convinced that this was cover enough. If someone
was
watching, he’d see that she was interacting with the car next to her. But in all honesty, if this guy was for real and a genuine witness, it shouldn’t really matter to him if more than one police officer showed up. Okay, he might be a nervous sort who’d gone to inordinate lengths to avoid a complex police entanglement, but ultimately he couldn’t seriously have expected an officer to fly solo on this given the potential risks.

‘How do you want to play this?’ Des asked. ‘There’s a lot of subway space under the precinct and he didn’t give you a specific spot … which is another thing I don’t like about it.’

‘Been thinking about that,’ she said. ‘I can leave my bike anywhere, but I’m gonna park at the south end, near the bus station, and walk through from that side.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Perhaps you can park on the taxi rank at the north end and walk through from that side? Meet me in the middle. That way, if he realises I’m not alone and legs it, you’ll be in a good position to head him off. And if he attacks me … well, you’ll be there in a minute or two, won’t you?’

They drove on together through the intersection, Des still far from happy.

Chapter 26

Crowley shopping precinct had been improved significantly in modern times.

Formerly a concrete Stalinist monstrosity, which had appeared overnight circa 1970 like a carbuncle on the already grim industrial landscape, it had now been completely rebuilt and re-named ‘the Crowley Emporia’. Whereas in its former incarnation the precinct had mainly occupied ground-level, with living space overhead – tiers of dismal grey flats rising above a labyrinth of bleak passages off which cubbyhole shops mostly sold cigarettes, booze, girlie mags or second-hand junk – it was now an art-deco retail palace boasting a variety of interconnecting floors and galleries, all airy and spacious and covered against the rain by stained, sound-proofed glass, and as such it was filled with traditional high street names.

No one could argue that in a depressed backwater of a town, which had suffered from its ‘Manchester satellite’ status rather than benefitted, the Crowley Emporia wasn’t a rare success story. But beneath it, the old subway system remained, even if it was little more now than a shabby relic of a forgotten past.

When first built at the end of the 1960s, Crowley shopping precinct had covered about a square mile and a half of the town centre. Major roads encircled it on three sides, and so the local authority had seen fit to install a complex of underground car parks and walk-throughs, only accessible by steep stone staircases. In addition to this, permanently faulty wiring had ensured they were ill lit. The net-result, even back then when the subways were used regularly and by necessity, was lots of graffiti, lots of litter and lots of unsavoury characters loitering in the gloom. Especially at night.

In modern times, the pedestrianisation of most of the above-ground area, and the addition of surface-parking and unloading bays for the retailers, plus new clean toilets and cafeterias, meant that this lower section was completely defunct. Certainly that was Lucy’s view. No one she knew used it any more unless they were up to no good. At least three times, she’d made juicy arrests down there: indecent assault, robbery, and possession with intent to supply. In truth, there was nowhere more ominous where this unknown letter-writer could have asked to meet her, but Lucy was increasingly determined that she wasn’t walking away from this thing empty-handed.

She and Des split up when they were a couple of streets away, and so when she arrived at her destination, Crowley Central Bus Station, at 8.35pm, she wasn’t quite sure whether she’d got there first or second. Not that it mattered. She halted her bike close to the entrance to the gents toilets, and lowered the kickstand. The bus station rolled away in a south-easterly direction, sliced into regimented rows by lines of lamp posts and steel-roofed shelters. One or two buses were idling at their terminals, the drivers behind their wheels reading evening papers. There was no sign of any passengers, but then it was now almost nine o’clock on a Thursday evening.

Lucy clasped her helmet under her arm as she walked west along a row of closed and grilled shopfronts, eventually coming to an entry-point, where a flight of wet stone steps dropped down a white-tiled stairwell. She shoved her hand into her pocket and cut the open line to Des. There was no point in it now. Once they were underground, all reception would cease.

Despite stepping lightly, her trainer-clad feet resounded as she descended, the only light above her already flickering on and off. At the bottom, some twenty feet down, she turned left. Here the white-tiled wall gave out and she was into the subways proper, a bare grey passage dwindling ahead of her, occasional patches of it blotted out where yet more lighting had failed. Lucy wrinkled her nostrils at the usual fetor of stale urine. She strained her ears for anything unusual, but heard only dripping water and the occasional muffled mumble of vehicles. When she started forward, she trod softly, glancing repeatedly over her shoulder to ensure that no one came down the stairway behind, but all she saw was the foot of that stairway gradually retreating into the twilight.

Des had been right: there’d been nothing specific in the last letter about where this guy expected to meet her, which didn’t bode well. There was no focal point to the Emporia Subways. It was a windswept maze of barren concrete tunnels. It was also a succession of tight corners, behind any one of which an assailant could be waiting.

She glanced around the first. Another passage trailed off. Most of the lights down that way were broken, so it led eventually into complete darkness. Meanwhile, an opening on the right connected with a cavernous space that had once been used for parking. It was strewn with litter and autumn leaves, water dripping from the brick arches forming its ceiling. At its far side, a large, barred gate blocked the slip road leading down from above. Lucy wandered in there anyway. The corroded hulks of two abandoned vehicles occupied a far corner, but there was nothing else.

Frustrated, she moved back to the junction. There were several more openings ahead, but increasingly this whole thing felt like a wild goose chase. She wondered if she should shout out to Des – he couldn’t be too far away – and then they could hook up and call it a night.

But some elusive sixth sense forbade this.

It was that old hunch thing again.

Perhaps Lucy’s was better honed than she’d thought, because half a second later she spied a figure crossing the passage about sixty yards ahead. She halted, but already the figure had vanished from view. Due to another faltering light bulb she’d only caught a glimpse of it, and that was insufficient to show whether or not it possessed the dumpy, raincoat-clad physique of Des Barton.

Again, instinct prevented her calling out. But she hurried forward.

The figure had walked across the passage from right to left, and when Lucy got there, it looked to have headed down a short flight of steps, at the foot of which another barred gate stood ajar. Beyond this lay some kind of darkened basement area.

Lucy hesitated. What actually was
below
the Emporia Subways?

Though she’d been a cop in this town for ten years, she didn’t know. Even during routine patrols of the Subways, Lucy had never descended to that level. Usually, it was closed off.

She sidled down the steps to the gate and peered through, though she wasn’t able to see much. It would have been nice at this moment to have her baton or CS spray with her, but of course she was in plain clothes and off-duty. She didn’t even have her handcuffs or torch. Despite this, she pushed at the gate. It was heavy and stiff, but it creaked sufficiently open for her to slide past it. She could just about discern a steel footway trailing away in front, steam rising through it. As her eyes attuned further, she saw pipes and valves on either side, and twists of leaky, foil-wrapped conduit snaking overhead.

She took her mobile out and activated the light, though it didn’t bring a great deal extra into view. Training it ahead, she progressed forward, feet clanking on the grille.

The route ran straight for maybe fifty yards before ending at a T-junction. Lucy stopped, more palls of steam drifting past. Five yards to the right stood a closed door made of heavy, riveted steel, with no handle visible. On the left, the passage led past a row of massive, churning cisterns. She opted for that direction, still training the light in front. But every additional step now felt like folly. There was no good reason why this informant, if that’s what he genuinely was, would be all the way down here. Despite these misgivings, she turned another corner.

More of the same faced her: conduit lining the ceiling, liquid gurgling through horizontal pipes. However, at least this next passage appeared to be doubling back towards the entrance. She followed it, occasionally getting caught in gusts of steam as they burst through meshed vents. However, a few yards further on, the path veered sharply to the right, terminating at a bank of wheels and dials. At which point, from somewhere in the dim recesses of this complex place, there was a short, thin squeal.