The Evil Beneath (27 page)

‘They’ve got the message,’ shouted Colin, ‘But, we’re getting out - right now.’

At this stage, the ledge at the base of the ladder was fast filling up. The roar was deafening and we had to communicate in signals from then on. Colin helped me drag Jack, once all in white, now in nothing but brown, up the ladders.

I hesitated when it was my turn to climb out on to the surface. I wanted to wait to make sure Brad got out safely, knowing he and his colleague also had the corpse to contend with. Colin, however, grabbed my arm and hauled me out, taking my brief halt as a sign of flagging energy.

‘You alright?’ he said, out of breath.

‘Yes. Fine.’ I tore off the gloves and sank down to the pavement. Two police officers in abseiling kit were crouched over the hole with torches. Colin joined them.

‘Are the last two okay?’ I croaked. ‘Have they reached the ladder?’

‘They’re on their way out,’ cried Colin, straightening up. ‘You did a good job there,’ he said, patting my shoulder.

‘What about you?’ he said, squatting down beside PC Craig. The constable responded by vomiting again, narrowly missing Colin’s boots.

Jack looked terrified, bedraggled and filthy. I looked down and realised I must look the same. Bystanders started backing away from us, repelled by the smell. Colin and several police offers were instructing them to move back even further, knowing that something far worse was on its way.

A man from Thames Water handed me a towel and a bottle of water to pour over my face and hair. Jack, who had by now got to his feet, was being sick again.

‘He’s swallowed a lot,’ I said to a paramedic who was on standby. ‘He’s going to need some treatment.’ I was constantly watching the hole in the pavement, waiting for the moment when three shapes, instead of two, broke the surface.

‘What about you?’ she said.

I ran the clean water over my lips. ‘I didn’t take any down,’ I said.

‘Wash your mouth out with this a few times…’ She handed me a bottle of grey-coloured liquid. ‘And you’d better come to the hospital, just in case. Don’t want you picking up any E. coli infections.’ She handed me some antiseptic wipes to clean my face.

An officer from one of the police vans brought over a folded grey blanket and left it beside the manhole. Another carried over a barrier wrapped in orange tarpaulin and erected it around the opening in an attempt to provide some element of dignity for what was to follow.

There was a hush all around. Then I saw the top of a white helmet and Brad’s colleague came out first. He was dragging the dark dripping bundle, craning his neck away from the smell. A horrified gasp rippled through the crowd. Brad followed, the same strained and exhausted look on his face. They laid the body down inside the makeshift enclosure and a paramedic laid the blanket over it. I didn’t quite cover her face. Her puffy skin was purple and waxy. It looked like she’d been down there for several days.

A team sprang into action and the body was quickly shifted onto a stretcher and taken out of sight into the back of an ambulance.

I was exhausted and still had to remove all the gear I’d pinched, but all I could focus on was the smell that was still lurking in the street. The unmistakeable gangrenous stink - way beyond the sticky sweet smell of a dead rabbit. I had a feeling that this final trace of her – whoever she was - would be with me for many weeks to come. It seemed even more of a tragedy that this was the only thing I knew about her.

I turned round just as Brad was walking away from the ambulance. He saw me instantly, a look of confusion, then anger, consuming his face. Confirmation that he hadn’t known I was there.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing,’ he said, pulling me by my arm away from the others.

‘Did I break the law?’ I broke free, rubbing my bicep.

‘What?’

‘Did I break the law?’

He stared at his boots unable to meet my gaze, his hands on his hips, bearing his teeth.

‘You hampered a police operation,’ he said, his eyes wild with fury, his damp hair curling with perspiration.

‘Did I hamper it?’

‘Well…I don’t know…but if you were down there, you were a liability. I should arrest you.’ He leant towards me, waving his rubber glove in my face. ‘You
shouldn’t
have been here.’

‘DCI Madison?’ A man wearing a Thames Water bib was calling him and Brad turned away. I stripped myself of the gear I’d borrowed and made my way over to the second ambulance.

It wasn’t until later that afternoon, when word must have got out, that Brad phoned.

‘I heard about PC Craig,’ he said. He sounded contrite, but a touch of belligerence was still loitering in his voice.

‘Oh.’ Nonchalant. No big deal.

‘He said you saved his bacon.’

I laughed. ‘That’s nice.’

‘It was still a
very bad idea
.’

‘I know. I couldn’t help myself.’ I decided to move on. ‘Was there any sign of William or…Leyton Meade…Andrew..?’

‘No. We’re waiting for an ID on the body. Definitely a young female.’

A short silence followed.

‘Is PC Craig all right?’

‘Bruised ego, but apart from that, he’s fine. Craig was on our list as a good swimmer,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what happened to him.’

‘Water’s like that. It’s unpredictable. He slipped and started to panic.’

‘You’re making a habit of this.’

‘Of what?’

‘Rescuing people who are drowning.’ I didn’t make the connection. ‘Those girls you saved in the Lake District,’ he said.

‘Ah. Yes. You see, I’m a pretty useful person to have around. I’m surprised they let you go down, given you’re not a swimmer yourself.’

There was a brief silence, long enough for me to grasp that he hadn’t told the team. Or he’d lied.

‘I think perhaps we’re both guilty of a misdemeanour,’ I said, allowing the slightest hint of smugness to flavour my voice.

‘No point, I suppose, in getting you to promise that nothing like this will ever happen again?’ he said.

‘You’re right. No point.’

He sounded like he was going to say something else.

‘What is it?’

‘Not sure I should mention it.’

I tutted. ‘Come on, Brad. Put me out of my misery.’

‘It’s Andrew.’ His voice was clipped.

‘Oh, no. What’s happened?’

‘Looks like there’s a connection…between Andrew and William Jones.’

I couldn’t speak for a moment. ‘I don’t understand. How?’

‘Andrew has been teaching at an evening class. A painting course. William is in his group.’

I could feel my face snap back to the expression of dread that had been its natural position all day. I stared at the carpet unable to move.
William was in Andrew’s painting class. They knew each other.
I thought again about Andrew’s gruesome pictures of the river. I’d thought that had all been explained. Now I wasn’t so sure. I didn’t hear Brad end the call.

Chapter Twenty-eight

I stayed in on Saturday night, watching vacuous DVDs. I kept going to the window to watch the rain. Images of the underground passageways I’d walked along filling up with more and more water played on my mind. Visions of the corpse looming out of the darkness. I traced the wobbling course of the rain drops, as they made their way down the glass and wondered if the police had found out by now who the victim was.

It was the early hours of Sunday when I finally got to bed. As soon as I sank my head down I knew I couldn’t sleep. My body was exhausted with the emotional turmoil, but when I closed my eyes all the lights were still on and my brain was firing on all cylinders.
Who was the dead woman? Could we have prevented it? Would there be another creepy connection with me?

I had an awful sense of foreboding in the pit of my stomach that felt like rotting fish. I went to the kitchen to fetch a bucket and stood it beside the bed. I couldn’t trust the soup I’d had earlier to stay where it was.

I tried picturing sheep, but they wouldn’t come out to be counted, one by one. Instead they huddled under a tree, refusing to budge. I let them be. I couldn’t blame them. I hadn’t known dread like this - ever - in my entire life. I didn’t expect sheep to save me at a time like this.

I listened to the occasional passing car, hissing in the rain. It was 3.15. I didn’t want to be in the dark, so I put the bedside lamp on and then, restless, I got up to make a cup of tea. Sometimes just hearing the kettle come to the boil is comforting, but not this time. I sat on the edge of the bed and breathed into the hot steam, hoping it would somehow scorch away the evil. I finally put out the light at nearly half-past four.

* * *

Sunday came and went. I heard nothing. Then Monday morning came round again, dragging itself out of the dawn; heavy, dull and still drizzling. The last thing I felt like doing was listening to other people’s problems, but I had a full day of clients and feeling grim didn’t seem a good enough excuse to let them all down.

Once I got into the swing of things, I didn’t feel so bad. There really is truth in the notion that focusing on other people’s problems tends to make your own retreat for a while.

At the end of the day, there was a message waiting for me from Brad.

‘Can you come into the station, first thing tomorrow?’ he said, when I rang him back. ‘There’s something I’d like you to see.’

I didn’t have enough energy to ask what it was about - no doubt it would involve the recent victim - so I just agreed and tried to make myself eat something.

On Tuesday morning, Brad led me to the incident room, his shirt crumpled, his sleeves rolled up. As I followed him, I caught the same musky aroma I’d noticed when we’d embarked on our short-lived intimate moment, which now felt like months ago. I wondered if Brad had forgotten all about it, by now. He’d certainly not referred to it, but then he did have rather a lot on his mind - and I had to admit, some of my actions probably hadn’t helped.

We stopped at the white board dedicated to Operation Chicane. Another photograph had been added to the three already up there. It was hard to tell whether the disfigured shape was a person or an inanimate bundle of sodden clothes. Beside it was a small snapshot from happier times, showing a teenager with braces on her teeth, her hair tied back into a ponytail.

‘Suzanne Mahoy, seventeen,’ he said. ‘Been dead about five days, according to the post-mortem. We think she was the victim intended for Kew on November 9
^th
. Recognise her?’

I forced myself to look at the smiling face and leant against the nearest desk, shaking my head. The place had filled up even more since I was last here: plastic crates and boxes of files were stacked in every corner and there was a heightened buzz of activity.

‘We think she’d been in the sewer for several days,’ he said, stretching his arms over his head. He invited me to sit on a spongy typists’ chair; the kind you pump up and down, but I preferred to remain on my feet. ‘Must have got the body down long before we went over there. Witnesses said there were gas works on New Bridge Street on the twelfth, on the exact spot where we got access to the sewer, but British Gas says no work was scheduled to take place there that day. They did admit, however, that equipment - red barriers and the like - had been stolen a few days earlier from a nearby street, but they didn’t report it. Happens all the time, apparently.’

‘She was down there all along…’

‘Yeah. We found some frayed elastic attached to the belt of her jacket. She’d been tied - perhaps to a tethering ring set into the brick - just upstream from the ladders we went down. Killer must have hoped that, with the rain and the high water-flow down there, she’d eventually break loose and head towards the Thames on the fifteenth.’

‘We found her on the fourteenth. He must have got his calculations wrong by at least twelve hours,’ I said, cynically.

‘There must have been more rainfall than he - they - thought. The weather was one thing they couldn’t control. And they hadn’t banked on us getting down there.’

He dragged his hands through his hair. It was lank and could have done with a wash and he seemed to have extra folds under his eyes. He must have been at the station all night.

‘It’s still a considerable achievement to pull off.’ Brad yawned and didn’t bother to hide it. ‘Jones might have mental problems, but from the papers we found in his flat, he’s got an amazing brain.’

‘Where was he?’ I said.

‘Didn’t leave his flat all night. Went to the corner shop this morning…’

‘Nothing to pin it on him, then?’

‘Bugger all…sorry, been a long night…day…’ He looked confused as though he had no idea what time it was. ‘Your “Demo-man” alias Reginald McGuire is back on the radar, though. That’s not his real name. He’s also known as Damon Hartnell and has a record for assault on…wait for it…women who’ve had terminations.’

‘Really?’ He tapped one of many loose sheets lying on his desk.

‘He was in Paris earlier this year outside an abortion clinic and allegedly punched one woman and was verbally abusive to another, but he wasn’t arrested. We know he’s been an agitator in Ireland and has been at various Pro-life demonstrations up and down this country. Problem is, we can’t find him.’

I let my shoulders drop with a heavy sigh. He’d made no mention of Andrew, but I knew that didn’t mean he was out of the picture. I couldn’t handle any further setbacks, so I didn’t ask.

‘You wanted me to see something.’

‘Yeah. You can’t see the body. It’s badly decomposed and —’

I put my hand up. ‘I know - can we stop there?’ I’d already spent a night seeing images of the victim; her skin puffy and transparent, and starting to peel away. For once I wished my imagination wasn’t quite so sharp.

He reached across his desk for some photographs. ‘Suzanne was strangled like the others,’ he said. ‘Dead before she got in the sewer - pathologist says there wasn’t enough water in her lungs or stomach to suggest she drowned. And, like the three others, she’d had a recent termination - at Fairways.’

That link again.

He handed me a batch of photographs. I flinched.

‘It’s okay. These are just pictures of her clothes, that’s all. Like before, we wondered if there was anything familiar.’

I carefully checked each print. The girl’s clothes had been dried and laid on a white table; a thin zip-up jacket, a single green glove, jeans, a black t-shirt, black bra and matching panties. My first thought was that it wasn’t much for a wet November night, forgetting that she may have been killed on a dry day earlier in the week. I didn’t recognise any of it.

‘And then there was this.’ He handed me a sealed plastic bag containing a small white card. It had been scuffed, the way paper disintegrates when you’ve put it by accident through the washing machine.

It was the size of a business card. I held it closer until I could make out a few letters on the front.

‘It says “Odeon”, I think,’ I said.

‘Yeah, that’s what we think. We’ve also been able to work out a couple of other sections; one is “Future”, the other looks like it might be “Derby Street”.’

I dropped the plastic bag and took a step backwards, colliding with a filing cabinet. I had that horrible feeling: the one when you look up and realise your purse has been stolen or walk in the front door and know you’ve been burgled. That nasty cocktail of shock and despair that made the pit of your stomach collapse. ‘It’s a cinema ticket…from Norwich.’ I grabbed hold of it again. ‘Look here…these numbers…it’s a date.’ I squinted, unable to believe what I was seeing. ‘It’s from…1990.’

‘What the —’

‘The killer knows about my past. He was
there
,’ I said. This stupid, vile game was turning into a never ending torment.

While Brad stabbed about on DS Markeson’s desk, trying to find the file to replace the ticket, I leant against the desk, not trusting myself to stand unsupported. I glanced down at the cascade of overlapping sheets. There were pages and pages of handwritten numbers in columns and others that looked like complex diagrams of electrical grids. I was about to ask if I was free to go, when my eyes fell on another page. I stared at it in disbelief, my pulse throbbing in my temples.

This can’t be happening.

‘Where did this come from?’ I asked, my voice sounding like it was being dragged over sandpaper.

Brad turned round. ‘Oh, it’s the pile of papers we picked up from Jones’ flat. Tide-tables for the Thames and pages of calculations about boats and speeds. It doesn’t mean anything to me, I’m afraid, but our technical guys say it’s high-level complicated stuff.’ He glanced up at my face and must have noticed my ashen colour. ‘You okay?’ He pushed a chair into the fold of my knees and I gratefully slumped into it.

I held up the top sheet. There it was: the hallway with stairs on the left and the sitting room first right; the dining room second right, leading to the breakfast room and then the kitchen. I pressed it against my chest as if it was a photograph of a long lost relative.

‘It’s mine,’ I said.

The home where we were all happy, until the fire swallowed Luke up.

‘What is?’

‘This plan. It’s the layout of our old house in Norwich.’

Brad dropped the folder he was holding. ‘
Your house
?’ he said, pressing his fingers into his forehead.

‘Yes. And look at it.’ I held it up. ‘It shows the power points and the position of basic appliances. It’s about the fire, isn’t it?’

‘Let me see.’ He prised the page out of my hands and flattened it out on the desk. ‘You sure this is the plan of
your
house?’

‘William was involved with the fire…’ I whispered. My voice didn’t sound like mine anymore. It sounded flat, distant, disembodied.

He repeated his question, the way policemen do.

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ I said. ‘Every detail. The exact location of the rooms, the fuse-box under the stairs…the fridge, the cooker - everything.’

‘Oh my God,’ he said. He squeezed his eyes shut and looked dazed for a second, then called to an officer sitting at a desk by the window. ‘I want all the records of Jones’ history, where he used to live and when,’ he said. ‘And I want it now.’ He turned to me. ‘We’ve missed something huge,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to stay. This might take a while.’