The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (17 page)

I’d never heard someone just come out and talk about their
suicide attempt so matter-of-factly. Come to think of it, I’d never heard anyone talk about a suicide attempt at
all
. Something about the fact that we had just gone into that hospital together had opened a conversational door. I could feel his willingness to talk creeping out like a reluctant cat from under a sofa.

“It was because of your sister’s death,” I said.

“And my inability to deal with it. Or my family’s refusal to do so. Whichever you like. Both apply.”

“How long were you there?” I asked.

“Just over a month.” He pinch-wiped his nose. “My parents sent me to the Priory. No NHS for me. Posh hospital, and as far away as possible. I don’t know if they really thought I needed to go or if they were just trying to get rid of me for a while. I went to hospital. They went to Greece. There was a reason my sister did so many drugs.”

He almost smiled.

“Were you and your sister close?” I asked.

“She was three years older. We both went to boarding schools, different ones. I didn’t even see her that often. I mean, we cared for each other, but we weren’t in each other’s pockets. I had no idea about all the things she’d been doing. I think that was partly why I felt so guilty. She was taking massive amounts of drugs, really dangerous amounts, and I had no idea. None of her so-called friends were all that surprised when she overdosed. I was the only one who was shocked. I was fine for three years, and then…” He cut himself off and brushed some imaginary lint off his sleeve. He was drawing a line under this subject.

“These things,” I said. “They keep happening. Murders.”

“It’s not that there are more things happening. It’s that you’re aware of them now.”

“I think more things are
actually happening,
” I said.

“It’s still a question of perception. When I did the training to become a police officer, I got to see crime reports. I worked a desk on a Saturday night and saw what came in to the station. I saw people beating each other and stabbing each other. You start to see violence everywhere.”

“I can’t go on like this,” I said. “School’s a joke. I lie to everyone. My friends think I’m pathological.”

“That’s why it’s easier not to say anything at all.”

“How do you
not say anything
to anyone?”

“When you have no friends, it makes it easier,” he said, with that weird little half smile.

“Not helpful.”

“No…but more to the point, is what Sam told us true?”

Sharing time was over, and we were back to the matter at hand.

“I think I believe him,” I said.

“I’m not sure where I am with it, but it’s worth a trip to the Royal Gunpowder, at least. Callum and Boo should be back from hospital soon. We can go over this evening or tomorrow.”

“Or you can go now,” I said. “With me.”

“Rory.”

“Because if there is something down there, what are you going to do about it?”

“The same thing I’ve been doing for the last few weeks—I’m going to talk to him or her.”

“Yes, but he or she probably killed someone with a hammer, so maybe that’s not a good idea. You need me with you.”

“You need to understand,” he said. “This is our job. I am glad you are back and that you want to help, but—”

“I’ll go by myself, then.”

“You really are difficult, aren’t you?”

“This should not be news.”

“This isn’t a game,” he said.

“When, at any point, has any of this been fun or gamelike to me?” I asked. “Getting stalked for weeks? Getting stabbed? Going into a deserted underground station in the dark to see a man who had murdered about a dozen people? Tell me which part was the game, because I’m missing it.”

I had him there, and he rubbed his nose again.

“Same rules,” he said. “Let me do the talking. And I
mean
it this time. Promise me, and keep your promise.”

“I promise,” I said. “But, you know, he talked to me—and my talking is the thing that got him to talk.”

“We got away with it in there, but we won’t get away with it in a more public setting. We’ll say you’re a social worker, victim services, just there to observe. Keep your head down and don’t engage. And remember, the owners of this pub just lost a family member.”

“I know.”

“So a certain amount of—”

“I’ll be quiet. You go first. I get it.”

What mattered was that underneath all of this Stephen was saying yes.

The Royal Gunpowder was very crowded. It appeared that some kind of informal memorial gathering was going on. There were flowers on the bar, and the conversation was loud, but respectfully so. We got some looks when we came in—well, Stephen did. I had shed the police accessories and was now
playing the part of a person who was not going to say anything. Stephen worked his way to the front in a practiced way. (I’d noticed that most English people knew how to get to the front of a crowded bar, that there was an understood way to shoulder slide to the front without actually cutting anyone else in line.)

There was a woman behind the bar in a plain black dress, deep in conversation with a group of men who were holding their AA chips. She nodded a lot and wiped her eyes a few times. Stephen interrupted as politely as possible and showed his warrant card. I stared into the back of Stephen’s jacket as he introduced himself and made some polite inquiries about how things had gone with the reopening.

“Do you feel comfortable here?” he asked.

“What you mean, comfortable? My father-in-law was beaten to death with a hammer in the basement,” she said. “So, no, I suppose you could say I don’t feel
comfortable.
”

“I’m very sorry,” Stephen said quickly. “Let me rephrase that. Has anyone been disturbing you? Any vandals? Anything we need to be aware of? Sometimes crime scenes get hangers-on, so we like to check up.”

I peered around Stephen in what I hoped was a casual manner, to see how this was going.

“Oh,” she said. “Course. I see. No, nothing like that.”

“You don’t seem sure. Really. If there’s something, however small, we’ll look into it.”

“Well…” She considered for a moment. “After what happened, we hired a cleaning crew to come in and clear the place up. You can hire people for this sort of thing, you know. They came and scrubbed everything, even the ceiling. Made it perfectly neat and new down there. Then I went down for the first
time. I took some of the flowers people had been leaving and put them on the spot where it happened. When I went down the next day to change the water in the vases, they were all in different places. I asked the staff if they done it, and they say they didn’t. They swore they didn’t. But it’s just flowers. You can’t call the police because someone moves your flowers. Anyway, I’m sure one of the staff did it, but maybe they didn’t want to say when I asked. Maybe they thought I’d be angry.”

“It would be helpful if I could go down and have a look,” Stephen said. “Make sure everything’s secure. It will only take a minute.”

“Who’s she?” the woman said, nodding at me.

“Victim relations,” Stephen answered smoothly. “She does the paperwork to make sure everything’s in order.”

I feigned intense interest in a menu on the wall advertising a five-pound lunch special. The woman started to come down with us, but Stephen held up his hand.

“If you can just stay up here,” he said. “It’s procedure. Health and safety. Stupid, I know, but there you go.”

To my surprise, the woman nodded again and went back up the stairs, shutting the door. This astonished me.

“I can’t believe that worked,” I said when we got downstairs. “Procedure? In my town, no one would just
let the law
into their basement to have a look around for seemingly no reason at all. They’d either get a lawyer or a gun. If uncertain, they’d get both.”

“This is England,” he explained. “Tell someone it’s a procedure, and they’ll believe you. The pointless procedure is one of our great natural resources.”

There was a shelving unit directly at the bottom of the steps,
which was full of toilet paper: rolls and rolls of the stuff. Someone liked buying in bulk. There was an open doorway to the right and the left of this.

“Is there anyone down here?” Stephen asked the dark. “We mean you no harm. Please make yourself known to us if you are here.”

No answer.

“Here’s what we are going to do,” Stephen told me. “We go to the bottom of the stairs. You will look to the left, and I will look to the right.”

This was real police stuff—going to the door, one person covering one direction, another covering the opposite. So we did that. I faced a room full of pipes and kegs with no hiding spaces and no ghosts.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Can’t see anything this way,” Stephen said. “But this side goes on a bit and has another room beyond.”

We proceeded cautiously to a narrow room that mostly housed broken-down boxes, then entered a much larger room, which seemed to be the main basement room. This had shelves all around and the barrels that led to the taps upstairs. The lingering scent of some strong chemical hung in the air. But there were no ghosts.

“No reception down here,” Stephen said, looking at his phone before pocketing it. “Not good enough anyway. I can’t access the files with the photos, but I’ve looked at them enough. This is clearly the attack room.”

There was a vase of drooping daffodils on the floor by some beer kegs.

“So let’s go through what we know,” Stephen said. “Both
from what Sam said and the report taken at the scene. Sam said he arrived at work at approximately nine forty-five in the morning. Shortly after Sam’s arrival, Charlie Strong left to purchase a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea. We have a record of him buying his sandwich; the cash register receipt is marked three minutes after ten. While Charlie was gone, Sam vacuumed the floor. Charlie returns. Sam goes to the basement for the first time to get tonic water. The notes say that when he came up, Charlie was watching
Morning with Michael and Alice
. They were on the cooking segment of the show—”

“I like that show,” I said. “I watched it a lot at home.”

“—and they were preparing a roast chicken. That segment aired from fourteen minutes after ten until seventeen minutes after ten. Somewhere in the middle of the segment, Charlie instructs Sam to go to the basement to get some nuts and crisps. So here’s what that tells us: at some point shortly after 10:03, Sam goes to the basement for the first time. There is no cross on the floor. The cooking segment was running both when he went down and when he came back up, so we know that the second trip to the basement occurs between 10:14 and 10:17, and at that point, the cross has appeared.”

“You memorized all this?”

“Yes. Anyway, at this point, something happens. The glass is broken, something Sam claims he didn’t do. This suggests agitation on the part of—whatever he claims was down here. Sam yells for Charlie, and Charlie comes down. Charlie finds Sam in distress over this cross and presumably some flying glass. And Sam said Charlie got down on the floor to wipe away the cross.”

Stephen got on his knees in the middle of the floor.

“So Charlie is on his knees. He’s cleaning the floor. What’s a cross? It’s a burial marker.
X
marks the spot. Maybe whatever it was was marking where it was buried? And the flowers—flowers also mark graves. She just said the flowers down here were also moved, maybe to indicate the site…maybe it attacked because Charlie was interfering with his gravesite?”

While Stephen worked that out, I walked over to the wall that butted against Artillery Lane, where the crack met the outside of the building. There were shelving units all along that wall, full of glasses and boxes of snacks. I tried to look between the shelves to see the wall, but they were too full. I started to remove the items.

“What are you doing?” Stephen asked.

“The crack. I’m trying to see if it comes down this wall.”

Stephen got up and helped me move the boxes and glasses away, and together we moved the metal unit away from the wall. Funny, I was certain what I would find there, and yet I was shocked to actually see it. The crack came from the ceiling, from street level, and extended to about midway down the wall, snaking along the mortar that bound the brick wall of the basement.

“It doesn’t go to the floor,” he said. “So presumably whatever escaped from here, if anything did in fact escape, came from whatever is beyond this wall, under the street.”

“Weird to think of things being buried under the street,” I said.

“There are so many bodies around here. Over sixty-eight thousand of them over by Spitalfields alone. It’s not just a question of there being a body. There’s always a body around in London. I think it’s more of a change of state issue. Maybe there was always some lingering presence here, but the explosion
at Wexford woke it? Upset it? Shook it in some way? And it reacted violently to the disruption? Anyone will be upset by a nearby explosion.”

“So you think it was just pissed off?”

“
Pissed off
ghosts are called poltergeists in the common vernacular, and they do some very bad things.”

I felt a lecture coming on and turned away for a second.

“Stephen,” I said.

“The thing we need to remember—”

“Stephen.” I tugged on his arm to make him turn and look.

The figure was in the doorway. I say “the figure” because I couldn’t quite tell if it was a man or a woman or what age it was. It was a bundle of cloth, of watery features and gray air. I could tell where the eyes were supposed to be, but there were just deep spaces with no center. It rocked back and forth, as if moved by a breeze.

“Hello,” Stephen said.

The figure moved forward a few feet, and not by any method that resembled walking. It just
moved
and continued quaking at us from a slightly closer location.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” Stephen said. “Can you understand us? Please indicate if you can understand us.”

The figure remained exactly as it was.