He heard the African give an angry nasal snort. He fancied from the breathing noises that Wiley was bending, and then he heard the rasp of the trapdoor as it lifted. A moment later he felt a slight, a very slight, movement of the air and he sensed the blow that was coming at him. Almost involuntarily, instinctively, in response to some deep habit of self-preservation, he twisted his body a little at the last moment and the savage blow, the fierce downthrust of lead piping, took him across the back of the neck instead of the head; nevertheless, he went down like a log, breaking some of the flooring in his crashing fall.
Wiley laughed softly, turned and gave Pelly a similar blow. Then he picked up the two inert forms in his powerful arms, one by one, dragged them to the trapdoor, and dropped them through like so much rubbish. They crashed down, and chunks of rubble fell in after them, and then dark, stinking waters closed over their heads.
Up top, Wiley closed the trap and then smashed away at the floor. Within seconds the broken woodwork crumbled downwards, lay gaping in a jagged hole, a brand-new wound which could so very easily have been caused by the weight of two big men.
Wiley walked away quickly, down the slimy stone steps to the underground room where Canasset was waiting. As he entered Wiley grinned and lifted his thumbs. Canasset took up the telephone, gave a few brief orders to Verity up in the office, put the phone down, got up, and slid back a big stone block in the wall. With Wiley behind him he squirmed through into a narrow passage whose walls dripped foul-smelling water, and he waited impatiently, his lips tight. Shortly after there was a sound from ahead and then a single flash of light. Canasset, his voice echoing along the passage, called out sharply.
“Wait!”
He went ahead and joined up with two more men — and the girl, whose face was pale and shadowed in the torchlight. She showed no outward sign of bad treatment and her clothes were neat and tidy; she would pass without comment inside a car. Canasset looked at her, his face working strangely, his cheeks flushed and his breath coming fast. He reached out a puffy white hand, fumbled with the fastening of her dress. She shrank back; the men behind her held her fast, helpless. Canasset’s shaking fingers pulled, groped, opening the frock to her waist. The pudgy hand was on her body, feeling the cruel weals which had reddened the white skin. ;
He said softly, “This was why you screamed, then?"
She nodded, her eyes bright with tears.
Canasset stared at her, and then very suddenly his hand came up, struck like a snake, taking her twice across the cheeks with vicious slaps. He said, “There will be no more screaming when we leave here. If there is… I will allow these men to do as they wish with you. I think you understand. Now dress.”
A few moments later Canasset took the lead, and they walked along for some six hundred yards. After that the floor of the tunnel took an upward turn, and after a short but steepish climb Canasset reached a ladder. Climbing this, he banged twice with the butt of a revolver on a metal trap above his head. After half a minute the trap was opened and the party climbed out into the oily inspection-pit of a garage.
A man in dungarees said, “She’s all ready for you.”
“Good.”
They climbed out of the pit and went towards a plain black car, a fast, rakish job whose engine was running already. When they had piled in, the car pulled out into Canning Town, turned to the left in the roadway, and drove off fast, swinging round corners. Hitting the Barking by-pass where it crossed the line of the Northern Outfall Sewer, it headed east down river.
Back in the offices above the warehouse Verity, who a short while before had taken the message from Canasset below the cellar, took up the phone and asked the private exchange for an outside line. When he had got it, he asked for a Southampton number and spoke urgently to a director of a subsidiary company of the Emco group. After that he called Grays in Essex and talked for a while to Canasset’s wife. Then, mopping at his forehead, he sent down for the clerk from the inquiry office.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Shaw went down into that filthy ooze, the bottom of the pit soft and foul and muddy beneath his slack, unconscious body. He lay there where he had fallen, on a pile of silt with the stinking water lapping his face, seeping horribly into mouth and nose and ears. Imperceptibly the water deepened as the incoming tide flooded into the London River, brackish water coming up from the lower reaches by Southend and the North Foreland, sea-fresh to start with, vile as it seeped through the ancient, decayed stone and brick rubble below Canning Town, bringing with it the filthy refuse from the drains and sewers. Close to Shaw, Pelly lay with his head right under, just a black and slimy lump that had so recently been a man — walking, living, breathing.
The sudden twist of Shaw’s body as the chopping, downward-slicing piping had taken him, had deflected the full force of the blow and it hadn’t landed square. In Pelly’s case it had; and Pelly had broken his neck in the fall anyway. The slimy ooze, blocking mouth and nose completely, had quickly done the rest. Shaw’s instant reflex action, attuned to danger more than most people’s, had saved his life — so far.
As, up in the fresh, clean daylight, Canasset’s car rushed eastward, Shaw came back to semi-consciousness to find himself retching horribly, a gut-tearing upsurge of green bile that stung his throat raw, shook him, racked him, ate to the very centre of his being, a retching into seemingly solid blackness which left him as limp as a rag doll and unable to think constructively.
He moved higher up the bank of silt, dragging himself painfully, to clear his face from the muck, retching still; and when he’d brought up all he could he lay inert, shaken with a feverish trembling, his eyes stinging agonizingly even now.
He lay in a silence which was almost total, a vibrant, flesh-creeping stillness which was broken only by a low gurgle of water rising through the pores and breaks in the crumbly brickwork. He lay there motionless, his face covered with a sweat which was as icy cold as death itself.
A little later he heard sounds above his head, vague and distant sounds. Those sounds could mean that Thompson had got word through — as indeed he must have done by now — and Latymer’s boys had come along and were going through the cellars. Or it could mean that they’d been and gone while Shaw was unconscious, and now Canasset and Wiley had come back to make sure they’d done the job properly. Or it could be simply the warehousemen going about their work, the noises on the warehouse floor echoing down to him through the cellar.
In any case, if he stayed there much longer he was gone for sure. So he tried to call out, but all that came back to him was the thin echo of his own weakened voice, and he was quite unable to make anybody hear. Once a reflection of light filtered down very briefly as a torch flickered across the wall above the rotten flooring and then he knew that some one was actually in the cellar over his head; but his efforts to call out again only resulted in an indistinct murmur which was lost in the echoing clatter of footsteps, and then that light vanished and he was utterly alone again.
After that there was absolute stillness, stillness and the groping, strangling dark, and the sucking, awful gurgle of the inflow, the ever-rising oozy liquid.
The phone went once again in Latymer’s office, and the urgent voice told him, “Reporting from the warehouse, sir. We’ve been right through the place and there’s no sign of Commander Shaw or Pelly — or the girl, Miss Ross… by the way, sir, that Mr Verity’s just flown into a paddy and called Scotland Yard.”
“Blast him!” Latymer said savagely. “All right — thank you. Stay where you are. I’ll contact you again very shortly.” Latymer jammed the phone back and drummed his stubby fingers on the desk-top, his face tight and anxious and angry. Then he buzzed through to Miss Larkin and told her to send Captain Carberry up.