He strode towards it, with Branson and the constable right behind him and switched on his torch. As he entered the storm drain, shadows jigged wildly back at him. He ducked his head, crinkling his nose at the strong, fetid smell of damp. It was higher in here than it had seemed from the outside; it felt like being in an ancient tube tunnel, with no platform.
‘The Third Man,’ Glenn Branson said suddenly. ‘You’ve seen that movie. You’ve got that at home.’
‘The one with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten?’ Grace said.
‘Yeah, good memory! Sewers always remind me of it.’
Grace shone the powerful beam to the right. Darkness. Shimmering puddles of water. Ancient brickwork. Then he shone the beam to the left. And jumped.
‘Shit!’ Glenn Branson shouted, his voice echoing round them.
Although Grace had been expecting it, what he saw, several yards away down the tunnel, still spooked him. A skeleton, reclining against the wall, partially buried in silt. It looked like it was just lounging there, waiting for him. Long fronds of hair were still attached to the scalp in places, but otherwise it was mostly just bare bones, picked or rotted clean, with a few tiny patches of desiccated skin.
He squelched towards it, being careful not to slip on the mulch base. Twin pinpricks of red appeared for an instant and were gone. A rat. He swung the beam back on to the skull, its inane rictus grin chilling him.
And something else about it chilled him too.
The hair. Even though the lustre had long gone, it was the same length and had the same winter-wheat colouring as the hair of his long-vanished wife, Sandy.
Trying to dismiss the thought from his mind, he turned to the constable and asked, ‘Have you searched the whole length?’
‘No, sir, I thought we should wait for the SOCOs.’
‘Good.’
Grace was relieved, glad that the young man had had the sense not to risk disturbing or destroying any evidence that might still be in here. Then he realized his hand was shaking. He shone the beam back on the skull.
On the fronds of hair.
On his thirtieth birthday, a little over nine years ago now, Sandy, the wife he adored, had vanished off the face of the earth. He had been searching for her ever since. Wondering every day, and every night, what had happened to her. Had she been kidnapped and imprisoned somewhere? Run off with a secret lover? Been murdered? Committed suicide? Was she still alive or dead? He’d even resorted to mediums, clairvoyants and just about every other kind of psychic he could find.
Most recently he had been to Munich, where there had been a possible sighting. That made some sense, as she had relatives, on her mother’s side, from near there. But none of them had heard from her, and all his enquiries, as usual, had drawn a blank. Every time he encountered an unidentified dead woman who was remotely in Sandy’s age bracket, he wondered if perhaps this time it was her.
And the skeleton in front of him now, in this buried storm drain in the city where he had been born, grown up and fallen in love, seemed to be taunting him, as if to say, You took your time getting here!
6
Abby, on the hard carpeted floor, stared at the small sign beside the panel of buttons on the grey wall. In red capital letters on a white background it read:
WHEN BROKE DOWN
CALL 013 228 7828
OR DIAL 999
The grammar did not exactly fill her with confidence. Below the button panel was a narrow, cracked glass door. Slowly, one inch at a time, she crawled across the floor. It was only a few feet away but, with the lift rocking wildly at every movement, it might as well have been on the far side of the world.
Finally she reached it, prised it open and removed the handset, which was attached to a coiled wire.
It was dead.
She tapped the cradle and the lift swayed wildly again, but there was no sound from the handset. She dialled the numbers, just in case. Still nothing.
Great, she thought. Terrific. Then she eased her mobile from her handbag and dialled 999.
The phone beeped sharply at her. On the display the message appeared:
No network coverage.
‘Jesus, no, don’t do this to me.’
Breathing fast, she switched the phone off, then a few seconds later switched it back on again, watching, waiting for just one signal blob to appear. But none did.
She dialled 999 again and got the same sharp beep and message. She tried again, then again, jabbing the buttons harder each time.
‘Come on, come on. Please, please.’
She stared at the display again. Sometimes signal strength came and went. Maybe if she waited…
Then she called out, tentatively at first, ‘Hello? Help me!’
Her voice sound small, bottled.
Taking a deep lungful of air, she bellowed at the top of her voice, ‘HELLO? HELP ME PLEASE! HELP ME! I’M TRAPPED IN THE LIFT!’
She waited. Silence.
Silence so loud she could hear it. The hum of one of the lights in the panel above her. The thudding of her own heart. The sound of her blood coursing through her veins. The rapid hiss-puff of her own breathing.
She could see the walls shrinking in around her.
She breathed in slowly, then out. She stared at the display of her phone again. Her hand was shaking so much it was almost impossible to read it. The figures were just a blur. She breathed in deeply again, and again. Dialled 999 once more. Nothing. Then, putting the phone down, she pounded hard on the wall.
There was a reverberating boom and the lift swayed alarmingly, clanging into one side of the shaft and dropping a few more inches.
‘HELP ME!’ she screamed.
Even that caused the lift to rock and bang again. She lay still. The lift settled.
Then, through her terror, she felt a flash of hysterical anger at her predicament. Hauling herself a few feet forward, she began pounding on the metal doors and yelling at the same time – yelling until her ears hurt from the din, and her throat was too sore to go on, and she began coughing, as if she had swallowed a whole lungful of dust.
‘LET ME OUT!’
Then she felt the lift move, suddenly, as if someone had pushed down on the roof. Her eyes shot up. She held her breath, listening.
But all she could hear was the silence.
7
Lorraine Wilson was topless on a deckchair in her garden, soaking up the last of the summer, trying to prolong her tan. Through large oval sunglasses she looked at her watch – the gold Rolex Ronnie had bought her for her birthday, in June, and which he had insisted was genuine. But she didn’t believe that. She knew Ronnie too well. He would not have spent ten thousand pounds when he could have bought something that looked the same for fifty. And certainly not at the moment, with his financial worries.
Not that he ever shared his problems with her, but she could tell from the way he had recently tightened up on everything, checking her grocery bills, complaining about the money she spent on clothes, her hair and even her lunches out with her friends. Parts of the house were looking embarrassingly shabby, but Ronnie refused to let her call in the decorators, telling her they would have to economize.
She loved him deeply, but there was a part of him that she could never reach, as if he had a secret internal compartment where he kept and fought his private demon, all alone. She knew a little of what that demon was – his determination to show the world, and in particular everyone who knew him, that he was a success.