I heard movement on the line ahead; men jumping down to the chippings and walking down the track. I thought I knew what they were going to do, so I took my chance. It was risky because I couldn’t be sure they wouldn’t have posted a guard on the off-side of the train. I unfastened the gate on the left side of the wagon, peeked out at the night and the empty southbound track, and lowered myself slowly onto a sleeper. I reached up to close the gate then scuttled away down the line, stepping only on the sleepers to reduce noise, and when I reached the end of the train I cut across the track and hid in the undergrowth at the side of the line. Thanks to the slight curvature of the track I had a perfect view of what was going on.
A gang of workers dressed in dark boilersuits had started unloading the wagons. They passed the corpses over their heads in a human chain. In a gap in the undergrowth a large works vehicle had backed up as close as it could get to the line. The bodies were tossed into the back of this vehicle. Some had stiffened and slid around on top of others like a load of discarded shop-window dummies; others were still pliable and their arms and legs cracked and bent this way or that as more were thrown on the pile.
The men emptied at least a dozen wagons and I guessed there must have been at least twenty-five bodies in my own cattle truck. When the first works vehicle could carry no more it drove off down the slope and another took its place. I watched the first vehicle as it rumbled down over the rough ground towards the gasholders. It stopped by a cluster of small outbuildings and another team of workers emerged from the darkness to unload the cargo. Behind the outbuildings were several pipes leading up to the half-empty gasholder. I watched disbelieving as the bodies were carried one at a time and inserted into the broadest of these pipes. It was a slow process: after seven or eight bodies had been tipped into the pipe, the workers could push them no further along inside and they stopped, replaced a cover over the gap in the pipe and opened up a faucet several yards up the pipe. After a few seconds the faucet was closed again and the cover taken off the gap and more corpses stuffed in.
When they had finished, the gasholder seemed to have risen very slightly, but it was almost impossible to tell. There would be room for hundreds of thousands of bodies so it was unlikely a few hundred would make much of an impression.
The teams of men strolled back up the slope in an almost leisurely way and got back on the train, which started moving straight away, back the way it had come, the locomotive pushing from behind.
I crouched down even further in the bushes and watched as the train passed over my head. In the last wagon I saw a group of the corpse carriers. They’d left the truck gate open and were smoking cigarettes, the ends glowing like fireflies as the men stared out into the rushing night. One took a final pull and cast his hot coal into space. It arced through the velvet darkness and landed in the vegetation an inch or two from my face. I held my breath, waiting for the sound of the driver slamming on his brakes, but it didn’t come.
Because I reasoned there was nothing to be gained from a closer inspection of the gasholder or its feeder pipe — and because I was too fucking freaked out to go near it — I crossed the line and fought my way through a set of allotments to get to a road where I flagged down the first minicab I saw and asked the driver to take me into Birmingham.
I was exhausted and my instinct was to go home and collapse, but I was worried about Annie Risk, so I caught the first train from New Street to Manchester. There wasn’t time to ring before it left. On the train I fell asleep. If I dreamed at all I woke up when the train braked at a red light outside Piccadilly with no recollection of having done so. I stared out of the window and saw the two giant gasholders over beyond Ancoats. I shivered and pulled my jacket around me. My clothes had dried out after my dip in the canal but I had not warmed up.
I walked down the Piccadilly ramp and crossed the tramlines, having decided to walk to Annie’s so I had a chance to get my head together. It wasn’t that far, a couple of miles. Within minutes I was marching past the sprawling university buildings. It was late and the streets were deserted. I took in my surroundings, relieved to be back in the real world. Even the wind on my face felt different, slightly cooler than in the City. I plunged into the grid of terraced streets and back entries that was Moss Side.
I stood outside Annie’s place for half a minute looking up at her window for signs of life. The light was on but there were no shadows of movement. Pushing open the street door I felt my way through the gloom of the hallway to the stairs and began to climb. My legs felt heavy. At the top I hesitated outside Annie’s door and listened again. Nothing. I knocked and waited. There was no sound of activity from within so I knocked again, louder. Still nothing. I tried the handle. The door swung open.
‘Annie,’ I said quietly as I walked into her flat. ‘Annie, are you there?’
The bathroom on my right was in darkness. I checked it nevertheless. It was empty. The little flints of mirrored glass on the wall flickered in the light from the hall. The kitchen was also empty, dirty mugs left standing on the draining board and take-away boxes sticking out of the top of the bin. The light I’d seen from outside was burning in the bedroom, but Annie wasn’t there either. The bed was unmade. I glanced in the living room. Empty. I stepped back into the hall then straight back into the living room, my heart in my mouth: I’d glimpsed something on the living room wall and only assimilated it unconsciously.
On the wall in two-foot-high letters — in red — were the crudely daubed words KING KILLER.
I looked in the empty bedroom again. The unmade bed. The light.
My breathing became quick and shallow. Where was Annie Risk?
Chapter Fifteen
It was too late to get a train anywhere and when I sat down on Annie’s bed to think about what I could do to find her I must have given in to exhaustion because the next thing I knew I was waking up. Light was streaming in at the window. I felt a momentary elation that I was back and then I remembered that Annie was missing. I got up and looked in the other room: I had not dreamt the message on the wall. The red seemed a little less vivid in daylight. Or maybe it was just that it was six hours later and no longer fresh. It had acquired the rusty look of dried blood.
I showered, shaved and dressed in ten minutes, and left the flat.
On my way to Piccadilly I bought a bap, a pack of Camels and a newspaper, which told me it was a Wednesday. So what? On the train I soon put it down unread: I couldn’t concentrate on this world while Annie was being held hostage for me in another. The Camels, however, tasted good after the stale muck available in the City.
Arriving in London I went straight to the shop. I pushed the door open against a wodge of circulars, free newspapers and bills. I trailed my finger through a layer of dust on the counter, thought about sticking a record on the turntable and decided against it, in case it turned out to be the recording of my court case. I sat in the back room for a while with a cup of instant coffee and a couple of cigarettes, then went up the back stairs to use the toilet. I sat there looking at the picture of a figure skater in the Winter Olympics I’d clipped from one of the Sunday supplements and tacked to the inside of the door. About to go into a spin, she had already started to turn and twirl her star-speckled black skirt.
I walked downstairs, lit another Camel, stuffed the pack down the side of my left boot and left the shop by the back door.
I found myself stepping directly into a back entry in the City. The air was thicker, warmer on my shaved cheeks. I walked with confidence now I had some purpose other than my own salvation. Soon I was among the crowds. People streamed out of an official-looking building carrying brown paper parcels stencilled with the letter W. I guessed — or understood, as you do in a dream — that W stood for Wednesday, as M had stood for Monday; today’s news on the hunt for the escaped King killer. Twenty yards further on was a street-corner judge. I approached him.