by Tony Parsons
‘Funny,’ she said. ‘But the Piccadilly line still runs through Down Street. It just hasn’t stopped for a hundred years. Trains travelling east and west between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner still pass through Down Street.’ She checked her watch. ‘And you should hear both those trains on the way down.’
‘Got those times, Max?’ Whitestone said.
‘Eleven forty-five westbound, eleven fifty eastbound,’ I said.
‘Apart from the live tracks, there is a siding tunnel in use for servicing and reversing westbound trains,’ Adams said.
‘And we suspect that’s the entry point for our unknown suspect,’ Whitestone said. ‘If someone’s down there, then the route they took to get there was almost certainly the service track.’ She nodded towards the entrance. ‘Nobody has gone through that door all day apart from Flowers.’
‘I walked your route down this afternoon,’ Joy told me. ‘Access to the platforms is by the emergency stairwell. It’s pitch-dark in there but the stairs are kept clear because they are still used as an escape route from the Piccadilly line to the surface. Stick close to the wall and you will be OK. There are two lift shafts. Neither operational. Both removed to allow better ventilation for the engineers who work down there. There is also a two-man lift that hasn’t been used since the war. Officially declared unsafe. They reckon you can still smell Churchill’s cigars. Best skip the lift.’
‘How far to the bottom?’
‘I had a count of one hundred and three steps on the emergency stairwell. Then there’s a corridor followed by nineteen steps that lead to the platform. You are going to have to count them down, unfortunately. Platforms are located 22.2 metres below street level – and it’s filthy down there, a century’s worth of muck and grime, and the only light comes from passing trains.’ She looked at Whitestone. ‘Really, Max could do with a torch.’
Whitestone shook her head.
‘The lights have to stay out until the action starts,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘That’s your five minutes, Max.’
I stood up and faced her.
‘Just remember your training and you’ll be fine,’ she said.
I nodded.
A formal arrest will always be accompanied by physically taking control.
‘Subdue and control anyone who’s down there,’ she said. ‘And then give us a shout.’
I adjusted the weight of the Kevlar stab-proof vest I was wearing, but it still felt uncomfortable. Although not quite as uncomfortable as being stabbed. I remembered that as being really uncomfortable.
Adams was folding her maps.
‘What do you think Flowers will do if someone’s waiting for him down there?’ she said.
‘I think he will try to kill them before they kill him,’ I said, feeling a trickle of nervous sweat run down my spine.
And then I followed Harry Flowers underground.
Beyond the unmarked door there were lights on the top level and I quickly left them behind me as I went down the emergency stairwell and into the darkness, counting every step.
103, 102, 101 …
There were red and white tiles on the walls, coated with a century of filth, as Adams had promised, but they quickly faded to black as I went down the unlit spiral staircase. And soon there was only the darkness and the countdown inside my head.
89, 88, 87 …
The wind seemed to rise up to meet me as I heard the first of the trains, roaring far below.
I looked at my wrist but it was too dark to see.
The 11.45 westbound, I thought.
Flowers could not have been far ahead of me.
But I felt totally alone, as if the city had swallowed all trace of him.
36, 35, 34 …
And then the train was gone, and there was only silence below me, and I could hear my breath and feel the blood pumping in my veins.
10, 9, 8 …
I paused to listen for Flowers. Nothing.
3, 2, 1 …
I stopped. Controlled my breathing. I could see nothing but the unbroken darkness, yet I knew I was standing at the start of the corridor that led to the platforms. There was a noise in the distance, getting louder. I walked slowly towards it.
And as I reached the end of the corridor that had once taken long-dead commuters to and from the platforms, a train roared through Down Street station without slowing down, close enough to take my breath away, throwing out a dazzling light, the faces of the passengers all a ghostly blur. In the sudden flare of light I saw a modern sign that was there to orientate the engineers. Piccadilly Line – Westbound, it said. Earls Court – Hammersmith – Heathrow – Uxbridge. As the light faded with the disappearing train, I saw the entrances to both eastbound and westbound platforms were boarded up with walls that had massive ventilation grilles.
But one of the grilles had been torn away at the bottom corner.
As if someone had recently gone through it.
I listened, heard nothing, then pulled the grille back and scrambled through it and on to the platform. There was a long moment of total silence.
And then soft footsteps approached me in the darkness.
A torch shone in my eyes, blinding me.
‘Harry?’ I said.
But it was not Flowers.
It was a woman in an orange hi-viz jacket with a Transport for London logo. She was perhaps sixty. A short, stumpy woman in thick glasses. She had to be one of the engineers that Adams had told me about. She hobbled towards me with the painful gait of the arthritis sufferer.
‘You can’t be down here, ma’am,’ I said.
She smiled brightly. ‘Why’s that then?’
‘There’s a police operation in progress. I need you to take the emergency stairwell to the surface. Please do it now.’
She nodded, and I had half-turned my head to look for Harry Flowers when I saw the aerosol can in her hand.
She lifted it.
And sprayed it in my face.
And then all I felt was the burning in my eyes.
Acid, I thought. Please help me God.
My skin did not begin to melt from my face and so I knew that it was not acid, but my eyes were on fire, the lids closed of their own will, slammed shut as if they would never open again, and I could feel it in the membranes of my nose, mouth and lungs all beginning to seize up.
Phenacyl chloride or chemical mace or pepper spray, I thought, fighting the panic.
I doubled up in shock and pain, my heart pounding with fear because I could no longer breathe. My airways shut down and I sank to the ground, coughing, choking, sick to my stomach.
Drool slid from my mouth, my body no longer my own.
And I howled in pain and terror.
Pepper spray is forty-five minutes in hell, they say.
But that is if you stand stock-still and give them a free shot while they spray you. My head had been half-turned so one eye was not as bad as the other. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was on my knees, retching my guts up, and knowing it was pepper spray because it was too strong to be anything else. Chemical mace is like tear gas – an irritant designed to take the wind out of a riot, designed to make you feel like stopping protesting for the day and going home for your tea.
But pepper spray is designed to immediately incapacitate an assailant.
And that was what had been sprayed in my face.
And then I heard a man’s voice.
I looked up. One eye was still glued shut but I could half-open the other one, although it was red raw and streaming with tears. And it was open enough for me to see the young man who also wore an orange hi-viz jacket with a Transport for London badge. He was small and stocky like the woman, but perhaps thirty years younger.
‘Who is it, Mum?’ he said, and a torch played over me.
‘Just some dumb pig,’ the woman said, shining her own torch in my face.
She had sprayed me from about twelve feet. Maximum effectiveness for any kind of self-defence caniste
r is less than ten feet. These things are designed to spray in the eyes of someone who is right on top of you and attempting to rape or murder you, or both.
So although one eye was gone, the other was working well enough for me to see through my blurred and streaming vision that Harry Flowers had been flattened.
He lay on his back, motionless in the piercing white beams of their torches, and I believed he must be dead.
‘Just the one pig, Mum?’ the young man said.
‘You all alone, little piggy?’ the woman said conversationally and kicked me in the ribs. ‘He’s alone. The rest of them will be waiting up top, skulking around, as is their wont.’
Then Flowers groaned, clawing at his eyes, and I saw that they had sprayed him with the same pepper spray they had used on me.
The young man pulled out a butcher’s knife. ‘Remember me, Harry? It’s been a while.’
Flowers made a whimpering noise and attempted to get up on one elbow.
The young man placed the sole of his boot on Flowers’ arm and casually shoved him back down. Flowers was coughing and choking and puking. He must have been a lot closer than me when he took the spray in his eyes.
‘Is Harry tooled up?’ the woman said.
‘I’ll ask him,’ the young man said, leaning over Flowers. ‘You tooled up, H? Let me have a look.’
They spoke to him with a horrible familiarity, as if they were the oldest of friends or the deadliest of enemies. The young man searched Flowers and pulled something from his flying jacket.
‘Knuckle dusters, Mum.’
‘Brass, dear?’
‘No, that modern lightweight stuff. Like grey plastic. Polymer?’
He tried them on for size.
‘Mum?’ the young man said. ‘Should we do the pig or Harry first?’
She did not have to think about it for very long. ‘Let’s do the pig quick, and then we can take our time with Harry,’ she said. ‘Nobody’s going to bother us down here for a while. They’re all waiting upstairs. So let’s put the pig out of his misery and then have some fun with Harry. Chop all sorts of bits off him. Stick the bits in his mouth. And up his Wembley Way.’
They had a good chortle at that.
‘Where’s your whore tonight then, Harry?’ the woman said.
‘You’re not going to find her down here, H,’ the young man said. ‘We haven’t got your whore.’
They laughed even louder.
They were enjoying themselves.
They had waited a long time for this moment. A lifetime.
Then the young man came towards me with the knife, suddenly all business.
He began making pig noises, a throaty snorting that died in his throat as Harry Flowers lashed a foot out and the young man stumbled over it, falling towards me and then regaining his balance and steadying himself. He had dropped his torch. As he stooped to pick it up, I drove the sole of my shoe into his knee.
If you are going to kick someone with plans to kill you, then kick them in the knee. A smashed knee makes everyone change their plans.
He screamed and fell, clutching the smashed ligaments in agony.
And then Harry Flowers was screaming too, and getting to his feet, his eyes closed and streaming, as the woman fell on me to finish what the young man had started.
I smelled roll-up cigarettes and Chanel No. 5 as she dragged her fingernails down my face, trying to take my eyes out. I threw her off me and she grunted as she hit the wall.
Harry Flowers blinked furiously, cursed and cried out as he scanned the ground.
‘I can’t see! I can’t see! I can’t see!’
But he blindly reached down and when he stood up I saw that he had the knife in his hand.
And for the first time I saw the violence in him.
He slashed out at the young man as he tried to stand up with his ruined knee and then he went for the woman. She threw herself at him and the knife skittered away into the darkness.
The young man was hopping around on his one good leg.
Flowers picked up the can of pepper spray and emptied it into his face.
Then the three of them were locked in a brutal, tumbling, half-crippled embrace, all of them yelling in the darkness, the torches dropped and lost and forgotten.
I was shouting into the radio on my collar.
‘Grade A response! Grade A response! Jesus Christ, get down here, Whitestone!’
But there was only the white noise of dead air on the other end.
Harry Flowers grunted as the woman lifted one of her short legs into his groin and it doubled him up and she tore at his face as he bent over, her fingernails in his eyes, but when he got back up he had the knife in his hand and began to blindly slash out, screaming a promise of murder.
‘Mum!’ the young man cried, and there was real fear in his voice, because they had not killed us when they had the chance and now his body was broken and the chance had gone.
The woman turned at the sound of her son’s terror and she went to his side and then they fled, the young man holding his mother for support, the fight suddenly all out of them. I went after them but I stopped, my way blocked by Flowers and his swinging knife sightlessly stabbing at thin air.
‘Kill them – not me, you bloody fool!’ I told him.
He let the knife fall to his side, his eyes staring at me without seeing as I heard a metallic clang-clang-clang of the mother and her son attempting to get through the hole they had made in the ventilation grille.
They wanted to reach the other platform.
They wanted to get to the other tracks.
Because that was the route they had taken to get here, I realised.
And that was how they had planned to leave.
Down the westbound tracks, I thought. From Hyde Park Corner.
That’s where they came in, I thought. Not far at all. Almost next door. One stop.
And it had been a good plan. Until it all went wrong.
Their exit strategy wasn’t going to work because the young man’s injury prevented him from climbing through the ventilation grille and he was far too big for his mother to lift, carry or push through it. They were trapped down here. And suddenly they knew it.
They abandoned the torn ventilation grille and stumbled off down the platform, heading for the darkness of the tunnel.
They glanced back and saw me coming after them, although I felt like I moved in pain-racked slow motion, the agony in my damaged eye blotting out all thought and my legs not working as they should.
There were some service steps at the end of the platform and, arm in arm, they hobbled down them. I called a warning and they looked quickly back before disappearing into the tunnel. I held my breath as the first dazzling light of the approaching train broke the darkness, illuminating two silhouettes on the curve of the tunnel’s wall.
They did not have time to scream.
Flowers was sitting with his back to the red-tiled wall.
I had turned on my torch. I shone it on the ID that I had found on what remained of the two bodies. A woman’s pension book. A man’s driving licence. Both torn and bent, both smeared with blood and dirt.
I brushed it off to read the names.
‘Janet Mahone,’ I said, looking at the pension book. I shone the light on the driving licence. ‘And Peter Mahone. Ever met anyone by the name of Mahone, Harry? Ring any bells?’
He did not respond.
He was swabbing at his burning eyes.
‘I’m guessing Janet was married to the late Patrick Mahone,’ I said. ‘Your old business associate. And I reckon that Peter was one of their children. The eldest?’ I could just about read the date of birth. ‘Peter Mahone must have been a very young child on that day back in the Eighties when someone came to their house as they were sitting down for Sunday lunch and soaked the entire family in petrol. And then lit a match.’
I kicked his leg.
‘Are you listening to me?’
‘I’m listening.’
/> ‘This was thirty years ago. Janet Mahone was a young wife and mother. And Peter Mahone – that young man on the tracks down there – was a little kid. But they never forgot what happened that day, Harry.’
‘I never saw them before in my life,’ he said.
That’s the worst thing about my job.
People lie to you. They lie to you all the time.
And they lie to you even when they know that you know they are lying.
I stood up, wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked down at Flowers.
‘Better get up,’ I told him. ‘It’s a long walk to the top.’
He got slowly to his feet.
He stared into the darkness.
‘What happened in there?’ he said.
‘That last train was a bit late,’ I said.
9
The sun was coming up when I drove Flowers home.
He had come off far worse than me. His eyes were still half-shut and bloodshot, the surrounding skin as raw as sunburn and slick with the vegetable oil that had been used to soothe his burns.
He watched his ancestral homeland of the East End pass by as if it was a foreign country. It was still early, so I drove quickly through the light traffic. The only people on the streets were the men and women who cleaned the shining glass towers of Docklands, and they all used public transport.
Whitestone had conducted the hot debrief – the interview that takes place in the immediate aftermath of any serious incident – as Flowers and I lay on adjacent beds in St Bart’s and the nurses cleaned our eyes with hand soap, because hand soap can remove the oil in pepper spray like nothing else can. It hurts like hell, but works quite well. There wasn’t much to tell her but we told it time and time and time again as the nurses flushed the poison from our eyes.
And as the night wore on, Whitestone had things to tell us.
Peter Mahone, the eldest son of Flowers’ former business partner, Patrick Mahone, had worked briefly on the London Underground ten years ago, until a drink problem forced him to retreat to the south coast and the small caravan where his mother Janet Mahone lived. When word spread that the mistress of Harry Flowers had been kidnapped, Peter Mahone knew enough to get himself and his mother into Down Street tube station.