by Dane Cobain
“It’s Allman,” Craig said. “He got away.”
Leipfold swore. “How the hell did that happen?”
“Search me,” Craig said. “I thought I had him. I really did. Son of a bitch must’ve slipped me and hopped a fence or something.”
“Get looking!” Leipfold shouted. By this point, he was thirty feet away, pulling up to a stop in a quiet cul-de-sac that looked as distant from the case as the iceberg must have seemed to the lookouts on the Titanic. But he could see a narrow little alleyway, and he could see Craig standing at the entrance to it, waving frantically at Leipfold and glancing behind him towards Maile, who was jogging along the street to keep up with him.
Leipfold followed Craig into the alley, where the henchman gestured to the dozen doors that opened out into it.
“He must have gone through one of these,” he said. “But which one?”
“Start knocking,” Leipfold said. “We’ll find out.”
“What if no one answers?”
“We’ll deal with that when we get there,” Leipfold said. He knocked at one of the doors while Craig hopped over to the other side of the alleyway. Maile arrived on the scene just as the first door was being opened by a man wearing chef’s whites and holding a meat cleaver. He didn’t look happy to be disturbed.
* * *
While Leipfold and Craig continued to work through the doors, asking everyone who answered whether they’d seen a man who matched Marc Allman’s description, Maile leaned against a wall to catch her breath before making her way to the end of the alleyway, searching vaguely through the detritus that littered it. There was a wall at the end of it, and Maile looked up at the top of it.
“Boss?” she said. Leipfold didn’t hear her, so she repeated herself and managed to attract his attention before he knocked at the fourth of seven doors on his side of the alleyway.
“What?” he snapped. “I’m kind of busy here.”
“You might be busy wasting your time,” Maile said. She looked at the wall again. “What if he climbed over it?”
Leipfold paused and thought about it. “What’s on the other side?” he asked.
“Train tracks,” Craig said. “Stinging nettles and electricity cables. That sort of thing.”
“Woah,” Maile said. “I’m impressed. What, did you memorise a map of the city?”
“No,” Craig said, shrugging his shoulders. “I boosted myself up and took a look over it when I got here. No sign of Allman.”
“Then he must have gone through one of the doors,” Leipfold said. “Keep knocking.”
“Yes, boss,” Craig said.
Maile watched as the two men worked their way towards her. Even if they got a lead on him, Allman could be half a mile away by now, maybe more if he had some sort of transport. He’d just need to enter by the rear and leave by the front, like some guy in a trench coat from an old spy movie.
She looked down again and scanned the bin bags, the flattened cardboard boxes and the other junk that had been left out for the rats in the alleyway. She swept it aside with her foot, wincing as the sludge and muck transferred itself onto her new Nikes. Then she hit metal and bent down to take a closer look.
“Hmm,” she murmured. “If he didn’t go over the wall then perhaps he went under it instead.”
* * *
“I don’t understand,” Kat said. “Why are you doing this?”
The silence was almost deafening.
“I’m asking you woman to woman,” Kat said. “Please, don’t do this.”
“It’s too late.”
“Too late for what?”
“It’s too late for you,” the woman said. She sighed, and Kat flinched as the knife traced a path across her cheek. “You know, I was in your place once.”
“My place?”
“I was down here in the darkness,” she said. “Captured by the Tower Hill Terror.”
Kat moaned, a low, guttural sound like an injured animal. For the first time since she’d found herself in the darkness, she started to realise just how much danger she was in.
“I was down here for weeks,” the woman said. “But I talked to him.”
“Him?”
“I’ve said too much.”
But Kat wouldn’t take no for an answer. She realised that her only chance was if she kept the woman talking for long enough for help to arrive. If help was indeed on its way.
“You mentioned the Tower Hill Terror.”
“Yes,” the woman said. “I suppose there’s no harm in you knowing. The Terror isn’t just one person. There are two of us. I’m just one half of it.”
“But I thought you said you were down here in the darkness.”
“I was,” she said. “But then I told a story. But just as I was about to reach the end, I stopped. He had to keep me alive if he wanted to hear the ending. I did that again and again and again and eventually, he realised he needed me. And I needed him.”
“Like the Arabian Knights.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing,” Kat said. “You said you needed him. Why?”
“He completes me,” the woman said. “And I complete him. I was his first victim, you know. He didn’t have the heart to go through with it. But together, we’re unstoppable.”
“Stockholm Syndrome.”
“No,” the woman said. “We’re partners. He needed a new way to find his victims. He met me at my dating night. I was the one who suggested using the apps.”
“Holy shit,” Kat said as the pieces started to fall into place. She knew she recognised the woman’s voice. And now she knew why. “You’re Lucy Fforde.”
The woman sighed again. In the darkness, it sounded like a slashed tyre leaking air at pressure.
“Oh dear,” the woman said. “Now you’re really in trouble.”
Chapter Twenty-Four:
The Tables Turned
SOMEWHRE IN THE DARKNESS, Kat Cotteril was doing her best to live, to survive.
“I can’t let you live,” Fforde said. “Not now you know who I am.”
“Please,” Kat said. “I won’t tell a soul.”
“I know you won’t,” Fforde replied. “I’ll make sure of it.”
Kat felt a soft rush of air as the woman moved towards her. She countered by throwing all of her weight to the side and letting gravity do her dirty work. Behind her, the manacles loosened slightly but still held, and the shock of the sudden stop sent pain flaring up both of her arms. She felt movement again, or perhaps she sensed it, and some primal instinct told her to readjust and to throw all of her weight the other way. There was a dull thud as she collided with Lucy Fforde. Then the grinding of metal and mortar as the manacles finally came free. The two women hit the floor at the same time, but Kat was the first to react even with the pain in her arms and shoulders.
It was still too dark to see, and Kat was fighting for her life with her hands free but still manacled together. She struck out at random and hit nothing but air, then felt movement to her right and lucked out. Something clattered to the floor and Kat followed the sound, praying that she’d disarmed the woman and not just made her drop a phone. If the knife was still in Fforde’s hand, Kat knew she was a goner.
Kat struck out again at nothing, and then she tried again and made contact. Fforde was in front and to her right, and Kat went for the eyes with her fingers and came up against some sort of headgear.
The goggles, she thought. She tore at them with her hands until the strap snapped and the goggles came away. That left them both in the darkness, both fighting tooth and nail as though their entire lives had led up to that moment. In a way, they had.
Fforde went down on the floor and Kat tripped over her, hitting the floor with a crunch that she hoped didn’t signify a broken bone. But if something was broken then the pain was delayed, maybe by the adrenaline. As she scrab
bled backwards across the floor, her left hand hit the blade. She winced as it cut into her palm, but she swallowed the cry of pain that was fighting to make its way out of her oesophogus so that Fforde couldn’t tell where she was. She picked up the knife with her left hand and transferred it to her right with shaking fingers.
Then she started to stand up again. When she got to her knees, she was hit with a flying tackle that sent both women to the ground again. Kat landed on the bottom and tried to roll over, but the woman was too heavy and she had her hands on her face with her manicured fingernails digging into the flesh beneath Kat’s eye.
Then Kat screamed, a sort of wordless battle cry, and cuffed the woman in the side of the head. She struck again and then again, fierce little blows to the face that hit like drops of rain against a windowpane. They were tactical blows, left-handed jabs inflicted with the aid of a weapon. The manacles were wrapped around her fist like a knuckleduster.
Fforde loosened her grip, and that was all Kat needed. She brought her right hand up and around just as the woman was reaching for her throat again. There was a sound, a horrible, disturbing schlop sound that Kat knew she’d remember for the rest of her life, however long that might be. Then there was a watery gurgle and the rattling, wheezing sound of the woman’s lungs, her laboured breathing made worse by the blade that was now sticking through them.
Kat shrieked and crawled away from her, backing up on her hands like a crab on a sandy beach. She paused for a moment to catch her breath and shuddered at the sound that the woman was making. She was whimpering pathetically, and it made Kat’s clammy skin break out in goosebumps. She was trying to say something, and Kat crawled closer to hear what it was.
“He’s coming,” she was saying, slurring her words like a drunk at closing time. “He’s coming to get you.”
“Who?” Kat growled.
But the woman just laughed herself into a coughing fit. Kat got a little closer, close enough to wrap her hand around the handle of the knife and to wiggle it around in the wound. The woman screamed for mercy, but her pleas fell on deaf ears.
“Who?” Kat repeated.
But the woman couldn’t talk. She could barely breathe, and she started coughing again as Kat backed away from her.
Kat scrabbled across the floor looking for the fallen goggles. After what felt like half a lifetime, she found them. She muttered a quick prayer to a god she didn’t believe in and then slipped them over her head.
Kat could immediately see the room around her, cast in a sort of greenish hue but still visible enough to make out the walls and the floors and the woman who was slumped on the floor. Even through the goggles, she could tell it was her.
Lucy Fforde.
Kat thought about going to the woman’s aid and then decided against it.
Fuck her, she thought. I’ve already wasted enough time looking for answers when I could’ve been finding a way out of this hellhole.
She grabbed the handle of the knife and pulled it out, wincing at the sound it made and the effect it had on the woman, whose tortured breaths had started to rattle. Removing the knife, Kat knew, could have caused more damage than the initial blow, but it sounded like the woman was already on the way out and besides, it was self-defence.
Kat reached into Fforde’s pockets and came up with nothing. Then she reached down again and found something on a chain around the woman’s neck. It was a weak, flimsy thing meant for decoration and not for utility, and it snapped easily as she yanked it from Fforde’s neck.
There was a little key on the end of it. Her heart leapt as she tried to manoeuvre it into position. But her hands were shaking too much, and the key dropped to the floor. She cursed and ran her hands across the cold and dusty surface until she found the chain, then she scooped it up and tried again. This time, the key twisted in the lock and it popped open. The manacles fell to the floor and she started to rub her hands together to restore the circulation.
Kat struck out into the darkness, picking a direction at random. She reached a wall and started to make her way along it, feeling for a door or an exit. But there was nothing.
Nothing but the woman’s ragged breathing and the distant clip-clop of two heavy pairs of shoes as they made their way towards her.
Chapter Twenty-Five:
In the Sewers
THERE WAS A LIGHT. At first, it was just the simple glint of a distant candle, but it started to grow and grow until it was a sun in the sky and Kat was blinded by the glare. Her eyes weren’t ready for it.
“What’s going on here, then?”
The voice belonged to a man, and Kat could see the rough outline of his shape behind the lamplight when she could hold her eyes open for long enough to see him. He was fairly well-built and struck an imposing figure in the half-light. Kat had been expecting a monster, but it was just a man, any man, a man you could walk past on the street without noticing him.
She could also see the dim outline of the room around her. There was only the one exit, and that was where the man had come from. He caught sight of Kat at about the same time that he saw his partner with blood pouring out of her chest and pooling around her as she twitched and groaned on the floor.
“Please,” Kat said. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“How did you get free?” the man growled.
“She let me go,” Kat lied. She needed to keep him talking, at least until her eyes adjusted. She still held the knife in her hand. “But then there was a struggle.”
“A struggle?” The man waved the lantern angrily and stepped further into the room, bending down to take a cursory look at his partner without taking his eyes off his prisoner. The strobing light hit Kat hard and blinded her momentarily while he took stock of the woman’s wound. It didn’t look good. “Jesus Christ, you stabbed her!”
“It was an accident,” Kat lied. “Is she alive?”
“Barely,” the man said. “She needs medical attention.”
“So take her to a hospital.”
“It’s not as easy as that,” the man said. He left the injured woman where she was and put his lantern down beside her. Now that Kat could see, she could get her bearings. The two of them were underground somewhere in some sort of steampunk paradise. It looked like the room had once been a brewery, or perhaps a workshop room for the plumber’s guild. The place had clearly been gutted at some point, but it still retained a vibe of its former glory thanks to the curiously shaped recesses in the walls and the odd sections of copper pipe. The walls were built from brick—old bricks, by the look of them—and the floor was of rough earth that had been flatted down and ironed out.
Kat looked around for the exit, but she couldn’t see it at first. Then she saw a narrow band of light on one of the walls. It looked almost angelic, like some sort of divine halo, and it reminded her of the portals she’d seen in one of Maile’s computer games. Kat saw her chance and she took it, springing into as much action as her aching body would allow. With one shoulder still hanging uncomfortably from its socket, she put in a burst of speed and moved towards the light. Her legs, unused to taking her weight, felt like wobbling stilts beneath her, and she veered from side to side like a drunk driver.
“Calm down,” the man said. He intercepted her with ease, barely breaking a sweat. When she tried to bring the knife down, he deflected it with a blow to her wrist which sent it clattering down to the floor again. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Kat dropped to the floor, exhausted. She just lay there, too tired to move, too crushed and too broken to fight.
“What do you want from me?” Kat asked.
The man looked down at her. He held something in his hand and it sparkled in the half-light. Kat shuddered as she saw it for what it was, another knife, a bigger one, sharper and shinier. The man smiled, and the light hit his teeth and made him stand out of the darkness like the Cheshire Cat.
“
You don’t want to know,” he said.
* * *
Leipfold, Maile and Craig decided to split up.
“Divide and conquer,” Leipfold said. “That’s the way to do it. Just be careful, okay? We don’t know what we might be getting into. Could be that Mr. Allman is innocent.”
“Could be,” Craig agreed.
“Yeah,” Maile said. “Or maybe he’s the creepiest creep in Creep Town. There’s something not right about the guy.”
“Let’s find him and find out,” Leipfold said.
Leipfold took one of the doors on the right-hand side of the alleyway and Craig took one on the left. Maile, meanwhile, took a different route in another direction entirely.
Craig’s door led to the storage hall of a small supermarket, and he was let inside by one of the employees after claiming to be an off-duty cop who was in pursuit of a suspect. Leipfold, meanwhile, had resorted to jimmying his door with a tool on his penknife, reasoning that if nobody answered, it might be because they had something to hide. It was dark inside, so he summoned up a flashlight on his smartphone and used it to lead the way.
Maile, for her part, had found a manhole, and it wasn’t lying flush with the surface. She’d spotted it poking out amongst a pile of rubbish. It caught her eye because it looked oddly untouched, a little out of place in its surroundings. She thought back to what she’d said to Leipfold. “If he didn’t go over the wall…”
She lifted up the cover and climbed down the ladder, then looked around at her less-than-salubrious surroundings. She found herself below street level, standing ankle-deep in brackish water in the middle of the city’s old Victorian sewer system. Maile had no idea how much of it was still in use, and she didn’t care. She was more preoccupied with the stench that assaulted her nostrils and her newfound thankfulness for her big black boots.
If I’d been wearing flats, she thought, my feet would be wet through with cholera juice.
The walls were built with thick bricks, many of which had started to crumble and to fade away. In other places, mould and mildew had started to colonise and create new lifeforms, and a dangerous-looking set of electric cabling ran along the opposite wall, presumably bringing life to some sort of sewage machine. She pinched her nose and explored, first to the left and then to the right. She could hear the distant echo of a couple of voices, a man and a woman, but it was hard to tell which direction it was coming from. Maile was afraid to wander too far away from the ladder in case she couldn’t find her way back out.