Her remarks and the photograph are distracting, but from what? She rests a soft hand on my wrist and murmurs “So do you see, if I’ve no problem saying that’s real—”
“Quiet a moment. Can you hear that?”
“I can’t. What—”
“Quiet. You’re not giving it a chance.”
She looks hurt as she takes her hand away to extend a finger across her lips. I don’t know if the wistful mime of muteness is intended to placate me or amuse me, but it’s simply another distraction from the sound of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” As the dogged performance recedes into the distance I’m growing surer that I don’t only recognise the song. I’ve also begun, however reluctantly, to suspect where it’s coming from, but it has retreated farther by the time I squeeze through the gap in the fence.
“What are you doing?” Lucinda calls, but that can’t delay me. Nor can the wire mesh that claws at my sleeve. I stride across the remains of the mosaic, which scrapes its stones together underfoot, to the railway arch. I’m yards short of it when the song recommences, having fallen silent as if the singer sensed my approach. I don’t believe he can, because he’s on the far side of the wall of bricks inside the arch. He isn’t just beyond it; the hollowness of his voice betrays that he’s in some kind of tunnel—a long one, by the sound of it. He’s my father.
Chapter Forty-six
UNDER THE STONE
For a moment I think the bridge is somehow deeper than the arch, as though it has achieved a dream of becoming a tunnel. Or could the entire landscape be something else’s dream? I can’t let my half-awake fancies distract me; they feel as if the premature gloom is summoning too many elements of sleep. “It’s me,” I shout. “It’s Gavin. Don’t go away again.”
“What is it?” Lucinda cries through the fence. “What do you think you can hear?”
“I don’t think.” I mustn’t imagine that she’s trying to blot out my father’s voice, which fell silent as soon as I raised mine. “Quiet till I say,” I exhort her and stoop to the bricked-up arch.
Is the dimness hindering my vision, or are my eyes misbehaving somehow? I feel as if my senses are undergoing some adjustment by the time I distinguish a gap in the bricks at the bottom right-hand corner of the arch. Though it puts me in mind of a burrow, surely it’s a vandal’s work. I go down on my knees in the rubble and crouch to the gap. “Gavin…” Lucinda says more or less under her breath.
Perhaps I look as if I’m prostrating myself to a god I’ve rediscovered. My efforts don’t show me much; it’s far darker beyond the bricks. The ground within the arch appears to stir, and even if that’s just an effect of straining my eyes, I find it unappealing. I still have the camera. Holding it close to the gap, I set off the flash.
Something pale and encrusted with earth rears up beneath the arch and then retreats into the blackness. Despite the illusion of movement, which almost makes me lose my balance, it isn’t alive. If I’m not mistaken, it’s a trapdoor. I poise the camera again and am waiting for the flash to recharge when Lucinda calls “Don’t waste it. Wait, I’ve got a torch.”
I needn’t visualise her leading me into the depths below the trapdoor with a flambeau in her hand. She hurries to the car for a flashlight, which she uses to hold back the ragged edge of the fence while she slips through. She halts some feet away from me on a weedy section of mosaic. “Gavin, you’ve got to tell me what you think you’re hearing.”
“I’m not just now.” When she only gazes at me I add “My father.”
“In there.”
“Yes, in there. There’s more to it than it looks like. I’ll show you. Take a look.”
Her sole response is to hand me the flashlight. I switch it on and poke it through the jagged aperture. I have to go down on all fours and then, not without some one-armed wobbling, move the beam in an arc before I can put the space beyond the bricks together in my head. The wall and its twin on the far side of the arch have enclosed a section of the street, where pavements strewn with rubble flank an equally littered stub of roadway. The object I mistook for a trapdoor is a raised flagstone on the right-hand pavement. I have to hold the flashlight by the very end of its rubbery tube before I’m sure that the blackness exposed by the flagstone isn’t just a square patch of earth. It’s a hole deeper than the beam can reach. “I knew it,” I blurt.
“What did you think you knew, Gavin?”
“See for yourself. You can’t see from there.”
As I rise to my feet, leaving the flashlight in the gap, Lucinda squats and crouches forward. I’m about to demand a reaction by the time she says “Children.”
“Where? What do you mean?”
“Children must have broken in, mustn’t they? Nobody else would do that.”
“Maybe, but they aren’t who’s there now.”
She waves the flashlight at the bricked-up darkness. “Nobody is, Gavin.”
“Not in there, below it. There’s a tunnel if you look.”
The beam alights on the raised flagstone and sinks into the beginnings of the depths. “I wouldn’t call that a tunnel,” says Lucinda. “You aren’t saying a grown person would try to get in it.”
“Yes, I am. They have. There’s room.”
“But why would anybody want to?”
“I’ll be finding out. Can I get through?”
As she stands up I see her eyes are moist. “I suppose you have to exhaust every avenue,” she says.
However grotesque my behaviour appears, it has to be right. I’m returning to all fours when Lucinda says “You won’t need the camera as well, will you?”
I hand it to her and go prone on the rubble, a position from which it feels unnatural to speak. “I’ll shout if I need to,” I tell her. “My phone isn’t going to work.”
I can think of nothing more to say, and so I crawl through the gap, hitching myself on knees and elbows over the rubble. Bricks scrape my shoulders until I crouch lower. My heel sends a piece of debris across the waste ground with a clatter and a clink, and then I’m through, shoving the flashlight ahead. Its beam slithers along the littered pavement and draws the walls out of the dark. As I wobble to my feet there’s a prolonged rumble overhead, and the bridge shudders all around me. The disturbance isn’t thunder or an earthquake, it’s the reverberation of a train, and only the unsteadiness of the flashlight beam shifted the walls. The resonance gathers under the bridge and fills my ears until I feel as if it’s undermining all my senses while I examine where I am.
It smells like a dungeon where the sunlight never enters—earthy and damp. The truncated sections of roadway and pavements resemble an exhibit in a museum, a sample of a street from some undetermined past. The museum itself would be derelict, given the patches of lichen glistening with moisture on the walls. The raised flagstone puts me in mind of a grave, perhaps because it’s resting against a mound of earth. As I step forward the light pokes ever deeper into the square hole, which has roughly the same outline as the flagstone. I’m at the edge before I see exactly what’s beneath. The hole penetrates several feet of clay, below which is a tunnel scattered with fragments of brick that must have formed part of the ceiling. Propped more than a foot beneath the hole in the pavement, a ladder irrelevantly reminiscent of a window-cleaner’s stands on the floor of the tunnel.
As the rumble of the train continues to oppress my senses I wonder what the sequence of events may have been. Could vibrations from the railway have weakened the tunnel roof? Perhaps nobody knew the tunnel was there. If it wasn’t Williamson’s doing—there’s no record that he dug so close to the river—he’s rumoured to have had imitators. It isn’t so far from the site of the castle, from which a tunnel led to the Pool, and it’s nearer still to Exchange Flags, the stage James Maybrick trod while he conducted his business. That whole area is underlaid by passages and subterranean rooms, and how far may the burrows extend in this direction? Even the known tunnels under the city are said to be as numerous as the streets. I’m being distracted b
y the stream of consciousness that’s the history of Liverpool and by the thunder penned beneath the bridge. Did someone dig the hole because they heard sounds in the tunnel? Whatever they found, is that why the bridge—this one and no other along the embankment—was closed off? Did they neglect to make the hole safe, or was it reopened after the arch was bricked up? All of this feels like yet another secret the city is trying to keep, and I’ve resolved none of it by the time the train draws its tail across the bridge. As the rumble fades into the distance I hear the sound it has been concealing. It’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” farther off than previously but just as audible. My mother has joined in.
She sounds less convinced by the message of the song than my father seems determined to be. I’m lifting my free hand to help me send a shout to them when Lucinda says “I can hear something. Is that your father?”
“It’s both of them. They’re in here. They’re somewhere down below.”
“Shush, then.” She plants her fists outside the gap, and her face appears between them. “Let me listen,” she says.
She’s making more noise than I was, and my parents have gone quiet. I’m on the verge of accusing her until they start another verse. Her intent face loses its expression, and she wriggles through the gap, so much more deftly than I managed that she makes me feel clumsy and bloated. Once she rises gracefully to her feet I say “Hold this for me till I’m down.”
As I extend the flashlight to her the walls quiver. Shadows stream up her face, playing with its shape. Her features grow steadier, outlining her concern, as soon as she takes the flashlight. I give her a quick hug, which feels softer than I like, but I’ve no time to improve on it. Though the song is still audible, mostly in my father’s voice, it’s retreating into the depths.
I stand on the brink of the hole and reach with one foot for the ladder. I teeter on the edge, stretching my leg down, until Lucinda extends her free hand to grasp my right one. She keeps hold, leaning so far forward that it begins to look precarious, while I balance on the top rung and grope for the next and establish a slippery foothold. As I step down again she releases me and straightens up to her full height, training the flashlight on the hole. I rest my hands on the gritty pavement and stretch a leg downwards, wishing I weren’t so bulky. My foot locates the next rung, and I close my fingers around the topmost. Apparently I’m less out of shape than I feared, because twisting my body a little allows me to descend without touching the clay on any side. Only a trickle of soil dislodged by the ladder makes me afraid that the hole may collapse.
In a few seconds I’m through it and clambering down the rest of the ladder. As my head clears the underside of the ceiling, so does the flashlight beam. It expands, becoming dimmer, to show me an arched brick tunnel about eight feet high, leading both ways into blackness. Is it one of the disused sewers? I can hear the faintest lapping to my right, from the direction of the river. The dogged song is off to my left, however far away. I clutch at the rungs, which feel moist enough for many years of condensation, and hasten down the ladder. Fragments of the roof crunch underneath, though most of the debris is piled against the walls. The instant I set foot on the floor the light is snatched away, and I have more than a moment of breathless panic. “Here it comes,” Lucinda calls.
Kneeling at the edge of the hole, she lowers the flashlight towards me. She’s holding it by the lens, muffling the glow, which blurs her face and her outstretched arm. As I start back up the ladder she opens her hand. She must expect me to catch the flashlight, but I barely do, clutching it with splayed fingers and thumping it against my chest. I’m reclaiming my breath from a gasp when the ladder begins to shiver as if it’s magnifying the panic I experienced. “Hold it so I can see where I’m going,” says Lucinda.
I’ve barely left the ladder and raised the flashlight beam when she descends into it with the swiftness of an acrobat performing a familiar routine. Of course she must have gained experience in the Williamson tunnels. Her progress drags the light down, stopping up the hole with blackness—that is, I lower the beam. It probes the empty dark that leads towards the river. Brick dust crunches beneath Lucinda’s feet as she steps on the floor. “Which way are we going?” she says.
Her call from above silenced my parents. “If you didn’t shout you could hear.”
“I’m not shouting, Gavin.”
“You need to keep quieter than that.” The tunnel amplifies my whisper while rendering it thin and shrill. “His text said not to look for them,” I resent having to admit.
“Why would he say that? Do you think they’re—”
“I don’t know. I don’t care. I just care about saving them.”
“I’ll surprise you how quiet I can be, then. You won’t even know I’m here unless you want to.”
I see her mouth this more than I hear the words. It’s less reassuring than she presumably intends, because it makes me wonder if anybody else is being stealthy in the dark. As I swing the beam past the ladder, the tunnel appears to dilate while the shadows of rungs scurry over the wall. Darkness floods up from the river when I turn the beam inland. At its farthest extent, which is as dim as the glow of a guttering candle, I’m just able to distinguish that the tunnel starts to curve to the right, in the general direction of the Castle and the mouth of the Pool. I’m pacing away from the ladder, putting on speed once the floor is clear of rubble, when the song is revived somewhere ahead.
At least my parents aren’t troubled by the light, because they’re too far off to see it. Surely they won’t be able to hear my footsteps for a while, although I wish I could be as discreet as Lucinda; I have to keep glancing over my shoulder to confirm she’s still following me. She must be staying back in case we bump into each other, though the tunnel is wide enough for us to walk abreast. Can I be quieter? Working on how fast I can stride without making any appreciable noise brings me no closer to my parents, but they don’t seem to be receding either. By the time I reach the bend in the tunnel my footfalls aren’t too far from noiseless. The hush is broken mostly by my parents’ unequal duet until I hear voices at my back.
The lit section of tunnel reels around us as I twist to face Lucinda. A glistening shape swells up behind her on the wall that’s blackened with patches of damp, but it’s her shadow. The passage must have amplified the voices, unless my nerves did, because the speakers are out of range of the flashlight. They aren’t even in the tunnel; they’re above it. As I strain to understand them, my ears feel as if they’re expanding. In a few moments I manage to hear “Sounds like somebody’s having a singalong.”
“Let’s see what they’ve got to sing about,” the answer comes, so muffled that the speakers must be outside the bridge. This isn’t as reassuring as I would like, because they’re Wrigley and Maddock.
Chapter Forty-seven
WHERE IT LED
Lucinda looks transfixed by the light I’m directing past her. Her face has grown blank, the eyes in particular. She must be concentrating on the sounds outside the tunnel, unless she’s doing her best not to distract me or to make any inadvertent noise. At least the police can’t reach my parents before we do. For a change I’m glad they’ve taken so long to discover where my father’s message came from. They won’t be able to follow until they clear more of a way, since I was barely able to fit through the gap. I put a finger to my lips and point around the bend with the flashlight. As I turn in that direction the first speaker says “They won’t be singing when they see us.”
“They’ll be singing on the other side of their faces.” I want to believe the tunnel is playing another acoustic prank. How can they already sound closer? Surely I would have heard them enlarging the gap in the bricks. Then one of them says “Black as a Paki’s arsehole down there” with a laugh I’d rather not understand—I feel as if the darkness is releasing his true self—and there’s no question that he’s inside the bridge, because his voice is directly above the hole in the roof of the tunnel. “Just like home,” says his companion.
I would prefer not to interpret this either. Any inclination I might have had to confront the men has fled into the dark. I ought to be using the time it will take them to squeeze through the hole in the pavement—using it to ensure that we and the light are hidden by the bend. It curves as far as I can see, and I lengthen my strides, even when the light sways like a vessel in a storm. I’ve advanced just a few yards when a body drops into the tunnel, followed almost immediately by another.
They sound like large soft heavy sacks. I have the quite unnecessary notion that they expanded as they struck the floor. Mightn’t they be bags of some kind of equipment? Apparently not, since one remarks “Didn’t know I could still do that.”
“We never lose it, us.”
They’ve silenced my parents—indeed, the impacts did. I can’t let the newcomers or any thoughts of them delay me, and I stride along the tunnel as its depths work like a parched throat. Stealth is still with me, though I hardly need it, since I hear heavy footfalls padding at my back. I can’t help glancing over my shoulder, but only Lucinda is to be seen. She widens her eyes, asking a mute question or simply acknowledging me. I mustn’t speak, though I’m disturbed by the sight behind her. The beam in front of me lends a tinge of visibility to a short stretch of the passage we’ve traversed, but beyond this there isn’t a trace of light. Despite their speed, Wrigley and Maddock seem to be in total darkness.
Surely the bend is concealing whatever light they have. The tunnel curves for another hundred yards or so before straightening to release the unsteady beam into the depths. What’s barring the way in the distance? It can’t be a dead end, unless my parents have turned aside somewhere I’ve yet to locate. Suppose I didn’t notice a side passage, and the police are now between me and my parents? What am I afraid the men will do to them? I would rather not dream of that, even in daylight—the daylight I suppose is still above us in the world. In a few seconds I’m able to distinguish the prospect ahead. Though it isn’t a blockage, it’s almost as unwelcome. It’s a fork that splits the tunnel in half.
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