Ashes to Ashes

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘Perhaps it’ll all be knocked down soon,’ Joanna said hopefully.

  ‘Which would get rid of O’Connor and his mob but they’d go somewhere else,’ I said, mostly to myself.

  ‘The underpass, then?’

  It would have to be the underpass.

  EIGHTEEN

  The first thing we noticed were the dead and dying rats, the latter semi-paralysed, dragging themselves around in small circles, around and around, or lying twitching. They were everywhere on the road approaching the underpass. The crows were pecking at them, both the living and the dead.

  ‘They’ve been poisoned,’ I whispered, tearing my gaze from one that had had its eyes pecked out. It was still just alive.

  ‘The council did it, I expect,’ Joanna said. ‘You have to get rid of them; they’re filthy, diseased things.’

  ‘The birds will be poisoned as well if they eat them.’

  ‘I don’t see how it could be avoided.’

  I had brought a good flashlamp with me so at least we would not find ourselves treading on them.

  My mobile rang.

  ‘I have a bit of news for you, but not from the lab,’ James Carrick’s voice said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Surviving,’ I answered.

  ‘Is Joanna still with you?’

  I replied in the affirmative, and then added: ‘She’s invaluable to me as a companion and offering really useful advice.’

  ‘Oh, good. Please tell her I informed her interview people that she wasn’t well so they’re not expecting her. And Ingrid, I hope you’re following safe procedures such as intending to involve the local police and aren’t going anywhere near that condemned housing estate.’

  ‘A little low-key surveillance, that’s all.’

  He sighed. ‘Promise me you’ll call out the Met if you even get a hint that O’Connor’s there.’

  ‘I will.’

  ‘I’ve contacted a DI John Masterson at Leytonstone nick and he said he’d already had an enquiry about the place today. Was that you?’

  ‘Yes, via DI Janice North in Feltham.’

  He did not query this, but went on: ‘I rang mainly because forensics found a note in the box. It was stuck to the inside of the lid, perhaps by the dampness. It’s printed but looks like the same handwriting as is on the label. I’m afraid it just says that some of the rest is to follow. Postage is expensive and he’ll expect you to refund it, the bastard says.’

  I thanked him, knowing that I must keep calm.

  ‘So stationing cops at local post offices, just in case, might be a good idea. Masterson says he’ll arrange it. I had to explain the situation a bit more of course.’

  Automatically I thanked him again and then asked when the DNA results might come through.

  ‘Tomorrow, I hope. You won’t believe it but there’s a snag at the lab. Their electrics blew up.’

  We switched off our phones. I knew that if anyone was here we would have been spotted by now, like two people walking across a desert. There was no cover – nothing would be gained by creeping along at the base of the buildings, the only place out of sight from anyone keeping watch was inside the underpass. Then, having travelled through that one would be in full view of another block, those at the rear of the ones here, not to mention the side windows of any number of flats.

  Just inside the entrance to the underpass, I shrugged off the rucksack and found one of the sets of plans, which I had been forced to fold up in order to fit them in it. Gazing at one of them for at least the fourth time, I was no further in guessing where anyone would hide out. Just towers of apartments, at least a couple of hundred of them. Now, there would be no gas, electricity or water, and no furniture, unless the last of these had been brought in. At best it could only be used as a temporary place of concealment.

  ‘So where—’ I began. I made myself say it. ‘Where did they do the boiling?’

  ‘Good point,’ Joanna said. ‘Perhaps a gas bottle connected to an old stove in a lock-up garage? Water from someone’s outside tap or a filling station?’

  ‘Gas bottles,’ I repeated, thinking.

  ‘And a big pot.’

  Everything went a bit fuzzy and I bent over so my head was near my knees.

  Joanna put an arm around me. ‘I’m sorry, sorry, sorry,’ she whispered, a catch in her voice.

  When I felt a bit better, I stood up straight again. ‘I forgot to tell you. James has told the interview panel that you’re ill.’

  ‘We will be very ill if we stand here much longer breathing in all these dead rats.’ And Joanna set off down the tunnel, into the murky interior.

  Just call us Frodo and Sam, I thought inconsequentially, switching on the torch and setting off after her. I must have hallucinated a little then, or, more likely, my imagination had a bit of a breakdown due to shock, as I found myself thinking of the possibilities of Shelob lurking in the tunnel and Gollum creeping up behind us, while the bastions of the apartment blocks towered over us like Mordor.

  We had to move carefully to avoid the rats, and came upon a couple of wrecked motorbikes I hadn’t noticed the first time and sundry other rubbish. Obviously the council workers hadn’t penetrated this far. One could hardly blame them – it still stank. We remained silent, all the better to hear the slightest sound other than the soft pad of our footsteps. I had a bad moment when the torch beam lit up what turned out to be torn strips of a plastic bin bag caught on a projection on the wall and gently waving in the slight current of air blowing through the tunnel. No, stupid, not the legs of a giant spider.

  Then, ahead, our light flashed over metal, a barricade of supermarket trollies. It was not very high, two, perhaps three, piled one on another, and there were narrow spaces left at the sides.

  ‘This wasn’t here last time,’ I remarked as we squeezed through the gap.

  ‘It proves that someone’s in residence who doesn’t want visitors,’ Joanna said.

  The little breeze in our faces brought with it another smell, a familiar smell, a smell that immediately made me turn to the wall of the tunnel and vomit. Joanna ran over to me and held me tightly while I helplessly threw up.

  ‘Ingrid, you really shouldn’t be here!’ she exclaimed when the worst was over but I was still retching.

  ‘It’s the same smell,’ I gasped.

  She sniffed the air. ‘Just a sort of stale cooking smell.’ Our eyes met. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘You stay here while I go and look.’

  There was the distinct sound of the buzzing of flies.

  I couldn’t let her go alone and, ahead of me as I slowly brought up the rear, I saw her stop towards the end of the underpass. It was lighter here and as I approached I saw that her face was ashen as she turned towards me. I switched off the torch.

  ‘Human remains,’ she managed to get out before turning away, but added, ‘cooked,’ in a choked voice.

  My ears making strange singing noises, I went over to where an odd jumble lay at the side of the road surrounded by a cloud of flies. It was very difficult to make sense of it without touching anything and everything seemed to have been sprinkled with a whitish powder. Finally, after mostly ineffectually waving away the flies, I was able to make out that the corpse, the flesh falling away from the bones, had been chopped into sections: two arms severed at the shoulders and divided at the elbows, a torso split into four, a leg cut into two at the knee. I couldn’t see the other one. There was no head. The entrails, which I tried not to look at, had just been dumped a short distance away. My one fleeting glance in that direction had told me that they had not been subjected to any heat, but I shied away from thinking of them as ‘raw’. Animals and birds had pecked, pulled and torn at everything. Fingers and toes were missing.

  ‘These are the remains of Patrick,’ I murmured, using one hand on the tunnel wall to support myself and feeling faint again.

  Joanna turned, her voice shattering the black pit that seemed to beckon me. ‘How on earth can you tell?’

  �
�There’s only one lower leg and foot.’

  She came over and put her arms around me. ‘Look, it’s such a muddle. The other one might be … well … underneath.’

  The body was the source of the poison.

  Footsteps approached somewhere out in the fresh air. We ran, on tiptoe, back into the gloom and flung ourselves down on the road. Almost immediately, two men were silhouetted against the light, one carrying what looked like a plastic bin bag. Either my eyes were playing up or they were both swaying on their feet. The other man, taller and skinny, came up the tunnel to the corpse and appeared to regard it thoughtfully for about half a minute. Then he stooped and, muttering, no doubt swearing under his breath at the flies, selected what looked like – from where I was lying anyway – two sections, perhaps a lower arm and leg. I shuddered as he shook them violently to rid them of loose flesh and then dropped them into the bag held open by the other man.

  ‘Rat bait – you have to hand it to Jinty,’ one or other of them, probably the taller man, said, slurring his words and with a loud laugh. ‘I hope you’re enjoying this, ratties,’ he shouted down the tunnel, his voice echoing eerily.

  After they had tottered from sight, we stayed where we were for half a minute or so and then cautiously got to our feet. Whispering, I told Joanna what her husband had said about the note in the box, something else I had forgotten to mention.

  ‘It’s so horrible I can’t think of anything to say,’ she said.

  ‘We should go and look for gas bottles,’ I said, the words coming out automatically. Hell, it was a goal – something to aim for that would fill a tiny corner of my brain that was otherwise empty of ideas. He was dead, end of story, and had finished up as rat poison.

  Joanna said, ‘I reckon if we call out the local police and they arrive like something out of a cop show anyone here will have time to do a runner before they’ve even done their risk assessment.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly,’ I told her. ‘But I thought you wanted back in.’

  ‘I do. But there’s nothing like a last fling. For Patrick.’

  I gave her a quick hug.

  ‘What if we spot blokes like that pair of cyborgs and they see us?’ she then said.

  ‘I’ll probably have to shoot them.’

  Having made quite sure that the men were not anywhere in sight, we set off, walking quickly and quietly along the road. We already knew the roadway led to the rear where the rows of lock-up garages were. We were just two women, walking, perhaps lost, not craning our necks in order to try to see if they were being watched, definitely not looking for mobsters.

  ‘I’m an utter fool,’ I muttered as we approached the area where the large rubbish bins had been. ‘I’ve looked at those plans several times and didn’t hoist it in.’

  ‘What?’ Joanna responded, quickly wiping away a few tears. ‘Sorry,’ she gulped. ‘I loved him a bit too, you see. Sorry.’

  There was nothing I could say to this and fought back some ready tears of my own. Then I said, huskily, ‘There’s one place in this whole complex where I’m sure you must be able to see every main entrance of the other buildings, either close by or at an angle some distance away. It’s marked on the plan as an office so might have been used as that when the place was first built and deliberately sited there. There’s a chance a caretaker or some kind of handyman lived there afterwards.’

  ‘Where is it?’ She was trying to look interested but wasn’t right now.

  ‘It’s a ground floor flat in the first block as you come in.’

  Joanna took a deep breath. ‘You reckon O’Connor might be there because of that advantage? The man’s probably too thick to work it out.’

  ‘In which case we could break in and keep watch.’

  ‘Ingrid, do we have to go back through that bloody underpass?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  We sprinted and for some bizarre reason I felt a sudden lightness of mood. My cat’s whiskers perhaps, telling me that I was doing the right thing.

  ‘I hope someone’s looking after us,’ Joanna said all at once as we ran, the torch beam bobbing along on front of us.

  ‘Bound to be,’ I panted.

  ‘D’you sort of believe that …?’ Her voice trailed away.

  ‘I’m beginning to think … that there has to be something in it.’

  We reached the end and came to a standstill, gazing around warily, getting our breath back. Nothing moved but the dying rats, and after a minute or so of careful observation we headed for the block of flats I had pinpointed in my mind’s eye. Leaving the main access road, we took a wide path off to the right, had to go through and around all kinds of rubbish the council, or whoever, had missed, and eventually arrived at the entrance. I had noted on the way that the curtains, rags actually, at the windows of the apartment in question were closed on this nearest side. The main door to the block was not locked and we pushed through it and went in. Within, the lobby was a stinking lavatory, awash with urine, human excrement at the sides and in the corners. Used syringes were everywhere.

  ‘Let’s go!’ Joanna said, swiftly in reverse.

  I took the Smith and Wesson from my pocket and in a mood where I would have cheerfully filled with holes any armed mobster who answered the door, battered on it with my fist. Weirdly, what should have been merely a series of indiscriminate raps manifested itself into one of the coded knocks that Patrick and I had used when we worked for MI5 and have done since. Habit perhaps.

  Ready to fire, I leapt back as the door was opened. The business end of a Glock 17 appeared.

  Then: ‘Is that you, Ingrid?’

  I couldn’t speak. I discovered that I could barely stand and leaned on the wall. Even that didn’t help much.

  He must have seen Joanna first and looked around the door frame, a week or so’s growth of beard, eyes hollow from lack of sleep, layers of dirt and all.

  I snatched the wig off when he just stared at me. Then he said, ‘I didn’t see you coming – must have nodded off.’

  Joanna came forward and, not for the first time that day, put her arms around me. ‘Ingrid was sent what she thought was your head in a parcel,’ she told him tersely and with quite amazing composure. ‘Boiled. We just found the rest in the underpass.’

  They took me inside and I think I was laughing hysterically. I can’t really remember much except being firmly shushed and given a quick hug. Joanna hugged him too. He seemed a bit baffled by the emotional state of us.

  ‘O’Connor’s not there,’ Patrick said. ‘But he’ll be back, and when he arrives I shall call up the cops. I haven’t before as he left almost immediately. During the time he’s away the others drink or take drugs and I get the impression they’re in hiding. They’re all plastered now, including the two who were wandering around with a bin bag a little while ago.’

  ‘We saw them,’ I said. ‘They put a couple more body parts in the bag.’

  It had emerged that Patrick had been living on the barest essentials, mostly on army survival rations which he had acquired from somewhere or the other, and water which was only available from the hot tap in the kitchen so must be the dregs from a tank. He was putting purification tablets in it to be on the safe side but it still tasted horrible. I knew because it was all there was to drink and I had a tin mug of it in my hand.

  I still could not believe that he was alive, right in front of me, having a quick look through a gap in the curtains.

  ‘I wandered over one night when I knew O’Connor’s wasn’t there,’ Patrick continued. ‘They’re on the second floor and the door was open, perhaps because they can’t be bothered to keep getting up to let people in and feel very safe where they are up there – and to let the stink out. Hardly a bunker. They have just a couple of camping lamps for when it gets dark.’ He smiled reflectively. ‘I walked around inside. It was like a shipwreck with unconscious bodies and the remains of takeaways everywhere. I counted and there were thirteen of them without O’Connor. Unlucky number for some. Oh, and so
meone’s injured – there were bloodstained bandages in the bathroom and empty packets of over-the-counter painkillers. It might be O’Connor himself after you shot the gun out of his hand, Ingrid. Which is good news, of course.’

  ‘You promised me you wouldn’t work alone,’ I said.

  ‘But I’m not now.’ This with a big smile. ‘No, seriously, I tried to contact Terry Meadows but, as often happens these days, he’s in the States.’

  I said, ‘I really would like to put your parents’ minds at rest.’

  ‘There’s no signal here for some reason so when O’Connor comes someone’s going to have to go away until they can get one. Try your phone.’

  I did. No signal.

  ‘You don’t have to wait,’ Patrick said, ‘I can escort you to the main road when it’s dark.’

  ‘I’ll wait,’ Joanna replied firmly. ‘You’ll need someone to man, or rather woman, the curtain.’

  ‘Thank you.’ He chuckled. ‘You’re wearing my jeans and belt.’

  ‘I’ll wait too,’ I said.

  I don’t think either of us wanted to let him out of our sight.

  ‘O’Connor’ll be back tonight,’ Patrick said, having another quick look through the gap in the curtain. ‘He brings the food so they must have transport somewhere. My main worry is that he’ll abandon his henchmen and not return at all, but that carries the risk for him that they’ll be arrested and sing like canaries to get even.’

  ‘Have some rest first,’ I suggested. ‘We’ll woman the curtain.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Perfectly sure.’

  He lay down on the sofa and was instantly asleep.

  ‘What are these survival rations then?’ Joanna whispered to me. ‘I’m absolutely famished.’

  There wasn’t much left but we found several high energy bars, a few hard brown biscuits with little tubs of pâté to put on them, tea, coffee and one meal in a pouch that was cooked and could either be heated or eaten cold. We left the last of these for Patrick and had a couple of high energy bars each, then tried stirring instant coffee into the cold water from the tap. The result was even more horrible than the water on its own but we drank it anyway and then took it in turns to keep watch while the other lay on the floor on Patrick’s anorak.