Unti Lucy Black Novel #3

by Brian McGilloway

  With nowhere in particular to go, she drove in through the town. The streets were busy, even so late in the evening, but as she drove down the main thoroughfare inside the city’s Walls, Shipquay Street, Lucy couldn’t help but notice the number of premises that lay empty, the shopfronts just painted boards, much like the bank building in Great James Street. The facade of prosperity and business hid a much more sinister truth: the city center was dying, slowly, hemorrhaging trade out of town.

  On the corner of Shipquay Street, just before she passed through the Gate out toward the Guildhall, Lucy spotted a girl who, for a moment, she thought was Grace. She slowed the car as she drew near, which caused the girl to turn and look at her. The girl was much younger, her face fresh and alight with the laughter she shared with her friends.

  Lucy raised a hand in acknowledgment of her mistake and drove on. She lifted her mobile and tried dialing Grace one more time. Again the call rang out, going to call answering.

  “Grace. Lucy Black here. You called me earlier. Not sure if you meant to or not. Will you give me a shout if you get a chance? Just to let me know everything’s okay.”

  She did another circuit of the city center, in the vague hope that she might spot Grace, before cutting back up through the Diamond to head home. As she passed the bottom of Pump Street, she glanced up to see a squad car parked opposite Moore’s house. She stopped and, doing a U-­turn, went back around the one-­way system and pulled down into the spot behind the marked vehicle.

  As she approached, she saw that the two officers inside were eating their dinner, a bucket of KFC balancing on the dash. One, a thin man with a goatee and a shaven head, opened the door, the windows of the car being sealed shut. He wiped the grease from his fingers onto the Kevlar vest he wore.

  “Everything all right?” he asked, then recognized Lucy. “DS Black? Hot wing?” He proffered the fast food bucket.

  “I’m good, thanks,” Lucy said. “Are you sitting out here all night?”

  The man shook his head. Lucy was fairly certain his surname was Frazer, but didn’t want to risk calling him that lest she was wrong. After all, he had remembered her name.

  “No. We’re to drive past every so often, take a quick check.”

  Lucy nodded. “Any signs of life in there?”

  “Nothing. We’re here about ten minutes; stopped for a bite to eat and thought we’d sit for a bit and kill two birds with one stone, you know?”

  Lucy straightened, staring up at the house. There was something about the rubble in the yard. She wanted to get back into the house again, to check the rooms carefully for signs of activity. The mixture of earth and old bricks she’d seen in the garden had come from somewhere, after all. The only way she’d get back in to search more thoroughly would be if they knew Moore was in there.

  “What’s that?” she asked suddenly. “In the back?”

  Frazer shifted in his seat to see, unbalancing the bucket of fried chicken from the dash, which spilled onto the floor of the car.

  “Shit,” he said, gathering up the food with the aid of his passenger, whom Lucy now saw to be a fresh-­faced female officer, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “I didn’t see anything,” the woman offered.

  “I think I saw torchlight,” Lucy said. “Moving about in the kitchen. Definitely. Look.”

  She moved away from the car, approaching the darkened house and peering in the front window. “I’m sure I saw someone moving about in there.”

  Frazer had joined her now on the pavement, his presence marked by the waft of grease and spices. “Where?” he asked.

  Lucy moved next to him, leaning lightly against him as she pointed. “In there,” she said. “I’m certain I saw something.”

  Frazer peered in where she pointed, not moving away from her closeness. “You might be right,” he said.

  “I didn’t see anything,” the passenger said, getting out of the car.

  “Best be sure,” Frazer said. “Eh?” He lifted the radio handset from the shoulder pocket of his vest and radioed through to the Strand Road to report it.

  SEAMUS MOORE ARRIVED almost half an hour later, his manner more abrupt than it had been when Lucy had previously met him.

  “This better not be a waste of time,” Moore said, flicking through the keys on the ring, then selecting the one he needed. “I’ve better places to be on a Saturday night.”

  “We appreciate your assistance, Mr. Moore—­” Lucy began.

  “I’m here because the Chief Superintendent asked me,” Moore said. “That’s the only reason.”

  Lucy nodded. “I understand, sir.”

  He unlocked the door and opened it ajar, then stopped. “And, as before, this is also on the understanding that my brother, if he is here, will give you any information he might have about the death of the man you found in the bins, but will not answer any questions about anything else he might have done. Is that clear? The Chief Super has already agreed to it.”

  Lucy nodded again. “That’s fine. I’m sure I saw someone in there,” she said, already regretting her lie.

  THE HOUSE WAS exactly as it had been on her previous visit, bin bags still lying on the hall floor. This time, though, Lucy noticed that the papers that Seamus Moore had removed from the bags had been replaced and the torn part of the bag tied up in a knot. Perhaps Seamus Moore himself had done it, she reasoned.

  She moved upstairs this time, while the other two officers searched the ground-­floor rooms. There were two bedrooms in the house. One was crowded with bags and boxes of magazines and books all relating to horses, even the bed sagging a little under the weight of the materials piled on top. The second room contained more memorabilia—­boxes of trophies and rosettes, many of them tattered with age and frequent handling. A chest of drawers against one wall was covered with statues and toy horses. There was no space for anyone to sleep in either room, or indeed any evidence that Aaron Moore had recently been there. More importantly, Lucy noted, there was no evidence of building work having been done. Both rooms were papered with fading striped wallpaper, which appeared to have been on the walls for some considerable time.

  She moved back down the stairs, picking her way carefully past the black bags, which lined the staircase.

  “Nothing,” Frazer said, blushing a little. “Are you sure you saw something?”

  Seamus Moore stood behind him, arms folded, glaring at Lucy.

  “Constable Kerr here tells me that she didn’t see anyone moving about from outside,” he said, nodding to the female officer.

  “I’m sure I saw someone moving about in here,” Lucy said. “I saw a torch beam moving about.”

  “Why are you even here?” Moore asked. “I understand that the two officers were passing by as requested. Why were you here?”

  Lucy shrugged. “I was on a call-­out,” she said. “Let me just take a last look down here,” she added.

  “It’s already been checked,” Moore called, but Lucy was already moving into the living room again where Constable Kerr glared at her.

  “We’ve already looked,” she said. “He’s not down here either.”

  Lucy couldn’t explain that it wasn’t the man she was looking for; it was evidence of what work had resulted in the pile of soil and rubble littering the backyard. Again, though, the kitchen, living room, and downstairs toilet showed no evidence of recent work.

  “Downstairs toilet only,” Lucy observed. “That must be a pain in the middle of the night.”

  “He’s lucky there’s one at all,” Moore said. “These houses didn’t have inside toilets. When I bought it there was only the outhouse. We had to get this one installed; that used to be a cupboard.”

  “There’s an outhouse,” Lucy said. “Can I check it?”

  Moore frowned. “You think he’s living in an outhouse?”

  Lucy sh
rugged. “It won’t take a minute,” she said.

  Moore shuffled through the keys on his key ring again until he found the large dead bolt key and unlocked the back door.

  “Be my guest. It’s the last time you’ll be getting inside this house without a warrant,” he said.

  The yard was small, boxed in on all sides by the houses surrounding it. A small scrap of grass at its center had grown up around the pile of soil and pieces of red brick that Lucy had seen on her first visit. As she shone her torch around the yard she saw, for the first time, tucked in around the corner of the house itself, a small cinder block building, with a corrugated iron roof and an old wooden door.

  “Is there an outside light?” she asked. A moment later, the yard was bathed in light from the halogen lamp above the back door.

  Lucy moved across to the outhouse, pushing open the door with her foot. At first, she could not understand what had happened, for the torch beam seemed to drop from where she had expected to see it shining against the back wall. Her own shadow, cast by the halogen lamp behind her, fell forward into a hole, about five feet in radius, which had been excavated in the floor of the outhouse where the toilet should have been. Leaning forwards, holding on to the doorjamb to prevent herself falling, Lucy could see that a ladder descended down into the hole.

  “There’s something here,” she shouted, turning and putting her foot on the uppermost rung, her torch clamped in her hand as she tried her best to continue gripping the side of the ladder.

  She climbed down twelve steps before she felt the ground beneath with an exploratory prod of her toe. She stepped down onto the ground and, gripping the torch, shone it around where she stood. The space was just large enough to accommodate her height, with a foot to spare above her. The sidewalls curved around her, joining above her head to create a perfect circle. She shone the torch upwards, noting that the masonry was red brick. In one or two spots, along the curve of the wall, single blocks seemed to have fallen out onto the ground, where they lay, shattered.

  Lucy had heard before of the supposed tunnels running beneath the city. Some ­people had claimed that they stretched right back to the Siege; others that they were, in fact, Victorian sewer systems. The red brickwork, which Lucy could see, supported the second hypothesis more than the first. She directed the torch beam along the length of the tunnel walls, to where it curved out of sight. Finally, she directed it toward the ground at her feet, worried that she might be about to step into sewage, but the ground was dry, the system long since out of use.

  As she heard the clatter of Constable Frazer’s steps on the ladder above, she began moving forwards, following the curve of the tunnel.

  Chapter Fifty-­Four

  AS SHE MOVED, she sensed that the tunnel was inclining slightly to the right, though she wasn’t sure if this was actually the case, or simply a result of her staring at the ever-­receding turn of the wall. The brickwork was damp, mossy in places, though the floor beneath her wasn’t as slippery as she’d expected, due in large part to a coating of sediment along its length, which provided her with some grip.

  The further along it she moved, she realized that the ceiling was starting to rise slightly above her head and she had a sense that the tunnel itself was widening. Finally, she saw that there was a more definite shift in direction and, having turned the corner, she stepped out into a small chamber.

  The ceiling was, perhaps fifteen feet from the floor, held up, seemingly, by four arches of red brick which grew from the four corners of the chamber up toward its apex, where they met. The chamber opened out onto two further tunnels, both of which had gullies running the visible length of the floor, evidently, at one time, feeding water into this chamber and then on down the tunnel along which Lucy had just come.

  Lucy could hear the persistent plop of water dripping from ceiling to floor, but it was not that which held her attention. Next to the far wall of the chamber stood a small cooking stove, beside which was a sleeping bag lying on the ground. The bag yawned open, its flap thrown back, as if only recently vacated.

  She moved across, scanning the rest of the space for signs of Moore, but the room was clearly empty. And, as he hadn’t passed her on the tunnel that she’d just walked, she reasoned that, if indeed the sleeping bag was his and he was still beneath ground, he must have taken one of the two tunnels now facing her.

  She reached down and felt the cooking stove cautiously, but it was cold. Next to his sleeping bag, she could see now, tacked to the wall, were more pictures of horses, seven in total, their images arranged in a circle. At the center of the circle was another image, this time a crudely hand-­drawn picture of a blood red flower, at its center a single black circle. At first, Lucy thought it was a bleeding bullet wound and then, she realized that it was actually meant to be a poppy. She could see the ground beneath the pictures was strewn with the foil of chewing gum wrappers. As she peeled the corner of the poppy picture back, she could see Moore had evidently been using gum in place of glue to create the shrine on his wall.

  “Jesus!”

  She turned to where Constable Frazer stood at the entranceway to the chamber, looking around him.

  “Did you know this was down here?” he asked.

  Lucy shook her head. “Not here exactly. I had heard of the tunnels before, and the chambers. There were over twenty of them, I think.”

  Frazer stared up at the vaulted ceiling and whistled softly through his teeth in admiration of the workmanship.

  “I think Moore has been living down here. Sleeping here at least,” Lucy said, training her torch beam on the makeshift bed.

  “Is he still here?”

  Lucy shook her head. “I don’t know. If he is, he’s gone one of two ways.” She nodded toward where the tunnels split.

  “Do you want left or right?” Frazer asked.

  “Where’s Kerr?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Still up top; she’s claustrophobic, she says. I’ll take left.” With that, he moved off into the tunnel, ducking down to avoid banging his head on the lowering ceiling.

  Lucy felt the heft of her torch in her hand, then set off toward the right-­hand side.

  Again, as she moved, she had a sense that the tunnel was veering slightly to the side and she tried to guess whereabouts she was relative to what was above her. She could hear, behind the constant dripping water now, the low drone of traffic overhead and she guessed that she was moving toward the Diamond. That being the case, Frazer was probably headed toward Bishop Street. She knew that the Apprentice Boy’s Memorial Hall had once had access to the tunnels beneath and wondered if that would be where he would emerge. She also knew, however, that the Army had sealed up the tunnels during the late seventies, after they’d been mapped and had, indeed, confiscated all the maps lest someone try to plant a bomb beneath the road to target passing Saracens overhead. The thought of being sealed below ground brought her little comfort and she regretted now not leaving markers to allow her to find her way back to the ladder and Aaron Moore’s outhouse if she needed to.

  Suddenly, she heard something different from the rumble of the cars above and the plop-­plop of water from the ceiling. The sound was like a soft scuffling ahead of her. The tunnel seemed to curve toward a bend now and she could only see to the edge of her torch beam, six or seven feet ahead.

  The shifting of the light beam along the curvature of the tunnel made everything seem to skew to the left. She could hear the sound more clearly now, the scraping of something against the stonework. She resisted the urge to call for Frazer and instead kept inching forwards, approaching the bend in the tunnel, torch held steady.

  As she rounded the curve, a large fat-­bodied rat sat on its haunches, staring at her, the bristles of its whiskers gleaming in the torch beam, the light reflecting off the small black beads of its eyes. Lucy shuddered involuntarily, shivering away the goose bumps as the rat dropped to all fours an
d bounded away at the noise.

  Lucy scanned ahead now, moving the torch from side to side in search of where the rat had gone. It was then that she saw the elongating shadows, thrown against the far curved wall of the tunnel, assume a slightly different shape and, bringing the torch around again, she saw, ahead of her, a stooped figure rounding the bend of the tunnel and vanishing from view.

  “Mr. Moore,” Lucy called, setting off at a run. “Mr. Moore. I’m with the police. I’ve come to help you.”

  There was no sign of the figure ahead, now, as Lucy continued moving along the tunnels. Suddenly, something cold touched the skin of the back of her neck, startling her. Reaching back, she felt it wet to the touch. Bringing her fingertips close to her face, using the torch beam for light, she saw it had been a drip of water. Angling the torch upwards, she saw a second drop falling from the ceiling above.

  She could sense, again, that the tunnel was widening now and, as she turned another bend, found herself in yet another chamber, similar to the first, though empty of vestiges of human habitation this time. Again, the chamber opened onto two further tunnels.

  Afraid of being lost, she decided to keep going right, as she had done the first time. She jogged across the space of the chamber and up the right-­hand tunnel. However, she had only made it about fifty meters when she realized that, just ahead of her, the tunnel had been bricked up with concrete blocks, the hardened overspill of cement curled around the spaces between the stonework. There was clearly nowhere for Moore to hide, which meant that he had taken the left-­hand opening from the second chamber.

  She ran back along the tunnel and took the second path, all the time wondering if Moore may have already made his way back toward his house unnoticed.

  This left-­hand tunnel, like the right, curved quickly to one side and, she realized as she turned the last bend, had been similarly bricked up. Only this time, Aaron Moore stood there, his back against the concrete block wall, his gaze locked on Lucy’s, brandishing a bread knife in his hand.