by Carla Blake
Title Page
WILLING VICTIM
by
Carla Blake
Publisher Information
Willing Victim published in 2010 by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
The characters and situations in this book are entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any real person or actual happening.
Copyright © Carla Blake
The right of Carla Blake to be identified as author of this book has been asserted in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyrights Designs and Patents Act 1988.
One
“Do I have to?’
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re the only one we can spare.”
“Oh, that’s nice.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Fine. But if I’m not back in an hour, just make sure you send someone down to find me.”
Rachel Collins had no idea what she’d done to deserve this.
Three years she’d worked for this power company. Three years in which she’d worked hard, taken the minimum of days off sick, constantly turned up on time and always been the first one the managers thought of whenever there was a trip to the basement to organize.
It was incredible! Especially how everyone else managed to avoid it and she had to admit it was almost beautiful to watch; how, suddenly, the rest of the team miraculously became invisible, disappearing behind masses of paperwork or an urgent need to go to the toilet.
It wasn’t as if they were that busy, or suffering from a irritating bladder weakness, they were just cowards, the lot of them. Too embarrassed to admit that the real reason they didn’t want to go down to the basement was because they were scared.
Like she was.
The basement was seriously spooky, and the rest of the building wasn’t far behind.
Designed nearly eight decades ago in the wake of art deco and somewhere between the two world wars, the three storey building had shrugged aside what vibrant colour it might once have enjoyed in favour of a drab grey that completely overwhelmed everything. Even the gold leaf that had clung to the ornate carvings ringing the edge of the roof was gone. Stripped clean by the constant bombardment of the British weather. The windows were grimy. The paintwork tired. The foot of the building black from exhaust fumes, making it’s listed building status almost unfathomable to comprehend. Only the part it had played in history still shone, as a welcome and life saving air raid shelter from the worst of the German invasion.
Back then, the basement had been a God send and hundreds had cowered beneath the inches thick concrete walls, their eyes turned to the cold, grey ceiling whilst bombs dropped, buildings fell and a thousand nightmares came to life. And the proof of their existence still remained in the rows of gas masks that hung from rusted hooks like the decapitated heads of traitors and thieves.
Rachel deemed it rather macabre that they were still down there at all, and on the one occasion when she’d actually been escorted through the myriad of concrete corridors, in a semi serious, ‘ meet your building’ tour conducted by her supervisor, she’d voiced the opinion that perhaps they would be better off inside a museum. It hadn’t gone down well. The building, her supervisor had haughtily pointed out, was proud of its heritage and so should Rachel be. She was very lucky to work here. Inside history.
Yeah, right, Rachel had thought, following dutifully as she’d been led through the many dank and dusty corners and numerous rooms once occupied by former civilians resigned to spending another night under ground. You don’t know the nightmares I’m going to have. Trapped all alone down here in the dark, with only that sodding, great, ancient boiler for company. It even has to have it’s own room, it’s that big! I mean, how mental is that? And what if it breaks free? And chases me down the corridor, wheezing and blowing and threatening to swallow me into the huge chasm of its fiery belly. How will I get out?
God, I’m never going to be able to sleep.
Now she had to go down there again. On her own. Because everyone else was too scared.
Leaving the office and avoiding the spiteful gaze of Phil, a department manager who’d had it in for her ever since she’d first joined, Rachel ducked into the ladies and used the toilet. In truth she didn’t really have any pressing need to go, there was nothing wrong with her bladder, but she knew that if she didn’t go now, then the moment she stepped into the gloomy, subterranean depths of the building, her bladder would turn to water and she’d be desperate for a pee. And she really didn’t want to use the toilet down there again. Not after last time when she’d flushed and then returned to the offices above, red faced and blushing, convinced that anyone listening would have heard the clanking cistern and the thumping, gushing pipes and instantly known where she’d been and what she’d been doing. Not that they had. They’d all been too busy congratulation themselves on not being the one to suffer the torment of a journey to the basement, to worry about what she was doing whilst trapped in the nether regions.
It still wasn’t worth the risk, though. Just in case.
Washing her hands at the basin, Rachel glanced at herself in the mirror and tutted at its positioning. At five feet, six inches tall, she’d never really considered herself particular short in stature, but apparently she was, because both her lips and her chin were missing from her reflection. Restricted from view by a mirror positioned so far up the wall it was unable to show her anything beneath her nose, which was bloody irritating when trying to apply lipstick.
Still, her hair looked okay, especially after the light brown dye she’d put through it and the highlights she’d added did give the illusion of volume, even if her flat mate, Polly, did still insist she’d only done it to hide the grey!
Like she needed to do that at twenty two, the cheeky cow. Dying her hair in order to hide the silver was still a long way off. Along with the horrors of getting wrinkles, growing fat and having boobs that hung round her waist like deflated arm bands. Those delights were still way off in the future, thank God and hidden in some dark place marked ‘forties.’ Right now she was young, slim, healthy, reasonably pretty and bloody grateful for it. Oh, and scared. Mustn’t forget scared. Because she was bricking it.
Leaving the ladies, Rachel took a deep breath, walked along the corridor and pushed through the set of double doors that would take her to the lifts. Once there, she selected the ‘down’ button and stood nervously chewing on her lip whilst she waited for the doors to open. She’d didn’t like lifts. Never had done. The tiny, enclosed spaces too futile a place for her imagination to dwell, and whenever she had to use one, she would instantly be rewarded with a vision of herself plummeting to the bottom and ending up in a broken, sticky mess of blood and bone. And this lift was worst than most. Painted a deeply disturbing blood red, which not only further added to the horror but gave the impression she was being transported straight down into the bowels of hell, the irony failed to amuse her, especially when taken in consideration that the lift didn’t actually go down as far as the basement.
Instead it stopped at reception, and stepping out, Rachel waved at the staff behind the front desk before turning right and descending down a flight of wide, concrete steps.
At the bottom, and again facing the same direction in which she’d started, thanks to the stairs’ spi
ral design, Rachel quickly stepped though another set of fire proof doors and straight onto dark blue carpet.
This stretch of the basement had recently been modernized and after several months of hammering, painting and incessant drilling, it now played host to several conference rooms and a staff ‘comfort room’, which to Rachel’s knowledge had never been used. She and her fellow colleagues preferring to enjoy their breaks in the subsidized bar of the social club rather than in a tiny, tucked away space offering nothing more potent that a cup of tea squeezed out of a noisy vending machine.
The staff canteen stood at the end of the corridor. Bright, busy and often noisy during the morning period and the two hours set aside for lunch, its whole demure changed once two o’clock arrived. Then, with the last saucepan put away and the last table wiped, it settled into a gloomy, deserted cavern, which approaching it now at three thirty, did little to lift Rachel’s spirits.
The sight of the double doors leading through to the basement proper did little to help the situation either and peering through the small, glass partition at the top of the door, Rachel swallowed hard and then coughed dryly, determined that the next time someone was required to come down here to wheedle out a consumer’s past records, she was definitely going to be so busy her nose bled!
Pushing open the door and shuddering at the sudden chill, Rachel sneezed at the dusty smells of old cement and mould and hugged her arms around her chest. She really didn’t want to do this. She wanted to be upstairs. In the warm and the light.
She wanted to be braver than she was being.
Tentatively, she took a single step forward, conscious of the carpet disappearing beneath her feet and the reappearance of cold, hard concrete echoing back the click of her heels. Anxiously, she stared down the corridor.
Bare bricks made up the walls, the slightly red coloured clay thick with clumps of grey dust and the occasional cobweb. An empty notice board peppered with ancient drawing pins turned brown with age hung on her right and the only illumination came from bare light bulbs, dangling from dodgy looking wiring and switched on by ancient, round light switches last installed sometime in the thirties.
It was a depressing and claustrophobic place and given the choice Rachel would have liked to have turned around right then, except she hadn’t even reached the worst of it yet. The ‘squash court’.
Originally the loading bay for trucks when the ground floor of the building had been used for retail, the vast, empty space had, in fact, never been used as a squash court at all. Instead it had been left vacant, derelict and terrifyingly deep; the only concession to health and safety being a thin, wire mesh that had been erected around the edge to stop people falling in. It was, Rachel considered, frighteningly ineffectual and giving it a wide berth was the only sensible option, especially as she was under no illusion that if she were to trip and fall against the frail barrier, it would instantly give way and she would fall to her death.
Providing the lift didn’t finish her off first.
Keeping well over to the other side of the corridor, Rachel walked briskly past and tried not to look down. She failed miserably. The hole beckoned her with an evil fascination she found difficult to ignore, and just like a horror movie you just knew was going to scare you silly, but couldn’t help watching anyway, she felt drawn to the drop. If only to prove to herself that she wasn’t scared and that she could look down and face whatever it was down there. Because there had to be something. A dead body. A monster. Even a hideously deformed survivor of the war because given the right conditions a person could probably live down there for years without being discovered. No one ever went near. The huge, metal doors leading to the outside world long closed. Secured by a huge, iron padlock, rusted to orange, but nevertheless looking as though it might take dynamite to shift. There was also no way of getting down to the bottom from up here.
Unless you fell.
Shuddering, Rachel pushed the thought aside and hurried along the remaining corridor to the filing room. Once there, she pushed the metal door open and flicked on the light switch, staring in dismay as the single bare bulb struggled weakly into life. There was hardly enough light to illuminate the back of the room, let alone read the small print she was about to struggle with and brushing grime from her fingers, Rachel looked at the mess and sighed.
Who had last been rummaging about down here, she thought. A teenager? The filing cabinets were in disarray, their drawers left open to spill paper, and it wasn’t just one of them. They were all like it. Every filing cabinet lining the walls and packed so closely together there wasn’t room to insert a sheet of paper inbetween, looked like it had been raided by the vice squad. Those lined up in rows down the middle just looked filthy and heaped on the floor in no particular order, lay old grey mailbags bulging with hastily stuffed documents.
Eyeing them, Rachel felt relieved the file she needed would be housed inside one of the grey, metal cabinets, and pulling open the reluctant and squeaky drawer she ran a hand across the paperwork and coughed violently when a cloud of dust flew into the air.
How this much muck could manage to work its way inside a closed filing cabinet was a mystery to her, but there it was, and rubbing her fingers across the tops of the files, she grimaced in distaste and began to search through the countless folders.
Of course nothing was in order. Files had been shoved in any old how or not at all, and after several minutes of reading every name except the one she wanted, Rachel was seriously considering giving up and stomping back upstairs to wash her hands and brew a strong, black coffee.
Then came the sound of footsteps, echoing outside in the corridor and jolting with surprise, dismayed, too, by the sudden hitch in her breathing the sound had produced, Rachel quietly slid the drawer shut and listened.
It was definitely a woman, she thought. The sound of advancing heels tapping across the concrete undeniable. Maybe it was her boss? Come to tell her not to bother and that the customer had changed his mind and no longer cared about an energy bill he’d paid some time when flairs were still in fashion. Or maybe it was another unlucky soul like herself. Doomed to enter the basement because no one else wanted to.
The handle moved slowly, as if the person outside was reluctant to enter, and licking her lips, Rachel stared at the door and felt her heart lurch painfully in her chest.
What the hell was the matter with her, she frowned. It was only someone from upstairs. She even knew it was another woman.
The handle turned still more and thoughts of the squash court flowed unbidden into her head. It wasn’t a woman out there at all, she trembled, it was the loony from the depths. Come to drag her away by the hair and into its hellish chamber where it would feast on her succulent meat and make soup from her bones.
Oh, for God’s sake!
Mentally slapping herself, Rachel pressed her lips together and forced herself not to whimper. She was being ridiculous. Stupid! It was just a work colleague.
The door creaked again, opening an inch and letting in a weak glow from outside, together with the damp smell of mouldy foundations. Holding her breath, Rachel’s fixed her gaze on the metal and watched as slender fingers snaked around the rim and pushed the door open.
Kate Adams stepped over the threshold.
Rachel gasped with relief.
Kate was seconds behind her.
“Jesus!” She breathed, seeing Rachel standing directly in front of her. “I didn’t know you were down here! Why didn’t you call out or something? Gave me the fright of my life!”
“I’m so sorry. I thought you were..”
“What? The beast of the squash court?”
Rachel smiled. She liked Kate. Mainly because she was one of the few people in the building who seemed genuinely nice and didn’t consider it their lifetime ambition to gain promotion by being as snide and underhand as humanly possible. Instead, like her, she seemed to treat the
job as a means to an end and talked constantly about packing up and moving to Italy the first chance she got. She was also the only person who had stood up for her the day Phil Meadows had bellowed at her across her desk and almost made her cry.
An afternoon she was never likely to forget!
She had never been able to work out why Phil Meadows had had it in for her right from the moment she’d first stepped through the door, and Phil had certainly never offered an explanation, but by the end of her first week the feeling of hostility had most certainly been mutual, and she now considered Phil Meadows to be an absolute tosser. He was rude, he was snide, he made stupid comments behind her back and he tried to dump her in it whenever possible. None of which Rachel had done anything to deserve. He also lacked any sense of humour whatsoever, unless it was coming from him, and when Kate suggested that being as extremely thin as he was, when he was naked and with a hard on, he would look exactly like a corkscrew, Rachel found it even harder to take him seriously. Amused more by the thought of someone actually finding this rake thin, prematurely balding idiot desirable than by the joke itself.
But then Phil had got the telephone call, and coupled with a lunch break spent boozing in the pub, had allowed his puerile nature to completely obliterate his common sense as storming over to Rachel’s desk, he’d loomed over her in the same ill fitting suit he’d worn every since the day she’d first started there, and waited for Rachel to look up at him before slamming a duplicate copy down hard on her blotter and going red in the face.
“Why the fuck did you send this out!?” He yelled, jabbing a finger at the final demand in question and making a dent.” I’ve had this bloody arse hole on the phone for the last twenty minutes wanting to know why he’s got two bloody final demands! Didn’t you check the soddin’ records, you bloody idiot! And what are you doing sending them out anyway? I send out the final demands, not you! Christ All- fucking Mighty! I can’t believe the bloody dead wood we have here!”