by Chris Ryan
The door on the left led into the front room. Wall-to-wall bookcases, stuffed full of hardback books and CDs of classical music. A TV in the corner, its standby light on. A very old three-piece suite with a floral pattern, and a russet carpet. But Zak had never seen such chaos. The floor was piled high with books and stacks of old newspapers and a coffee table was littered with perhaps fifty crosswords, all cut out from newspapers. It was incredibly dusty – thousands of dust particles danced in a shard of light that entered the room from a gap at the top of the closed curtains – and two large, black flies buzzed around the air. Occasionally they hit the mirror above the fireplace with a gentle thump, before returning to their aerial dance.
‘Nice gaff,’ Raf murmured, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
The kitchen was more sparse – and it gave the definite impression that the occupant of this house was not a keen cook. There was a dirty frying pan on the stove with a layer of congealed grease. Another fly was crawling on the white fat. A Yale key was sitting in the lock of the back door. When Zak saw Gabs appear, soaking wet, in the tiny rear garden, he unlocked it to let her in. Nobody spoke. Together, the three of them climbed the stairs.
As they approached the first floor, the sweet smell grew stronger. More unpleasant. Zak found himself covering his nose and throat, and he noticed the look Raf and Gabs exchanged.
‘You should go back downstairs, sweetie,’ Gabs said as they stood on the landing. But Zak shook his head. He could make his own decisions, and Gabs appeared to respect that. Zak peered into the small bathroom. A white bath with yellow stains, and a mildewing shower curtain hanging from a rail. A ring of stubble and shaving scum around the inside of the sink. The toilet seat was up, and it didn’t smell too fresh. Zak noticed another fly buzzing around, at least as big as the two he’d seen downstairs. It was only a fly, but still: something about it made his flesh creep.
Zak froze. He could hear something. He looked up. There was a scratching sound above him. Movement above the bathroom ceiling. He looked over his shoulder at Raf and Gabs. They had noticed it too.
The scratching sound stopped. The only noise now was the buzzing of the fly.
There was a closed door at the end of the landing. Raf drew a gun as he approached it. Zak and Gabs followed a metre behind. The smell was now even more pungent, and Zak wasn’t sure but he thought he could hear something else. A gentle hum. It came from behind the door.
A click. It was Raf releasing the safety catch on his pistol. He was a metre from the door and holding the gun out in front of him. He raised three fingers of his left hand.
Two.
One.
The force with which he kicked down the door was immense. It almost seemed to make the frame itself rattle. And as Raf burst into the room, something else burst out: a swarm of flies, perhaps several hundred of them, greasy and black, and a stench so bad it made Zak gag.
Through the open door, he could see Raf looking towards the ceiling. Zak stepped forward, waving his hand in front of his face to swat the flies, and hitting a couple of insects with each swipe. Gabs was close behind him, also gagging as they entered the room.
The air was thick with flies, all buzzing. The room itself contained nothing but a single bed and a bedside table with a glass of stale water beside it. Near the wall opposite the window, however, there was a trapdoor in the ceiling, with a loft ladder descending from it down to the ground. The flies were coming from up there, and so was the scurrying sound. Raf extracted a torch from inside his jacket and shone it through the opening and up into the loft. It lit up the soles of a pair of feet, seemingly suspended in midair to one side of the opening. It didn’t take too much imagination to realize they were staring up at a hanged man.
‘You don’t have to look at this, sweetie,’ Gabs said. Zak clenched his jaw and ignored her as Raf climbed the ladder. Then Gabs.
Then Zak.
He was sure, as he stared at the corpse, that he would not be able to stay there for very long. He had already seen two fat rats with long, scaly tails scurry away into the corner of the loft, and up here the flies were darting around so furiously that one hit his face every couple of seconds. The stink was putrid, but none of these were as bad as the sight of the body hanging from the central rafters high above. It was naked for a start. The skin was yellow and waxy, and it glistened in places where fluid had escaped. Rolls of fat seemed to have sunk from his torso to his belly, as though the skin were slipping down off his bones.
But his face was the worst.
The mouth and eyes were wide open, the nostrils flared. In the corner of the left eye Zak saw something move. It was, he realized, a maggot. More movement around the mouth. A scaly black cockroach crawled into the cavity, hiding from the light of Raf’s torch. For the second time in as many minutes, Zak forced himself not to vomit.
‘I don’t know about you,’ Raf breathed, ‘but I don’t think the Puzzle Master has set any puzzles for a good few days now.’
Neither Zak nor Gabs replied. They just hurried back down the loft ladder and returned to the ground floor where the smell was less malodorous, and they could at least breathe freely.
Back in the kitchen, Zak still felt nauseous and Raf opened the back door to let in some fresh air, and they all breathed deeply for a minute without speaking. Gabs broke the silence. ‘Suicide?’ she said.
Raf shook his head. ‘I don’t think he did it himself – there’s nothing up there for him to leap from. No, the poor guy was killed.’
‘How long has he been dead for, do you think?’ Zak asked.
‘Difficult to say. The roof wasn’t insulated, so it could get pretty hot up there, accelerate the decomposition process. Even so, from the smell of him I’d say he’s been there at least a week. A coroner will be more precise when they perform a postmortem.’ He pulled his phone from his pocket. ‘I need to report the death, update Michael.’
‘We should search the place before any police or clean-up people get here,’ Gabs said. ‘See if anything shows up.’
Zak nodded. Together they went into the front room and started to turn it upside down.
At the end of St Mary’s Crescent, a figure in a wide-brimmed hat and a heavy raincoat leaned against a pillar box. He had stood here watching as a black CR-V pulled up outside number thirty-one, and had counted three figures emerge from the vehicle. The rain was too heavy for him to make out their features clearly. Two of them were clearly adults, but could it really be the case that one of them was still only a youngster?
He allowed the intruders a few minutes to enter, then started to walk towards their vehicle. His right hand was in the pocket of his coat, and his fingers fiddled sweatily with a heavy, circular, metallic object. It was a magnet that provided the bulk of the object’s weight. Remove that and the tiny battery-powered transmitter would barely register in the palm of his hands. Still, it was very powerful for such a small thing. There weren’t many places on earth that the device’s GPS capability wouldn’t work, but he doubted that the people he was tracking would be taking a holiday under the thick canopy of the jungles of Belize, or underwater.
As he sidled up to the car, he wondered if they had found what they were looking for yet. He pictured them opening the bedroom door and looking upwards. Idly, he wondered if the corpse had decomposed enough for the body to separate from the head, or whether Mr Alan Hinton, the Puzzle Master, was still hanging intact from the rafters.
And as he walked round to the side of the car furthest from the pavement, bent down and slipped the magnetic tracking device onto the undercarriage, he found himself smiling grimly. Somebody may well have worked out his clever little code, but it didn’t matter. He had other ways of getting his message out. Other ways that the right people would be watching.
That the right person would be watching.
The device clamped itself firmly to the undercarriage. The man crossed the road and continued walking through the rain to the opposite end of St Mary’s Crescent.
He didn’t look back. He didn’t need to. His job was done.
‘I don’t know how people can live like this,’ Gabs said as she flicked through a dusty pile of books on the armchair. ‘This place can’t have been cleaned for years.’
Zak nodded in agreement, but in truth his mind was elsewhere. ‘Look at this,’ he said.
In his hands he had a pale blue exercise book, like he used to write on at primary school. He had found it beneath a cushion on the sofa. It was mostly empty. Only the first couple of pages were filled with messy but compact handwriting.
‘Listen,’ he breathed, and he started to read.
Monday, 2 June
All the journalists I know say that when something strange happens you should take notes. So here goes. I had a phone call today. It was just before midnight. I was working on a puzzle. It was a man. His voice sounded strange. I saw a film once when the baddie used some contraption to disguise his voice. It sounded like that. I can’t remember exactly what he said. I was too surprised, really. He asked me if I’d like to earn £1,000. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You don’t earn much writing puzzles,’ I said. All I had to do, he told me, was replace three of my crosswords with three of his. Send them into the paper and make sure they were printed. I got spooked when he said that. I don’t know why. I put the phone down straight away.
I’m writing this in the kitchen. I thought I saw something move in the garden just now. It was probably just a cat. Or a fox. They get everywhere. I locked the door just in case. I’ll go to bed now. I hope he doesn’t phone again.
Tuesday, 3 June
He called again today. Six o’clock, just as I was making my tea. I couldn’t hear him at first because the sausages were spitting in the pan. He said he would pay me £5,000. I’m afraid I got rather angry with him. I told him to stop calling. He threatened me then. He said that he knew people at the paper, and could have me fired. I don’t want to lose my job, but I hung up on him again. Did I do the right thing?
Thursday, 5 June
Should I go to the police? He’s offered me more money. £10,000 to replace three crosswords with different ones of his own choosing. I said no, of course, and he got angry this time. Very angry. He said he would give me one more chance, and that I would regret it if I said no again.
I wish I knew who he was. Someone at the newspaper, I suspect. Ludgrove? I’ve met him a few times. He’s a rotten apple. If only I could have heard the caller’s voice properly, but he was still disguising it.
I’m frightened. I think I will go to the police. First thing tomorrow.
‘That’s his last entry,’ Zak said quietly. ‘I guess he was . . .’ He looked meaningfully upwards.
Gabs stepped towards him and took the exercise book, her eyes lost in thought. ‘Yeah,’ she agreed with a nod. ‘I guess he was. But before someone killed him, they got him to replace three crosswords. Not one. Three.’
‘Three crosswords, three bombs . . .’ Zak breathed.
‘I think it might be time to buy a newspaper,’ Gabs said.
7
THE SECOND BOMB
ZAK STILL REMEMBERED the first time his mum had given him fifty pence to go to the shop by himself and buy some sweets. He’d been ten years old, and had run as fast as he could to the local newsagent, the coin gripped sweatily in his hand. But now he ran twice as fast, trying to find the nearest newsagent to the Puzzle Master’s house. There was more at stake than a bar of chocolate.
Having turned left out of St Mary’s Crescent, he saw a little parade of shops thirty metres down the road: a laundrette, an estate agent, a greengrocer and, to his relief, a newsagent. There was a queue in the shop, four men in suits clearly buying papers for their commute into work. A fifth man was at the newspaper shelves, about to help himself to the last copy of the Daily Post. Zak grabbed it instead.
‘Hey, sunshine,’ the man protested. Zak ignored him. He barged to the front of the queue, threw a ten-pound note onto the counter and, without waiting for the change, sprinted back out into the street and, barely catching his breath, returned to the Puzzle Master’s house.
Raf and Gabs were waiting for him in the front room, anxious looks on their faces. There were a few more flies in here now, but Zak paid the insects no attention as he kneeled down at the coffee table, swiped a pile of books from it onto the floor and opened up the newspaper. The crossword – luckily not a cryptic one – was on the inside of the back page.
‘You do it, Raf,’ Gabs said, her voice tense. She handed him a pen and after about five minutes’ concentration – and one or two Google searches for unusual words – Raf had the grid completed. Together they looked at the result:
Immediately, Zak’s eyes fell upon the solution for one down. He felt a chill as he read the word ‘explosion’. With a steady hand, he wrote it down on a blank area of the newspaper.
The word had nine letters. He quickly identified the next nine ‘down’ clues of the solution.
His hand was shaking silently as he wrote down the first letter of each of these answers beneath the word ‘explosion’.
He glanced up at Gabs. ‘Go on, sweetie,’ she whispered.
Zak wrote out the alphabet, with a number underneath each letter.
Then he filled the relevant numbers into his grid.
With this done, he added the numbers together, starting back at zero for any result higher than 25, just like Gabs had taught him.
And finally, he wrote the corresponding letter beneath each number.
The three of them stared at the results.
‘St Oswald’s? That rings a bell,’ said Raf.
Gabs, however, was standing up and pulling her phone out of her pocket. ‘I’ll Google it,’ she said. She typed the word into her phone, then waited a moment for a page to load.
Her face turned white.
‘What is it, Gabs?’ Zak asked.
She was shaking her head. ‘It can’t be . . .’
Zak stood up, took the phone from her and looked at the screen. He read the first entry. It made his stomach twist.
St Oswald’s Children’s Hospital.
He tapped the link. The page took an excruciating ten seconds to load. A picture of a large glass-fronted building. Words beneath it, which Zak read out. ‘“Situated on the bank of the Thames, directly opposite the Houses of Parliament, St Oswald’s Children’s Hospital has been caring for sick children since—”’
He broke off. ‘It’s got to be a mistake. Nobody would attack a children’s hospital. Would they?’
But Raf clearly thought they would. He was already pulling out his own phone and dialling a number.
‘Michael, it’s me,’ he said as soon as it was answered. ‘We’ve got a problem. We’re going to need a few extra hands . . .’
8
ST OSWALD’S
0726hrs
MR FRASER WILLIS, of number 125 Leigh Avenue, Acton, had what most people would call a boring job. The job title had the word ‘administrator’ in it, after all. Fraser didn’t care. Even though everybody saw him as a tedious pen-pusher, he knew that his job as hospital administrator at St Oswald’s Children’s Hospital was an important one. He wasn’t a doctor or a nurse, but in his own small way he saved lives too, by keeping the hospital running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. Just so long as his job remained boring, it meant everything was going well.
When he emerged from the underground at seven o’clock that morning, the rain that had been falling when he left the house had stopped, and bright sunshine had taken its place. He smiled, but then saw that he had nine missed calls, all in the last minute. Something was very wrong.
Fraser was still staring at his phone when it rang again. Number unknown. He answered quickly. ‘Fraser Willis.’
A sharp voice at the other end. ‘Scotland Yard, anti-terrorist branch. What is your exact location?’
Fraser blinked. ‘I, er, I’ve just come out of the tube station . . . Waterloo. Is there . . . is there a problem?’
‘How long till you get to the hospital?’
‘Four or five minutes . . .’
‘Run. We’ll have a team there in sixty seconds.’ The phone went dead.
Fraser stared at it again, a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Then he clutched the handle of his leather briefcase a little more firmly, and ran.
The hospital administrator was not built for speed. His legs and arms were thin and his suit flapped as he ran. By the time the huge glass frontage of the hospital appeared before him, his thinning red hair was damp with sweat. He stopped, wheezing, ten metres from the entrance. With the exception of a black Audi 6 parked up on the kerb, its hazard lights flashing, everything was as normal. He recognized one of the consultants walking into the building just as two members of the cleaning staff exited, looking tired after their early morning shift. It was only as he entered the building and looked towards the reception desk that he noticed anything different. There were two men he didn’t know talking to the receptionist. As he entered, the receptionist pointed immediately in his direction. The two men looked round; a further two appeared as if from nowhere on either side of him.
‘Fraser Willis?’ asked one of them. He had short-cropped hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken at least a couple of times.
‘That’s right . . .’
‘You need to initiate emergency procedure 3A immediately.’
Fraser panicked for a moment. What was emergency procedure 3A? But before he could say anything else, the man was ushering him towards the others at the reception desk, talking quickly but under his breath so that nobody other than Fraser could hear. ‘We have credible intelligence of an explosive device somewhere on the premises . . .’
‘A bomb?’ Fraser almost shouted. At a stern look from his companion, he lowered his voice. ‘A bomb?’