by Sarah Hilary
She was looking for a ladder. A way out.
It took her under a minute to work her way around the small square space.
Empty floor, blank walls.
No ladder.
Just four walls, stone like the floor, and a ceiling she couldn’t reach.
She was shut in on all sides.
This was a big stone-lined, breath-stealing box of stale air.
Panic ate its way up her spine, a brute pressure that had her lungs labouring and her hands curling into fists. Her throat burned with wanting to scream.
She made herself sit down on the stone floor, and breathe. Slowly.
Okay. All right. Think.
Her phone was here, her hands were free. She wasn’t in the boot of a car. She didn’t have a skull fracture or a wire coat hanger wrapped around her wrists. She was in a bunker, under Merrick’s site on the Isle of Dogs. She hadn’t been unconscious long enough to be anywhere else, not unless he’d drugged her, and if he’d done that, she’d be able to taste it.
Matt Reid …
It must have been Matt who put her down here. She hadn’t had time to recognise the face in the dirty glass of the mobile office. Too fast, the face and the hand in the same second, closing over her mouth, cutting off her air. But it must have been Matt Reid.
How had he got her down here, without a ladder? He hadn’t dropped her. She didn’t ache enough for that. Her pride was bruised, but she wasn’t hurt.
So there had to be a way in, and out.
Worst-case scenario …
Noah and the others would find her. No signal on the phone, but it was switched on, even if the display was faulty. That would be enough for them to get a location.
Colin Pitcher had the plans for the tunnel system; he’d given them to Noah, who was on his way. Ed would be able to tell them where she’d headed, across the site.
She should have stayed with Ed, in the ambulance. Waited for the rest of the team. It wasn’t like her to be reckless, but she’d thought …
She’d been scared for Clancy, and Terry.
For Matt.
How had he got her down here?
She must have missed something.
There had to be a way in and out.
Setting her teeth, she pushed upright again, ignoring the sucking panic, the dead air.
Searching again, with her hands out in front of her.
One step at a time, every square inch of the box she’d been put in.
31
The unit leader nodded at the sign Ian Merrick had nailed to the gate.
‘Unexploded bomb. Your boss a bit gung-ho, is she?’
‘Not remotely,’ Noah said. ‘She just knows a piece of improvised artwork when she sees it. We checked with Bomb Disposal, and nothing’s been reported in this area.’
‘So who put the sign up?’
‘Most likely the man who owns the site. Ian Merrick.’
‘And you’ve got his permission to search here?’ The man was a pedant, or possibly just lazy; easier to stand here arguing with Noah than to put in the work required to sweep the site for signs of unlawful entry to the tunnel system under their feet.
‘Clancy Brand is fourteen and at risk of harm. Any more questions, or can we get on?’
The light was going and everyone was tired. It was the end of a long day. Noah had hoped to check on his mum on the way home to Dan and Sol, but …
They had to find Clancy, and Terry.
At least Ed Belloc was safe.
He walked to where Ed was sitting in the back of the ambulance. ‘How’s it going?’
‘I’m good.’ Ed gave a lopsided smile. ‘Feeling like a first-class idiot, but good.’
‘Don’t beat yourself up.’ Ed looked like the car boot had done that job for him. ‘You didn’t know what we were dealing with. None of us did.’
‘How’s Beth?’ Ed asked. ‘And the children?’
‘They’re safe. I think they’ll be okay.’
Noah looked across the site to where the team was rigging extra lights. ‘I’d better find the boss and show her these plans … Catch you later, Ed.’
32
The box was thirty square feet of stone. The same size as the bunker where Esther had buried the boys, but no ladder, no manhole. A box, shut in on all sides.
Marnie crouched in the darkness, picking grit from the stinging palms of her hands. She’d searched every inch of the floor. No bucket, no bed, no tinned food. Just raw stone that took the skin from her fingers as she searched.
No ladder. How could there be no ladder?
The bluebottle didn’t like it any better than she did. She could hear it knocking about in the dark, hitting the walls, searching for a way out. It had got in, so it had to be able to get out. The same went for her.
Air was getting in too, no matter how quickly she fried it by breathing too fast and moving too much. Air was getting in.
Logically, she knew there was a way out. But logic wasn’t getting much of a look-in just at the moment. She remembered Noah’s panic in the bunker under Blackthorn Road, and thanked God he wasn’t here to witness this new dimension of hell.
Try it without the manhole or the ladder.
This wasn’t a pit. It was a tomb.
She’d tried shouting. Tried it until her throat felt flayed. Shouting for Matt, and for Terry, even for Clancy. It didn’t do any good. The box just absorbed her noise. When she finally shut up, the bluebottle was there, droning, knocking about in the dark.
Why had Matt put her here? It made no sense. He was after Clancy. Wasn’t he?
All the reasons she’d dreamed up for his actions – worrying about the children, wanting to teach Clancy to be more responsible, hiding from the police – none of those reasons led here. He could have asked her if the children were safe, and she’d have told him. He could have stayed hidden from her, up on the site. She hadn’t spotted him until he appeared behind her.
What did he want? Why was she here? Why put her in an airless box (not airless, not quite; slow down; breathe) and leave her? The way Esther left his boys …
Out of harm’s way. Except they weren’t. The harm was right there with them, in that hole in the ground. Was this revenge?
Slow down. Breathe.
Noah was coming. He’d be on-site by now, with the team and the plans to the tunnel system, except this wasn’t a tunnel it was a tomb, and what if she wasn’t under the site at all? What if he’d taken her somewhere else? How far …
How far could he have taken her? How long since he shut off her air with his hand, up there by Merrick’s mobile office? An hour? Less, surely. She couldn’t see her watch face, no illuminated dial.
He hadn’t drugged her; she’d be able to tell if he’d drugged her. Wouldn’t she?
Her head ached, black and red, and there was a metallic taste in her mouth, but it was thirst. She was very thirsty.
That wasn’t good.
The bluebottle bumped off the walls, an angry buzzing.
Marnie sat with her back to the wall, counting her blessings, such as they were. If she was under the river, at least it was dry down here, no danger of flooding. She wasn’t too cold, or hungry, yet. She was thirsty, but she could stand it, for a while at least.
Ed was safe. Carmen and Tommy were safe. Noah was coming.
Clancy and Terry …
Her mind blanked. She didn’t even know for sure that it was Terry who’d put her down here. It’d happened too fast. She pressed her lips together, trying to taste the hand that had covered her mouth. A large hand, but Clancy had big hands. Strong wrists …
Her lips tasted of metal, dry.
Terry had put Ed into the boot of his car before Ed knew what was happening. He was fast. The gardening had given him strong arms, all that digging …
She saw his spade, silver-edged, lying on the lawn at number 14.
He’d found his sons buried alive.
What had that done to his mind?
Cla
ncy knew, she was sure of it.
Clancy had looked at Terry Doyle and seen Matt Reid. On a mission to make him more responsible, less like Matt at that age. Talking to him all hours, up in the room at Blackthorn Road where Noah said the windows and skylight were nailed shut and there was nothing to show that a teenage boy lived there, no trace of Clancy in sight.
Like Stephen’s bedroom, at her parents’ house.
They’d moved him into Marnie’s old room, waiting for Stephen to show an interest in redecorating. He’d not shown an interest in anything, other than her skin, and their deaths.
Clancy wasn’t like Stephen. Was he?
Both boys had a go-bag, their lives packed, ready to run. Prepared for anything, because that was what their parents had taught them. To be afraid of the world and everything in it, prepared for the worst possible scenario. Paranoia, taken to its outside extreme.
She would have been able to fight off a fourteen-year-old boy. If it was Clancy who’d grabbed her outside the mobile office, she’d have been able to fight.
Wouldn’t she?
33
No sign of Marnie with the search team, and her phone had no signal.
Noah called Ron at the hospital. ‘How’s Merrick?’
‘He’ll live, by the look of it. How’s things on the Isle of Dogs?’
‘It’s going to be a long night … Has the boss been in touch?’
‘Nope,’ Ron said. ‘But she’s got better things to worry about than whether this bastard pulls through. We all have.’
Noah didn’t argue.
He called Colin at the station. ‘Have you heard from the boss?’
‘Yes, about an hour ago. I told her you were on your way, with the tunnel plans. I take it there’s no news yet? Of Terry and Clancy?’
‘Not yet.’ Noah rang off.
A hard breeze was blowing up from the water, chilling the back of his neck.
Where was Marnie?
34
Searching the walls, again. Fingertip search, the kind they taught her years ago. Cyclical fingertip search. Round and round. It made her wonder whether the boys had done this; not Fred perhaps, but Archie, the big brother, the one in charge.
How many times did Archie climb that ladder and try to get them out, before he became too weak to climb? How long was too long? When did you give up trying, and accept that there was no way out and no one coming to rescue you? She wanted to believe the boys didn’t die like that, in despair. But it was frightening how quickly despair crept up on you.
Noah was coming.
This wasn’t like the bunker where Fred and Archie died. She was in part of a tunnel system, she had to be. It was marked on the plans Colin gave to Noah. Right now, they were looking at the plans, figuring out how to find her. She had no reason to give up hope.
Had Archie given up? Or had he gone to sleep with his arms around his brother, believing he would try again tomorrow, or that tomorrow his mum or dad would come? A false hope, but better than the alternative. Better than despair.
Ed was safe. Carmen and Tommy were safe. Noah was coming.
She was near water. She could smell the Thames, finally.
Not red or black, but brown.
She was under the river, in the tunnel system. There was a way out, into the tunnels. She just hadn’t found it yet. She’d figured it out, though.
An opening, high up on one of the walls. Like an inlet pipe, but wide enough to let a body through. When she had the energy, she’d search again.
She’d been concentrating on the floor, and the walls within easy reach. What she needed to do was stretch up the walls, maybe jump, high enough to find the opening.
It couldn’t be that high, or she’d have fallen when they pushed her through, broken something or picked up bruises at least. Her phone had taken a knock, but she was okay.
The opening had to be above the place where she’d been lying when she came round. She’d lost her bearings, though, no longer sure whether she was facing east or west.
Too easy to give in to the voice in her head whispering: trappedtrappedtrapped.
How had Archie got beyond this point, enough to take care of Fred the way he must have done, to keep them both alive as long as he had? Brave, brave boys.
She wished she could have saved them. That she hadn’t been too late, the way she was always too late …
Enough. Get up. Get out.
Start looking. East, or west, it doesn’t matter. Cyclical search, remember?
Just work your way round …
It took twenty minutes, by her best estimate.
Twenty minutes of stretching as high as she could reach, inching the ends of her fingers across the stone for as long as she could stand the pain of gravity pulling at her shoulders, her hands protesting the lack of blood circulation.
Inch, inch, inch.
Rest, let the blood back into your fingers, ignore the pins and needles.
Inch, inch, inch.
She sobbed when she found it.
A high ledge where her fingers caught and hooked, cooled by the slow curl of air from above.
A way out.
Seven or eight feet up the wall, nearly too high to reach. But she reached it, hooking her fingers there for a second before she started measuring.
Four feet wide, and flat. Easily wide enough for her to climb through, if she could get a grip and pull herself up. Assuming the gap was deep enough.
One way to find out.
She touched the ledge once more, for luck, then retreated to the other side of the box, keeping her stare fixed dead ahead, on the spot her fingers had found.
Ran, and jumped, fingers scrabbling for the ledge, slipping, not enough strength in her arms to drag herself through the gap. She ended up back on the floor, knees bruised where they’d smacked into the wall.
Picked herself up. Retreated again. Wiped her hands on her clothes to get rid of the sweat. Got her breathing under control. Measured the distance to the ledge. Visualised the gap as a letterbox but one large enough to fit her body through, out to the other side.
Ran and jumped, grabbing hold of the ledge with both hands and hauling her body up the wall, head down, chin tucked tight to her chest.
Her grip held.
She dragged herself on her elbows through the neck of the aperture, until only her feet were still inside the box, for the few seconds it took to wriggle deeper into the pipe.
Six, seven feet of pipe, then a short, sharp drop down the other side.
Into the shallow, fetid water of the tunnel system.
35
She was looking at a microcosm of London, all the city’s litter and stink packed into fifty, sixty feet of subterranea. Enough light leaking through the brickwork here and there for her eyes to prick with returning vision.
The tunnel snaked ahead of her, each curve scaly with shadow, the last holding the light in its jaws like an egg. It had been used by people sleeping rough, or taking drugs. Litter was kicked into gutters, the walls burnt to black at intervals. Empty carrier bags and cardboard boxes lay in leaking layers.
Water was running to her right. She could feel the tidal path of the Thames, responsible for the flooding that had closed off this part of the tunnel system. Except it hadn’t, not properly. People had been down here. Not just Ian Merrick. And recently; the floor was hazardous with broken glass and bricks, cigarette packets, empty bottles of Smirnoff Ice.
A sound made her look dead ahead, to the last curve in the tunnel, where the dark fell away like dirty water down a drain. ‘Hello?’
The air in here was flat and empty. If she shouted for help it would fall at her feet; no echo to bounce it about. Cement overhead, cement underfoot. She was out of the box, but she was still stuck between layers of London, like the city’s dead, stamped all over the city.
Bones on bones on bones …
Nice. But enough. Move.
She started down the tunnel. Her brain didn’t like it, hissing at her to s
top, to wait for the rescue team. But she’d had enough of sitting around, waiting to be rescued.
She pushed on, stooping to go into the space where the tunnel curved away.
Damp ran down the walls. Her feet splashed in standing water. She retreated to where it was dry, relying on the dull bleed of light through the bricks to show her what lay ahead.
The shallow water swallowed the light and spat shadows on the walls.
A square space, set to one side of the main track of the tunnel. Standing room for equipment in the event of repairs, she guessed.
She wished she had Colin’s map of the condemned tunnels. She was at the outer perimeter of the site, close to where the river passed overhead. Was she?
Damn, she was thirsty.
The blood beat blackly in her head and she reached for the wall, working her way down it until she was sitting. Easier to fight the sudden flush of dizziness down here.
That noise again …
But it was empty. The tunnel was empty.
Just her and the dark.
Wrong.
Someone else was down here.
Two crouching yellow points of light.
Eyes, watching her.
She could smell him, through the blackness.
A heady mix of hormones and hate.
36
‘Clancy?’
‘Shut up!’ A hiss, like gas escaping under pressure. All it needed was a match and the whole tunnel would be alight.
‘Where is he?’ She kept it low, a whisper, but he moved at her, fast, angry. She kicked backwards, her feet slipping in the slick from the flooded storage room.
He was quick, getting in behind her at the last second, clamping a hand across her mouth so that she could taste him. Bitter and metallic, like a fired gun.
She twisted, trying to get free, trying to say his name.
‘Shut up!’ Clancy’s hand tasted of soil, and sweat. He was strong, easily holding her still with one arm across her chest.
He dragged her towards the wall, away from the trickle of light, dropping them into the dark so suddenly, Marnie yelped.
She fought the instinct to bite down, to find his eyes with her nails, because there was something scarier than Clancy down here. Something worse than a teenage boy with his dirty hand across her mouth. The pain was a footnote to the fear.