The Dead Tracks (52 page)

    Four
walls. No roof. A dark, empty interior.

    Clambering
up on to the top of the wall, I waited for Healy to do the same. He was bigger,
slower, but seemed to move pretty smoothly. 'Looks like we're going to have to
make a leap for it,' I said, turning to him. He didn't seem keen.

    I
aimed for a patch of grass slightly to the left, and just about hit it. The
impact was hard, but not painful. I stood and looked back at Healy. He was
sizing it up. A foot either side of the space I'd hit and he'd be landing on
brick or stones and breaking an ankle. He glanced at me and then back to the
patch he wanted to land on. Then he leapt across the river. As he landed, I
heard a hard slapping noise: skin, bones and cartilage impacting against the
ground. Mud kicked up, gravel spat away.

    'You
okay?' I said.

    He
nodded, moved gingerly. 'I'll survive.'

    Now
we were closer to the house it looked even bigger and more ominous than before.
The opening in its front was a mouth. The windows that remained were eyes.
Blackened moss ran from the bricks and was speckled around the entrances, like
the house had coughed up its memories. Trees loomed, almost leaning in, as if
drawn to the building. And there was a sudden lack of sound again. The river.
The rustle of the leaves.

    But
nothing else.

    In my
jacket pocket was Healy's torch. I flicked it on and shone it into the darkness
of the house. The cone of light swept across the interior. There were two
windows upstairs, both long since smashed through, huge branches reaching in
from trees lining the rear of the building. Some of the original wooden floors
remained, but they'd been chipped and scuffed, broken by falling branches and
pieces of masonry. Rubble was scattered everywhere: stone, concrete, wood,
tiles.

    Further
inside it was even colder. And now there was a noise. Very distant, but clearly
audible. I turned to Healy.

    'You
hear that?'

    He
stepped closer and listened.

    A
wind passed through the holes in the house, disguising the sound for a moment.
Then, as everything settled again, the noise emerged for a second time.

    'Something's
clicking,' Healy whispered.

    Dropping
to my haunches, I shone the torchlight towards the centre of the room. Piles of
rubble had formed everywhere. To my left was part of the wall that had once
divided the kitchen and living room. More rubble. Bricks. Grass coming through
a crack in the floor. To my right was what was left of the living room: a
fireplace built into the wall; a couple of original floorboards, but mostly
just the space beneath them. I got to my feet and walked across to where the
floorboards didn't exist any more and shone the torch down. A rat darted across
the floor. Lots of dust and debris. Bricks from the walls.

    And
hidden in the darkness: a manhole cover.

    We
jumped down into the space below the floorboards. Everything else was decades
old, but the manhole looked new. It had been painted black. There was a
T-shaped lever built into its middle, sitting in a hollowed-out space. I reached
down, wrapped my fingers around the lever and turned it. A squeak. Then it
began to move. On the other side the clicking sound continued, neither of us
saying anything.

    Finally,
the lever hit a buffer and there was a gentle clank.

    I
looked at Healy, nodded, then lifted it out. It was heavy, but relatively easy
to move. I shifted it sideways and placed it gently on the floor, among all the
debris. Then we turned back to the hole and looked down.

    Immediately
inside was a speaker, a crackle coming from it like static. Next to that,
embedded in the wall, was a small plastic box, about the size of a ten-pound
note. There was nothing on it but two LED lights. One red. One green. It was an
alarm system. The green light was on, and the clicking was faster now. The
light must have changed from red to green the minute I'd removed the manhole
cover, and the faster click was the alarm going off somewhere else.

    
He
knows we're coming.

    A
ladder dropped down into a circle of darkness. I shone the torch into the
space. I could see a polished floor below, but not much else. Maybe a cabinet
and a door to the right — but the torch was already struggling. The batteries
were old, and the beam was starting to fade from using it continuously at
Markham's house. In fifteen minutes, we'd have a light that couldn't define
anything clearly. In twenty minutes, we'd have nothing at all.

    I
looked at Healy. Are you okay? He nodded, but all of a sudden he looked old and
ground down. This place; the expectancy of what lay ahead; the confrontations,
dead ends and betrayals that had littered his journey: it had all come to a
head.

    'Healy?'
I said softly.

    A
second's pause, as if he was trying to pull himself out of the funk - and then he
did. 'I'm fine,' he replied and, as if to prove it, he shuffled into position
at the manhole and started descending the ladder. I put a finger to my lips.
Slowly. Even as he dropped down through the hole, I could hear the gentle ching
of his shoes against the metal rungs. When he was about halfway down, I started
to wonder if that might not be the point: every surface, every movement, made a
sound.

    After
about ten seconds, all I could see of Healy was his head. I leaned down and
handed him the torch, a fist coming up from the black circle and taking it from
me. Then I got into position myself. Below, I could hear him taking the rest of
the steps. Ching ching ching. Then nothing. He must have reached the bottom. I
stopped and peered into the dark. The torch swung left and right, picking out
walls, another door and the cabinet I'd glimpsed earlier.

    I
started down after him. There were thirty-eight rungs in all, and each one felt
wet to the touch. Maybe it was dew from Healy's boot. Maybe it was oil. It felt
thicker than water, but didn't leave any colour on my skin. Once my feet
touched the floor, I wiped my hands on my trousers and looked for Healy. He was
off to my right, the torch gripped at shoulder height. He was shining it
through a big glass panel in a door in the corner. He tried the door but it was
locked. Inside it was mostly dark, but the torch revealed what looked like
steel medical storage units, the torch reflecting in their surface as he swung
it in all directions. In the centre of the room, drilled into the floor — so
dark and so deep we couldn't see the bottom — was a hole.

    Healy
raised his eyebrows:
That's where he kept Sona
.

    Suddenly,
a noise exploded around us.

    Both
of us put our hands to our ears and Healy manoeuvred the torch until he found a
second speaker high up on the opposite wall. Then, as quickly as it had
started, it stopped. The silence was like a shockwave passing across the room.

    Beside
me, Healy reached into his jacket and took out his gun.

    I
followed the circle of light as he moved it around the room. Now he had the
torch
and
the gun, and I had nothing. I was completely reliant on him. I
didn't like the lack of control, but I liked ceding it to Healy even less. It wasn't
that I didn't trust him to watch my back — it was that I didn't trust him to
watch his own.

    "What
is
this place?' he whispered.

    It
wasn't part of the sewer network. It wasn't a bomb shelter either — or, at
least, wasn't built to house people originally. Which meant it could have been
a relic from the factories on the eastern edge: some sort of transportation
tunnel. Healy shone the torch towards the manhole again. It looked like a new
addition, as if it had been hollowed out and drilled through in order to join
the area we were standing in. But everything else looked old. I wondered for a
moment how Glass had got equipment down here, and how long it had taken him to
do it. And then I thought again about him, how meticulous and patient he was. How,
ultimately, the time and logistics wouldn't have mattered. He would have got it
done, and — as he'd already proved — he would kill anyone who got in the way.

    Healy
swung the torch around the room a second time and picked out a thick reinforced
door. It looked like a submarine hatch, black and rusting, a hole in the centre
where the wheel had once been. It didn't seem to fit the frame, or the frame
had been made too big. There were gaps at the bottom and at the right-hand
edge, faint light trickling through from the other side. Out of the speaker
above it came a constant buzz.

    We
edged across the room, Healy slightly ahead with the torch and gun up in front
of him. His finger was tight in against the trigger. He had the air of a man
who'd used one before, and not just in a firing range. Police warrant cards
were marked with an endorsement if an officer had the right to carry firearms.
Healy's hadn't been. Wherever he'd learned to fire weapons, whatever he'd done
with them before, it hadn't been within the boundaries of the law.

    At
the door, he pulled at the hatch. It stuck, juddered in its frame, then came
back at us, squeaking as it swung on its hinges. On the other side was a
partially lit corridor, a series of glass panels on the right. The walls were
tightly packed red brick and the floors polished concrete. At the end of the
corridor, the artificial light stopped and there was a vaguely circular wall of
darkness. Above us, wires snaked out of another speaker, static buzzing from
it, filling the dead air in the corridor. When we stepped through the hatch, we
could see the glass panels were windows.

    
Just
like Sona had described
.

    There
were three of them, looking into three small rooms, each one about twenty feet
square. Everything had been painted white: the brick walls, the ceiling, the
concrete floors, the door on the other side. In the first room there was a
small table with nothing on it. We edged further along. The second was
completely empty.

    A
noise from up ahead.

    Healy
shone the torch into the darkness at the end of the corridor. It kinked right
at the end, past four unmarked barrels. As we moved forward, towards the third
window, the sound of static increased. Healy directed the light upwards. Three
feet above us was another speaker, pumping out sound. A constant, unbroken wall
of noise like someone had hit a dead TV channel.

    We
reached the third window.

    In
the centre of the room was a hospital bed. A white mattress and white
bedclothes on top of that, the bedclothes half covering the legs of the woman
lying on it. She was semi-conscious and dressed in a pale blue night dress,
lying on her side in the foetal position. One of her hands rested on her
stomach. After a while, her fingers started moving gently across her midriff,
even as she slept. Tracing the roundness of her belly. The swell of her
pregnancy. Eventually she shifted position on the mattress, her head tilting in
our direction.

    It
was Megan Carver.

    There
was no door into the room from the corridor and the glass was a one-way mirror.
Reinforced. When I tapped on it, it made almost no sound: just a dull whup. We
need to call the police. We need a medical team. I took out my phone and
flipped it open. There was no signal this far underground. It would only take
me a couple of minutes to get up above ground and make the call - but I needed
to get to Megan first. I wasn't going to leave her. Not now.

    We
moved quickly forward, into the gloom of the corridor, torchlight swinging
right to left in Healy's hands. When I glanced at him, I could see the
desperation building. Sweat was forming on his hairline, even though it was
cold in the corridor. His shoulders had tensed. His muscles had hardened. Up
ahead, the barrels started to emerge more clearly in the darkness, all four
unmarked except for a serial number at their base in Cyrillic. Healy angled the
torchlight across them.

    Then
the torch cut out.

    He
bashed it against his hand, trying to force new life into the batteries. But
they were gone. I got out my phone and flipped it open again. The blue light
from the display crawled across the walls and floor, lighting our way for about
ten feet. I nodded to his jacket, telling him to remove his mobile. 'One of us
needs to move ahead,'

    I said,
keeping my voice low. 'We need to stay six feet apart, then we can light more
of the corridor.'