The Sixth Soul (27 page)

Wasn’t it?

Phillip had been overtaken by the only moment of clarity he’d experienced since discovering Julia had been abducted.

‘Which newspaper are you from?’ he had asked.

‘The one you read, according to your newsagent,’ she replied. ‘So, come on, Phillip, I want to help, I—’

At that point he had switched off the phone and poured himself a large whisky.

When the coroner released Julia’s body, her mother took over the arrangements for the funeral, much as she had done for their wedding, much as she would have done for the christening of
their baby.

He tried to work, which he enjoyed, to finish off a central heating installation in St John’s Wood, but he couldn’t. He went to the pub, a place he didn’t much like.

He could drink. He could pump money into the fruit machine and find a strange comfort in those spinning icons, a welcome ritual in the ‘nudge’ and ‘hold’ decisions that
the machine seduced him into.

Best of all, though, no one talked to him. In the pub, at the fruit machine, it was as if he had an invisible wall around him. No one could see through that wall, and a man with a Calvinist work
ethic, and a knowledge down to the last penny of what he had in the bank, happily dropped coin after coin into the belly of the fruit machine.

When he did move away, it was only when the alcohol started to wear off and he needed another drink from the bar.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the barmaid, a well-preserved blonde with kind eyes and a wedding ring on her finger. ‘I can’t serve you any more.’

‘Why?’ As he asked the question, he felt a little absurd because he heard the answer in his own voice. He was drunk, categorically hammered.

‘Go home,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you a taxi. Go home and get some sleep.’

‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Sleep.’

On a television set above the bar, the six o’clock news began on the BBC. He tried to turn away but couldn’t and, in looking up, he saw a face, a frozen image that went offscreen to
give way to some CCTV footage from the front of a big building, with a commentary he could barely hear above the noise of the bar.

He walked backwards, his gaze fixed on the TV screen, and barked, ‘Shut up!’ to a couple whose table he wobbled into, almost knocking over their glasses.

‘OK, that’s enough,’ said the barmaid.

The face came back on the screen, behind the head of the newsreader. Phillip pointed at the TV, straining to hear, as the newsreader said something about the police issuing two sets of CCTV
footage: one from the British Library and one that had been taken that day outside a hospital.

Where from? Where did he know him from?

The newsreader gave way to library footage of a tree-lined street in suburban London.

‘That’s my house,’ said Phillip. The man the police wanted to talk to was called Paul Dwyer. ‘But his name’s not Dwyer.’ They wanted to talk to a priest as
well, a fresh-faced young man by the look of him. But Phillip didn’t have a clue who the priest was.

‘His name’s Paul but it isn’t Dwyer. I did a job for him.’

Phillip’s realizations made perfect sense to himself but he had enough presence of mind to know his speech sounded slurred beyond recognition.

He took out his mobile phone and, in trying to switch it on, realized he’d forgotten his pin number.

He turned to the couple he’d just shouted at.

‘Can you help me?’ he said, showing them the phone in the palm of his hand. They turned away as the manager arrived.

‘Out you go, come on!’

‘I’m going.’

There was a numbness in his limbs that made walking from the bar to the door an ordeal; the pretence of sobriety and dignity was a tall order under the judgemental eyes of the drinkers who chose
to watch him.

But he ignored their staring eyes and tried to recall Paul’s surname.

‘I know where he lives.’

He had Detective Rosen’s direct number stored on his phone.

Outside, the fresh air made him giddy. He recalled his pin number, 1204, 12 April, Julia’s birthday, but in typing the digits in, he slipped on the step, falling heavily on the tarmac,
cracking his skull and knocking himself out.

S
arah counted back from ten, both hands pressed flat against the underside of the lid. As she reached three, she felt sick at the prospect of
pushing the lid up, fearing the sight of his pupils peering at her through the crack. Her chest tightened in the stale air that grew thinner with each breath. But she had to do it, she had to hear
and see as much as she could. When she whispered, ‘Zero!’ she kept her promise to herself and softly pushed the lid.

Red light in a darkened room. No sound. No sign of him but such a tiny gap. The trickle of air was close to pleasurable, but the weight of lifting the lid caused her arm muscles to burn.

The lid was loose at the top, near her head, but showed no sign of shifting near her feet, where it seemed to be tightly locked. She raised a foot to test it and felt like crying when the
resistance was just too strong. She wasn’t going to be able to lift the lid and climb out. The best she could hope for was air . . .

Then there was a sound. Above her head and outside the walls of the building in which she was confined. She listened hard as it came closer. Two noises. Voices and scraping. But the voices
weren’t human and the scraping was made by the friction of two hard surfaces. It was the sound of cattle lowing, their hooves clattering on tarmac. Cows ambling back from their pastures. The
gentle sound of cattle calling relieved her loneliness for a moment and then made her compulsion to weep sharp and unbearable.

How far away? How far away from home am I?
she wondered, as the sound of the cattle passed by on the road outside. The sound had come from above. It occurred to Sarah she was being held
in a basement.

She lifted the lid a little higher but could push no more than to a ten-degree angle. She held on, allowing fresh air into the chamber, and felt the tightening in her chest ease.

Slowly, she lowered the lid because she just didn’t have the strength to keep it up.

She thought deeply and for a long time. Then she started to count.

She would count to a hundred and raise the lid for ten seconds.

As she counted, she bit at the tips of the nails on her right hand, making the smooth edges jagged and raw. If she raised the lid and he was there, watching, his pupils peering at her, with a
ten-degree angle she had enough room to thrust her fingers through the gap and scratch his eyes.

She recalled Rosen telling her of the autopsy reports and the effects of oxygen deprivation on the lungs and brains of the other women. She lay still and counted. As she passed the fifty mark,
for the first time in a long time she felt an alien sensation inside her: a gentle fluttering.

Her baby was moving. Since the death of her daughter Hannah, she had dreamed for so long of this moment and, when it came, it came with the knowledge that the man who had her trapped was going
to starve her and her baby of air.

As she reached one hundred, there was a black hatred in her heart.

She raised the lid to hear footsteps descending wooden stairs and above this the sound of a tuneless tune, a joyless yet lightly whistled improvisation.

She lowered the lid, holding in her lungs the fresh air she’d taken from the basement. She felt the ragged tips of her nails and pictured his eyes in the lift at St Thomas’s
Hospital, imagining them streaming with blood.

He was in the basement and she wondered whether he was ready.

Sarah closed the lid completely and composed herself in the pitiless blackness.

S
he raised the lid. It was by the slightest amount, but the light and noise were astonishing.

The room was full of what sounded like a huge machine, as if the room had been eaten alive and she was listening from within the belly of some mechanical beast. Wheels clattered across a rough
stone floor.

The noise was getting closer. She raised the lid a little more, a fraction more light. Something dark was swinging in and out of the path of light. The noise stopped, to be replaced by another
sound. His breathing was fast and uneven, the sound of exertion.

Through the walls of the house and the ceiling of the basement, a car engine was coming closer. She willed it to slow down and stop but after it passed the nearest point, the sound started
fading away into the distance.

He was close at hand and there was a foul smell.

He stopped. And then quickening footsteps, moving away from her, told her that he had been suddenly called away.

He was heading up a flight of steps and then she heard his feet on the ceiling above her. Hurrying, hurrying, hurrying.

She was alone again, in the tank, in the basement.

She lifted the lid a little more, then raised her head, looking through the crack from as many angles as the confined space allowed.

A vertical metal pole and what looked like a saddle suspended in midair. She pushed hard and the small crack became wider. There was a metal arm connected to the cradle. It was a lifting device.
Was it the thing on wheels that had made a racket on the concrete floor?

He was going to use it to lift her.

If she was incapacitated through lack of air, he wasn’t going to kill her in the tank. He was going to take her somewhere else to do that.

She would lift the lid only for air now.

She knew enough.

She needed to conserve all her strength for what was coming.

I
n a soulless Port of Dover café, Sebastian Flint sipped a cup of Earl Grey tea and recalled the time when he’d been lynched. He
remembered the moment when the mob had fallen silent, assuming he was dead, the moment after the very last kick to his ribs when the mob had drifted away, slowly at first, in dribs and drabs.

Flint recollected the carpet viper slumbering in the shadow of a rock. Like the snake, Sebastian was belly down in the Kenyan dust. He had opened his eyes enough to watch the serpent flick out
its tongue to collect the chemical information hanging in the air around him, information seeping from his skin as he shed warm blood into the thirsty soil.

The carpet viper retracted its tongue, passing its cargo to its Jacobson’s gland in the roof of its mouth, where the airborne chemicals would be distilled, keener than smell and sharper
than taste. From them, the snake would know not to attack the man who was neither prey nor predator.

Flint had smiled through continents of pain, the darkness of his pupils connecting with the black of the serpent’s eye. He called to mind the carpet viper sliding from the shadows towards
him. As he had drifted out of consciousness, he had watched the serpent slide across his fingers to the open wound at the base of his hand.

From the darkness around the rock, a deeper shadow had crept towards his brutalized body. Unable to speak, he had stared into the darkness as it had crawled onto his skin in the final moments
before he passed out.

In the almost empty Port of Dover café, Flint observed the increasing tension in the lorry driver at the till. He reached inside his coat and produced nothing. He rummaged with both hands
in his hip pockets. Empty. He tried his trousers with no success.

‘Shit! My wallet.’

Flint walked over to the till. The girl behind the counter drew back the cup of coffee she’d been about to serve the driver.

‘Here,’ said Flint, handing a two-pound coin to the girl, who pushed the cup of coffee back towards the driver. Flint indicated the table in the corner where he was sitting and the
driver joined him.

‘Are you sure you didn’t leave it in the cab of your lorry?’ asked Flint.

‘No, I bought a paper in the newsagents, five minutes back. Thanks for this.’ He sipped the hot coffee.

‘You want me to help you find that wallet?’

‘There was only a fiver in it.’

‘Got your phone?’ asked Flint.

‘Yeah.’

‘Got your passport?’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘You need to call your credit card provider and cancel—’

The driver laughed sourly and stared past Flint. ‘I don’t have any credit cards. Not any more.’

‘No credit cards?’

‘I had several when I was married.’ He looked wistful at the memory.

‘I think we’ve been to the same place,’ said Flint. The man looked back at him. Flint added, ‘My ex maxed out all my cards before she left me.’

‘Bitch. She wasn’t called Lisa, was she?’ The driver laughed at his own joke and Flint joined in, louder than his new companion but in total harmony.

It opened doors. The driver said, ‘She cleaned me out; left me for some other fellah and I ended up being made bankrupt. The worst of it is, I’ve got a new woman in me life now;
she’s an angel, the opposite of Lisa. She’s pregnant, and we’re going to charity shops to get stuff for the baby.’

‘That’s just so unfair,’ Flint commented. The driver drank the rest of his coffee in silence, then glanced up at Flint and smiled.

‘What you looking at me like that for?’

‘You’re not the only one with problems, mate,’ said Flint. ‘Where you heading?’

‘France.’

‘What you carrying?’

‘Flat-packed furniture.’

‘Let’s go look for that wallet,’ suggested Flint.

‘There was just a fiver in it, that’s all.’

‘A fiver’s a fiver. Let’s go look for it.’

——

A
QUARTER OF
an hour later, in the lorry’s cab, Flint said, ‘At least we tried.’

‘I didn’t think we’d find it.’

The water bottle on the dashboard looked old, as if it had been refilled from the tap on dozens of occasions over several months. The driver caught Flint eyeing it.

‘What did you mean back in the café?’ asked the driver.

‘I said a few things.’

‘You said, something like,
you’re not the only one with problems, mate.
What were you getting at?’

‘I need a favour.’ Flint reached inside his coat and took out a fat brown envelope, which he placed in his own lap. He saw the excitement in the driver’s eyes. ‘I
don’t know your name, you don’t know mine. Let’s keep it simple,’ he said. He opened the envelope to show a wad of money. ‘Three thousand in fifties. Hide me in your
lorry. As soon as we get to France, I’m history and you’re three grand better off.’