Vanished (16 page)

Her phone trilled. Choking down the bread, cheese and chutney that was in her mouth, Molly checked the screen. The call wasn't from Michael, damn it, but was an unknown number, probably a business contact. “Molly Graham.”

“I suggest you take that flower basket seriously. The next time, neither you nor your husband will walk away.”

The male voice was cold, the vowels rounded, the
consonants partly swallowed, in a posh accent so strong it was a caricature of Trevor's or… Molly darted a glance at Aleister. He was still talking to Jenkins.

She scrutinized all the passing faces, recognizing only a few. Who had seen her at the book shop?

Who was the killer who was now after her?

“Hello?” Molly said again, but there was no reply. She tried returning the call, but it rang unanswered. When a one-size-fits-all voice-mail message came on, she restored the phone to her purse and clasped her hands to keep them from trembling when, despite the warmth, an icicle slipped down her spine.

The taste in her mouth was no longer that of cheese and chutney, but the acrid tang of fear.

 

M
ICHAEL'S BACK CREAKED.
If anything, Rohan had exaggerated the height of the tunnel running from the book shop. The petite Grace had to crouch. Michael had to bend double.

He followed the beam of his torch through a passageway as narrow as a snake's throat, its low ceiling a rough, pointed arch. Drops of water plunked on his hard hat, echoing the splats of booted feet feeling their way through the brown slurry of the floor. The wet-dog smell hadn't really weakened, but he'd gotten used to it.

“Have a care!” said Connor, and Michael ducked before he knocked his head against a stone block protruding from the oozing ceiling.

As with other parts of the labyrinth beneath Blackpool, this tunnel was lined with stone. It was mostly mortared rubble, patterned with pale roots like the fingertips of ghosts. Occasionally, the shape of a well-cut limestone ashlar would loom from the darkness, blocks perhaps left over from Charles Crowe's multiple building projects.
The tunnels themselves predated Crowe. Michael half expected to see Stone Age drawings of extinct animals on the walls.

He squeezed himself through an opening so constricted he had to turn sideways, stepping over a low pile of tumbled stone, and emerged in a wider, relatively taller tunnel. Warily, he stretched, his back twanging. This ceiling was also too low for him to stand erect, but still he felt as though he had just walked into York Cathedral with its soaring arches.

“I know where we are,” said Rohan. “This is the tunnel running behind Compass Rose Street. There's a branch that eventually comes out in the dell below Ravenhearst.”

“I've only gone up that branch the once,” Michael told him. “The ground's boggy there, and the ceilings have shifted and cracked. They could collapse at any moment.”

“And it's Ravenhearst,” said Grace, without needing to add any further cautions.

Michael took a few steps farther on, then pulled Willie's penciled maps from his pocket. In the light of his torch he compared them to each other. And suddenly they made sense.

“I see what Willie was doing. These lines are meant to be the tunnels going right into the hillside, these are the ones paralleling the major streets and these are the ones running into some of the buildings, like the warehouses along the docks—those are Crowe's work, as well. There's no saying what he was getting up to there.”

“Excuse me,” Lydia piped up. “Crowe here.”

“You said yourself, you can't help being a Crowe.”

“Yes, but you don't have to imply—”

“Give it a rest,” Connor told her, and she did.

Rohan swung his light around to inspect the aperture they'd just crawled through. “Look at the stones knocked from the wall, and the fresh chisel marks. There's an empty beer can and another piece of that drawin' paper—nothing on it, though. Willie's work, for sure. Is this where he found the coins?”

“If so, he left no traces of them,” said Michael. “See this wiggly line? That's this tunnel, behind the bookshop. If a wiggly line means a tunnel he opened up on his own—there's a fool, rushing in where an angel wouldn't risk his shoe leather—then this line's a new tunnel, as well.”

Rohan leaned closer to the smudged paper ringed with light, his dark eyes gleaming. “But there's only one tunnel leadin' from the lighthouse, with no branches.”

“My granddad saw Willie at the lighthouse just last week,” said Grace. “He claimed he was doing some work on the masonry, but Granddad thought he was up to no good. Said he looked dirty.”

“Let's take the low road to the lighthouse, then.” Michael folded the maps and thrust them back into his pocket. Like most puzzles, this one seemed easy once he'd figured it out. Although he'd been a long enough time doing it. When had Naomi said something about hearing footsteps behind the walls of the bicycle shop, just below the lighthouse?

Single file, the tunnel rats made their way along the underground equivalent of a promenade, water rushing and echoing in the distance. Michael thought of flooded tunnels and collapsing roofs, then pushed the images away. Exploring the tunnels was exciting, not frightening.

They walked past the Customs House entrance and around a group of tourists standing about like sheep with torches. Michael made a mental note to come back and
police the area—visitors were leaving bits of rubbish, and more than one had even carved his name into the lumpy limestone walls.

Several branchings and various wanderers later, Michael led the way into a narrower, lower path. The cellar of the lighthouse lay ahead, carved out of rock centuries ago like an ancient chambered tomb. A breath of chill, fetid air wafted past his face, and he shivered, reminding himself he didn't believe in ghosts, or curses or even…Well, no. He did believe in gypsy gold, now.

“There.” The light of his torch sliced through the gloom to expose a stone shoulder, a hidden buttress supporting the bedrock that was Dockside Head. “That's the place Willie marked on his map.”

“That's the Oxter,” said Rohan, with a chuckle at the old Scots word for
armpit.
“Most tourists never get any farther, mon. They come this far, lose their nerve, and go back to the lighthouse pub for a pint.”

Stepping around the shoulder, Michael focused his light into the dank alcove just behind. “This has never been more than a dead end and a rubbish pit—and a loo. The smell alone's enough to keep people away.”

Lydia made a noise of disgust.

“But now the rubbish is piled to one side, see? And the far wall's as smooth as my plastered parlor. There's nowhere else in the tunnels you've got such an even coating of mud.” Michael stepped into the alcove. So did the others, the vapor of their breaths wafting like specters through the multiple beams of light.

Light that revealed, behind a coating of mud displaying handprints and the marks of a trowel, a regular pattern of square on square… Bricks. A doorway blocked with bricks.

“Yes!” Michael said, but restrained himself from
pumping his fist in the air. “Back off a bit—here, this one's loose. And this one, as well.” Carefully, he pried at a brick and pulled it away, then another and another, opening up a small, rectangular space. Beyond it gaped nothingness. He aimed his torch through the hole and peered inside.

“What is it? What do you see?” chorused Lydia and Connor, while Grace asked, “Is it another tunnel?”

“No, it's not a tunnel.” The damp, moldy smell leaking through the aperture combined with the smell of the alcove clogged Michael's throat. Still he managed to choke out, “It's a room. And it's occupied.”

T
HE OTHERS JOSTLED FORWARD,
eager to look through the hole. “Stop!” Michael ordered. “You'll have the wall down! The bricks were once mortared together—see the traces along the edges—but Willie only stacked them back in the opening.”

Rohan waggled a brick here, pressed a brick there. “There's only a few been removed, just enough to squeeze inside. The others are still solid.”

“That bloke in there's none too solid,” said Connor, the whites of his eyes glittering in the torchlight.

Quelling his thrill of horror, Michael scanned the room again then, moving only one muscle at a time, climbed inside. Rohan followed. Between them, they almost filled the floor space.

The skeleton lay curled in the far corner, as though its original owner had simply fallen asleep. The skull lay on its side, the empty eye sockets staring into eternity, the jaw hanging askew. The dark brown ribs rose from the muck in parallel rows, and the arm bones were angled in two vees in the front. The legs were likewise bent…Well, no.
Leg
—there was only one. The other ended at the knee. A brown ridge extending from it was a waterlogged, partially decayed wooden leg.

Shreds of cloth still clung to the limbs and the chest, now as dark brown and sodden as steeped tea leaves.

Beams of light danced over the oozing walls as Grace,
Lydia and Connor clustered in the opening. Rohan knelt down to get a closer look at the body. Michael averted his eyes—poor chap, surely he hadn't been walled up in here—and saw something an arm's length away from the fan of finger bones.

Or, rather, saw the absence of something. Four round shapes were imprinted in the mud, just the right size to be three Wallachian coins and a Dutch thaler. In fact, by bending over and focusing his torch, Michael could see where the fine ridges rimming the coins had corrugated the shallow depressions in the dirt. Except for the places where fingers had very recently gouged the indents away.

“This is where Willie got the coins,” he said.

“He didn't notice this, mon.” Rohan lifted away what had once been the breast of a coat. Gold glinted beneath. “It's another coin, a big one.”

The disc gleamed all the brighter for resting against brown tatters and browner bone. Michael peered at it. “No, it's a medallion. Palm trees, sailing ships—those clouds must be puffs of smoke. Looks to be a battle scene.” Squinting, he read the letters engraved below the picture. “‘Shared Losses All Round.' This should help identify the body, don't you think?”

With a scramble and scrape, Grace headed for the lighthouse entrance—or exit, depending. “I'll phone Paddington.”

He should phone or text Molly, Michael told himself. But his phone wouldn't work underground any more than Grace's… That wasn't quite true. Michael produced his iPhone and with cold, muddy fingers started taking photos. In the shadows caused by the camera flashes and the wavering torches, the bones seemed to shift uneasily.
Just illusion, Michael, relax.
he told himself.

Muttering, “The guy's glad to be found,” Rohan stepped back to the wall and examined it. “The bricks are laid in a Flemish bond pattern, typical of the eighteenth, early nineteenth, centuries. Over the years the mud ran down and roots grew over them till they blended in with the rest of the wall.”

“How'd Willie find the place, then?” asked Connor.

“He actually looked instead of just passing by,” said Michael.

“Or he may have come along at just the right time to spot a crack, or a slip or water leaking from between the bricks or somethin',” Rohan said.

Connor replied, “He was lucky.”

“For a few days. Then his luck ran out.” Michael stood up.

“Only four coins,” Lydia said. “That's hardly a treasure.”

“It was to Willie. He could have set himself up nicely selling those coins. A collector like Trevor Hopewell would have bought that medallion as well, but you can't blame Willie for not getting any closer to the skeleton.”

Lydia said, “Still, this doesn't prove that the rumors are true. All of them, that is.”

“Tell that to the reporters and the trippers,” Connor said, as voices echoed down the tunnel.

Rohan climbed back into the tunnel and stood guard in the opening, shooing away everyone who wandered up—after lecturing them about going into the tunnels without proper equipment. Before long, footsteps reverberated, and Paddington's voice bellowed, “Make room, make room!”

The inspector himself hung back, letting Dr. Harvey Parker, who was also acting as the local coroner today, climb into the small chamber. “This is a day and no
mistake,” he remarked. “First a birth, then another death.”

“Not a recent death, not like Willie and Daisy,” Michael told him, “but not unrelated, either.”

Parker knelt by the skeleton. “Well, well, well. This acid soil usually eats away bones, but these were placed just right. It's a man—you can tell by the narrowness of the pelvic arch. His leg was amputated well before his death. See how the end of the bone has grown over? But then, there's a primitive wooden prosthetic there, preserved by the damp.”

“The battle on the medallion,” Michael said. “Perhaps he was wounded in it.”

“That's not what he died from.” Gently, Parker turned the skull in its muddy nest. “He was killed by a shot to the head. See the entry wound?”

A jagged hole in the back arch of the man's skull testified that he'd been taken from behind.

Parker trained his torchlight into the hole. “I do believe the bullet is still there—no other reason for a squashed bit of lead inside a chap's skull, eh? Probably killed him instantly.”

“He wasn't walled up in here, then?”

“If he'd been trying to get out, you'd expect to find him lying next to the bricks. I think it was more a matter of his body being hidden here.”

“Another murder?” groaned Paddington from the doorway.

“I think this one is old enough to be outside your jurisdiction,” Parker told him. “Still, we'd best call Ripon.”

“Might as well put that chap Ross on my payroll!” Paddington stamped away.

“You get on—I'll keep watch here,” Rohan told Mi
chael. His eyes strayed back down the tunnel, beyond the oxter.

“Thanks, mate.” Michael gave Rohan his flask of tea, and along with Parker followed Connor, Lydia and Grace out of the tunnel. He stepped into the cellar of the lighthouse with a sense of relief and made his way up the uneven stairs and out into the light of day with an even bigger one. He closed his eyes against the sun, blurred by humidity as it was, and let the warm, damp air dispel the chill clinging to his body. This must be what Molly's claustrophobia felt like. Eagerly he inhaled the odors of the sea, traces of diesel from the marina, cooking food from the lighthouse pub.

“Michael.” It was Molly's voice. Her arms embraced his rib cage, regardless of his mud-stained garments. “They're saying you stumbled on another body.”

Opening his eyes, he feasted them on her face and form, then rested his chin on her hair. Her perfume, the scent of a garden in June, wafted into his nostrils and the tight muscles of his face relaxed. “It's a very old body, just a skeleton, in a little room off the tunnel. That's where Willie found the coins. There were only the four.”

He looked around to see the customers of the lighthouse pub watching him; the flagstoned veranda with its tables provided ringside seats. Luann Krebs was rolling out her crime scene tape, a job she was getting very good at by now. A sound like chirping crickets was Fred Purnell's and Tim Jenkins's cameras clicking in harmony. Michael was starting to think of them as the gruesome twosome.

“No more coins?” asked Fred.

“Can I quote you on that?” Jenkins prodded.

“Go right ahead,” Michael told them, “if it will keep
folk from blundering about in the tunnels causing rock-falls and leaving rubbish.”

Fred turned to Molly. “What's this I hear about someone dropping a basket on your head?”

“What?” Michael's entire body tensed as she relayed to him what had happened.

“Thank goodness for Addison's peripheral vision,” Molly concluded, but from her glance to Jenkins and Fred, Michael knew she hadn't told him everything. “Tim, did I see you with Aleister at the Café?”

“Had us a nice leisurely lunch. He's trying to convince me there's some plot by the townsfolk to make his family look bad and is even offering an exclusive interview about it, for a price. But then, he was paying for the food, so I listened to him until I'd had my pudding.”

“Oooh,” Fred said. “Aleister as master of mayhem. I like that… Ah! Dr. Parker! Over here!”

Parker was trying to slip away down the steps to Dockside Avenue. At Fred's cry, he doubled his speed, leaping down the stairway and across the car park, spry as a mountain goat.

Tim pursued him, chiming, “How about a statement, Doc?” A few members of Tim's crew followed, while the crowd of locals and tourists stood postulating scenarios involving gold, curses and murders.

As if he
did
have a sixth sense, Liam McKenna, black eyes sparkling, materialized to hand out more flyers. “What's hidden in these tunnels? What do the powers-that-be here in Blackpool not want you to know—that the curse has claimed another life? A miasma of evil permeates the secret passageways, flowing out into the streets.”

From her place in front of the lighthouse door, Krebs gave him her worst scowl and took up a stance, fists
knotted at her sides, like a tae kwan do champion facing a challenger.

Liam waved, fingers waggling, and continued working the crowd.

Taking advantage of the distraction, Michael and Molly hurried down the steps and didn't stop until they stood in the lee of the bicycle shop. From inside came Dylan's voice extolling the virtues of multiple gears and braking systems, but for once Michael didn't want to talk to him. “I take it Jenkins was with Aleister when a psychopath was chucking baskets at you?” he asked Molly.

“Yes. And he was with Aleister when someone called—a man—and said I should take that flower basket seriously, and next time, neither you nor I would walk away. I didn't recognize the voice—the accent reminded me of Aleister's, to a degree, but Aleister and Tim were right in front of me.”

“Was the accent like Trevor's?”

“Sort of. I did find out that Liam and Holly were with Margaret when Willie was killed, and that Aleister was in the churchyard, ditto. I'm still assuming we've only got one killer, not a pack of them going around offing Willie and Daisy, and trying to scare me…” Molly wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead and lifted the hair off the back of her neck.

The gesture would have fanned Michael's senses, if they hadn't been so thoroughly chilled by other matters. Like death, and the fear of it. “The villain's after us now.”

Molly forced a smile. “You're getting a reputation for being nosey.”

“Me? No one's dropping baskets on me!”

“Not yet. Don't hold your breath.” Molly tensed against Michael's chest. “We can't let it stop us. In for a penny,
in for a pound. Besides,” she added, “I really, really want to know whodunnit. Especially now that they're doing it to me.”

“What happens to you happens to me, love.” Michael could only hope that, like cats, he and Molly had nine lives.

“Cheers!” shouted Dylan from around the corner, apparently sending a customer on his way.

“And there's still Dylan's name to clear,” Michael breathed into Molly's hair.

She replied, “That is the point of the exercise, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is, though we've gotten a ways beyond Dylan. Look here.” Michael pulled out his phone and showed Molly the photos of the bones and the medallion. “Half a tick, I can't go walking into the library like this, but I want to identify that medal.”

“Won't the library be closed for the bank holiday?”

“I'm betting with all these tourists and treasure hunters, Mrs. Hirschfield wouldn't dream of not opening. She's probably never seen so many people in the library.”

Molly laughed and pushed him on into the bicycle shop. He gave Dylan the short version of recent events as well as his rucksack and helmet, and borrowed a greasy rag to clean the mud from his boots.

When he went back outside, Molly was waiting. “You sure you want to waste the effort researching something that's old news? Or are you just getting ideas for your game?”

“You never know what's important,” he retorted.

“Fine. I'll walk you to the library.” She took his arm.

They talked about the man Daisy heard Willie arguing with, and how many other people she'd spoken to, and whether the third time in Blackpool would be the charm
for D.I. Ross. By the time they arrived at the library, Michael was considering a mind-meld, just to save so much talking.

Molly rose on her tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “I'm going to the hospital to see if I can talk to Michelle. There may be something she hasn't told us, and with a new baby, maybe she'll have her priorities straight.”

“Phone or text if you need me, eh?”

“And you, if you need me.” Molly strode off down the street, leaving Michael to look at her retreating form and think,
I'll always need you, love.

Trying not to imagine heavy flower baskets crushing Molly's beautiful head, Michael hurried through the vestibule and into the old Victorian mansion that housed the library.

Michael had been right about the library being open—and the number of people inside. Two people were reading recent
Blackpool Journals,
the pages threaded through long staves. Another inserted microfiches into the reader. A young woman worked at a laptop computer. An older gentleman in the window bay was actually reading a book.