Barry Maitland: Chelsea Mansions

‘They’ve booby-trapped it,’ she said, taking a careful step back. ‘What is he planning to do, blow the whole building up?’

Brock said, ‘Call the bomb squad, Kathy.’ As she made the call she watched him walk away, looking back to the stair and round again at the wall with the sealed door, scratching his beard. When she hung up he said rapidly, ‘This is the side of the house facing the Moszynskis, right? And Toby told us that he had found a way through to their basement. So we may be able to get into this room from the other side, from the Moszynskis’.’

They ran up the stairs, along the hall and out into the street, Kathy on her phone again, shouting for back-up. When they arrived, panting, at the Moszynskis’ front porch there was no answer to their urgent pounding on the door.

‘The place is empty,’ Brock gasped. ‘They’ve all left.’

As they waited for help there was another call from the airfield. A Colonel Beaumont had asked for a message to be relayed. Chief Inspector Brock was running out of time, he’d said. The plane must be allowed to take off immediately, or he would not answer for the consequences. Kathy looked at Brock for a response, but he said nothing, staring fixedly down the street from where the sounds of police sirens could be heard.

Brock shouted at the crew of the first car as they jumped out, and they brought up a ram and began slamming it at the edge of the door. The door was very solidly built, and it seemed to take an age before it finally splintered and burst inward.

‘Kathy,’ Brock said, ‘one of us will have to stay at the hotel and take the bomb squad down. I’ll do that. You go with these lads. There’s a door behind the glass lift on the other side of the hall that gives access to a stair to the basement. You’ll find tools down there you may need, pickaxes and sledgehammers. Let me have the Biggin Hill number and I’ll stay in touch with them.’

Kathy gave it to him and then led the uniforms, joined now by a second squad, across the hallway. She followed Brock’s directions, running through the cellars, leaping over excavations and piles of debris until they came up against a solid brick wall with no openings. ‘Okay,’ she panted, ‘we need to work our way along this wall, left and right, into the rooms next door, until we come to some sign of a way through.’

It wasn’t long before they found it, a panel, encrusted with layers of old whitewash. They ripped the panel apart with a crowbar to reveal a heavy steel door beneath, like the one next door, but without a handle. ‘Handle must be on the other side,’ Kathy said.

A few blows with sledgehammers convinced them that they would never penetrate it that way. ‘We’ll have to go through the wall,’ one of the men said. ‘Stand back!’ and two of them began an assault on the brickwork to one side of the door, sending splinters of brick flying.

As they worked, Kathy imagined the bomb, just a few yards away from them now, steadily ticking towards whatever deadline Toby Beaumont had set. She turned away from the noise of the sledgehammers and called Brock. The bomb squad had arrived, he said; he was with them now, examining the box with some kind of equipment they’d brought; they could hear the pounding of the hammers, ringing through the brickwork. She turned at the sound of a shout as a blow finally punched a small hole through the wall. ‘Shouldn’t be long now,’ she yelled into her phone.

They steadily worked at the hole, smashing it larger and larger until it was wide enough for a man to slide through. Then they stopped and looked at Kathy. She called for a torch and stuck her head and shoulders through and turned it on. The beam flashed around the chamber, picking up a mound of soil and bricks, a shovel, but no human figure. Her heart sank. They would be too late now. They would never find him. ‘This isn’t it. He’s not here,’ she cried, and then thought she heard an answering sound, a distant moan. She twisted her head, straining, and called out, ‘Hello!’‚ and there it was again, not much more than a whisper. She pushed her head further in and turned the beam down at the floor, and saw a figure directly beneath her, bound in tape and covered in broken bricks and dust, a mop of dark hair she thought she recognised. ‘Hell!’ she said. ‘We could have killed him.’ She clambered through the hole, swept the debris off him, and began to rip away the tape. At the same moment a door on the other side of the chamber swung open and Brock stood there and the room was flooded with light.

T hey stood on the hotel steps and watched the stretcher with John, wrapped in a silver thermal blanket, face covered with an oxygen mask, being wheeled to the ambulance.

‘Are you sure it’s true, Kathy?’ Brock said. ‘He wasn’t just shooting you a line, was he?’

‘About being your son? No, it’s true all right. I’d bet Moszynski’s millions on it.’

And it was only then, in the strange aftermath of frenzied action, that the impact of Toby Beaumont’s revelation fully struck him. John Greenslade was his son. It had always been there, in the back of his mind, wondering if this day would come, and how it might happen, but he could hardly have imagined this.

His mind went back to a nightmarish day in April 1981, the day his wife Alice left him and the day Brixton, down the road, exploded in flaming anarchy. Neither event had really surprised him. It was almost a month after that before he discovered that Alice had gone to Canada to stay with her sister Tess, although even then Tess had been reluctant to admit it. ‘She just wants to be left alone, David,’ Tess had said. ‘She’s terrified.’ But that was absurd, just histrionics, he’d told himself. It was many years before he discovered that Spider Roach had been threatening her. She had left without a word, and he’d had no inkling she was pregnant. It wasn’t until after he had signed the divorce papers Tess passed on to him three years later that she finally let him know that Alice had had a baby boy.

And now what?

He reached for the phone and dialled Suzanne’s number. She was astonished, then delighted by his news, and wanted to jump in her car and drive straight up to London to be with him, but there was so much to do now, and he needed time to think, and they agreed in the end that they would get together at the weekend.

When they finally let them in to see John, he was sitting up in bed, his head bandaged and a drip in his arm, but his expression was alert.

‘John, how are you?’ Brock said, going to the side of the bed, and something in his manner must have alerted John because he shot Kathy a quick, uncertain glance, and Brock said, ‘Yes, Kathy told me. You really are Alice’s son?’

‘Yes, and yours I believe.’

Brock was lost for words for a moment, then he growled, ‘Hell of a way to find out.’

There was an awkward silence, and then they both began to laugh.

‘We’ll have time to talk later, but right now you’d better tell us what happened to you.’

So John told them the story. ‘I really did think I was going to die down there,’ he said finally. ‘It was the skull that really freaked me out. I thought, someone else died here, and now it’s my turn.’

‘There’s no skull down there, John. We both had a good look around the cellar before we left, and the sloping plank you mention, that you thought might be for waterboarding, that was there, but no skull and no bones.’

John looked at Kathy, who nodded in agreement.

‘There was a smooth lump of stone among the debris,’ Brock said. ‘Perhaps that’s what you felt.’

‘No! Look, I saw it, when they returned and there was light. It was a grinning skull, with eye sockets and a row of rotten teeth.’