Peter James: Not Dead Yet

‘Blimey, you gave me a fright, sir!’

‘That makes two of us,’ Grace said. ‘What’s happening? Has anyone found anything here?’

The guard knelt down, bending his stiff frame with some difficulty, and picked up his torch. ‘Nothing, sir, not so far. But it’s a bloody big place to search and you have to know your way around to do it. So many corridors – it was designed as a sort of a double skin, so that staff could move all around the ground floors without going into any of the main rooms unless needed. I’ve been here seven years and even I keep finding new spaces all the time. Be easy for someone who knows it well to avoid being seen.’

‘What’s up there?’ Grace pointed to the steps he had just come down.

‘Takes you up to the main hallway, just inside the front entrance, and the toilets.’

‘I’m certain Gaia’s abductor must have brought her along here, sometime in the past couple of hours. Where could he have taken her from here?’

‘Well, he couldn’t go any further along this passage. If you shine your beam along there you’ll see.’ He pointed along the continuation of the tunnel and it was bricked off a short distance along. ‘He’d either have to have taken her back the way he came or up these stairs.’

Grace suddenly recalled the smell of fresh chocolate. The abandoned Crunchie wrapper with a trace of lipstick on it.

Anna Galicia’s lipstick?

‘Follow me, will you?’ Grace said, and sprinted up the stairs, through the open half-gate, then across the hall to the half-concealed door on the far side, where he had been taken by the Curator yesterday. He pulled it open, then began to lope up the spiral stairs.

Some way behind him, he heard the panting voice of the elderly security guard. ‘Don’t touch the handrail, sir, it’s dangerously rickety!’

He reached the top and entered the old, abandoned apartment beneath the dome, with its unpleasant musty smell and dust sheets over the uneven, angular shapes. But he didn’t even notice the smell. Or the dust sheets. Or the Crunchie wrapper still lying on the ground.

He was staring, transfixed at the bizarre and horrific tableau facing him. It could have been two actors rehearsing a scene in a play. Except neither of them was acting. They were both standing on a dangerously rotten trapdoor, and one had a noose around her neck.

Gaia, in jeans and a sweat-darkened white T-shirt, her face glistening with the perspiration of fear, stood on tiptoe, a noose of razor wire around her neck pulled tight and looped around the pulley system high above the trapdoor. Blood trickled down parts of her neck where the wire had dug into her skin. A small strip of duct tape lay, curled, on the floor. The skin around her mouth looked red and raw, probably from that bit of tape that had been ripped away, Grace thought, feeling fury at what he saw, tinged with relief that she was still, at this moment, alive.

Her hands were tied behind her back. Inches from her sparkly trainers was the sign on the trapdoor that read in bold letters, DANGER – STEEP DROP BELOW. DO NOT STAND ON DOOR.

Her eyes, filled with stark terror, locked on to his. He tried to flash back reassurance. His heart went out to her, she looked so vulnerable and helpless.

Crouched beside her was an apparition, caked in make-up, dressed in female Regency clothing and wearing a huge, lopsided wig, staring at him with a strangely triumphant smile. One hand was on each of the two rusty bolts that secured the trapdoor from opening downwards – and taking them both with it, plunging through the hatch, down the forty-foot drop straight to the store room above the kitchens. On the floor beside this creature was a vicious-looking open-bladed hunting knife and a mobile phone.

There was a sudden, sharp crack, like a gunshot.

Gaia yammered in terror. The apparition’s eyes darted momentarily down.

Grace realized what it was. The trapdoor was starting to give way. His mind was racing, spinning, trying to get traction and figure what to do. The two of them were about ten feet in front of him. Three fast paces, he assessed. The bolts could be slid long before he even got close. He couldn’t take the risk, not at this moment.

There was another crack. This time the trapdoor visibly sagged a fraction, tightening the razor wire even more. The door was going to cave in at any moment.

‘Detective Superintendent Roy Grace,’ the apparition smiled, speaking through gleaming white teeth in a seductive, gravelly voice that mimicked Gaia’s. ‘I recognize you from the Argus . How nice of you to join our little private party!’

Gaia was pleading with her eyes for him to do something.

His heart was hammering so hard he could feel pulsing in his ears. ‘Eric Whiteley?’ he said. ‘Or should I call you Anna Galicia?’

He heard footsteps behind him, then heavy panting.

‘Get rid of your fat friend with the tash, hon, he’s so ugly,’ the apparition continued in her Gaia voice. ‘I’ll talk to you, but I’m not talking to any bullying thug.’

Grace hesitated.

The creature slid the bolts back a good half inch. The panic in Gaia’s eyes deepened into wild terror. There was another, smaller crack, and the apparition jolted, but seemed not to care. ‘Get rid of your fat friend or the bitch and I go. You have five seconds, Detective Superintendent.’ He tightened his grip on the bolts.

Grace turned and said urgently to the security guard, ‘Do what she said!’

The guard gave him a look, as if questioning his sanity.

‘GET OUT OF HERE! GO!’ Grace yelled at him.

It had the desired effect. The security guard turned in shock and lumbered out of the room. Grace turned back to the transvestite, thinking fast. He was trying to remember all he had been told by the indexer Annalise Vineer, who’d had researchers delving back as far as they could into Whiteley’s past. As well as all the insights he’d had from the psychologist Dr Tara Lester. But the first stage was to get a rapport going, to try to bond with Whiteley. And at the same time to make his Plan B.

‘Tell me what you would like me to call you,’ he said. ‘Anna Galicia or Eric Whiteley?’ He looked up at the wire above Gaia for an instant.

‘Very funny,’ Whiteley snapped back. It came out as a male snarl. ‘I’m not afraid to kill her.’

‘You’ve killed before haven’t you, Anna? Shall we stick with Anna?’

‘Anna will be very happy with that.’ Now she sounded like Gaia again.

A chill wave swept through Grace. It felt as if he were dealing with two totally different people in one. ‘And how about Eric? Will he be happy?’

‘Eric will do what Anna tells him,’ Whiteley said in his Anna voice.

‘You killed Myles Royce, didn’t you. Why did you kill him?’

‘Because he was richer than me. He kept outbidding me on things I really wanted. I couldn’t let that go on. I invited him round to see my collection and then I killed him. I collected him! He was a nice trophy to have. Eric approved!’

Grace was conscious of Gaia desperately staring at him, but at this moment he didn’t want to break eye contact with Whiteley. He needed to try to find some common ground, some way to start to bond with him. And he knew he didn’t have much time. Maybe only seconds.

There was another splintering crack.

‘You’d better be quick, Detective Superintendent, we’re going down!’ Whiteley said, again in Anna’s seductive Gaia voice.

Whiteley had been clever. The wire had been wound several times around the winch in large loops, then he had bent it several times just above Gaia’s head, to take up the slack and force her on to her toes. There was about six feet of slack in those loops. If the hatch collapsed, Gaia would fall that distance, and even if her neck wasn’t broken instantly, or her head severed completely by the wire, it would be impossible to reach her. It would be equally impossible to haul her weight up by that single strand of sharp wire.