Tim Weaver - Vanished

Healy moved in beside me, and as I shone the flashlight into the foot tunnel, I could hear the drip of water again, and a very faint sound, rhythmic and soft. Above us, somewhere out of sight, people were working on the subsurface lines, cleaning the Circle and District. I passed through the grille, ducking under the frame and into the foot tunnel, and immediately the temperature dropped. On my right the tunnel ran parallel to the line, heading back in the direction of Westminster. On my left, it curved under the river, tracing the Jubilee. There was little definition to anything. Up close I could see brickwork and on the ground – uneven; scored and gouged by age – the floor was still marked by the wheels that had once passed along it.

Healy ducked into the tunnel, and then O’Keefe followed gingerly, pausing half in, half out of the entrance. I could see clearly what was going through his head. When I glanced at Healy I saw he looked disconcerted too, and, as I was about to try and put into words the sinking feeling I was starting to get in my guts, something made a noise.

I stood, eyes fixed on the darkness.

‘What?’ Healy said.

I held the flashlight up above my head and pointed it along the tunnel, back in the direction of Westminster. ‘Stevie,’ I said quietly, keeping my eyes on the beam as it carved off into the depths of the tunnel. ‘We’re just going to have a look down here.’

‘I’m not supposed to leave you,’ he said.

‘It’s fine. We’re just going to walk a little way along.’

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he asked, and we both turned to look at him. What he really meant was, I don’t want to stay here . I glanced at Healy again and then back to O’Keefe, and it was clear that we both saw the same thing: a man who had spent his life walking the line, reduced to this: panicked and edgy, maybe even borderline paranoid.

‘Why don’t you head back up?’

He studied me, then Healy, then asked for one of the torches. Healy gave him the weaker one. ‘It’s fine,’ I said again, and this time he nodded, seemed almost relieved, and backed out from the grille. Seconds later, he’d returned to the tracks on the Jubilee line.

Seconds after that, he was gone from view.

59

The foot tunnel was dead straight, no deviation, no change of direction, the same uniform brickwork unfurling either side of us, the same stone floor beneath our feet. I thought, for a moment, about all the bodies that must have travelled this route, about the horse-drawn carts that must have come this way, their flatbeds home to the dead; and, as I did, a faint breeze picked up. It passed across us, almost through us, but – even after it was gone – a trace of it remained, like a murmur. O’Keefe had talked of ghosts, but it wasn’t ghosts. It was something real, as if the place had absorbed its past. Every act. Every drop of blood.

We moved on.

After about two minutes, the flashlight picked out something further down, and I realized it was a staircase, knocked into an alcove on the left side of the tunnel. It wound upwards in a steep spiral, a blistered handrail coiling around the steps. I got under it and shone the beam up through the middle. Sixty feet up, at the top of the steps, I could see a red door with EXIT printed on it. Healy walked on, using his phone for light, and, about thirty feet further down, stopped. Beyond him was a wall, painted white. The tunnel had been bricked up.

I started up the stairs. They were relatively new, but the metal was still stained and discoloured, and the paint on the handrail flaked against my fingers. In the quiet, our footsteps echoed against them, the noise carrying off into the space below as the walls closed around us. Suddenly it was like being inside a crawl space. At the top, the alcove widened into a platform, about ten feet across, and there was the red exit door.

I tried the handle.

The door popped away from its frame, revealing a narrow room, dark on either side, and a second door directly opposite, partially lit by an emergency exit sign. On both sides were a series of cardboard boxes, stacked on top of each other. It reminded me of the famous deep-level facilities on the Northern and Central lines: former air-raid shelters, turned into storage units after the Second World War. There was no break in the boxes. No gaps. I stepped further in, past the edge of the door frame.

There was a musty smell, like old paper. Healy came in behind me and I heard him sniff the air. He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, leading the way across the room towards the second door. When we got there, he placed his fingers around the handle and looked back at me. ‘If you haven’t got anything to cover your hands with, keep them in your pockets.’

The best I had were the sleeves of my jacket, and although his tone pricked at my anger, I knew where the words had come from: he was off reservation, working from nothing but a gut feeling; I was the guy he’d invited along, the non-cop, the man who had looked his boss in the face and lied about Sam Wren. He was minimizing risk.

No prints. No trail.

He pressed the handle of the door down and pushed it open.

In front of us was another tunnel, partitioned from top to bottom. On one side was a second set of stairs, which, I imagined, would take us back up to the subsurface stations. On the other was a doorway. No door frame. No door. Just the space for one.

We inched forward, and as we did the storage room clicked shut and it was like the smell of paper, of age, disappeared instantly. In its place came something tangy and awful, like overripe fruit. I directed the torch through the doorway ahead. It was an old bathroom. Even from where we were standing I could see the cubicles, two of them, both stripped of everything, leaving only the toilets, shapeless and broken. Big basins were attached to the wall next to them, a splashguard above that. As we got level with the entrance and shifted the torch around inside, I could see another set of cubicles. I put a hand to my mouth and nose and zeroed in on the one furthest away from us, the only one with a door still attached.

There was blood on the floor inside.

Healy, still ahead of me, made for the cubicle. When he got there, he pressed his fingers to the door, ready to push it open. But then he seemed to hesitate. He glanced at me. There was no fear in him, no dread, no sense that he couldn’t handle this moment as a professional. This wasn’t about that. This was about a circle closing; about one part of his life joining up with the next. This was about spending nearly eight months away from the bodies – and about the last one being Leanne.

He swallowed, and then pushed the cubicle door open.

It squeaked on its hinges, and in the darkness – lit only by the beam of a torch – it felt like something shifted around us. Like the whole room turned a degree, awoken from its slumber. The smell was horrendous. Dense and gummy, filling the spaces around us so quickly it was like being suffocated. I moved in behind him, and against the silence could suddenly hear flies, above our heads, inside the cubicle, at our feet.

The body was in the toilet, feet in the dry bowl, legs and arms folded into itself, so – at first – it just looked like a ball of clothes. It was obvious why it had been placed like that: so no one could see it from outside. As I moved the torch over it, I could see it was a man, and his head was forward, chin against his chest, tucked in against himself in the same way as his arms and legs. Above him, a thick pipe connected the toilet to the raised black cistern. The man had been tied to the pipe to hold him in place, rope looping around his midriff and again around his neck and legs, keeping him in a ball, keeping him positioned exactly where he was. I traced the torch along his body, trying to see how he’d died.