Blood Falls (46 page)

Returning with a tray of sandwiches, the sound of a toilet flushing made her heart lurch. But it was Ellie who had slipped out. Glenn was kneeling by the fire, idly probing at the flames with a poker, no sign of his phone anywhere.

‘Fantastic!’ he said. He chose to sit close to Diana on the sofa, consuming the sandwiches with a noisy, exaggerated pleasure, accompanied by frequent glances at his ex-wife. Ellie, idly thumbing through a glossy magazine, took no notice.

All these years, Glenn had fostered Diana’s insecurity by encouraging her to believe that Ellie still hankered after him, but maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe it had never been true. And the knowledge that Ellie didn’t want him helped to crystallise Diana’s own feelings.

She didn’t want him either
.

Glenn finished his sandwich and burped, proudly, before directing his gaze once more at Ellie. ‘You planning on a future with Joe?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘So he wasn’t Mr Right, then?’ Glenn laughed. To Diana, it sounded needlessly callous.

Without looking up from the magazine, Ellie said, ‘A halfwit could see what you’re trying to do here, Glenn. I’m not about to fall for it, and neither is Diana.’

Embarrassed, Glenn mumbled something – it might have been ‘
Mouthy bitch
’ – then he took out his phone and stared at it longingly. Diana felt her heart rate increase.
Here it comes
…

But, to her relief, he put it away. Sighed. Checked his watch.

‘Anxious?’ Diana said, attempting to keep the mood congenial.

‘Mmm.’

‘I’m so worried for Joe. Do you think he’ll be all right?’

‘He’s got to be,’ Glenn said, with unexpected conviction. ‘He’s got to be.’

Leon didn’t want Fenton to see that he was worried, but where the hell were Reece, Todd and Bruce? They were the only ones he trusted for the serious work – the illegal stuff. He needed them back here.

Reluctantly he let Fenton show him the basement again. The sofas were almost lost from sight, the water two feet deep and rising; filthy brown with bubbles of scum on the surface. The room stank of mud and waste. Leon took one look and marched back upstairs, Fenton panting and wailing behind him.

‘Leon, please. I can’t emphasise this enough. It’s not safe here.’

‘Fuck that. Give it another hour. Keep trying Glenn.’

Fenton sighed. ‘Please understand that I genuinely have your best interests at heart—’

‘If Glenn doesn’t answer in the next ten minutes, you can go and find him. Bring him back here, then we’ll talk about evacuating. Okay?’

Made restless by his anger, Leon headed for the comms room again. Despite knowing that the damage had been caused by the
weather, he kept checking the monitors, gripped by the idea that he was under siege. As he stepped into the room, a shadow flitted beneath the viewpoint of the camera that covered part of the driveway.

‘D’you see that?’

‘What?’ Fenton was too slow, as usual.

Leon switched cameras, catching a much larger shadow near the front door. A blur of motion was followed by a loud crash, and then the screen went black.

The sound of glass breaking was Joe’s cue to move. The back door had a good lock and a small double-glazed window. For a fast entry, Joe used the crowbar to prise the door away from the frame. Messy, and noisy, but he hoped the distraction out front would protect him.

Crossing the kitchen, he peered out at the hall. The front door was standing open: someone had gone to investigate the disturbance. There was no one in sight.

As he opened the door to the basement, the smell hit him at once: like sewage and rotting vegetation. Joe was halfway down the stairs when he realised the shadows were too high, too even, as though the floor had been raised. Then his foot splashed into water.

He stopped, found his torch and switched it on. The room was flooded to a depth of about two feet.

Drowning. You dreamed you were drowning in a tunnel
.

Joe pushed the thought away. Everything rested on a simple question: Did he really believe that Kamila could be down here?

The answer was yes. On that basis, the choice was made for him.

He plunged into the water, felt the bitter cold penetrate his clothes and his shoes. Breathing in shallow gasps, trying not to dwell on what was causing the stench, he waded towards the toilet. He remembered Glenn saying that the plumbing didn’t work properly. Had that been a bluff, to deter people from using the room?

He was examining the wall above the cistern when he heard a
commotion upstairs. He hoped Davy wasn’t in too much trouble: the Australian had made him agree that nothing should divert Joe from finding Kamila.

Spotting a gap in the panel, Joe attacked it with the crowbar, levering it away from the wall. At first it stretched and bent, then popped out as a couple of tiny screws were dislodged.

The entrance to the tunnel was about two feet wide and three feet high, positioned at chest height but easily accessible if you used the toilet bowl and the cistern as steps. Gripping the torch between his teeth, Joe climbed up, squeezed through the gap and lowered himself back into the water.

He could feel the rough stone floor of the tunnel beneath his feet. The walls and ceiling were also bare rock, but there was a single weak bulb set above him. Beyond its range the tunnel vanished into a tight dark circle.

Joe shivered, and he was back in the Shell Cavern, the walls closing in, crushing the breath from his lungs …

Gripping the torch tightly, he shone it straight ahead. The tunnel must be flooding slowly from some small ingress, but the river above him was roaring like a freight train. He couldn’t help but wonder at the thickness of the rock that was holding back the main body of water. At any moment that opening could be overwhelmed and the tunnel would flood in an instant.

He swore softly to himself. Not the way to be thinking …

Then the beam of light picked out a shape, about twenty feet away. A straight edge: man-made. It was the corner wall of Leon’s strongroom.

Joe pushed through the water, feeling the current pressing against him. He broke out in a cold sweat, prickling through his hair and down his neck. If he slipped and went under, it wouldn’t be the flood that destroyed him; it would be the panic.

Then something bumped against his stomach. A rat? Debris swept in from the river?

Heart thudding, he pointed the torch down and saw a grimy white sheen, something long and smooth floating on the surface. Because his police career had incorporated all manner of grim discoveries, Joe identified it immediately.

It was a bone. A human femur.

Eighty-Four

THE ATTACK’S BEGUN
at last
, Leon thought as he wrestled the front door open. In a strange way, it came as a relief.

He had no real idea
who
the enemy was. Could be Cadwell’s men, or the authorities – or even Danny Morton. Whoever it was, Leon was braced for a fight to the death. Reece and the others had failed to return. There was nobody left that he could trust. His house was collapsing around him. Why not go out in a blaze of glory?

He’d had the foresight to grab the Glock. It was an imitation – a harmless replica – but it had fooled Joe well enough earlier. Might buy him some time, at least.

Leaving Fenton in the comms room, Leon rushed outside and found just one man, far from young, dressed like a hiker and wielding a cricket bat. He’d used it to smash the camera above the door and now, grinning like a maniac, he turned on Leon. It was Patrick Davy, the Aussie who’d fallen out with Cadwell after refusing to sell the gallery.

‘Tried to kill me, you bastard!’ he roared, whipping the bat down in a two-handed grip. Leon dodged sideways but the bat caught his gun hand full on: he felt the bones in his wrist crack in a white-hot explosion of pain.

Leon shrieked. Saw Davy raising the bat for another strike and lunged towards him, using his height and weight to knock the older
man off balance. As Davy stumbled, Leon rained blows on him with his left hand, clumsy but brutal, until Davy dropped the bat and his legs gave out and he fell to the ground.

Joe pushed on through the tunnel, fighting revulsion and claustrophobia. The torchlight swept over the water and revealed other debris, other bones. The strongroom was just a few feet away, jutting out from what seemed to be a natural alcove in the rock. As Glenn had said, the door was secured by a padlock, now just a couple of inches above the flood water.

And Glenn was right about something else. It
did
look like a cell.

Joe tried to rest for a second or two. The pressure of the water was making it harder to stay upright. Bracing himself against the side of the tunnel, he turned to check that his exit was still clear, but the torch beam was swallowed by a much deeper darkness to his right. There was another opening in the rock, a chamber reaching back several yards at least.

Joe was shivering so violently that he could barely hold the torch steady. He shone it into the chamber and saw her straight away.

Kamila.

The water had reached above her waist and was lapping just below her breasts, but Jenny didn’t feel it. Didn’t feel anything. She longed to sink beneath the surface, fill her lungs with water and have it ended. But she couldn’t. Some primitive, obstinate instinct refused to let her give in.

So she was still upright, propped against the damaged wall, slipping in and out of consciousness, when she registered a flash of light in the darkness. Maybe some kind of hallucinatory flare, the product of a dying brain, synapses firing their last desperate signals.

An image came to her: Mum and Dad, finally alerted to her disappearance after … how many days or weeks? She pictured them years later, slipping towards death themselves, corroded by the agony
of the questions no one could answer. The mindless torture of
not knowing
.

The water sloshed against her, as if the current had been disturbed. A noise like kids in a paddling pool. A fresh misery plucked at her heart: children she would never have.

She bumped her forehead against the wall, as if she could beat out the bad thoughts. A moan escaped her and she prayed:
God willing, this should be my last breath
…

The body was floating face up in the water, naked, the skin blackened and putrefied. The abdominal cavity had burst open, and the limbs were only loosely connected to the torso. The features were unrecognisable, but Joe remembered the dark wavy hair from the photograph Alise had shown him.

It was Kamila. She’d probably been dead for weeks, left to decompose in her underground tomb. The bones he had found must belong to a much earlier victim. He was too late. Now he had to get out of here before he froze—

A soft thud behind him, followed by a groan. Joe’s body convulsed. The torch slipped from his grasp. Like a clumsy juggler he writhed and snatched at the air; caught the torch just before it hit the water. The light flickered, but stayed on.

He realised the sounds had come from the strongroom. The cell. He turned, careful not to slip, and reached for the padlock, holding it while he got his balance.

‘Hello?’ he called, his voice juddering from the cold.

The only response was another whimpering groan.

‘Hold on. I’m going to get you out.’ Fixing the position of the padlock in his mind, Joe eased the rucksack onto one shoulder, put the torch away and brought out the bolt cutters. He knew he’d need two hands for the job, which meant working without a light.

Groping for the padlock, which was now partially submerged, he sited the blades around the shank, held it steady and brought the bolt
cutters together. The padlock twisted and the cutters slipped off, almost falling into the water.

Joe took a deep breath. He was rushing. He needed to be slow and methodical. Forget the tunnel, the rising water …

On the second attempt there was a quiet snap and the padlock gave way. Joe dropped the cutters into the rucksack, retrieved the torch and eased the door open a fraction. Once he’d established that the cell was flooded to the same level as the tunnel, he opened the door further.

There was a girl: naked, freezing, barely conscious, and yet somehow still standing. As he stepped into the cell she toppled and slid into his arms. He grabbed her, and in doing so he lost his balance, jabbing his elbow on the door frame to stay upright.

Once he’d steadied himself, Joe managed to direct the torchlight onto her face. Her eyes were shut and her skin had a blueish tint. There was no living warmth in her body at all.

Leon’s wrist was a constant, screaming agony, but he was damned if he was going to let it defeat him. After summoning Fenton, the two of them managed to haul Patrick Davy back into the house.

‘What’s going on?’ Fenton gasped.

‘Just broke my fucking wrist.’

Davy regained consciousness as they dragged him into the living room. Leon kicked him hard in the ribs.

‘Settle down, or I’ll stamp your head to mush.’

Once inside, Fenton pinned the Australian down while Leon fetched plasticuffs and a bottle of ibuprofen. Leon couldn’t open the bottle with one hand so he had to get Fenton to do it. He crunched down four pills, then did his best to assist Fenton as he removed Davy’s coat, tied the man’s hands behind him and sat him up against one of the armchairs.

Fenton clucked like a mother hen. ‘Leon, you’re drenched. You need fresh clothes.’

‘A towel will do. And get a knife,’ he added, glaring at Davy. ‘To make this fucker talk.’

The phone rang as Fenton left the room. Leon heard him pick it up in the hall.

Thank Christ
, he thought.
That had to be either Glenn or Reece
.

Time had slowed to a crawl. The candles provided a cosy light, and thanks to the fire the room was deliciously warm, the wood popping and hissing while the rain beat down on the roof. It was an environment that normally guaranteed an afternoon doze, but sleep was the last thing on Diana’s mind.