Good People (28 page)

I remained on my platform until the wash from the headlights disappeared, and then forced myself to stay put long enough to establish that they weren’t going to double-back to sucker me. I climbed down into the clearing. The anticipation that had sparked when they first arrived had turned hollow. I had learned nothing. I still had an empty hut.

I walked to the far side where the willows clustered in. The smell of diesel from their quad bikes still hung in the damp air here.

I stopped, hammered to the spot when it came to me.

The quad bikes had petrol engines.

I ran through the possibilities and kept turning up the same result. I was smelling the residual fumes from a diesel generator’s exhaust outlet. I risked shining my torch into the willows that crowded the base of the bank in front of me. But there was too much shadow involvement in the tangle of branches to make anything out.

I took a deep breath, shut my eyes, and concentrated on listening. Catching the wind soughing through the trees on the bank above me, and that sense of suspension, as if all the wild things in the vicinity were holding themselves in bated stillness until my attention wandered again. Nothing mechanical.

I stood in front of the Den and went back through Ken and Les’s arrival. The light that they’d turned on had had the unmistakable white incandescence of a gas lantern. At no point had I heard a generator start up.

I already knew where this was taking me. But, for the sake of professionalism and procedures, I had to argue with myself. By breaking into the Den, I would be putting a future case in jeopardy by making any evidence I found inadmissible. They would probably overlook the transgression if I discovered a body. But I didn’t want to find a body.

How could I just walk away, though? Especially when there was a possibility that Magda’s orbit had at last come into conjunction with mine.

I did some ethical juggling. Forcing an entry would be a Bad Thing because I did not have a search warrant, and it would corrupt any evidence that I might find. Covering up a forced entry would not turn it into a Good Thing, but, if I found anything vibrant in there to screw Ken and Les with, I was pretty sure that I could shoulder that moral burden.

The door had slumped on a mismatched set of hinges nailed to a raw pine post that was now rotted and spongy. I jiggled the door, working it towards me. The nails in the bottom hinge came out, and the door dropped and skewed with a painful screech of twisting iron. Now it was only supported by the top hinge and the padlock hasp. I slipped into the nearest shadow and practised rigid attention while I strained to hear if there were going to be any consequences arising from the banshee noise that I had just ripped the night with.

I gave a spider enough time to anchor half a web to my right ear before I crept out again. I gauged the door’s list. By pulling the bottom corner away there would be just enough room for me to crawl in.

It was a tight squeeze, like trying to limbo dance into a crushed car. Inside the hut the enfolding darkness and the difficulty of the access made me feel trapped. I fought down the panic possibility that Ken and Les could return at any time. I couldn’t risk turning their light on. I was going to have to rely on my torch, keeping it masked as much as possible.

The interior gave off a damp reek of burned butane gas and mildew. No sound of a generator, no smell of diesel fumes in here.

I swung the torch round slowly, concentrating on the rear wall, which was built up against the bank. This, like the rest of the interior, was lined with vertical timber planks. There was no visible door in the wall, and the only thing that could have disguised one was an old wardrobe, the walnut veneer peeling off.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
? I resisted the temptation to open it and discover the portal to an enchanted land. Instead, I rocked it away from the wall. I didn’t have to move it far. The back was solid, and the quantity of cobwebs and general crud behind it told me that it hadn’t been shifted in a long time. Very carefully I moved it back to where I had found it.

I had an art teacher once who had almost inspired me. Mr Hawkins. He had a saying that he used to drill into us:
Things may not always be in the form that you expect to find them.
For him it had been about a way of relating to and experiencing abstract art; for me it became a useful exercise in keeping perception fluid.

Doors don’t have to be door shaped.

I tested the floorboards with a flamenco dancer’s foot stomp. Hollowness. There was a void under the floor. I got down on my knees and worked systematically across the room, moving the furniture piece by piece and replacing it in exactly the same spot as I had found it. I had a couple of false alarms but, on close inspection, they turned out to be just replacements for the original boards. There was no trapdoor.

My back ached when I stood up again. The doubt pills started to work. An instinct was nagging at me to get out of there. Had I been mistaken about the smell of diesel? Could I have misinterpreted some tricky olfactory esters produced by the decomposition of leaf mould because I had not wanted to accept that the game stopped here?

Doors don’t have to be door shaped.

I used the mantra to damp down my internal panic, and looked around again. But I had already searched everywhere. The three external walls could be discounted, unless an entirely new dimension in the space/time continuum was involved, and I didn’t have the physics to cope with that. I had checked behind the wardrobe. I had moved the sofa bed away from the wall. I went back to that thought and qualified it. I had moved the sofa bed when I had been looking for a trapdoor in the floor.

I shifted it again, getting in close and concentrating on the wall this time. There was a horizontal seam in the vertical planking, low down, about seventy-five centimetres off the floor. It looked like a repair job, a replacement for some rotten boards. But then, they would want it to look like a repair job. Something that would pass a cursory inspection.

The panel was completely flush, and roughly square. I ran my fingers around the perimeter joint carefully, wary of wood splinters or deliberately planted needles. I missed it on the first circuit. A clever little spring-loaded catch that popped the top of the panel out when pressure was applied. I pulled it away. Behind the revealed opening was another, heavier, hatch set into a wall of dense concrete blockwork and secured with two heavy deadbolts.

I imagined Lord Carnarvon entering the tomb of Tutankhamen as I drew the bolts and pushed the hatch open. How fast-acting would the curse be in this place?

The hatch swung into silence and blackness. I crawled in, fighting the reaction that I was extruding myself into somewhere terrible. The air smelt stale, with a trace overlay of something mildly perfumed, a vague memory of the vicinity of a spinster aunt’s dressing table.

I stood up out of my crouch, put a hand out behind me to steady myself, and recoiled. My fingers had just encountered a too busy geometry. I shone my torch. The inside of the wall was lined with egg boxes.

It took a moment for me to make sense of it. They were using the dimpled boxes as acoustic baffles. Sound insulation. Back-up for the thick blockwork wall, to help to keep inside noise from travelling.

The torch picked up an old Bakelite light switch, and, instinctively, I flicked it. I heard a mechanical clunk, and the lights stuttered on. It was a demand switch to activate the generator. The clunk had been the flywheel kicking in. The noise dropped down to a muted chugging off behind some panelling to my right.

I had found the Rumpus Room.

The space was dominated by a contraption. A crude amalgamation of a barber’s and a dentist’s chair. The worn brown leather padded seat and back were raked at an acute angle. A range of leather securing straps was attached to the grey steel frame. A magnifying shaving mirror on a pivoting arm was fixed to one of the arm rests, and a full-length mirror was screwed horizontally to the ceiling above it.

I moved in closer, wondering why the thing gave off such a sense of clumsiness. Then I realized it was the welds. All over the frame, looking like metal scar tissue. Whatever this thing had been in the outside world, they had had to deconstruct its component parts to get it through the hatch, and had put it together without any reference to craft or beauty.

What kind of creepy experiments had been concocted on that thing?

I dropped the thought. Before my imagination could kick Ken and Les into action, I dragged my attention away.

The place was grim. It had the feel of being not quite abandoned, as if despair had been distilled in here and allowed to seep into the fabric.

The other walls were plank-lined; the one to my right had been creosoted some time in the past. To damp-proof it, I supposed. Once I got my head around the shape I realized that the space was like a truncated wedge. The ceiling sloped down, and the walls appeared to taper in. It made sense. I was probably inside the quarry that the Den had been constructed in front of.

The floor was roughly tamped concrete. Two self-assembly single beds with air mattresses were placed on either side of a small, cheap, chest of drawers. I knew before I slid them open that the drawers would be empty.

The kitchen arrangement was basic. A two-ring gas burner on a wide plywood shelf supported on a pair of old kitchen cabinets. I opened them. Cans of beans and tomatoes mainly, dry pasta and rice in rusty biscuit tins to keep the mice and rats away.

The bathroom was a partition made from two old pine doors. Behind it there was a chemical toilet and a yellow plastic basin on another plywood shelf. The scum on the bar of soap was not quite dry. Two hairs on it. Too long to be either Ken or Les’s. I didn’t let myself get excited.

I went over to the two-drawer filing cabinet that I had been saving until last. I closed my eyes and unlocked it mentally before I tried the top drawer. It opened in real life too. A dish-drying cloth that was fooling no one covered a laptop computer with a mains lead coiled beside it. I cradled it out carefully on to the top of the cabinet, memorizing the position of everything that I was moving.

I checked the bottom drawer while I waited for the computer to load. I almost gagged on the smell of lubricant and semen-soiled leather that time and damp had played around with. The drawer was a jumble of straps, dildos, vibrators, a metal curry comb, pliers, and a small, locked, black, precision-made box that made me think of surgical instruments.

The computer sang out its opening riff. It was prompting me to enter a password. Magda was in there somewhere, I was certain of it. Did it go back far enough to include Wendy and Donna? Colette?

I winced in frustration. How smart were those two likely to be?

I typed in
password
and hit the enter key. Smarter than that, the computer informed me. And I was running out of time. My nerves were telling me that I was stretching my luck. If I fought the flight impulse I knew that I would start making mistakes. I had no option but to put everything back, to try to leave the place in the exact same condition that I had found it.

I backed up to the hatch, making one last visual sweep to make sure that I hadn’t left my mark behind before I switched off the light. The generator died and I fought down panic as the dark crushed in on me with the illusion that the room had just collapsed. I shuffled backwards into the greyness of the outer room feeling my world expand again. I bolted the inner hatch and turned round, flicking my torch on to see where I had left the outer hatch.

The torch beam picked up a patch of deeper darkness underneath the sofa bed. The thought that it could be a rat or a squirrel curtailed my reflex to reach under for it. I gingerly tilted the sofa bed up, and shone the torch again. The thing didn’t move. It was dusty and had been flattened by the sofa bed, a crumpled bundle of some kind of fabric.

I tilted the sofa bed over completely to free up the space. Professional instinct warned me not to move this. I used my gloved forefinger to carefully unravel the bundle, fold by random fold, until it started to take on a recognizable form. A sweatshirt. A couple more moves turned it into a hooded sweatshirt.

Belonging to Magda?

I was trembling. This operation was too delicate and precise for an interloper who could be caught in flagrante delicto at any moment. My nerves were shrieking at me to just grab the thing and get the fuck out of there pronto. It was tempting. But I reminded myself that I was already involved in an illegal entry. If this thing was evidence, it had to stay here to be found as evidence.

I continued unfolding the sweatshirt until I was able to make out the logo on the front: S.W.A.T. in big block letters. But it wasn’t that that was grabbing my attention. It was the rust-brown stain under the logo, roughly the shape of the continent of Australia.

I had been around enough victims to recognize the colour of dried blood under torchlight.

I was wired. I had to call Sally. I used the drive down out of the forest in search of a mobile-phone signal to try to analyse the event.

Had they simply been careless? It happened when people were in a panic. So often it was the way we got our breaks.

The body must have been wrapped somehow. There had been no sign of blood being scrubbed off that concrete floor. Probably naked, otherwise the clothes wouldn’t have been loose. They would have been scrabbling out through that hatch with a body and a bundle of clothes, working against fear and high anxiety. As a result, they’re not methodical. They don’t think it through, don’t consider that two trips might be required. They’re too intent on getting out of there and disposing of this thing as fast and as soon as possible. Appalled by the weight and the awkwardness of it, they just want to be safe again.

So, somehow, the sweatshirt comes adrift. Gets lodged underneath the sofa as they struggle to get out and lock the place up behind them. The clothes are just something else to get rid of. They don’t sort through them. They never realize,
Oh fuck, there’s something missing.