Chapter 9
Our city has an underground system with six stops.
It runs for several miles below the southern half of the city, under the picturesque old town and business sectors, basically tracing the curl of the river, and is used primarily by tourists and professional sorts.
You can travel the entire juddering, clacking line in about twenty minutes.
The trains move fast enough between stations that you wouldn’t notice the open pipes and passageways you’re passing.
Tunnels under the earth that aren’t entirely as abandoned as you might imagine.
The underground was originally planned to have eight stations, but due to budget miscalculations – or, more cynically, budget misappropriations – only six were ever completed.
So there are two unfinished stations, one at either end, and they aren’t abandoned either.
They’re the first official stops on the city below the city: one to the east and one to the west.
Because our second victim had been found much closer to the east, that was where I was heading.
The rush hour slowed me down, but I reached the dead station before nine.
All that remained of the original building was a black door with a rusted chain hanging across the centre and a red circle daubed on at head height.
A much grander entrance had been absorbed by the shops to either side, which were typical of the area: shuttered off-licences, bookies, a drab post-office.
Bin bags clustered against the walls, huddled together for warmth.
There were more pigeons around right now than people, most of them pecking inexplicably at dirty stretches of pavement.
I drove a little further on, then parked up on a road close to the river and walked down to the water.
From here, I could see all the way across to the northern bank, to the empty bays where we’d found the second victim.
There were no boats in sight today, just the white crosses of gulls turning lazily over the river.
I doubled back on myself to find the large circular tunnel leading down under the road above and into the depths of the earth.
It was half grilled over, the fractured side ending in hundreds of tiny, rusted fingers.
I kept my gun clipped in its holster, but took out a Maglite torch, clicking it on as I eased around the broken grille and stepped into the tunnel.
It wasn’t silent inside, but there was an immediate and profound change to the quality of sound.
The world felt compacted; existence had shrunk its parameters to the seven-foot-diameter pipe I began walking down, feeling as much as hearing the insistent hiss of pressure in the air.
The pipe was built from enormous, arching stone blocks, all thick with green lichen and damp.
The torch cast meagre light, only ever revealing a few metres ahead, and I kept it mostly on my footing.
Beneath my feet, the dank stone ground was strewn with a thatch of twigs and branches that had blown down here from the river.
As I walked, the heavy hush of underground air was complemented by the steady drip of water, and the air grew colder.
After a time, the tunnel reached a larger space: a square room with pipes curling from one wall and then disappearing into the ground, as though they’d poked their heads out and immediately burrowed down out of sight.
In another corner, the water was dripping down more profusely, landing on a slumped pile of pale, congealed slime.
Puddles of stagnant water sat in pits in the stone floor.
The room smelled of mulch and rotting vegetation, like a breeze drifting through an abandoned vegetable stall.
At the far end, a doorway led into something that more approximated a normal corridor: perhaps it had once connected maintenance areas around the station. That was the way to go – I’d been here before.
Barely a minute later, my torch caught movement up ahead and then a torch belonging to someone else was shining in my face.
I held my forearm over my eyes.
‘Ow.’
A voice boomed out, jovial and theatrical: ‘Who goes there?’
‘Police,’ I said. ‘Get that light out of my eyes. I’m not looking for trouble.’
‘Okey-dokey.’
The torch beam immediately dropped down to the ground, and a figure up ahead approached.
The splay of light revealed a large man, with a barrel of a body that seemed to be made primarily from rags. He was bearded, with wild, black hair and a red face, and smiling like a loon.
‘What can I do for you, officer?’
‘I’m looking for someone,’ I said.
‘I can possibly help you with that.’
The possibly was to be expected, of course. The people down here had nothing to gain by annoying the police, but that didn’t mean they’d openly co-operate if it meant selling out one of their own.
‘This particular person is not alive anymore,’ I said.
‘That doesn’t mean they’re not here!’ His voice boomed in the enclosed space. ‘We’re full of ghosts, officer. You know that. That’s all some people down here ever talk to.’
‘He may be one of yours,’ I said. ‘We found him upside and need to identify him.’
‘Description?’
‘Not so much. But I’ve got these.’
I took out some photographs of the clothes and items we’d found on the second victim. A lot of them were generic, but I held out some hope for a necklace we’d found, wrapped away beneath his clothes. There was an old wedding ring on it.
The man took them one by one with gnarled fingers wrapped in wool gloves, shining his torch over each of them before passing them back. He paused at the ring.
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘He’s passed by, on and off, for years. Jesus nut. That’s all I know. Don’t know his name, but someone will.’
‘All right. Can I –?’
‘Go in?’ He moved to one side and shouted: ‘Be my guest!’
I walked a little way on, him following behind, muttering to himself.
After a minute, he stepped into an alcove where a three-seater settee had been lodged, next to a packing crate with a candle burning.
A battered old paperback was lying splayed out on the settee, and a sleeping bag was rolled up neatly at one end.
A little further on, I reached what had once been intended to become Foxton underground station.
It was an echoing hexagonal space, every surface tiled, every wall filled with empty poster grids.
Where the ticket machines should have been, there were racks of bunk beds.
Graffiti covered the walls. There were a handful of rusted metal barrels that, in winter, would be full of burning wood, but now they were dark and dead.
Everything was bathed in amber light from the countless candles burning.
People everywhere: hunched shadows, either slumped in place or meandering around erratically.
There were also a number of corridors running off the central area.
Doors that might once have been labelled ‘No Entry’ were now propped open with large chunks of rock.
Every conceivable space down here had been colonised.
Along all the corridors, I knew, there were fenced-off sleeping areas.
Televisions flickered in the darkness, powered by the electrics that had been developed down here: snaking rubber cables that connected junction boxes and ended, occasionally, in rubber plugs in archaic boxes in the walls. There were toilets and shower stalls.
I worked my way through, showing my photos here and there to people whose faces I couldn’t see. Despite what the watchman had said, all I got was shakes of the head and shrugs.
I was beginning to despair slightly until I wandered down a stationary escalator and found a small church.
It had been built in a storage area below one of the railway arches.
Two metal bins were burning brightly on either side of the entrance, the flames crackling, the metal as thin and fragile as charred paper.
I peered inside. A number of benches had been arranged roughly in lines, and hooded figures were dotted here and there, elbows on knees, heads bowed, facing a wooden table at the far end.
The stone wall above was daubed with various religious symbols.
The air was hot in here, and, perhaps because of the silence of its small congregation, the room felt as though it was waiting for something – some boom or clank from the bowels of the surrounding tunnels.
A god freak, the guard had said.
If anyone would know our John Doe, it was someone here.
I approached a man at the back of the room. He was dressed in jeans and an old black hoodie, but it was easy to tell he was fat and saggy beneath it.
‘Police,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to identify someone. You recognise any of these belongings?’
I was already holding out the photographs when he looked up at me, revealing a bearded face mottled with red veins and eyeballs as yellow as butter.
Greasy flecks of black hair poked out from beneath the hood like spider legs.
I recoiled slightly. He stared up at me, and his bleary eyes seemed to focus slightly.
‘Do I know you?’ he said.
‘No.’
The man shook his head, confused. ‘You put me away once?’
‘Not that I remember,’ I said.
He stared at me for a few seconds longer, still trying to work out whether I was a real figure from his past or just a stranger overlaid with a ghost. Then he looked down at the photograph I was holding, which showed the wedding ring on the necklace.
He nodded slowly to himself.
‘Yeah, I know him.’
‘Okay,’ I said.
I waited some more, but he didn’t volunteer anything.
‘And?’ I said. ‘What about a name?’
‘Fifty.’
‘That’s a weird name. Parents are cruel, right?’
‘I meant –’
‘I know what you meant.’
I looked around. Just outside the entrance, the flames were crackling louder than before.
I had that same impression that something was waiting down here in the shadows.
The pressure felt like it had gone up a notch.
I wanted out of here; my forehead was suddenly damp.
But instead, I reached into my back pocket for my wallet, and tried to smile.
‘You do receipts?’