Authors: Wendy Percival
33
Esme stared, unable to move. A figure climbed out of the car. So this was Leonard Nicholson. Had to be. Although she could see the similarities to the police’s picture, he was different from the image she had formed in her mind. She’d envisaged a rough, coarse individual, which clearly this man was not. He was slight, almost fragile. She recalled Mary referring to him as a gentleman, a concept at which Esme had scoffed. Now she understood why Mary had described him that way, even if his conduct didn’t warrant the label.
What should she do? Confrontation, while satisfying an urge within her, was not the wisest move. Irrespective of whether she would be risking physical injury – she had to remind herself of Elizabeth’s circumstances – it made more sense to keep Gemma’s predicament in mind and hope that he might lead them to her. But she couldn’t chance making a call on her mobile to summon assistance until he was out of earshot, and if she stayed back too long she might lose him. Already he was he was moving quickly away across the rough grass. In a few seconds he would be out of sight.
She started after him. If she could just hang on to his route long enough to determine in which direction he was going, she could make her call and the inspector’s team could take over. She stumbled over the tufts of grass, cowering low so as not to attract his attention while trying desperately to keep him in view. But she was losing ground.
Just as she was debating whether it would be more effective to stop and make the call, a particularly large and slippery clump of grass defeated her. She lost her balance and rolled off it, turning her ankle. With a groan of frustration she went down. She put her hand out to stop her fall but instead of the rough grass her fingers felt the roughness of a rusting metal grid. It gave way under the pressure of her hand and she found herself tumbling into some sort of void. She plunged into an empty blackness. She landed with a thud, losing all sense of orientation.
For a moment all she could hear was the echoing of her attempts at gasping for air. She slowed her breathing and when she was able she held her breath, listening. She was in some sort of chamber. She heard the drip, drip of water coming from what she realised was the roof of the tunnel. She must have fallen down one of the ventilation shafts. A musty, rotting smell accosted her nose. She felt sick.
She tried to sit up. Her back and right hip felt bruised but there were no acute stabs of pain. Hopefully that meant nothing was broken. It was utterly dark around her. She couldn’t see anything but liquid black. She reached out and touched something. She flinched and withdrew her hand. It felt wet and slimy.
She blinked. Slowly the light from above began to penetrate the blackness. Her eyes adjusted little by little and she looked up. She could make out the roof of the tunnel above her, around the narrow shaft down which she had fallen. Slowly she scanned down the wall. Her eyes fell on the object beside her. The shape compelled her attention. Even in half-light she knew that she was looking at a body.
Suddenly someone started screaming, deafening and out of control. Esme put her hands over her ears to cut out the terrifying sound. Then she realised who was screaming. She was.
*
Lucy sat in the car, absently tapping her mobile phone against her chin. Occasionally she looked over her shoulder to see if Esme was coming into view. Surely she should have come back by now. What was she doing? Should she ring her? Lucy glanced at her watch. She’d spoken to her not three minutes ago. Esme would only complain that Lucy was overreacting.
She sighed. She still thought it was mad to go wandering around where they thought Leonard Nicholson might be holding Gemma, but once Esme had got something into her head, Lucy knew from experience that it was all but impossible to steer her on a different course.
She had already defended Esme’s actions to the inspector on the phone, as far as she could. Though from what she had heard in the background, the inspector was more furious with someone else than he was with Esme. Something to do with not making the proper checks at the exchange, which meant that they were unaware of the call diversion facility that Esme had on her line.
Lucy took another glance over her shoulder. It was eerily quiet. The clouds were still hanging heavy overhead threatening to discharge a hefty shower at any moment. It created a menacing light which heightened Lucy’s disquiet. She opened the door of the car and stepped outside. She slowly made her way towards the direction Esme had taken. She stopped when she reached the top of the rise and scanned the distant landscape. Nothing.
She tried to stay rational. From her first leaving the car, it had been a good fifteen minutes before Esme had phoned to say she had reached the end of the tunnel and that the wall had been breached. She had said she was going to look around before she came back. Lucy reminded herself that if she had done that, she wouldn’t be on her way back for at least another five minutes, assuming she’d only had a brief look around, and Lucy wouldn’t be able to see her coming for at least another ten. She was being over-anxious.
She didn’t convince herself, though.
She knew why Esme had felt the need to go in search of Gemma. It was partly because she felt it was her fault that Gemma was in this terrifying position and partly because of her past demons. When Esme’s husband Tim had been killed, it had been Esme who had found the body. Lucy prayed that the current crisis wouldn’t result in a similar tragedy. Esme might not recover from such a horrifying experience a second time around.
And although Lucy told herself that one quick phone call to Esme’s mobile would resolve her anxieties she found she couldn’t make the call. She knew she was being weak. She wasn’t really deterred by the fact that Esme might moan at her for fretting unnecessarily. She was terrified that by telephoning she would discover that her worst fears were confirmed.
34
Lucy realised that she was gently rocking back and forth when the sound of fast-approaching cars startled her. She turned her head, terrified at what she would see. A convoy of patrol vehicles came hurtling on to the wasteland along with a posse of other unmarked, presumably police, cars. It was a relief not to be alone any longer.
She saw Inspector Barry emerge from an unmarked car and she made her way over to him. ‘Any sign of Mrs Quentin, yet?’ asked the inspector as she came into earshot.
Lucy shook her head. She lifted an arm and pointed down the canal route. ‘She went off in that direction. That’s where the tunnel entrance is.’
The inspector turned and began directing members of his team. Lucy watched as two officers headed off with reassuring urgency along the empty canal. The inspector turned back towards Lucy but before he could say anything, his mobile phone began ringing. He reached in his inside pocket and snapped it open.
‘Barry,’ he barked.
Lucy studied his face, trying to discern something from his expression. He gave a couple of instinctive curt nods as he listened, then abruptly severed the call.
‘You say Mrs Quentin’s got her phone on her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Call her. She needs to get back here.’
*
When she managed to stop screaming, Esme sat shivering, partly from the cold and damp and partly from shock. After steadying her breathing she forced herself a sideways glance at the body. It took all her strength and determination to focus long enough for her eyes to become accustomed to the gloom.
There was no way of telling whether it was Gemma. It was too dark to make it out properly and it was wrapped in plastic sheeting of some kind. It had been tied tightly, though there wasn’t enough light to see detail. She supposed that that would be to stop the whole thing from coming loose while it was being transported. She certainly had no intention of unravelling it to look further.
When they lifted the sheet for her to formally identify Tim it had been a devastating experience. It had taken many years before she was able to cope with the memory. But now the demons were threatening to take over. What hope was there now for her sanity if she looked beneath the shroud?
She turned away. How had it come to this? Gemma had never wanted her to go digging about in Elizabeth’s past but Esme had ignored her because of her own overwhelming need for answers. Why should the need to know become so dangerous? Such danger existed if one was investigating serious crime or corrupt government officialdom in unstable countries, as she and Tim had proved. But this time all she had been doing was looking into Elizabeth’s family history.
She took a deep breath and tried to stand up, deliberately looking away from the terrifying shape beside her. She looked up towards the shaft. It wasn’t so far up, which explained why she hadn’t broken any bones, but it would be another thing all together to climb out. Her only way out was to let someone know she was here. She was about to start shouting when she remembered her phone. Would she get a signal though? She got an immediate answer to her question. As she took it out of her pocket it rang.
She felt a moment’s panic as a thought occurred to her. She’d re-routed her landline to this number. Was it Leonard Nicholson phoning to discuss their next move? What had she done? Just when she should be at home with the police nearby co-ordinating Gemma’s rescue she had gone off on a wild-goose chase. Had her impulsive actions caused Gemma’s death and scuppered hope of her own safe rescue? Or was he playing with them, having disposed of Gemma already?
Before she had time to consider how to deal with what he had to say, she stabbed the receive button. She had to believe that Gemma was still alive.
‘Hello?’ she croaked.
Silence. She brought the phone round to look at the illuminated screen. The bars which indicated reception levels were fluctuating between one and completely dead. She stuck the instrument back on her ear again.
‘Hello?’ she called desperately. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Leonard Nicholson’s voice.
Esme froze. The voice hadn’t come from the phone. It was behind her.
*
Lucy clicked off her mobile phone and looked up at the Inspector. ‘I can’t reach her. It just keeps switching to voice mail.’
‘There’s probably no signal. She must be in a dead area.’
Lucy winced at the description. ‘Well she wouldn’t have switched it off. Where could she be? I spoke to her all right earlier on.’
‘Sir!’
The inspector looked round and headed over to join his colleagues, who were huddled over a map laid out on the bonnet of one of the vehicles. Lucy climbed out of her car and walked across to join them. As she approached, two officers hurried away, shouting instructions to other policemen in the car park.
‘What’s happening?’ Lucy asked the inspector.
‘The tunnel looked as though it had been breached, you said?’
‘Yes, but she promised she wouldn’t go down there.’ She looked up, her eyes wide. ‘You think she’s followed him into the tunnel?’
The inspector sighed. ‘It’s possible, if she thought he’d lead her to Miss Holland. His car’s been sighted, so it’s likely he’s in the area. But we would have seen him if he’d gone in the tunnel at the north end. Unless there’s another way in. A maintenance entrance, perhaps.’
‘British Waterways might know, if anyone does.’
The policeman nodded. ‘We’ve already spoken to them. They’re trying to find someone who can help us.’ He fished out a packet of chewing-gum from his pocket, unwrapped a stick and put it in his mouth.
‘Mrs Quentin is understandably distressed by Gemma’s disappearance,’ he said, chewing thoughtfully, ‘but it’s not the usual course of action to go off in hot pursuit. Not in my experience, anyway.’
‘No,’ agreed Lucy. ‘I thought she was over all that.’
‘Oh?’
Lucy hesitated. It seemed to be betraying a confidence but then in reality it wasn’t. It was a fact. ‘She used to be in journalism. The investigative sort – unearthing the unpalatable, that sort of thing. Her husband was Timothy Quentin.’
The inspector frowned then slowly nodded. ‘I thought her surname rang a bell. Haven’t seen his name around for years.’
Lucy stared out across the bleak landscape. ‘You wouldn’t have. He died.’
‘Ah.’
‘Killed. In the line of duty, you might say. Esme was caught up in it all, too.’
She glanced sideways. He was looking at her, perhaps aware that she had more to add. She shivered. ‘Esme always maintained that they would have killed her too if there hadn’t been some sort of disturbance nearby. They obviously decided it was time to get out. They made a run for it but not before slashing Esme’s face.’
‘And her husband?’
‘They implied they’d already caught up with Tim. She went looking for him but it was too late.’
They stood in mutual contemplation. Lucy focused on the straw-like quality of the couch grass on the edge of the bank in front of her and tried to blank out the horrors of Esme’s past, whilst willing for them not to recur somewhere below her.
The inspector’s phone rang. He snapped it open.
‘Barry?’
He grunted something back and put the phone back in his pocket. He turned to Lucy.
‘They’re ready. They’re going into the tunnel.’
35
Esme slowly turned her head and looked over her shoulder. There was a dim light about two or three yards further down the tunnel and she could just make out a figure in the gloom. There was no mistaking the voice.
‘Well, well, what have we here?’
Esme twisted round. ‘What have you done with Gemma?’ she demanded, with more self-assurance than she was feeling. She drew some comfort at the sound of her voice echoing around the cavernous space. She felt as though she was taking control, however false the illusion.
Nicholson started to move towards her, the light source, a battered old lantern, strangely incongruous against the suit he was wearing, swinging ahead of him and creating disturbing shapes on the pitted walls of the tunnel. ‘It’s most kind of you to come and bring the cash with you so promptly.’
Esme was alarmed by his statement and the cool assumption implied within it. He was clearly deranged if he seriously believed it to be as simple as that. How could she even begin to convince him otherwise?
The flickering light continued to move relentlessly towards her. ‘I don’t hear you, Mrs Quentin. That was our arrangement, was it not?’
‘Not our arrangement, only your demands. There’s a difference.’ Esme backed away slightly and considered her options. She wouldn’t get six feet in the dark if she tried to make a run for it. The tunnel hadn’t been in operation for years. The canal bottom would be covered with the debris of neglect, not to mention a thick layer of mud. Hardly ideal for an effective escape. She glanced around for a potential weapon to defend herself but could see nothing in the blackness.
‘You have caused me a great deal of trouble, Mrs Quentin,’ said the ever-closer voice. ‘Because of your flagrant interference you have deprived me of my birthright. You now have to pay for that error of judgement. It’s a question of justice.’
‘What birthright?’ Esme watched him warily, aware that her heart was pounding in her chest. He was coming into focus now.
‘It was my inheritance and she tried to trick me.’
‘Who?’ Was this another of his delusions?
‘She told me she was dying. She said it would all come to me, but she lied. Like they all do.’ He stopped in front of her and held up the lamp. It emphasised his gaunt features, giving his face a grotesque quality. His smile was a grinning skull in the shadows. ‘But I had the last laugh, didn’t I?’
Esme’s insides jolted. He was talking about Daisy, had to be. In her concern for Gemma the suspicion of Leonard Nicholson’s involvement in Daisy’s death had slipped from the forefront of her mind. She stared into his face, afraid to move. So her assumptions had been right. What else could he mean by having the last laugh? She was staring at Daisy’s killer. She felt giddy.
‘What do you mean?’ whispered Esme. She imagined Daisy trying to catch her breath and the man in front of her pulling her life-saving oxygen out of reach. She shuddered.
He flicked his head up. ‘Catherine, of course. She thought she’d been so clever.’ His eyes glared. ‘No matter. You’re here to put things right.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t understand,’ suggested Esme. Perhaps she could keep him talking. But for how long? No one knew where she was. She had gone blundering into danger again, as usual. Would she never learn?
Leonard glowered at her. ‘She knew all right. They’re all the same. They tell you something but they lie.’
‘Who? I don’t understand what you’re talking about.’
He sneered at her. ‘And you, Mrs Quentin, are you to be trusted or are you the same as the rest of them?’
‘The rest of them?’
He looked straight into her eyes. ‘Women, Mrs Quentin. Are you another lying, cheating bitch like the rest your sex?’
Esme held his stare, her distaste for him increasing by the second along with her anxiety. She thought of the many nannies and nursemaids who, Albert had said, had left because of Leonard’s insufferable behaviour. She was being subjected to the damaged legacy that such events had left behind. Rationality was not going to defuse this situation. Comprehension of the reality of her situation gripped her insides and turned them to water.
‘Of course you are,’ Leonard continued when she didn’t answer. ‘You have already shown your true colours, haven’t you? You interfered.’ His voice was rising now. He took a step towards her.
Esme shrunk back. ‘I don’t know what you mean?’
‘The old lady was about to sign, but you made her change her mind.’ He was pointing an accusing finger at her. ‘I have been cruelly deprived of what was due to me and you prevented her from restoring that justice.’
Esme’s disgust and fury finally empowered her. ‘Justice? By blackmailing a vulnerable elderly lady? What sort of justice is that? You’re just a self-centred little shit and, from what I hear, you always have been.’
His face erupted into a mass of scarlet. For a moment Esme thought he might physically explode. She took a tentative step backwards. If he dropped the lamp she might evade him in the darkness. If he held on to it he would be hampered. Even if he attacked her maybe she could fight him off. He couldn’t be very strong, slightly built as he was, and she was no lady weakened by illness, as Daisy has been. Yet she didn’t underestimate the significance of his emotional state. If her own anger gave her strength then the rage she could read in his face could arouse a force she’d rather not test.
Turning suddenly she darted away from him and ran blindly out of the lantern’s pool of light, to one side of where he stood. She calculated that if she then circled back behind him she might disorientate him enough to give herself time to reach the tunnel’s entrance. If the police had removed more of the bricks there might be enough light coming through to guide her way.
But her optimism was short-lived. Instead it was exactly as she’d feared. She had run no more than ten yards when her legs became caught in a tangle of wire. She went crashing to the ground.
She felt him run up behind her. His hands seize the back of her jacket and with surprising strength he dragged her up on to her knees. He pushed his face into hers.
He forced the words out slowly, one at a time, as though they caused him pain.
‘If I say justice, that’s what it is.’
Esme swung her arm round as hard as she could and aimed for anything she thought was within hitting distance. She made contact with his lamp-carrying arm and the light sailed through the air.
She was gasping for breath now, the anxiety and the exertion taking its toll. She sensed that he was still near and she struggled to her feet. She could hear his vicious words and she scrambled in the opposite direction from the sound.
Then suddenly there was light. And noise. Shouting and hurried footsteps. Esme winced against the sudden radiance which all but blinded her and she put up her arm to shade her eyes. People surged past her.
Someone grabbed her arm and she flinched.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Quentin? It’s Sergeant Morris. You’re safe now.’
Esme felt suddenly weak. She grasped his sleeve.
‘Down there,’ she said, pointing in the general direction behind her. ‘There’s a…’ She swallowed. ‘It looks like a body.’
‘It’s not Gemma,’ said the policeman. ‘Gemma is fine. We found her in Nicholson’s car boot.’
‘Thank God.’ Esme slumped against the policeman.
‘Now, let’s get you out of here.’
As she was led out of the tunnel she shivered at the thought of the unidentified body lying a few yards away behind her. Whose body was this? The inspector had mentioned to her that they were keen to question Leonard about a missing person. She recalled Albert saying that Leonard had been into drugs and…what was his last comment? And worse.
Esme shuddered. She hadn’t stopped to think at the time what he’d meant by it. She hadn’t expected their paths to cross.
If the victim was connected to Leonard Nicholson and he had dumped the body here, work to restore the canal would have led to its discovery. No wonder he wanted to know how the project was progressing. It all made sense now.