Chameleon - A City of London Thriller (23 page)

“
Right, then.
Let’s get this gate open and get out of this wind.”

Trevor fiddled
with the lock for a minute before declaring, “Someone has changed
the padlock. I can’t get in. We’ll have to go down the side
entrance if you don’t mind, sir.”

Barry shivered
as he pushed his hands deep into his old Crombie overcoat. The
woollen scarf around his neck was offering some protection from the
cold, but his face was almost numb. They reached the side
entrance.

“
Bloody hell!
The lock’s been changed here as well. You know, I bet those idiots
in maintenance have put the wrong padlocks on the station doors. I
wouldn’t mind betting that if we went to Temple we’d find the
Strand padlocks on the wrong gates.” The man paused as he placed
the keys back in his pockets. “I hope you don’t mind tight spaces,”
he said, leading him back the way they had come.

Barry huddled
into his coat and followed Trevor to the Aldwych and the old fire
exit door.

“
Hoo-bloody-ray!” the Transport for London operative hooted
loudly as the door opened. The two men entered and began to descend
the narrow stairway to the platform level. A faint but rather
unpleasant aroma met them on the breeze.

“
What’s that
smell?” Barry asked, turning his nose up.

“
Buggered if
I know,” the old underground worker responded. “It smells like
yesterday’s barbeque.”

Trevor Deacon
took a long hard look at the door leading to the rail line. Signs
of recent burning were all too obvious. Kids, he thought to
himself.

***

Barry didn’t
like fieldwork at the best of times, and if his career had not been
at risk he would never have entered this pit of a staircase. He was
panicking in a way he had never done before, and only his pride
prevented him from screaming out, demanding to be freed from this
claustrophobic hell.

Trevor took
his time opening the door and the pungent, rancid smell reached
their noses even more strongly, but not before the charred remains
of Tim came into sight.

“
My God, is
that Tim? Is he dead?” Barry spluttered uselessly.

“
Hang on,
I’ll check for a pulse.” The older man leaned closer to the body
that looked more like a charcoal sculpture than a human
body.

“
You’re
joking surely?” Barry exclaimed.

“
Of course I
am, you prat!” All respect had disappeared from his voice. Norman
leaned forward, being careful not to touch anything. “Did your man
wear a Rolex?”

“
Yes, an
Oyster, I believe. Why?”

“
Well, good
news there, then.” There was a pause. “It’s still
working.”

***

Twenty minutes
later the tunnel was filled with bodies, all alive except for Tim,
whose metal service tags had survived the incineration. There were
representatives from the Transport Police, Transport for London,
the Health and Safety Executive and an MI5 duty officer.

Barry had
tried fruitlessly to rein things in, to keep the lid on this, but
Trevor Deacon was having none of it. This was his problem, even if
the dead man was some fried spook who had evidently been wandering
around where he shouldn’t have been.

The HSE man
was clearly in charge, and the police were following his
instructions. He wandered over to Barry, who was sitting on the
edge of the platform, his legs dangling over the rail.

“
Here’s the
thing, Mr Mitchinson. Your boy has undoubtedly been cooked by
several hundred volts, but the line is not presently live.” The
tall thin HSE inspector took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge
of his nose. Using his spectacles to point in the direction of the
rails at the entrance of the tunnel, he continued.

“
The bar -
the one you see there - well, that bar prevents anyone from making
the line live inadvertently. So, given that it’s in place now, the
only possibility is that someone replaced it after your man died.
No current can have passed though the line with that bar in
place.”

“
What does
that mean, exactly?” Barry asked, fearful of the answer.

“
It means
that this may no longer be an HSE matter. It may be a police
matter. I think your friend there was murdered.”

Chapter
3
2

MI5
Headquarters, Thames House, London. Wednesday, 11am.

Barry
Mitchinson had been in the office since seven in the morning and he
was flagging already. The beta blockers weren’t helping his panic
attacks, and the more of them he took, the edgier he seemed to
become. Reaching into the bottom of his movable pedestal drawers,
he lifted out a new bottle of No.7 Sour Mash Whiskey all the way
from Lynchburg, Tennessee. He splashed a generous serving into a
disposable plastic cup from the water cooler, and stashed the
bottle again.

Looking at his
monitor, he watched with disgust as rodents crawled over the face
of a prostrate body, eating their fill.

***

It had been
almost midnight when he had managed to usher out the last of the
police, the HSE and other sundry interfering busybodies from the
Strand station platform. Left alone, he ascended the spiral
staircase to the ground level lobby and lifted the old wooden cover
from the abandoned lift shaft. There was nothing to see. It was
pitch dark in the shaft, and the expected smell was thankfully
absent.

If Gil Davis
really was down there, as Tim had claimed, she would have been dead
for no more than a few hours; the odours of decomposition would, no
doubt, follow later. There was a rattle as the padlock on the
shutters was cut off and the cage shutters rolled aside.

Two men from
Technical Services entered the lobby and closed the shutter behind
them. The first nodded to Barry and the second spoke.

“
We have the
equipment. Do you mind if we measure up first?” he asked more
politely than was necessary, given Barry’s precarious position in
the service as of tonight.

“
Do as you
wish. Let’s just get on with it.”

The two
technicians measured the opening and marked the dimensions down in
a yellow covered flip over pad, much like a policeman’s notebook.
They spoke between themselves.

“
It’s a
standard diameter, so a cast Iron cover will do. We’ll have a ring
around the top, and the manhole cover in the middle will be hinged
to allow access. Might as well put some hydraulics on it to make it
easy to lift.”

The older man
addressed Barry, who was staring blankly into space. “Does that
sound OK, Guv?”

“
Whatever it
takes to seal it off, I don’t really care. Can we get the camera
down there now?”

Slightly
annoyed at the perceived lack of appreciation for their attending a
dusty old tube station in the middle of the night, the older
technician produced what looked like an oversized metal attaché
case. The body of the case was black but the reinforced edges were
brushed aluminium. Setting the case down and unclasping the two
metal restraints, the Technician opened the case to reveal what
looked like a professional photographer’s camera case but with a
five and a half inch colour monitor built into the lid.

The case was
split into two longitudinal compartments; the camera and cable were
closest to the lid and the transformers and lens adapters closest
to the front of the case.

“
Seth, we
need the battery and the extra cable out of the box, please,” the
technician noted.

The younger
man, Seth, quickly extracted the cable and what looked like a car
battery from the pull along trolley they had brought in with them,
and within a few short minutes the camera was sliding down the
seventy-feet-deep shaft.

Once the
camera hit the bottom, Victor, the older technician, switched on
the camera. After a few seconds of fuzzy lines and then pixilation,
the picture steadied.

“
OK, Seth. Up
about a foot.”

The young man
lifted the camera cable as requested. “Right, Guv, I’m putting on
the active light. This only illuminates the immediate area,
especially in the pitch darkness, OK?”

Barry nodded,
too tired and demoralised to speak. He just knew that there would
be no body down there and that Gil Davis was already out of the
country.

“
Bugger me!”
Victor flinched as he said it, and looked at Barry, who was
transfixed at the awful scene.

***

Sitting back
in his chair, Barry swigged the last of the whiskey and crumpled
the cup before discarding it in a recycling bin. Throwing a stick
of Trebor gum into his mouth to mask the smell of the alcohol, he
watched the final moments of the DVD the technicians had recorded
last night.

There in
extreme wide angle was a body; it was broadly in profile but it was
definitely a body. The body had a coat, a scarf and gloves, as one
would expect on a cold day. The hair was long and fair, loosely
styled as a woman would wear it. The camera zoomed into the face
but there was little to see. One at a time rats would crawl up onto
the exposed skin, bury their sharp incisors into the flesh, tear
off a strip and run away to enjoy their meal.

Obviously no
one could say that this was definitely Gil Davis, but the corpse
had her build and was wearing her style of dress. The hair colour
was a rough match, given the poor video quality, and who else was
going to be down there? It looked very much as if Tim had done his
job and then got himself killed on the way out. Never mind. He
hadn’t been much use, anyway.

Barry was
contemplating one more drink to calm his agitation when the phone
rang. It was the Director himself; no PA this time.

“
My office.
Now!” he demanded, his voice betraying barely concealed
anger.

Barry took the
DVD and his written report, and hurried towards the
elevator.

***

The holiday
flight had left on time from a very quiet Newcastle Airport. The
charter flight, operated by a well known holiday company, was
code-sharing the route with another household name from the travel
industry. Holidaymakers from two of Europe’s largest tour operators
mingled in the concourse, dressed in a variety of tee shirts,
denims and football shirts. They were all dressed for sunnier
climes, as the temperature outside the glass atrium was only
fractionally above zero.

Gil had no
problems checking in using the Gold Class desk. There was no-one
ahead of her and she was ushered through quickly. Her seat was on
the aisle and was the equivalent of a business class seat on a
scheduled airline. The seat was pale tan leather with ample legroom
and a good one hundred and thirty five degree recline. Her TV
screen was around ten inches across and boasted an enviable range
of movies, games and TV on demand. The one fly in the ointment was
her immediate neighbour, John from Sunderland.

“
You aren’t
from Sunderland, are you, bonnie lass? I can tell. I can always
spot a Mackem girl.”

Gil smiled in
pretended comprehension. She had barely understood a word of the
man’s statement, concealed as it was behind an unfathomable accent.
John was well into his life story when the plane took off. He was
just getting to the ‘exciting part’ where he joined the National
Coal Board as a welder, whilst playing trumpet in a dance band,
when the plane left the ground and John was silenced. He went
several shades of grey before his sallow complexion settled on
white. His knuckles were bloodless as he gripped the seat with an
intensity that suggested he would never let it go.

The man was in
his sixties and seemed gentle enough. Gil placed her left hand on
his right hand and gave it a gentle squeeze in an effort to comfort
him. He looked at her, his lips set in a straight line. She smiled
back and told him that he could relax; there was nothing to worry
about.

Taking
advantage of the sudden silence, she clamped her Bose noise
reduction headphones around her head and over her ears, where she
would keep them for the duration of the flight.

Whilst the
sunshine beckoned and the beaches on offer on this package holiday
appeared clean and white, Gil knew that she would not be sampling
them. Their island destination was simply a staging point for the
remainder of her journey, but she did have forty eight hours to
play with before her next flight, and so she thought she might just
top up her tan.

She smiled to
herself, wondering what the reaction of the holiday rep would be
when one of their guests missed the welcome brunch, disappeared
from the hotel and failed to make the return flight next
week.

***

The door to
the director’s outer office was closed, but the slider confirmed
that the director was ‘available’. Barry tapped on the door and
opened it. Immediately in front of him to the left sat Maureen
Lassiter. Directly ahead of him was the open door which led to the
Director’s inner sanctum, overlooking the river.

Barry looked
at Maureen, tight lipped. She flicked her eyes to the left,
indicating that the director was waiting and there was no time for
small talk, or even so much as a cursory greeting. The bespectacled
underling stepped forward and into the boss’s office with all of
the trepidation of Daniel entering the lion’s den, except that
Daniel had known that God would save him. Barry had no such high
hopes for deity stepping in on his behalf.