Dead Man's Footsteps (6 page)

11 SEPTEMBER 2001

Ronnie hurried down West Broadway, crossing Murray Street, Park Place, then Barclay Street. The World Trade Center was right in front of him now, on the far side of Vesey Street, the two silver monoliths rising sheer into the sky. The smells from the fire were much stronger and sheets of curled, burning paper were floating in the air, while debris tumbled down and smashed to the ground.

Through the dense black smoke he could see crimson, as if the tower was bleeding. Then flashes of bright orange. Flames.  Jesus, he thought, feeling a terrible dark fear in his gut.  This cannot be happening.

People were staggering out of the entrance, looking dazed, staring upwards, men in sharp shirts and ties without jackets, some on their mobiles. For a second he watched an attractive young brunette in a power suit stumbling along with only one shoe on. She suddenly clamped her hands to her head, looking pained, as if a falling object had just struck her, and he saw a trickle of blood run down her cheek.

He hesitated. It didn’t look safe to go any further. But he needed that meeting, needed it so desperately badly.  Just have to chance it, he thought.  Run like hell.  He coughed, the smoke pricking his throat, and stepped off the sidewalk. The kerb was higher than he realized and, as the wheels of his case bumped down, the handle twisted in his hand and his briefcase fell off.

Shit! Don’t do this to me.

Then, just as he ducked down and grabbed the handle of his briefcase, he heard the scream of a jet aircraft.

He looked up again. And could not believe his eyes. A split second later, before he had time to register intelligibly what he was seeing, came an explosion. A metallic thunderclap boom, like two cosmic dustbins colliding. A sound that seemed to echo in his brain and to go on echoing, rumbling around out of control inside his skull until he wanted to stick his fingers in his ears to stop it, to choke it. Then he felt the shockwave. Felt it shuffling every single atom in his body.

A massive ball of orange flames, showering diamanté sparks and black smoke, erupted from near the top of the South Tower. For one fleeting instant he was struck dumb by the sheer beauty of that sight: the contrast of colours – the orange, the black – stark against the rich blue of the sky.

It seemed as if a million, billion feathers were floating in the air around the flames, drifting unhurriedly towards the ground. All in slow motion.

Then the reality slammed into him.

Slabs of wood, glass, chairs, desks, phones, filing cabinets were bouncing, shattering, on the ground in front of him. A police car pulled up, just past him, doors opening before it had even stopped. A mere hundred yards or so to his right, along Vesey Street, what at first looked like a burning flying saucer dropped with a massive clanging sound, smashing a deep crater, then bounced, shedding parts of its covering and innards, spraying out flames. When it finally lay still it continued to burn fiercely.

To his utter numb horror, Ronnie realized that it was a jet aircraft engine.

That this was the South Tower.

Donald Hatcook’s office was here. The eighty-seventh floor. He tried to count upwards.

Two planes.

Donald’s office. By his quick estimate, Donald’s office was right where it hit.

What the hell is happening? Oh, Jesus Christ, what the hell is going on?

He stared at the burning engine. Could feel the heat. Saw the cops run forward from their car.

Ronnie’s brain was telling him there wasn’t going to be any meeting. But he tried to ignore it. His brain was wrong. His eyes were wrong. Somehow he would still make that meeting. He needed to keep going.  Keep going. You can make the meeting. You can still make the meeting. YOU NEED THAT FUCKING MEETING!

And another part of his brain was telling him that while one plane hitting the Twin Towers was an accident, two was something else. Two was badly not right.

Propelled by absolute desperation, he gripped his bag handle and walked forward determinedly.

Seconds later he heard a dull thud, like a sack of potatoes falling. He felt a wet slap on his face. Then he saw something white and ragged roll across the ground towards him and stop inches from his feet. It was a human arm. Something wet was sliding down his cheek. He shot his hand up to his face and his fingers touched liquid. He looked at them and saw they were smeared in blood.

His stomach heaved liked wet cement in a mixer. He turned away and threw up his breakfast where he stood, almost oblivious to another thud only a few feet away. Sirens wailed, sirens from the pit of hell. Sirens from all around. Everywhere. Then another thud, another spatter on his face and hands.

He looked up. Flames and smoke and ant-like figures and sheet glass and a man, in shirtsleeves and trousers, tumbling in free fall from the sky. One shoe came away, flipping over and over. He watched it all the way down, end-over-end-over-end-over-end. People the size of toy soldiers and debris, indistinguishable from each other at first, were raining from the sky.

He just stood and stared. A set of postage stamps he had once traded, commemorating the Dutch painter Bosch’s vision of death and hell, came into his mind. That’s what this was. Hell.

The foul choking air was thick with noise now. Screams, sirens, cries, the overhead chop of helicopter blades. Police and fire officers were running towards the buildings. A fire truck bearing the words ‘Ladder 12’ pulled up in front of him, blocking his view. He moved around the far side of it as helmeted firemen poured out and broke into a run.

There was another thud. Ronnie saw a plump man in a suit land on his back and explode.

He threw up again, swaying giddily, then dropped to one knee, covering his face with his hands, and stayed there for some moments, shaking. He closed his eyes, as if somehow that would make everything go away. Then he turned in a sudden panic that someone had taken his bag and his briefcase. But they were there, right behind him. His smart fake Louis Vuitton briefcase. Not that anyone was going to care at this moment who the hell had made it. Or whether it was fake or real.

After some minutes, Ronnie pulled himself together and stood up. He spat several times, trying to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth. Then a flash of anger turned in seconds to a burning rage inside him.  Why today? Why not some other fucking day? Why did this have to happen today?

He saw a stream of people, some of them covered in white dust, some bleeding, walking slowly, as if in a trance, out of the entrance of the North Tower. Then he heard the distant  honk-honk-honk  of another fire engine. Then another. And another. Someone in front of him was holding a video camera.

News, he thought.  Television. Stupid bloody Lorraine would be panicking if she saw this. She panicked over everything. If there was a pile-up on a motorway she would instantly call to make sure he was all right, even when she must have known, if she’d only thought about it, that he couldn’t have been within a hundred miles of it.

He pulled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled her number. There was a sharp beep, then the message on the display:

Network busy.

He tried again, twice more, then put the phone back in his pocket.

He would come to realize just a little while later, when he reflected on it, how lucky he was that his call did not get through.

OCTOBER 2007

You are meant to be bloody luminous!  In the pitch, bitumen-black darkness, Abby brought her watch right up to her face, until she felt the cold steel and glass against her nose, and still she could not see a damned thing.

I paid money for a luminous watch, damn you!

Curled up on the hard floor, she had a feeling she might have slept, but she had no idea for how long. Was it day or night?

Her muscles felt as if they had seized and her arm was dead. She swung it through the air, trying to shake circulation back into it. It was like a lead weight. She crawled a couple of feet and swung it again, then winced in pain as it struck the side of the lift with a dull  boom.

‘Hello!’ she croaked.

She banged again, then again and again.

Felt the lift swaying at her exertion.

Banged again. Again. Again.

Felt the urge to pee once more. One boot was already full. The reek of stale urine was growing stronger. Her mouth was parched. She closed her eyes, then opened them again, brought the watch up close until she could feel the coldness on her nose. But still she couldn’t see it.

Squirming in sudden panic, she wondered if she could have gone blind.

What the hell time was it? When she had last looked, before the lights went out, it had been 3.08 a.m. Some time after then she had peed into her boot. Or at least as best she could in the darkness.

She had felt better then and had been able to think clearly. Now the need to pee was muzzing her thoughts again. She tried to push the desire from her mind. Some years ago she had watched a documentary on television about people who had survived disasters. A young woman her own age had been one of the few survivors from an aircraft that had crash-landed and caught fire. The woman reckoned she had lived because she kept calm when everyone else was panicking, had thought logically, figured out through the smoke and darkness which way the exit was.

The same theme had been echoed by all the other survivors. Keeping calm, thinking clearly. That was what you had to do.

Easier said than done.

They had exit doors on planes. And stewardesses with  Stepford Wives  expressions who pointed out the exits and held up orange life jackets and tugged at oxygen masks, as if they were addressing a convention of mentally retarded deaf mutes on every flight. England was a bloody nanny state now, so why hadn’t they passed a law ensuring that every lift had a stewardess on board? Why didn’t you find a robotic blonde standing inside each time you entered, handing you a laminated card that told you where the doors were? Giving you an orange life jacket in case the lift got flooded while you were in it? Waving oxygen masks in your face?

Suddenly she heard a sharp beep-beep.

Her phone!

She fumbled for her handbag. Light spilled out of it. Her phone was working! There was a signal! And, of course, there was a clock on the phone – she had totally forgotten about in her panic!

She pulled it out and stared at it. On the display were the words:

New message.

Barely able to contain her excitement, she clicked it open.

She did not recognize the number. The message read:

I know where you are.

OCTOBER 2007

Roy Grace shivered. Although he had on thick jeans, a heavy-knit pullover and lined boots under his paper suit, the damp inside the storm drain and the rain outside were getting into his bones.

The SOCOs and search officers, who had the unpleasant task of checking every inch of the drain, mostly on their hands and knees, had so far found a few rodent skeletons, but nothing of interest. Either the dead woman’s clothing had been removed before she was deposited here, or it had been washed away, rotted or even taken for animals’ nests. Working painstakingly slowly with trowels, Joan Major and Frazer Theobald were scraping away the silt around the pelvis, bagging and tagging each layer of dirt separately in neat cellophane bags. They would be another two or three hours at this rate, Grace estimated.

And all the time he was drawn back to the grinning skull. The sensation that Sandy’s spirit was here with him.  Could it really be you?  he wondered, staring hard. Every medium he had been to in the past nine years had told him that his wife was not in the spirit world. Which meant she was still alive – if he believed them. But none had been able to say where she was.

A chill fluttered through him. This time it was not the cold, but something else. He had determined a while ago to find closure and move forward with his life. But each time he tried, something happened that sowed doubt in him, and it was happening again now.

The crackle of his radio phone startled him out of his reverie. He held it to his ear with a curt, ‘Roy Grace?’

‘Morning, Roy. Your career going down the drain, is it?’ Then he heard Norman Potting’s throaty chuckle.

‘Very funny, Norman. Where are you?’

‘With the scene guard. Want me to get togged up and come down?’

‘No, I’ll come to you – meet me in the SOCO van.’

Grace welcomed the excuse to get away for a bit. He wasn’t strictly needed here and could easily have gone back to his office, but he liked his team to see him leading from the front. If they were having to spend their Saturday inside a dank, horrible drain, at least they could see his day wasn’t any better.

It was a relief to shut the door on the elements and sit down on the soft upholstery at the work table in the van. Even if it meant being confined in a small area with Norman Potting – never an experience he relished. He could smell the stale pipe smoke coming off the man’s clothes, mixed with a strong reminder of last night’s garlic.

Detective Sergeant Norman Potting had a narrow, rather rubbery face criss-crossed with broken veins, protruding lips and a thinning comb-over, part of which, at this moment was sticking bolt upright, having been blasted by the elements. He was fifty-three, although those who particularly disliked him spread rumours that he had knocked several years off his age so he could stay in the force longer, because he was terrified of retirement.

Grace had never seen Potting without a tie and this morning was no exception. The man was wearing a long, wet anorak with duffel tags over a tweed jacket, Viyella shirt and a fraying green knitted tie, grey flannel trousers and stout brogues. With a wheezing sound, he eased himself behind the table, on to the bench seat opposite Grace, then plonked down a large, dripping-wet cellophane folder, looking triumphant.

‘Why do people always pick such bleedin’ awful places to get murdered or dumped in?’ he said, leaning forward and exhaling directly into Roy’s face.

Trying not to wince as a blast furnace of hot and rancid smells enveloped him, Roy decided that this was probably what being breathed on by a dragon would be like. ‘Maybe you should draw up some guidelines,’ he said testily. ‘A fifty-point code of practice for murder victims to abide by.’

Subtlety had never been Norman Potting’s strong point and it took him a moment now to realize that the Detective Superintendent was being sarcastic. Then he broke into a grin, showing a mouthful of stained, crooked teeth, like tombstones on subsiding ground.

He raised a finger. ‘I’m rather slow this morning, Roy. Had a bit of a night last night. Li was like a bloody tiger!’

Potting had recently ‘acquired’ a Thai bride and constantly regaled anyone in earshot with details of his new-found prowess in bed with her.

Heading off the subject rapidly, Grace pointed at the cellophane folder. ‘You got the plans?’

‘Four times last night, Roy! And she’s a dirty cow – do anything! Phoawwww! She makes me a very happy man!’

‘Good.’

For a brief moment, Grace actually felt pleased for him. Potting had never had a lot of luck in his love life. He was a veteran of three marriages, with several children he had once admitted, ruefully, that he rarely saw. The youngest was a girl with Down’s syndrome whom he had tried and failed to get custody of. He wasn’t a bad or a stupid person, Roy knew – he was a very competent detective – but he lacked the social skills essential to rising any higher in the force, should he want to. Still, Norman Potting was a solid and dependable workhorse, with sometimes surprising initiative, and those aspects of him were far more important in any major inquiry, in his view.

‘You should consider it yourself, Roy.’

‘Consider what?’

‘Getting a Thai bride. Hundreds of them gagging for an English husband. I’ll give you the website – they are bloody wonderful, I tell you. They cook, clean, do all your ironing, give you the best sex of your life – lovely little bodies—’

‘The plans?’ Grace said, ignoring the last remark.

‘Ah, yes.’

Potting shook several large photocopies of street maps, grids and section drawings out of the folder and spread them over the table. Some of them dated back to the nineteenth century.

Wind rocked the van. Outside, somewhere in the distance, an emergency service siren sounded and then faded away. The rain drummed steadily on the roof.

Plans had never been something that Roy found easy to follow, so he let Potting talk him through the complexities of Brighton and Hove’s drainage system, using the paperwork and briefing which had been given to him by a corporation engineer earlier this morning. The DS ran a grimy-nailed finger across, down, then up each of the drawings in turn, showing how the water ran, always downhill, eventually out into the sea.

Roy tried hard to keep up with him, but half an hour on he was little wiser than he had been before he started. It seemed to him that it all added up to the fact that the weight of the dead woman’s body had jammed her in the silt, while anything else would have been washed down the drain, into the trap and out to sea.

Potting concurred with him.

Grace’s phone rang again. Excusing himself, he answered it, and his heart immediately sank as he heard the dentist’s-drill voice of freshly appointed Detective Superintendent Cassian Pewe. The slimeball from the Met his boss had brought in to eat his lunch.

‘Hello, Roy,’ Pewe said. Even distanced by a phone connection, Grace had the impression that Pewe’s smug, pretty-boy face was pressed claustrophobically up against his own. ‘Alison Vosper suggested I give you a call – to see if you needed a hand.’

‘Well, that’s very kind of you, Cassian,’ he replied. ‘But no, actually, the body’s intact – I’ve got both of her hands here.’

There was a silence. Pewe made a sound like a man who has started to urinate against an electric fence. A kind of stilted laughter. ‘Oh, very funny, Roy,’ he patronized. Then, after an awkward silence, he added, ‘You’ve got all the SOCOs and search officers you need?’

Grace felt a band tighten inside him. Somehow he restrained himself from telling the man to go and find something else to do with his Saturday. ‘Thank you,’ he said instead.

‘Good. Alison will be pleased. I’ll let her know.’

‘Actually, I’ll let her know,’ Grace said. ‘If I need your help I will ask her, but at the moment we are all managing very well. And – I thought you weren’t actually starting until Monday.’

‘Oh, absolutely, Roy, that’s correct. Alison just felt that helping you out over the weekend might be a good way to get my eye in.’

‘I appreciate her concern,’ Grace managed to say before he hung up, boiling with rage.

‘Detective Superintendent Pewe?’ Potting asked him, with raised eyebrows.

‘You’ve met him?’

‘Aye, met him. Know his type. Give a pompous ass like him enough rope and he’ll hang himself. Never fails.’

‘Got any rope on you?’ Grace asked.