Staffe looks across the Attlee estate, can see into the flats on the Bevin’s lower decks, opposite. It’s where they had found Bobo Bogdanovic last year, hoisted from the neck by his foes. People die all the time in these blocks and anything sinister usually crosses Staffe’s path. No matter what he does, the harm that man wreaks on man still comes. But you can save one life. In his time, he has done more than that. He counts back. But sometimes, the closer you get, the more damage you can do.
Josie knocks again and a shadow scrolls across the
living-room
window. They each take a fraction of a step back.
‘Robert Hutchison?’ says Staffe as the door opens.
‘I’ve done nothing. Don’t owe nothing neither.’ He is wearing jeans and his chest is bare.
Josie shows her card, says, ‘Can we come in?’
‘It’s late. I’ve got company.’
‘Emily?’
Hutchison’s eyes flit and he takes a step out, even though he is barefoot. ‘No. It’s not. She fucked off.’
‘With your baby?’
‘Rob!’ calls a woman, distant within the flat.
‘Where is Emily?’ hisses Hutchison, pulling the door almost closed as he steps fully onto the deck.
‘Was it your baby, Rob?’ says Staffe.
‘The fuck you want?’
‘Did she go of her own accord?’ says Josie.
‘Look. I never done nothing to that girl. She was carrying my baby for fuck’s sake and she said fuck all, she just left one day and then I never saw her. I reported her missing. I done all the right things.’
‘Was she going to keep the baby, Rob?’ says Josie.
The door opens and a woman in velour bottoms and a grey bra appears behind Hutchison. ‘What baby?’
‘Fuck off,’ says Hutchison. He turns round and snarls, in the woman’s face, ‘Just fuck off, go on.’ He steps back into the flat and says to Staffe, ‘I said I’d marry her. I would tomorrow.’ In the light of the flat, Josie can see he is a handsome man with fine features and expensively cut, mod hair. He’s
skinny-rib
and his jeans are crazily low, showing tufts of hair, the hollow indent of his loins.
His latest girl looks him up and down as she brushes past, the top of her velour trackie under her arm.
They go inside and sit down and Hutchison runs through the last days he spent with Emily Mae Bagshot. He swears blind he hasn’t seen her since the fifteenth of July 2008 and he doesn’t know she had ever signed up to not follow through with the birth. Josie asks him about the two visits Emily had made to the City Royal’s antenatal unit – as verified by his own statement in the missing-persons file.
‘I’d have gone – like a shot – but she never wanted me to.’
‘Was she looking forward to the birth?’
‘Mostly.’ Hutchison stands, goes into a cupboard and pulls out a framed photograph. ‘That’s her. Something else, eh?’
Josie takes the photograph: a beautiful girl with almond eyes and a shock of honey-coloured, ringlet hair, smiling the broadest smile, straight into camera. ‘She was going to get rid, wasn’t she, Rob?’
He shrugs. ‘She was messed up. She was cool and then she wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I loved her, but she’d have been fuck-all use as a mother. I’d have brought the baby up. I told her that. I love kids.’
‘More than the mother?’ says Staffe.
‘What do you mean?’ Hutchison looks up, stares Staffe in the eye. ‘Hey! Not like that. I’d never have forced her, fuck me, not like that poor cow they found the other week.’ He sits down. He talks to the floor. ‘Jesus. It’s not one of them. It can’t be. Not Emily.’
‘Tell me about her appointments at the hospital. She went to City Royal,’ says Staffe.
‘I didn’t go.’ His voice cracks as the ends of his words fail. ‘The first time, she liked it. I remember. She came home and she was buzzing. It was a good day, for her. She didn’t always have good days. You think she’s all right, don’t you?’
‘What did Emily say about the hospital?’ says Staffe.
‘She said the nurse was nice to her.’ Hutchison wrings his hands, frowns, searching for the memory. ‘She sat there.’ He turns to Josie. ‘Where you are now. She’d been worried about going, said she felt ashamed.’
‘So she was going to end it.’
‘Like I said, she couldn’t make her mind up, but this nurse made her feel like what she was doing would be all right.’
‘Did she say anything else about the nurse?’
‘Said she was pretty.’ Hutchison smiles to himself, lost in a good thought. ‘She always said when she thought a girl was pretty. She was like that. And she knew her.’
‘Knew her! What was her name?’
Hutchison shrugs. ‘They weren’t mates or nothing.’
‘Try to remember.’
‘I can remember, exactly. Emily said, “I’m sure I know her.” I asked her where from and she said she didn’t want to talk about it. She was dog tired. Simple as.’
Staffe stands, whispers something to Josie and goes into the hallway.
‘What you doing?’ says Hutchison.
‘I have to make a call.’
‘Oh, my God,’ says Hutchison. He leans forward and his shoulders twitch. ‘You think they took her? You think she’s down there?’
‘I don’t know, Rob,’ says Staffe. ‘DC Chancellor’s going to ask you some questions, about Emily. We’ll do whatever we can to find her.’
Staffe steps out, calls Jombaugh, who says he’ll get hold of forensics, and Staffe gives him Asquith’s number, tells him to get the underground historian down there, pronto. And then he asks Jombaugh to get hold of Pulford. He says, ‘Tell him to check the nurses’ rota for the days and shifts when Bagshot had her appointments. Tell him to look for a Nurse Delahunty. Eve Delahunty.’
*
Pulford sits in a steel-framed chair and feels the knots in his lower back tighten. It is well past midnight and there are only a couple of nurses here. The duty sister quite literally groaned when he said he needed to see the files of a patient going back three years. But she had gone off, wearily, checking in on beds along the ward as she went.
He watches her come back, pausing by a bed with a blonde, smiling nurse he recognises from when Baby Grace was in her pod, struggling for life. As she approaches him, the sister shakes her head. ‘No record of her being here. Are you sure she didn’t transfer to another clinic? They often do. This is such a big place. Not everybody’s cup of tea.’ She manages a smile, but soon remembers who she is.
Pulford refers to his notes. ‘Emily Bagshot. She came here on the sixth of June, and again on the fifteenth of July – 2008.’
‘That’s odd. We went computerised way before then and there’s nothing on file. She
must
have transferred to another clinic.’
‘There’s no birth registered.’
‘That’s sad, but it happens all the time,’ says the sister.
There is no need to tell her about Emily going missing. Instead, he says, ‘I’d like to know who was on duty the afternoon of the fifteenth of July 2008. Can you show me the rosters?’
‘Why?’ The sister looks at him warily.
‘We’ll need to talk to the staff – see if their memory is better than the computer.’
Which makes the sister smile. ‘You know we have three and a half thousand births a year here. I’ll get the roster up, but then you’ll have to come back when we have more cover if you want to talk to the nurses. That’s if they’re still here.’
As they go, the blonde nurse smiles at Pulford. Her teeth are good and her eyes sparkle. She closes one of them, slowly, and makes Pulford laugh. As he goes, he half turns, catches her looking him up and down. It brightens his night.
In the sister’s office, the overhead lights fizz and the computer screen glows. Her office faces onto the Victorian bricks of Raven Lane. It is a skyless aspect and he wonders how long the staff might go without seeing natural light.
‘Duty sister was Underwood. She’s gone. Nurses Redpath and Gilligan are gone, too.’ She clicks onto another screen. ‘But Stafford’s still here. She’s on tonight, actually.’
‘Is she blonde?’
‘I can’t spare her. Like I said, you’ll have to come back. And there’s Nurse Delahunty, too. That’s it.’
‘Eve Delahunty?’
‘Yes. How do you know her?’
‘From the Baby Grace case.’
‘Aaah yes. She got attached to that one.’ The sister shakes her head, suddenly looking stern. ‘I’ll show you out.’
*
Staffe takes his final step down the ladders into the Smithfield tunnel. Unlike the last time he was here, the tunnel is ferociously lit, revealing a cavern that had been intended as a passenger hall. Within fifty yards or so, the cavern forks into two separate conduits.
Staffe stands at the confluence of the two tunnels, walks backwards towards the entrance, looking left and right. The entrance curves round towards the bottom of the ladders and you can barely see into the left-hand tunnel. Kerry was found in the right.
From the left, emerging from their blind spot, a group of SOC officers in white, disposable overalls march into view. The gang on the right are following the historian, Asquith. As soon as he sees Staffe, Asquith tacks an extra clip to his stride, holds his hand aloft, as if this is his world, Staffe merely a guest.
Staffe looks beyond Asquith, into the brilliantly lit, carved tubes, going nowhere. The Victorians had cut into London’s clay these perfect cylinders – except at the bottom, where they had carved shelves for the two platforms and below that, troughs to take the rails, except you can see now that they are not perfect, on account of what Asquith had called Quaternary river terrace deposits. This is the sand and gravel from the course of the Thames, and it rendered this tunnel unstable. Elsewhere, in this part of the network, they would cut and cover.
Kerry Degg had been at the end of the right-hand platform and the detritus from the birth had been recovered further along, up what Asquith called a service spur.
Now, in this light, it seems perfectly plausible, and not quite so inhumane, to be tended down here, but Staffe reminds himself of that first scene he discovered, when Kerry had bitten almost clean through her lip. And he begins to wonder where the hell they might have put Emily Bagshot.
Asquith says, ‘I’ve taken them every navigable yard of the system and there’s nothing.’
‘Are you sure? What about the spurs, where we found the placenta.’
‘Am I sure?’ says Asquith, pulling his beard. He looks at Staffe, quite nonplussed. ‘Am I sure? Do you have any idea how much research I have conducted since our last trip? I have spoken with the London Transport in-house historian. I have consulted with engineers at Imperial College. I have
cross-checked
the mappings of the water, gas and electric companies, and the cable communications cartographers.’ His eyes sparkle and his lips are wet with his passion for this subterranea. Above, the tunnel roof glistens with percolating moisture. ‘I know this place. I know this place like nobody else alive.’
A strange phrase, thinks Staffe.
Asquith takes a step closer. Behind him, the SOCOs are packing away. A light shuts down and the electric fizz goes down a notch. Kerry’s tunnel goes back to black.
Staffe feels a chill jag through his blood.
Asquith whispers passionately, up close now so Staffe gets a gust of the bearded man’s supper, ‘Is there another woman? Were we looking for a body?’
‘Mind your own damn business.’
‘You invited me to make this my business. I’m part of this.’
‘What made you come down here the night we found Kerry Degg?’
‘
I
found her.’
‘What
exactly
made you come?’
‘I had planned the visit for months.’
‘You had no permissions. What if you had discovered something of value? That would be theft, as well as trespass.’
‘You’re not proposing to betray me, Inspector?’
‘Answer me. Why that night?’
Asquith looks away.
‘You had seen somebody coming down here, hadn’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Was it a man?’
‘I’ve told you.’
‘How about a nurse?’
He shakes his head.
‘Which tunnel did you go down?’
Asquith turns, says, ‘The left.’
To his back, Staffe asks Asquith, ‘And did you hear anything? Anything at all?’
Asquith doesn’t move, nor does he say anything.
Staffe taps him on the shoulder.
Asquith spins round, smiling and tapping his ear. ‘Sorry. A little hard of hearing.’
‘You saw nothing down here?’
Asquith shakes his head.
‘You wouldn’t want to obstruct the truth. You’re an historian, for crying out loud.’
Which makes Asquith smile. ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of. And as for obstruction, my actions have been quite the reverse.’ He holds his head high and walks away, towards the constable at the bottom of the ladder. As he gets to the uniformed officer, he has to pause, waiting for somebody else, descending the ladder.
‘Don’t talk to him!’ shouts Staffe. Asquith and Nick Absolom stand just feet apart. Each of them looks bemused and as Asquith climbs, Absolom approaches Staffe,
wide-eyed
, like a child in the grotto of all grottoes. He looks around in wonder, says, ‘How could this be here and nobody know?’
‘I’ve done my bit, Absolom,’ says Staffe. ‘Now, you tell me what you know.’
‘We have our deal? Can I take photographs?’
‘No.’
‘Who was that I just passed? He looked weird, but not a suspect, right?’
‘You’re here. Nobody else.’ Staffe is uneasy about this pact he has made with the devil’s own, but he has a pro quo in mind, so extends his arm with a sweep and points the way to the tunnels. ‘You can have a look round. I’ll even show you the spot we found Kerry Degg. Now, what is it you said you could tell me?’
Absolom says, ‘I’ve had contact from Lesley Crawford.’
‘I knew it,’ says Staffe. ‘She’d been in touch when we were at the Sean Degg scene.’
‘And since. She saved another baby, in 2008. The mother and baby survived.’
‘My God,’ says Staffe. ‘How do you know she’s not bullshitting just to get this bill of Vernon Short’s resurrected?’
‘The mother is Emily Bagshot.’