Mumtaz was thirsty. She was hungry too, but that need was not as urgent as the one she had for water. Also, hearing water lapping about down below somewhere was torture. She knew she was high above it and that reaching it, as in throwing herself down into it, probably meant she would die. But wasn’t that going to happen anyway?

  She’d heard nothing except the lapping of the water and could see only complete blackness. At least if she launched herself into whatever was below, she might have a chance of survival.

  Had whoever had thrown her inside this place meant her to tumble into the void? No one, as far as she knew, had come to check on her. Perhaps they thought she was already dead? Her head hurt like hell and felt sticky as if it had bled. Maybe if, against all her instincts, she called out or screamed or something, then someone would come and perhaps she could overpower them? Could she? Really?

  Although she couldn’t see herself, she knew she was bruised all over – and with her legs hanging over the void, how could she stand? For all she knew this empty space could be like a moat and almost completely surround her. Even if someone did come with a light of some sort, how could she get up on her dead, damaged legs quickly enough to be able to run?

  ‘Do you hold with Scottish independence, boy?’ Fitzy asked.

  Now on only his second pint, he appeared to be more pissed than the other men who were onto, Jordan reckoned, their fifth. Or was he just stereotyping Fitzy’s behaviour because he was Scottish?

  ‘I don’t do politics,’ Jordan said.

  Fitzy playfully punched his shoulder. ‘Everyone does politics, pal,’ he said. ‘Just by living you’re doing politics, ya ken?’

  Jordan said nothing but one of the other blokes called over, ‘Ah go back to Jock-land then, you fucking twat! Go back if you don’t like it here!’

  ‘Don’t worry I will!’ Fitzy roared.

  ‘So fuck off now then!’

  The other men laughed. Fitzy took another gulp of cider and then leant to one side to take a sip from a hidden hip flask.

  ‘Fucking English,’ he muttered.

  The other men were joined by a couple of women, also cider drinkers. Pissed before they arrived, they smelt of damp and old fags. Spotting Jordan, the older of the two said, ‘Tasty!’

  They all laughed. Jordan wasn’t going to get the measure of this place by hanging out with these people. All hard drinkers, if not alcoholics, they were lost in their own subculture of addiction. Where they drank was irrelevant – or so it seemed.

  Fitzy helped himself to more of Jordan’s tobacco and said, ‘Look at them old slappers there!’

  Jordan said nothing. If the women were indeed on the game there was probably a good reason.

  ‘Sort of scum you get in here,’ Fitzy said as he lit up.

  ‘So why’d you come here?’ Jordan asked.

  Fitzy clearly didn’t like these people and they didn’t like him.

  He looked at his glass. Yes, the cider was cheap and if you didn’t mind that it tasted like a chemistry set, that was probably good enough …

  Fitzy shook his head. ‘It’s open early,’ he said. ‘When you’ve had a night in a hostel you need an early drink.’

  Jordan nodded his head. He knew what some of them were like. A load of men trying to rub along together while some of them screamed, wanked and fought each other. No wonder so many chose the street.

  Then a woman came into the beer garden who didn’t look like the others. In late middle age, she wore a stylish white angora coat, high leather boots and mirrored sunglasses. All the men, including Fitzy, raised their glasses to her. After a moment taken bathing in their adulation, she said to Jordan, ‘Give us a moment, will you please, dear.’

  Her voice was as posh as her clothes.

  He said, ‘A moment to …’

  ‘Fuck off,’ the woman snarled. ‘This isn’t a place for the likes of you, boy.’

  Jordan felt cold. Fitzy leant across the table and said, ‘You’d best hop on, boy. She’s right, this ain’t no place for you, not now.’

  Once outside, he closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. He was in a corridor. Dank and damp, it felt as if it was near water, which made some sense. Narrow and squat, the passageway was made of stone and, as he walked tentatively along it, lights came on automatically. The floor was made of earth which mercifully made no sound as he trod on it.

  Where was he? All the places he’d been to under the house before had possessed walls dressed with plaster and some of them had windows, albeit high up. His dad had hinted to him that the place was bigger than he thought.

  He’d told him, ‘You can hide an army down here.’

  Which was exactly what they wanted to do.

  He’d been to the Shrine. They’d taken him there but he didn’t know where it was. That had no windows that he could remember, so maybe this was somewhere near there. Weirdly he didn’t feel afraid. Even with the knowledge of what they could be capable of – he just wasn’t. Even though he knew his dad wouldn’t save him.

  It wasn’t until he remembered what the old man had once said about the tunnels that he began to feel anxious.

  He’d told him, ‘They’re older than the cathedral. There’s layers too. The deepest British level, the Roman, mediaeval, them the Inquisition used, the ones what Wren put in. Go deep into the earth they do, deep and wide. Some of them lead onto other tunnels and chambers and some do not. Some lead nowhere, just to death.’

  It almost made him turn back, that memory, but what would that achieve? Nothing, and if he didn’t try what would that make him? Like them? And besides, if he was down there, maybe there were others and maybe they might know more about this place than he did.

  He jogged to the end of the corridor and found himself at the T-junction. Now left or right?

  He heard a cough back down the corridor he’d just jogged along and plumped for left. The lights on the walls went out as he moved onwards, switching off behind him.

  FOURTEEN

  Lee recognised Dillon Connor immediately. Plonking oranges into plastic bowls beside an Asian guy doing the same with onions. If anyone was in charge it was an older white bloke who was serving a woman on a mobility scooter. To see such a stall inside a shopping centre, placed in front of a couple of empty shops, wasn’t uncommon these days. Who except the big chain stores could afford to rent out these big and expensive units? Boots the chemist had a place in the Heathway, plus some phone shops and cheap clothes outlets, but that was about it.

  So here, as Gary had predicted, was Dillon’s benefit fraud. If indeed he was claiming Income Support. Lee had to remember that Gary was furious with his brother and with good cause. The scrote was shagging his missus, a woman Gary clearly loved.

  Lee wandered into Percy Ingle’s the baker’s and ordered tea and a bun. Just outside the shopping centre, it allowed him to keep an eye on the stall. He sat down.

  Where was Mumtaz and what was she doing? Was she hurt? Missing adults were always a problem for the law. To some extent adults had to be free to disappear if they wanted to. That was still, in spite of the proliferation of CCTV and the ubiquity of mobile phone connectivity, a corner stone of a democratic system. But it had its problems. And there were practical implications. A lot of adults went missing every year. Many were found and many were not. Did the police even have the resources these days to find everyone?

  The sound of an enraged female voice outside lifted him from his reverie. He looked out of the window and saw an older, bleached-blonde woman shouting at the bloke who ran Dillon’s stall. He could hear her yelling, ‘Why should he bother to help you out if you don’t fucking pay him?’

  The bloke said something Lee couldn’t hear. Then the woman said to Dillon, ‘You’re a fucking mug, you are! You let him mug you off, you only got yourself to blame!’

  And then she stomped off towards Boots.

  Lee looked around at the other coffee and tea drinkers sitting down in Ingle’s. They’d all watched the ‘show’ outside. One of them, an elderly man, raised his eyes up to heaven and then muttered, ‘Scumbags.’

  A large middle-aged woman laughed and then said, ‘Never was a family so wrongly named!’

  Several other people laughed. It was only later that Lee learnt what that meant.

  It was a relief to be getting away from The Jolly Sailor. Replaced by two ‘proper’ CID officers, Jordan Whittington walked to Bermondsey Tube Station and made his way back to Bishopsgate. He’d not heard anything about Colin Macbeth. The posh woman in the angora coat had taken a couple of the homeless men away with her when she left the pub. Jordan caught that she was giving them some sort of casual work.

  He’d settled down to write his report when DS Melina Pinker slipped into the chair next to his and said, ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘It’s mainly a sports pub,’ Jordan said. There had been four big TV screens around the large single-pub bar – all off when he’d visited.

  ‘So what did you see?’

  ‘A few homeless men,’ he said. ‘Early doors alcoholics by the look of them. Some woman about sixty took a couple of them off to do something. Don’t know for sure if it was paid work. She was hostile to me.’

  ‘Did she threaten you?’

  ‘No,’ Jordan said. ‘But she didn’t look like the sort you’d like to cross.’

  ‘Reckon it was because you’re black?’ Pinker asked.

  ‘Could be.’ He shrugged. ‘Then again maybe not. Maybe it was just because I was a new face. As I said, she took some men somewhere and they seemed eager to go. I’m assuming she was paying them …’

  ‘Possible benefit fraud,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jordan said. ‘But if Macbeth drinks there, I think it’s safe to say he’s not that fussed about quality beer or mixing with the polite middle classes. The Jolly Sailor is a straightforward, plain ordinary bloke’s pub. Nothing wrong with that, my granddad likes places like that. But what he doesn’t like is a boozer that is heavily scarred by numerous fights and uncomfortable due to neglect. And The Jolly Sailor is both of those things.’

  Hidden around a corner and stationary now, he heard the old man go into the room they’d kept him in and then come out again. He heard him say ‘Fuck’. Holding his breath, he listened for footsteps he knew he wouldn’t be able to hear and looked for the lights in the corridor he’d just come from to switch back on, but they didn’t. He left what he felt was a long time before he allowed himself to peep around the corner. As soon as he did so, the light came on behind him and he could see a short distance in front of him. It looked as if the old man had gone. Probably to report back that he had escaped. That wouldn’t go well for the old git. Good. He hoped they chopped his fucking fingers off.

  He turned back and began to walk along this new corridor. Dank and hot, like the one he’d just left, there were little pools of water on the dirt floor. In places it looked as if the stone walls were oozing sweat. When he got to the end of the corridor there was no choice but to go down a series of stone steps and so he descended. It was hotter and even more cramped down there and this time he was presented with three ways forward. He was about to plump for the corridor in the middle when he heard the sound of crying, coming from his left.

  Wilko had given him an out and so he didn’t have to do it. But George Feldman was intrigued – and concerned. Something was deeply amiss at the heart of the capital and he wanted to know what it was. The child’s death had made a statement. Now that needed translation.

  Over the years he had discussed the many ways in which the history of the city might lie in wait for the unwary underneath its streets, the blood that every year soaked further and further into the substrate, all but disappearing. But losing none of its power.

  Now at last, or so it seemed, there was something he could do. But it was risky. That said, he had given his word to Wilko straight away and now he was committed. It was Wilko’s belief that a network of tunnels and chambers honeycombed the underground city. Places concealed by time, hidden from builders of modern structures and Tube lines.

  A long time ago, when he’d been a child living with his siblings and his parents in the Temple precinct, he’d had several experiences in the basement of their building that he, even now, found hard to explain. In those days his mother hadn’t had a washing machine of her own. An old twin-tub, used by all the families resident in their building, was down in the basement. Sometimes George would accompany his mother to the washing machine and occasionally she’d meet another woman down there. They would talk, leaving George to explore the basement on his own. Even now he remembered the noises he heard down there. Creaks and whispers, groans like those of the damned, wind howling through empty chambers …

  He’d never forgotten it. He’d also never forgotten how he’d tried to tell his mother about it and she’d told him not to ‘say mad things’. Only once had she explained, when she’d said to him, ‘People like us can’t talk about things like that, it’s dangerous.’ What she’d meant, he still didn’t really know, but he could still recall how his skin had crawled afterwards.

  The left-hand tunnel was short but wide. He had to bow his head to avoid scraping his skull on the vaulted roof. Again, there were lights set into the walls. As he passed along towards an end he couldn’t see, the crying became louder. What other poor sod did they have down here? What sort of state would they be in when he found them? The crying ceased.

  He stopped for a moment. Although his feet made no noise, his heart was pounding so fast he could hardly hear himself think. When he stopped, it slowed. He listened for the crying. But it didn’t reappear. Rather it was replaced by a snuffling and whimpering sound. It wasn’t far away. He held his breath …

  Lack of oxygen burnt the back of his throat and his tongue felt thick and dry. He was just about to gag when he heard that the whimper came from the right. From the first, maybe the second door on his right. He moved soundlessly forward and turned the handle of the first door. It opened into utter blackness.

  There always had been and probably always would be ‘those’ families. Given to loud altercations, dodgy motors and a bit of light violence, everywhere had one of ‘those’ families. In reality a big, largely poor place, like Dagenham, probably had a few. The Saints, however, were quite exceptional.

  Originating in south London, Pat Saint had moved to Dagenham in the eighties as a single mother of four. She’d moved to the Heathway and taken up residence in a house behind the shopping centre. A bit of a ‘goer’ by all accounts, she’d been a regular at several of the local pubs, which was where she’d met Gary Connor’s dad, Jim. Entranced by her apparently very obvious charms back in the day, Jim had even taken on her kids in order to be with her. Then she’d got pregnant with Dillon and Jim had left Gary’s mum. He’d died some years later, leaving Gary and his brother Mick to try and persuade Pat not to let Dillon run wild. They’d failed. Then Pat’s eldest son Ryan had come back home to live with his mum and a full-scale problem family had evolved. Apparently, or so the locals told Lee Arnold, when Pat wasn’t getting drunk and shagging local men, Ryan was nicking their motors. Dillon was, so far, mainly into petty crime and benefit fraud. No wonder Gary was so worried about Fallon and Harrison.

  And what about Danielle Saint, the girl who lived with the brief in EC4? Same name, and she came from Dagenham. What were the odds? And Lee hadn’t believed her. Mumtaz was sometimes disorganised but she was always accurate, and so if she’d written ‘Danielle’ and ‘Saint’ on a post-it there had to have been a reason.

  The old man he’d been speaking to said, ‘You after the Saints, are you?’

  Lee said that he wasn’t. He’d just been interested in the shouting woman he’d seen outside.

  ‘Course it’s only Pat’s lot that are like that,’ the old man continued. ‘The others are alright.’

  ‘The others?’

  ‘Only reason Pat got to be here when she left her first husband was because her Rodney lived here.’

  ‘Her Rodney?’

  ‘Her brother,’ he said. ‘Married a local girl and the council give them a house. Rodney’s quite a different kettle of fish, quiet and that. I reckon he was pissed off as anyone when Pat moved here too.’

  ‘This Rodney,’ Lee asked, ‘he have any kids, does he?’

  The old man smiled. ‘You are sniffing around, ain’t you son?’ he said. ‘Not that I care. If you manage to get rid of Pat and her boys I’ll buy you a pint. He’s got girls, has Rodney. Five.’

  There was a gasp.

  He could see nothing and so he fumbled beside the door for a light switch. Left side first then the right, where he found something. He flicked it downwards.

  She gasped again, the woman sitting on the floor. It was a large room and he could hear water. The woman, who had long black hair, was shielding her eyes.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  He could now see she was sitting with her legs over the side of something. He said, ‘John.’

  Tentatively, at first, she took her hand away from her eyes. She was dark, maybe even Asian. She was shaking. What had they done to her?

  ‘Why are you …’

  ‘No, why are you here?’ the woman said. ‘If you mean to kill me …’

  ‘No!’

  She jumped at his vehemence.

  ‘No,’ he said more calmly. ‘I’m not like them.’

  ‘Like who?’ she said.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

  Her eyes were now accustomed to the light and she looked straight at him, saying nothing.

  Eventually John closed the door behind him and said, ‘You’re sitting on something. What is it?’

  She looked down.

  ‘There’s water at the bottom,’ she said.