The Meating Room (27 page)

‘Anything, boss?’ Stan shouted from the shaft’s opening.

Gilchrist’s beam danced over concrete walls and columns, and into open doorways that seemed to lead from one empty space to another. The metallic rattle of Stan’s torch on the ladder’s rungs echoed around the basement as he worked his way down.

‘It’s some kind of bunker,’ Gilchrist said. ‘The barn’s been built over it.’

Then Stan was beside him, their beams lighting the immediate darkness but sinking into a distant blackness. ‘It’s bigger than the barn,’ Stan said. ‘And it doesn’t smell as bad down here.’

Gilchrist knew that the human olfactory system could stand only so much, and that their sense of smell had been obliterated by the strength of the stench. He remembered old Bert Mackie – Head of Forensic Medicine before Cooper took over – telling him that once you got past the initial hit, and your sense of smell was cooked, you just stayed with it until you completed the postmortems. Hell mend you if you took a break and a breath of fresh air, for when you returned to the job you had to go through the whole hellish process of becoming accustomed to the rotten guff again from scratch.

‘This way,’ he said, heading through one of the open doorways.

Dripping water echoed in the dank stillness. The sound of their shoes scratching the concrete floor and the feverish rush of their breath were amplified in the blackness, too.

‘What the hell is this?’ Stan said.

‘Could be an old bomb shelter from World War Two.’

Their torch beams sliced into walls of darkness, and Gilchrist could only guess at the size of the place. They stepped deeper into the labyrinth, scanning a series of small empty rooms either side. He could visualise families with sleeping bags and Primus stoves, wide-eyed children fearful of the night ahead, huddling together in the cold concrete units.

‘I think we should head back, boss.’

Gilchrist wanted to agree, but something kept pulling him on. He shone his torch into another room, and the light disappeared down a long corridor with even more doorways. It seemed as if they had discovered a concrete warren. For all he knew, it could run all the way to the cottage.

‘This reminds me of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur,’ Gilchrist said.

‘The one with the maze and the thread?’

‘Didn’t know you read Greek mythology, Stan.’

‘I read a lot of stuff,’ Stan said, ‘But I don’t like the thought that we won’t find our way back.’

Gilchrist turned, and shone his torch back to the ladder. But its beam settled into blackness. For one unsettling moment, it hit him that they really could lose their bearings down here, that if their torches failed they could stumble about in total darkness, completely disoriented. But his mind cast that aside as his gut told him they were going in the wrong direction, that they had walked too far into the underground maze. And it struck him, too, that despite the earlier assault on his sense of smell, the air seemed cleaner here, no longer thick on the tongue.

‘It’s not here,’ he said.

‘What’s not here?’

‘How does it smell to you?’

Stan turned his head to the left, then the right. ‘I can’t say, boss.’

They headed back in the general direction of the shaft. The room above was in total darkness, so the shaft offered not even a glimmer of light to assist them. But Gilchrist breathed a sigh of relief when their torch beams picked out the distant rungs of the metal ladder.

Stan strode towards it, but Gilchrist said, ‘The smell’s stronger over here.’

Stan responded by shining his torch in the same direction of Gilchrist’s beam, and together they entered another section of the warren. Gilchrist ducked his head as he passed through an open doorway into yet one more chamber. His instincts were telling him he was on the right path this time. The air seemed thicker, and not quite as cold.

‘Ah fuck,’ said Stan as his torch clattered to the floor, its beam spinning across the concrete. He bent down to pick it up, but even then the beam continued to quiver.

‘You all right, Stan?’

‘Boss . . .’

Gilchrist followed the line of Stan’s shivering beam as it settled on the metal legs of some kind of workbench, then rose from the floor to rest for a moment before shifting to the side.

Ice flashed through Gilchrist’s blood.

The shock forced him back a step, then another.

He stopped, struggled to stay upright.

His legs could be rubber, his lungs dried paper for all the good they were doing.

Then the moment passed, and he gasped, sucked in air, gripped his torch.

And shone it at the hellish scene before them.

Gilchrist tried to hold his torch beam steady, but his hands and fingers seemed to have developed a nervous system of their own. The figure . . . the
thing
, because that was what he was looking at – a thing that seemed part human, part alien – was hanging from a hook secured into the concrete ceiling.

Its glazed eyes stared at some point directly over Gilchrist’s head, as if it were interested in something beyond him. As he traced the beam down its length, he was struck by the strangest sensation that he was looking at a work of art, a sculpture of sorts, comprising body parts and metal wires and pieces of wood and cloth, which together formed a discernible human shape – a creature that seemed to be captured in the sculptor’s snapshot of life . . . or death.

A woman’s head sat atop a wire-meshed cage that resembled a skeletal frame covered in strips of skin that curled like dog-ears. Through the gaps in the skin, and beyond the metal mesh of ribs, Gilchrist could not mistake a ruddy lump of meat that had once been a beating heart. Beneath that, in a cavity of their own, coiled intestines lay like a sleeping nest of snakes. Arms stretched out both sides in scarecrow fashion, strips of skin frayed like tattered clothes, ending in wooden fingers tipped with human nails for claws. Lower, too, legs dressed in stripped skin for trousers, and shoeless feet of wire and toes of wood with toenails that glistened in the flickering beam.

Gilchrist was aware of Stan by his side, shocked into momentary silence, their torch beams frozen on the horrific figure before them.

‘Is it human, boss?’

An image of Amy McCulloch’s gutted and skinned body hit Gilchrist with a force that had him gripping his throat to avoid retching. He flashed his torch to the head, then down to the heart, the intestines, and along one leg to the full set of toenails that had been torn from a once-living human being. ‘She’s human,’ he said.

‘Who is she?’

Gilchrist flicked his beam back to the head to confirm that this was not Amy McCulloch, but some other poor soul whose life had been stolen.

So if this was not Amy McCulloch, then where was she?

He shone his beam to the side and gasped. ‘Jesus, Stan.’

Stan’s beam flickered alongside Gilchrist’s, forcing light into deeper recesses, and a row of concrete chambers that housed a series of individually wired figures, as if each were set in its own personal sarcophagus.

Stan was first to recover. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘We need to get this seen to.’ The light from his torch flickered around the walls of the chambers as he pulled out his mobile.

Now that the initial shock was past, Gilchrist’s instinctive curiosity overpowered all reservations and he stepped deeper into the catacombs. He counted six other figures and stopped at the first – a young woman with blue eyes glazed like icing and blonde hair as dry as straw. Within her wired body, her lungs and heart reflected his torch beam like the sheen from plastic. Intestines lay curled beneath a bloated ball of a stomach. Her blue fingernails reminded him of Janice Meechan’s bare foot dripping with rain.

Who was she? Was she a mother, a daughter, a sister? When was she killed? Had anyone even reported her missing?

‘Can’t get a signal, boss.’

Gilchrist pulled out his own mobile, but the concrete labyrinth was blocking any kind of signal. He was about to ask Stan for the camera when he cocked his head to the ceiling. ‘You hear that?’

Stan frowned as he shone his torch at the concrete roof. ‘Sounds like a motor.’

At first, Gilchrist thought Purvis must be making his escape in the BMW. But why would he do that when the Focus was parked in his driveway? As the logic tumbled into place, Gilchrist came to understand that the sound was not the revving engine of a top-of-the-range Beemer, but something much heavier, more industrial.

‘It’s the generator,’ he said.

‘Purvis knows we’re here?’

Gilchrist caught the alarm in Stan’s voice. ‘Someone does.’

‘We must have triggered something,’ Stan said. ‘Maybe there are webcams down here.’ He flashed his beam along the corners of the ceiling then walked towards the entry shaft. ‘Let’s go and get him before—’

‘Don’t, Stan.’

Stan stopped and swung his beam at Gilchrist.

‘If it’s Purvis, he’ll be armed. He’s got two shotguns and a rifle in that cottage.’ And God only knows what else, he wanted to say, and almost cursed his own stupidity. He should have insisted on a search warrant and seized the cache of arms before trying anything like this.

‘We can’t stay down here and do nothing, boss. What if he locks us in?’

Gilchrist saw that Stan had a point. But he also saw that Purvis was not someone who let loose ends lie around. He would not want two detectives sniffing around his underground graveyard. And Gilchrist came to see that if Purvis had caught them on a webcam he would know exactly how many were down here.

Would he lock them in and leave them to die?

Or would he flush them out like rats from a nest?

The noise from the generator gave Gilchrist his answer.

Purvis was going to switch on the lights and come down with a loaded shotgun. His criminal past spoke of a man who was not afraid to take on the law. He would do whatever was necessary to make sure he never spent time behind bars again – including killing two detectives, if he had to.

From somewhere overhead, the sound of a fan starting gave Gilchrist a jolt. He strained to hear footsteps in the barn above, but the concrete roof was as good a sound-damper as any. Even so, Gilchrist knew that he and Stan were running out of time.

He shone his beam over the bare concrete walls – there had to be a light source somewhere. But he could find no switches on the walls, or light bulbs hanging from the ceiling. Then the ringing clatter of metal on metal to his right warned him that someone was descending the ladder. He switched off his torch.

‘Lights out, Stan.’

Stan did as ordered.

A pitch blackness, thicker than any Gilchrist had experienced, descended on them with the suddenness of a guillotine chop. In the darkness, the heavy weight of the torch felt good. He slapped it into the palm of his hand. Not much of a weapon, but it was all they had.

Or maybe not.

‘Purvis is as blind as we are,’ Gilchrist whispered. ‘So we’ll wait until he switches on the lights, then surprise him.’ He tried to pull up what he could remember of the basement’s layout in his mind’s eye, and edged along a wall, his back against the cold concrete. Then he caught the leathery scrape of shoes on the floor. ‘Lift your feet, Stan. Don’t drag them.’

In the ensuing silence, Gilchrist heard the steady crunch of someone walking towards them – not creeping like they were, but striding with confidence, as if he knew every twist and turn of the labyrinth.

As if he could see in the dark.

And Gilchrist realised that the binoculars on the workbench in the barn were not binoculars at all, but night-vision goggles.

The footsteps stopped, and Purvis said, ‘Just look at the pair of you. Cowering in the corners.’

Gilchrist peered into the darkness, in the direction of the voice, but he was as good as blind. The footsteps shifted, shuffled on the concrete, crackling clumps of dust and fragments of stone. A bit more to his right, Gilchrist thought, but closer, too.

Then silence.

Gilchrist waited, his senses stretched as tight as wire.

Not a sound now, except the hard beating of his heart.

Gilchrist pushed to his feet, and stepped into the darkness. ‘You’re under arrest,’ he shouted, imagining Purvis facing him from about ten yards away.

He lifted his torch and clicked it on.

The beam lit up nothing but a concrete wall.

Stan got the message and clicked his torch on, too.

A cough from somewhere to their right had both beams flashing to the side, where they picked up Purvis smiling at them. The night-vision goggles were high on his forehead, and a shotgun was aimed straight at Gilchrist.

‘Okay, boys, down with the torches.’ Purvis shifted to the side and nudged the wall with his elbow. A switch clicked, and the place lit up like Blackpool Illuminations.

Gilchrist grunted and shielded his eyes.

‘On the ground.
Now
.’

‘We’re police officers,’ Stan said.

‘I know you are.’

‘We’ve already sent for back-up,’ Gilchrist tried.

Purvis chuckled. ‘The little bimbo who was shitting herself? Now you’ve really got me scared.’ He levelled the shotgun at Gilchrist’s face. ‘It makes no difference to me if you drop the torch when you’re alive or if I have to kick it out of your dead fingers.’ He gave a sideways nod at Stan. ‘And don’t you be getting any ideas, sonny. On the ground.’

Gilchrist forced all thoughts of rushing Purvis from his mind. The casual way he handled himself, the ease with which his muscles flexed, told him that he would not hesitate to fire at either or both of them before they took more than two steps. Gilchrist caught Stan’s eyes, gave the slightest nod, then released his torch and let it clatter to the ground.

He kicked it towards Purvis and it skittered across the floor.

Without a word, Purvis turned the shotgun on Stan.

Stan hesitated, then dropped his torch.

‘Kick it over here.’

Stan nudged it with his foot and it clattered towards Purvis.

‘Turn around, boys.’

Gilchrist resisted, and raised both his hands, palms up. ‘You can’t possibly get away with this. If we don’t report back to the Office within the next few minutes a team will be dispatched—’