The Meating Room (32 page)

‘Why would he do that?’

‘So the sick fuck doesn’t have to talk to us?’

‘Then he wouldn’t be able to tell us all about his new studio. He’s an egotistical psycho. He wants us to know what he’s going to do.’

‘Flat battery?’

‘Mhairi’s reliable,’ he said.

‘Not like some of us?’

Through the first room, the air thickened with the stench from the basement warren. In the second room, Gilchrist slid both legs into the shaft, found the rungs, and gripped the handrail.

‘I don’t think he’s in the cottage,’ he said.

‘Well, the car’s not moved. So where is he?’

‘That’s what we’re about to find out.’

The foul smell of the basement had Gilchrist covering his nose. He worked his way through the chambers to the lit main room. Magner was still cuffed to the workbench, but now conscious, with blistered eyes and a face that could have gone the full card with all contenders. He swung his free leg as Gilchrist entered the room, a weak attempt at a kick, and spat blood at Jessie as she followed.

‘Not so suave now, are we?’ she said.

‘Fuck you.’

She showed Magner her torch, and said, ‘Believe me, it won’t take much pissing me off to make me give you another one with this. So why don’t you shut it.’

Magner glared at her, but got the message.

Gilchrist reached the monitor, still set on the four views of the exterior of the cottage. Two quick clicks had him looking at the interior from four different angles. Then he brought up another quartet of interior images, only to confirm that the cottage was deserted.

He turned to Magner. ‘Where is he?’

Magner did his best to look confused.

Gilchrist was not up for beating the truth from the man. Instead, he clicked through the webcam images until he found what he was looking for – the screen that showed four doors within the basement warren.

The Ford Focus – still parked in the driveway – had sealed it for Gilchrist. Mhairi would not have parked her car anywhere near the cottage – Stan would have warned her about that – and Purvis could not risk being seen dragging a captive woman across the Scottish countryside.

So they still had to be on the property.

But not necessarily at ground level.

‘Where do these doors lead to?’ he asked Magner.

Silence.

Jessie stepped towards Magner, clenching the torch.

‘You can hit me all you like,’ Magner said to her, his words slurred through a broken jaw. ‘But I can’t answer something I don’t know.’ He spat another mouthful of blood at her.

‘Forget him, Jessie. I think I see which one.’

Jessie turned to the monitor and frowned. ‘They all look the same.’

‘But they’re not.’

Gilchrist stepped back and stared at the opening to the main room. Dim light from the entrance shaft gave him his bearings. The basement warren mirrored the rectangular barn above it – meaning that one axis pointed in the direction of the cottage, with the other at right-angles to it. He reasoned that as there were four doors, each had to exit in one of four directions, the four sides of the basement. His rationale also told him it was difficult enough to build an underground warren, without having to construct a maze leading from it. And what would be the point?

So, logically, only one of those doors led to the cottage.

He clicked on his torch, said, ‘This way,’ and stepped into the shadows.

Soon, they were stepping over blockwork rubble and rusted reinforcing bars, as if the contractor had left the structure unfinished. The steady drip of water seemed to surround them, and the walls glistened wet as they splashed through puddles. Gilchrist flashed the torch left and right, penetrating deeper into the maze, as they stepped from chamber to chamber.

‘What
is
this place?’ Jessie said. ‘Maybe it was constructed during the war. Some sort of bomb shelter?’

‘Bit big for a bomb shelter,’ Gilchrist said.

‘Are we anywhere near the Secret Bunker?’

Now opened to the public, the Secret Bunker had been constructed after World War Two to house the regional government in the event of a nuclear or biological attack. A guardhouse, constructed to resemble a farmhouse, was the main entrance to the reinforced-concrete subterranean control centre. It was not too much of a stretch to imagine this warren formed part of some similar government scheme.

‘We’re miles away from it,’ he said. ‘But who knows what the government got up to.’

Something scrabbled over stones in the dark to his left, and he swung his torch to reveal a wall crawling with rats big enough to take on cats. A crack in the concrete near the ceiling, caused by years of settlement, seemed to be the point of ingress. The exposure to an unexpected torch beam caused not even a ruffle of fur as the rats sniffed the air and brushed around and over each other, oblivious to Gilchrist’s presence.

‘I hate these things,’ Jessie said.

‘They eat them in the Far East.’

‘Remind me never to dine out there.’

‘But it makes sense now,’ Gilchrist said.

‘What does?’

‘The wire mesh in the sculptures. So the rats can’t eat the meat.’

‘Like squirrel-proof bird-feeders?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Fuck sake,’ Jessie said. ‘We anywhere near that door yet?’

Gilchrist directed his torch ahead, and thought he saw an end to the warren. ‘Getting close,’ he said.

They stepped through another opening, which seemed to be the last of the chambers, and shone their torches to the left, then the right. A narrow corridor peeled off to either side, each echoing with the sound of dripping water and the whispering scuffle of rodents.

‘The corridor probably runs around the entire perimeter of the basement,’ Gilchrist said.

‘You see a door?’

His beam picked up a darker shadow on the wall about ten yards to their right, and he strode towards it.

The door was inset about six inches or so into the wall. Gilchrist felt his heart sink as he shone the torch over it. Layers of rust curled from its metal panels like sheets of burned paper, and swelled around the hinges like peeling blisters. A black slit for a keyhole suggested it was locked. But the corroded handle tempted him to try it anyway. He pressed down hard and heard the lock click. Then he gritted his teeth and pulled. The hinges creaked in resistance, but the door eased back half an inch.

‘We’re in,’ he said.

Cracking the door open was one thing. Forcing it wide enough to let a body through was another. And Gilchrist’s injury was not helping. When he gripped the handle with both hands, and flexed his muscles to pull the door open farther, his left arm burned with a fire that had him gasping in pain.

‘It’s no use,’ he said. ‘I can’t open it.’

Jessie shone her torch at the door to reveal a gap of no more than three inches. ‘Let me try,’ she said, but gave a squeal of disgust when she took hold of the handle. She shone her torch at her hand. ‘You’re still bleeding,’ she said.

‘Trying to open rusty doors will do that.’

‘Want me to take another look at it?’

‘Let’s open this first.’

‘That’s what we’ll inscribe on your headstone,’ she said. ‘ “I should have kept the door shut.” ’ She turned back to the door, gripped the handle, and closed it with a grunt. Then she jerked it open, closed it, jerked it open again.

‘I think it’s working,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Keep going.’

‘Where’s a man when you need him?’

After thirty seconds of heaving the door open and shut, Jessie released the handle and gasped, ‘Got to stop. I’m knackered.’ Her breath clouded like ectoplasm in the gloom.

Gilchrist’s beam showed the gap was now some ten inches. If he could just squeeze his shoulder into it, he might be able to use his body to prise it open a touch more, maybe even slip through. He pushed his right arm in, then managed to get his shoulder in, too. He pressed and pushed and flexed his shoulder, but could not open it any wider.

‘Ah, shit,’ Jessie said. ‘My torch has just died on me.’

‘I’m not going to say a word.’

He shone his torch at her face, and saw fear in her eyes. He had partnered her long enough to understand that her bravado and cocky talk were no more than a shield she put up to protect herself. Being underground in a psycho-cum-artist’s studio was enough to scare anyone witless. And witnessing Stan’s cold-blooded murder had rocked Jessie to the core – himself too.

‘Take mine.’ He flinched from the pain as he slipped off his leather jacket.

‘What’re you doing?’

‘Squeezing through.’

‘Christ, Andy, you’re on your own. One of my tits is bigger than that gap.’

‘I thought you were taking karate lessons and losing weight.’

‘I’d need to get down to four stone before I could squeeze this lot through.’

Gilchrist pressed his face hard against the wall, and pushed his right arm and leg into the opening. Squeezing his head through the gap almost cost him an ear, and his backside kept him locked in place for a good two minutes, until he wriggled and turned and managed to break through. He twisted his body then pulled his left leg into the darkness of the tunnel, and took great care doing the same with his left arm.

‘I know you’re slim,’ she said, ‘but that must have hurt.’

‘A bit tight.’

‘How are your balls?’

‘Fine.’

‘You counted them?’

‘Jacket,’ he said.

She passed it through.

He removed his mobile from the pocket and powered up the screen. Not the best torch in the world, but at least it let him see where he was going. He stretched out his arm and did a one-eighty sweep, but could see no more than a few feet, the light from the screen casting a glow rather than a directional beam.

‘Anything?’ Jessie asked.

Her torch beam was blinding through the gap in the door. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But I’ll press on.’ He turned round, shielded his eyes. ‘Make your way back. You can’t go wrong. It’s only one of three directions. Left, right, or straight on.’

‘As long as I don’t have to read a map.’

‘I need you to take charge, Jessie,’ he said, serious now. ‘Read Magner his rights, then organise a team to take him to the surface. Start the ball rolling for search warrants for Purvis’s property, the works. And call Chief Super Whyte, too. Let him know what we’ve got.’

‘Meanwhile, you’re going for a stroll?’

‘And arrange for someone in Family Liaison to notify Stan’s parents,’ he said.

A pause, then, ‘Will do, Andy.’ She shone her torch through the gap, and he had to turn away. ‘How’s that arm doing?’

‘Sore,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got a spare one.’

She chuckled at the lame attempt at a joke. ‘You don’t have to do this. We can get cutting equipment down here and send in a team.’

They could also try searching Purvis’s cottage for a trapdoor. There had to be one, if his theory was correct. Instead, he said, ‘We don’t have time. Not if we want to save Mhairi.’ With that, he turned from the door and stepped into the darkness of the tunnel.

The going was not easy.

The tunnel floor was not concrete, but hard angular stones over which Gilchrist’s feet slipped and twisted. Moss glistened on the walls and floor. Water dribbled between the stones, reflecting the light from the phone like a mirror. The constant echo of drips and splashes accompanied the crunching of his boots as he worked his way forward.

His progress was much slower than he’d hoped. About two minutes in, he stumbled, lost his balance, and only just managed to keep hold of the phone as his knees crashed onto sharp stones, causing him to cry out in pain. The fire in his left arm flared, and he wondered if he should just do as Jessie had suggested – return to the surface and let the experts take over. But the echo of Purvis’s laugh, and the thought of what he might do to Mhairi, forced him to ignore the pain and struggle to his feet.

Upright again, he took some time to recover.

The ceiling seemed lower here, the walls closer, too, as if the tunnel were narrowing on all sides. He looked over his shoulder, but saw only pitch blackness beyond the weak glow of the phone. He could be a bubble of light in a black tunnel in space. In his mind’s eye, he pulled up an image of the barn and where it stood in relation to the cottage. Then he shifted that image underground, and tried to figure out how far he had come.

Moving on with that mental map, he reckoned he must be only about fifty yards from the cottage. But however near he was, he knew it would be slow going from here.

He held his mobile in front of him, and pressed on.

Jessie surprised herself by finding her way back to Magner without any wrong turns. Once she stumbled her way through a series of empty rooms, the distant glow of light from the main chamber drew her forward like a moth to a flame. She intended to leave Magner lying in his own blood and snot for another thirty minutes – the more extreme his discomfort, the better, as far as she was concerned.

Her first task would be to organise a team to search the cottage for the trapdoor to the tunnel. And she needed a team down here, too – to cut through the metal door and follow Andy. Just the thought of creeping through the dark like that caused a shiver to run the length of her spine.

As she entered the last of the chambers before the main room, she shielded her eyes from the macabre anterooms that housed Purvis’s sculptures. She could hear the heavy throb of the generator in the barn above, and the light was now bright enough to permit her to switch off her torch. She braced herself for the imminent sight of Stan’s body on the floor.

She entered the main room.

Her breath locked. Her heart stopped . . .

Then restarted with a kick that pulled a gasp from her.

Magner was gone.

Survival instinct and raw fear dropped her to the ground like a rock.

Beyond Stan’s body, by the leg of the workbench to which Magner had been cuffed, a hacksaw lay discarded on the floor. Even from where she crouched, Jessie saw that Magner had somehow managed to haul the heavy bench across the floor, pull a shelf from the wall – pliers, saw blades, screwdrivers, hammers, lay scattered – and cut his way through the FlexiCuffs.