Ugley Business (22 page)

I was on the ground, coughing and spitting out dust, wiping it away from my streaming eyes, and Luke was leaning in the doorway, watching me.

“You didn’t think to close your eyes?”

“Well, what if there’d been someone in there? Janulevic, maybe?”

“In a crypt that hasn’t been opened for centuries?”

I stuck my tongue out at him, and only slightly ruined the effect by coughing some more.

“Are you ready?” Luke asked, and I hauled myself to my feet, nodding.

“Ready.”

Luke got out a big heavy-duty flashlight that he’d got from the helicopter, and shone it inside. The steps went down another couple of feet, so that most of the dank little room was underground. I followed him in, cautious even though I knew there was no way anything living could be in there.

And in fact there wasn’t even anything dead, either, apart from a couple of smelly rats in the corner of a small, brick-lined room, with a door at the far end. We looked at each other, and Luke got the key out. I shook my head and pushed at the door, which was pretty rotten, and it shambled inwards.

“Smart arse,” Luke said, and I preened. He was standing pretty close, but for once I wasn’t feeling horny. It’s all right for Buffy and Spike to get their naughty on in a crypt, but that was a nice, clean Hollywood studio, not a damp, dirty, dead-ratty hole.

The rotten door revealed a tunnel: narrow, low and very dark. It was hard to remember that outside it was daylight, a nice pretty summer’s day. In here it was forever night, a cold, damp winter night.

“Ladies first?” Luke suggested, and I stared at him.

“You must be fucking joking.”

“You’re not scared, are you?”

“Of course I bloody am. Didn’t you watch the
Indiana Jones
films? Or
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
? Nothing good ever comes out of dark, slimy tunnels.”

“Wuss.”

“And proud of it.”

He shone the light into the tunnel. It reflected off curved brick walls, black with slime and dirt. The tunnel sloped downwards, and unless I was wrong, aimed for somewhere under the church.

Luke stepped inside, and when I hesitated, reached back and took my hand and pulled me after him.

It was hard to know how far we were going. After a few steps we were swallowed up in total darkness. There was nothing either forwards or backwards, just slimy black walls on either side, a steady sound of dripping, and our own echoing footsteps. It was cold in the tunnel, and damp, and we were breathing in white clouds.

“How long have we been in here?” I whispered after what felt like half an hour.

“About a minute and a half.”

“Feels longer.”

“That’s because you’re walking slower than my car.”

So he did have a sense of humour about it. “Which is in turn because I don’t want to go A over T and break my neck on this slimy floor.”

“Sophie?”

“Yes?”

“Why are we whispering?”

I blinked. Because people in dark tunnels always whisper. “So the zombies won’t hear us.”

“Ah.”

My heart was thumping so loudly, my blood thudding in my ears, I could hardly hear anything. I don’t know why I was so afraid. I didn’t even know what I was afraid of—but maybe that was the thing. I was scared of the unknown. Maybe Janulevic was hiding down here. Maybe it was Greg Winter’s skeleton. Maybe Indiana Jones-style riches, glittering like the contents of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Or maybe just some more dead rats.

Finally we got to another little door. There was a niche in the wall with some candles—some damp, extinct candles—and some very dead matches.

We stood and looked at the door for a while. It was about four feet high, and it reminded me of a door in my old schoolfriend Sarah’s house. It was this ancient Elizabethan mishmash of about four minuscule cottages knocked into one, with staircases all over the place and intricately useless plumbing, and there was this one door that I was too tall for when I was seven. Honest to God, seven.

“Well,” Luke said, still holding my hand, “what d’you rec?”

“I reckon I wish I was in bed with the covers over my head.”

“Since when did you get to be such a coward?”

“Since I thought I was right about a lot of things and found out I was horribly wrong.”

“Such as?”

Boy, he really wasn’t showing any mercy.

“Docherty,” I said. “You.”

“You weren’t wrong about me,” Luke said quietly, but at the same time something scuttled behind me, and I jumped, and his hand tightened around mine.

“You think maybe we should go in?” I said, looking at the door. “Face our fear?”

“Speak for yourself,” Luke said. “I’ve been potholing in Wales. This is a walk in the park.”

“Watch out, macho alert.”

He grinned in the darkness and handed me the torch as he lifted the latch on the little door, took out his gun, and pushed the door open with his foot.

The room was low and very dark, and so long the torch beam didn’t reach to the other side. At a guess, it was maybe twenty feet across, with brick arches that were only just high enough in the centre for Luke to stand underneath. Along the walls were stone shelves, and I couldn’t see what was on them to begin with.

“Storage?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Luke went over to the nearest shelf, leaving me alone and vulnerable by the door, “definitely storage.” He brushed away a cobweb, and I sucked in a breath, because what was on the shelf was a skeletal hand. And not just a hand, a whole body. And then I looked around, and saw through the thick, heavy layers of dust that every shelf bore bones, some neatly laid out in order, some in miscellaneous heaps.

“I thought Angel said this place was empty,” I croaked.

“Apparently she was wrong.”

I tried to calm myself. What was so damn scary about bones? These people were dead, had been dead for a very, very long time. I’d faced much scarier things than a couple of heaps of bones.

“How many do you think there are?” I said, creeping over to Luke and peering over his shoulder at the skeleton.

“God knows. I don’t know how far the barony goes back. There could be hundreds.”

I shuddered.

“What? They’re already dead, Soph, they can’t hurt you.”

“I know. But dead things are always creepy.”

“Says she living with a cat who turns her living room into a graveyard.”

“I know, but they’re fresh. They’re like what you buy in a supermarket.”

“So let me get this straight,” we were moving along the ranks of dead barons now, “you don’t find dead, ripped-apart squirrels creepy, but the bones of someone who died hundreds of years ago make you shudder?”

I nodded. It made sense to me.

“Women.” Luke shook his head, and I scowled.

“So rows of dead people don’t bother you at all? I suppose you’re perfectly at home in a crypt.”

“My parents are buried in one,” Luke said, and I shut up.

There were dusty, corroded little plaques on the shelves, each announcing the baron and his dates. We passed the Henrys, Samuels and Johns of the seventeenth century, then the Edwards, Thomases and Francises of the sixteenth, right through the Williams, Edgars and Geoffreys of the late middle ages, after which the plaques started to get hard to read, and after a while, disappeared totally.

“Now tell me this isn’t creepy,” I said, as we ventured so deep into the darkness that the door wasn’t even visible behind us.

“Maybe it is a little.”

“Glad to hear it. I was starting to think you were some kind of android.”

Luke frowned at me. “Remind me why we’re here again?”

“The key. Which may not have even fit this lock.”

“Marvellous.”

“But, I bet it’d be a great place to hide something,” I said. “Something like, I don’t know, a mysterious ring with great powers.”

“You really believe it has powers?”

I wasn’t about to rule it out. “Janulevic does.”

“What do we do when we find it?”

How the hell was I supposed to know? “Cast it back into the fires of Mount Doom?”

“You’ve been watching
Lord of the Rings
again, haven’t you?”

“I could have been reading it.”

Luke shone the torch at my face. “Have you ever read it?”

“Most of it.”

He grinned and, the next moment, tripped over something, grabbing my arm for support.

“What the hell was that?”

“The third baron?”

“Funny.” He aimed the beam at the floor. There was a large, solid iron ring set into the stones. If I looked carefully I could just see that the edges of a small trapdoor were visible.

“I am
not
going down there,” I said.

“Could be fun,” Luke said, but he didn’t sound very enthusiastic. He knelt down, handed me the torch, and pulled at the ring. Nothing happened.

“Could be locked,” I said.

“Do you see a keyhole?”

“Maybe it was locked from the inside. Maybe there’s someone down there.”

“They’ll be in good shape, then. Help me out with this, Soph. My arm’s bloody killing me.”

I’d forgotten about that. I reached down and hooked two fingers from each hand around the iron ring. Luke counted to three and we both pulled.

The trapdoor sprung open, and we fell backwards. And I didn’t give a damn about what was down there, or all the dead barons around us, or the dust or the slime: I was lying in Luke’s arms and my heart was pounding.

“Hey,” he said, brushing back the hair from my face, “you look hot when you’re scared.”

I frowned. Not the romantic line I’d been thinking of.

I pushed myself away from him and picked up the torch again. The trapdoor was small, maybe fifteen inches across, and the hole beneath it wasn’t much bigger.

“There’s something in there.” I peered at the bottom of the hole, which was about two feet deep.

“You want to do the honours, or shall I?”

Reaching into a dark, forgotten hole to pick up an unnamed object wasn’t my idea of fun. I could pull off the Lara Croft look, but I’d rather do without the dirt and the bugs and the general ickiness of your average tomb.

“I’ll let you,” I said. “Someone has to hold the torch.”

Luke gave me a look, but he gamely reached into the hole and brought out a small, carved wooden box. It had a little lock on the front, but a long time in the ground had corroded the metal. It opened easily.

“It’s like pass the parcel,” I said, looking at the dusty velvet wrapping inside. Luke held out the box and I, mindful of nasty wriggly things, very gingerly reached in and lifted the velvet aside.

There was a ring, a large, man’s ring, set with tiny little jewels in a complicated Celtic design. The whole thing was gorgeously made, every surface covered with intricate patterns.

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “Do you think that’s what I think it is?”

“I think it might be,” Luke said, and took it out. “It’s big.”

“Irish kings had big fingers.”

“You really reckon it’s that old?”

I frowned. “Well, it’s called Séala, so it’s supposed to be a seal. But you wouldn’t put stones in a seal ring. Maybe it was reset.”

Luke took it out and slid it onto his thumb. “Maybe it’s not the same ring.”

And then a voice came from behind us, a gravely, foreign voice, and we both spun around to see the man who had run Tammy over standing there, holding a gun against Harvey’s temple.

“Hey,” Harvey said. “How about that, you’re here too.”

“Harvey? What are you—what’s going on?”

He gave a very tense smile. “This is Dmitri Janulevic. He showed up at your apartment and said he knew where you were and I was going to come along and help him.”

“How did he know?” Luke asked, at the same time I asked, “Help?”

Janulevic garbled something and I glanced at Luke. He shrugged in incomprehension, but Harvey apparently understood. He shifted on his plaster cast, grimacing.

“He’s been monitoring the cameras you set up at Angel’s. You all left the church unattended so he could hack in.”

“But—Maria?” I said in horror. She was supposed to have been watching it.

Janulevic chortled nastily and said something. Harvey winced.

“He sent her a telegram her mother was dying. Maria left.”

“I’ll fucking kill her,” Luke muttered.

“He saw you coming and watched you go in the crypt. Then he came and got me for, uh, translation purposes.”

Janulevic said something else, and Harvey flicked his eyes at me. “He wants you to know it’s not personal, he just wants the ring.”

“What ring?” Luke said, and I willed myself not to look at his hand, which was hovering by the gun at his side.

Janulevic snapped something, and Harvey translated, “He says drop your weapons. Both of you. And, Sophie, your bag too.”

I glanced at Luke. He gave a small nod, and I unbuckled the holster holding Docherty’s gun. God, why hadn’t we gone to get him out first! The gun went on the floor, and then Luke’s joined it, and I added my little backpack to the pile.

“Hands up.”

I raised my hands.

“He wants to know what’s in the box.”

“Nothing,” Luke said swiftly. “We dug it up but it’s empty. Someone else must have got here first.”

Harvey relayed this to Janulevic, who shook his head and babbled something that came back to us as, “He says you’re lying. Luke, he wants to see your ring.”

“What ring?”

Harvey rolled his eyes. “On your thumb?”

Luke held up his hand. “It’s a family ring. We all have them. A signet ring. It’s a British thing.”

Harvey said something to Janulevic, who shook his head crossly.

“He says that’s the ring he wants.”

I cleared my throat. “I thought he was after a seal ring? This one has stones in it. You wouldn’t put stones in a seal ring.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Luke asked, sotto voce.

“Well, no, because you’d use the ring for sealing letters and you wouldn’t want to get wax in all those diamonds, would you?”

Luke and Harvey looked impressed. Janulevic didn’t. He glared at me and jabbered something in Czech. Harvey’s face fell.

“He says you need to shut up.”

“Good luck,” Luke muttered, and I glared at him.