Anyhow, he had a much better plan.
25
Roy Grace was still struggling, even with the help of the direct beam of a halogen light, to see the minute object Frazer Theobald was holding up in his stainless-steel tweezers. All he could make out was something blue and blurred.
He squinted, reluctant to admit to himself that he was getting to the point where he needed glasses. It was only when the pathologist placed a small square of paper behind the tweezers and handed him a magnifying glass that Roy could see it more clearly. It was a fibre of some kind, thinner than a human hair, like a gossamer strand of a spider’s web. It appeared translucent one moment, then pale blue the next, and the ends were jigging from a combination of the faintest tremor in Theobald’s hand and the icy breeze blowing through the storm drain.
‘Whoever killed this woman did his best to leave no evidence,’ the pathologist said. ‘It’s my guess he put her down here expecting that at some point she’d be washed along through the drainage system and then flushed out of the sewage outfall into the sea – thinking a sufficient distance from the shore for sewage would be a safe enough distance for a body.’
Grace stared again at the skeleton, unable to get the possibility that it was Sandy out of his mind.
‘Perhaps her killer hadn’t considered the drain not flooding,’ Theobald went on. ‘He hadn’t reckoned on her getting embedded in the silt, and because the water table was down, there wasn’t enough flow through the drain system to wash her free. Or maybe the drain went out of use.’
Grace nodded, looking again at the twitching thread.
‘It’s a carpet fibre, that’s what I think. I could be wrong, but
I think the lab analysis will show it’s a carpet fibre. Too hard to be from a pullover or a skirt or a cushion cover. It’s a carpet fibre.’
Joan Major nodded in agreement.
‘Where did you find it?’ Grace asked.
The forensic pathologist pointed at the skeleton’s right hand, which was partially buried in the silt. The fingers were exposed. He pointed at the end of the middle finger. ‘See that? It’s an artificial nail – from one of those nail studio places.’
Grace felt a chill run through him. Sandy had bitten her nails. When they were watching television she would chew on them, making busy little clicking sounds like a hamster. It drove him nuts. And sometimes in bed as well. Often when he was trying to go to sleep, she would be gnawing away, as if fretting about something she could not or would not share with him. Then suddenly she’d look at her nails and get angry with herself, say to him that he must tell her when she was biting and help her to stop. And she would go to a nail studio to have expensive, artificial nails put over her bitten ones.
‘A plastic compound, glued on, somehow the nails didn’t get washed away when the skin beneath rotted,’ Frazer Theobald said. ‘The fibre was beneath this one. It could be that her assailant dragged her along a carpet and she dug her nails in. That’s the most likely explanation of how it got there. Bit of luck that it didn’t get washed away.’
‘Luck, yes,’ Grace said distantly. His mind was racing. Dragged along a carpet. A blue carpet fibre. Pale blue. Sky blue.
There was a pale blue carpet at home. In the bedroom. The bedroom he and Sandy had shared until the night she disappeared.
Into the blue.
26
Ronnie had been running for maybe a minute when day changed into night, as if there had been an instant, total eclipse of the sun. Suddenly he was stumbling through a choking, stinking void, with the sound of thunder in his ears, thunder that was rising from the ground.
It was as if someone had emptied a billion tons of foul-smelling, bitter-tasting black and grey flour into the sky directly above him. It stung his eyes, filled his mouth. He swallowed some of it and coughed it back up, immediately swallowing more. Grey shapes like ghosts swirled past him. He stubbed his toe painfully on something – a fire hydrant, he realized – as he tripped over the damned thing and fell forward, hard, on to the ground. Ground that was moving. It was vibrating, quaking, as if some giant monster had awakened and was breaking free from the belly of the earth itself.
Have to get out of here. Away from here.
Someone trod on his leg and crashed down on top of him. He heard a woman’s voice, cursing and apologizing, and smelled a fleeting whiff of fine perfume. He wriggled free of her, tried to stand up, and immediately someone slammed into his back, hurtling him forward again.
Hyperventilating in panic, he scrambled to his feet and saw the woman, looking like a grey snowman clutching a pair of court shoes, get up. Then a huge fat man with mad hair crashed into him, cursing, punching him out of the way, and ran stumbling on to be swallowed by the fog.
Then he was knocked over again. Got to get up. Get up. Get up!
Memories of reading about people being crushed to death in panicking crowds swirled in his mind. He struggled to his feet again, turned, saw more snowy figures lumbering out of the gloom. One knocked him sideways. He searched through the oncoming legs, shoes, bare feet, for his bag and his briefcase, saw them, ducked down, grabbed them both, then was barged over on to his back again.
‘Fuck you!’ he screamed.
A stiletto heel passed over his head like a spiky shadow.
Then suddenly there was silence.
The rumbling stopped. The thunder stopped. The ground wasn’t vibrating any more. The sirens stopped too.
For an instant, he felt elation. He was OK! He was alive!
People were walking past more slowly now, more orderly. Some were limping. Some were holding on to each other. Some had glass in their hair, like ice crystals. Blood was the only colour in an otherwise grey and black world.
‘This is not happening,’ a male voice near him said. ‘This is so not happening.’
Ronnie could see the North Tower and then, to the right, a hill of twisted, lopsided wreckage, rubble, window frames, broken cars, burning vehicles, broken bodies lying motionless on the stained ground. Then he saw sky where the South Tower should have been.
Where it had been.
The Tower was gone.
It had been there minutes ago and now it wasn’t there any more. He blinked, to check it wasn’t some kind of trick, an optical illusion, and more of the dry stuff got caught in his eyes, making them water.
He was shaking, shaking all over. But mostly he was shaking deep inside.
Something caught his eye, drifting down, flapping, rising for a moment – caught in an updraught – then continuing its descent again. A piece of fabric. It looked like one of those felt cloths you got when you bought a new laptop, to stop the screen being scratched when you closed it.
He watched it fall all the way to the ground like a dead butterfly, landing just yards in front of him, and for an instant, amid all that was going on in his mind, he wondered if it was worth picking up, because he had long ago lost the one that had come with his laptop.
More people trudged past. An endless line, all in black and white and grey, like an old war movie or documentary showing refugees on the march. He thought he heard a phone ring. His own? In panic, he checked his pocket. His phone was still there, thank God! He pulled it out, but it wasn’t ringing and there was no missed-call sign. He tried Lorraine again, but there was no signal, just a hollow beep-beep-beep, which was drowned out after a few seconds by the chop of a helicopter right above his head.