It took three of them to swing it out and back and the light flooded in to reveal a corridor, unlit, the steel walls Run Silent, Run Deep, a Second World War film set aboard a submarine, the crew sweating in the silence under an oily sea or dead in an airless tomb.
It was an eerie image, so that when he saw something move in the shadows it made him flinch, as if from a blow.
Out of the ash-grey shadows came a man, walking towards them, shuffling, a hand to his side where a bloody bandage encircled his flesh. The smell was fetid, the stench of humankind, and, thought Shaw, the sweet smell of rotting fruit. It was an image out of a nightmare, and the thought that broke into Shaw’s mind was that he was relieved that Fran wasn’t there to see it – because it would haunt a child’s mind, as it would his.
‘Sean?’
Neil Judd stood at Shaw’s shoulder. The word seemed to stop the shuffling man in his tracks, and he swayed, then sank to his knees.
Neil Judd ran forward and helped him up, and when their heads were together it became obvious that they were brothers, even now, because Sean Judd had lost his mop of hair.
Shaw and Valentine pushed past, down the corridor, which at first seemed to end in a blank wall. As his vision adjusted to the gloom, however, Shaw could see that the end wall contained another door. Beyond it was a room which doubled back towards the operating theatre.
Inside were six beds, three of them occupied, each occupant held to the bedstead by a single handcuff. The first raised his head from a grimy pillow and held Shaw’s
Standing there, Shaw’s mind locked, as if it was unable to complete a difficult computation. But he knew what he had in his mind – the image of Liam Kennedy, collecting prescriptions for men who should have been long gone. But they’d been here, waiting to fulfil their purpose, a living organ bank. And another image: the sudden darkness on that Sunday when the power had failed. The chaos here in this room, the fear and the anger. Had they been handcuffed then, he wondered, or free?
One of the other two men sat up, then rolled from his bed, tugging the bed frame with him, holding a hand up, trying to cover his face. In the third bed a man lay still, bandages around his head. The man on the floor began to scream, a thin wail, gathering strength. Shaw was still struggling to understand what he was seeing, and in his confusion he tried to find a parallel from his own experience, but all he could call to mind was a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, a nightmare vision of hell. The man in the corner stopped screaming and pointed at the man with the bandaged head.
The heat in the room lay like a second skin. The men were dressed only in shorts, so that Shaw and Valentine could see the scars. Several on each. And the long, stitched lines along calves and arms where tendon and tissue had been removed.
The man in the corner told them where to go next – not with his voice, but with his eyes, which kept flickering to the other door, into the third container.
Two men lay in the ice, their many scars a vivid blue, the bodies naked. One had had a leg removed, the stump a dull terracotta. Valentine walked past Shaw and opened the next: a man, ice like a blanket around him through which only lips and hair could be seen, and the toes – breaking through. But the skin looked patched, black in places, and disfigured. Shaw remembered that the Rosa’s power supply, when switched on that night after the generator had been reassembled, had blown the circuits, so that the contents of the fridges had begun to rot and they couldn’t have let the power engineers run a cable aboard – not that night, anyway, because of the chaos on the ship. Eventually these men had been refrozen, but now their flesh was useless.
Shaw wondered if he was in shock. Time seemed to have slowed down, and when Valentine spoke it was like listening to a voice underwater.
‘They kept them alive – for this?’ asked Valentine.
Shaw walked back into the next room. The man in the corner had begun to shake rhythmically, keening softly now. In the corridor he felt the first comforting hint of the cooler air from the operating theatre. And when he got there a sight which halted, for a moment at least,
Sunday, 19 September
The stock cars circled the arena as if locked together, a screaming high-velocity scrap heap of painted metal wrapped in exhaust fumes. Above rose a cloud of summer dust, like a nuclear mushroom, climbing into a towering column in the hot, windless evening air. The sun was setting through this prism of dirt, so that everywhere the light was red and golden. Valentine watched the last race; or rather, he looked as if he was watching the last race. But his field glasses did not swing as the cars went past. They were fixed instead on a spot in the pits opposite. The man he was watching wore a spotless mechanic’s jacket, reflective glasses, and a baseball cap with a logo Valentine couldn’t read – although he knew what it said: TEAM MOSSE.
The air was soaked with petrol so that he could taste it on his lips – iron, and the astringent kick of gas – so he pulled the third can of beer out of his raincoat pocket. The first had been iced, this one was warm, and as he pulled the tab he let the froth explode in his mouth. He was pleased it was the last race because his back ached, and the noise was making a small bone in his inner ear buzz like a trapped fly.
A chequered flag the size of a picnic blanket waved WINNER – TEAM MOSSE. As the chasing pack swept past a piece of chassis span off one of the cars, followed by a few strips of burnt tyre. The crowd, about 8,000 strong, screamed with delight as the disintegrating car failed to pull out of the bend, the offside front wheel crumpling so that the whole vehicle carried on, catching the crash barrier, tipping, then riding ahead on its roof.
But Valentine wasn’t watching. He’d found his target again in the pits opposite: Robert Mosse, standing alone, hands on hips, watching Cosyns bring in the winning car. When the driver got out Mosse stopped clapping and lit a cigar, turning away, and it was a mechanic from the next pit who patted the winner on the back. Valentine wondered again why Robert Mosse was sending Cosyns £1,000 cheques and then cutting him dead in his moment of glory. Cosyns didn’t register the slight, simply accepting a bottle of beer from the man in overalls and calmly sipping it as he watched the replay of the final lap.
Valentine dropped the can, half finished, in a bin and began to thread through the crowd towards the exit gates. There’d be a kind of circus finale, with all the cars circling, but he didn’t need to see that because he was here to find out where they kept the Team Mosse trailer. Cosyns housed the car in the garage beside the undertakers, but there was no room for anything else, and Valentine had executed a drive-by surveillance of Mosse’s tasteless suburban villa – there were three garages, but all standard
Outside the arena it was chaos, like some nightmare version of the Monte Carlo Rally, with people running for their cars, trying to beat the inevitable traffic jam. The sun shone from a thousand windscreens. Valentine found the Mazda, zigzagged to the gates, and slipped into a lay-by next to a mobile tea van. He had the window down so the smell of fat and bacon filled the car.
He kicked open the door but left the engine running.
His mobile rang. He’d changed the ring tone to play the theme from Ghostbusters, and it still made him laugh.