Dr Castelli peered at the screen. ‘So Sam’s a woman,’ she said.
More startled pigeons in MacNeil’s head. He desperately tried to focus on a single one, like a hunter with a gun attempting to bring one down. But he kept missing. Nothing made any sense. How could this Dr Samantha Looker possibly be involved? And yet somehow she was.
Almost as if she had read his mind, Dr Castelli said, ‘I guess you’re going to have to ask her.’
MacNeil lifted Amy’s phone from beside the computer and dialled Sam’s number from the address book. He waited a long time before hanging up on the unanswered call. He shook his head. ‘Looks like we’ll never know.’
‘Maybe she’s just not answering the phone. We can always go to her house.’
‘She lives on the Isle of Dogs.’
‘So?’
‘They haven’t been allowed to report it in the press, but it’s a no-go area. Sealed off from the rest of the city. A little island of flu-free London that the people who live there want to keep that way.’
‘But you’re a police officer.’
‘I could be the Queen and it wouldn’t make any difference. If we try to get on to the Isle of Dogs they’ll shoot us.’
‘Sounds more like the Wild West than the East End of London,’ the doctor said. She frowned for a moment, and then her face lit up. ‘I know how we might be able to get on.’
‘You’re not going anywhere,’ MacNeil said. ‘Especially anywhere near the Isle of Dogs.’
Dr Castelli shrugged. ‘Then you can find your own way.’ He gave her a dangerous look, but she only smiled. ‘Trust me,’ she said. ‘I’m a doctor.’
But MacNeil wasn’t smiling. Samantha Looker was a doctor, too. Amy had trusted her, and now she’d disappeared. And MacNeil couldn’t think of any other way of finding out what had happened to her. He turned to Dr Castelli. ‘Okay. Tell me.’
II
In the narrative poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’, by the Scots bard Robert Burns, the eponymous hero sees a young woman clad only in a cut-down shift, dancing to the Devil’s tune in a haunted churchyard. He cries out, quite involuntarily, ‘Weel done, Cutty-sark!’, thereby attracting the unwanted attention of witches and warlocks. And providing the name for the most famous tea clipper ever to ply its trade across the world’s oceans. The Cutty Sark, lovingly restored to its former glory, was visited each year by millions. It sat now in the brooding darkness of its dry dock at Greenwich, five hundred miles from its birthplace at Dumbarton on the River Clyde.
MacNeil left his car in Greenwich Church Street, and he and Dr Castelli hurried past the towering masts of the clipper, across the huge open concourse that led to Greenwich pier and the distinctive red-brick rotunda above the entrance to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Just four hundred yards to the north, the lights of the Isle of Dogs reflected across the sluggish waters of the Thames. They could see the apartment blocks lining the embankment on the far side, the street lights in St. Davids Square. They were so close. Almost within touching distance. And yet it seemed to MacNeil that the gap was an impossible one to bridge. He knew that snipers kept watch from the rooftops. He knew, too, that although no one had yet been shot in this stand-off, the risk of it was real enough. And he didn’t want to be the first.
The domed roof of the rotunda was glazed like a conservatory, and in the daylight hours let in light to illuminate the lift shaft and the spiral staircase that led down to the tunnel below. Tonight, the hundreds of panes of glass reflected what little light there was back at the sky, and the interior was mired in the deepest gloom. There were two entrances side by side. One was completely closed off by a heavy, black-painted steel door. The way through the other was barred by a steel gate with a row of tall spikes along the top. There was a gap of about three feet between the spikes and the lintel.
MacNeil surveyed it warily. ‘Supposing I manage to scale the gate and get inside without wrecking my manhood, what guarantee is there we’d be able to get out at the other side?’
‘Because it’s exactly the same,’ said the doctor. ‘They’re like peas in a pod. Twin rotundas. The Victorians were pretty anal about their need for symmetry.’ She paused. ‘Although strictly speaking, I should say Edwardians. Because the tunnel didn’t open until the year after Victoria died. But it was conceived and mostly built during her reign, so I think we could safely say it was Victorian.’
MacNeil regarded her with a mixture of awe and irritation. ‘How the hell do you know all this?’
‘Oh, you know, when I first came to London, I had to do all the tourist stuff. The Greenwich Foot Tunnel was just one of the items on the itinerary.’
‘I suppose you probably know how long it is.’
‘Twelve hundred feet,’ she said without hesitation. ‘It’s nine feet high, and lined with more than two hundred thousand tiles. Ask me another.’
‘I’d ask you to shut up, but I’m too polite.’
MacNeil held the torch and helped the doctor up to a foothold at the bottom of the spikes. She had to draw up her tweed skirt, revealing muscular little legs, in order to straddle the spikes and get a foothold on the other side. ‘No peeking,’ she said.
She dropped down to safety and MacNeil handed the torch through the bars. He pulled himself up and swung himself easily over the top of the spikes to jump down beside her and take back the torch. A white, tiled wall led away to their right, towards the doors of the lift which stood silent and dark behind its glass-panelled shaft. To their left, steel-studded steps spiralled down into blackness. The beam of the torch barely penetrated the thick, damp air, moisture hanging in it like smoke.
A smell of damp earth and rust rose to greet them as they made their way down, the staircase curving around the exterior of the lift shaft. It felt like a very long descent. The air got colder as they went, their breath billowing in white clouds in front of them. Finally, at the foot of the stairs, they turned left into the tunnel itself, reinforced as it dipped beneath the river by huge bolted sections of curved steel. The tunnel stretched away into impenetrable darkness, yellowed white tiles arching around and above them to the rusted trunking that ran overhead carrying power cables for lights that had been extinguished weeks ago.
They could feel the gentle downward slope of the tunnel underfoot as it tilted below the riverbed. Water dripped from the roof and lay in puddles all along the concrete floor. Their footsteps and their breath echoed back at them like the spirits of all those who had gone this way before. The cold was intense now, and the sense of claustrophobia almost unbearable.
‘Jeez,’ Dr Castelli whispered, ‘it wasn’t like this when we did it with the tour guide.’
MacNeil barely heard her. Something about the dark and the cold, and the sense of the river bearing down on them from above, increased his sense of frustration. Somehow everything had got out of control. He was no long running an investigation. He was being swept along by events. Events he could neither predict nor manage. And his sense of frustration increased his sense of urgency. He broke into a run.
‘What are you doing?’ the doctor called after him.
‘I can’t afford the time to walk,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘If you can’t keep up, go back.’
‘I’ll never get out on my own,’ she shouted, and he heard her sensible shoes clatter across the concrete as she chased after him. The fact that he still had her torch was probably an added incentive.