“What did the doctor tell you?”
“They won't know for a few days.”
Choking on the words: “Will I be able to walk?”
“They think so.”
Her eyes squeeze shut and tears form in the delta of wrinkles.
“You'll be fine,” I say, trying to sound convincing. “You'll be back at work in no time—all six feet of you.”
Ali wants me to stay. I watch her sleeping until a nurse shoos me outside. It's almost midday. A dozen calls are waiting in my message bank—most of them from Campbell Smith.
Calling the operating room, I try to get the latest on Gerry Brandt, who is still missing. Nobody will talk to me. Finally I get through to the Senior Investigating Officer, who takes pity on me. There were three hundred Ecstasy tablets beneath the floorboards in Gerry Brandt's bedroom, as well as traces of speed in the S-bend of the upstairs toilet. Is that why he ran?
I arrive at the Harrow Road Police Station just before 2:00 p.m. and pass through a crowded front office where two motorists with bloodstained shirts are yelling about a traffic accident.
Campbell shuts the office door behind me. He looks every inch a chief-constable-in-waiting, with his arms behind him and a face stiffer than shirt cardboard.
“Jesus Christ, Ruiz! Two fractured vertebrae, broken ribs and a ruptured spleen—she could finish in a wheelchair. And where were you? Being run over by a fucking milk truck . . .”
I can hear them laughing down the hall. The worst of the jokes haven't started yet but that's only because Ali is so sick.
Campbell opens his top drawer and produces a sheet of typed paper. “I warned you. I told you to stay out of this.”
He hands me a resignation letter. Mine. I am to retire immediately on health grounds.
“Sign this.”
“What are you doing to find Gerry Brandt?”
“That's not your concern. Sign the letter.”
“I want to help you find him. I'll sign the letter if you let me help find him.”
Campbell grows indignant, huffing and puffing like a pantomime wolf. I can't see his eyes. They are hidden beneath eyebrows that crawl across his forehead, fleeing toward his ears.
I tell him about the ransom letters and the DNA tests, recounting what I've managed to piece together about the ransom drop. I know it sounds far-fetched but I'm getting closer. I just need help to follow the trail. Gerry Brandt had something to do with it.
Campbell shakes his head in disbelief. “You should hear yourself. You're obsessed.”
“You're not listening. Someone kidnapped Mickey. I don't think Howard Wavell killed her. She's alive!”
“No! You listen to me. This is bullshit. Mickey Carlyle died three years ago. Answer me something—if someone kidnapped her, why did they wait three years before sending a ransom demand? It doesn't make sense because it isn't true.”
He pushes my resignation letter back at me. “You should have retired when I gave you the chance. You're getting divorced. You hardly see your kids. You live alone. Look at you! Christ, you're a mess! I used to tell young detectives to model themselves on you, but now you're an embarrassment. You stayed on too long, Vincent—”
“No, don't ask me.”
“You're over the hill.”
“What hill? I didn't see any hill!”
“Sign the letter.”
Turning my face to one side, I squeeze my eyes shut, blinking away the bitterness. The more I think about it, the angrier it makes me. I can feel it stirring in my guts, churning around like the pistons of a steam engine.
Campbell takes back the fountain pen and returns it to his drawer. “You give me no option. I regret to inform you that your commission with the London Metropolitan Police has been withdrawn. The Commissioner has decided you are a liability. He won't let you give evidence under the label of a serving officer.”
“What do you mean give evidence?”
Campbell takes another letter from his desk drawer. This one is a subpoena.
“At ten o'clock this morning lawyers for Howard Wavell subpoenaed you to give evidence at his appeal hearing at midday tomorrow. They know about the ransom demand and the DNA test. They're going to argue that if a senior serving police officer approved the payment of a ransom for Michaela Carlyle we must believe she's still alive.”
“How did they find out?”
“You tell me. They're also applying for bail. Howard Wavell could be out of prison by tomorrow afternoon.”
Suddenly, I understand. My sacking will be part of the damage limitation. I'll be a maverick cop instead of a serving officer.
Breathing dies in the room. Campbell is still talking but I don't hear the words. I'm living ten seconds ahead of time or ten seconds behind. Meanwhile, a phone is ringing somewhere that nobody wants to answer.
23
Sitting low on worn springs in the front seat of the van, I peer through the windshield at the growing darkness. An Elvis doll on a suction cup dances to and fro on the dashboard.
Weatherman Pete is driving, with his woollen hat and walrus mustache. His jaw moves constantly on a wad of chewing gum that he retrieved from behind his ear.
In the back of the van are his four companions, who refer to themselves as “urban explorers.” Barry, a Cockney, has only two front teeth and a complete absence of hair. He is arguing with Angus, a retired coal miner, about which heavyweight champion had the weakest jaw. Opposite them, Phil tries to join in the conversation but his stutter gives the others too much time to interrupt. The only quiet member of the crew is Moley, who sits on the floor of the van checking ropes and lamps.
“It's the last frontier,” says Pete, talking to me. “Forty thousand miles of sewers, some of them hundreds of years old—it's a feat of engineering to rival the Suez Canal, but nobody gives your sewers a second thought. They just purge their poisons and flush them away.”
“But why explore them?”
He gives me a disappointed look. “Did they ask Hillary why he climbed Everest?”
“Yeah, they did.”
“OK. OK. Well these sewers are like Everest. They're the last frontier. You'll see. It's another world. Go down thirty feet and it's so quiet you can hear your pores opening and closing. And the darkness—it's unnatural. It's not like outside where if you wait your pupils dilate so that you can start making out shapes. Down there it's blacker than black.”
Barry leans through from the back of the van. “It's like a lost city. You got streams, culverts, shelters, basements, grottoes, graves, crypts, catacombs, secret places that the government don't want nobody to know about. It's a different world. One layer burying the next, just like rock sediments. Whenever the great civilizations crumble—Egyptian, Hittite, Roman—the one thing they always leave behind is their sewers and latrines. A million years from now archaeologists are going to be digging up our fossilized turds, take my word for it.”
“And a lot more besides,” adds Angus. “We find all sorts of stuff—jewelry, false teeth, spectacles, flashlights, gold coins, hearing aids, harmonicas, shoes—”
“I once saw a full-grown p-p-p-p-pig,” interrupts Phil. “Biggest p-p-p-porker you ever saw.”
“Happy as a pig in shit, was he?” cackles Angus. Barry joins in until Weatherman Pete tries to raise the tone.
“You know what a tosher is?”
“No.”
“Back in the eighteenth century they used to scour the sewers, panning the muck like you'd pan for gold. Imagine that! Then you had your gongfermers and rakers, who cleaned the sewers and repaired them. Nowadays they call them flushers. You might even hear some of 'em working tonight.”
“Why do they work at night?”