The Killing Club (23 page)

Chapter 18

The corridor was stale and dank, the dust as thick as midnight fog. So thick in fact that, despite the dim blue glow of his phone’s fascia, Heck only knew it was a corridor by bouncing from wall to wall and occasionally encountering open doors, beyond which lay tiny spaces heaped with grime-encrusted junk. It wouldn’t be true to say there was no sound: rats scuttled away, squeaking and skittering; there were occasional dull booms denoting the reverberations of Tube trains.

He tried to place a call, but of course got nowhere. There was no signal beneath London’s streets. He pressed on, turning corner after corner, before seeing what looked like natural light. At first it was a dull smudge, a vaguely visible streak on the wall opposite another open door. When he glanced through the door, he saw the light filtering out of a tiny square aperture where a ventilation fan had once been attached. Its faint radiance revealed what had formerly been an office, again buried under rubbish and masses of mouldy, filth-covered paperwork. It also showed a recognisable insignia on the passage wall: the traditional red roundel and horizontal blue band of the London Underground, complete with a name:

Shacklewell Street

Heck had vague memories of such a station. He thought it had ceased to operate sometime in the 1970s, having once been part of the Victoria Line. How much of it remained beyond this point was another question. It had been a deep-level station, and many of those now disused had been demolished and filled in. That said, it might be possible to work his way through to another station that was still in service. Half a second later it became imperative he at least try – because he spotted the flashing of torches at the end of the corridor. An explosive smashing of wood suggested that his pursuers were kicking in doors as they came steadily nearer.

He extinguished his own phone light and ran on – only for the passage to ramp downward and terminate at a barred gate hung with cobwebs so old and dusty they were more like tatters of rotted fabric. Heavy, corroded chains held the gate closed.

Heck halted in front of it, sweat pinpricking his face.

Only one other avenue presented itself: an open door on the left. Beyond this lay an even smaller room than those he’d previously seen. By the flickering torchlight, he glimpsed shelves crammed with bric-a-brac, a dog-eared girlie calendar hanging above a chair. The bountiful curves of Miss June 1979 were visible through a skin of mildew, but what stood behind her promised more.

A second door.

Heck threw the chair aside and pulled the calendar down, to find the second door had no handle, just a small hole. Frantic seconds passed as the torches outside drew nearer. He scrabbled along the shelves, initially ploughing nothing but foulness and dirt. There were tools here, but they were ancient and useless. And now he heard voices.

‘Time-check, mate?’

‘Five to eleven.’

The second voice was Cockney; the first voice different – Australian maybe?

‘Mate, this is fucked!’

Then Heck’s hand alighted on a familiarly angled shape: a lever door handle. There were no screws in it, but its squared-off turning bar remained. He spun around. The passage was now filled with light. Frantic, he slotted the bar into the hole and twisted it. The door clicked open.

Had they heard? It didn’t matter.

He withdrew the handle and slipped through into the blackness on the other side, easing the door closed after him. The voices became muffled, but at best he knew the door would only hold them for a couple of minutes. He quickly brought his own phone back to life. Its battery was low on juice, and the glow it emitted so poor that he now saw very little: just maintenance passages leading off; bare brick walls; exposed wiring; fallen plaster.

At least the light enabled him to walk quickly and freely, which was a relief as a furious banging now sounded behind him. Several bursts of gunfire followed.

Heck started running, rounding a corner and proceeding another twenty yards before stumbling into a section of roof-fall. Massed heaps of bricks and dirt prevented further progress. He doubled back, stopping en route to collect a shovel propped against a wall. He had no plans to dig, but it was the closest thing approximating a weapon he’d seen thus far.

The banging abruptly ceased. Heck halted to listen, trying to suppress the sound of his laboured breathing. It occurred to him that his light might be a giveaway, but then a brighter light burst to life at the end of the adjoining passage. It was one of the electric torches; again it was advancing.

Heck edged to the next corner, heart drumming. He shoved his phone into his pocket, dousing its light. Then he waited – and waited.

Padding footsteps accompanied the advancing torchlight. There was no chatter. Did that mean only one of them was present? It hardly mattered. There was nowhere else for Heck to go. Fresh sweat beaded his brow. His muscles coiled like springs – but it was only as the muzzle of a submachine gun, with a flashlight attachment, protruded around the corner, that he swung the shovel with both hands.

The flat of its blade made ferocious contact with the gunman’s face, the deafening
CLANG
echoing through the passages.

It was the big white guy. He went down onto his back, a crimson font spraying from his nose, and yet managed to retain consciousness. He even kept hold of his weapon, discharging a blind volley across the ceiling, bringing down plumes of dust and plaster.

Heck ducked around this and sprinted back the way he had come. The gunman twisted where he lay and fired after him, but was clearly groggy, drilling slugs harmlessly into the wall. ‘Pommie fucker!’ he howled in hoarse Australian.

Heck didn’t know where the other killer was; nor did he care. He turned a couple more corners and hammered along a much narrower passage, which had steel plates for a floor and wire-mesh on either side. Midway along this there was an aperture on his left. He ventured through it, finding steps dropping into blackness. He descended these for about fifteen feet before he alighted on flat concrete.

The rasp of his breathing reverberated eerily, and he realised he was in some large, vaulted chamber. He fumbled his phone from his pocket. Again, it didn’t illuminate much, but was sufficient to show that he was on a long, broad platform with deep black pits lying parallel on either side of it. When he edged left and glanced into the first of these, rat-tails lashed as furry bodies scampered away into holes and crevices. It was the old track-bed, though the rails themselves had long been removed. Overhead, most of the cream and brown tiling had fallen from the arched ceiling and lay scattered. The walls were adorned with aged movie posters. They were mouldy, blistered with damp, but the films were recognisable:
Apocalypse Now
…
Mad Max
…
Moonraker
…
Alien
…

With a low, dull rumble, everything shuddered. More dust trickled down.

Another train had passed close by.

Heck hurried along the platform, circling the bare frame of a billboard on which the tattered remnants of a Tube map hung. He couldn’t yet see the tunnel mouth at the far end, but it could only be a hundred yards or so. By the sounds of it, living London wasn’t too far away. But then he spotted something else a short distance ahead: a low, arched entrance with another stair rising behind it.

More importantly, a light was descending that stair.

For half a second, Heck imagined help had arrived. Had someone posted on the old site been alerted to intruders? Did Shacklewell Street connect with other buildings still in use? And then the truth dawned. No one was posted on this abandoned site, nor had they been for decades. The light he was seeing was the light of the second gunman, who had somehow got ahead of him. Heck recalled the extra bursts of shooting he’d heard. They’d been blowing the chains off the barred gates.

He turned and ran the other way – only to see a second light, this one proceeding along the mesh-covered bridge.

He was hemmed in from either end.

Scalp tingling, Heck pivoted around. Directly across the left-hand track-bed, he spied a recess in the wall with a steel door set in it. Vaulting down from the platform, he hurried over there. Yet even before reaching the door, he saw that this too was closed and fixed with a chain and padlock.

Heck glanced around. The two lights were now on the level, advancing one from either end of the platform. They’d almost certainly seen each other, but had not yet spotted him, which would explain their cautious approach. Even so, it would only be a matter of seconds. He pocketed his phone and swung back to the door. It was solid steel, its chains intact – but there was one other possibility. The door was mounted on a step, beneath which there was a vent: a rusted, circular pipe sticking out several inches from the brickwork, about twenty inches in diameter.

He ripped off his jacket, dropped to his knees and crawled in headfirst, only then realising how small the space was that he was attempting to pass through; its dimensions were coffin-like, its darkness absolute. He could only make ground by worming ahead on his elbows, his groping hands frequently encountering soft, furry bodies, which again scattered at his touch. And there was another problem: it began to slope downhill. Heck had expected this pipe to lead through into whatever space lay on the other side of the door, but apparently not. He passed over a circular rim, and the passage tightened further. Another ten yards, and he entered an even narrower section. He could only progress from here by slithering on his belly, and even then it fitted him like a glove, tearing at his shoulders, weighing on his back, the mere sensation of which set his gut churning.

A Lancashire lad by origin, Heck remembered tales his coalminer grandfather had told about being trapped underground during a cave-in. He’d suffered nightmares for days afterwards, about the pit: all those tons of dirt over the top of you; the blackness; the airlessness; the narrow gaps; the flat crawlspaces under the seams; the creaking and groaning deep in the rock faces. Being held fast in there, being suffocated, being squashed in the depths of the earth.

But now it wasn’t a dream.

Heck snaked on, passing another riveted joint beyond which the angle of descent tilted even more steeply. Here, he hesitated. Only the snugness of the pipe’s fit preventing him tumbling forward. He wondered what he’d do if he went down and it suddenly tipped upright. That was a hideous thought, and yet it wasn’t possible to go back – he could now hear tinny voices at the end of the pipe. He tried to glance over his shoulder, though even if the slender space had allowed this it was too dark to see anything. Not that he needed to. The bastards were no more than thirty feet away; they’d have found his jacket and thus located his escape route.

Pouring sweat, he squirmed over the ridge, slithering down another twelve yards or so – at which point, very suddenly, the pipe seemed to change shape, become oval, turn narrower. Had earth movements outside partly crushed it? With probing fingers, Heck felt lines of jagged teeth where the interior surface had buckled.

He halted again, fighting down panic.

Somewhere behind, the voices sounded louder. He imagined them gazing into the pipe, perhaps preparing to unleash volleys of gunfire after him. Twisting onto his side, he tried to push himself through. The concave metal immediately gouged his chest, crooked steel ripping through his shirt and into the skin underneath. Briefly, he was stuck there. There wasn’t room to bring his elbows back to his sides. His arms were fully extended in front, so he couldn’t use those to gain leverage. Even the most strenuous efforts to wriggle through had no effect – but those voices were now ringing down the pipe. They knew he was here; they’d hear him gasping, choking. Metallic clicks echoed as fresh magazines were snapped into place.

That was enough.

The pressure on his chest might be adequate to prevent him filling his lungs with enough air to scream, but it was inadequate to hold him indefinitely, to prevent him driving forward one last time, forcing himself past the obstruction, and then hauling himself bodily on. When the pipe suddenly levelled out, and he found his hands and head emerging into air and space, he almost shouted with relief. He was able to plant his palms against the rim at the end of the pipe, and push hard, sliding his torso out next, then his waist and finally his legs.

Heck lay stunned and filthied on a damp, gritty floor, bleeding from a dozen minor wounds. Another deep rumble somewhere close by roused him.

Sobbing for breath, he dug in his pocket to retrieve the phone. When he hoisted the meagre light, he saw that he was in a secondary tunnel. In this case the tracks were still in place, minus the electrified inner-rail. Some twenty yards to his right stood a set of buffers and behind those, a wall of solid black bricks. To his left, there was a train.

Heck gazed at it in disbelief.

It didn’t look like a modern train: it was the same shape, but maroon in colour. One of its rear windows was broken, the other intact, though centimetres-thick with grime. In fact, the whole thing was so covered in dirt and cobwebs that he could barely distinguish the ornate, gold-painted
London Transport
motif.

More worryingly, it blocked the tunnel. There wasn’t enough room to get around it on either side, and certainly not underneath it. Another faint rumble suggested a passing train. Meanwhile, a muffled staccato coughing denoted gunfire.

Heck swung around.

Unmistakably gunfire, followed by a metallic grating and crashing, and then the banging of feet on a metal stair. Set above the pipe he’d just clambered through was an identical steel door to that on the higher level. This too was chained and padlocked.

‘You’ve got to be kidding …’ he said.

A second later, a fusillade of shots ripped through it, lasers of torchlight blasting after them. With a squeal of ancient hinges, this second door was kicked open and two of the Nice Guys stood there. If Heck had been around, he’d have seen that one was tall, powerfully built and black; the other white, his formerly handsome features now flat as an anvil, his pulverised nose thick with clotted gore.