The Madness Underneath: Book 2 (THE SHADES OF LONDON) (7 page)

“Bakerloo?” Thorpe asked.

Stephen nodded.

I looked up at the sign, with the brown lettering that indicated the Bakerloo line. The Bakerloo line at Charing Cross…that meant something to me. But it wasn’t until we got down to the platform that the significance became clear.

“Do you see someone?” Thorpe asked me.

At the far end of the platform was a woman. Her hair was a silver-blond, swept back in heavy wings. She wore a black cowl-neck sweater and a gray skirt—ordinary enough clothes. I think the shoes told me she was from a different era. They were just a bit too chunky, too platform. She stood right at the edge of the platform, her gaze fixed on the opposite wall. The last time I’d spoken to this woman, all she could say was “I jumped” over and over in a brittle whisper. She was vulnerable and pale and, frankly, depressing to be around. Just getting near her made my spirits sink.

“The woman,” I said, glancing at Stephen. “I’ve met her before.”

Thorpe nodded to Stephen, who gently cleared his throat.

“Let’s go and talk to her,” Stephen said.

“Why?” I whispered. “What are we
doing
here?”

“Something important, I promise. I wouldn’t have brought you here otherwise. I just need you to talk to this woman.”

I looked down the length of the empty platform, where the
woman stood by the gaping maw of the silent tunnel. She had turned toward us, expectant. Stephen started to walk toward her, slowly, allowing me to follow. The woman could do me no harm—I knew that. I wasn’t frightened of her. It was more that she was so obviously sad—beyond sad, to some terrible point of existence. She was a palette of grays, and I didn’t want to get anywhere near her.

“It’s you,” she said when we reached her.

“Yes,” Stephen replied. “I was here a few days ago.”

“You came back. You brought her.”

“I did, yes. Rory, this is Diane.”

“Hello,” I said. I kept a foot or two behind Stephen, eyeing the woman.

“He said you would help me.” There was desperation in Diane’s eyes. “Will you help me?”

“Help you what?” I said.

“Make it stop. He said you could make it stop.”

At first, I refused to accept what I’d just heard. It made me vaguely sick. Stephen wouldn’t have brought me down here for that. Stephen didn’t even
know
I could do that…

“You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,” Stephen said. “But she’s suffering.”

Except he clearly
did
know.

“Please,” Diane said again. “Please. Please. I can’t go on like this. Please. Please. I never wanted to be here. I thought it would be quick. Jumping is quick. But I never went away. I jumped…but I never went away.”

I had used a terminus before, so it wasn’t that I was entirely opposed to the idea, in general. And if anyone needed a
terminus, it was probably this poor woman, trapped on a train platform for thirty or forty years, constantly stuck in the place that she’d killed herself. This gray and sad woman…

And yet. I’d been brought here all cloak-and-dagger. Stephen knew things that he shouldn’t have known. Thorpe stood down at his end of the platform and watched the show. That’s what it felt like—a show. I stepped away from Diane a bit and waved Stephen closer. His chin was down toward his chest, and he couldn’t look directly at me.

“How did you know?” I said, low enough so that Thorpe couldn’t hear.

“I kept an eye on you in Bristol,” Stephen said quietly.

“An eye on me? You followed me? And didn’t say anything?”

“I wanted to make sure—”

“And you told Thorpe? You told this woman I’d fix things for her? You brought me here to test me or something?”

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” he said, lifting his head a bit. “If you want, we walk away right now.”

“Oh, sure,” I said.

“I mean it. We leave right now if you say so.”

I looked back at Diane for just a moment, but I had to turn away. She was the embodiment of depression, of desperation. Releasing her would be fair. It would be right. I could come back and do it some other time, maybe. But not now. Not when I’d been brought here like this.

“Okay,” I said, drawing myself up as tall as I could. “We leave. Now.”

He blinked slowly.

“If that’s what you want.”

“That’s what I want.”

Stephen examined my face for a moment and rocked back and forth on his heels ever so slightly. We stood practically toe to toe, and I could smell the cold on his coat.

“Right,” he said.

Diane must have been listening, because she let out a wail. It was unpleasant to hear, so I blocked it out. I walked back down the platform toward Thorpe and left Stephen to try to talk to her. This was his fault. He’d made the promise. He could explain to her why it wasn’t going to happen.

“What’s going on?” Thorpe called.

“Nothing,” I replied. “I’m leaving.”

“Is it done?”

“Nope,” I said.

“Are you unable to…do what she asks?”

“I’m not—”

“Rory!” Stephen yelled.

This is when I felt something at my back. It felt like the wind—a cold and strong wind. There was a zing of electricity up my spine, and I couldn’t move, couldn’t talk.

It wasn’t unlike that feeling you get at the top of a roller coaster, just when you hear the clanking noise that pulled you up there stop, and something lets go, and you know the feeling is about to get much more intense and extreme. Everything goes up—your pulse, the blood to your head, even your organs seem to leap as it all falls away. The air comes into your lungs faster than you can process it, so you choke on it for a moment.

My ears filled with the sound of my own heartbeat, my blood
being forced through my veins. The world went white. Then everything settled just as fast as it had stirred, and I could smell the smoky flower smell, and the world came back into focus.

I fell to my knees on the platform surface, just managing to keep myself from going headfirst over the edge by grabbing at it. Then I felt hands at my waist, holding me steady, pulling me back into a seated position.

“You’re all right,” Stephen said. “You’re all right. She came up behind you. She grabbed you. She was too fast. I couldn’t stop her.”

Thorpe hurried up to us.

“Did something happen?” he asked.

In reply, I got down on my knees on the bumpy yellow section at the very edge of the platform, leaned over the side, and began to throw up on the tracks. Someone—Stephen, I guessed—held me from behind to make sure I didn’t lose my balance. The sickness didn’t last long, and it cleared my head instantly. I pushed back and sat on my heels and wiped my mouth.

“I didn’t do it,” I said, once I caught my breath.

“What?” Thorpe asked.

“It happened,” Stephen said. “The woman touched Rory, not the other way around. That’s what she means.”

“But you
are
sure.”

“There’s no mistaking it,” Stephen said, a little sharply. “It’s not subtle.”

“Then get her back to her school and make sure she’s all right.”

“Come on,” Stephen said to me softly. “Can you stand?”

I didn’t answer, and when he tried to help me, I pushed his
hands away and walked down the platform. I knew Stephen was a few steps behind me, quiet, nervous. I saw several mice dash along the edges of the corridors or along the steps as we approached, put out by our appearance. The Tube belonged to them at night.

I stood outside Charing Cross station for a minute, taking deep, heavy breaths of cold air. The policewoman watched me from a distance—impassive. She couldn’t have had any idea why I was here or what I’d just done. I was trying to figure out what I was feeling. It wasn’t anger, but it was something related to it. Was it exhaustion? Maybe even relief? It was all those feelings, maybe, and I didn’t feel like having any of them, so I decided to ignore them all and concentrate on breathing nice and slow.

Stephen exited the station a minute later. He went right to the car and held the passenger’s door open for me.

“Don’t we have to wait for Thorpe?” I asked. There was a bit of a growl in my voice, mostly from the vomiting. It made me sound very angry. I was fine with that.

“He can ride with the other officer. He said I should take you.”

I got into the car, and Stephen shut the door. He turned on the engine and turned the heat on full blast. Gusts of warm air roared out of the vents and directly into my face. I reached over and turned it down.

“I thought you might be cold,” he said.

“I am. It feels good. I just threw up.”

“She was too fast for me to stop her,” he said. “Sometimes they move quickly, more quickly than us. I couldn’t stop her.”

I’d seen it. I knew that was true. There was nothing he could
have done to stop her if she’d been moving as fast as she really wanted to go. Ghosts are quick when they want to be.

Still, I wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. I maintained a steely silence for a few moments.

“Be mad at me if you want,” he said. “But everything I’ve done has been for good reasons.”

“Like what?”

He took off his black glasses and rubbed them on his leg. His leg bounced a little with tension.

“Rory, I just…it’s…it’s very complicated.”

“Try me.”

“Rory…”

“What’s Thorpe doing?” I said. “Over there, by the door?”

Thorpe wasn’t over by the door. I’d just said that to distract him. I yanked the keys out of the ignition.

“Tell me,” I said, shoving them down my shirt and holding them against my chest. “Tell me, or we go nowhere. Tell me or I’ll start screaming. Do you want me to draw lots of attention to what’s going on here? I’ll totally do it.”

A deep sigh from Stephen. He banged his head gently against his headrest and stared up at the car ceiling.

“They were going to shut us down. They were happy with the results of the Ripper case, but without a terminus, they didn’t know how we could still function.”

“You still have one,” I said. “What about the one in the bathroom? The one Jo used on Newman?”

He reached into his pocket and removed a small plastic vial, then he switched on the interior light so I could look at it. It contained a gray stone.

“That’s it,” he said. “It’s gone cloudy, as you can see. It doesn’t work anymore. We’ve tried. It’s like a blown lightbulb.”

“What about the two in the river?” I asked. “Can you get them back? You can get things out of the Thames—guns and evidence and stuff, right?”

“Guns, maybe, on a good day. But not two extremely small stones. The Thames is a powerful tidal river. Presumably the stones drifted a bit before they sank, and now they’re mixed in somewhere in the millions of tons of sediment and sludge. So you are the only terminus. Then I saw what happened to you…I needed to show Thorpe that there was one terminus left. I also needed a good reason to bring you back. I was never comfortable with you being sent away like that, on your own, with no support. This solved both problems. We’ll be allowed to keep going for a while now that he’s seen.”

Stephen was right. I couldn’t have stayed there on my own, with no one to talk to. He reached over and took the vial and put it back in his pocket.

“And how did you do it?” I asked. “How did you bring me back?”

“Thorpe did that. I honestly don’t know how he set it up. I only know he made a very strong suggestion to your therapist that you should be returned to London. He didn’t give me any details.”

Of course. Now it all made sense. Julia’s sudden decision that I should return to Wexford. Her obvious lie about all the work I’d done in therapy.

“It was up to you,” Stephen said. “You were asked if you wanted to return. You said yes.”

“But I didn’t say I would just…put on some freak show for Thorpe, or blow up some woman. You could have told me where we were going.”

“I wasn’t sure if you’d agree to just…doing it. But I thought if you saw the pain Diane was in…it was appropriate use, Rory. She was in agony. Now, I’ve told you everything. Give me back the keys. Now.”

The keys were sweat-stuck to my chest. I knocked them loose and they fell gracefully into my crotch. I picked them up and handed them over. He started the car again and was putting it into reverse, then stopped.

“Boo and Callum,” he said, his voice smooth and quiet again. “They know you’re back. I can take you to see them now, and we can talk about it. If you want. We can go right now, or we can do it some other time. I don’t know how you’re feeling.”

The rapid change in emotions, the way he wasn’t looking at me…he was still feeling very guilty. His reasons may have been good, but he still felt bad about using me like that, about keeping things from me.

I did want to see Boo and Callum. Truth be told, I was still glad to see Stephen. And to tell even more truth, it was just a little bit fun to play with his guilt. And he did feel guilty. And after the last few weeks, I deserved whatever fun I could get.

“We can go now,” I said in a low voice, rubbing a clear patch in the fog on the window.

6

I
N JUST A FEW TURNS, WE WERE HEADING TOWARD THE YELLOW glowing eye of the clock at the top of Big Ben. The Houses of Parliament were lit up for the night, and the London Eye loomed just across the water, a neon bluish-purple circle revolving slowly. Everything in this part of London was alight. We crossed the bridge by the Parliament buildings and headed over to the south side of the river.

We turned past Waterloo station and onto the fairly quiet residential streets beyond. He drove down a street with a chip shop on the corner and pulled the car into the only empty space along the street and turned off the engine.

“We have a new flat—” he began.

“I know,” I said.

This seemed to surprise him. He knew something about me, but I knew something about him as well.

“Oh. Right. Well, the owner of our old flat decided it was time to start charging three thousand pounds a month again.
So that was that, really. Since we did such a good job with the Ripper, Her Majesty’s Government has given us a proper office and somewhere to live. It’s just here.”