Phobia Page 19

  ‘I can’t be one hundred per cent sure, sir, no,’ Honor admitted, ‘but it doesn’t fit his method so far. He could take her anywhere, but transporting her long distances increases risk for him, and I’m certain that he uses the sewers to move around. Given where she is now, it’s more likely that she’s somewhere within the square mile.’ She shook her head as she watched Jayden’s ordeal. Somehow it made it more personal, more terrifying than ever, watching somebody slowly die right before her.

  ‘He’s going to get his wish. His work is going to become famous now, whether we catch him or not,’ Harper said.

  ‘We’ll catch him all right,’ DCI Mitchell said as his voice rose to be directed at the entire room, ‘and then we’ll make the bastard famous for all the wrong reasons. Jayden Nixx has to be our priority for now, so I want every London Borough council informed of the incident, and every resource devoted to finding Jayden Nixx, is that clear?’

  A chorus of “yes boss” shook the room. As if on cue, one by one, the telephones began to ring as the media picked up on the viral Internet feed and began calling frantically for more information.

  DI Harper turned to Honor.

  ‘I think that it’s fair to say you’ve got the best handle on this case. What do you need?’

  Honor thought for a moment, tried to get ahead of the situation escalating rapidly around her.

  ‘I need a map of London’s sewers,’ she said. ‘All of them.’

  The thrill of it.

  His nerves jangled, twitching to live currents pulsing through his synapses. His mind seethed with latent energy, primal drums beating ancient rhythms that echoed through darkened neural networks. Absolute power, absolutely unrestrained. He was committing the perfect crime; watching it live, yet far from the action. One of his legs bounced up and down on tiptoe, nervous energy spilling from him in mindless repetition.

  He sat on his sofa and watched, wide–eyed, as Jayden Nixx shivered in the cold water that was plummeting down onto her head. Her long, black hair was curled into drenched locks that plastered her face, her arms outstretched either side of her, her cuffed wrists just out of shot of the camera.

  The wall to which she was manacled was bare of any features – he couldn’t afford council workers to be able to identify in which sewer conduit Jayden was imprisoned. That risked them finding her before she died. No, she was somewhere in the city’s endless labyrinth of subterranean tunnels, and it would take a gargantuan effort to find her before they flooded.

  He smiled, watching her without blinking, afraid to miss that crucial moment. Sure, he could rewind it if he missed it, but that just wasn’t the same, was it? To be there, right there, and yet not need to be there at all, that was something that he owed to the immense power of the Internet, and now the rest of the world knew about it too. The rest of the world.

  The knowledge that right now there were millions of people watching Jayden Nixx’s terminal moments sent a fresh wave of electrifying delight rippling through his nerve endings. Millions. Perhaps tens of millions. Hundreds of millions? The police, by now, would be once again caught up in the turmoil of the chase, once again out–foxed, out– witted and out–manoeuvred by a man they still could not identify. He glanced at a second television, this one tuned to a foreign television station’s digital broadcast. It was beyond his hope that the BBC or any other official channel would display the footage that he had presented to the world, too afraid to risk the legal wrath of the politically correct. But other countries did not hold their reporting to the same standard, and even now he revelled in the thought of distant countries waking up to a sunrise and the terrible reports coming in from England, of the girl drowning in full view of the entire globe. It would be talked about for months, years, perhaps decades. This was not the kind of story that was forgotten the next day, like a conflict in some far–flung corner of the globe or a random stabbing on a derelict housing estate. No, this was something that would be in the public memory forever, a lasting, haunting memory that would stalk London’s streets just as the Ripper had done.

  He checked his watch: two forty–eight pm. He glanced to his right, out of the living room window, where a darkened sky shadowed the city. He stood up, willing to leave the television if only for a moment to check the weather, and was rewarded with a scene of apocalyptic rainfall, the roads awash, streetlights coming on as their sensors detected a lack of light and reacted to the supposed onset of evening.

  The news stations had issued yellow alerts for heavy weather for the rest of the day and into the evening, with no let–up in the rainfall predicted until at least midnight. It wouldn’t stop, and he knew that there was no chance that Jayden Nixx would be spared her fate. He glanced to his left, as though he could see through the rows of houses and beyond toward the Thames, where right now Jayden was incarcerated in her darkened subterranean prison and facing her death head–on.

  ‘Soon, Jayden,’ he smiled, shivering with anticipation. ‘Not long now.’

  The water was frigid, Jayden’s feet aching with the cold as she strained against her bonds. Water splattered down onto her head from above, where it was running down the arched walls of the sewer and then falling away to land on her. She looked up, squinting into the falling water, and could see the shaft rising up and away from the chamber gantry, and right at the top, the manhole cover through which she could just about see the open sky through holes in the iron surface.

  Water cascaded down through the drain cover, pouring in glistening sheets down the walls of the sewer and ironically keeping most of her clean despite the stinking mess flowing past her. She looked down, her entire body shaking as she watched the dark, microbe–infested water sluice by. It had risen above her ankles in the past hour and now it was rising faster by the minute. She felt objects in the water brush past her skin, chunks of unthinkable human waste coiling around her legs, the stench enough to make her gag.

  She squinted up again toward the drain, wondering where she was and whether anybody would hear her if she were able to shout for help. The gag in her mouth was tightly wound fabric, and she had been working at it with her teeth in the hopes of slicing it away over time and freeing her lungs to scream. Her wrists were another matter – tightly fastened in place with what looked like Victorian–style manacles that might once have belonged on a slave ship or in a gaol.

  Jayden turned her head to the camera attached to the far wall of the sewer, its tiny light casting a feeble glow into the chamber. She could not know whether he was watching, whether anybody was watching, but she had to assume that it was her only means of contacting the outside world. She would dearly have loved to have been able to communicate her location, like a Hollywood heroine who would somehow figure out a way to alert her friends to where she was, and escape alive to see her tormentor arrested and imprisoned for his crimes.

  The water was rising. She looked down, her stomach in turmoil as she saw the foul soup churning around her calves; filthy wet–wipes, discarded food, thick drools of cooking fat and oils seething in a sea of bacterial waste as revolting in appearance as it was in smell. The stench permeated the air like a living thing, coating the back of her throat with slime as she fought against her bonds and tried to keep her breathing under control. She knew instinctively that to panic now would seal her fate, but her heart was slamming against her chest and her nerves were already shredded, jangling with shame and fear.

  Water.

  In her mind’s eye Jayden saw herself as a little girl, playing near a stream with her friends. She saw herself trip in reeds near the bank, saw herself fall into the water. It had been the middle of summer, but the water had been icy cold as she’d plunged in.

  The shock of the cold water had caused her to suck in an involuntary breath, and with it, the water.

  She had thrashed, coughed, gagged and choked beneath the surface, struggling for the last few seconds of her life but hopelessly tangled up in the thick reeds, the water that had looked so peaceful and inviting
now cold, dark and dangerous. She had felt her consciousness slipping away, her limbs unable to move, and then, suddenly, a tremendous force had hauled her from her watery grave as a passer–by had rushed to her aid.

  She had coughed up a thick mess of water soon after, never having actually fully lost consciousness. She had experienced every last moment of her near–drowning at the tender age of seven, and it had a lasting impact on her. She feared water with a passion. She could not travel on ferries or boats of any kind, and would avoid flying anywhere that required crossing large stretches of open water. She had only ever visited Europe, for it could be reached by crossing the English Channel in an airplane, and a former boyfriend had assured her that by the time an aircraft reached the middle of the Channel, they were high enough to carry on to dry land in either direction, even if an engine were lost. Were it not for that knowledge, she would never have travelled abroad at all. Jayden could not swim, and would only fill a bath with the bare minimum of water. She couldn’t watch films or read books that had even the slightest hint of a drowning in them, and had huge admiration for anybody that could endure such an ordeal.

  Now, she stared into the darkness as her mind began to unravel. She could almost feel the fragments of her sanity slipping away like a tree battered by ferocious storms, its leaves tumbling away into the maelstrom. She was going to drown here. Terror was building up inside of her in the same way that the water was rising in the chamber. She glanced down, almost afraid to look, and there in the weak light she saw the churning water rising toward her knees – black, dangerous and as cold as death itself.

  Please, no. Not like this.

  He was watching her, she was certain. Who the hell the insane man was, she didn’t know, but she knew his face. She’d seen him before, in the pub, on the street, just here and there, somebody she recognised enough to say hi. A nice guy, a normal guy, who smiled at her when he said hello and never bothered her in the slightest. Now, in retrospect, she realised that he must have been following her, learning about her, knowing everything about her: where she lived, where she worked and with whom, her routines, her life, even her fears. What she didn’t understand was, why? Who the hell was she to him? Why would he have gone to all of this bother to entrap her down here to die?

  Jayden focused on his face in her mind, tried to ignore the sludge–laden water rising over her knees. There had to be a reason why she was targeted, something about her, perhaps in her past, that had provoked in him the need to kill her in this most cruel of ways? Had she rejected his advances? She didn’t recall ever speaking to him at length, couldn’t remember anybody who looked like him, and he’d seemed a fair bit older than her, maybe in his very early forties, so they couldn’t have been at school or college together. Maybe university? But she’d studied in Bristol, a chance to escape the capital in which she’d been raised, to see another part of the country. He wouldn’t have followed her all the way back here, would he?

  The rush of the water was now becoming louder as smaller outflows began to join the deluge, blasting more water into the chamber. To her right, she could still see the exit pipe that she assumed must run down towards the Thames, the water flowing into it, but the level was quickly rising as the water simply couldn’t flow out of the chamber as fast as it was pouring in from every other direction.

  As the level rose, so the red light from the camera reflected on the surface a little more, and Jayden looked up to see various bits of debris hanging from subterranean power cables, loops and strings of material clogging London’s bowels. She felt fresh terror surge through her as her worst fears were confirmed: the debris must have been caught there the last time the sewers had flooded, and that meant the water had in the past risen several feet above her head.

  Jayden began to sob as fear closed its cold fingers around her, her tears adding to the deluge as she looked at the manacles pinning her in place and wondered if she could somehow pull them from the brick walls. Another thought crossed her mind: she could eat through her own arms and walk away.

  Jesus, Jayden.

  There was no way out. The rush of the water began to thunder through the chamber, and she realised that even if she could remove her gag, she would never be heard above the commotion. She looked up at the manhole cover, far above her, and saw that the sky had darkened.

  The full force of the storm was now being unleashed on the city above. As she listened to the water thundering into the chamber, so she heard something else coming with it, a high–pitched whistling noise that seemed to emerge all around her at once. For a moment, she dared to hope that somebody, anybody, was coming to her rescue. But then she saw the lights.

  Tiny, pin–prick lights, reflecting the light of the camera opposite. In the darkness, she saw shapes scuttling around the edges of the sewer, running along shelves in the brickwork and swimming through the foul mess swilling around her. Their eyes flicked this way and that, their noses sniffing the air as they tumbled into the chamber in their hundreds, trying to avoid the same terrible fate to which she was doomed.

  A large rat swam toward her, its grey coat smeared with congealed waste, and Jayden shrieked through her gag as the animal’s claws latched onto her nightclothes and it tried to scramble up her body and away from the rising water.

  Honor McVey spread a large map onto a table in the Incident Room as every detective in the building gathered around her. Many of them were working other cases with other MIT units, but the extraordinary nature of Jayden Nixx’s suffering had brought them across to the operation, and even some detectives whose shifts were about to end were there, Hansen among them.

  ‘These are the sewers of London,’ she said. ‘It’s our belief that the man responsible for the deaths of Sebastian Dukas and Amber McVey has been using them to traverse the square mile without being observed. The current ordeal of Jayden Nixx seems to confirm that.’ She gestured to a man standing alongside her. ‘This is Paul Sharp. He’s worked for Hamlets Council for the past two decades and knows much of what’s down there. Paul, tell us everything you know.’

  Paul Sharp was a short, stocky man who looked both nervous to be in the company of so many law–enforcement officers, and excited to be involved in a major investigation. His grey, curly hair was receding and he wore square–rimmed spectacles as he glanced down at the map and cleared his throat.

  ‘As I’m sure most of you know, the city’s sewers were built between 1859 and 1865 to combat cholera epidemics, the result of raw sewage discharged into the Thames. There are six interceptor sewers with a combined length of around one hundred miles, many of which now channel what were once rivers that flowed through the city. Three of these sewers are north of the water, three to the south, and all use gravity to flow eastwards toward pumping stations. The one closest to the river, on the Embankment, is the lowest.’

  ‘Can anybody gain access to them?’ Danny asked.

  ‘Sure,’ Paul nodded, ‘although why anybody would want to, I don’t know. It’s a rough place down there, dangerous for obvious reasons.’

  ‘How far can somebody travel?’ Samir asked.

  ‘The sewers are vast and cover much of the city, over four hundred miles of them in total,’ Paul replied, with apparent pride. ‘But seeing as we’re talking about the square mile, it’s possible for a person to enter the sewers at Moorgate and come out on King William Street without ever being seen, although many of the drain lids are on the surface of busy streets, so they’d have to pick their moments.’

  DI Harper spoke up, standing at one end of the table with her arms folded as she stared down at the map.

  ‘Jayden Nixx is somewhere down there right now. Was there anything you could see in the video that might pin–point her location?’

  Paul had been shown the live feed a few minutes before the briefing began, and had been suitably traumatised and appalled by what he had witnessed, but despite his great knowledge of the sewer system he shook his head slowly.

  ‘Whoever put her down t
here was smart enough to place her somewhere such that it’s impossible to identify from the footage you have of her. There’s not enough of the surrounding area for us to tell. She could be literally anywhere, although I can narrow down the search for you.’

  Paul leaned over the map and pointed to certain areas.

  ‘She’s fixed to a brickwork area, which rules out any sections of the sewers that have been reworked with modern concrete. That, and the fact that whoever put her there clearly wants to drown her, means that she is probably in one of the deeper sections, somewhere that will flood quickly and prevent you from reaching her. The deepest sections are those nearest the river, along Embankment.’

  ‘Any idea on which side of the river?’ DCI Harper asked.

  ‘She’s north of the water,’ Honor said, speaking on impulse. She looked up to see Paul and DI Harper frowning at her. ‘He’s going to keep every killing that he can in the Whitechapel area, that’s part of his design. Plus, I suspect he’s enjoying this game of his and wants to see us scurrying about the city looking for her, while marvelling at his own creativity.’ There was little reason to argue with her, but Honor gestured to the map. ‘Still, we should obviously search both sides of the water, I’d just put an emphasis on anything to the north. Anything else, Paul?’

  He sighed thoughtfully.

  ‘She might be in what we call a breather space, the convergence of several interceptors into a chamber. The water falling on her head supports that – it’s coming from something above her, possibly a manhole cover or roadside drain.’

  ‘Rainwater?’ Honor asked, and was rewarded with a nod. ‘How can this guy have accessed the sewers so often without being detected?’

  Paul answered with a grim smile.

  ‘It’s not exactly Piccadilly Circus down there. If you have somebody running about the sewers, they’re not going to meet many other people, apart from the drainers.’