“What does that mean, exactly?” Barry asked, fearful of the answer.

“It means that this may no longer be an HSE matter. It may be a police matter. I think your friend there was murdered.”

Chapter 3 2

MI5 Headquarters, Thames House, London. Wednesday, 11am.

Barry Mitchinson had been in the office since seven in the morning and he was flagging already. The beta blockers weren’t helping his panic attacks, and the more of them he took, the edgier he seemed to become. Reaching into the bottom of his movable pedestal drawers, he lifted out a new bottle of No.7 Sour Mash Whiskey all the way from Lynchburg, Tennessee. He splashed a generous serving into a disposable plastic cup from the water cooler, and stashed the bottle again.

Looking at his monitor, he watched with disgust as rodents crawled over the face of a prostrate body, eating their fill.

***

It had been almost midnight when he had managed to usher out the last of the police, the HSE and other sundry interfering busybodies from the Strand station platform. Left alone, he ascended the spiral staircase to the ground level lobby and lifted the old wooden cover from the abandoned lift shaft. There was nothing to see. It was pitch dark in the shaft, and the expected smell was thankfully absent.

If Gil Davis really was down there, as Tim had claimed, she would have been dead for no more than a few hours; the odours of decomposition would, no doubt, follow later. There was a rattle as the padlock on the shutters was cut off and the cage shutters rolled aside.

Two men from Technical Services entered the lobby and closed the shutter behind them. The first nodded to Barry and the second spoke.

“We have the equipment. Do you mind if we measure up first?” he asked more politely than was necessary, given Barry’s precarious position in the service as of tonight.

“Do as you wish. Let’s just get on with it.”

The two technicians measured the opening and marked the dimensions down in a yellow covered flip over pad, much like a policeman’s notebook. They spoke between themselves.

“It’s a standard diameter, so a cast Iron cover will do. We’ll have a ring around the top, and the manhole cover in the middle will be hinged to allow access. Might as well put some hydraulics on it to make it easy to lift.”

The older man addressed Barry, who was staring blankly into space. “Does that sound OK, Guv?”

“Whatever it takes to seal it off, I don’t really care. Can we get the camera down there now?”

Slightly annoyed at the perceived lack of appreciation for their attending a dusty old tube station in the middle of the night, the older technician produced what looked like an oversized metal attaché case. The body of the case was black but the reinforced edges were brushed aluminium. Setting the case down and unclasping the two metal restraints, the Technician opened the case to reveal what looked like a professional photographer’s camera case but with a five and a half inch colour monitor built into the lid.

The case was split into two longitudinal compartments; the camera and cable were closest to the lid and the transformers and lens adapters closest to the front of the case.

“Seth, we need the battery and the extra cable out of the box, please,” the technician noted.

The younger man, Seth, quickly extracted the cable and what looked like a car battery from the pull along trolley they had brought in with them, and within a few short minutes the camera was sliding down the seventy-feet-deep shaft.

Once the camera hit the bottom, Victor, the older technician, switched on the camera. After a few seconds of fuzzy lines and then pixilation, the picture steadied.

“OK, Seth. Up about a foot.”

The young man lifted the camera cable as requested. “Right, Guv, I’m putting on the active light. This only illuminates the immediate area, especially in the pitch darkness, OK?”

Barry nodded, too tired and demoralised to speak. He just knew that there would be no body down there and that Gil Davis was already out of the country.

“Bugger me!” Victor flinched as he said it, and looked at Barry, who was transfixed at the awful scene.

***

Sitting back in his chair, Barry swigged the last of the whiskey and crumpled the cup before discarding it in a recycling bin. Throwing a stick of Trebor gum into his mouth to mask the smell of the alcohol, he watched the final moments of the DVD the technicians had recorded last night.

There in extreme wide angle was a body; it was broadly in profile but it was definitely a body. The body had a coat, a scarf and gloves, as one would expect on a cold day. The hair was long and fair, loosely styled as a woman would wear it. The camera zoomed into the face but there was little to see. One at a time rats would crawl up onto the exposed skin, bury their sharp incisors into the flesh, tear off a strip and run away to enjoy their meal.

Obviously no one could say that this was definitely Gil Davis, but the corpse had her build and was wearing her style of dress. The hair colour was a rough match, given the poor video quality, and who else was going to be down there? It looked very much as if Tim had done his job and then got himself killed on the way out. Never mind. He hadn’t been much use, anyway.

Barry was contemplating one more drink to calm his agitation when the phone rang. It was the Director himself; no PA this time.

“My office. Now!” he demanded, his voice betraying barely concealed anger.

Barry took the DVD and his written report, and hurried towards the elevator.

***

The holiday flight had left on time from a very quiet Newcastle Airport. The charter flight, operated by a well known holiday company, was code-sharing the route with another household name from the travel industry. Holidaymakers from two of Europe’s largest tour operators mingled in the concourse, dressed in a variety of tee shirts, denims and football shirts. They were all dressed for sunnier climes, as the temperature outside the glass atrium was only fractionally above zero.

Gil had no problems checking in using the Gold Class desk. There was no-one ahead of her and she was ushered through quickly. Her seat was on the aisle and was the equivalent of a business class seat on a scheduled airline. The seat was pale tan leather with ample legroom and a good one hundred and thirty five degree recline. Her TV screen was around ten inches across and boasted an enviable range of movies, games and TV on demand. The one fly in the ointment was her immediate neighbour, John from Sunderland.

“You aren’t from Sunderland, are you, bonnie lass? I can tell. I can always spot a Mackem girl.”

Gil smiled in pretended comprehension. She had barely understood a word of the man’s statement, concealed as it was behind an unfathomable accent. John was well into his life story when the plane took off. He was just getting to the ‘exciting part’ where he joined the National Coal Board as a welder, whilst playing trumpet in a dance band, when the plane left the ground and John was silenced. He went several shades of grey before his sallow complexion settled on white. His knuckles were bloodless as he gripped the seat with an intensity that suggested he would never let it go.

The man was in his sixties and seemed gentle enough. Gil placed her left hand on his right hand and gave it a gentle squeeze in an effort to comfort him. He looked at her, his lips set in a straight line. She smiled back and told him that he could relax; there was nothing to worry about.

Taking advantage of the sudden silence, she clamped her Bose noise reduction headphones around her head and over her ears, where she would keep them for the duration of the flight.

Whilst the sunshine beckoned and the beaches on offer on this package holiday appeared clean and white, Gil knew that she would not be sampling them. Their island destination was simply a staging point for the remainder of her journey, but she did have forty eight hours to play with before her next flight, and so she thought she might just top up her tan.