Reaching the estate, Cassie used her phone torch to navigate the dead-end section of towpath, finding the rough track that recent feet had trodden through the undergrowth. Flyte would almost certainly be pissed off at Cassie tailing her while she was on police business, but fuck it. Since she wasn’t answering her phone there was no other way to pass on Copernicus’s revelation.
Emerging at the end of the passage, she stopped, checking out the row of garages, and the crumbling hulk of the abandoned estate looming over her. Feeling suddenly anxious, she realised it was the silence that was unnerving her. She was missing Camden’s reassuring soundtrack of partygoers, music, the rumble of a bus, the shrill of a police siren.
She made her way down the line of garages, ear tuned to any sound. The place was pretty creepy, especially the shadowy area under the estate, piled high with dumped waste. It looked like rat city under there. Cassie shivered; she had a thing about rats. She squinted, half expecting to see Flyte’s slender outline, picking her way fastidiously through the litter, the pale flash of her wheat-blonde hair.
Maybe she’d never even made it here, had gone home instead. Cassie pictured her eating an M&S ready meal and watching some cosy box set in her leisurewear. She smiled. Freshly ironed leisurewear, obvs.
*
Flyte’s phone told her she’d already been trapped in here for around thirty minutes. As soon as the oxygen issue had occurred to her, she’d frantically calculated the dimensions of the freezer and how much air it held. Two metres long by a metre wide and maybe one and a half deep, at a guess. Minus whatever her own mass displaced. Flyte had routinely come top of her maths class at school but now she’d happily be innumerate. She had once read somewhere that an average human needed 150 cubic feet of oxygen-rich air a day, and by her calculation the freezer held less than 60.
That gave her ten, maybe eleven hours of oxygen. Her phone told her it was half past eight.
If she wasn’t found by seven thirty tomorrow morning she would suffocate.
Poppy’s face, radiating calm, came into her mind along with the hushed interior of the church where she would finally claim her name. Poppy Flyte-Howard. Matt’s surname as well as hers, to give her a mum and a dad.
‘Don’t worry, darling,’ Flyte murmured. ‘Nothing is going to stop me getting out of here.’
There was no point wasting her oxygen shouting and banging. She just had to wait till she got a bar of signal back and use it – fast. If she wrote a text now wouldn’t it send instantly when the signal returned? But whom to message? Seb? His flat was probably closest but something stopped her. Cassie? Probably drunk or stoned, or both, by now, and in any case only a civilian. She needed somebody senior, someone with the clout to send manpower double-quick, to get her out of this plastic coffin and find the bastard who’d put her in it. She started to tap out a text to Steadman. Pressed ‘send’. Got the little red exclamation mark and ‘Message Undelivered’.
To save precious battery life she’d just have to wait and hope for signal.
*
Averting her eyes from the creepy-looking undercroft, Cassie carried cautiously on down the row of lock-ups, feeling a mixture of fear and excitement. With the canal so easily accessible she was convinced that Sean Kavanagh’s body had been stored in a freezer that lay behind one of these doors . . . If it was still there, it would almost certainly hold traces of his DNA – and his killer’s.
About a dozen garages down the row she halted, listening.
Yes! It was only a faint burble, but from the single voice and the pauses – it was somebody talking on the phone. Flyte? Or Willets?
It seemed to be coming from a lock-up just up ahead. On reaching the double doors, she saw a glimmer of light coming through the crack between them. Whoever had been speaking had fallen silent so she held her breath until the voice started up again. It was clearly male but he must be facing the other way because as much as she strained her ears she couldn’t identify him.
So where the hell was Flyte?
She retraced her steps – grateful now for her rubber-soled plimsolls – and once she’d put some distance between herself and the lock-up, darted silently across the roadway. Then she stepped cautiously into the foul dumping ground amid the massive columns holding up the estate, trying to keeping her feet clear of anything that might be a rats’ nest. Going behind one of the columns she tried Flyte’s number again.
*
Flyte could have wept if she hadn’t felt so furious and . . . impotent.
A bar of signal had briefly appeared, allowing her to re-send her text to Steadman but it hadn’t been read yet. He was probably still out of town at the conference, and was right now knocking back beers with his fellow officers in the hotel bar. A terrible thought occurred to her: what if he stumbled back to his room and went to bed without even checking his messages? She’d just started tapping out a text to Seb when her phone rang. It must have got flipped off silent mode when it fell into the freezer. Seeing Cassie’s name she immediately hit the green button, only to hear the line go dead.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!
*
Moments after she tapped Flyte’s number Cassie almost dropped the phone. The muffled but unmistakable sound of chiming bells – Flyte’s ringtone – was coming from close by, apparently somewhere in the piles of rubbish. Hastily killing the call, she started picking her way through the rat minefield towards its source.
*
Flyte tried to ring Cassie back and was getting no reply, when she heard something. The sound of tentative footsteps coming closer. Shit. Her attacker was back. Maybe the original plan had been to leave her to suffocate, but it was less risky to finish the job for certain.
She bit her lip so hard the ferrous taste of blood welled on her tongue. Balled her hand round her phone – her only weapon. She would play dead and then smash it in his fucking face.
Then she heard a voice.
*
Cassie bent close to the top of the freezer and murmured, ‘Phyllida . . . Don’t say a word, but if you’re in there tap on the lid.’
Three rapid little taps.
Christ on a bike!
‘OK. Give me a minute, there’s a fridge on top, I need to work out how to get it off without making a noise.’
Ignoring the muffled yet vigorous response, Cassie planted both hands on the fridge on top of the freezer and gave it an experimental push. It wouldn’t be that hard to shift off the freezer but if it fell into the old tellies, strollers and assorted crap on the ground the racket would be heard across the canal, never mind in the garages opposite. Squinting around in the gloom, her eye fell on something.
Dragging the mattress over to the freezer as soundlessly as possible took a couple of minutes – luckily it was light, filled with foam rather than metal springs. After positioning it to the rear of the freezer, she stood to one side, picturing the fridge’s trajectory, before making adjustments. Then she went back to the front, and putting her shoulder to the fridge, started slowly scooting it across the freezer top, aware of every little scrape and squeak. Once it was poised at the edge, she took a breath and gave it a final shove. The fridge landed more or less squarely on the mattress with a not-too-loud whump but it didn’t stop there: Cassie could only watch in horror as it continued to roll, a journey that would end with an ear-splintering crash as it met the litter-strewn concrete. The fridge hung on its leading edge for a split second of indecision before rocking back and forward again. Then it settled on the mattress.
Cassie was reaching for the handle when the lid flew open and Flyte’s furious blood-streaked face emerged. She used her arms to lever herself out and scissored her long legs over the side, ignoring Cassie’s proffered arm, before sending her a look of pure rage. ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ in a hissed whisper.
‘You’re welcome,’ said Cassie mildly.
But she had to admit this new incarnation of the uptight cop was a thrilling sight. Her wheat-blonde hair dishevelled, the bloodied face, and the fury in her ice-blue eyes put Cassie in mind of a Viking warrior. A Valkyrie.
Flyte dusted down her stained trouser suit – pointlessly, since the torn cuff and stains meant it would never see active service again. ‘You haven’t answered me,’ she said.
Cassie gave her a tissue, nodding at her forehead. ‘You need some TCP on that.’
‘Fuck TCP,’ she said crisply. ‘I need to find who tipped me in there.’ With a backward jab of her head.
Cassie blinked, trying to recall if she’d ever heard Flyte swear before. ‘I think I can help you there.’
When she told her that she’d heard a man’s voice in one of the lock-ups over the way, Flyte said, ‘Show me.’
At the edge of the undercroft, Cassie pointed out the garage and Flyte said, ‘You need to leave. I don’t want you anywhere near this situation. It could be dangerous.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Cassie, shaking her head slowly. ‘And there’s something else you need to know.’
She repeated what Copernicus had told her – that he was using his telescope when he chanced upon a plainclothes cop coming out of her cabin the previous week. ‘I knew someone had been inside the boat. There was a . . . lemony smell I couldn’t trace.’
‘How did this homeless guy know he was a cop if he was in plainclothes?’ asked Flyte, back in sceptical mode.
Cassie gave her a look. ‘You lot stand out a mile. Anyway the cop realised he’d been spotted so he went over and told Copernicus he was there on police business and showed his ID.’
‘Which could have been fake.’ Flyte folded her arms. ‘So, what did this guy look like?’
Cassie remembered Copernicus saying, ‘Like a policeman,’ as if that were enough. ‘Yeah, he was a bit vague on that front. All he could recall was that the guy was wearing a suit and had brown hair.’
‘Oh, great. That really narrows it down.’