Saturday 5 February, 12:35
Loxton paused to shine her torch downwards and saw the light glimmering back at her from far below. Water. But how much? She was too high to tell if it was moving, so she clicked the torch off and made her way further down.
‘We’re nearly at the bottom,’ she called up to Lena.
‘Thank God,’ Lena replied, her voice tense, and Loxton knew she was pushing herself to keep up.
Loxton strained her ears in the darkness and could hear the drip, drip, drip of water but nothing else. She estimated thirty more rungs, so when she got to twenty-five, she stopped. The torch illuminated the water below her. It was still. She couldn’t tell how deep it was, so she pulled out her baton and extended it.
She climbed the last five rungs and then lowered her baton into the water. It hit something hard. She tested the area below her. The water was only an inch or two high. The smell wasn’t as bad as she’d expected – more like stagnant pond water than anything else, and she was surprised. She put one foot slowly onto the floor and then the other, glad she was wearing her ankle boots and that it was winter.
‘It’s fine.’ She looked up and saw Lena steadily making progress above her. She moved away from the ladder, swinging her torch left and right. The tunnel was wider than she’d expected, big enough for a train to pass through.
Would the killer have brought someone down here? It was a perfect area to destroy any forensic evidence. Water washed DNA and fingerprints away, even this small amount, and maybe at different times of the month the water was higher.
Lena hesitated on the last rung. ‘What’s in there?’
‘It’s just water. I wouldn’t drink it, but it’s fine to walk through.’
Lena lowered herself down and carefully put her feet into the water. ‘Do you really think Kowalski would have been able to bring someone down here?’ She looked up towards the circle of light, impossibly high above them.
‘He’s strong enough. Or anyone would be able to lower a body down with ropes.’ Loxton imagined climbing ropes. If you knew how deep the drop was, it wouldn’t be too hard to do. In fact, the rope marks on the body made her sure that the sewers were the right place to look.
Lena didn’t look convinced and she turned on her own torch. ‘We could split up. I go left, you go right?’
Loxton pulled out her radio and turned up the volume. There was nothing. She couldn’t hear the main channel. The radio signal was non-existent. ‘We should stick together. Otherwise we’ll be completely on our own.’
‘Good point,’ Lena said.
‘Let’s go left,’ Loxton said.
‘Why left and not right?’ Lena asked.
‘Reynolds suggested the killer might favour their left hand from the way the victims were strangled. If that’s the case they would instinctively favour their left, so would be more likely to go that way,’ Loxton said.
‘Interesting theory.’ Lena said. ‘I’m ambidextrous; which way would I go? Do right-handed people always go right?’
‘It’s a fifty-fifty chance,’ Loxton said.
They moved through the tunnel. Loxton scanned the water in front of her, sweeping her torch across the surface, not sure what she was looking for. It was impossible to know if anyone had been here recently or whether this place had been deserted for years.
‘There’s no way this water is going to get any higher?’ Lena asked. ‘I mean, it’s not linked into the Thames tide, is it?’
Loxton shone her torch on the walls. They were dank and dripping, but the highest water mark was only knee high. ‘It doesn’t look like it gets too high. We’ll just go down here for a bit. Then try the other way. Really we’re going to need dogs to search this area.’
‘I doubt the dogs will be able to pick anything up through this stench.’ Lena wrinkled her nose. ‘I really don’t think this would be the place the killer would operate out of. And there’s no way Kowalski would leave his car so close.’
‘I don’t think it is Kowalski. I think he worked out where the killer was operating from and came here to look around. Then maybe he came across the killer and is still down here. Perhaps the killer didn’t know Kowalski had come here by car and that it’s parked so nearby. We can’t rule anything out.’
‘You’re right,’ Lena said, but in the torchlight she didn’t look convinced as she checked fearfully around her. ‘It doesn’t explain the knives in his boot though.’
They moved in silence until Lena stopped still. ‘What’s that?’ She pointed her torch into the water.
Loxton followed the beam and saw something glinting under the water’s surface. Silver. She scooped the object out of the water. It was a bracelet, the clasp broken, but she could make out decorative words on it. ‘Aaron and Joseph’.
It was Jane’s bracelet.
She turned towards Lena, but before she had a chance, something cracked into the side of her temple. The force spun her sideways, her head swimming from the blow, and she lost her footing, landing heavily onto her hands and knees in the cold water.
She tried to raise her head. Her vision swam and she felt sick. The pain came again, hard into the back of her skull and she fell forwards, her face crashing into the black water and drowning everything else out.