Tim edged cautiously into the office. Searching each of the walls quickly, he saw that he was alone, at least within the confined space of the small inner room: he was unable to shake off the uncanny feeling that someone else was hiding close by, awaiting his or her moment.
Taking the torch out of his pocket, he played it first across the stack of floorboards which had been levered up and placed in a neat pile against one wall and then over the gaping hole at his feet. The cesspit was roughly round in shape and deeper than he had expected: he calculated it to be one and a half times his own height. It was lined with large red bricks, most marred with efflorescence and flaking in places. It looked like a waterless well. Although it had clearly not held sewage for many years, a strong and unpleasant smell was rising up from the cavity: a mixture of sour earth, damp and something harder to define. It was an odour he’d encountered before, reminiscent perhaps of rotting mushrooms.
A short metal ladder had been fixed to the lip of the pit. Tim shone the torch on it. It consisted of four or five rungs extending to about three feet above the floor of the pit. It was designed to make both descending into the pit and returning to the surface easy to accomplish.
Tim crouched at the edge of the pit and pointed the torch at its floor. He could see that a number of items had been placed there, but the torch wasn’t powerful enough to pick them out in detail.
Tim looked over his shoulder, then at the ladder. His hunch about the cesspit had been right so far: someone had spent some time uncovering it, which meant it was important to them. He was now convinced that the pit held the clue to Martha Johnson’s disappearance, perhaps some of the other crimes he was investigating, too. He was torn between his desire to descend the ladder to find out what had been left there and the knowledge that once inside the cavity he would be trapped if someone were to attack him.
He’d promised Katrin that he wouldn’t get into such a situation, but he was here now. He reasoned that there was still an outside chance that Martha Johnson was alive and being held somewhere against her will. If he climbed into the pit, he might discover the information that would set her free. Really, he had no choice.
He slipped the ring at the end of the torch over his thumb and grabbed hold of the top of the ladder, carefully edging himself down into the darkness. When he reached the final rung, he jumped the remaining few feet. It had not been a difficult exercise, but the pungent smell hit hard now he was at the bottom: it was strong enough to make him want to retch. Taking off his jacket, he tried to hold part of it bunched over his face, but found he was unable to do this and direct the light of the torch as well. He decided to alternate the two actions.
From the top of the pit, he’d spotted what had looked like a heap of rags. He’d seen they were nearest the ladder and he poked around for them first. He located them quickly. Tucking his jacket through one of the rungs of the ladder, he shone the torch on the rags and gingerly touched the item on top. It was a scarf or bandana, a man’s neckerchief, perhaps. It was caked with some substance that had caused the fabric to mass into a long, rope-like coil. Tim tried to smooth it flat, holding the torch close to it, and realised that the disfiguring substance was dried blood. Disgusted, his instinct was to toss it away from him, but mindful that it constituted evidence he laid the scarf carefully to one side and picked up the next item, a bright pink jumper which appeared to be undamaged. He put that next to the scarf and continued to work methodically through the pile. In a couple of minutes he was surrounded by a random agglomeration of articles of clothing, including a pair of over-the-knee boots, a mini-skirt, a raincoat and a woman’s headscarf. At the very bottom of the pile he found a large canvas bag.
He knew that from the top of the pit he’d seen other things down here besides the heap of clothes. He pressed on by moving methodically around its perimeter, shining the torch on the lower half of the wall and the floor in front of it as he went. He’d proceeded only a few steps when he noticed the flat edge of an object that had been pushed into a crevice in the wall. He grabbed it and pulled. It yielded so easily that he’d exerted too much strength on dislodging it and almost lost his balance. He turned it over, scrutinising it by torchlight. It was a black leather wallet embellished with some writing in gold or silver. ‘Michael Kors’, Tim read. He opened the wallet. It contained two twenty-pound notes, several credit cards and an ID badge. The photograph on the ID badge had been scored through, almost certainly deliberately, but the name printed on the badge and the credit cards was intact: Steven S. Smythe.
Tim drew a deep breath, oblivious now to the foul smell. He had no doubt that all the items in the cesspit were trophies of some kind, but the wallet was the first definitive link he could make with one of the murders.
He thought he heard a cracking sound and looked up fearfully at the dark-rimmed circle that had become the top of the cesspit. He turned off the torch and waited. All above was silent: he must either have imagined the noise or it was just the normal creaking of an agricultural building. After listening for a couple of minutes, he set the torch again and continued his circuit.
It didn’t take him long to find what he was looking for.