I turned awkwardly and started moving down the ladder, and spied in the mess of items near the edge of the hole a long barbecue fork with a wooden handle. I pretended to trip, grabbed at the mess, swept the fork and some other items into the hole with me.
‘Watch it, Neighbour.’
‘Sorry,’ I said. In the darkness at the bottom of the ladder, Fred had a flashlight pressed into his palm, giving off a soft glow. I pretended to examine my ankle for scratches caused by the near-fall and slipped the handle of the barbecue fork into my shoe, pulled my jeans down over the top of it. Mike and Ada climbed down the ladder and stood quietly in the dark. Fetid air, heavy with a metallic taste, the unmistakeable reek of human waste and stagnant water. I could hear the breaths of the people around me. They were shallow, fast, measured: the breathing of people who had done this before, people who had sat in cars outside banks in balaclavas, waiting for the doors to open. People who had waited in the bushes near the guarded entries to stash houses. Thieves. Hunters. Some silent consensus was reached, and I was grabbed and guided along a gloomy dirt tunnel braced with untreated wood. Ada was beside me, Fred ahead and Mike behind us. The dirt tunnel ended in a smashed concrete curve of wall. I climbed through, was shoved to the right on a path. I could see nothing beyond the edge of the path, but some primal awareness told me we were walking in a narrow tube with one horizontal surface on the right meant for traversing the passage on foot. My arm brushed pipes and ridges in the wall in the dark, and I reached up experimentally at one point and touched the concrete ceiling, felt metal tubing, spokes, more pipes.
‘Keep moving,’ Ada whispered, poking me in the ribs with her gun.
We moved at a painful pace in the dark. Now and then Fred slid his palm slightly off the torchlight, illuminated the next few empty yards of sewer. I couldn’t bear the silence.
‘No one has been who they say they are in this,’ I said quietly.
‘What?’ Ada said.
‘You,’ I said. ‘I thought you were genuinely helping us find a missing girl. I thought you were paying your debt to me.’
‘Well, you’re an idiot. That’s not my fault.’
‘And Dayly,’ I said. ‘You saw that man up there. The old man. He’s been suffering. How long has he been there? Weeks? Dayly was a part of that. I thought she was different. But Dayly and Lemon and Ramirez did that to him so they could get down here.’
‘So Dayly’s a heartless piece of trash, like her mother,’ Ada said. ‘You’re a whole lot more surprised than you should be, Blair, if you want my opinion. I don’t know how you’ve maintained your faith in people all this time. You’ve been locked up longer than I ever was. You should have learned in the can that deep down inside, everybody’s just out to get their cut.’
Fred stopped suddenly ahead of us. Ada dragged me against the wall. There was a pause, and then a voice rippled down the tunnel towards us from up ahead.
‘Dayly?’ the voice called. I recognised it as Officer Lemon.
Fred dropped to one knee, let the torch fall by his side, and started firing in the direction of the voice.