Lucy heard the scream loud and clear.
She was less than a hundred yards away. Not overly familiar with the road layout in what remained of the St Clement’s ward, she’d stopped at a junction of unmarked lanes and sat astride her parked bike as she used the sat-nav on her mobile to locate Canning Crescent.
Now she no longer needed it.
She rode the derelict roadway slowly, standing on her footpegs, visor raised as she scanned the verges.
A scream at night could mean anything, from someone being attacked to kids engaged in horseplay. But in this district the latter seemed unlikely. It demanded an immediate but cautious response. She was alert and ready, therefore, when, not far ahead, a pair of headlamps sprang to life and came rocketing towards her.
As she veered out of the way, skidding on the mossy cobblestones, a green transit van flickered by. She swung around, almost turning sideways as she slid to a thirty-yard halt, bewildered by the sight of one of its two back doors swinging open. It swerved out of view, not giving her a chance to clock its registration mark. But if this was who she thought it was, the VRM would likely be useless – just another fake plate. With its rear doors unsecured, it seemed unlikely the vehicle would be carrying a prisoner, or any other illicit cargo, but even so, the only thing to do now was pursue it, flag it down and perform a stop-and-search – if she hadn’t already lost track of it, because it had had a hell of a start.
At which point Lucy heard a second scream.
Not as shrill or as shocking as the first, but muffled, as if it had come from indoors. What was more, it had sounded from somewhere nearby.
Her gaze roved up the dilapidated frontage of the massive building lowering over her. Griggs Warehouse. Given the state of its current occupants, that sound didn’t necessarily mean that someone was being attacked. Of course, she wouldn’t be any kind of police officer if she didn’t investigate it.
She rode on towards the foot of the slope where the path beat its way up to what she’d thought of previously as ‘the arcade’. At which point, she heard another scream, this one even more muffled, but distinctly the sound of someone in grave distress.
Lucy braked and looked left, and saw again that entrance to the warehouse’s undercroft, or whatever it was, where the suspect van had apparently emerged when Fred Holborn was abducted. She veered towards it, accelerating as a fourth scream sounded, slowing down again as she spied a couple of items on the floor that she recognised: a brown leather satchel with a shoulder-strap that had snapped, its contents scattered, and a heap of ragged black material, which looked suspiciously like a nun’s cloak.
Lucy throttled forward, hitting the top of the ramp at 35mph and hurtling down it forty yards or so, her headlamp spearing through the darkness, flooding over a mound of white, dusty rubble lying across her path. At some point in the past, a concrete pillar had toppled across the foot of the ramp, bringing down a mass of masonry, which now formed a barrier impassable to a four-wheeled vehicle.
But not to a bike.
She slowed again, but the rubble wasn’t steep and was loosely compacted, which gave her an easier tread. She wove her way up it, arriving on the top and braking hard.
The glare of her light now revealed a much larger cellar than she’d expected, an unloading area of some sort. It was fifty by sixty yards, and almost entirely concrete, much of it cracked or water-stained, the many pillars holding up its ceiling scrawled with incomprehensible graffiti. There was plenty more evidence that folk had been sleeping down here; she saw blackened braziers, stained mattresses, food cartons, but the only two people present were in the very centre of the underground space, engaged in what looked at first like a violent dance.
One of them, by her spinning, tattered skirts and the fact that her veil had come off, allowing a mop of damp red-grey hair to billow free, was Sister Cassie. The other, her assailant, was younger, leaner and wearing what looked like black combat fatigues complete with boots and gloves, and a harness to which weapons were visibly attached.
To Lucy’s incredulity, this second person, who’d snatched the ex-nun by her front collar with one hand and was aiming punches at her with the other, looked female. That was the only impression that could be gleaned from the blonde, sweat-slick hair flying around her head, though it was difficult to be absolutely sure, as she ducked and weaved in her efforts to avoid retaliatory blows from Sister Cassie.
Lucy cut her engine. ‘Police officer!’ she bellowed. ‘What’s going on here?’
The blonde girl responded quickly, jumping ramrod-straight, glaring in Lucy’s direction. She’d clearly noticed when the glow of the headlamp had appeared over the pile of rubble, but perhaps, in the midst of combat, had mistaken it for her confederate’s vehicle. Now the light caught her full-on, revealing what looked like extensive facial injuries. At the same time, it distracted her, and she caught a left-hand swing from Sister Cassie hard on her left cheek, which drew a squawk of rage and pain. She replied with a vicious punch, hacking it into Sister Cassie’s ribs, doubling her down to her knees, and then, after kicking her in the side and sending her sprawling, running towards a distant doorway.
Lucy slammed her visor shut and screeched down the other side of the rubble on her rear wheel. Masonry and grit showered behind her as she raced across the cellar, skidding to a halt alongside the ex-nun, who was looking up again, and indicated with a limp, bloodstained hand that she was okay.
Lucy sped on, passing through the narrow doorway and entering a long, concrete passage that had never been intended for vehicles. Again, it was cluttered with debris, as though part of the ceiling had collapsed, which made it difficult going. A dark shape bobbing ahead of her revealed her fleeing prey, but before she could catch up with it, she reached a junction of passages obstructed by a wheeled cart that was loaded with wooden pallets.
Lucy braked sharply. She heard feet hammering away ahead as she leaped from her seat to shove it all aside. What this place had once been, she couldn’t fathom. Whatever it was, if the rest of the structure was anything to go by, it was likely to be labyrinthine, which was all she needed when her quarry had a head-start like this.
She clambered back onto her bike and accelerated forward at reckless speed. At the next intersection of corridors, she had to slow down to listen. Hearing an echoing clatter of rubble on her right, she swung her machine after it, accelerating again. It was the same at the next junction. Even with her headlamp on full beam, she now saw nothing but endless concrete tunnels telescoping ahead, black elongated nightmares along which her Ducati hopped and skipped as it cleared mound after mound of masonry. Some were so narrow that at times her handlebars all but carved their way along the walls and turned the reverberation of her engine into a barrage of gunfire; it was thunderous even to Lucy, whose ears were padded by the helmet. Though it probably explained why the fugitive, who suddenly came into view some sixty yards ahead, streaked forward with athletic prowess, no doubt galvanised by the racket behind her, and gained ground with every corner she turned because they were too tight for the bike to take quickly.
Lucy swore. She could have overhauled this suspect in any normal circumstances, but it was typical that she’d wound up chasing her in what had to be the only place in Crowley where the speed and power of her Ducati were nullified. At the same time, she found herself having to duck, as missiles came flying back from the fleeing form: bricks, discarded bottles, wooden laths heavy with cement. At least her adrenalin was up, dulling the thudding impacts on her body, the blows of bricks and cans, the crunch of smashing glass on her visor. But Lucy knew that she wasn’t immune to this punishment. If her headlight was taken out, that was it; she’d be marooned in this unlit maze, at the mercy of whoever this maniac was, and with a mountain of mouldering brickwork overhead, there was almost no chance that she’d be able to get a phone or radio signal out.
That didn’t happen, but she was constantly impeded in other ways, the twosome emerging into rooms at such speeds and angles that the bike would lose traction, slewing sideways through tangles of trash and filth, always allowing the fugitive to stay ahead, turning corner after corner, again swooping down to grab more projectiles that she could pitch over her shoulder. Lucy followed stoically, her headlamp reflecting kaleidoscopically from cracked walls, rotted ceilings and stretches of opaque, ankle-deep water that exploded from her tyres as she blasted through.
She’d now lost all sense of direction, but it felt as if she ought to have passed through the entire undercroft of the industrial complex. And as this occurred to her, she sped out into a much larger space, the floor changing from rubble-strewn cement to well-worn timber. There was light in here too, that milky combination of moonlight and streetlight filtering through a row of square apertures high up on a distant wall; some looked like the openings to outdoor chutes, though a taller, broader one was clearly a doorway, possibly for the use of small vehicles like forklift trucks. Lucy wasn’t immediately able to focus on this because she had to evade all kinds of immediate obstacles: boxes, crates, the blackened hulks of skips filled with refuse. She twisted and turned deftly to avoid headlong smashes, and so never even saw the heavy hanging chain with the huge rusty hook at the end come rushing at her head.
It struck the side of her helmet with a BANG! like a hand grenade.
The impact was so forceful that not only did it half dislodge her helmet, the visor breaking loose at one side, it sent her skidding out of control. The shock and concussion were terrific, but she clung to consciousness just sufficiently to attempt a controlled crash, sliding on her side through rivers of rank, desiccated newspaper.
No sooner had she come to a halt than a weird, whinnying laugh filled the dusty air above her. Lucy turned groggily from where she lay and saw the figure of the girl on a high point some twenty yards off. Possibly it was a loading platform of some sort. She’d clearly been crouching there, lying in wait, but now she stood up and was silhouetted against the rays of light penetrating the chute apertures.
Lucy disentangled herself from the fallen bike and scrambled to her feet, only to turn woozy when she stood up. Disoriented, she struggled to rip aside the broken visor but made sure to keep her helmet on. When she glanced up again, she saw that the girl had drawn something from her webbing; Lucy spied the outline of a heavy-bladed knife complete with a medieval-style cross-guard. The girl squatted again, as though to leap down from her perch, and perhaps come gambolling forward through the shadows.
Before she could do this, a car horn blared angrily from a distant corner of the depot. Lucy and her opponent turned to see that a vehicle with green bodywork had pulled up on the other side of the forklift entry doors.
The fugitive gave another hyena-like laugh and made her move – but not to come aggressively forward. Instead, she leaped down from the other side of the platform, and ran across the loading depot at speed, dodging nimbly around obstacles as she headed towards her getaway vehicle. Lucy tried to follow, but turned dizzy again, tilted over and landed on her hands and knees.
As she knelt there, a pair of feet thudded up a wooden ramp, a door opened and closed, and with a noisy crunching of gears the green vehicle revved away into the night.