The UK Border Agency had sent him a text confirming that the Irish Garda had added Tug Coyle to the list of individuals who should be stopped at airports and ports. He rang the chief constable’s secretary and left a message for O’Hare. He’d email a brief for the presser as arranged but they were making rapid progress in the inquiry. He planned to use the press conference to help launch a nationwide public appeal for information in their efforts to track down a prime suspect. The secretary asked him to wait and relayed the message into a meeting. She had a message for Shaw when she got back: the chief constable would take the press conference.
Texting DC Campbell in the incident room he asked her to put together a rough press release on the hunt for Tug Coyle and arrange for a decent picture of him from the RNLI records to be sent to St James’ for the attention of the press office. Then he rang the force’s chief press officer, an ex-Fleet Street tabloid crime correspondent who’d come to Lynn to prepare for retirement, and filled her in on developments.
Then a single, jarring sound made Shaw’s heart skip a beat — the clash of metal on metal. He ran back to the dig. The trapdoor they’d uncovered was iron, badly corroded, set in a flaking concrete frame.
‘These doors were all counter-weighted,’ said Twine. ‘There’d be a wire along the ground to a tree, or a wood pile, or something they could find easily — then just a handle, camouflaged. Idea was if they were being followed they couldn’t afford to be discovered struggling with the trapdoor — it had to be up, down, and no sign, in seconds.’
They looked at the rusted trapdoor in the pit. ‘That was seventy years ago,’ said Valentine. They put a pickaxe through the eggshell thin iron and the door lifted, the hinges turning to dust. The hole beneath was deep, apparently featureless, a concrete coffin on its end. Shaw caught the scent of the trapped air escaping. It smelt like history — decades of damp and dark. The brief flare of hope, already fading, guttered out.
‘OK,’ said Shaw, taking a torch from Twine. ‘Follow me down, Paul. We might as well check this out.’
‘I was going to call St James’ — get an engineer out, check it’s safe?’ offered Twine.
‘Right,’ said Shaw. That was sensible. But despite the clear evidence the dugout had been unused for more than half a century Shaw felt impatient. Why wait? They needed to get this over and put all their resources into finding Coyle.
‘It probably collapsed long ago,’ said Shaw. ‘I’ll check it out; you stay here.’
With a hand on either side Shaw lowered his six-foot frame into the hole then, as his toes sought the floor he let himself drop, his blood freezing for just one heartbeat while he was in mid-air. The impact of his fall raised dust. The downward stairwell led out of the vertical shaft and was narrow, so he turned side on, and edged towards the first step. He approached each following a routine he’d developed shortly after losing the sight in his left eye. Without 3D vision steps could be lethal, especially as often the banister post in domestic stairs was not on the bottom step, but the penultimate step. So he put his foot on each edge and let the toes rock over it, before stepping down to the next.
He heard Twine drop in the well behind him. The dust flowed down the steps, heavier than air, settling round Shaw’s boots where he could see some amber earwigs manically trying to find cover. The smell was extraordinary, a kind of visceral rot, a fundamental decay. Lifeless but for the scurrying insects. Eight spiral steps down brought Shaw to an iron door, locked with a padlock and chain, corroded so badly they’d become one piece of metal.
Shaw asked for lock-cutters and the request went back up the line. The lock-cutters came back within thirty seconds with Twine. Shaw felt the sweat the DC had left on the cold metal. He clamped the mechanical jaws on either side of the U on the padlock. When the steel gave the door fell away from him, the old hinges shattering, so that he found himself just staring into the black outline of the entrance, peering into a profound darkness.
And then he knew. Because there was nothing stale about the air which brushed his face. His heightened sense of smell unpacked the traces threaded together: paraffin, certainly; then stale bread and, most pungent of all, ground coffee.
Until now the light from above had been enough, filtering down the stairwell. But here they were beyond the final turn in the staircase so that only the faintest trace of illumination spilt beyond the threshold. Shaw flicked on the torch, covering his eyes for a second against the glare. The beam was narrow and clogged with the dust billowing into the room.
As the air cleared he noticed three things: the floor was concrete but freshly swept; one of the iron bunks set against one corrugated wall had a pillow; and on the single narrow metal seat against the far wall sat Tug Coyle, tied into the chair by a rope across his chest, his head tipped back to reveal the fleshy throat. Shaw knew he was dead because of the ugly angle at which one of his feet touched the floor, turned violently on to its outer edge, sole inwards, the other straight out, extended to the extreme limit, so that he could see the pale lifeless skin of the leg. The percussion of the falling door still echoed in the small space and Coyle’s head fell back, his teeth clashing, as if biting at the air.
FORTY
The dogs found the other — emergency — exit to the dugout before Shaw had time to trace the long, tail-like tunnel to meet them. About thirty yards long, it was reinforced, like the main shelter itself, with a double layer of corrugated iron. The final door was vertical, not a trapdoor, but let into the side of a small clay cliff, obscured by brambles and hawthorn, the lock well-oiled and new.
Justina Kazimierz, the pathologist, appeared out of the woods in a white, ghostly, SOC suit, clutching the black forensic bag. She led the way back in, pausing only for a second on the threshold, followed by Shaw and Valentine. In the end chamber Tug Coyle still sat roped into the seat in which he’d died.
Shaw, standing back as she began her initial examination of the victim, thought how bizarre it was that an inquiry that had begun with a distant view of a field of sunflowers should lead here, in a lightless subterranean tomb, a lifeless vault.
‘So much for our prime suspect,’ said Valentine, putting an unlit Silk Cut between his teeth. He’d already sent a PC back to the incident room with orders for Twine to wind up the nationwide search for Tug Coyle.
Tom Hadden had lit the room with two halogen lamps, their beams turned to the metal walls. The effect of the illumination was to make the space smaller, and the thought of six men living here, beneath the earth, for up to two weeks, while the invading German army moved in land, made Shaw’s skin creep. Hadden worked in one corner, bent over a set of ammunition boxes. He straightened, a hand at his back, a face mask pulled up and set on his forehead where the once-ginger hair had thinned. ‘I think this stuff’s alright,’ he said, one hand on a box. ‘But I’ve asked someone from Sherringham to come up. Clearly, until then, there’s a danger. But I reckon it’s minimal. In the meantime, softly softly,’ he added, lifting the wooden lid on one of the boxes: ‘Bullets —.38s. One of the others is grenades, pretty much rusted into the box. And this. .’ He lifted out a kind of metal tripod. ‘Stand for a Thompson sub-machine gun. State of the art — if Winston Churchill’s prime minister.’
He’d set other items on the iron mesh of the top bunk — the one without a mattress or blanket, just the single pillow. Shaw recognized a Primus stove, a Tilley Lamp, a pair of entrenching tools.
Hadden tapped a metal box on the floor with the cap of his boot. ‘Chemical toilet,’ he said. ‘Not been used — not for fifty years anyway. But these are more interesting. .’
In one corner, set on end, were two large animal traps.
‘I’ll get these back to the lab,’ said Hadden, touching the metal rim of one of the traps. ‘They’re a match to the one that brought down Holtby, but we should be able to get closer than that. I reckon they’re identical. And they’re post-war. No more than ten years old. Less.’
‘Shaw.’ Dr Kazimierz’s voice was slightly furred, indistinct, and when they all turned they could see why. She was behind the dead man, kneeling, cutting away the shoe on the hidden, left, foot.
Shaw squatted down. The pathologist applied a swab to the heel of the foot and showed him the blood.
‘He’s been dragged in, on his back, heels kicking.’ Standing, she came round to the front of the chair and set her head, motionless, about six inches from Coyle’s thrown-back face. She sniffed theatrically. Shaw got in close too.
‘Almonds again?’ he asked.
She took the dead man’s head and gently lifted it from its position of rest over the back of the chair, and let it come forward, the fleshy chin resting on the chest. ‘Rigor’s gone,’ she said. ‘So he’s been dead twelve hours, maybe a little less.’ Taking his chin in one hand and clasping his upper jaw with the other, she went to open the mouth.
