I flipped it over.
More grime. More dirt. And more blood. But the blood wasn’t what caught my attention this time. It was what was written across the middle of the board in black.
I glanced at the flyer – realizing it was for a shelter – and then at the coat next to it. Now I knew why I recognized it.
It had been Leon Spane’s.
Reaching down into the bag, I took out the leather pouch and then the roll of printed pages. The pouch was soft leather, closed at either end and bound in its centre with a tie. I pulled at the tie and the pouch fell open, like a bird spreading its wings.
Knives, one after the other.
Different lengths, different blades, different edges, different grips. But all of them had one thing in common: blood on them, congealed and dried, sticking to the leather and to each other. I placed them down on the floor next to the coat, next to the flyer, next to the cardboard sign – and I opened up the printouts.
They were maps.
I laid them side by side, but quickly realized it was the same map, reprinted over and over again, just at different magnifications. I brought the one with the closest view of the area towards me. It was Highgate. I could make out Pell’s house. I could see Queen’s Wood, and Highgate Cemetery to the south. And then a trail, running parallel to the Northern line and branching off right. Some kind of footpath. It cut between housing estates as it carved east, and halfway along, as nature became more dense, Pell had marked it with red pen.
And then I realized it wasn’t a footpath.
It was a disused railway line.
48
They called it Fell Wood. I found it about half a mile south of Highgate Tube station, on the other side of a row of trees shielding the path from the road. I entered through a metal gate that squeaked on its hinges, and passed under a thick covering of oak trees, expecting woodland to unravel around me. Instead, after thirty yards, the trees thinned out and the railway line emerged, gravelled in patches but mostly just overrun by grass.
The tracks and the sleepers had long since been ripped up, but there was still a raised station house ahead of me, its legs straddling the old platforms on the left and right of the path, its old ticket office perched directly above the line. It was derelict. The ground-floor entrance, the windows and the doors were all bricked up; the windows on the second floor were all broken. Either side of me, trees and grass reached up into the clear blue sky. But when the breeze came, foliage shifted and grass swayed, and I saw modern houses beyond the treeline, kids running around in the gardens, dads standing over barbecues. I passed under the station house, its old bones creaking and moaning in the sun, and carried on.
Pell had circled a spot about a mile from the station I’d just passed. As I walked, the trees got thicker on both sides, and after about ten minutes a railway tunnel emerged from behind a weave of oak and ash trees. All around the entrance was graffiti, up to about the eight-foot mark, but mostly it was vines, seas of the stuff, the crumbling facade clawed at by twisted branches and covered in a layer of green moss.
Inside the tunnel, sound faded, like a dial being turned down, and as I stood there, facing into a circle of light at the end of fifty yards of complete darkness, I suddenly felt a strange sensation, as if someone was standing right on my shoulder.
I swivelled. Behind me, the station house was just a blur in the distance, distorted by heat haze and half disguised by trees. Its second-floor windows were like black holes carved into the bricks, and some of the rear of the building had fallen away: about three-quarters of the way up, the roof had caved in and part of the wall was destroyed. In the roof space, I thought I could see movement, a flash of white – like a face – but after a while a bird emerged, flapping its wings, and took flight up and across the treeline.
I turned back and headed into the tunnel.
Halfway along, all noise died. No birds. No wind. No cars. I was struck again by the strange acoustics of the old line, the way volume ebbed and flowed, and when I got to the end, it changed again: gravel and grass became just grass, the distant sounds of the city returned – and two hundred yards ahead of me was the mark on Pell’s map.
Another station.
It was smaller than the first one but perched on a raised island of concrete, which bisected the line. Either side were where the westbound and eastbound tracks had once run, both now reclaimed by nature. Further down, on the left-hand side of the station, was another building, this one in behind the treeline. It was bigger, more modern, a small chimney-like structure rising out of its roof, its walls mostly hidden behind thick foliage. As I moved up on to the island, I got a better view and could see a series of ventilation shafts adjacent to the chimney.
I turned my attention back to the station. Every window and door was bricked up, but a blanket of glass, gravel and debris still crunched under my shoes as I passed along the eastbound platform. Once I was halfway along, I dropped down on to the line and crossed towards the second building. The closer I got, the more of it I could make out beyond the trees. Seconds later, I spotted a space on its wall where a sign had once hung, age and weather rinsing the colour off and on to the brickwork.
It was the red and blue symbol of the Tube.
Suddenly it made sense: this was a two-part station. The island platform and station house fed the overground line, a track that had once run between Highgate and Finsbury Park. Below ground had been a deep- level station – accessed via the second building – cleaving its way through the belly of the city, now disconnected from the network. A ghost station, shut down, bricked up and forgotten.
But not by Duncan Pell.
The Tube station was surrounded – almost swamped – by trees and foliage, but a path still remained, cutting through the overgrowth to the entrance. I headed in. It was uneven, the concrete broken, but it led all the way through to a narrow passageway and a staircase down. At the bottom, a rusting metal grille should have been pulled shut and padlocked to stop people from entering.
Except the grille wasn’t all the way across.
And the padlock was on the floor.
49
Fifteen feet away, in the gnarled bark of an old ash, I found a fallen branch. I picked it up, broke it in two and gripped it like a baseball bat, the thicker end facing up.
Then I headed down.
When I got to the grille, I stopped. Shapes formed in the dark on the other side and, as I manoeuvred myself into the gap, my eyes adjusted to the light and I could make out an old ticket office. Off to the right, barely visible in the darkness, was a lift: its doors were open, but another grille was pulled across. This one was still padlocked.
I got out my mobile, and used a light app to illuminate the area beyond the lift. It was a corridor, about thirty feet long, old-fashioned wooden phone booths on the left and then a door at the far end. Another sign, more difficult to read, was screwed to the wall above. STAIRS. They must have led down to the platform. Except there was no way to get down there now: the lift was padlocked and the door was bricked over.
A noise behind me.
I turned quickly and looked back across the ticket hall. My phone only reached so far into the darkness. Six feet. Maybe less. Something shifted in the shadows above my eyeline, right up in the corner of the room. I lifted the mobile higher. At the very limit of its glow, grey-blue in the light, I could see what it was. Bats. There were eight of them, hanging from a support beam in the roof. One of them was moving, its wings twitching.
I took a couple of steps back towards the office and, as I did, felt a faint draught at ankle level. Not much, but enough. When I stopped again I could hear it moving past me: a whisper, soft and unrefined, like a child’s voice. Eventually it faded out, as if sensing I was listening, and then I realized something else: it was freezing cold. The whole place – the whole building – was like a refrigerator. Turning the phone in the direction of the draught, I felt
