15
The tramway tunnel slopes down from the regular road surface at an angle of about twenty degrees. For the first fifty yards or so, it’s not a tunnel at all because it’s open to the sky; it’s just a cobblestoned ramp, bordered on either side by black stone walls, with wrought-iron gates closing it off from the street.
We didn’t bother checking to see whether the gates were locked. The walls were low enough to climb, and Trudie was way ahead of me, already vaulting up one-handed onto the parapet and then dropping silently on the further side. A couple of passers-by gave us a curious look as I clambered after her, but they didn’t challenge us and I thought it was unlikely they’d dial 999. More likely than not, they’d think we were looking for a private spot to do some dogging.
Trudie walked on down the ramp, but stopped when she came to the tunnel opening. The gates here looked a lot more solid, and since they reached to within an inch or so of the tunnel roof, they couldn’t be climbed.
Trudie rattled them experimentally, then turned to me as I came up beside her. ‘Did you bring your lock picks?’ she asked.
I shook my head. Picking locks was a hobby of mine, dating back to a doomed attempt in my early twenties to make my name as a stage magician. I always appreciated a chance to keep my hand in, but I tended not to carry my burglary kit with me unless I knew I was going to use it. I’d had too many painful brushes with the long arm and short temper of the law to court any more of them when I didn’t have to.
It was impossible to see anything beyond the gates. We were entirely below the level of the street now, and almost no light filtered this far down. Perhaps that was why it took me a few seconds to see what was staring me in the face. The big padlock on the lower gates had been twisted with immense force, until the hasp had snapped off clean at one end, and then hung loosely in place again on the chain so that it looked as though the gates were still secured.
I slipped it off and let it fall to the ground, then took the chain and pulled it through the gates’ central uprights. I pushed the gate open, wincing a little at the loud squealing of the hinges even though I knew there was nobody inside. I bowed and threw out my free hand, inviting Trudie to go through first.
‘We’re not going to be able to see much,’ she pointed out as she crossed the threshold.
‘That depends,’ I muttered. I slipped through the gates behind her and pulled them to. ‘They connected all the lights back up for an art installation a few years back – something to do with the twentieth anniversary of 1984. Pen covered it for the Art Attacks webzine. If we’re lucky, there’ll be a switch somewhere.’
There wasn’t, or at least not at first. We advanced into the gloom, skirting huge grey bags full of builders’ rubble and canted stacks of MEN AT WORK signs. Dead leaves from seasons past didn’t so much crunch as sigh under our feet, crumbling instantly into dust like vampires caught out at dawn. There was no obvious sign that anyone had been here recently before us, but I put my trust in the broken padlock and kept on going.
For the first ten feet or so, the walls were whitewashed particle board; beyond that, the tiles of the original tunnel appeared. At the point where they joined, I found the switch at ground level and threw it. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the lights woke slowly, dithering in spastic strobe before finally settling for on.
The tunnel gaped open in front of us like the gullet of Leviathan. It was unnerving, a trompe l’oeil in reverse, opening up a third dimension where the wall of darkness had seemed flat and solid and close to. Half a mile or more to the river, and the underpass went all the way there. This would be a bad place to get caught with the demon between us and the outside world.
I turned to Trudie. ‘Stay here,’ I told her. ‘Keep lookout for me.’
She met my gaze squarely.
‘No,’ she said.
‘This is a dead end.’
‘I don’t care, Castor. If he comes back, the two of us together have got a better chance of staying alive.’
I was going to argue the toss because she was flat-out wrong on that one, but she forestalled me by walking ahead into the tunnel. I had no choice but to follow.
Without discussion, Trudie took one side of the tunnel and I took the other. We moved fast, scanning walls and floor for any obvious breaks, openings or trapdoors. The dust underfoot deadened the echoes of our footfalls, but the sound of our breathing came back to us, amplified and distorted, from the tunnel’s further end, adding to the illusion that we were being swallowed alive.
We kept moving, roughly in sync. I was setting a good pace, but Trudie’s long stride easily matched mine. There was no sign of any opening off the tunnel ahead of us; it seemed to extend into unfathomable distance.
Then I spotted the mouth of a cross-way. It was invisible from a distance because the white-tiled tunnel wall stood proud at that point, concealing the actual opening until we were very close to it.
We quickened our pace until we reached the intersection. The right-hand tunnel was blocked after about ten feet by a concrete wall that looked fairly new. Road signs and traffic cones were stacked in this shallow space in great profusion. On our left the side tunnel went on for about twenty feet and then angled sharply, again to the left.
It made sense to cover this side branch first, rather than leave it to be explored on on the return leg. We walked quickly to the corner, skirting it widely to avoid being surprised.
Ahead of us there were only a further ten feet of corridor, ending in another wall of grey concrete. Set into it was a door, over which a sign – hanging slightly askew – read THAMES FLOOD CONTROL CENTRE.
‘That’s just surreal,’ I muttered.
‘It’s obsolete,’ Trudie answered, her voice pitched as low as mine. ‘Before they built the Thames Barrier, every borough had its own flood warning centre. This must have been where Camden’s was based.’
We tried the door, found it locked, and went back to the main corridor. As we advanced now, I became aware that there was something wrong with the endless perspective of the tunnel ahead of us. The proportions were subtly – and then not so subtly – off true. A few moments later, Trudie muttered a profanity.
‘The ceiling is closing in on us,’ she said.
She was right. It had been high above our heads when we started, but now it was almost close enough to touch. As I stared up at it, I heard a distant basso rumble.
‘The road tunnel,’ I said. ‘They built it inside the shell of the underpass. The road is right over our heads here.’
This stretch of the tunnel was more untidy, with piles of bricks, steel buckets and even the occasional hammer or trowel stacked against the wall or casually dropped on the floor. Dead leaves had drifted in ragged heaps against all of these objects, giving each of them its own dull brown comet tail.
We kept on moving, and the distance between floor and ceiling kept on narrowing, so that after another couple of minutes we were having to stoop. It was hard to fight off a feeling of claustrophobia. Trudie reached up and touched the underside of a manhole cover, gave it a tentative push, but it was rusted into place. It was obvious it hadn’t been opened in decades.
Up to now the air had smelled only of dust and damp stonework, but in this stretch of the tunnel it had curdled into something much more unpleasant: a sweet-sour tang like rotting vegetables, overlaid with something hard-edged and chemical. It was subtle at first, but it intensified as we went forward.
Up ahead it now looked as though the converging perspective lines met within a few hundred yards, rather than at some distant horizon. I was about to make some remark about running out of road and suggest we turn back, when I realised that I’d been tricked again by the flat light and the ubiquitous white tiles.
The floor and the ceiling didn’t actually meet at all. At the point where we would have had to go down on all fours and crawl to keep moving forward, the corridor ended at a letterbox-shaped opening about two feet high but stretching across the full width of the underpass. Just in front of it, on Trudie’s side of the corridor, a dark irregular mass resolved itself as we approached into a human body.
This was where the rotting-vegetable smell was coming from, and Trudie covered her mouth with her hand as she knelt to examine it. I crossed the tunnel to look over her shoulder.
The raincoat, piebald Doc Martens and grubby workmen’s trousers with pockets on the knees gave the overall impression that the body was that of a man; otherwise it would have been hard to say. He’d been dead a
