Condemned Page 4

  ‘No, I insist,’ Thomas was shouting. ‘I absolutely insist!’

  Charley retraced her steps and blocked his way into the house. ‘You can insist all you like, Mr Thomas, but it won’t get you anywhere. Now, are you going to leave the site of your own free will, or do you want to be arrested for obstruction, and escorted back to the nick to wait for me in a cell?’

  James Thomas’s body language told her he was far from happy. It appeared he wasn’t finished. Angrily he jabbed an outstretched finger towards the Joe Greenwood, but the question was directed at Charley, ‘What gives him the right?’

  Annie cringed as she waited for Charley’s reaction. Anyone who knew her boss knew he was making a big mistake by antagonising her. Annie was a relative newbie to CID, but she had been told by the team about her superior just before Charley’s imminent arrival at Peel Street Station. Physically fit, and as tough as her bare-knuckle-fighting father before her, Charley’s right-hand punch was one that any professional fighter would have been proud of.

  Charley’s voice was quiet, and devoid of emotion. ‘Mr Greenwood was the one to make the discovery. He’s already been into the scene. Now, will you please calm down? I won’t stand here being shouted at.’ Her voice rose, but was steely. ‘Do I make myself clear?’

  Thomas’s eyes resembled those of a raccoon, so black were the circles around them. ‘Don’t you tell me what to do, this is my land you’re standing on!’

  Charley stared Thomas straight in the eye, and lowered her voice to a threatening whisper. ‘Do as you’re told or I will personally throw you out, and I’m sure you don’t want the others to see you squealing like a stuck pig, do you?’

  As she readied herself for his response, she didn’t anticipate seeing the quivering of his lower lip, as he took a step backwards and pointed a finger in her direction. ‘You don’t know who you’re dealing with, Sherlock. I’ll be having words with your boss, you mark my words.’

  ‘Good, it’ll save my updating him,’ Charley shouted to his retreating figure. Annie wasn’t the only one to see the expression on Charley’s face as she indicated that the uniformed officer should follow him.

  After their departure, Charley stood for a moment, quietly soaking up her surroundings. She turned to the others. ‘Right, now where were we?’ she said.

  Although she had never been inside the property before, she could see why Crownest had long held the interest of so many historians down the generations. There was a lot to take in even where the walls, now lifeless and cold, had crumbled; in their place stood beams of wood, blackened and charred where the flames had licked them. The odour of smoke and ash filled Charley’s mouth, nostril and lungs and she began to cough.

  ‘You okay?’ Asked Joe.

  Charley nodded. The glass littering the floor where the remains of the once beautiful stained-glass window had fallen crunched under the sole of her shoes, and the metal base of the hall chandelier lay blacked and twisted at her feet. After a moment or two Joe Greenwood moved slowly and quietly towards one of the doors leading off the ornate grand entrance hall to the dining room. When he reached it, he cast a look over his shoulder with eyes that invited her to follow him. When Charley joined him, he spoke to her in a reserved tone. ‘I can’t think what’s got into James. I’ve known him a long time. We grew up on the same estate, Irish Catholic workers. He went to Rome to become a priest, but he didn’t qualify in the end.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m not here to be liked, I’m here to do my job.’

  Chapter 4

  Joe automatically reached down for the handle on the door. Realising it had already been removed in preparation for the demolition he looked down at the round hole through the old door that showed them the thickness of the wood, and finding Charley’s face, his lips turned up at the corner. ‘Habit,’ he said, ‘the handles are of value, the doors, not.’

  The dining room was dark, with a minimum of light, more so because of the outer branches of the dense tree just outside, which had forced themselves through gaps in the broken boarded-up windows.

  ‘Just tell me this, how could any decent human being want to move the bones of another found in suspicious circumstances, without trying to find out who they belong to, how they got there, and why?’ Joe said.

  There was no answer Charley could give that would satisfy Joe Greenwood, because she couldn’t decipher it herself. ‘I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand people,’ she said in response.

  Free from any furniture, the floor space in this room was littered with bricks, smaller stones, rubble, wood, and debris of all shapes and sizes. Adjacent to the door lay the would-be crime scene, concealed somewhere behind the walk-in fireplace.

  ‘Wow,’ said Annie, on seeing the grand feature. She gagged and pulled her rollneck jumper up over her mouth. ‘The smell! What is it? It reminds me of the recycling centre on a hot day.’

  Joe grinned. ‘It’s at times like these that I definitely don’t miss my sense of smell.’

  Their feet tapped on the stone floor as they proceeded towards the source of the strange odour, and the sound echoed loudly. Despite the smell Charley found herself swallowing deep breaths to fight off a sudden feeling of nausea. The smell was not only putrid, but the atmosphere was heavy, as if all the energy had been drained from it, leaving behind a bitter taste of… what? Hate, anger, death? Again, Charley checked her emotions.

  Joe removed the plans for the original building from a pocket inside his jacket, and studied them closely.

  ‘Could I have a copy of those by any chance?’ Charley asked, grateful for the distraction.

  Joe nodded. ‘Aye, ’course, I’ve got some in the cabin, outside. I’ll grab you a copy when we’ve finished here.’

  Annie was preoccupied surveying the room. She came to a stop at the fireplace. ‘Can you just imagine the heat that it gave off? Look at the size of it.’

  ‘Hot enough to burn anything, and everything in them days, but that’s another story.’ Joe stepped to the back of the fireplace, and squatted on his heels. ‘It’s quite valuable, given its age. We were trying to figure out a way of taking it out without damaging it when we found the corpse.’

  ‘So, where is it?’ Annie asked.

  The two detectives watched and waited in anticipation of seeing the final resting place of the decaying body. Joe pointed to the stone to the side of him.

  ‘Well, if you look closely, there is a lack of mortar surrounding this particular slab of stone. This suggested to me that it’s removable, and since I’m wondering about that, I’m also thinking that if there was a big fire roaring away in here the concealed opening, that led to who knows what could be hidden by a roaring fire in this old grate,’ he stopped to steady himself by putting his hand on the iron basket. It was a good job he did, for in the next moment there came a blast of wind down the chimney and he rocked precariously back on his heels. A shower of soot floated down, blackening Joe and the floor surrounding him. Using his sleeve to wipe the coal dust from his face, he held his breath. After a moment or two he looked tentatively up the chimney, but no more black powder was forthcoming. Unfazed, Joe continued. ‘Finn and I decided to take a jemmy to the stone. It wasn’t easy to open, let me tell you, given its size.’

  Joe grunted with the effort, but he sought shallow fingerholds around the edge of the big piece of stonework at the back of the fire. As Joe cursed, the stone shifted slowly, eventually exposing a sort of doorway in the fireplace, just as Joe had suggested. As Joe worked away at the stone, the feeling came to Charley of something searching for a way to escape, after the torment of being trapped within. She shivered.

  Sticking her neck out to peer into the black abyss, Annie had an idea. ‘Maybe it’s an old priest hole, and the priest got forgotten about?’

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Charley.

  ‘I went to a convent school, remember?’ Annie nodded towards the window. ‘The church on the opposite side of
the road, it’s the nearest building, isn’t it? Churches have long been known to have tunnels to connect them to another building, haven’t they?’ A smile crossed her face. ‘A priest hole is nothing more than a modern-day panic room really, isn’t it?’

  ‘A lot less comfy though,’ said Charley.

  The pair didn’t realise that Joe was listening to their conversation as his head was stuck inside the cavity, which he was searching with his head torchlight. He spoke up, ‘Don’t think so.’ His voice sounded strained, ‘this house was rebuilt on the site of a sixteenth-century farmhouse, around the time of the Industrial Revolution,’ he said. His body then disappeared further into the doorway and his boots could be heard making faint scraping sounds on the tunnel’s uneven surface as he inched himself forward in the darkness. There was a moment’s pause. His words sounded garbled and echoed in the enclosed space. ‘This tunnel – it appears to go on for ever. Your guess is as good as mine as to where it leads,’ he called out.

  The two detectives looked at each other.

  Joe appeared back at the opening of the cavern. He stretched out his hand and beckoned to them. Once they were directly behind him he pointed just inside the passageway. A metal bar attached to the stonework provided a simplified lock that, when dropped, would ensure that the door couldn’t be opened from outside.

  ‘Now, this suggests to me that there is another way out for whoever was coming to and fro, don’t you think?’

  ‘Maybe it was a servants’ passage?’ said Annie, in nothing more than a whisper. ‘They’re quite common in grand houses and palaces, I hear, to enable the servants to go about their duty undetected, without disturbing anyone or causing offence to the nobility.’

  Joe shook his head. ‘The door to a servants’ passage wouldn’t likely be in the fireplace. It’s usually in a wall which is often covered in a highly patterned wallpaper so as to hide its position.’

  ‘Plus, the number of servants required in a house of this size would be minimal. They wouldn’t require servants’ passageways,’ replied Charley.

  Joe scratched his head. ‘I’ve certainly never seen nowt like this ’afore.’

  Joe stepped back inside the dining room, and offered Charley the chance to step forward. As she did so, cold air rushed towards her. Her blood chilled. Feeling aimless and adrift, she stumbled ahead. Placing her feet on the increasingly uneven ground, she put her trembling sweaty palms against the walls of the tunnel, and twisted her head around to scan the impenetrable blackness. Her breath was coming rapidly, the strain of the day no doubt taking its toll. Another strong odour reached her nostrils, similar to rotting meat or sour milk. Joe switched on his torch and shone the ultra-bright light over her shoulder, where its beam reached way deep inside the long, narrow tunnel until it hit a wall of darkness. Slowly he pulled the torchlight back, counting the tunnels support which reminded Charley of a tunnel in a mine, as he did so. He stopped to concentrate on one wooden beam in particular. ‘Corpse number one,’ he announced. Seconds later he flipped the beam to Charley’s immediate right. Charley jumped to see the darkness open up with light. In front of her lay a corpse in a discarded heap, in a bundle of dried-blood-soaked clothes.

  Charley’s own knowledge told her that within a year, the remains of a body are only the skeleton and teeth, unless the body is frozen. She could see flesh on these bones, and that smell – of course, it was that of a rotting corpse. A smell that stayed with you. The head or partial bloodied skull was positioned nearest to her.

  ‘Can I?’ asked Charley as she put her hand up to reach the torch Joe held above her shoulder. Taking hold of the torch she directed the beam up and down the remains that were covered with possible ash, or rubble. She could be wrong, but her first impression was that this body had been put there quite recently.

  ‘What do the plans tell us about the tunnel?’ she asked.

  ‘There is no depiction of a tunnel on the drawings, but then you wouldn’t mention it, would you, if it was something you wanted to keep a secret?’

  ‘Mmm… point taken.’

  ‘Obviously, when we came across the tunnel, we were eager to investigate its final destination, but once we saw the dead body, we decided not to go any further. We didn’t want to disturb anything.’

  Charley swung the torch round and her eyes found Joe’s face close behind her. ‘You did the right thing.’

  Moving the beam of light here and there, Charley sought clues in silence.

  ‘I think you could be right, Annie. St Anne’s Church opposite is definitely a line of enquiry we should pursue.’

  As she walked out of this incredible tunnel, that someone had taken time to excavate, and back into the spacious fireplace, her mind was exploring all sorts of possibilities.

  ‘I read that the Alderman family had links to the church, but how much of what I read is fact or fiction is yet to be seen.’

  Charley passed the torch back to Joe.

  ‘Okay, where’s body number two?’ Charley asked, impatient to move on before she called the experts out.

  ‘It’s in the cellar,’ Joe said.

  ‘Lead on. We’re right behind you.’

  Chapter 5

  Joe gave the cellar door a hearty kick and it swiftly fell away from the woodworm-infested frame with a satisfying ripping sound. He switched on his torch again and peered down the steps. It was completely silent and dark as a grave.

  ‘Do be careful, let your eyes adjust to the darkness,’ he called over his shoulder. The sound of his jacket scuffing against the walls of the staircase indicated just how narrow it was.

  Suddenly he halted, and there was a catch in his breath.

  ‘It’s slippery in parts,’ he warned, inching himself forward with a great deal of caution. Dust billowed around, making him cough; he stopped again for a moment, but the crunch of the debris beneath his foot on the next step told Charley he had pressed on regardless.

  Charley prepared to follow. She gripped the handrail tightly in anticipation of her steep descent, the paint crusty, cold and damp to the touch, but no matter how abhorrent it was to her, she wouldn’t be letting go for man nor beast – not until she reached the bottom.

  ‘Can you imagine having to carry yer washing up ’ere, through the kitchen and out into the yard just to dry yer clothes?’ said Annie, mocking the Yorkshire accent in her typically Southern drawl.

  ‘Or worse, coming down into this pit for a bath?’ said Joe, whose voice echoed beneath the low granite roof. At the same moment as they reached the bottom of the stairs, a black cat scrambled hastily up the low cellar wall towards the coal chute situated on an external way. When it reached its destination, it turned round, showing its gleaming green eyes briefly before making its escape.

  Charley heard Joe anxiously draw in his breath.

  A little nervous chuckle escaped Annie’s lips. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ she squealed. ‘I did not expect that!’

  Heart beating wildly in her chest, Charley felt the temperature plummet, and goosebumps rose on her arms. The darkness played tricks with her mind. With each tentative step she found the musty smell all-consuming; it took her back to her six-year-old self, dodging cobwebs that licked her bare skin and stuck like candy floss to her hair in her granny’s cellar. Now, she jumped instinctively as a spider fell onto her face, and she raised a hand and silently screamed as she batted it away in haste.

  Now, in her mind’s eye, Charley pictured this cellar as a mirror to her granny’s. The floor, made of flagstones, had held a coal bucket always filled with wood and coal taken from the coal ’ole, ready for the fire to heat the water in the ‘Copper’ for wash days and bath water. The tin bath situated farthest away from the coal ’ole, had a flowery, plastic curtain drawn across the front for privacy. As Charley now stood in Crownest’s cellar, her grandpa’s words rang in her ears, ‘See behind there, that’s where the bones are kept.’ He was jesting, of course, he was always joking, but there were some seriously bad vibes in Granny’s
cellar that gave her nightmares as a youngster and it put her on edge now.

  The light from Joe’s torch began to flicker, before turning off completely, leaving the three of them trapped in the pitch darkness. Charley’s six-year-old self was more than ready to flee and scramble back up the steps, had it not been for Annie’s hand clamped firmly to her arm, encouraging her to go on. For Charley knew, such was the influence of an SIO, that if she ran away screaming, so would her credibility.

  The darkness remained for what seemed like an age, but the sound of the tap, tap of the torch being hit on the wall was followed by light once more, and the beating of Charley’s heart returned to a less erratic beat.

  Immediately Charley eyes swept the room, lit only by the moving beam of light. She caught sight of a mangle, and on the shelf above, flaked washing soap and a scrub board. It was as if her childhood nightmare had returned.

  When Joe turned sharply to the left, the light from his torch shifted with him, and it felt like a curtain had fallen on wash day.

  ‘Over here.’ His voice echoed, and its urgency startled her. ‘We discovered a false wall.’

  Charley swallowed hard.

  ‘Why, I ask myself, would anyone build a false wall in a cellar?’ Joe continued, ‘That was until we found more human remains.’

  Charley crept across the dark shadows to gaze into the hole in the wall that had been partially demolished, with what looked like the swing of a hefty hammer. Joe shone his torch through the hole. Charley felt Annie’s fingers curl round her arm again. A muffled cry escaped her lips. ‘Holy Mother of God!’

  A body lay spread-eagled in the centre of the hidden room, the ribs glistening, in the torchlight. Joe flicked the beam up and down the skeletal remains. This corpse, it was plain to see, had been laid out carefully, as if this was its final resting place, unlike the one behind the fireplace. The torchlight caught something else that shone, between the ribs, in the darkness. Whatever it was they’d have to wait until the body was removed to find out.