Pain of Death Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t want me to say any more than that. But I wouldn’t say she wrote ill of you.’
    ‘I couldn’t ever harm her.’
    ‘Before, you said you “curated” Kerry.’
    ‘I have always worked in performance. I went to university, you know. I studied stage design.’
    ‘Where do you curate?’
    ‘Residencies, tours, one-off nights.’
    Staff tries to disguise his scepticism, says, ‘Tell me about her father.’
    ‘Because I am older than her?’
    ‘She was sixteen when you met.’
    ‘And I was twenty-nine. You think that’s sick, do you?’
    ‘It’s unusual, but not sick.’
    ‘I couldn’t stay at the hospital. It was too much.’
    ‘You think this baby is yours?’
    ‘They said she might die.’
    ‘The baby, or Kerry?’
    ‘I have a feeling one of them will be taken from me.’
    ‘I asked you about her father.’
    ‘I don’t know him.’
    Staffe watches as Sean looks away. He can tell when a man is lying but has a lesser instinct for the truth. He gathers together what he feels he needs and makes a list, hands it to Sean, returning the rest of Kerry’s possessions to her desk.
    Degg looks at the list: notebook, red; notebook, blue; school records; doctor’s notes; sundry photographs x 12 . He doesn’t look up or reply when Staffe bids him farewell.
    *

     
    ‘What exactly are we looking for?’ whispers Pulford, to Staffe, straining to see beyond the twenty-foot beam from his head torch. Paul Asquith marches ahead, carrying a larger lamp, casting a wider beam far into the dark. He strides confidently into the Spitalfields tunnel where he had discovered Kerry Degg. ‘We’ll have to watch him,’ Staffe whispers.
    ‘You don’t think …?’
    Staffe raises a finger to his lips and glares at Pulford. The ethanol afterburn of the sergeant’s party is strong.
    As they follow Asquith, Staffe ponders quite what sequence of events might have brought Kerry Degg to this place, having had her baby already. Could that be possible?
    When they reach the spot where Kerry Degg had been found, with its dark stains illuminated by Paul Asquith’s powerful torch, Staffe says to the historian, ‘Where would you hide something – from here?’
    ‘There is a series of spurs – some were trial tunnels, others to accommodate machinery. We haven’t actually finished mapping them. The documentation isn’t what it might be.’
    ‘But you have maps?’
    Asquith smiles, proudly, and holds up a clipboard, to which he has taped a plastic envelope. He shows it to Staffe. ‘The red-hatched areas are what we sourced from the original documents.’
    ‘And the yellow?’
    ‘That was our mission. To verify these minor tunnels and spurs.’
    ‘And we are here?’ Staffe points to a red area.
    Asquith nods, sagely.
    ‘Knowing what you do of the system down here, and if you had brought someone down here, say, a week ago, and wished their presence to be untraceable, where would you store the provisions – and secrete the traces of life?’
    ‘Food and water and ablutions? I can’t be sure, but there is a link a hundred yards or so to the west. It is in some documents but not others.’
    ‘Is it safe?’ asks Pulford.
    ‘This could have been a station. That’s what I think. But they chose Aldgate.’
    ‘Is it safe?’
    ‘We shall see.’
    Pulford takes a step away from Asquith’s arc of light, holds Staffe’s sleeve and tugs, waits until Asquith has advanced beyond earshot. He hisses, ‘They could be down here, still.’
    ‘Who?’
    ‘We have an officer on the door. Nobody has come out. If they were down here when you answered Asquith’s call, doing whatever they were doing with Kerry Degg – they could still be here. They would have to be.’
    Asquith turns, thirty yards ahead, says, ‘I’m willing to take my chances.’
    ‘And so am I,’ says Staffe, who turns to Pulford, says, ‘Go back above ground, start phoning around everyone in Kerry’s address book. And check out all the Underground