Dead Man's Footsteps

But still she couldn’t see it.
    Squirming in sudden panic, she wondered if she could have gone blind.
    What the hell time was it? When she had last looked, before the lights went out, it had been 3.08 a.m. Some time after then she had peed into her boot. Or at least as best she could in the darkness.
    She had felt better then and had been able to think clearly. Now the need to pee was muzzing her thoughts again. She tried to push the desire from her mind. Some years ago she had watched a documentary on television about people who had survived disasters. A young woman her own age had been one of the few survivors from an aircraft that had crash-landed and caught fire. The woman reckoned she had lived because she kept calm when everyone else was panicking, had thought logically, figured out through the smoke and darkness which way the exit was.
    The same theme had been echoed by all the other survivors. Keeping calm, thinking clearly. That was what you had to do.
    Easier said than done.
    They had exit doors on planes. And stewardesses with Stepford Wives expressions who pointed out the exits and held up orange life jackets and tugged at oxygen masks, as if they were addressing a convention of mentally retarded deaf mutes on every flight. England was a bloody nanny state now, so why hadn’t they passed a law ensuring that every lift had a stewardess on board? Why didn’t you find a robotic blonde standing inside each time you entered, handing you a laminated card that told you where the doors were? Giving you an orange life jacket in case the lift got flooded while you were in it? Waving oxygen masks in your face?
    Suddenly she heard a sharp beep-beep.
    Her phone!
    She fumbled for her handbag. Light spilled out of it. Her phone was working! There was a signal! And, of course, there was a clock on the phone – she had totally forgotten about in her panic!
    She pulled it out and stared at it. On the display were the words:
    New message .
    Barely able to contain her excitement, she clicked it open.
    She did not recognize the number. The message read:
    I know where you are .

17
OCTOBER 2007
    Roy Grace shivered. Although he had on thick jeans, a heavy-knit pullover and lined boots under his paper suit, the damp inside the storm drain and the rain outside were getting into his bones.
    The SOCOs and search officers, who had the unpleasant task of checking every inch of the drain, mostly on their hands and knees, had so far found a few rodent skeletons, but nothing of interest. Either the dead woman’s clothing had been removed before she was deposited here, or it had been washed away, rotted or even taken for animals’ nests. Working painstakingly slowly with trowels, Joan Major and Frazer Theobald were scraping away the silt around the pelvis, bagging and tagging each layer of dirt separately in neat cellophane bags. They would be another two or three hours at this rate, Grace estimated.
    And all the time he was drawn back to the grinning skull. The sensation that Sandy’s spirit was here with him. Could it really be you? he wondered, staring hard. Every medium he had been to in the past nine years had told him that his wife was not in the spirit world. Which meant she was still alive – if he believed them. But none had been able to say where she was.
    A chill fluttered through him. This time it was not the cold, but something else. He had determined a while agoto find closure and move forward with his life. But each time he tried, something happened that sowed doubt in him, and it was happening again now.
    The crackle of his radio phone startled him out of his reverie. He held it to his ear with a curt, ‘Roy Grace?’
    ‘Morning, Roy. Your career going down the drain, is it?’ Then he heard Norman Potting’s throaty chuckle.
    ‘Very funny, Norman. Where are you?’
    ‘With the scene guard. Want me to get togged up and come down?’
    ‘No, I’ll come to you – meet me in the SOCO van.’
    Grace welcomed the excuse to get away for a bit. He wasn’t strictly needed here and could easily have gone back to his office, but he liked his team to see him leading from the front. If they were having to spend their Saturday inside a dank, horrible drain, at least they could see his day wasn’t any better.
    It was a relief to shut the door on the elements and sit down on the soft upholstery at the work table in the van. Even if it meant being confined in a small area with Norman Potting – never an experience he