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“Where’s James?” I ask again, panic rising. I don’t understand how his body could just have disappeared.
“He’s under the floor, okay? I’ll move him closer to the outside wall, then we’ll be able to remove him. We’ll also need to give the floor and walls a proper clean.”
“I can grab one of the cleaning caddies from the housing office,” I answer, frowning at the rest of the solution. “Are you going to move the body with your car?” Then, before he can respond, “What happens if someone recognises it?”
“No, I’ll—”
He breaks off and stares into the middle distance, cogs turning behind his eyes. After a moment, there’s a curve of a gentle smile. “My driver will bring a different vehicle. He can swap out the plates.” He speaks the words slowly, like each one is birthing right as he opens his mouth. “If he parks it outside, I can bring it closer when we’re ready to move.”
By the end of the sentence, he looks relieved and satisfied.
“Are you okay to grab those cleaning supplies?” He pulls me close and presses a gentle kiss on my forehead. “You’re not feeling too—”
“I’m fine.”
Most of all, I’m thrilled to be of help.
With another kiss and an admonition not to open the door unless he knows it’s me on the other side, I let myself into the corridor and rush to the lobby to fulfil the request.
* * *
CONNER
Paisley scrubs the floor while I pull out the drawers again and drop through the manhole, still dressed only in my briefs, joining the body in the bowels of the housing block.
When I looked at the space on the original blueprints, it seemed large enough. Being crammed into the foot-high gap between the floor above and the hard concrete below is a different story.
When I inhale, I breathe in a decade of dust, of spider’s webs so old they’ve turned dry and fallen apart, the corpses of their starved owners turned to powder. With each movement, I dislodge dirt gone rancid after years of never seeing the sun. The debris coats my mouth, tickles my lungs until I clamp my mouth shut, eyes streaming to fight against a cough.
Even when I fight past that urge, I still have to contend with the weight of the building above me. My head imagines the straining struts, the beams criss-crossed with cracks, ready to fall, ready to crush me into a thin paste to feed as a sacrifice to the concrete gods.
A bit late in the game to unleash my unknown claustrophobia. I try to push it aside with all my other concerns, but my breathing remains shallow, my forehead clammy.
My mind insists it’s perfectly safe; the building’s stood for this long, it’ll hold for another hour. My gut argues that the behemoth of concrete and glass can’t possibly be supported by the meagre blocks on display, that it must be about to collapse upon me at any second.
I’ll die, covered from head to toe in every piece of filth that’s collected in this gap from the moment the building was constructed.
Indulging my voice of doom lasts for all of a metre, then I have to dismiss it, or I wouldn’t be able to move. Instead of giving in to visions of me crushed to death, I focus on the smaller grumble that with the money invested in this place, a decent lighting system for the crawlspace wouldn’t go astray.
Add proper ventilation to that list because the air gets thinner with every breath.
I can’t risk shining my torch app and have someone outside seeing. In the darkening night, it’ll be easily visible. Instead, as my eyes adjust to the gloom, I find the faint pattern of light coming from the grates in the side of the building. Tracing out a map in my head, I struggle to drag the body across the concrete. The position doesn’t allow much leverage and sweat streams from my almost naked body as I wrestle it into place.
Eventually, I reach the far wall of the underground space, lights beeping at me from the darkness, a plethora of different cables feeding into the rooms above.
I pour the bottle of bleach I stole from the cleaning caddy over the body before turning to retrace my steps, seeking the dim shape of the manhole as a target. Without a corpse in tow, the passage back takes a fraction of the time.
Once I reach it, I continue onwards, stirring dust and making a path that could lead from any of half a dozen different rooms, disguising the obvious track straight back to Paisley.
With the body now accessible from outside, there’s a chance I won’t need to call upon my brother or uncle for help. One more pinch of luck and this mess will be cleared away.
The few metres distance between the grate and the trunk of a vehicle will be agonising, but there’s no helping it. Unless I had easy access to a woodchipper, the body’s going to look exactly like what it is. A corpse wrapped in a sheet.
But once the body’s in the car boot, we can move it a hundred different places to hide it. There are old wells, disused quarries, a bend in the river where more than one car has ended up over the years.
Places to put a body where it’ll never be discovered, no matter how many resources his father pours into the search.
And with the cheating results about to come to light, there’s even a plausible—if weak—reason for James to go AWOL.
