office. Sometime in the past, vandals had scribbled slogans all over the walls in this one.
‘Kids have been in here, alright,’ he said. ‘Dirty little buggers too. Seen this … “My little sister gave me my first blowjob. She’ll do you too for a fiver.” There’s even a fucking phone number. “Every day I wank into my mum’s knickers – now she’s pregnant again. Oh shit.”’ Getting no response, he turned.
Rodwell had not come into the room with him.
Ernshaw went back to the door and glanced into the office with the filing cabinet; Rodwell wasn’t in there either.
‘Keith?’ he said.
A footfall sounded behind him. He whirled around – to find that he was still alone. But on the far side of the room another door stood ajar.
Hadn’t it been closed previously?
Ernshaw approached it, suddenly suspecting that someone was in the next room. Baton drawn again, he yanked the door open – entering yet another deserted corridor, the contents of more gutted offices spilling into it from adjoining doorways.
‘Keith?’
Still there was no reply.
Ernshaw proceeded forward. At the extreme end there was another stairway, but when he reached this, it was only short and led up to a closed door, beyond which a crack of bright daylight was visible.
‘Keith? You up there, mate?’
Again, nothing.
He ascended slowly, body half-turned so that he could watch both in front and behind. At the top, the door swung open easily and Ernshaw entered the most spacious office he’d seen to date – a good forty foot by thirty – the sort of palatial residence an MD might once have inhabited. It possessed several large windows, all intact, none covered by planking or sheets of green canvas. The walls were even papered, though the floor contained loose boards, several of which had warped and sprung. There was no furniture; just a scattering of broken bricks and, in one corner, rather curiously, a wheelbarrow rimmed with hardened cement, a pick and sledge-hammer standing against it.
But none of this captured Ernshaw’s attention as much as the strange object on the farthest side of the room.
He walked forward.
It appeared to be a section of new wall; a seven-foot-wide rectangle rising almost floor to ceiling. The paper and plaster had recently been torn away, and the ancient stonework beneath demolished; new, yellowish bricks had been mortared into the resulting cavity. But what really caught his eye hung in the middle of this: a sheet of white paper with a message emblazoned on it in startling crimson. The paper was fresh and new; when Ernshaw took it from the wall it had been fixed there with Blu-Tack, which proved to be soft and obviously new as well.
The message had been printed by a modern desk-jet of some sort. It read:
Ho Ho Ho
Ernshaw’s short-cropped hair prickled. This sign could easily be more empty-headed idiocy from the local scrotes. But there was something about it – probably the fact that it was clearly a recent addition to this neglected pile – that made him think it might be significant. He stepped backward, examining the wall again. It had definitely been constructed more recently than the rest of the building. At its base, two lumps of tapered black wood protruded through a tiny gap under the bricks; some builder’s device, no doubt, to keep the whole thing level.
A hand tapped his shoulder.
Ernshaw spun around like a dervish. ‘Fuck me!’ he hissed.
‘What’s this?’ Rodwell asked.
‘Will you stop sneaking up on people!’ Ernshaw handed him the notice. ‘Dunno. Found it pinned to the wall.’
Rodwell stared at the wall first. ‘This brickwork’s new.’
‘That’s what I thought. Well … they’ll have done all sorts of jobs over the years, to keep the place serviceable, won’t they?’
‘Not in the last twenty.’ Rodwell glanced at the notice, then back at the wall again. ‘This is a chimney breast. Or it was. Probably connected to one of the outer flues.’
‘Okay, it’s a chimney,’ Ernshaw said. ‘Bricking up an old chimney isn’t much of a criminal offence these days, is it?’
Rodwell read the notice a second time.
Ho Ho Ho
‘Jesus … Christ,’ he breathed slowly. ‘Jesus Christ almighty!’
Moving faster than Ernshaw had ever seen him, Rodwell threw the paper aside and dropped to one knee to examine the two wooden stubs protruding below the brickwork. Ernshaw leaned down to look as well – and suddenly realised what he was actually seeing; the scuffed toes of a pair of boots.
Rodwell grabbed the pick and Ernshaw the hammer.
They went at the new wall as hard as they could, and at first it resisted their efforts – but they pounded fiercely, Rodwell stopping only to call for supervision and an ambulance, Ernshaw to unzip his anorak and throw off his hat. After several minutes grunting and sweating, mortar was bursting out with every impact – then they were loosening bricks, extricating them with their fingers, guarding their eyes against flying chips. Piece by piece, the wall came down, gradually exposing what stood behind it – though the aroma hit them first.
Ernshaw gagged, clamping a hand to his nose and mouth. Rodwell worked all the harder, smashing away the last vestiges of brickwork.
They stood back panting, wafting at the dust, retching at the stink.
‘Good God!’ Rodwell said as he focused on what they’d uncovered.
Though it stood upright, this was only because it had been suspended by the wrists from two manacles fixed above its head. It had reached that stage of early putrefaction where it could either have been a shrivelled corpse or a wax dummy, its complexion somewhere between sickly yellow and maggoty green. It had once been an elderly man – that much was evident from the scraggly white beard on its skullish jaw, plus it was bone-thin, an impression only enhanced by its baggy, extremely dirty garb. This consisted of a red tunic hanging in foul-smelling folds, trimmed with dirt-grey fur, and red pantaloons, the front of them thick with frozen urine, their cuffs tucked into a pair of oversized wellingtons.
It was not an unusual experience, even for relatively new bobbies like Ernshaw, to discover corpses in a state of corruption. Not everyone handled it well, though Ernshaw usually had – until now.
He laughed. Bizarrely. It was almost a cackle.
‘S-Santa,’ he stuttered.
Rodwell glanced at him, distracted.
‘Fucking Santa!’ Ernshaw continued to cackle, though his glazed expression contained no mirth. ‘Looks like there was no one nice waiting for him at the bottom of this chimney. Only naughty …’
Rodwell glanced back at the corpse as he recalled the words on the sign – Ho Ho Ho. He noticed that a red hood with a filthy
