As he pedaled out of the shadows into a sunnier street a black Mercedes, chauffeur-driven, sailed past, so quietly it could have been wind-propelled. Cameron caught sight of the passengers only briefly. One he recognized as a man Voight had been talking with before the race, a thin faced individual of about forty, with a mouth so tight his lips might have been surgically removed.
Beside him sat Voight.
Impossible as it seemed it was Voight’s face that glanced back out of the smoked glass windows; he was even dressed for the race.
Cameron didn’t like the look of this at all. He’d seen the South African five minutes earlier, off and running. So who was this? A double obviously. It smelt of a fix, somehow; it stank to high heaven.
The Mercedes was already disappearing around a corner. Cameron turned off the radio and pedaled pell-mell after the car. The balmy sun made him sweat as he rode.
The Mercedes was threading its way through the narrow streets with some difficulty, ignoring all the One Way signs as it went. Its slow passage made it relatively easy for Cameron to keep the vehicle in view without being seen by its occupants, though the effort was beginning to light a fire in his lungs.
In a tiny, nameless alley just west of Fetter Lane, where the shadows were particularly dense, the Mercedes stopped. Cameron, hidden from view round a corner not twenty yards from the car, watched as the door was opened by the chauffeur and the lipless man, with the Voight look-alike close behind, stepped out and went into a nondescript building. When all three had disappeared Cameron propped his bike up against the wall and followed.
The street was pin-drop hushed. From this distance the roar of the crowd was only a murmur. It could have been another world, this street. The flitting shadows of birds, the windows of the buildings bricked up, the peeling paint, the rotten smell in the still air. A dead rabbit lay in the gutter, a black rabbit with a white collar, someone’s lost pet. Flies rose and fell on it, alternately startled and ravenous.
Cameron crept towards the open door as quietly as he was able. He had, as it turned out, nothing to fear. The trio had disappeared down the dark hallway of the house long since. The air was cool in the hall, and smelt of damp. Looking fearless, but feeling afraid, Cameron entered the blind building. The wall-paper in the hallway was shit-coloured, the paint the same. It was like walking into a bowel; a dead man”s bowel, cold and shitty. Ahead, the stairway had collapsed, preventing access to the upper storey. They had not gone up, but down.
The door to the cellar was adjacent to the defunct staircase, and Cameron could hear voices from below.
No time like the present, he thought, and opened the door sufficiently to squeeze into the dark beyond. It was icy. Not just cold, not damp, but refrigerated. For a moment he thought he’d stepped into a cold storage room. His breath became a mist at his lips: his teeth wanted to chatter.
Can’t turn back now, he thought, and started down the frost-slick steps. It wasn’t impossibly dark. At the bottom of the flight, a long way down, a pale light flickered, its uninspired glow aspiring to the day. Cameron glanced longingly round at the open door behind him. It looked extremely tempting, but he was curious, so curious. There was nothing to do but descend.
In his nostrils the scent of the place teased. He had a lousy sense of smell, and a worse palate, as his wife was fond of reminding him. She’d say he couldn’t distinguish between garlic and a rose, and it was probably true. But the smell in this deep meant something to him, something that stirred the acid in his belly into life.
Goats. It smelt, ha, he wanted to tell her then and there how he’d remembered, it smelt of goats.
He was almost at the bottom of the stairs, twenty, maybe thirty, feet underground. The voices were still some distance away, behind a second door.