“Sounds like a lot of moving parts, Constable.”

“I’m a multi-tasker. Here we are.”

He’d been trying to inscribe on his memory the desolation of this hopeless pit as she moved him through it. There were paths of cardboard on the ground, crisscrossing the little space, leading to a wall with four doors in it. These were the holding pens, he gathered. The whole space was perhaps four hundred square feet. The wall to his right had a steel door set in it.

“No expense spared,” said Bellecourt. Someone had dug out this space. Just a small borer and a conveyor to the surface would have moved the dirt out. Probably it had been spread in the fields. The fields and the underground river had offered them perfect cover.

Bellecourt unlocked the heavy steel door. The moment it was open a crack, a pair of thin arms shot out of the space and scrabbled along the thick wall. Bellecourt smashed the arms with a downward swing of the rifle and a piercing cry shocked his ears. “Get back, whores,” she shouted. “Get back or get shot.”

She pulled the door open further. Wingate saw two women within, blinded by the sudden light. Both shielded their eyes and cried out. He recognized Cherry. Bellecourt had the gun at his back.

“Get in. We’ll sort you all out later.”

He walked into the space. It was ten by ten. The door closed behind him and he heard the workings of a heavy lock rotate the deadbolt into its concrete pocket.

“No … no …,” whimpered one of the voices. He felt a hand on his arm.

“It’s me,” he said, covering the hand. “Cherry, it’s me.”

“We are dead. Dead now.”

“I’m Detective Constable James Wingate,” he said, reaching out to the girl he didn’t recognize. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“No,” she said, avoiding his touch. “We will never leave here.”

Hazel was already in LeJeune’s cruiser, waiting with the window down for an opportunity to get moving. LeJeune had placed a call to someone she trusted in the casino and as they feared, Travers was nowhere to be found. They’d had the drop on them all along, Bellecourt and Travers. They’d controlled their every move. And now Wingate had gone silent, and the woman was down there, holding all of the cards.

Hazel put the key in the ignition. Greene was watching her blankly. “Now give me your radio,” she said to Commander LeJeune. The woman appeared to be in shock, her mouth held in a small moue. She was lost in thought. “Radio,” Hazel repeated, and LeJeune passed it to her silently. She put the car in drive. She raised the radio to her mouth and depressed the call button. “Bellecourt, come in.”

“Ah, Hazel Micallef,” came Bellecourt’s voice. “Good to be on the same page at last.”

“If you harm him, you die.”

“Dammit,” said Bellecourt. “We should have spoken before now.”

“I want to talk to him.”

“He’s unreachable right now.”

Hazel pushed the gas pedal down. This woman was going to die in pain. “Well, I guess I’ve played my part excellently, haven’t I?”

“You did what any good detective would have done, Hazel. Don’t get down on yourself now.”

“Where’s your fiancé?

“Taking care of business.”

“I gather you know you’re already surrounded by police?”

“Of course. I’ve had access to your frequencies since you came up and visited us last week. I know everything. Where are you right now, Hazel?”

“I’m coming to see you.”

“Company! How nice.”

“Will you come out and meet with me?”

“I’d love to, but I have pressing business. Can I propose we postpone?”

“I’m on the 26. I’m going over the speed limit.”

“Well, you should know your James Wingate is in a hole below one of these fields. There’s a hole poked in it so he can breathe, but I can stop it up anytime, if need be … are you still there, Detective?”

“I’m here.” She tried to keep the relief out of her voice. Maybe he really was still alive.

“So let’s do this my way. You go back and wait a spell with your colleagues. I’ll call you when you can come and collect your friend. And you might want to tell everyone to use their cellphones from here on in.”

Bellecourt disconnected. Hazel pushed the accelerator to the floor. She got Greene on her cell.

“Where’s LeJeune?”

“We’ve asked her to stick around and ‘aid’ the investigation.”

“Put her on.” LeJeune was on the other end in an instant. “Mr. Sugar. Who is Mr. Sugar?”

“I don’t know a – ”

“It’s not his real name. If Travers is involved with this, then maybe there’s a link through the casino. Find out.”

She didn’t wait for LeJeune’s response. She slowed down to forty for a stop sign.

Where the light was, there were also thin jets of air. It provided the only fresh oxygen they were getting, but it also contributed to the cold, which was wearying. Wingate ran his fingers over the opening of the steel pipe that ran to the surface. The bottom of it was closed over with a steel lattice that appeared to be screwed into place. Not that any of them would be able to climb up the pipe if he could get the lattice removed: the opening was five inches in diameter.

The two girls were holding each other to keep warm. It was hard to imagine that either of these women would ever recover from their trials. Only Kitty had been strong enough to survive. Perhaps Bellecourt and her accomplices deliberately chose women they thought they could break. They’d been wrong with Kitty.

He saw a fluttery movement in the corner of his eye, and it was Cherry reaching out to him. They needed his bodily warmth. Where before he had recoiled from the horror of the fact of her imprisoned body, now he went to her willingly. He found his arms were long enough to enclose them both.

] 31 [

The sound of the television was louder in the back of the house. She would have to pass through the kitchen. She pushed the kitchen’s side door open slightly, the one that led into the dining room and from where she would have a vantage on him.

Through the crack in the kitchen door, she heard a voice – a TV anchor reporting the news. She saw the colours of the television program reflected on Sugar’s eyeglasses. He held a bottle of red wine in his lap, his screwcap wine. Matthieu had taught her how to appreciate wine. They were going to drive through Bordeaux together. That was another of her futures she wasn’t sure would happen now.

She let the door swing closed quietly and then opened it in toward herself so she could slip into the dining room. She quickly tucked herself against the wall to her right and began slowly tracing the wall to the corner, then along the side of the dining room, looking down the long wood table that never got used, and to the other corner where the wall turned to the cut-out between the dining room and the TV room. She held herself tightly up against the edge here and collected herself. She felt in her back pocket for the hunting knife that had paced her run.

It was a good knife. It was a curved, heavy one made entirely out of steel. Four inches closed, and heavy and balanced in her hand. It was spring-loaded, and small enough to hide. The night he’d given it to her, she’d sat in her dirt room weighing it in her palm. It seemed like a thing with a mind of its own. It wanted to kill.

The night she’d gotten out, shift change had come at around eleven as usual. She’d been hearing Gene’s voice outside. Bobby would come in and replace him and he’d be there the rest of the night. Nothing unusual happened down there in the rooms, and whichever guard sat on the couch beside the single heater in the whole space usually fell asleep within minutes. Bobby snored. She waited in her locked cave for the sound that would tell her she could use the tip of the blade in the door handle. There was some shuffling without; she listened to it through her door. Bobby was a big man with a huge, round belly. She knew him to be careless and soft-minded. She could probably convince him to let her out to use the bucket that was in the corner of the dug-out room. But it would be better to take him asleep.