Underlife by Robert Finn (different e readers txt) 📕

“See?” he said. He looked at it himself and read aloud, “J. Disk one. E-mails, plans and accounts. That has to be what you were after. Whatever he stole, whoever he was working for, I bet it’s all on here.”

“Give me that,” Warren said, that curious bloody gurgle evident in his voice. Then he started walking towards Clipper. “Now!” he yelled.

Clipper scuttled backwards to the door of the rear cab, wedged the disk in the doorframe and applied some pressure. “Stop right there or I’ll break it,” he commanded.

Warren stopped. For a moment. Then he began to edge slowly forwards. “Let’s do a deal,” he said. It was just like before, when Kieran had stood on more or less this spot and Warren had offered him a deal too. Clipper wondered if this reckless feeling inside him was what Kieran had felt too.

Warren was using that same old reasonable voice again: “Matt? You know I can track you down if I have to. Now that I know you were Gary’s friend I can find out everything else about you. But that’s good. Because it means right now I can let you go. If you cause trouble for me, you know I’ll be able to hunt you down. But if you don’t… then we’re fine. You understand? So if you give me the disk now, I won’t have to take it off you. You live, and I get the information I came for.”

The curious wobble Clipper could hear in Warren’s voice didn’t seem to be emotional — the man was as sure of himself as ever; it was something to do with his injury. Clipper realised that Warren was trying to make a deal even as blood trickled into his lungs.

Then, with a lurch the train moved, and everyone grabbed for something to hold on to. A second later, the brakes slapped into place, the train shuddered to a halt and the compressors kicked in again.

“We’ll be out of here in a minute,” Warren said. “I bet you could probably be home in an hour. But if you break that disk, I’ll kill you, and that will be that.”

“And what about her?” Clipper asked, nodding towards Rachel.

“Of course. You can both go,” Warren said. Clipper waited for him to argue, to explain his conditions and lay out the terms of the deal, but he just repeated, “You can both go if you let me have that disk.”

Maybe if Warren had asked for Rachel’s surname, demanded to see some proof of her identity, Clipper might have been tempted to believe him. But he didn’t. And that meant Warren had no intention of letting her leave the train alive. Which pretty much settled it in Clipper’s mind. Any doubts he’d had about what he was planning to do were gone.

Again the compressor cut out and again the train lurched, but this time the motion continued and the train began to move forwards at last.

As they pulled away, Warren was beginning to sound a little pressured. “OK, we’ve run out of time, so let me turn this around and see if that helps,” he said. “I’m going to come over there and kill you now. See if you can talk me out of it.” Then he started towards Clipper, his eyes hard and fixed on his target. His hands were clamped so tightly over the hole in his chest that his fingers were white and the steps he took were slightly unsteady, but there was no mistaking his murderous determination.

“Right. OK,” Clipper called out in a tone of surrender. He held up the disk. “OK.” Then he leant over and set it on the floor, in the doorway to the rear cab, before clambering up onto the nearest seat, as though he was trying to get out of Clipper’s way.

The train was accelerating now, the driver obviously having taken Warren’s words to heart, and Warren was moving faster too. Clipper tried to get past him by hopping across the seats, stepping rapidly over the arm rests as Warren dragged himself down the aisle towards the disk. But as they passed, Warren threw out his hand, cracking Clipper across the side of the head with a solid punch and sending him sprawling headlong into the aisle.

Warren reached the doorway to the rear cab as, behind him, Clipper tried to get up. He’d smacked his head pretty hard and the fall had been awkward. His arm had been trapped under him as he fell. He thought it might be broken, which would explain why he couldn’t seem to get it to work.

Rachel rushed forwards to help him and Clipper screamed at her to get back. He sounded so desperate for her to listen to him that she stopped dead.

Warren had the disk now and was tucking it into a pocket in the leg of his trousers. With the hole in his chest slowing him down, it took him a few seconds. By the time he was finished, Clipper had managed to crawl away as far as the double-doors — all of five metres forward from where Warren was standing. He was almost at the exact spot where Sebastian had died.

The train was really moving now, a fact Warren was obviously very aware of as he said, “I think we’d better make this quick.” Then he threw out his hand with a stabbing movement, thrusting it towards Clipper. It was just like the punch that Warren had thrown in the club, the one that never landed. But this time it was Clipper who felt the awful impact of it. It felt like a bomb had gone off inside him. His chest was lit up with pain as though he’d stepped out in front of a bus. Or maybe, as some part of Clipper’s reeling brain insisted on suggesting, as though he’d been hit with the force of a train.

And at that moment it happened. There was a sound from the rear cab as the rope snapped taut. Clipper had wrapped a loop of it around the driver’s seat, to hold it until the last second. With a crack like a whip, it snatched itself free. Then the metre-long metal bar of the SCD leapt backwards and flew through the door of the cab, encountering Warren as it did so. As the clamp struck him, the train was doing just under forty miles an hour and the rope, tethered as it was to a spot just under where the cab had previously stood, transmitted all of that velocity to the steel shaft of the SCD.

Clipper wasn’t able to stay conscious long enough to see it hit. But he heard the incredible noise it made and knew it had happened. He knew Rachel was safe. He just wished he’d been able to see Gary one last time and explain that he’d solved the riddle of the perfect iPod lift. The trick was that you swapped it around. Always choose a train over a platform. You put yourself on the receding train with the prize and you left the cord behind, along with your unlucky victim. Gary probably wouldn’t have approved of modifying it so he could kill someone, but he’d have been pleased that Clipper had solved the riddle, and even more pleased that he’d used it to save a life. It’s just a shame it hadn’t been Clipper’s own.

His last thought was that maybe he was about to get a chance to see Gary in person and thank him for giving Clipper a way to keep Rachel alive.

*

Rachel sat in the kitchen looking out across the fields of home — perfectly familiar, but made new with a fresh fall of snow. She had coffee in her cupped hands. Her mother had made it at around six, before she went out to check on the horses. Rachel had slept in until after seven. The house had been warm and deserted, except for a sleeping dog toasting itself on the base of the cooking range. He looked up at her, whined politely, and then laid his head back down.

She tucked her feet in their thick socks beneath her and sat at the counter, half focusing on a distant pair of crows, arguing over something they’d found in the snow, while the other half of her mind was miles away.

She’d waited a fortnight before leaving the UK. There’d been questions to answer, even more than she’d expected. And it had been made a little trickier by her need to bend the truth in a couple of areas and to leave out anything that no one would believe anyway. Fortunately, it was fairly clear to the police that she was just a passenger who got caught up in something terrible. With the way things were, you didn’t accuse US citizens of anything unless the State Department said you could. And you didn’t inconvenience the employees of US banks, even once they’d resigned, unless you had no choice.

So Rachel turned Warren’s death into an accident. Or rather, she said that she couldn’t explain it and the police concluded for themselves that the trailing rope had snagged on something, all by itself. Any knots Matt had tied were gone. The fake cops, whoever they had been, must just have been careless. And the back of the train was sufficiently wrecked to make the exact sequence of events a matter fit only for theories and best guesses.

In Rachel’s version, she and Matt had watched as the fake cops and an unidentified gunman fought. Both of the fake policemen had been shot. Had she seen a knife? She wasn’t sure; she’d been hiding. And then the gunman had thrown himself from the train. So far so good. Then she and Matt had both been injured as the train slammed to a halt, which explained her bruises. With the train stationary, the least-injured fake cop had needed a hand retrieving the gunman’s body and Matt had agreed to help, but he was unsteady on his feet and had slipped, falling from the back of the train onto the rails. The fake cop got Matt back on board, and decided to forget about the body on the tracks. He wanted to save his companion, who was in a bad way, by getting the train moving again. Shortly afterwards, the rope had snagged, a terrible accident had occurred, and that was that.

One or two problems arose when the forensics report suggested that her sequence of events didn’t match the evidence, but no one knew what to make of that — and when Rachel could offer no explanation, there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. Two crooks, posing as policemen, had cornered a third man and driven him to kill himself. No one could implicate her in any of it and Matt was in no position to contribute anything to the enquiry. The police had even retrieved a single fat brick of US dollars, which seemed sufficient motive for the violent squabble. The gun, when it was eventually located, shed no light on anything. It had been wiped clean of fingerprints.

So Rachel had returned home, later than expected, but more glad than ever to be leaving London behind. There’d been just one last piece of business for her to take care of before she departed. She’d gone to visit Matt in hospital and told him everything she’d done, what she’d said and what her plans were. And then she’d flown home to find that her mother — who’d been following the British news — was even more grateful to have her daughter home safe than Rachel had thought possible.

In fact these last three weeks had been a wonderful dream she didn’t want to wake up from. Her mother and her hadn’t quarrelled. There