Sacrifice. Paul Finch

he came to comprised another huge workshop. Not all the windows up here were boarded, though their glass was so grimy that only a paltry winter light filtered through. Even so, it was enough to hint at an immense hangar-like space ranging far across the building, filled with stacked crates and workbenches, forested by steel pillars.

      Ernshaw hesitated, gripping the hilt of his baton. This time last year he’d been an innocent young student at the University of Hull, so he had no trouble admitting to himself that, while it was bad enough being made to work on Christmas Day – only the older, married guys tended to be spared that pain-in-the-arse duty – it was even worse having to spend it trawling through the guts of an eerie, frozen ruin like this.

      A loud crackle from his radio made him jump.

      The voice of Comms boomed out as it dispatched messages to patrols elsewhere on the subdivision. Irritated, he turned the volume down.

      Ernshaw advanced as his eyes adjusted to the half-light. Directly ahead, about forty yards away, a doorway opened into what looked like an antechamber. For some reason, the rear brick wall of that chamber was lit by a greenish glow.

      Green?

      A coloured candle, maybe? A paper lantern?

      Ernshaw halted as a figure flitted past the doorway on the other side.

      ‘Hey,’ he said under his breath. Then louder: ‘Hey!’

      He dashed forward, with baton drawn and angled across his shoulder.

      When he entered the chamber, nobody was there, but he saw that the odd-coloured light had been caused by a sheet of mouldy green canvas fastened over a window. A stairway – an indoor fire-escape, all rust and riveted steel – dropped down through a trapdoor; while a secondary stair rose up to the next level, though this was very narrow, scarcely broad enough for an average-sized man to climb it without turning sideways. He peered up, spying a ray of feeble daylight at the top. When he listened, he heard nothing, though it wasn’t difficult to imagine that someone was lurking up there, listening back.

      ‘Alan?’ someone asked.

      Half-shouting, Ernshaw spun around.

      Rodwell gazed at him from the trapdoor, in particular at his drawn baton.

      ‘Have you …?’ Ernshaw glanced back up the stair, listening intently. ‘Have you been up here once? I mean, have you been up already and gone back down for any reason?’ Rodwell shook his head as he rose fully into view. ‘Thought I saw someone, but …’ The more Ernshaw considered it, the less substantial that ‘figure’ seemed. A shadow maybe, cast by his torch? ‘Could’ve been mistaken, I suppose …’

      Rodwell also glanced up the next stair. Without speaking, he ascended it, just about able to slide his big body between its encroaching walls.

      Ernshaw followed, discomforted by the tightness of the passage. The floor at the top of this had been partitioned into small rooms and connecting corridors. Even fewer of the windows on this level were boarded, but there were less of them, so a sepulchral gloom pervaded.

      Before they commenced exploring, Rodwell lifted a dust-caked Venetian blind and peered down into the yard below. It had occurred to them both, somewhat belatedly, that if this was some daft but elaborate ruse to create a diversion by which to steal a police vehicle, they’d be left with an omelette-sized egg on their faces. However, the van sat unmolested; the snow around it unmarked. From this height, they could see further afield into adjacent streets, or what remained of them. Most of the rows of terraced housing on the south side of Kemp’s Mill had been demolished, but even with the recent snowfall, the parallel outlines of their old foundations were still visible.

      There was no sign of anyone around. The nearest habitations were two blocks of 1970s flats about three hundred yards away, beyond a mountain of snow-covered scrap; only one or two lights – the garish neon of Christmas decorations – twinkled from their windows.

      ‘2376 from Three?’ the voice of Comms crackled from Rodwell’s radio.

      ‘Go ahead,’ he said, dropping the blind back into place.

      ‘Anything from Franklyn Road yet?’

      ‘No offences revealed at this stage. Still searching, over.’

      ‘Message from Sergeant Roebuck, Keith. Don’t waste too much time there. If it’s just some kids messing around, leave it. There are other jobs piling up.’

      ‘Roger, received.’

      ‘That it, then?’ Ernshaw asked hopefully.

      ‘No,’ Rodwell replied.

      They ventured along a central passage, peeking around the first door they came to, seeing what had presumably once been an office. In the middle of it, weak daylight illuminated a single filing cabinet from which a ton of paperwork had overflowed. Ernshaw entered, scooping up some of the documents: work rosters yellowed by age; dog-eared time-and-motion sheets. He tossed them away, moving through the next doorway into another identical 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