Consciousness returned to Beth in a series of incremental stages. Her entire body ached, and when she teased her eyes open, there was nothing but blackness. A heavy weight pressed down on her body making it hard for her to move and tough to breathe. There was a muffled shout as someone called her name. She tried to shout in reply, but her mouth didn’t produce anything beyond a croak.

For a moment Beth struggled to identify where she was. Why she couldn’t move and why someone was shouting for her. She just wanted to wriggle herself comfortable, find somewhere she wasn’t crushed and didn’t have jagged things sticking into her.

Some of the weight shifted from her legs.

Again the voice shouted for her. ‘Beth? Are you okay? Please, Beth, answer me.’

The shouts were punctuated by crashing sounds as weights were lifted from her body and tossed away.

It sounded like O’Dowd’s voice. Why would she be trying to wake her?

‘Ma’am?’

‘Beth? Oh thank God you’re alive.’

Why wouldn’t she be alive?

It was when Beth drew a breath through her nose that her memory came back. The stench of death was a reminder like no other. She gagged and swallowed three times before she got control of herself.

Her breathing stabilised itself in the exact moment confusion became fear. She was trapped in a cellar with three dead bodies. O’Dowd was there and although she could feel an incremental lightening of the weight pinning her to the floor, it wasn’t happening anything like quick enough for Beth.

Around her was blackness, death and decay. She lay in filth and detritus among the droppings of mice, rats and other wild animals. Fear turned to panic. She thrashed, squirmed and wriggled to no avail. Thanks to O’Dowd’s efforts, her legs had some room to move but there was no space for her torso or arms to travel more than an inch before they met resistance.

A hand grabbed her ankle. Squeezed. Not hard, but there was enough pressure to offer comfort and support.

‘Keep still. I’ll get you out.’

‘Hurry. Please hurry.’

Another brief squeeze was followed by the sounds of more debris being lifted from her. Beth could feel a continual easing of the pressure on her body as O’Dowd doubled her exertions as she fought to free her. Unable to have any input with the rescue, Beth lay still and concentrated on taking steady breaths and keeping her eyes pressed shut.

Beth felt her legs come free, but she lay still in case she kicked her rescuer. There were grunts and curses flooding from O’Dowd until all of a sudden there was silence.

Some rubble was lifted from her head and she saw the flash of a torch beam against her eyelids. When it shifted she opened an eye and saw O’Dowd illuminating her own face.

The DI had blood running from a cut in her forehead and she was grubby, but there was relief in her eyes.

‘Beth, there’s a large beam that’s trapping you. It’s too big for me to lift by myself, which means I have two options.’ Even before she paused her sentence, Beth could see the hesitation on O’Dowd’s face. ‘I can go and get help. Or I can try to pull you out.’

‘Please, don’t leave me. I don’t want to be left alone, not in here.’

The words were spoken before Beth had given any thought to O’Dowd’s suggestions. There was no way she wanted to be alone down here. Not when she was surrounded by death.

Besides, how long would it take O’Dowd to persuade some of the men to come and rescue her? They may well refuse on the grounds of their own safety. It was a right they had. She and O’Dowd had taken a risk and it had backfired on them. They had to get themselves out of this. Beth wasn’t an arch feminist, but neither did she want to come across as the kind of helpless bimbo who was forever needing a man to rescue her.

‘Please, ma’am. Don’t leave me.’

‘Okay.’ O’Dowd lay down the torch so it was illuminating them. ‘I’m going to try and drag you out. Wriggle your body when you feel me pull. You ready?’

‘Yes.’

Beth held her body tense and got ready to follow O’Dowd’s instructions.

‘On three.’ She felt two hands wrap themselves around her right ankle. ‘One. Two. Three.’

On three, Beth drove her arms upwards to minimise her width and thrashed her body while trying not to wrench her foot from O’Dowd’s grip.

She felt herself slide about six inches before coming to a halt. As well as the distance travelled, she’d managed to roll herself from her left side onto her back. There were rocks and other things pressing into her back, but they were minor discomforts that were more than tolerable if it meant she’d soon be free.

‘Again.’ This time, O’Dowd tucked each of Beth’s ankles under her arms and gripped her calves.

Even with all the other aches and pains, she could feel the DI’s fingernails digging into her soft flesh.

‘Three.’

O’Dowd’s screamed grunt echoed round the cellar as she dragged Beth free.

As she was pulled along the floor, Beth could feel her jacket and shirt rucking up and scooping earth and other substances from the floor as her paper oversuit was now in tatters. It didn’t matter. Neither did the scrapes the rocks left on her back. O’Dowd stopped pulling and buckled over, hands on knees gasping for breath.

With only her head left beneath the beam, Beth eased first one arm to her side, then the other. She put both hands on the beam and pushed herself free.

When she clambered to her feet, O’Dowd enveloped her in a crushing hug. ‘Thank God you’re okay.’

Beth understood the older woman’s relief. They’d catch merry hell from the brass when word of this got out. O’Dowd as the senior officer would get the worst of it, but Beth knew that wasn’t the major reason for her relief. It was bad enough the DI had led her down here, but the knowledge she’d been the cause of the accident would have eaten at her had Beth suffered any significant injury. Yes, the DI could be a grumpy sod at times, but the more Beth was getting to know her boss, the more she was seeing that, as well as being an excellent detective, Zoe O’Dowd was a good woman with a decent heart.

When she was released, Beth leaned forward and untied her ponytail. Her fingers weren’t exactly clean, but after dusting them on her thighs, she used them as a comb to brush out all the rubbish that had lodged itself in her hair.

O’Dowd lifted her torch and pointed it towards the door. ‘C’mon, let’s get out of here.’

‘Wait. I’m not going through all that without getting a look at what we came for.’ Beth put her hand on the torch and pointed it around the cellar.

‘You stay right there, lady.’

Beth smiled in the darkness. O’Dowd’s authoritative tone was underpinned with a parental concern.

The torch swept the cellar and when it reached the far side, it illuminated a section of the partition that had remained upright after the collapse of the ceiling. Bound to the partition was a skeletal frame with the tiny folded yellow wings of a canary attached to its shoulder blades.

There wasn’t enough flesh on the bones to guess whether the victim was male or female. It was a moot point. All that mattered was that there was another victim. What flesh there was lay inside the skeleton’s ribcage and looked to have rotted to the point where not even carrion feeders would eat it.

Beth completed her sweep of the cellar, fearful there would be a fourth victim, but to her relief, found no more bodies.

‘Let’s go.’

Beth took a handful of O’Dowd’s jacket and trailed her, elephant-style, back towards the stairs.