Page 13 of 59 Minutes

CARRIE

The door closes behind her and Carrie presses her back to it for one second, two. Oh, thank goodness. This is the right place. And she is alone.

The air in this dimly lit corridor is as cold as it was when her agency filmed that deodorant ad.

The veteran stunt woman in a Die Hard vest, Daisy Dukes and heels performing action film feats, while the other woman, the twenty-one-year-old whose face they used for the close-ups, sat on a step rubbing her arms, sipping endless energy drinks and sending up clouds of blueberry vape.

After the panicked hum of hundreds of people, the silence in here is unnerving.

Why was this place unlocked? There’s no sign of anyone, but perhaps some staff are already down here, maybe sheltering in secret.

Is this a trap? Dangerous in some way? A dead-end that she’s misremembered?

But Carrie hasn’t got time to overthink it, she just has to move.

The windowless corridor is papered with posters and safety signs.

A clipboard hangs from a nail. Everything is dusty, tides of black dirt beached along the floor, the space lit half-heartedly by security lights.

As she rushes along, she automatically looks at her phone, expecting to see a message from Emma, thumbing her way to Favourites to call.

I’m on my way, give Clementine a kiss from me, I love you both, see you soon.

Kiss kiss. As if she was simply leaving work and heading home.

But the screen has been taken over by the parasitic message and nothing else is working.

She doesn’t remember it being so dark when she was here last time.

Maybe they turn up the lights for corporate customers.

Even as she thinks these pointless things, Carrie is running along the narrow space, past flapping pieces of paper that brush against her puffy coat.

Her trainers slap the floor so if there are any staff down here, they’ll certainly know she’s coming.

She reaches the staircase at the end of the corridor, sucks in a breath, then steps down.

All those desperate people back there, and she’s slipped away from them, burrowing her way secretly under the city.

The staircase twirls below her, corkscrewing under the earth, tiled in the old style of the tube.

The sound of her feet on the second, third, fourth step don’t so much echo as swirl, dancing up and down the dark space so it sounds like she is a small army.

This is a repurposed old lift shaft. She and her colleagues were told this as they stifled yawns, Carrie thinking at the time that she should write these facts down like she was on a school trip.

The stairs seem to stretch away as she runs down, tricking the eye like an Escher illustration. The wall tiles disappear, it’s just rough grey concrete now. This was never meant to be seen.

She’s glad to be travelling light, no dangling bag. Everything she needs is right here in her pockets. Well, nothing she truly needs but everything she has.

After stomping down as fast as she can, Carrie reaches the end of the stairs, knees wobbling uncertainly, suspicious of the flat ground. The echo of her steps continues for a moment.

A gust of chilled air hits her ankles, exposed and prickling above her trainers. She is in an alcove, the dark walls thick with foamy, fungal dirt. When she ventures outside of this corner, she is almost sick with relief. She is on a stub of platform, the very same one from the advert.

A mistake, a quirk of the train company changing design during the building of an extension, having to avoid some unknown pipe or other.

Occasionally it’s used for dragging broken carriages out of the way, but mostly it’s just forgotten.

More importantly, it leads onto the main track of either the Northern Line or the Bakerloo – she doesn’t remember which.

Maybe she should have written things down after all.

The whole crush of London is up there, over her head, but she really does have a chance of getting to her family. She can do this.