by Tony Black
‘Gilmour!’ I called louder now. I felt the veins on the sides of my head might pop as I struggled in the waning light. ‘Gilmour!’
As the hold fell into darkness I heard the sound of a latch being loosened, then a hinge creaking. The next noise I heard was a trapdoor closing, and then the sound of soil being heaped from a shovel stretched into near silence. Soon, the only sound I could make out was the hard pumping of my heart upon my ribcage.
Claustrophobia came to me as the strangest sensation. Suddenly and completely. I felt buried alive, starved of oxygen, suffocating. I knew I was letting my imagination run riot but I couldn’t do a thing about it. I was trapped and the outside world seemed as remote as another galaxy.
I tugged again and again at the shackles on my wrists. I tried to pull them from the wall but they were solid, secure. My wrists started to ache, and then the bare one bled. I struggled on, but it was futile.
The water dripping on the walls now felt uncomfortable on my back. I imagined black trails engulfing me, but it didn’t happen. An hour passed and nothing happened. I called out, roared. My throat grew sore, my voice hoarse. I developed a pattern: I called out, then waited for a reply. Not even an echo came. The only sound was the dripping of water in the low pools and puddles of the ground and the scurrying rats. They stayed away at first but soon they came to sniff around my boots.
I swore. I kicked out at them and they retreated but they always came back.
‘Away … go!’ No matter how hard I shouted the rats returned, likely drawn by the blood from my wrist.
When all that came was the rats, and no tide waters, I started to think Gilmour had fooled me, that the high-tide was all a scare and that I would be slowly devoured by more and more rats and then as quickly as they appeared they were gone.
‘What do they know that I don’t?’ I said to the walls of the hold.
In a few moments, I got my answer.
As if a tap had been turned, water flowed into the hold. By the bucketful.
Oh, Jesus Christ.
The soles of my feet were quickly covered.
‘No. Please … Tell me this isn’t happening.’ Nothing seemed real now. Holy mother of God.
Someone had once called me on my religious beliefs. My old friend Tommy had been devout as it suited him and told me that when the odds were against you, when all else seemed lost, everyone prayed. I’d doubted him, but now I experienced the truth of those words.
‘Oh God above …’
As the water lapped at my heels, I prayed. As it reached my knees, swallowed my thighs and encircled my waist in its freezing-cold grasp, I prayed. When the water passed my stomach I called out to the patron of lost causes, Saint Jude, and begged for his help. But no-one heard my pleas. No-one answered my prayers. No-one came.
As the water reached my chest, started to exert an intense pressure on my ribs, I started to lose the will to fight.
I felt beyond cold. Beyond freezing. Every bone, every fibre of my being cried out in agony. I grew drowsy, fell in and out of brief spells of catalepsy. My ties to the world seemed to be shifting. I lost all sense of self; imagined I was floating out to sea, towards the sun.
The water was calm there, as warm as a bath. Now, even as I shivered, I felt a warm glow. I seemed to leave my mortal body, and float further out to sea. I was heading towards the sunset.
Friends were calling me, old friends.
Voices I knew, voices I loved.
‘Doug …’
I couldn’t answer. I was paralysed in a dreamworld.
‘Doug …’
They kept calling.
‘Doug, are you there?’
Chapter 34 — EPILOGUE
They re-named me Lazarus in the hospital ward. The doctors said they had never seen anyone with lower vital signs when they brought me in. It was a miracle I was alive, apparently. I thought they were laying on the religious significance a bit thick. I’d told no-one about the prayers, I was just glad to be alive.
I had both my arms in bandages now. I had a wrapper like Rab C’s on my head, and a couple of drips that went everywhere with me; even the bathroom. I felt weak, drained, but like I said, glad to be feeling anything at all.
The nursing staff were playing up to me; I’d become a bit of a local celebrity since The Post printed my story. I liked to read the opener at least a dozen times a day:
AN AYRSHIRE man is recovering in hospital after a dramatic rescue from a long-forgotten smugglers’ hold that also unlocked a murder investigation and prompted a probe into Council, Port and Police authorities.
When I say I read the opener, the rest of the article usually followed. I liked to be reminded that Gilmour was in custody and facing charges for the murder of Kirsty Donald, and my own attempted murder. Likewise, it was good to see the pictures of Councillor Crawford with his coat pulled over his face as he was led away for questioning. The great and good of the Auld Toun had a full-scale gutting coming their way, and I couldn’t wait to raise a glass to that.
I folded the newspaper down its centre, turned the pages over once again — the creases were well-established now — and slotted in snugly to the bedside cabinet beside my bottle of Lucozade and the old Alistair MacLean novel I’d liberated from the common area. As I eased my broken body back towards the soft white pillows, and tight, crisp linen that kept me in bed I felt my heart kick with the sight of a familiar face.
Lyn stood at the end of my bed. As I stared at her my thoughts alighted on what Crawford had called her. He’d said she was a slut, a slag. I didn’t want to ever think of Lyn that way, but I knew Crawford had sown the seed of doubt in me and I still hated him for that. Almost as much as I hated Gilmour for completing her character assassination in the cavern.
She spoke, softly: ‘Hello, Doug …’ As I drew my focus away I realised there was someone with her. A tall, rangy youth I hadn’t recognised. ‘This is Glenn.’
The boy took his mother’s introduction as a cue to become animated. He stepped forward and held out a hand. ‘I wanted to say, y’know, thanks.’
I looked at the boy. His hair sat in tufts on his head. His eyes were wide and welcoming. He wore a Superdry T-shirt under a checked shirt. I didn’t know what I had expected but Glenn looked just like every other young lad I passed on the street; it made me smile, even though I knew he was Jonny Gilmour’s son.
‘I’d shake your hand, but …’ I lifted my bandaged and stookied arms in a pathetic pantomime gesture.
‘No worries.’ He looked at his mother and nodded, then sidled towards the open door as if he’d practiced the exit several times over. His appearance was for her sake; at least he thought enough of his mother to do that. Perhaps he was more her son than Gilmour’s after all but it didn’t matter. Lyn had a son with Gilmour that she’d kept quiet about and that’s what troubled me. I knew I could never look at her in the same way — or Glenn either — without judging. Maybe it was all in the past, a minor transgression, but I knew I’d jump on it the very second that our first flush of romance left us. Gilmour would forever inhabit our space — the cause of every drop of spilled milk we cried over.
I spoke first, when we were alone. ‘Glenn looks none the worse for wear.’
Lyn gripped her tongue in her teeth, nodded.
‘I’m glad he’s well, Lyn.’
‘Me too.’ Her voice cracked. I knew she was taking in the state of me. She’d been hurt too, but in other ways. None of us had got out of this without adding more scars to ourselves.
‘Oh, it’s worse than it looks,’ I said.
‘I’m sure it’s not.’ I thought I saw her wipe a tear from her eye but she masked the movement with a deep breath and a change of subject. She was being brave; I dreaded to think of what she had put herself through before setting foot in the hospital. ‘I need to thank you as well.’
I shrugged, tried to play things down. I hadn’t got involved to collect any laurels and who’s to say my motives weren’t every bit as un
derhand as hers. ‘We landed the right result, that’s what matters. I’m happy you and Glenn are back together and there’s no real damage done.’
Lyn let the strap of her bag fall from her shoulder and lowered herself onto the bed. The already tight blankets tightened further around my bruised legs. ‘I can’t pretend I feel right about this, Doug … after all that’s happened.’
I didn’t understand. She seemed to be going off at a tangent. Her face changed shape as I eyed her. I knew what I wanted to do, to hold her, but my injuries precluded that. The little voice in my head that controlled my emotions returned, for the first time in a long time, and told me how much it approved of my air of distance.
‘I don’t follow,’ I said.
She looked at her hands, removed a small peach-coloured tissue from her sleeve and dabbed at her moist eyes. ‘I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted this, any of it …’
I still didn’t know what she meant, exactly. She could have been referring to any number of preoccupations I held in my mind lately. I knew now most of my hopes had been misplaced; there was no future for us. I saw that there never had been; I’d deluded myself.
I saw it was difficult for Lyn to express what she wanted to say and at the same time I wanted to roar at her, to call her on Gilmour, but none of it mattered now. She was hurting, and she had taken more than her fair share of that already. ‘It doesn’t matter now, Lyn,’ I said.
She turned, stared at me. Her eyes were reddened, tear-lined. ‘You’re a good man, Doug. But it wouldn’t work, not now.’
All my aches and pains relocated to one point, somewhere just shy of the centre of my chest. I still felt something for Lyn, but I knew she was right. She deserved better than the hurt I would undoubtedly bring her now. I smiled and played dumb. ‘What wouldn’t work?’
I was giving her a ‘get out of jail free’ card and she knew it, seemed grateful. The tissue went back in her sleeve. ‘I’m leaving town.’
I couldn’t maintain the same smile, but tried to ease her suffering. ‘You need to do what’s best for you and Glenn … you’ve both been through a hellish ordeal.’
Her lips trembled again; she sucked them in and rose. Her cheeks were flushed, her movements jerky, as she walked towards me. She didn’t seem to know what to say, or do, next. She touched my hand with two cold fingers which dwelled for a second or two just south of my knuckles and then were jerked away.
I didn’t watch Lyn walk out of my life; I stared out of the window instead.
###
About the author
Tony Black is Irvine Welsh’s favourite British crime writer. The author of six critically acclaimed crime novels, his works include the Gus Dury PI series: Paying For It, Gutted, Loss and Long Time Dead, the final instalment of which will be filmed for the screen by Richard Jobson in 2012. His police inspector series, featuring DI Rob Brennan, includes the titles Truth Lies Bleeding and Murder Mile; both published by Random House UK. A heist novella, R.I.P Robbie Silva, is also forthcoming from Blasted Heath.
Before turning to the novel, Tony was an award-winning national newspaper journalist covering subjects as diverse as crime and nightclub reviews. He still writes for the press from time to time but most of his non-fiction now turns up on his blog, Pulp Pusher, and his website.
For news, reviews, interviews and lots more about Tony Black and our other great authors, visit Blasted Heath.
Also by Blasted Heath
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Wolf Tickets by Ray Banks
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Phase Four by Gary Carson
The Vanity Game by H.J. Hampson
The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay
The Unburied Dead by Douglas Lindsay
The Man in the Seventh Row by Brian Pendreigh
The Killing of Emma Gross by Damien Seaman
All The Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith
The Crime Interviews, Vol I and II by Len Wanner
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