by Sam Hepburn
‘We don’t know, but his vital signs are much stronger.’ Her voice was crisp and professional, as if she wanted to prove she would do her best for him, even if he was a killer. She removed the empty bag from his drip, snapped open a fresh one and attached it to the tubes.
The next few hours passed in a hushed blur punctuated by the murmur of my mother’s voice, the clicks and beeps of the equipment, the swish of the door as nurses came and went, and the muted voices of the policemen in the corridor. With every minute I felt more useless and frustrated. By late afternoon I couldn’t stand it any longer. There was nothing I could do here. I couldn’t sing to Behrouz or change his drip or check his monitors. I could hardly even bear to look at his burnt, restless body. But I could prove he was innocent. I backed towards the door, turned on my heel in my borrowed trainers and ran out of there.
If I were Behrouz, I would have had a plan all worked out in my head. I wasn’t Behrouz and all I had was a burning urge to find out why everything that had happened led back to Tewfiq Hamidi.
It was very late by the time I found my way to Hamidi’s house and when I got there it was in darkness. Dilapidated and menacing in the pale moonlight, dark stems of creeping vine stretching like tapering fingers across its frontage. I took out my phone to check it was switched to silent. There was no need. The battery had died. Fear trickled cold through my veins as I slipped it into my backpack. Breathing hard, I inched along the side wall and peered into the garden. Nothing moved. With a silent prayer I launched myself across the brambles, dropping to a crouch when I saw a sliver of light filtering through the curtains of the back room. I stayed low, head down, pushing my cuff to my mouth until I found enough courage to creep towards the window. I put my eye to the tear in the curtains and peered through the web of threads. A bare bulb threw a dim light across a heap of cables and silver boxes lying on the floor. I was straining so hard to see what was in them that it took me a moment to realize there was a figure curled on the couch. It was the boy, fast asleep, with his knees pulled up to his chest. The first thing I felt was envy. I hadn’t slept properly for so long it hurt to see him curled up like that, lost to my pain. Then the fury kicked in, rolling over me so I wanted to bang on the glass and scream at him. As I dug my nails into my palms the door of the room swung open. A fat man in a dirty white vest and track pants strolled in. Bleary-eyed and scratching himself as if he’d just woken up, he squatted down and began to pack away the cables. When he’d finished, he ambled over to the couch and bent over the boy. Gripping the window ledge, I stepped on to a broken brick and stretched up, angling my head to see what he was doing. He slapped the boy’s face, shook him roughly by the shoulders and let him fall. The boy’s head bounced against the arm of the couch and lolled sideways. Slits of white appeared between his twitching eyelids and a trickle of spit dropped from his gaping mouth.
Shock loosened my grip on the damp windowsill. I toppled off the brick, my foot skidding on the gritty surface of the terrace. Numb with terror, I dropped to my haunches, crawled along the cracked concrete and flattened myself against the back of the garage. The curtains flew apart, throwing light into the darkness. Another light came on in the kitchen. Stiff bolts creaked. I scuttled around the side of the garage, freezing as tyres crunched the drive, headlights swept the trees and the bonnet of a pale-coloured car slid to a stop at the end of the wall. The headlights snapped off. Someone walked to the front door. The doorbell rang, loud, impatient bursts. I raised myself up, poised to run for the gate as soon as the driver had gone inside, dropping down again when the door opened and a voice yelled, ‘There’s someone out there! Check the front.’
Seconds later the back door crashed open behind me. I heard someone run out, trip and swear loudly. I cringed into the brickwork as the car’s headlights came back on ahead of me. I couldn’t go forward to the drive. I couldn’t go back to the garden. I took the only option left and crawled towards the car. My stomach caved in as I recognized the pale-blue hatchback. I lay in the strip of shadow between the tyres and the garage door, craning through the knotted stems of the vine to see the driver run to the gateway and stand on the pavement, flashing a torch up and down the darkened street. While his back was turned, I pulled open the passenger door and slipped inside. The back seat had been folded down to make a large flat surface, half of it heaped with boxes and cans of beer and the other half covered in plastic sheeting that crackled as I scrambled under the seat and squeezed into the cramped footwell. I pushed my head into my knees, listening to the men stomp around outside shouting to each other.
More cars were arriving. More voices. I lifted my head, tipping the seat up just enough to see into the wing mirror. After a few minutes I saw the freckled man coming out of the house bathed in the light from the hall, carrying the boy on his shoulder like a carcass of meat. My heart seemed to stop. Was he dead? I ducked down. The boot creaked open and the folded seat thumped hard against my neck as he threw the boy inside. A phone rang. The man cursed and got in the driver’s side to answer it.
‘Yeah. No . . . worse than that. He was in the bloody loading bay. Saw everything . . . and he found Sahar’s phone in the flat.’ I knew that voice. The throatiness of it, the way he stretched some sounds and blunted others. ‘Yeah, he and the sister went through the photos . . .’ He was talking about me. I bit down on my lip to stop myself passing out. ‘. . . I don’t know . . . fourteen, fifteen maybe . . . I know . . . not yet, but don’t worry, we’re on it. She won’t get far . . .’ I trembled in the darkness, tasting blood on my tongue. ‘Yeah, he’s in the boot . . . Nah, leave it to me, I’ve got it sorted. We’re going have a party . . . too many drinks, too many drugs and, apart from a line in the local paper and some do-gooder moaning about teenagers today, no one’s going to bat an eyelid.’ He laughed. ‘Yeah . . . just another stupid kid who made a mistake and ended up dead.’
A deadly coldness poured through my aching body. I hadn’t understood everything he’d said, but enough to know they were going to kill the boy, then come after me. Terror spewed a memory from the back of my brain. The police station. That’s where I’d heard the freckled man’s voice. He was the policeman who’d brought me tea and sandwiches. He’d looked different in uniform but it was definitely him. Thoughts splintered into tiny pieces and reformed into ugly, unimaginable shapes. A policeman? Working with Hamidi? Drugging the boy?
I knew now why Behrouz had got himself a gun instead of trusting the police.
‘No, I’m keeping it local,’ he was saying. ‘That way I’m on it as soon as they find the body. Yeah, I’ll get a couple of the lads from the block to swear blind they saw him getting off his head. Nah . . . too risky. I’m going to use the three brothers . . . I know, the boss was all for it . . . All right, mate. Call you later.’
Who was his boss? Who were these brothers who killed people? What did it mean to bat an eyelid?
I willed him to go back to the house and give me a chance to run. When he started the engine, I struggled to hold on to my sanity. This man was going to find me and kill me before I could discover what any of this had to do with Behrouz. I heard the passenger door open. The car bounced as someone heavy got in. Another man said, ‘What shall I do with his phone?’
‘Text his mother. Tell her he’s staying over at a mate’s.’
‘What mate?’
‘I dunno, do I? Make up a name, then give it to me.’
I caught the smell of cigarettes, heard the men murmuring, then a click and a blast of music that shook the seat I was squashed against and pulsed through my cramped body. The car swung out of the drive, rattling the beer cans. The boy groaned. He wasn’t dead. Not yet. And I couldn’t let him die. Not before he’d told me everything he knew. The car stopped and started in the traffic, moving slowly for ten, fifteen minutes, then it got up speed, jolting my crushed bones for what seemed like a thousand dark, stifling, unbearable hours, made worse by the terror of what would happen when we stopped. I could barely breathe as the c
ar turned off the smooth road and slowed down, bumping on to rough ground as it came to a halt. The music stopped. The men jumped out. The back door opened. I balled myself tighter and felt the seat lift a little from my back as they dragged the boy out.
The freckled man said, ‘It’s all right. I’ve got him. You grab the beers. There’s some vodka in the boxes. Couple of bottles should do it.’
The boxes moved. Glass clinked. I listened to their footsteps fade and waited ten more excruciating minutes before I pushed back the folded seat and wriggled up to peer through the window. Clouds covered the moon but the night wasn’t pitch black like the night in Kabul and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or disturbed to see I was on a stretch of waste ground by the canal and that Meadowview was one of three light-sprinkled slabs in the distance. I scrambled into the front of the car, throwing aside cigarette cartons and sweet wrappers, searching for anything that might be useful. I got out on wobbly legs, struggling to stand, and gazed down the towpath. The boy was somewhere out there in the darkness with the freckled man, the passenger from the car and the three brothers. Five killers. All I had to save him with was a cigarette lighter I’d found shoved down the back of the driver’s seat.
DAN
I knew that noise. It was the click and fizz of a beer can spurting open. There it was again. Weird. Voices too, and footsteps, the hiss of an aerosol, the smell of paint and . . . what was that? Crisps. Yeah, that was it. Salt and vinegar, and something else. Something foul and rotting, like ditchwater. I was on my side, in darkness, stiff and heavy. I couldn’t move. Not my hands or my feet or my head or my eyelids. Had I been run over? Or beaten up? Why was I so cold and numb? Why was the world rocking and creaking? The emptiness in my head was terrifying. Black and sticky, smothering any memories of how I’d got there. I concentrated on my eyes, straining to force them open. The left one felt like it had been glued shut. The right one drooped and dragged, then fluttered a little, letting in a dim slit of light. Figures flitted past, chucking litter around, smashing bottles, opening beer cans, spraying a fat blue tag on the wall, trashing a low-ceilinged dimly lit room while my numb, useless legs were slipping sideways, dragging my top half with them. My mind churned, searching for a shred of reality that would make sense of any of it. ‘Help me!’ The howl stayed inside my skull, my tongue and lips too bloated to move. Suddenly I was crashing to the floor. My arms couldn’t move, couldn’t reach out to stop my head hitting something sharp or protect me from the weight smashing across my legs and clamping my foot in iron jaws. Footsteps. Someone kicking my ribs. A voice swearing in my ear. A sharp prick in my arm. A moment of helpless fear. Then the blanket of sticky blackness, wiping it all away.
ALIYA
I hobbled along a ditch at the edge of the towpath, frantically rubbing my legs to get the blood flowing. Gritting my teeth against the pain, I made for a shed on the far side of the allotments that was bleeding light through the cracks around its door. In my head I pictured the freckled man killing the boy in that cramped space and burying his body in one of the vegetable patches, where nobody would ever question a heap of newly turned earth. I tripped and stumbled among piles of rotting plants, easing on to my belly as I neared the shed. There were voices coming from inside and movements causing the light to flicker. Shielded by a clump of bushes, I wriggled closer, searching for a weapon. I grasped a piece of wood. I was sweating but my skin was cold and my mouth was as dry as ashes. A scream pierced the silence. Panic squeezed my heart. The door of the shed flew open. I rose up, dropping back when a girl in shorts and a white skimpy top burst into the night, her long hair streaming out behind her. A boy ran out after her, carrying a torch. Then he kissed her. She giggled and kissed him back and they ran off into the darkness, hand in hand.
I dropped the wood, it was useless – soft and rotten – and hurried back towards the canal, angry that I had lost so much time. I moved quickly, keeping behind the hedges and fences that ran between the allotments and the canal.
Voices drifted along the water. I dropped behind a rusty water-butt and waited to see who would come. Two figures appeared on the towpath. It was them, the freckled man and his passenger, walking fast. Without the boy. Had they left him for the three brothers to deal with? I watched them hurry to their car and had to stop myself gasping when the freckled man stopped for a moment with his hand on the open door and looked back, sweeping the gloom with his eyes. And then, as if he was pleased with his night’s work, he got in and drove away. I let the red tail-lights disappear before I dared to draw a breath.
The boats on this stretch of the canal were little more than wrecks, abandoned, empty and creaking softly in the wind. I moved carefully, terrified that the men would come back or the three brothers would leap from the shadows and grab me, but I felt a little better when the gravel gave way to soft mud that muffled the sound of my footsteps. I crouched down and sparked the lighter with shaking fingers, knowing in my heart that every second, every fragment of a second, counted now. The frail light caught two sets of shoe marks. Large footprints twice the size of mine, pointing both ways. As I moved the lighter the ripples on the water caught the reflection of the tiny flame. I stared at the shifting surface and imagined the boy at the bottom of the canal, weighted down in slime. I sprang back from the edge, shaking the image from my mind. I told myself they wouldn’t carry him all this way just to throw him in. Surely they’d have done it nearer to where they’d parked their car. The canal was just as deep back there. Just as deserted.
I walked on, checking the footprints for perhaps a hundred metres, and then I saw it: a swirl of wet earth, a muddle of footsteps and drag marks leading to the edge of the towpath and stopping beside the wreck of a wide, windowless cargo barge. It was as long as a bus with a deck at each end. I held the lighter high, picking out the clutter on the roof – buckets of coal, coils of cable, a small upturned boat made of some kind of plastic, and on the far deck a rusty little crane, leaning out over the water like a beaky bird. I lowered the lighter. The guttering flame caught letters painted on the side, half hidden behind drapes of rotten rope. The Three Brothers. I nearly cried out with relief. They weren’t men. The Three Brothers was a barge.
I pulled on the rope and jumped, landing on the deck with a thud that rocked the huge hull and sent a clutch of bottles rolling across the metal floor, glugging out their contents. The smell was acrid. Like medicine. I picked up one of the bottles and read the label. VODKA. I tried the door handle. It was jammed. I pulled again, heaving with all my strength until it swung open. I stumbled down the wooden steps, nearly falling when the end of the handrail swung loose from the wall.
‘Dan?’
There was no answer. My skin felt too flimsy to hold the swell of fear but I edged backwards and forced myself to pull the door shut before I flicked on the lighter. All I could see was a lake of oily water, littered with beer cans and broken bottles, stretching out to another set of steps and a door at the far end. Flashing the lighter across the brightly coloured tags on the walls, I stepped down into the water, gasping as the icy wet lapped over my knees and soaked through my jeans.
‘Dan,’ I whispered again. The dying flame touched a shudder of water bubbling through a hole in the side of the boat and causing the debris to bob and dance. All of it, except for one pale mound in the middle, which broke the surface like a small island. My world slowed. As if in a dark dream, I waded forward. Something sharp smashed my shin, ripping my jeans and flesh. I toppled sideways, struggling to keep the lighter clear of the water. I moved on, shuffling between the lumps of twisted metal lurking beneath the surface, until I was close enough to sweep the light across the mound. It was a dome of flesh; the boy’s cheek and the bump of his nose, his head twisted sideways, his mouth a grey slit beneath the surface. I flung myself towards him, grasped the floating tangle of his hair and lifted his head.
‘Get up!’ My voice broke apart. ‘Quickly! Get up!’
His eyes were closed. A trickle of water d
ribbled from his lips. I yanked his head higher. A choking retch shook his body. His eyes opened.
‘Dan!’
He stared past me, his eyes blank. Even as I looked the water was rising. The lighter flame dwindled and went out with a hiss. The darkness was shocking. Total. As if I’d been blinded. I stuck the lighter in my pocket, pushed my hands under his armpits and tried to drag him back towards the door. His top half swayed, his arms flopped loosely, then his body jerked to a stop, held fast by something under the water. I tore off my soaking hoodie, bundled it into a pillow and pushed it under his neck, raising his mouth a couple of inches above the water before I plunged my hand back down and groped along his legs. He seemed to be lying sideways across a pile of concrete blocks, with one foot trapped in the coils of a heavy iron chain. I felt around it. The chain was too heavy to lift, each link the size of my fist and tangled up in a heavy hunk of metal, maybe part of an engine. I couldn’t lift it. Not on my own. But there was no time to run for help. It was just me and the boy, and with every second the water was getting higher. Make a plan, Aliya! Think! What would Behrouz do now? A lever. He’d lever the chain up.
I staggered back, thumbing the wheel of the lighter again and again until it sparked a tiny spark that burnt my thumb but gave me my bearings. I launched myself towards the door I’d come in through, bashing my shins again as I found the steps and fumbled for the broken handrail. I twisted it free from the rotten panelling and turned back, guided by the fading image of the interior etched in my head.
‘It’s OK, Dan. It’s OK,’ I whispered.
I dropped to my knees, crawling and splashing in the dark and wet until I found the chain. I slid the tip of the handrail between the coils, working it as deeply as I could, then I pressed down with all my strength. The links creaked. I tore at the boy’s leg. I couldn’t free his foot. I tried again, jamming the rail between the coils but pressing on the end of it with my knee this time, releasing both hands to pull at his leg. The chain lifted very slightly but I wasn’t strong enough to yank his foot out. I could feel the rail bending, about to snap.
