“Jamie Macallan.” He didn’t raise his voice, or even turn his head towards the phone.
“Is your cousin Benedict there with you?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then.” The voice was male, smooth, assured. Unfamiliar, in tone as much as personality; people didn’t generally sound so sure of themselves, speaking to Macallans. Even from the other end of a telephone line. “You know that we have your women; you will be pleased to know that they are still ... together.”
Something about that little pause made me very unhappy indeed. He didn’t, I thought, mean that they were locked up together. He meant that neither one of them had been separated in the way that young Charlie had.
Yet, was what he really meant.
“We think,” he said, “that it was you two who set that fire in the police station. You know, of course, that it was a waste of time. It is however proving very inconvenient for us, and we’d appreciate the chance to discuss it with you. In person.”
You wouldn’t want us to separate your women. He was too cool to say that explicitly, but he didn’t need to. He wanted us, he could have us.
“Let the girls go,” Jamie said. “Straight swap. Okay?”
The man just laughed. “You misunderstand me. This is not a marketplace. I do not intend to bargain. Break a finger.”
For a moment, we simply didn’t understand. Then we heard a high breathy gasp, a sudden scream, a sob cut off abruptly; then we understood, all too well.
“Laura?” That was Jamie, his voice jerking as every muscle in his body had jerked. Me, I couldn’t have spoken. Just as I couldn’t have told whether it was Laura or Janice had screamed, nor was I sure yet. Nor was he, I thought, in all honesty.
Nor did the man tell us, nor give us the chance to talk to her, to learn.
“Come down to the quayside,” he said, “to the pathway under the old bridge. Come now.”
And then the phone’s speaker clicked and went silent, as he hung up.
o0o
Jamie did pick up the phone after a while, his big Macallan hands like trembling, misshapen claws, awkward on the buttons. I thought he was calling Uncle James, but no: he only hit four numbers. He listened for a moment, his face twisted, he put the receiver down again.
“What?”
“Didn’t say where he was calling from. Doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”
No need to ask where we were going. I picked up my jacket as he collected his, and we were halfway down the stairs before I said, “Don’t you want to call your dad, tell him what’s happening?”
“No. He’d only tell us not to go.”
True enough, he would. I might have told him anyway, but it was Jamie’s call and he was likely right. Safer, perhaps, fractionally safer if Uncle James didn’t know. He might do something stupid, that would endanger the girls more. If that were possible.
o0o
Down the hill one more time we went, back down to where we’d come from: past the station and down the curving run of steps that was the shortest way to the river, chasing our own long shadows while the sun played on our shoulders, prelude to a farewell. That didn’t matter, I reminded myself. Once the sun had gone, I’d still have Jamie. Night-time was his time, moonlight and starshine. And that didn’t matter either, I reminded myself more hastily on the back of that thought; we were both of us helpless here, regardless of the light. We’d tried to make ourselves the protagonists, but we were only pawns after all and we’d been pinned so easily, we couldn’t move at all, we couldn’t risk it...
So we came down to the quayside, not speaking, not making plans. We were only here for the one thing, to give ourselves over into deadly hands; and that didn’t need planning, and what else was there to say? I had only one truth in my head, I love Laura, and I didn’t think I had much interest in the future so I only kept one wish for that, I hope the girls will be okay in the end, Laura and Janice and all of them, though even so much seemed greedy and unlikely of fulfilment. And Jamie knew the first full well and must have been sharing the second; so no point at all to talking, better to save all our breath for walking, as fast as we could manage. Come now, the man had said, and he had not sounded flexible or patient.
Turn to the right, river on our left; above our heads the high bridges, road and rail, a long drop to the water. Ahead was the old bridge: not all so old in truth, its span was as Victorian as the others, an arch of steel, though being so much lower it was designed to swivel on its central pier to allow ships to pass through to the upper reaches of the river. The mechanism was broken now, or else simply redundant. I’d never seen it working.
The abutments on either bank, though, they were old stone, the bones of an earlier bridge lost in a great flood. The pathway ahead of us was cut straight through the stonework in a narrow tunnel, dark and dank; and yes, if you wanted to meet Macallans in safety, this was as good as a cellar or a cinema or any place shielded from natural light. Even the westering sun was blocked now by buildings or the high bank, throwing only shadows into the tunnel’s further mouth so that it showed grey and dim, no spark of light or promise.
I could see no one waiting for us on this side, nor make out any figures within.
“Straight in, then?” Jamie said; and,
“Yes,” I said. What else? We were doing what we’d been told to do, what we had to do. Fear for the girls had brought us this far; fear for ourselves couldn’t stop us now. Though we were afraid, and rightly. I couldn’t speak for Jamie, he had greater terrors to drive him, but I carried Charlie’s head on my back as surely as Jon had, and its weight was as great or greater.
It wasn’t even a trap or an ambush, we knew too well what we were doing here. We walked into that tunnel’s darkness as hostages already. I wanted to hold his hand, for whatever cousinly comfort I could draw from him, but he went ahead of me and all I could do was follow.
It was cold in there, cold in high summer, as cold as any work of man that never let the sun in. Damp also, the walls running with water that pooled blackly beneath our feet. So used to the tingle that daylight gave it, my skin prickled now with shivers that were something utterly else, wrought of chill and a building panic I had to fight hard to contain.
We went in ten or fifteen paces, halfway through to the pale arch of light that marked the end. Then Jamie stopped, and I stopped behind him. No point in going further. This was where we’d been told to come, and here we were.
We could I suppose have stood there looking at each other, at the faintly darker shadows that we made in that darkness. Our eyes would work eventually against the dimness, seize every stray particle of reflected light, till at last perhaps we would see each other’s faces; but each would only be a reflection of the other, a thumb-smudge of fear and nothing more. I didn’t want to see myself, or any semblance of me.
So we looked at each other no more than we looked back; only forward, trying to see more than a literal light at the end of the tunnel.
For five minutes, maybe ten, we were still and silent and scared, huddled into our jackets, into ourselves. Then abruptly there was more to see, there was a silhouette, a figure, a man walking slowly towards us. Light flared from his hand, dazed us, left us blinking at a burning after-image as it laid a bright path for his feet to walk upon; but that was nothing, only a torch, no use at all.
Noises behind us, footsteps, our shadows thrown distorted and dancing on the walls that closed us in so tightly. A glance over our shoulders showed us two men there with a torch each. They weren’t coming any closer, only blocking the entrance; and besides, two of them and only one of him. No question which counted for more. We turned back to face the singleton, the cool one, the one still coming.
Torchlight from him, directed generously downwards, not to blind us; torchlight from them, spilling past us. It wasn’t easy to fix anything for certain, the way the beams jerked and the shadows shifted, but at least we could see, of a sort.
We saw a man of middle height and middle years
, smartly dressed, dark suit and tie. His hair was combed, his expression almost benign. I didn’t know him, except that I would have laid money that he’d been the voice on the phone and was also very much the man in charge, here and elsewhere. Jamie, I knew, wanted to kill him and couldn’t; I wanted the killing to stop, but if you’d pressed me I thought I might have made an exception in his case.
When he was two, three metres away he stopped, gazed at us, smiled slightly unless that was the way his mouth fell naturally; then he lifted the hand that didn’t hold the torch. It held something else, a dark plastic tube that fitted comfortably into his palm. Looked something like an asthma inhaler, only it seemed to me he was holding it upside down, nozzle at the top.
“Carpe diem,” he said, and yes, he was definitely smiling, he was enjoying this.
“What?” I didn’t understand, didn’t particularly want to; the question was automatic, the voice it found was hoarse and strained.
“CS the day,” he said, and did.
o0o
He pressed or squeezed the top of his little tube; and not a fine spray to keep asthmatics breathing, no, what came was a lance in the light, a jet of liquid speared at our eyes, Jamie’s and then mine. I had time to close them but no more, my shielding hands were far too late.
First a prickling on my eyelids, on all the skin of my face and then my palms, where the liquid ran; then an acid burning, I thought my skin was being etched to rags and slime. And then pain such as I had never felt before, had only ever seen in other cousins’ dreadful deaths under my Uncle Allan’s culling ministrations. I heard Jamie moan and sob beside me, his shoulder pressed against mine and I shared his agony as he shared mine. We both of us dropped down onto the wet floor of the tunnel, crouching and rolling, gasping, not breath enough to scream with and every breath making it infinitely worse as the stuff was sucked inside to set our throats and lungs aflame. Dimly, distantly I heard the man laugh. Heard him say, “They’ll do now, lads. Come on, nothing to be afraid of here.”
Rough hands on us, grabbing our own hands that were already pulling away from our faces, too scared to rub for fear they’d rub the pain deeper, or else rub flesh from bone. Pulling them behind our backs with no resistance from us, shackling them with handcuffs; and then those hands in our armpits pulling us up again, forcing us to stand against the wall. Hoods of cloth being dropped over our heads, and even the light weight of them making the burning worse wherever they touched. Then we were turned and pushed into walking, hands gripping our arms to guide us; and we were taken out of the tunnel and eventually into sunlight, I felt it warm on my agonised fingers and was hurting too badly to use it even if I’d dared.
At last my shins banged against something hard and sharp, a voice close by my ear said, “Up,” and I fumbled my foot onto a step. My other found a floor above it, my head cracked against a low roof, the man who held me laughed and shoved me into shadow, out of the sun. I banged into a wall of metal and slid down it, thought vaguely that I was in a van; felt Jamie come in behind me, felt him trip over my feet and fall; heard the doors slammed and locked behind us, and then thought only of the cruel, crippling pain that was eating at my weeping eyes, thought I was blinded, thought I’d never see Laura or Janice or anyone, anything ever again.
It was a long time even before I thought or remembered that it really didn’t matter, that pain from these people’s hands was only a prelude to death, that I couldn’t seriously expect to survive this.
o0o
Slowly, slowly the worst of the pain ebbed away as we drove quickly, quickly through the streets. It wasn’t like a tide retreating, so much as lava cooling: less fierce, but still very much there. Bubbled and blackened my skin must be after that chemical washing, hideously scarred. For what short time I got to go on wearing it...
At first I was only aware of our speed in the way it threw me around the van, rocked me and rolled me, banged my face against the walls and made me use my hands as best I could: made things worse, in other words, made the fire flare up with every hard contact.
But then things didn’t hurt so much, and I was still being tossed and turned; and still going fast, I thought as I scrabbled and slid. No sound of siren overhead. If this was a police van, they weren’t using their best toy. Likely it wasn’t, though. Why draw attention? Probably just one more scruffy van with dodgy lights and a dodgy MOT, driven by some dodgy freak with a heavy right foot. The only way anyone would notice would be if it didn’t run the lights at amber, if it didn’t rev hard at every junction, if it didn’t blast its horn at any delay.
Fetching up in a corner, I wedged myself there as best I could, with my feet on the wheel-arch and my back against the door. Shortly after there was a soft thump of bone against my shoulder, and that was Jamie, searching or slipping I couldn’t tell, but finding me none the less. He pressed up against me, and we shared that corner and wedged each other for company.
Eventually the van slowed, almost to a crawl it felt like, though it was hard to tell speed with no visuals to mark it off against. First gear, at any rate, we could hear that; hear the horn too, blasting and blasting. Traffic jam, I thought, and still keeping in character, acting like a dickhead.
But then the engine cut, we went from crawl to stillness to silence to other sounds, the banging of doors while the van shifted beneath us, rising on its suspension as it lost all its passengers but us.
o0o
Still they left us a long time in our own private darknesses, in the darkness of the van. My face and hands still felt cruelly tender to the touch—not that I would have dared touch even if my hands had been free for it, but the hood touched my brow and cheeks and nose and the metal door unkindly touched my hands behind my back—but nothing was actually hurting any more, by the time the doors jerked and opened, and I nearly toppled straight out.
Saved myself with an effort of back and stomach that nearly gave me a rupture; and I needn’t have bothered anyway, because someone grabbed my shoulders and pulled me backwards, and I did topple out.
It wasn’t a long fall, only two or three feet, but blind and tied it was a paralysing shock, and the ground when it hit me hit me hard.
Jamie landed half on top of me half a second later, and I hope he was grateful for the cushioning.
They dragged him off, hauled me up and propelled us as before, grip and shove and steer from the rear. We couldn’t go cautious, we weren’t allowed; my mind juddered at every hurried, awkward step, expecting door or wall or staircase any moment, meeting none of them.
The ground changed, from gravel to wood; I lost another brief, useless tingle of sunlight; I figured we’d come from outside in.
Inside what I couldn’t try to guess, I wasn’t even certain I was right. At first our footsteps sounded hollow, like walking on a bridge except louder, echoing, contained. And then there was a doorway, a narrow one, I banged both shoulders as they pushed me through; and on the other side of that it was like the boards were laid on concrete, there was no noise and no resilience. Only it couldn’t be concrete because the floor was uneven suddenly, rising and falling unexpectedly, illogically...
A little of that and then they pulled us to a halt, they held us still; directly in front of me I heard metallic sounds: keys in locks, clatter of hasps, squeak of hinges. Wooden thud, as of door banged back against wall.
“This going to hold them, then?” a voice asked, male, heavy, anxious. “Straight up?”
“Safe as houses,” my own guide and tormentor assured him. “Look at it, what are they going to do in there? Besides, we’ve got their girls. A piece of fucking string would hold them. They came, didn’t they? They’re being good boys.”
And then unexpectedly I got a vicious kick in the solar plexus, and a rabbit-punch in the kidneys as I doubled over. Wrapped in another kind of pain, learning a lot here, I was only vaguely conscious of it as they stripped everything out of my pockets and then unlocked the cuffs, stripped the watch off my wrist and hauled me up onto my
feet again. I was only starting to recover when a sudden shove in the back thrust me forward. I went through another doorway blindly staggering, then slipping on wet stone and falling and cracking my head on a wall as I fell so that I wasn’t really conscious at all when they threw Jamie on top of me. Again.
o0o
If I was really out, though, it can’t have been for long. Mostly I just lay there feeling damp and dizzy and bright-headed, watching sparks fly in my skull and not trying to figure it out at all, neither what made the sparks fly nor what was the weight across my back that was making breathing so hard a thing to do.
Until the weight moved, until it rolled off to lie beside me and groan. Groaning made connections in my reeling head, groaning made sense. I groaned myself. And then I had it figured, that the lights in my skull weren’t fireworks, they were damage; and I was damp because I was lying in a puddle; and the weight had been Jamie, and he sounded pretty much as damaged as I was except that he’d had a softer, dryer landing and might not have caught his head such a crack.
Jamie’s job to be the tough one, then, up to Jamie to get us sorted. I waited for him to move, and marked him as he did: as he pushed himself up onto his elbows and then his arse, as he fumbled with the hood over his head, as he pulled it off and sat there for a minute, gulping air.
Funny, I could almost see him in my mind. My eyes were useless, my ears were muffled by my own hood, but still I knew every move he made. Hearing and touch, both amplified by this stretching darkness, perhaps; general closeness of body and spirit both, twenty-five years of being his bro; I don’t know what exactly was giving me what I had, but I took it as a gift.
I even knew just what he was doing as he lifted tender, trembling fingers to his cheeks and eyes, trying to find how much of his face was gone; and I heard, felt, knew his surprise when he found flesh and skin unscarred, eyelids and eyelashes and his eyes unmelted behind them. Shared his rush of relief, begrudged him not a moment of his momentary slumping then, before he remembered me.
Light Errant Page 19
