by Heide Goody
Someone had moved the gravestones – moved the whole graveyard – a foot or two away from the road. She looked at the narrow road leading onto the half-built housing development beyond. The tarmac was black and shining; the road was new.
60
With a splash of water to damp down the worst of the ash dust, Jimmy had ground the bone remnants into a sludge with the consistency of wet plaster. There was a tugging temptation to pour it out somewhere on site where another half inch of cement or screed was needed, but that was foolish. He would take the tub away, find a stream or a drain a suitable distance off and pour it away there.
Happy with the results of his labours, he turned the paddle mixer off. In the silence he heard the van horn.
Wayne was in the cab, halfway between the passenger and driver seats, bouncing up and down, alternating between pounding the horn and pointing excitedly across the way. Jimmy looked where he was pointing.
Jimmy didn’t see it at first. His gaze travelled along the housing development’s cul de sac, but saw nothing. Then he glimpsed movement beyond the little road. By the access road, beyond the narrow verge, the relocated fence and relocated gravestones, there was someone in the churchyard. His initial reaction – a dismissive ‘so what?’ – was immediately replaced by shock when he recognised the figure moving among the graves.
“Sam fucking Applewhite,” he gasped hoarsely.
It was shocking that she was here. It was incomprehensible she had somehow stumbled onto the business with the relocated gravestones. It was utterly galling that Jacinda had been right.
Cold Jimmy flexed and stretched. One more piece of business to attend to then.
He jogged down onto the main road and doubled back through the churchyard gate. There was nobody around at all. Sleepy village in the early afternoon. His best bet was to try to grab her and get her in the van, but could he manage it without her screaming? There were people living nearby who might respond to a woman’s screams.
Sam had crouched by a gravestone, brushed lichen from its eroded face. The hours Jimmy and Wayne had spent, levering up and repositioning those old stones. The woman had no idea what effort and time had gone into this scheme. Jimmy’s temper rose and the Cold Jimmy wrapped its tentacles around it, like a volcanic sea vent – hot, sulphurous, energising.
As he approached, his boot scuffed lightly against a flagstone and she turned and saw him. Her reaction told him everything he needed to know.
Her mouth hadn’t half-formed the word, “Jimmy” when she leapt up and bolted directly away from him.
He gave immediate chase. She dodged around the gravestones, but the grass was long, it wasn’t ideal for getting up speed. Jimmy was certain he could catch her if they were running out on the tarmac road, but this stuff hid all sorts of obstacles – like fallen headstones and tiny iron railings edging the grave plots.
“I know what you did!” she shouted as she ran.
He no longer gave an actual fuck if she knew what he’d done. His focus was entirely on the chase.
He could see she was running in a loop around the churchyard, ignoring the thick barrier of trees and barbed wire at the rear, trying to get all the way round the building and back to one of the lanes leading to the main road. At the edge of the church yard was a waist high fence. She hurdled it at speed, catching a toe on the barbed-wire top, stumbling onto her hands and knees, then bouncing up again.
Jimmy lumbered after her, knowing he wasn’t quite as agile. He stepped over the fence and continued the chase. Sam ran down the lane towards the centre of the village. There was a pub, The Wheel Inn, further up and a very real danger she might find help if she made it that far.
She jinked left to cut the corner, nipping around the back of a house. Jimmy followed. He could hear her breathing now, an exhausted rasp. She wasn’t a long distance runner then. He sprinted through the side gate and grinned wolfishly when he reached the back garden and found that, beyond the flower beds and a lawn with the children’s pop-up goal post, there was a high fence which prevented her escape.
Jimmy saw Sam in the process of hauling a wrought-iron bench over to the fence. She saw him in return, realising that moving the bench had cost her too much time.
“I’ve already called the police!” she yelled. With a grating clatter she dragged the bench a few more inches into place. Jimmy ran forward. As she climbed onto the bench he grabbed her by the knees and pulled her back.
She bounced heavily on the patio. The air knocked from her she yelped rather than screamed.
She glanced to the patio doors of the house. Jimmy did the same. Nobody had appeared.
“Get off! Help!” she yelled.
Jimmy clamped a hand over her mouth. Next to him was the pop-up goal post, made from some sort of spring-loaded plastic, with a mesh netting stretched across it. He reached for it with his free hand, rolling Sam inside the thing, his hand coming off her mouth briefly.
“What the hell are you doing!” she yelled. “And a net? A net? Are we in a comic or what?”
She thrashed and resisted. While the net was not a foolproof restraint, it definitely provided enough tangled resistance that Sam couldn’t put up any kind of meaningful fight. There might be fire in her voice, but there was also fear. Jimmy liked to hear the fear.
He hauled her wrapped body, feet first, down to the edge of the garden and the road, He heard a vehicle coming. He edged behind a trellis. Sam tried to make as much noise as she could, but it was no more than a muffled whine.
His own van appeared, Wayne somehow hanging onto the steering wheel in a very unnatural-looking way.
“Oh, you fucking beauty,” breathed Jimmy. He stepped out and held up a hand for Wayne to stop. The van braked hard, skidding past a dozen yards.
“Fuck’s sake,” he mumbled. He ran after it, dragging Sam roughly over the tarmac. He opened the back doors and heaved her inside. “Settle down.”
“See what I did there, Jimmy?” called Wayne from the front. “I saw her. I saw her and then you got her and I drove round and bam! What a team!”
“Yeah, like clockwork,” muttered Jimmy.
He used an elasticated bungee cord to fasten the mesh more securely. There was a rag on the floor of the van. He popped it into her mouth. “You’ll be fine.”
The lie came as easily as the violence.
Sam screamed through the gag, muffled. Jimmy liked that. Muffled, reduced, robbed of a voice. Maybe he’d do that to Jacinda when the time came.
That thought came as a surprise to Jimmy. It had come from Cold Jimmy in the darkness at the bottom of the sea. He could almost feel Cold Jimmy putting an avuncular tentacle across his shoulder and pointing out that, yes, obviously Jacinda would have to die at some point. Not for a while yet, not for months or even years, but he would have to kill her eventually. They were co-conspirators in murder and fraud. They were tied up together in this deal. But there was no written contract, and a verbal agreement wasn’t worth a damn.
Sam said she’d called the police. He searched her pockets, left then right, and pulled out her phone. It was unlocked. He scrolled the call history. Nothing to the emergency services. The last call was from a contact called Delia – Junk Shop and that was nearly an hour ago.
“Lying bitch,” he muttered, pocketing the phone.
Jimmy reached over to a tool caddy for more cable ties, but the van lurched forward.
“Shit.” He hissed, kicking the panel at the back of the cab. “Wait up!”
He jumped out, slammed the back door closed and ran round to the front. He tried to climb into the cab, but he found Wayne sitting in the driver’s seat. “How the hell did you—?”
“Someone’s coming Jimmy. Don’t worry, I can get us away,” said Wayne.
Jimmy looked up. A man, an old duffer in a wax jacket, was walking towards them on the pavement. Wayne had a point, but this wasn’t how he’d have chosen to tackle things. The van shot forward and Jimmy clambered across Wayne’s arms and shoul
ders so he wasn’t thrown from the door. He wriggled over to the other side and righted himself, sitting on the passenger seat. He saw Wayne’s right arm was still fastened to the left side of the steering wheel. He’d slid across to sit in the driver’s seat, but his arm was tightly clamped between his belly and the steering wheel, leaving his left arm to do everything else. It wasn’t working out.
“It’s a bit tricky,” said Wayne, hurtling forward on a fixed trajectory towards a row of parked cars. “The steering wheel is hard to move like this.”
Jimmy grabbed the wheel and yanked it to the left.
“Ow!” Wayne yelled, as his arm followed it round, his whole upper half twisting downwards.
“Back off the accelerator!” Jimmy shouted.
“I can’t feel my leg!” Wayne said.
“You shouldn’t drive.”
“Nah, I’m fine.”
Jimmy tried to lift the handbrake, but he couldn’t get to it with Wayne draped sideways. He straightened the steering, which hauled Wayne part of the way up, but the van was accelerating towards a junction, still in first gear, the engine screaming. Jimmy yanked round to the right, taking the turn much faster than he should have. Somehow the van made it round. It was a quiet street, but there were ditches on either side.
They zig-zagged down the road for a distance. Every time Jimmy straightened their course Wayne would yank them back again, complaining loudly.
“Fuck’s sake, Wayne, we cannot have an accident right now!”
“Best get a move on then.”
“Stop the van.”
“I’m not sure how.”
Wayne grunted and shifted position. It resulted in increased acceleration. They were still in first gear and the engine protested with an ear-splitting whine. They shot across a crossroads where they didn’t have right of way.
“Are you steering or am I?” asked Wayne.
His cable-tied hand had been twisted round and the plastic dug into his flesh. His hand, circulation cut off, was turning a rich purple.
“Do something with your legs!” snarled Jimmy. “Brake damn it!”
Jimmy held the steering wheel and rummaged again for any possible purchase on the handbrake beneath Wayne’s bulk. The A158 main road to Skeg was ahead. No chance of avoiding traffic there.
“Turn!” yelled Jimmy. As Wayne leaned right, Jimmy found and yanked the handbrake. The van skidded in a turn just before the junction and ended up, engine stalled, facing back the way it had come, the side of the vehicle half-mounting the knobbly roots of a tree.
Wayne turned the key in the ignition to restart it.
“Don’t!” yelled Jimmy. “Just leave it for a minute, Wayne.”
He searched in the glovebox and found a cheap folding multitool that he’d got from a petrol station ages ago. He unfolded it into the shape of pliers and, with some persistence, released the cable tie from Wayne’s arm. The dark discolouration of Wayne’s blood-engorged hand began to ebb away.
“Thanks, mate,” sighed Wayne. He made to turn the key again.
“No,” said Jimmy, placing a hand possessively over the steering wheel. “I’m going to drive.”
“Aw.”
“I’m going to walk around to that side and you’re going to come across here, understood?”
“Yes, Jimmy.”
Jimmy jumped down and walked round the cab. A car had slowed down to see what had happened. “It’s all right, just swerved to avoid a squirrel,” said Jimmy, waving, and climbed into the cab.
With Wayne back in the passenger side, Jimmy started the engine and edged the van away from the tree before pulling onto the road and accelerating away. There was a crimp in the wheel arch that was rubbing against the wheel, but as long as the tyre held they should be fine.
From one point in the landscape of Jimmy’s nightmare week to another, it was not a long drive from Welton to the Frost house at Friskney. It felt long to Jimmy. From the scraping of the damaged wheel arch to Wayne’s mumblings and moronic comments to Sam thrashing and squealing against her gag in the back, Jimmy felt as if he was chained to the noisy memories of his crimes. He stared at the road ahead, the straight road out to the fens. The vista before him was a single line separating land from sky. Cloud hung thickly and the sun was invisible in the uniformly grey afternoon sky. Hell, he thought, would be this road without end; an eternity with bleating and protesting in his ears and no meaningful destination ahead of him.
He tried to retreat to the cold cave of his mind again but, right now, it was hard to find. Cold Jimmy wasn’t needed right now, but would be soon enough. When he put Wayne and Sam out of his misery.
Once they were parked up in the yard between Jacinda’s house and the office shed, far from any public gaze, Jimmy told Wayne to take Sam into the office shed.
“Make sure she’s tied up properly as well.” He handed Wayne more of the cable ties.
“Sure,” said Wayne. Struggling to co-ordinate without the correct number of limbs or eyes, he bumped into the van door before grabbing Sam and slinging her over his shoulder.
As Wayne carried her over to the shed, Jimmy used the opportunity to put his latest idea into action. There was indeed a box of the fentanyl painkiller patches still in the van. Sacha had told him that more than a couple of patches at once could be potentially fatal, although the vet had not been one hundred percent certain. He was used to giving them to horses, not people.
The drugs came in two by three tearable sheets, fabric backing on one side, covered adhesive on the other. Each square patch in the sheet (according to the box) contained two and a half milligrams of fentanyl. It was clearly powerful stuff. There were two sheets left in the flat pack. More than enough.
Jimmy stood in the open door of the van as he worked. He dug out a pair of builder’s work gloves from a tool caddy and turned them inside out. He cut apart the fentanyl blocks and, with a nearly exhausted tube of superglue, stuck a patch on the first knuckle of each fingerhole, arranging them like the studs on a knuckleduster.
By the time he’d affixed the last one, the other nine were dry. He ripped off the adhesive covers and carefully turned the gloves inside out again, so the patches were on the inside. The tricky part was keeping the gloves loose enough that the patches didn’t immediately stick one side of the fingerhole to the other. They seemed to be okay.
“Hey, Wayne,” Jimmy muttered in mock rehearsal, “can you help me do the thingy? Put these on. Yeah. That’s great. They feel sticky? I’m surprised you can feel anything.”
He grinned.
Ten patches. The big imbecile would probably be dead before he walked a dozen yards.
There was the crunch of shoes on the chalk yard. “What the hell are you doing?” demanded Jacinda.
He turned, unfazed by her angry outburst. “Making plans for the future,” he said. “Nice dress.”
She was wearing a long sleek number with a slit up one leg. The dress was black with points of glitter that twinkled when she moved. The dress had more life in it than she did.
“Don’t change the subject,” she snapped. “I’m getting ready for the businessperson of the year awards and I discover you’ve brought Sam Applewhite – a prisoner! – to my home. To my fucking home, Jimmy MacIntyre!”
“We had to take her somewhere.”
“I told you I didn’t want to be part of this! I need full deniability!”
He grunted, a laugh. “You’re one of us now, Jacinda. You want Shore View to go off without a hitch? Then you get your hands dirty like the rest of us. Besides—” he gestured to the world around them: the RAF bombing range and the sea in one direction, the endless fenland fields in the other “—no one’s going to know what goes on out here.”
“Sacha?” she said.
“Reduced to a bucket of paste,” he said, realising he’d left the tub out at the Welton site. “The old woman too.”
“And then Wayne?” She nodded towards the office shed.
“Long John bloody Silv
er in there is next on my list,” he replied. He carefully folded the gloves and put them in his jacket pocket. “I’ll make it humane. Now, come inside and meet Sam. Let’s find out what she knows.”
61
The one-legged man carrying Sam stank.
Everybody had their smell. From the top to the bottom of society, everyone had an odour, and Sam had long accepted that some people were smellier than others. But this guy stank. It went beyond the regular ‘man who hasn’t showered in a week’ whiff. It was more than the ‘dude with a poor attitude to personal hygiene and underwear rotation’ guff. It was something deeper, something that had layers and texture, a complex aroma with so many notes – bass whiffs and high stinky quavers – that even a seasoned wine-expert or perfumier would require a month and a vulgar thesaurus to decode and describe it. The man smelled of death itself.
He dropped her roughly into a wheeled office chair. Her arms were secured to her sides with the bungee cord from the van. He wrapped some extras around the back of the chair and tied them behind. Cable ties held her wrists together. She was glad when he was done and she could get the full blast of his stench out of her nostrils. At least she’d managed to spit the disgusting rag out of her mouth when he hauled her over his shoulder.
The building was a single room, the size of a small warehouse. The walls, up to the start of the roof, were lined by walls of free-standing breeze block. Like someone had attempted drystone walling but wasn’t going to mess with any of that natural stone nonsense. Throughout the room there were cobbled together pedestals, also of breeze block, and on some of them what looked like junk from a house clearance: pottery, knick knacks, souvenirs. The floor was littered with crumbs of breeze block and the shattered remains of more household ornaments. Despite the worrying situation, Sam found herself insanely wondering if Delia would recognise any valuable junk shop potentials amongst these ruins. Her thoughts were giddy, wild, and Sam recognised that although she was able to function mentally, her conscious mind was nothing but a raft on a sea of terror. These people were going to kill her. There seemed no doubt.
