The Make

‘Alfie.’ She went back to him, shook his shoulder hard. ‘Can you walk; do you think you can stand up? Come on Alfie. Try and fight it, will you? We’ve got to get out of here.’

Alfie let out a giggle. His head waggled on his shoulders like it was too heavy for them. His eyes were unfocused. ‘Mickey, look. Look, Gracie.’

He was trying to point to a side table. Gracie went over. There was a vintage Mickey Mouse telephone there. Mickey grinned up at her in his red shorts, holding out the canary-yellow receiver in his big white-gloved hand, inviting her to make a call.

Mickey’s grin looked somehow threatening under these circumstances. She thought of all the boys Deano had entertained in this very room, maybe amusing them with this novelty phone before he pounced. She gulped down some air and gingerly picked up the phone. It had one of those old-fashioned dials on it, and her finger was shaking so badly she could hardly use the thing. She stood there and realized that she didn’t know Lorcan’s mobile number. It was stored on her mobile, and she didn’t have the damned thing with her.

Police then.

Nothing else for it.

She dialled 999. Waited. Cringing, almost whimpering in terror because she knew they were both as good as trapped here and that Deano Drax was going to walk in soon, find her here, do her damage. She clutched at the ice pick so hard that it dug into her skin.

‘Police, fire or ambulance?’ said a female operator in her ear.

‘Police,’ said Gracie, even her voice trembling now. ‘Hurry,’ she added. ‘And ambulance too – the man who came with me is out on the road, the car’s upside down, he’s unconscious.’

‘Where are you? What’s happening?’

Gracie stopped dead. She didn’t have a clue where she was, what road this was, what the name of the house was, nothing. She felt panicky tears starting in her eyes.

‘Deano Drax’s house in Essex,’ she said, and dredged from her frozen mind every other tiny detail she could muster before she hung up the phone.

It was then that she heard the screams coming from the garage.

Chapter 70

It was no weather to be out in. All the reports on the news said so. Don’t go out unless you absolutely have to. It was, so far as Lorcan could see, sound advice. It was freezing cold, and once you got off the main roads there were no gritters, so what you were driving on was basically a skid pan, which meant that he didn’t dare put his foot down or he’d just spin straight off the road, get stuck, and then he’d really be up shit creek.

He wasn’t even sure this was where Gracie had headed. He didn’t know what went on in her mind. But it was a hunch, a strong one. And the hunch told him she was still in love with him and she believed he was in trouble.

‘Ah, fuck,’ said Lorcan as the wheels lost traction again. The car drifted sideways and Lorcan stifled the impulse to wrench at the wheel or brake hard. He went with the skid, and presently the wheels gripped again, and he was able to proceed – driving at a snail’s pace, but there was no other way. Now the roads had become unlit country lanes, twisting and turning through pitch-black fields. His headlights speared ahead into the darkness. An owl swooped in front of the car, and he braked in surprise, nearly skidded; held it, thinking, Come on baby, steady.

Every slight bend was a potential crash site now. Lorcan drove with grim care, concentrating only on the endgame – finding Gracie. If Deano caused her any grief, he was going to rip his sorry arse out of his body. He steered carefully around each bend, fearing a skid at each and every turn, knowing that if the car was forfeited then he was bollocksed and would just have to go on foot.

He stared at the road, and nursed the car along. The headlights probed ahead. Another damned turn, sharper this time, much sharper. And it was then, easing the car oh so gently into the turn, that he saw the car upside-down in the ditch and thought, Oh fuck. Gracie.

It wasn’t Gracie, it was Paul. He was sitting on the snow-covered bank beside the car, nursing his head in both hands. Lorcan stopped the car, leaving the engine running, and got out. Paul turned his head, winced, and got back to the head-hugging again.

‘Paul? You okay?’

‘Fucking wonderful,’ groaned Paul.

Now Lorcan was looking in the car, fearing the worst. Shit, what if she was in there, dead? He was half afraid to look, but he had to. The car was empty. He stood up, looked at Paul.

‘Where’s Gracie?’ he asked.

‘Dunno. Don’t remember anything apart from the car spinning off the damned road,’ said Paul.

Lorcan forced himself to calm down, because right now he felt that he was about to pick Paul up by his ears and spin him round until he hollered. ‘What do you mean, you don’t know where she is? She was with you, right?’

‘Yeah. She was. So I guess she went on alone.’

Alone to Drax’s place? Acute anxiety was twisting Lorcan’s gut into knots now. He couldn’t believe she’d be so fucking foolhardy as to do that – but then, this was Gracie. Sometimes you didn’t know what she was going to do.

Or maybe she’d been injured in the crash, and crawled away, and was even now lying nearby in the snow, dying?

Lorcan hurried back to his car and brought a torch. He looked at the passenger side interior of Paul’s car, but there was no blood, no sign of any trauma. He flashed the torch around the ditch, back up the lane, then further on down. He couldn’t see her. He stood there, his breath pluming out in the frozen air, and looked at the lights away up in the distance. He flicked off the torch, went to Paul.

‘Can you walk?’ he asked.

Paul nodded, wincing. He stood up shakily. Lorcan got an arm around him and helped him round to the passenger side of Lorcan’s car. He closed the door carefully on Paul, then ran round to the driver’s side and, cursing the conditions that stopped him from driving like Lewis Hamilton on the track, he drove on, very slowly, very cautiously, heading for the lights up ahead.

Chapter 71

Gracie clapped a hand over her own mouth to stifle a small shriek of shock. Someone had screamed. Literally screamed, so loudly that she had heard it in here, and she was pretty sure that it had come from the garage.

What the hell was going on out there?

She looked at Alfie. He’d heard it too, even in his drug-befuddled state. She could see that his silly, smiling expression had faded to be replaced by bewilderment. She bent down to him again. Looked him in the eye. ‘Alfie?’ she tried.

No good. He was out of it.

And meanwhile, in the garage, Deano was doing something dreadful to someone, and she thought that someone must be Lorcan, and she had to do something, she couldn’t just stand here waiting for the police, they might not even be able to get through on these treacherous roads. She might be condemning Lorcan to death if she did nothing. ‘Alfie, I’m going outside,’ she said to him. ‘I think Lorcan’s in trouble out there. I’m going out to help. Okay?’

He just stared at her, dazed and confused.

For God’s sake, I could really use a hand here, thought Gracie.