FIFTH
VICTIM
A CHARLIE FOX THRILLER
ZOE SHARP
CHAPTER ONE
The only thing more terrifying than fighting for your life is fighting for someone else’s.
Especially when you’re losing the battle.
On my knees in the warm sand, I gouged at the reluctant earth with a driftwood shovel, with both hands and my every breath. And the more I burrowed, the more the sides of the hole folded in quietly to meet the void. I knew then, gritted in the face of defeat, that there was only one way this was going to end.
Badly.
Pig-headed, I ploughed on, seeing nothing but the next scoop of sand that rushed in, mocking, to fill the last insignificant hollow. Dig, twist, throw.
I’d lost a principal two winters previously, had watched her die, helpless, only metres away. Might as well have been light years, for all the use I’d been to her then. But that was better than this agony of grim expectation, of not knowing life from death one way or the other. I was overwhelmed by a sense of waste and dread, so strong I feared the stink would always linger.
Just ahead of me, one end of the shallow pit was marked by an upright length of pipe. Ordinary grey soil pipe, about forty mil in diameter, like any plumber would install for the drain of a sink or a shower. Before I’d begun my ragged excavation, it had stuck a hand’s breadth out of the ground, protected from the elements by an upturned plastic bucket. Now I could see half a metre or more before the pipe disappeared into the sand beneath.
I stopped digging and scraped around it carefully with cupped hands, creating a protective moat and driving granules deep under my broken nails as I did so. And, all the while, I had visions of someone watching this frantic rescue from a safe distance and laughing at my attempt to exhume what might so easily turn out to be nothing more than a false thread laid into empty ground. I resisted the temptation to grab and rive, just to make sure the other end really was attached to something. Because if it was, and I yanked it free …
To come this far and face failure, so close to the finish, would be worse than never finding the bloody burial site in the first place.
I heard the swish of footsteps approaching fast across the loose surface behind me, but didn’t stop, didn’t turn.
‘Charlie!’ Parker’s voice, hoarse against the ocean breeze rippling up the beach. I glanced over my shoulder then, in time to see him rip off his jacket and tie, bunching himself to jump down into the hole.
‘Don’t,’ I said, gasping with the effort of speech. ‘We don’t know what the box is made out of – how much extra weight it will take – and I’m lighter.’
Parker must have seen the desperation in my eyes. To his credit, he didn’t point out that he was stronger, fresher, and could probably clear the grave a hell of a lot faster than I could.
Instead, he squatted near the open end of the tube, cocked his ear close for any sound of movement below, any sign that we were not too late. I could have told him I’d already tried that and hadn’t come away reassured, but I saved what little breath I had left for the ground.
‘Hang on in there,’ he shouted downwards, paused. Silence. ‘If you can hear me, we got you. Help’s coming.’
I kept my head down and my thoughts to myself.
‘They should have thought of this hours ago,’ I muttered. ‘Where the hell
‘On their way,’ Parker said, but his face was white.
He scrambled round to the side of the pit and began clearing the sand I’d already raised, levelling the ground, kicking it away to stop it sucking back into the hole. It suddenly seemed that I’d made much less progress than I’d thought.
I prayed our gravedigger hadn’t favoured the traditional depth of six feet under. By my reckoning, every extra foot was another half a ton of fill to shift. I’d attended enough funerals over here to know that the modern American trend was to go down only four feet, then encase the coffin in concrete to make it solid enough to be driven over, and not rise in a flood or be raided by scavengers.
If that was the case, we were all fucked.
And then, at last, I thudded into something solid yet strangely hollow, jarring my arms hard enough to make me grunt. I dropped the driftwood and scrabbled at the sand, fingers meeting roughened timber. I battered down to the surface, found cheap chipboard, like you’d use to board up a derelict house.
A spurt of renewed anger flushed through me at this crude vulgarity, as though bird’s-eye maple with rosewood inlay would have made it any better. I snatched up my driftwood again and attacked the remaining sand, sending it up and out of the hole like flung hail. Even Parker stepped back in the face of it.
By the time it was half cleared, the outline spoke for itself. Not a simple rectangular box but a long taper towards the end furthest from the pipe. Parker, higher up, realised the significance first. He began to swear, soft and vicious under his breath.
I have utterly no concept of what it’s like to be put underground in something that’s so obviously shaped like a coffin, still alive and scared out of your wits.
I swept the last film of sand away and stopped, panting. The lid was held down with screws around the outer edge, already beginning to corrode with the salt. They were spaced at irregular intervals, as if whoever had built this monstrosity had been in a hurry, and careless about the details.
I fumbled in my pocket for my Swiss Army knife, wrenched out the screwdriver attachment and went down on my knees, hand slapping hard onto the surface.
‘Hold on,’ I yelled in a voice not quite my own. ‘Hold on!’
Parker slithered down behind me, his own pocket knife out. I met his eyes and saw my own tightly clamped emotion reflected right back at me. Then I was bending close to the first screw head, blowing away the grit so the tool would bite hard enough to turn.
A faint scuffle of noise reached my ears and stopped my breath. I froze, glanced up at Parker, hope flaring until I saw his eyes. He shook his head, and I realised it was just a clump of sand dropping back into the pit to scatter with cruel deception across the exposed wood.
A sudden image reared up, vivid enough to stun, of another reaching out to me, unable to make himself heard or gain anyone’s attention, trapped in a soundless, wordless, motionless nightmare. Everything seemed to lurch under me. I put a hand up onto the damp sand to steady myself.
‘You OK?’
