‘ Christ, Dunbar, does Ealing Comedy write your scripts? You’ll be telling me next that I won’t get away with it. Move!’
Merton prodded the gun into Steven’s back and he moved off in the direction that the gun dictated. Merton seemed so calm that he didn’t bother coming out with any more cliches.
‘ It’s only right that a good-looking chap like you should join the ladies,’ said Merton.
‘ What’s that supposed to mean?’ said Steven.
‘ Just my little joke,’ said Merton.
They came to a flight of stone stairs leading down to a heavy cellar door and Merton paused to fumble in his pocket for the key. It was not only obvious to Steven that Merton was going to lock him up in there but that the cellar would almost certainly become his tomb because of the charges that Merton had been laying. When they went off he would either be buried under tons of rubble or burnt alive in a firestorm.
Steven felt like a lamb being led to the slaughter. He told himself that he couldn’t just meekly step into his grave but the odds were hopelessly stacked against him. Merton gestured that he go down the steps and he did so but when he reached the bottom he suddenly turned and lunged at him. He managed to reach Merton’s arm just as he saw the flash from the muzzle of the gun. It was the last thing he saw before his senses left him.
The sound of the Land Rover’s engine revving woke Steven and for a moment he thought the sound was inside his head, such was the headache that welcomed him back to consciousness. He put his hand up gingerly to the left side of his head and through the sticky, matted mess he found there he could feel a groove running from just above his left eyebrow to the top of his forehead. Merton’s bullet had not penetrated his skull but it had left its calling card. A few degrees different and Jenny would already have been an orphan.
The fact that Merton was leaving suddenly brought home to Steven where he was and what was about to happen. Panic threatened to take over from pain and its message was clear and simple. If he didn’t get out of here, he was going to die. Adrenaline flooded through him but his first scrambled attempt at getting to his feet failed. He lost his balance and fell heavily to the floor again where he remained on all fours, breathing hard and fighting feelings of nausea. He looked up at the one window in the wall above him and saw that there was no glass in it but it was heavily barred.
He pulled himself across the floor, fighting dizziness all the way until he reached the door and could examine it at close quarters. It had to be at least six inches thick and the heavy lock was in good condition. The fact that he could see the outside through the large keyhole when he knelt in front of it told him that the key had not been left in the lock.
Steven rested his cheek against the door for a moment, knowing that even if he had the strength to put his shoulder to it, the most likely outcome would be a broken collarbone. He turned and looked at his surroundings in the light that was coming in through the barred window. He had no idea what the original use for the cellar had been when monks had been at the abbey but in more recent times it had been used for storing gardening tools and equipment. Most of it looked as if it hadn’t been used in many years. The tools were rusty and covered in cobwebs and the writing on several of the bags of what he supposed was fertiliser or weed killer had almost faded away to nothing.
There was an old wooden bench with an ancient paraffin primus stove sitting on it along with bits and pieces for making tea — a heavy black kettle that would have been at home in a Victorian kitchen, a rusty tea caddy, a couple of tarnished spoons and a half-full sugar bag that had once been white but was now parchment yellow.
A muffled explosion outside made him stop breathing in anticipation but there was no after-blast and no sound of crashing masonry. Merton had set incendiary devices rather than explosives. As if to confirm this, a searing wave of heat came in through the window and made him screw up his eyes. When it abated he continued examining his surroundings. The ceiling was solid stone. The floor was covered in stone flagging and there were three extra stones propped up against the wall under the window, not that being able to stand on them and get up to the barred window would be much help.
Steven revisited his earlier fear that this cellar would be his tomb and found little comfort in being proved right. He did however, see the irony of a British tomb having tea-making equipment in it whereas an Egyptian one would have provided a more expansive spread for the journey into the afterlife. Another explosion and the sound of fire taking hold told him that his own journey must be imminent.
Although his stomach was knotted with fear, Steven took out the notebook that he’d noted down the registration number of Merton’s car in and tore out a clean page in order to write a last note to Jenny. By the orange glow that was coming in from outside, he addressed the note to Miss Jenny Dunbar at Sue and Peter’s address in Glenvane. In it he told her that he loved her very much and hoped that in time she would forgive him for not being there for her but he felt sure that she would grow up into a young lady that her Daddy and Mummy would be very proud of.
With tears mingling with the sweat and blood on his face, Steven looked around for something to put the note in, something that would protect it from the fire and allow it to survive to be found one day by someone who would deliver it. His eyes fell on the tea caddy and he lurched across the floor to empty out the tea, which had long ago turned to dust. He put the note inside and replaced the lid but then realised that the tin was so flimsy that it probably wouldn’t be up to the job. Supporting himself with a hand against the wall, he moved unsteadily around the cellar looking for some safe place to put it. The temperature seemed to be rising by the second. He stumbled when the floor beneath him seemed to give way then found that he was standing on bare earth. The flagstones under the window weren’t extra stones. They were part of the floor that had been lifted.
A fantasy of being able to tunnel his way out quickly gave way to cold reality. Even though there was an old spade in the corner, he would have to dig down at least six feet and then out for three before coming up for six again but at least he could bury the tin in the earth here. He knelt down and started scooping earth away with his bare hands as sweat dripped from his face into the hole. To his surprise he found that the earth was quite soft and he made good progress until he hit something that at first he thought was a flexible pipe. He gripped it and pulled hard until it seemed to come away at one end. It wasn’t a pipe. It was soft and it had a hand on the end of it.
Steven recoiled in horror as he realised that he was in the process of unearthing a body lying in a shallow grave. Some of the flesh had come away in his hand when he had pulled the arm and he scraped his palm against the wall in an effort to free himself from the horror of it. Although badly decaying, he could see that the hand was a woman’s. It was small and slim and still had two rings on it. He realised now what Merton had meant by ‘joining the ladies’. This must be where the bodies of the snuff film girls had been buried.
Steven pushed the arm back down into the hole in the earth, feeling more of the rotting flesh peel away as he did so and having to fight the bones of the girl’s hand that seemed to have other ideas about being buried again. Finally he placed the tea caddy in the hole and scooped earth on top. He tamped the surface down with his knees and then crawled to the opposite corner of the room where he threw up until his stomach was empty. The flow of sweat from his brow was stinging the open wound in his head and the pain inside it was reaching crescendo pitch as he retched and blinked back tears of anger, fear and frustration.
Another wave of heat followed in the wake of yet another explosion and the air inside the cellar momentarily became too hot to breathe. Steven looked to the side to avoid the bright orange glare at the window and his gaze fell on the old sacks. The bright light had made the contents label on one of them just legible: it contained sodium chlorate.
Three thoughts came to him in rapid succession. One, sodium chlorate was a very effective weed killer; two, it was a very strong oxidising agent that made any fire infinitely worse by feeding the flames pure oxygen and three, it could be explosive when mixed with certain other compounds. One of these compounds was sugar…
Steven’s heart missed a beat as he looked at the bag sitting on the bench. He might well be deluding himself but he believed that he had the makings of an elementary bomb. He grabbed at the sugar bag and found that the contents had congealed into a solid lump. He slammed it repeatedly down on the bench to break the lump and then ground the smaller lumps feverishly with the heel of his hand until it looked more like granular sugar. He had to keep clearing the sweat from his eyes, trying at the same time to avoid it falling into the sugar. When he had generated a respectable pile, he tore at the sodium chlorate sack to get at its contents, praying that it was old enough to have avoided the modern requirement for a fire retardant to be added to it.
What he needed now was some kind of hollow pipe in which to confine the explosive mix otherwise it would just flare up and he would have constructed an incendiary device. Talk about coals to Newcastle… He also needed to decide what he going to do with his bomb. The walls and door were so thick that any blast big enough to breach them would almost certainly kill him… but that might be preferable to being burnt alive, he concluded. He would at
