‘I remember what you’ve told me.’
He cut the bonds joining her wrists, then told her to remove the duct tape.
She shook her hands for some seconds to get them working again, then picked at the strands of tape, getting purchase and ripping them free. He held the knife up, all the time, stroking the flat of the blade with his opaque, gloved finger.
‘The floor is fine,’ he said, as he noticed her wondering what to do with the curled strips.
Then he reached down, picked up the leather shoe from the floor and handed it to Jessie. ‘Smell it!’ he said.
She frowned.
‘Hold it to your nose. Savour the smell!’
She sniffed the strong smell of fresh leather.
‘Good, isn’t it?’
His eyes, for an instant, were on the shoe and not her. She saw a glint in them. He was distracted. The shoe was at this moment the focus of his attention, not her. She held it up beneath her nose again, pretending to savour it, and surreptitiously changed her grip on it, so she was holding it by the toe. At the same time, on the pretext of working circulation back into her legs, she began to bend her knees.
‘Are you the one they talked about in the papers, with the little winkie?’ she asked suddenly.
He jerked towards her at the insult. As he did so, she arched her back and straightened her knees, springing both her legs up as hard as she could, striking him beneath the chin with the toes of her trainers, physically lifting him up, and slamming his head into the ceiling of the camper van. He fell, dazed, to the floor, the knife clattering away from him.
Before he had a chance to recover his wits, she was up on her feet, tearing the hood from his head. He looked almost pathetic without it, like a little startled mole. Then she slammed the shoe, stiletto heel first, as hard as she could into his right eye.
He screamed. A terrible howl of pain and shock and fury. Blood sprayed from his face. Then, grabbing the knife from the floor, she jerked open the sliding door and stumbled out, almost tumbling head first into pitch darkness. Behind her she heard the terrible howl of pain of a maddened, wounded beast.
She ran and crashed into something solid and unyielding. Then streaks of bright light darted around her.
Shit, shit, shit.
How could she have been so stupid? She should have taken the bloody torch!
In the beam, she momentarily saw the disused goods carriage on the dusted-over tracks. A gantry. Part of the steel walkway halfway up the walls. What looked like massive suspended turbines.
Where was the door?
She heard a shuffle. He was screaming out, in pain and fury. ‘YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING TO GET AWAY – YOU ARE NOT, YOU BITCH.’
She gripped the knife. The beam shone straight in her face, dazzling her. She turned. Saw huge double doors, over the railway tracks. For the carriages to come in and out through. She sprinted towards them, the beam guiding her all the way there.
All the way to the padlocked chain between them.
110
Sunday 18 January
Jessie turned and stared straight into the beam, her brain racing. He didn’t have a gun, she was pretty sure of that, otherwise he’d have pulled that on her, not the knife. He was wounded. He was not big. She had the knife. She knew some self-defence. But he still frightened her.
There must be another exit.
Then the torch went off.
She blinked at the darkness, as if that might make it go away, or somehow lighten it. She was shaking. She could hear herself panting. She struggled to quieten her breathing down.
Now they were equal, but he had an advantage. He presumably knew the layout in here.
Was he creeping up on her now?
In the torch beam, she’d seen to her left a vast space with what looked like some kind of silo at the end of it. She took a few steps and almost instantly stumbled. There was a loud metal pingggggg as something rolled away from under her feet and fell with a swoosh, splashing into water below seconds later.
Shit.
She stood still. Then she remembered her phone!
If she could get back to the van, she could call for help. Then with panic rising, she thought again, Call who? Where was she? Trapped inside some fucking great disused factory building somewhere. How great would that sound if she told the 999 operator?
He was already back at the camper van. His face was throbbing in agony and he couldn’t see out of his right eye, but he didn’t care, not at this moment. He did not care about anything except getting that bitch. She’d seen his face.
He had to find her. Had to stop her getting away.
Had to, because she could bring him down.
And he knew how.
He did not want to reveal his position by switching on the torch, so he moved as slowly as he could, feeling his way around the interior of the van until he found what he was looking for. His night-vision binoculars.
It took him only seconds to spot her. A green figure through the night-vision lens, moving slowly, inching her way left, walking like someone in slow motion.
Think you are so smart, don’t you?
He looked around for an implement. Something heavy and solid that would bring her down. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink, but it was too dark to see in, even with his night-vision. So he briefly switched on the torch. The night-vision flared, shooting searing light into his right eye, startling him so much he dropped the torch and stumbled back, falling over.
Jessie heard the crash. She looked over in its direction and instantly saw light inside the camper. She hurried further away towards the silo she had seen, fumbling her way, tripping over something, then banging her head into a sharp protruding object. She stifled a groan. Then carried on, feeling with her hands in the darkness until they reached an upright steel stanchion.
One of the pillars supporting the silo?
She crept forward, feeling the downward curve of the base of the silo, and crawled under it, then, still inching her way with her hands, she stood up, breathing in a dry dusty smell. Then she touched something that felt like the rung of a ladder.
He carried on searching with the torch, frantically opening each of the drawers. In the last one he found a bunch of tools. Among them was a big, heavy spanner. He picked it up, feeling the pain in his eye worsening with every second, feeling the blood streaming down his face. He retrieved the binoculars and moved to the door, staring out through them.
The bitch had vanished.
