Lev squeals at the touch of the rough material and the man clamps his hands to the sides of his captive’s face. Lev quietens immediately and the man leans forward and speaks.
“Are you going to be quiet?”
Lev nods his head and the man pats his shoulder.
Lev trembles and tries to calm his breathing. Every time he gulps in air he sucks the sack into his mouth and he coughs repeatedly as quietly as he can.
He hears footsteps receding, then, they return. This time, they are accompanied by something shuffling. He can hear the sounds of someone else now, not the man who put the sack over his head, but someone else, someone who is crying.
Lev’s heart sinks to the soles of his shoes as it strikes him that the crying is a familiar sound. He doesn’t speak, he barely breathes. He waits.
Minutes pass. He feels the man behind him once more and Lev tenses his body. He hears the flick of a switch and even through the sack is over his face Lev can tell that the light has changed. He feels a hand grip the bottom of the sack and air swirls around his face as it is removed.
Lev blinks, waits for his cloudy eyes to clear. When they focus he looks first at his surroundings. They’re in a basement, stone floor, brick walls, one tiny window. A bare but bright bulb hangs from the ceiling, casting a light around his prison.
His captor is behind him. In a chair, six feet away, trussed and tied just like Lev, sits a crying, shaking, snotty nosed Roland.
The man moves around Lev to stand behind Roland. Roland jerks in his chair, fresh tears streaming down his face. Lev swallows as he looks at the stranger who was with Roland at the pier.
This isn’t going to end well, he thinks. Not if this guy is letting me see his face.
And he looks at the man, really takes his appearance in. He’s of medium height, average build, but he moves slowly. His age is impossible to determine. He’s not young, but not ancient. He’s normal. Everything about him screams ‘normal’. Except a normal man wouldn’t put his hands on Roland’s thin, white neck and squeeze.
Lev feels the surprise wash over him, this man’s strength, that’s not normal. Roland isn’t a small guy, but even if he was a giant he’d be no match for the determined guy who is strangling him.
Towards the end, Roland bucks violently in his chair, but his sudden vigour is short lived as his face turns a strange puce colour.
Lev is no stranger to death. He has seen it many times before, both natural and violent. But all those times he has been an onlooker, safely waiting in the wings at the edge of the arena. Now he’s very much in the spotlight, centre stage. At risk.
And as the man let’s go of Roland, causing the young man’s head to flop forward onto his chest, Lev looks straight at the guy.
The man smiles and for a terrible moment Lev thinks he’s next. But the man simply turns tail, and makes his way slowly back up the concrete staircase.
Lev holds his breath, his mind full of instruments of torture that he’s going to return with.
But in the silence of the room, Lev hears a key turn in the door and what sounds like a bolt being slid into place.
And then he’s alone, left in the basement, with just Roland’s dead body for company.
52
ELIAN
THE BEACH and later, GEVERS DEYNOOTWEG
11.7.15 Sunrise
After her meal with Brigitta, Elian found that sleep eluded her. Too many thoughts were racing around her mind, almost as though they had been tied down inside her brain and only now the rope binding them had been cut, allowing them to jump around in her head. In the early hours, when it was still pitch black outside, she had got up and come down to the beach.
The promenade is still lit, though the bars and clubs have long since locked their doors. There’s a glow on the horizon which she knows is the sun beginning to rise. To her left a container ship is crawling on a long journey, emerging from the Hook, probably going from Rotterdam across to her homeland.
And as she watches the ship she contemplates on what she has begun to think of as her ‘old life’. She had - still has - an apartment in an affluent area of London. But it was just that; an apartment; it hadn’t been a home since her aunt Sissy had left it. She has money back home too; a bank account that was paid into by a benefactor who is still a mystery. She had a job, a position at the magazine that Alex’s detective agency was a front for. Although she’d been missing from her place of employment for well over a month now, there was probably a new person sitting at her desk these days. Elian has no idea what – if anything – Alex had told them in her absence.
Elian gets to her feet and decides to walk by Lev’s apartment. There won’t be anyone around at this time of night, but despite that thought, she’s glad she pulled on her black jeans and dark hoodie, all the better to conceal her.
As soon as she turns the corner onto Gevers Deynootweg she sees the police cars. There are a lot of lights on the upper floor of the apartment building, and
