He tried to push his way up it. The drum wobbled. He slid down. Rolling onto his stomach, his legs tangled behind him, his ankle agony, he jerked himself up, then up again. Finally, taking a massive breath and exhaling and pushing himself at the same time with all he had, he succeeded. He got his chin over the rim.
And it felt beautifully, raggedly, sharp.
Slowly, inching back, keeping his chin clamped over it, he levered it back; it was heavy, much heavier than he had imagined, too heavy for him. Suddenly it toppled and fell to the floor with a loud, echoing boom.
‘Tom?’ Kellie cried out.
‘It’s OK.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Nothing.’
Working as fast as he could, he moved up to the rim, felt in the darkness where the cord strapping his arms to his sides was, and began to rub that against the rough edge.
After some minutes – almost as surprised that it had actually worked as relieved – he was able to move his arms away from his body. Just one tiny step, he knew, but he felt as if he had just climbed Everest. Relief surged through him. He could do this!
Now he swung his hands, still tied tightly together, through the darkness, feeling for the rim. He found it and began to rub the cord between his wrists furiously against the edge. Slowly, steadily, he could feel the strands giving and the binding loosening. And suddenly his hands were free. He shook off the last bit of slack cord from his wrist, pushed himself upright, stretching his arms and flexing his hands, trying to get the blood circulating in them once more.
‘Are we going to die here, Tom?’ Kelly whimpered.
‘No, we are not.’
‘Mum and Dad couldn’t bring the children up. We’ve never thought about that, have we?’
‘We’re not going to die.’
‘I love you so much, Tom.’
Her voice brought him close to tears again. There was so much tenderness, warmth, caring in it. ‘I love you more than anything in the world, Kellie,’ he said, leaning forward, feeling his way along the cords that bound his legs until he came to the knot.
It was tied incredibly tightly. But he worked on it relentlessly and after a short while it started to come loose. And suddenly his legs were free! Except for his shackled ankle. The thought was ever present in his mind that if the fat man came in now, there would be hell to pay. But it was a risk he had to take.
He knelt, gripped the rim of the drum, then stood up and, lifting as hard as he could, righted it. Then he felt along the top for the cap, and found it quickly, clasping his hands around it, moving them across it, trying to work out how it opened, for the first time in his life having some understanding of what it must be like to be blind.
There was a twisted wire and a paper seal over it. He worked his fingers underneath the wire and pulled. It cut into his flesh. Digging his hand in his pocket, he pulled out his handkerchief and wound it round his fingers, then tried again.
The wire snapped.
‘Why are we here, Tom?’ she asked plaintively. ‘Who is that gross creep?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What did he mean, about us “looking good dead”?’
‘He was just trying to scare us,’ Tom replied, attempting to sound convincing, struggling to make the cap move, aware that his voice sounded considerably higher than usual, a vague, flimsy plan developing in his mind.
Slowly the cap began to turn. It took five, maybe six full turns before it came away in his hand. A vile, burning acrid reek instantly filled his nostrils. He lurched back, choking, dropping the cap and hearing it roll away in the darkness.
‘TOM?’ Kellie called out, alarmed.
He continued coughing, his lungs on fire. He was trying to think back to when he had done chemistry at school, a subject he had been crap at. There had been bottles of acid in the chemistry lab. Sulphuric and hydrochloric were the ones he could immediately remember. Would this stuff, whatever it was, eat through the chain attached to his ankle?
But how could he get it out of the drum in this darkness? If the drum fell over and the stuff started pouring out, it could spread over the floor to Kellie. Or choke them.
Then his heart felt as if it had stopped. He saw the ray of light out of the corner of his eye. The rectangle in the distance. Someone was coming in.
79
Down on Level 4 of the Civic Square car park a group of police officers was clustered around the black Volkswagen Golf. Outside, officers were blocking every entrance. There was not a soul anywhere else inside the entire building.
‘I don’t want the owner to know we’ve been in,’ Grace said to the young PC from Traffic who was kneeling by the driver’s door, holding a huge set of levers on a ring in one hand and what looked like a radio transmitter in the other.
‘No worries. I’ll be able to lock it again. He’ll never know.’
Joe Tindall, in a white protective suit, stood beside Grace, chewing a stick of gum. He seemed in an even more grumpy mood than usual. ‘Not content with ruining my weekend, Roy?’ the senior SOCO said. ‘Making sure you screw my week up right from the word go too, eh?’
There was a loud click and the Golf’s door opened. Instantly its horn started blaring, a deafening, echoing
The Traffic constable popped the bonnet open and ducked under it. Within seconds, the beeping stopped. He closed the bonnet. ‘OK,’ he said to Tindall and Grace. ‘All yours.’
Grace, also in white protective suit and gloves, let Tindall go in first, and stood watching him. A quick check of his watch showed it had been twenty-five minutes since they had closed the car park. The scene outside the entrances was total chaos: police vehicles, ambulances, fire engines, dozens of stranded shoppers, business people, visitors. And the knock-on effect was that most of central Brighton’s traffic was now gridlocked.
Grace was going to have a lot of egg on his face if nothing came of this.
He watched Tindall take print dustings in the most likely places first: the interior mirror, gear stick, horn pad, interior and exterior door handles. When he was done with those, Tindall picked a hair off the driver’s headrest with tweezers and deposited it in an evidence bag. Then again using the tweezers, he removed one of several cigarette butts in the ashtray, and put that into a separate bag.
After a further five minutes he emerged from the car, looking marginally more cheerful than when he had arrived. ‘Got some good prints, Roy. I’ll get straight back and have the boys run them on NAFIS.’
NAFIS was the National Automated Fingerprint Information System.
‘I’m coming up there myself,’ Grace said. ‘I’ll be about ten minutes behind you.’
‘I’ll have a result waiting for you.’
‘I appreciate it.’
‘Actually, I don’t give a fuck whether you appreciate it or not,’ the SOCO said, staring hard at the Detective Superintendent.
Sometimes Grace found it hard to tell when Joe Tindall was being serious and when he was joking; the man had a peculiar sense of humour. He couldn’t gauge it now.
‘Good!’ Grace said, trying to humour the man. ‘I admire your detached professionalism.’
‘Detached bollocks!’ Tindall said. ‘I do it because I’m paid to do it. Being appreciated doesn’t bang my drum.’ He stepped out of his protective clothes, bagged them and headed off towards the exit staircase.
Grace and the Traffic constable exchanged a glance. ‘He can be a tetchy bugger!’
