feet between them.
‘You can’t dial with that thing, can you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘What about email?’
‘I could if I had my phone.’
He urinated into the orange bucket which had arrived a few minutes earlier with a relief that was, for a few fleeting moments, close to bliss.
‘Don’t forget to pull the chain,’ Kellie said.
He grinned, suddenly loving her courage. If you could still smile, keep your spirits up – that was how people survived ordeals. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘And I’ll put the lid back down.’
He took the few paces the chain allowed him over to the drum he had opened, then shone the light on its side, looking for the label he had felt earlier in the darkness. He found it.
It was white, with a yellow and black HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE! warning label next to it. On the white part was written: H2SO4. CONCENTRATE. 25 LTRS.
Tom again thought back as hard as he could to his schoolboy chemistry lessons. Would this stuff eat through metal? How quickly?
There was just one way to find out.
He put the Palm down on the floor and picked up the bucket. As he did so, the display went out. For an instant his heart sank as he feared the battery had died, then he realized it was on an automatic power-down after two minutes. Quickly, he reset it to stay on permanently. Then he picked up the bucket and hurled its contents away from himself and Kellie, as far as he could.
He turned his attention to the drum. He had removed the cap earlier, and there was a fierce acrid smell as he neared it. He took a deep breath and, holding the drum as firmly as he could, very aware and scared of the consequences of knocking it over, tilted it so that some poured from the top and splashed on the floor beside the bucket.
‘Shit.’
Steam curled up from the floor. The acid was reacting with something, which was a good sign.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just trying an experiment.’
‘What? What are you trying?’ Kellie asked, her voice pitifully tight.
From his poor memory of chemistry some acids would not dissolve both plastic and metal. The fact that these drums were plastic told him they should not dissolve the bucket.
The burning acrid reek was getting worse; he could feel it right down his throat. He stepped back, took a deep breath, then eased the drum back a few inches and tried again. This time the acid rattled into the bucket. He kept going until it was just under half full, set the drum back down, upright, then picked up the Palm, examining the bucket carefully to make sure no acid was on the handle nor anywhere else he would touch.
He poured a small amount of the acid onto a couple of links of the chain.
Nothing happened. Wisps of vile-smelling steam rose from the floor on which the two links lay, and immediately around them, but there was no apparent reaction with the steel at all.
He stared down in agonized frustration, and swore. He might just as well have poured water onto them.
84
Carl Venner waddled up and down his office, a freshly lit cigar clamped in his mouth, wringing his hands, directing his anger alternately at Luvic, who was chewing gum and smoking a cigarette at the same time, and the Russian. ‘Boys, this is not a good situation. It is just so not good.’
He raised his hand to his mouth, removed his cigar, then began biting the skin on the end of his index finger again. Tearing at it.
The Russian, who rarely spoke, said, ‘We need get Yuri out of hospital before he wake.’
‘Either get him out or silence him,’ Venner said.
‘I don’t kill my brother,’ he said darkly.
‘You work for me, Roman; you do what I fucking tell you.’
‘Then I no work for you.’
Venner strutted up to him. ‘Listen, you piece of shit. You’d be fucking driving a tractor in the Ukraine if it wasn’t for me, so don’t ever threaten to quit, because I just might accept your resignation, and then what the fuck do you do?’
The Russian looked sullen but said nothing.
Luvic mimed a chop across his own neck with his hand. ‘I fix.’
The Russian walked across to the Albanian and planted himself squarely in front of him; he stood a good head taller than the former bare-knuckle fighter. ‘You kill my brother,’ he said, ‘I kill you.’
The Albanian stared mockingly back at the Russian, still chewing his gum. He brought his cigarette to his mouth twice in rapid succession, taking two quick drags, inhaling sharply and blowing the smoke out, then said, ‘I do what Mr Smith say to me to do. I obey Mr Smith.’
‘We have an even more urgent problem,’ Venner said. ‘That fuckwit creep John Frost – Gidney – with his goddamn weather reports, well there’s one fucking report he got wrong!’
The two men looked at him quizzically.
‘Acid rain! Bad-hair day for him today.’
The Russian grinned; the Albanian, who had no sense of humour, did not get it. He had put the Weatherman’s body in the sulphuric acid tank, as was normal; in a couple of days he would move the bones to the hydrochloric tank. After that there would be no trace of him left.
‘Our problem,’ Venner went on, ‘is we don’t know what he did, what he said to anyone. And he lied about his phone, right?’
The Albanian nodded his confirmation. ‘It was in his car, outside, switched on.’
‘We know what that means, right?’ Venner said.
Both his employees nodded.
‘The police can get his phone company to plot his route across Brighton and Hove – exact times and places. Gentlemen, we need to bail, I’m afraid. We need to get out of here and go back to base in Albania until things calm down.’
‘I prefer stay here,’ the Russian said.
Venner tapped his chest. ‘I’m fifty-nine. You think I want to spend any part of what’s left of my life in that shithole country, if I don’t have to? It’s even got the world’s ugliest women. We’re here in this country because we like it here. But you guys have fucked up.’
‘How?’ the Russian said, looking angry now.
‘How?’ Venner said, as if astonished by the question. ‘Mik gets followed from somewhere in Kemp Town to a car park in the centre of Brighton-’
Interrupting him, the Albanian said, ‘Yes, but I lose him in the car park.’
‘Yes – and your goddamn Golf and all.’
‘I will get that back.’
Ignoring him, Venner turned his rage back to the Russian. ‘Your idiot brother attracts the attention of the police, then gets in an automobile wreck and lets them get their hands on his laptop with our film of D’Eath on it, and you don’t think that’s a fuck-up?’
The Russian was silent.
‘Here’s what we do,’ Venner said, his tone suddenly more conciliatory. ‘We shoot the film of Mr and Mrs Bryce right now, and get rid of them. Then we’re out of here. We’ll go to Paris this afternoon. Then on from there. OK?’
Two silent, reluctant nods.
Then the Albanian said, ‘Where we do the film?’
