Cursing to himself, Carlyle continued his slog round the site. After a couple of minutes largely spent trying not to fall into a series of large potholes, he caught a glimpse of a weak gleam coming from the ground floor of a property around 100 yards to his right.
An owl hooted in the darkness and he almost jumped out of his skin.
‘Get a grip, you idiot.’ After waiting for his heart rate to return to normal, he glanced at his watch. He had already been creeping round this place for more than half an hour. ‘Get on with it,’ he mumbled to himself, tightly gripping the salvaged length of pipe. ‘You don’t want Gapper to have to rescue you again.’
Cautiously approaching his target, the inspector saw that the light was coming from an empty window on the ground floor, gently illuminating the breezeblocks that formed the unfinished interior wall. As with its neighbours, the front of the property consisted of an area of deeply churned-up mud. Tiptoeing across this no man’s land, the inspector crouched below the empty window, listening for any evidence of human activity inside.
The owl hooted again.
Shut it.
Holding his breath, he tried to block out extraneous distractions. A few moments later, proof of life from inside the house came in the unmistakable form of a loud, extended fart. This was followed by a second, much shorter expulsion of wind.
The inspector resumed breathing, counted to ten and then slowly edged to the side of the window, before taking a peek inside.
Well, bugger me. Although it pained him to admit it, it looked as if the Commander had been right. Lying under a dirty blanket on the concrete floor, surrounded by an array of empty pizza boxes and other fast-food packaging, Werner Kortmann had his back to the window. Despite the chain around his ankle, he semed to be sleeping soundly. There was no sign of Popp.
Moving away from the window, Carlyle cautiously slunk around to the doorway and stepped inside. ‘Hey. It’s the police.’ Lifting a foot an inch off the ground, he prodded Kortmann with his toe.
‘Geh zum Teufel.’ Kortmann brushed away the inspector’s boot and sat bolt upright. ‘Wer bist du?’
‘The po-lice,’ Carlyle repeated, waiting for the guy to come to, recognize him and switch into his better-than-native English.
Kortmann obliged on all three fronts almost immediately. ‘Well, get me out of here,’ he snapped, yanking at his chain.
‘Erm, yes.’ Carlyle gave the chain a few desultory thwacks with the length of pipe he had discovered at the entrance to the site.
Kortmann grimaced at the sudden, discordant noise. ‘That’s not going to do it,’ he shouted, ‘is it?’
‘No, I suppose not.’ The inspector tossed the pipe into the corner of the room and looked around in the vain hope of finding a handy axe, or a pair of bolt cutters, nearby.
‘Hurry up.’
Carlyle swiftly concluded that his search was not going to glean so much as a paper clip. Perhaps Gapper might have something handy in the boot of the Astra. Digging out his mobile, he was about to call the driver when he remembered he was in the middle of nowhere, with no signal. Scratching his head, he smiled weakly. ‘I’m afraid this might take a little while.’
‘Schwachkopf.’
From Kortmann’s angry stare, Carlyle didn’t feel the need to ask for a translation. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get it sorted.’
The German said nothing. Distracted by a noise from the darkness, he turned his attention to a point somewhere behind the inspector’s head.
‘Now, now,’ said an amused voice from the doorway. Footsteps tapped across the concrete. ‘That’s no way to speak to the good inspector.’
The inspector looked longingly in the direction of his discarded weapon. ‘Marcus Popp, I presume.’
‘Good, good. Very good.’
Werner Kortmann’s angry gaze flashed from the policeman to the kidnapper and back again. It was hard to determine which of the two wretched specimens standing in front of him the old man found the more annoying. ‘Popp?’ he thundered. ‘Is that this criminal’s real name?’
Carlyle made a face. ‘It’s kind of complicated.’
‘Everything’s complicated to you, isn’t it, Mr Policeman?’ Taking a step away from the inspector, Popp’s eyes gleamed with a demented amusement. In the half-light, he looked like some kind of drugged-up Manga hoodlum. ‘Maybe you should take a rest. Sit down.’
Reluctantly, Carlyle did as he was told, parking his backside a couple of feet from Kortmann.
Popp waved the gun at his two captives. ‘Closer.’ As Carlyle shuffled towards the grumpy businessman, Popp fumbled in his pocket, coming up with a short length of chain – like the kind of thing you might use to attach a bicycle to a lamppost – and a padlock. ‘Here,’ he tossed the chain towards the inspector. ‘Tie yourself up, like Werner there.’
Catching the padlock in front of his face, the inspector did as he was told, tying the chain around his ankle and then running it carefully through the hook on the floor. ‘What’s the plan then, Marcus?’
‘You’ll see. It will be a surprise.’
Great, Carlyle thought gloomily, I love surprises. His analysis of Popp as a harmless nutter was now looking rather cavalier. Even the intervention of the local plod would have been welcome at this point. Some robust ribbing at the hands of a provincial flatfoot would be a price worth paying if they could get him out of this alive.
‘Hurry up.’
‘OK, OK.’ Carlyle fiddled ineffectually with the chain. ‘Locks were never really my strong point.’ Simpson would have a fit when she heard about this, no matter that this whole fiasco had been her bloody idea in the first place. He knew that everything would get twisted, so that it ended up as his fault.
Feeling rather sorry for himself, he stared out into the darkness, wondering if Elmhirst had already set off on her mission to find Gapper. If nothing else, Carlyle was confident that he could rely on the up-and-coming young sergeant to follow his instructions. Whether those instructions would prove enough to save him, however, was another matter entirely.
‘That’s one of the things I was wondering about,’ Popp chuckled. ‘What exactly is your strong point, Inspector?’
You’ll find out when I’m giving you a good hiding, you little wanker. Leaving the chain as loose as possible, he snapped the padlock shut and tossed the key back to his captor, deliberately sending it high and wide so that it flew past Popp’s right shoulder. The gunman made a half-hearted attempt to catch it, but in the event seemed happy enough to let it bounce off the concrete, landing somewhere in the shadows.
Stepping forward, Popp inspected the chain from a safe distance. ‘OK,’ he said finally. ‘You two sit tight, I won’t be long.’
Watching Popp disappear through the doorway, Carlyle shifted on the concrete. His left buttock ached and the pain in his foot had returned. After a few moments of ineffectually rattling his chain, he lay down flat.
‘It’s no good,’ Kortmann said bossily. ‘You’re not going to get comfortable.’
‘Thanks for pointing that out.’
‘I’ve been here for the last two days.’ Kortmann scooped up his blanket and wrapped it tightly around his shoulders. ‘I feel as if I’ve been run over by a truck’
Carlyle looked over at the dishevelled figure. ‘You’ve been taken for a ride here, haven’t you?’
Kortmann frowned. ‘Taken for a ride?’
‘Conned.’ He gestured towards the darkness. ‘This guy Popp has taken you for a right fool.’
‘You don’t say,’ Kortmann responded drily, apparently no longer particularly interested in his captor’s true identity. ‘Thank God you managed to see through him and rescue me from this rather unfortunate situation.’