He was in a bad mood. No matter how well you planned things, shit happened. There was always something you hadn’t accounted for. On this particular job now, it was tides. It just had not occurred to him. Now in the rucksack he had bought, lying beside him on the passenger seat, he had a tide chart which he’d printed out at an Internet café half an hour ago. He’d study it carefully in a few minutes and get his head around it. Meanwhile he was anxious to move the boy on. The area was crawling with police and it looked as if a massive systematic search was in progress. A quarter of a mile further up the road there was a roadblock, but the only vehicles they seemed interested in were Toyota Yaris saloons.
Too much heat on those vehicles. Too much danger of his being found. The search line still had a while to go before they reached this locality, he worked out, an hour and a half, maybe two hours. He would make sure they didn’t find anything.
He climbed out of the car, popped open the boot, then swiftly walked across to the rear of the Yaris.
Tyler, clenched up, fighting an urgent need to pee that was getting worse and worse, and craving water for his parched mouth and throat, had heard the sound of a car moving close by, then stopping. He was about to start kicking again when suddenly there was a sharp, metallic clunk and the boot opened. He felt a blast of fresh, damp air, but could not see any daylight now, just darkness with an orange streetlighting tinge to it.
Then he saw the dazzling beam of a torch and the shadowy shape of a baseball cap and dark glasses beyond. He was truly scared. If he could just speak, maybe the man would get him some water and something to eat?
Suddenly he felt himself being lifted. He was swung through the air, feeling spots of rain on his face, then dropped, painfully, inside another space that smelled similar, but different. Maybe even newer?
There was a thud and he was entombed once more in pitch darkness. He listened for footsteps but instead heard the car starting up. From the bumping motion, he could tell they were moving.
The car accelerated harshly, sending him rolling backwards and cracking his head painfully on something sharp. He let out a muffled cry of pain. Then the car braked sharply and he tumbled forward a couple of feet.
Whatever he had hit had definitely been sharp. He wormed his way back, as the car accelerated again, then felt with his face, rubbing his nose up against what he thought must be the rear of the boot. Then he found something that was protruding. He didn’t know what it was – perhaps the back of one of the rear light housings. He tried to press his mouth up against it and rub, but the car was swaying too much and he was finding it hard to keep steady.
Then he felt the car brake sharply and turn, and keep on turning. He was rolled, helplessly, on his side. There was a massive bump and he cracked his head again on the boot lid, then the car halted, throwing him forward.
Tooth looked carefully as he pulled off the side of the road above the harbour, bumping over the kerb and on to the grass, driving far enough away so that the car was almost invisible from the road. The lights of traffic flashed past above him and he could see the glow from the houses across the road, most of them with curtains or blinds drawn.
He halted beside a small, derelict-looking building, the size of a bus shelter, directly opposite the massive edifice of Shoreham Power Station, across the black water of the harbour. The little building was constructed in brick, with a tiled roof, and had a rusting metal door with a large, rusted padlock on it. It was the padlock he had put on last time he was here, six years ago. Clearly no one had been in, which was good. Not that anyone had any reason to go in there. The place was condemned, highly dangerous, toxic and in imminent danger of collapsing. A large yellow and black sign on the wall displayed an electricity symbol and the words KEEP OUT – DANGER OF DEATH.
In the distance he could hear a helicopter. It had been flying around, on and off, for most of the afternoon and evening. From his rucksack, with his gloved hands, he pulled out a head-mounted flashlight, strapped it around his baseball cap and removed the bolt cutters he had acquired in a hardware store. He switched on the flashlight, then snapped the padlock on the door of the brick building and switched the light off again. He checked the windows of the houses once more before lifting the boy out of the car and carrying him inside the building, along with his rucksack. He pulled the door closed with an echoing clang.
Then he switched on his flashlight once more. Directly in front of him was a short, narrow flight of concrete steps going down, between two brick walls. A pair of tiny red eyes appeared momentarily in the darkness at the bottom of the steps, then darted away.
Tooth put the boy down on his feet, still holding him to stop him falling over.
‘You need to take a piss, kid?’
The boy nodded. Tooth helped him and zipped him back up. Then he carried the boy down the steps, brushing past several spider webs. At the bottom was a gridded metal platform, with a handrail, and a whole cluster of pipes, some overhead, some on the walls, most of them bare, exposed metal, rusting badly and covered in what looked like fraying asbestos. It was as silent as a tomb in here.
On the other side of the handrail was a shaft, with a steel ladder, that dropped 190 feet. Tooth looked at the boy, ignoring the pleading in his eyes, then tilted him over the handrail and, shining his flashlight beam down, to enable the boy to see the vertical drop. The boy’s eyes bulged in terror.
Tooth pulled a length of blue, high-tensile rope from his rucksack and tied it carefully around the boy’s ankles. Then he lowered the boy, who was struggling now, thrashing in terror and making a whining, yammering sound through the duct tape across his mouth, a short distance down the shaft and tied the rope around the guard rail.
‘I’ll be back in a while, kid,’ Tooth said. ‘Don’t struggle too much. You wouldn’t want your ankles coming loose.’
105
Tyler’s glasses were falling up his nose. He was scared that at any moment they would drop into the void below. But worse, he could feel the rope slipping, especially down his left ankle. He was swaying and starting to feel giddy and totally disoriented.
Something tiny was crawling over his nose. A cold draught blew on his face, the air dank, musty and carrying the fainter, noxious odour of something rotting.
The rope slipped a little more.
Was the man going to come back?
Where was his phone? Was it in the car? How would anyone find him here without Mapper?
He began to panic, then felt the rope slip further. His glasses fell further, too. He froze, stiffening his legs and feet, pushing them against the bindings to keep them as tight as he could. The creature was climbing over his lips now, tickling his nose. He could feel the rush of blood in his head. Suddenly, something touched his right shoulder.
He screamed, the sound trapped inside him.
Then he realized he had just swung into the side of the shaft.
The walls had looked rough, he thought, in the brief moment he had seen them in the beam of the torch. The edges of the ladder would be rough, or at least sharp. As gently as he could, he tried to swing himself around, swaying, bumping into the shaft again, and again, then painfully against the ladder.
Yes!
If he could rub the bindings around his arms up and down against the rough edge, maybe he could saw through them.
His glasses moved further up his forehead. The insect was now crawling over his eyelid.
The rope slipped further down his ankles.
106
This place had worked well for him last week, Tooth reasoned. It was dark, no one overlooked it and there were no cameras. Aside from the power station, there were only timber warehouses, closed and dark for the night, on the far wharf. And the water was deep.