Energy flowed back into her body. She pushed herself away from the wall.
‘What are you doing now? Bitch?’
She breathed in and out slowly through her mouth, moving quietly to the rucksack.
‘Bitch.’
He hammered on the deck again – bang bang bang – but she didn’t flinch. She was right. He couldn’t get to her. He really couldn’t get to her. She began taking things out. The calcium carbide, the parachute line and the cigarette lighters. She put them all on the ledge just under the rope locker. The trick was going to be to seal the hole that went from the locker up to the deck. She could do it with her bloodied T-shirt – but she’d have to wait for him to get off the deck. The time would come. She was sure of it. He wasn’t going to stay up there for ever. She found the empty bottle he’d given her, uncapped it and submerged it in the water, squeezing it gently until it was full. Reaching above her head she squirted it into the locker, refilled it and repeated the process.
‘What’re you doing, bitch?’ He shifted around on the hatch. She could feel him above her, moving like an awful giant spider, trying to see what she was up to. ‘Tell me or I’ll come in there and find out.’
She swallowed. With about a litre of water in the rope locker she shook the bottle and placed it, neck down, in the webbing of the rucksack to dry out. Working in the moonlight, she found the chisel and the six-inch nail she’d been using with the acrow prop. She took her time, lining up the nail, and popping the plastic casing of the lighters with a neat tap of the chisel. Prody was listening to everything, his breathing right over her head. She could almost feel his cold eye swivelling to follow her as she bent and carefully tipped the contents of each lighter into the water bottle.
She straightened and gave the bottle a shake, watched the contents swishing around. The lighters had been full but there wasn’t much fluid – under a hundred millitres. It would be enough to soak part of the para line and make a wick of sorts that would reach into the next compartment. The rest she’d have to sacrifice to the rope locker to give the acetylene the extra explosive jolt it needed.
‘Tell me what you’re fucking doing or I’m coming in.’
She swallowed. She put her thumb and forefinger on her throat and pressed lightly. Tried to stop her voice shaking as she said, ‘Go on then. Come in and see.’
There was a pause. As if he couldn’t believe what she’d said. Then he began to claw and hammer and tear at the hatch, shouting and swearing and kicking. She raised her eyes to it. He can’t get in, she told herself. He cannot get in. Eyes locked on the hatch, she began searching through the rucksack, trying to find something she could put the lighter fuel in to protect it from the water in the rope locker. Prody stopped screaming at her. Breathing hard, he slithered to the edge of the deck and dropped off into the canal. She could hear him walking around the barge, pacing, trying to find a way in. He wouldn’t. Unless he got the angle grinder started again, or unless he climbed back up the hole and somehow found himself another power tool, he wouldn’t get back in. She was going to beat him at his own game.
She found the plastic tray that had contained batteries for her torch. She took it to the ledge and had turned for the bottle of lighter fuel when a long wave of nausea and weakness came over her.
Immediately she set the bottle on the ledge and sat down, breathing hard to steady herself. She opened her mouth and sucked in air, but her body was at the end of its resilience. The fumes of the lighter fuel, the stench of rot and fear overwhelmed her. She just had time to tip herself down on to the ledge when a dense and bitter pull rose up through her chest and neck and dragged her feet first downwards until everything, every thought, every impulse, was reduced to nothing more than a tiny red point of electrical activity at the pulpy centre of her brain.
67
At four thirty Charlie Stephenson blinked, opened his mouth and began to howl. In the room at the front of the house Skye stirred. She rubbed her eyes and reached sleepily for Nigel, but found cold empty sheets instead of his warm mass. She groaned and rolled on to her back, tilting her head up to see the numbers projected on to her ceiling – 4:32. She let her hands drop across her face. Four thirty. Charlie’s favourite time.
‘Oh, God, Charlie.’ She pulled on her dressing-gown, sleepily shoved her feet into slippers. ‘Oh God.’
She shuffled into the nursery, the walking dead moving towards the soft glow of his Winnie the Pooh nightlight. The nursery was dark. And cold – too cold. The sash window was open. Drowsily, she padded to it and closed it. She couldn’t recall leaving it open – but her brain was mush these days. She paused to look into the moonlit alley that ran along the side of the house. At the dustbins lined up. They’d had a break-in a couple of months ago. Someone had got in through the french windows in the living room. Nothing had been taken, but in a way that had freaked her out more than if everything had gone. Afterwards Nigel had put locks on the windows downstairs. She really ought to remember to close them.
In the cot Charlie screwed up his face. The sobs made his little chest jerk up and down.
‘Oh you little tyke.’ She smiled. ‘Waking Mummy up.’ She reached in and wrapped his blanket around him, swaddled it around his arms, lifted him up and carried him into her room, murmuring to him all the way, about how he was going to be the death of her, how she’d remind him of this when he was eighteen and dating. It was windy outside. The trees in the front were making strange moving shapes on the ceiling as they bent and swayed. The draught coming through the windows ruffled the curtains. They popped and lifted.
Charlie’s nappy was dry so she rested him on a pillow and climbed sleepily on to the bed next to him. She began to unhook the maternity bra. She stopped. Sat upright, eyes wide, suddenly completely awake, her heart thudding. In the alley outside Charlie’s window something had clattered.
She held a finger to her lip. ‘Stay there, Charlie.’ She tipped silently out of bed on her bare feet and went back into the nursery. The window was rattling. She went to it, pressed her forehead to the glass and peered down into the alley. One of the dustbin lids lay on the ground. Taken off by the wind.
She closed the curtains, went back into the bedroom and climbed on to the bed. That was the problem when Nigel was away. Her imagination ran riot.
‘Silly Mummy.’ She pulled Charlie into her arms, jammed down her bra to expose her nipple and got him latched on. Lay back and dreamily closed her eyes. ‘Silly old Mummy and her silly old imagination.’
68
As dawn came Caffery slept, fully dressed, half curled up on four chair cushions he’d dropped on to the office floor at three a.m. He dreamed, incongruously, of dragons and lions. The lions looked like real ones. Their teeth were a hard-grained yellow, coated with blood and saliva. He could smell their hot breath and see the matting in their manes. The dragons on the other hand were two-dimensional, children’s tin dragons, as if they were wearing armour. They clanged and clattered across the battlefield, carrying their streaming banners. They reared and rolled their long metallic necks. They were huge. They crushed the lions like ants.
From time to time he half woke. Surfaced a little to a place where the caustic remnants of worry sat. Niggles he hadn’t untangled before he’d slept. Prody’s sour face in the car as he drove away last night and how that had rankled. Flea going off for three days’ climbing and how that hadn’t sounded right. Worse, the whole sad, fat fact of Ted Moon still out there. Martha and Emily still missing six days into the case.