‘Petra!’ The whisper was from behind them, beyond the thorny shrubs and bushes. ‘Petra!’ She walked towards the voice and saw, crouching below them, Ed, on a lower outcrop of shale and rock. ‘Quickly!’
She gestured to Dane and Carly and the three of them clambered down the short slope to join their military commander. They were on a narrow pathway that snaked its way around the curve of the rock about three metres below the wider road above. A silhouette appeared from round the corner: Mary, effortlessly cat-walking along the ridge. It seemed a needlessly over-confident way to join them, Petra thought. Who was she trying to impress? Immediately their attention was grabbed by the sound of a car approaching. Peering up, they saw first the bumper, the bonnet, and then, as it swung slowly round, the unmistakable paintwork of a police car.
Instinctively they all squatted a little lower. The patrol car scrunched slowly in front of the tunnel and pulled up facing the dark mouth of the gated entrance. Its side windows were clearly visible to the perching trespassers, so they squatted out of sight.
‘Don’t worry,’ Ed whispered. ‘They don’t usually stay.’
As if on cue, the engine was switched off. Petra arched an eyebrow at Ed. ‘You were saying?’
‘Just sit tight,’ he assured them, and as he said that they heard the car door open, just five or six metres away from them, followed by the crunch of boots on gravel. ‘C’mon. Let’s go.’
As they started down the narrow ridge, Carly lost her footing and sent a shower of loose shale bouncing down below them. She clutched Dane’s hand and gasped. ‘Shit. Sorry. No harm done.’ But from above them Petra heard a voice say something in Spanish.
‘Quickly!’ urged Ed, and they crept onwards on near-silent feet down the slope to an old wrought iron gate in the side of the rock. It opened inwards and was ajar just enough for Ed to squeeze through without brushing against it.
‘Follow me. And be quiet.’
Mary slid expertly through and Petra found herself next. She wasn’t as lithe as Mary but was proud of her dexterity in slipping silently through the gap. Then the smell hit her. Ed had led them into the vilest squatters’ den, a cramped cave ankle deep in detritus left by past visitors: rank litter, bottles, crushed cans. Disturbing it sent a few flies up around her, and swatting them away from her face Petra wondered if this was the worst two hundred quid anyone had ever spent. Carly was eying up the rusty gate, her mouth twisted into a grimace. Behind her Dane sensed her unease and reached forward to open the gate a little wider. It made a loud scraping squeak as it battled with the debris and centuries of rust in its hinges.
‘Who’s there?’ came a voice from above.
Ed hushed them and beckoned Carly and Dane into the hiding place. Just beyond the gate, a torch beam swung through the grey light from on high.
Chapter 5
To Petra it felt like hours but was only a couple of minutes, standing like statues, static human figurines frozen in a theatre of shit. She tried to hold her breath but her lungs ached, so she allowed herself shallow breathing through her mouth. Even holding her nose didn’t stop the stench hitting the back of her throat. Dane had pulled his T-shirt up over his nose, but it didn’t appear to be helping him either. All it did was expose his ripped stomach, enticing Carly to place her hand there, a subconscious instinct. The searchlight torch from above vanished and Ed said, ‘He’s not coming down.’
‘Think we got away with that,’ Mary said, relaxing her breathing.
‘Sorry about the gate,’ Dane said.
‘Last of the great cat burglars,’ said Petra.
‘Oi,’ Carly protested. ‘That was chivalry.’ She stroked Dane’s torso, tugged his T-shirt from his face and kissed him on the lips.
‘Really?’ asked Petra. ‘Here?’ Her schoolmate had lost none of her incorrigible sexuality. She turned to Ed. ‘What happened to “They don’t usually stay?”’
‘Just bad luck. If they’ve heard a rumour about smugglers or whatever, they occasionally plonk an officer up here for the night. Partly as a deterrent, but mainly because it’s a good lookout spot.’
Petra looked cautiously through the bars of the gate. ‘Hey it’s fine,’ Mary reassured them. ‘He’s gone.’
‘We can get to the tunnels through here,’ said Ed. ‘This area is below where you lost your ring. But let’s close this. If our friend up there comes snooping, we’ll hear him.’ He moved past them towards the heavy gate and lifted it on its hinges to start quietly swinging it closed. For a man with an injured leg, he was very strong.
Petra saw her chance of freedom slipping away. ‘Wait. This is … too much. I think I should go.’
Ed paused, resting the gate on the ground again. ‘Absolutely, you should go back if you’re not sure.’
‘What? No!’ complained Carly.
‘I mean, I want to help, Carly, but –’
‘Oh come on, Petra. The more of us the better. Just come with us. We won’t be in here long.’
‘I don’t like it, Carls. I wish I’d gone back to the hotel with Krishna.’
‘You still can,’ said Mary, gesturing towards the open gate. ‘Look, why don’t you get Krishna and go over the border to the tapas bar we were telling you about? The crossing won’t be busy; you’ll be there in half an hour. We’ve all got our passports. When we’ve found Carly’s ring we’ll all walk over and we can show them where you are.’
This sounded tempting, and even as Petra was weighing up a potentially awkward hour alone with Krishna versus the grotty hole she was standing in, her friend clasped her hand.
‘Please come and help,’ Carly said with pleading eyes.
‘I’ll text you the details of the bar while we’ve got a signal,’ Mary said to Petra, ignoring Carly and tapping on her phone. ‘Once you’re in here you’ll be cut off.’
Torn between the two worlds, the fresh, fragrant night air and this rancid stink, torn between freedom and duty, Petra slumped her shoulders and submitted to the weight of duty. Carly gave a tiny clap of her hands, Ed and Mary shrugged to each other, and Ed hoisted the gate closed.
That was when Petra noticed something odd. As the iron frame of the gate met the stone wall, she saw that it was bent, creased against the lip of solid rock. ‘Jesus, look at that. Someone’s tried to push their way out of here.’
Dane peered closer. ‘Blimey, that’s taken some force.’
Ed seemed less interested. ‘Some local delinquent struggling with the complexities of push versus pull!’
‘Or tried to leave in a hurry,’ Petra whispered, running her fingers over the distorted, pitted hulk of metal.
Ed stomped his way through the trash, his lopsided limp sending crisp wrappers and food cartons scattering, and Mary said, ‘Probably just vandals. Bored kids, wouldn’t you say, Ed? This place is full of them. Watch out for needles.’
‘That’s really gross, can we get going?’ Carly asked.
Ed led the way, stooping into the dark, narrowing funnel of the cave, followed by Mary, then Dane holding Carly’s hand, and Petra at the rear. But before they’d got more than a few paces Carly halted them. With whispers of Wait! and What? the line stopped moving. ‘I saw it! I saw something!’ Carly ordered Mary to point the torch towards the floor near her feet and started picking at the litter, cautiously lifting detritus between finger and thumb.
They watched the circle of white light with growing disgust as Carly pulled litter – most of it damp, mouldy and unrecognisable – from the ground. She recoiled when she plucked a spent condom from the crater of filth. ‘Ewwww, not even I would …’
‘Shit, Carly, what are you doing?’ demanded Dane.
‘I’m telling you, I saw a glint. A sparkle. It was … HA!’ Victorious, she pulled something up into the light. ‘Oh.’ Rather than her ring, she’d discovered a silver crucifix on a silver chain.
Petra crouched next to her to examine the find. ‘This chain has been snapped.’ But before her thoughts could continue, she was inter
rupted by a squeal from Carly, who leapt to her feet. She clasped onto Dane and pointed at the ground.
‘What? What now?’ he asked.
Ed turned on his torch to bathe the fetid carpet in more light. Petra gasped as she glimpsed the cause of Carly’s shock. In the small hole Carly had excavated, buried under the damp rubbish, the light of the torches caught the dirty sheen of a fingernail on the tip of a finger. Petra swore.
‘What is that?’ Ed asked, leaning closer. Dane used the toe of his trainer to push aside the surrounding waste, revealing a small, sallow, waxy hand. Carly gagged and pulled Dane away.
The morbid reality struck Petra. ‘Is it … a body?’
Dane said, ‘Oh God, a kid.’ Carly coughed, a rasp of vomit scorching her throat.
Mary stooped forward and swept an armful of crap aside to disclose not a dead child at all, but a dead ape. Petra breathed a huge sigh of relief and heard Dane whisper ‘Thank Christ’ under his breath. The revulsion she’d felt a moment ago was replaced with a swell of sympathy within her. She crouched back down and stroked the creature’s matted fur. ‘Poor thing. What happened to you?’
Carly was still emitting claggy throat retches, but Dane, now fully composed, said, ‘You are properly weird, Petra.’
With a tenderness at odds with their surroundings, Petra gently pulled away the fallen animal’s shroud of forgotten plastic and paper. Almost immediately she lurched back in surprise. The torch beam showed that the ape was missing a leg. In its place was a mangled stump crawling with maggots, a spot-lit glow of writhing life in a pit of death. This was the final straw for Carly, who staggered away in search of purer air. Petra wasn’t horrified, but was mystified. ‘What would do that?’
‘Animals,’ suggested Mary. ‘A dog, maybe?’
‘Probably already injured,’ Ed mused, looking at the sorry beast. ‘Crawled in here to die. That’s a good meal for a fox.’
‘Can we please find my ring!’ pleaded Carly from behind them, almost at the point of tears.
‘Roger that.’ Ed resumed his commander resolve. ‘Follow me. Just through here.’ He disappeared under a low ridge. ‘Stay close. And stay left. No tourist walkways here. There’s a nasty drop to the right.’
Petra’s feet were heavy. She was gnawed at by unanswered questions and sluggish with regret for not being strong enough to leave when she had the chance. As her friends stooped into the passageway, consumed by gloom, she dragged herself through the sad stench of the ape-grave and onward into an unknown darkness.
Chapter 6
Krishna’s friendship with Dane was full of moments like this. They’d met at the logistics company when they both went through the induction course at the same time. Krishna got a job there straight from Harlow College whereas Dane was a year older and already had a heap of sales experience before joining Armpro. Dane was senior, good-looking and responsible for managing a small team. Krishna was none of those. Despite them joining the firm on the same day, Krishna felt like the new boy every time he was with Dane at work.
Thankfully, that wasn’t often. Krishna worked in data processing, number-crunching at a desk all day. Dane worked on a different floor, wooing new clients and trying not to lose the existing ones, and was within reach of a company BMW and a corner office. By and large their friendship worked. It had changed, of course. In almost four years it had gone from regular nights on the beer plus football at the weekend to fewer drunken nights and only meeting up for cup matches or international games. They’d even flat-shared for a year, but that was before Carly. For a guy driven by status symbols, Carly had been the perfect catch: vivacious, curvy, blonde, she was straight out of the pages of one of Dane’s lad mags.
And now they were engaged. Krishna hadn’t see that coming. Although the more he’d got to know Carly, the more he’d suspected that beneath the party girl façade was a woman who yearned for some grounded commitment; so maybe he shouldn’t have been too surprised.
As he trudged slowly back into the town of Gibraltar, Krishna reflected on how this feeling of being the outcast was not unfamiliar. Worse, it was a pattern. Ever since he’d known Dane there had been evenings like this. Bilzy’s stag do sprang to mind. A dozen blokes in Belarus, of all places, and whose suitcase didn’t turn up? Krishna spent two hours filling in forms at the airport while the rest of them charged into the cold Minsk air for a hot night of vodka-fuelled debauchery. The England game in Marseille. Three weeks’ wages went on that trip, and where was Krishna when Dier scored England’s only goal? Fetching burgers for the boys. And worse, it was a 1-1 draw. Against Russia!
There was a twisted logic to it, an equation in Krishna’s mathematical mind: Krishna + Dane + highly emotive environment = Dane has a great time while Krishna looks like a tit. Apparently, being on this peculiar rock made no difference to the immovable maths of their friendship. Descending a flight of steps into the warm lights of the town centre, he shrugged off his insecurities and headed towards the hotel. What had seemed like a cheap B&B pub in the daylight took on a more welcoming character after dark. The Luna Rossa Hotel, casting its faded-amber light over the cobbled street, was little more than a bar with some rooms above it, but thanks to recently putting the word ‘boutique’ in front of ‘hotel’ on their TripAdvisor listing, they were rarely without guests. Krishna liked the place but detected that their arrival that morning had been a disappointment to Carly and Petra. Girls were like that. Always making a mountain out of a shower curtain.
At the door he paused at a parish noticeboard, a scuffed Perspex window into another world: meat raffles, whist drives, a poster declaring ‘Desaparecidos’ above a picture of a pretty girl. Written in Spanish, it looked like the girl (age twenty-three, Krishna deciphered) had gone missing. The rudimentary details described red hair and a tattoo. Alongside her smiling picture was a close-up of a tattoo: Disney’s Tigger, grinning in blue ink. Judging by the poster’s crusty, curled corners this was not a recent story. Half pasted across it was a flyer for ‘Madame Rosella’, whose services ranged from tarot-card readings to full-immersion spirit-guide séances. She also did pedicures.
The Luna Rossa’s thick wooden door, held together by centuries of gloss paint, led to a small hallway not big enough to do anything but make a choice: two frosted glass doors offered Hotel on the right, or opposite, Bar. Krishna turned left.
He walked into a room filled with chatter, cigarette smoke and … men. That was the first thing he noticed, the lack of women and the abundance of smoke. In England smoking in public buildings had been banned for years. It was why most of Krishna’s colleagues ‘vaped’. Puffing on electronic cigarettes still allowed them to take regular breaks from their workstations. This bar was like a nicotine-coloured slice of a forgotten era: a 1970s working men’s club, wrenched from a sodden working-class backstreet and dropped among the lapping waves of the Mediterranean. A handful of locals sat at sticky tables playing dominoes, dealing cards, or laughing at a yellowing wall-mounted TV showing a home-video calamities show.
A barman wiped some glasses, staring at the screen. Krishna perched on a stool, and the man – tanned, craggy, with neatly cropped hair – put down his cloth and smiled a crooked ‘what can I get you?’ smile. Krishna placed a fifty-euro note on the bar and said, ‘Una cerveza, por favor.’
The barman raised his eyebrows and said, in a soft Scottish accent straight out of Perthshire, ‘And what sorta beer d’you want?’
Trying to style out his misinterpretation of the mahogany man’s origins, Krishna surveyed the beer pumps as if choosing a fine wine. ‘I’ll … take … a … lager. Pint.’
The barman flicked a plastic tap and familiar golden beer frothed in a glass. As he slid it to Krishna, the barman held up the orange euro note and said, ‘I’ll take it, pal, but it’s the Queen’s sterling here.’
‘Oh, really? Bloody hell, I’ve got three hundred in euros. Just assumed ’cause I was on my holidays it’d be euros all the way.’
‘Aye, you’re n
ot the first. Where you from?’
‘Basildon. In –’
‘Essex. Yeah, I know it. Well, you’re over a thousand miles from Basildon, laddy, but this is still England’s green and pleasant land.’ He stuffed the note in the cash register and slammed shut the cash drawer. ‘I’ll just keep it safe in there in case you want another.’ With that, the perpetrator of this extortion extended his hand. ‘I’m Fraser. Welcome to the Luna Rossa. My wife checked you and your friends in this morning, is that right?’
‘Oh, yeah, I’m Krishna.’ He felt the steel grip of Fraser’s rough hand and noticed that his tight-fitting T-shirt bore a military logo beneath which were embroidered the words OP TELIC 2003. ‘You, er, both run this place, then? S’lovely.’
‘Aye, thirteen years.’ The tone of his voice was factual. Friendly, yet at the same time without warmth. His short-cropped hair, creased, weathered face and well-toned arms made him look like a battle-worn army veteran. And that’s when Krishna realised that was exactly what he was. He supped his brew and searched for a subject change.
‘So let me get this straight. You’ve got pounds, not euros.’
‘Correct.’
‘Red telephone boxes like in olden days.’
‘Aye.’
‘There’s a Marks and Spencer’s.’
‘Be uncivilised not to.’
‘And also like the olden days, everyone’s smoking in the pub and … and the whole place is crawling with mad monkeys!’ Fraser laughed with a smoker’s rattle. ‘You’ve met the natives!’
‘Mmm,’ nodded Krishna through a slurp of froth. ‘A little too closely. One of them nearly had me earlier.’
‘If you think the monkeys are mad,’ drawled Fraser, pouring himself a tot of whisky, ‘you should meet the locals.’ He pointed to a poster behind the bar and said, ‘This isnae England, pal. You’re on the Rock, now!’ The poster had the words THIS IS NOT ENGLAND across the top and detailed a host of different emergency phone numbers for police, coastguard and the like. This strange welcome to a holiday destination that was never even Krishna’s idea reminded him of the welcome extended by the surly drinkers of the Slaughtered Lamb in American Werewolf in London. He frowned at his drink and muttered, ‘TripAdvisor never mentioned homicidal monkeys.’
All Hollow Page 4