by Chris Ewan
‘Satisfied?’ Anderson asked him.
Lukas nodded.
‘Good. Then check the girl.’
Rebecca staggered out of the van and swayed woozily in the clearing. Lukas went through the same process, beginning with her ankles and working his way up her body to the ends of her arms. I noticed that he didn’t meet Rebecca’s blackened eyes as he checked her.
‘She clear?’ Anderson asked.
Lukas nodded again. Fitfully this time.
‘Great. Then close up the van and come take this gun.’
Lukas slammed the sliding door shut, then limped back to Anderson and claimed the pistol. There was a soft breeze through the trees, swaying the tall pines and rustling the branches and needles. The sky above them was pale blue and near-cloudless. I could hear birdsong.
‘So, well done guys.’ Anderson sidestepped to my right, closer to the garage door. ‘Just the knife, right? And you dropped it during the amnesty, so that means we’re good. Except we’re not, as it happens. Because I lied about the amnesty.’
He moved fast, whipping the bat back over his shoulder, twisting at the waist and swinging with everything he had. The bat was a swooping blur. It buzzed in the air. I saw his elbows rotate, his wrists extend at the end of the swing. Then I felt the meat of the bat bury itself in the fragile plate of my bad shoulder.
I hadn’t expected it. I hadn’t adjusted my stance or braced for the impact. I was wide open at my most vulnerable point.
The pain was immediate and startling. Fissures of agony exploded across my back. My muscles spasmed. My head jerked back and I screamed and fell to my knees.
There was nothing I could do to smother the pain. I couldn’t clasp my hand to it. I couldn’t reach. My body was canted to the left, almost as if Anderson’s bat had passed right through me and taken a ragged slice of my torso with it. My left arm was dead. Completely busted. If the wrench hadn’t been hidden inside my sling, it would have dropped to the ground for sure.
The pain got worse. It bloomed and mushroomed. My eyes watered. My ears hummed.
Rebecca reached down to me, but I pushed her away. I knew that if anyone touched me the pain would be terrible. I thought of her face. The puffed-up, discoloured mess the bat had made of it. I couldn’t begin to imagine how bad it must have been for her.
‘Get up,’ Anderson barked.
But I couldn’t get up. I couldn’t move. I was making a lot of involuntary sounds. Panting and whimpering, drawing fast, shallow breaths.
‘Get up or I’ll hit you again.’
This time, Rebecca didn’t take no for an answer. She ducked down and hooked a hand beneath my good arm and heaved me to my feet. I howled. She held me up. Her strength surprised me. I needed her there. My legs were jelly. I was twisted around to my side, face down, my back turned to Anderson. I must have looked like I was cowering. Maybe I was. All I knew for certain was that I couldn’t straighten up for fear of passing out.
‘That was for the knife,’ Anderson said. ‘You’re a partnership, right? If one of you screws up, one of you has to suffer the consequences. Understand?’
‘Enough,’ Rebecca said. ‘Just tell us what you want.’
‘What I want? OK, I want you to get inside the house. Right now. Lukas, you have the key?’
Lukas fumbled in his pocket. His movements were rushed and anxious. I got the impression he wanted Anderson to hit us again about as much as we did. He circled the bonnet of my van, limping heavily, and approached the front door.
We didn’t hesitate to follow. The last thing I wanted was to be struck again.
Anderson locked the van and then tracked us from behind. He was holding the baseball bat out in front of him like a cattle prod. It was just inches from my skin.
Lukas had some trouble fitting the key in the lock. His hand was shaking. He got it eventually and pushed the door open. Then he hobbled to one side and waved us into the hallway with the gun.
It was gloomy and there was a strong smell of damp I hadn’t noticed before. The carpet was thin and threadbare underfoot. The corridor wasn’t wide enough for two. I went first, at a stoop. Rebecca followed.
‘Go on into the kitchen,’ Anderson said.
Nothing had changed. The wooden table and chairs were still in the middle of the room. The cheaply tiled counters were still empty. The windows were still too low in the wall, and too small to let in sufficient light.
‘Head through into the garage,’ Anderson said.
There was a key fitted in a lock on the internal door. Rebecca turned it, then swung the door open and helped me to shuffle through.
The garage was close to pitch black. I stumbled down the step from the kitchen, wrenching my aching shoulder.
Anderson said, ‘Move forwards. Into the middle.’
We did as we were told. There was a dry click and the fluorescent tubes twitched into life, bouncing light off the vast concrete floor. The garage was almost exactly the same as the last time I’d seen it. The boiler in the corner and the immersion tank alongside it and the tangle of piping surrounding them both. The empty cubicle shelving behind us. The garage door off to our right.
The garage door was the only thing that had changed. A horizontal dent ran across the central portion of it, at about waist height. The skirt of the door had been shunted back by the force of the impact from the van, lifting it an inch away from the floor and revealing a bar of daylight. Now I understood that Anderson wasn’t simply a bad driver. He’d used my van to block off a potential exit.
That only left one way out, and Anderson was about to seal it.
‘Sit tight awhile,’ he said.
Then he yanked the kitchen door closed behind him and I heard the sound of the key turning in the lock.
Chapter Forty-six
Lukas sagged with relief as he set the gun down on the kitchen table. He hadn’t liked holding it. He hadn’t welcomed the sensation of having a weapon in his hand or the thought of what it made him capable of. He’d been terrified of having to shoot. First, because he didn’t trust his aim or his nerve. Second, because he dreaded the reality of what shooting someone would be like. The gore. The guilt. The queasiness of it all.
The baseball bat had been bad enough. Anderson had made him watch while he beat the woman, and now the man, too. Somehow, he’d kept it together, and he was thankful they hadn’t tried to fight back. He hated the idea of what Anderson would have done to them, but more than that, he feared what would have happened to him if they’d overpowered Anderson in some way. He was no fighter. He would have been at their mercy, and who knew what kind of revenge they might have taken?
He stared at the plain white door that separated him from their prisoners. The cheap key protruding from the lock. He’d spent weeks sitting in this dismal kitchen, looking at the exact same door, and now it was all that stood between him and a future he was scared to contemplate. What would Anderson do with the brother? With the female detective? Whatever it turned out to be, Lukas didn’t think it would be good.
‘Go get your laptop,’ Anderson told him. He tossed the baseball bat on to the kitchen table and reached a hand inside his trouser pocket. He removed the purple memory stick and held it between his finger and thumb, like it was an exotic fruit he’d just plucked. ‘Bring it back in here. Let’s see what’s on this thing.’
Lukas turned and hobbled along the corridor and out into the clearing. The pain from his leg wasn’t so bad. Anderson had given him drugs that numbed the feeling in his thigh. His leg felt dull and stiff, and he’d grown used to swinging it from his hip without flexing his knee.
It was silent in the clearing, but he couldn’t ignore the urge to check over his shoulder. He didn’t feel safe here. It wasn’t the woods. It wasn’t the isolation. It was the memory of fleeing the first time. Of the two men who’d arrived in a rush and overpowered Pieter. Of the panic and the confusion and the gunfire. It was the knowledge that if they’d done it once, they could do it again any time th
ey liked.
He didn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. And maybe it was better for them to come. Maybe it was better for them to overwhelm Anderson in the same way they’d crushed Pieter. That way, he wouldn’t have to face up to whatever Anderson would make him do. It would be out of his hands.
Lukas limped over to the Land Rover and opened the passenger door. Your laptop, Anderson had said. But his computer equipment had been inside the cottage. It had been taken away by whoever had snatched Lena, along with everything else they’d had with them. The laptop he was left with was the one he’d taken from the brother’s home, and it was far less powerful than he was used to. Three years old, at least, and the brother hadn’t bothered to update the software or upgrade the processors. It was about as basic and slow as a modern laptop can get. Your laptop. It wasn’t even close to the type of machine he’d choose for himself.
Lukas snatched it from the passenger seat and held it under the crook of his arm. Shuffled towards the cottage. He didn’t look at the white van. He didn’t want to think about the brother and the detective trapped inside the garage.
Anderson had taken a seat at the kitchen table by the time Lukas returned. He was toying with the pistol, aiming it towards the light fitting in the ceiling, squinting along his line of sight.
The memory stick was in the middle of the table, close to the handle of the baseball bat. Lukas scraped back a chair and sat down and flipped up the laptop screen. The hard drive purred and chattered. It was noisy and brash. It was painfully slow. The whirring grew louder and a pale-blue visual appeared. The blue washed across Lukas’s hands in the murky kitchen as he traced his fingertip over the trackpad and clicked on the user icon. The desktop materialised. Lukas pulled the lid off the memory stick and poked it into the USB port. More purring. More chattering.
A likeness of the memory stick appeared on screen, above the letters MF. MF for Melanie Fleming. Lukas double-clicked on the icon. A dialogue box ballooned out from it.
Enter password.
Lukas grunted.
‘What is it?’ Anderson asked, glancing up from the gun.
‘The files are encrypted. Password-protected.’
‘So enter the password.’ Anderson pointed with the muzzle of the gun towards the memory stick and the sticky label that was attached to it. For Rob. 9A13D21A.
Lukas shrugged and his fingers danced across the keys. He typed 9A13D21A and hit Enter.
The laptop processed the information. It was impossibly slow compared to the computing speed Lukas was used to. Then it delivered its verdict. A dissonant sound, followed by a line of red text at the bottom of the dialogue box.
Invalid password. Retry.
Lukas shrugged and typed in For Rob. 9A13D21A. Hit Enter.
The laptop ran through the cycle once more. It emitted the same rude buzz.
Invalid password. Retry.
‘Problem?’ Anderson asked. His elbow was propped on the table, the gun hanging loosely from where he’d poked a finger through the trigger guard.
‘It doesn’t like this password.’
‘How many attempts do we have? Could it shut down on us if we keep entering the wrong code?’
Lukas pouted. He considered the garish memory stick, as if the answer might be contained on it. ‘Unlikely.’
‘Can you check?’
He pouted some more. ‘If I had more equipment, then maybe.’
‘How long to get the equipment you need?’
‘I don’t know. It could be difficult over here.’
‘So keep trying.’
Lukas did. He entered the password as one complete word: ForRob9A13D21A. Didn’t work. He tried the same thing again, only in lower case: forrob9a13d21a. Same result. He tried the man’s name on its own: Rob. No go. He tried the man’s full name: Robert Hale. Nothing. He tried the full name with the numbers. He tried the numbers before the name. All he got was a series of unpleasant dings and the familiar message.
Invalid password. Retry.
‘Can you hack it?’ Anderson asked.
‘Not without my equipment.’
Anderson sighed. Exasperated. He pushed himself to his feet and circled around the table until he was hovering over Lukas’s shoulder, one hand on the back of his chair, the hand with the gun braced against the table edge. He considered the dialogue box for a moment. Considered the memory stick.
‘So the message is a code,’ he said. ‘That makes sense, right? Some kind of double protection. This first part, For Rob, that just tells us who the code is designed for. But the numbers and the letters, they’re the code. So they mean something to the guy.’
‘Like what?’ Lukas asked.
‘That’s what I aim to ask him.’
*
I was kneeling on the concrete floor. Not the most comfortable position, but it was easier than trying to lower myself to sit on my backside. I didn’t rate the idea of standing for long, and leaning against a wall was out of the question. My shoulder blade hurt like hell. It was throbbing and very hot. It took a seriously good reason for me to move, and when I did move, I tried to remain as stiff as possible, like I was wearing a neck brace. I kept picturing little bits of jagged bone swimming around beneath my skin. Not a reassuring image.
Rebecca was much more active. To begin with, she’d tried to open the garage door, only to find that it wouldn’t budge. Now she was crouching near the bottom of the door, squeezing her hands through the gap that had been created by the van’s impact. I couldn’t see the point. She was doing a good job of scraping the skin from her knuckles but she wasn’t achieving much else. If we had access to some screwdrivers, then maybe we could have dismantled the door and removed it from its hinges. But all we had was the wrench hidden in my sling.
‘You should leave it,’ I said. ‘You’re wasting energy.’
‘Energy for what? We’re trapped in here.’
‘We have the wrench.’
‘Against a baseball bat. And a gun.’
‘At least it’s something.’
‘You can barely move. I can barely see.’
‘Yeah, but think what we could achieve if we pool our talents.’
Rebecca gave me a sour look. Not easy with badly swollen eyes and a flattened nose. She twisted her body around to face me. ‘I take it you get why they’ve brought us out here? Why we’re locked up like this?’
‘I’m guessing it’s not good.’
‘Come on.’ She tugged on her T-shirt, showing me her blood. ‘An isolated spot. Somewhere they think one of their men was killed and left to rot.’
‘We don’t know if that’s what really happened.’
‘Remember the blood we found in the woods? And look at that Lukas guy. The way he’s limping. I reckon he knows from personal experience that you can get hurt up here without anyone coming to help.’
‘Shimmin knows about this place.’
‘Yeah, and he was determined to leave it well alone. I don’t think there’s much chance of the cavalry arriving.’
‘People will see that I’m missing. My parents, for one.’
‘It’s the middle of the day, Rob. You’ve been out with me for the last couple of days. They won’t even begin to get worried until later tonight at the earliest. Maybe not even then.’
She was right. It wasn’t as if life was normal for any of us right now. If I didn’t get home to walk or feed Rocky, or to sleep in my own bed, Mum and Dad would be unlikely to panic right away. Especially if they thought I was with Rebecca.
She asked, ‘Did anyone know you were going to the sports centre this morning?’
‘Nobody.’
‘You didn’t tell Shimmin about the locker key?’
‘It was like I told you, I didn’t know who to trust. I kept it to myself.’
‘Perfect.’
She straightened and considered the damage to the backs of her hands. Sucked on one of her bloodied knuckles.
That was when I heard the sc
rabble of a key in a lock. Rebecca heard it, too. Her face jerked towards the door and I shuffled round on my knees.
Anderson stepped into the garage.
He was holding his baseball bat out in front of him like a sword. Two hands on the grip, right over left, body crouched and wary. He relaxed when he saw that we weren’t planning to attack him, and he nodded back towards Lukas in the kitchen, as if confirming that everything was fine. Lukas released a breath and lowered the gun he was holding, and Anderson nudged the door closed with the end of his bat before pacing further into the room. His swagger returned and so did his grin. I got the impression he enjoyed the sensation of power he had over us. I hoped that might be a good thing. Maybe he’d want to prolong the experience.
‘Still here?’ he said, and showed a lot of teeth.
‘What do you really want?’ Rebecca asked. She lowered her knuckle from her mouth. ‘You told us you were looking for Lena. But we don’t know where she is and holding us here is only going to distract you from finding her.’
His grin became wider. ‘We’ll find her when it matters.’
‘But there’s something else going on, isn’t there? She’s not your primary concern.’
‘Interesting,’ he said, leaning his head on to his muscular shoulder. ‘Now why would you think I’d tell you something like that?’
‘Because you’re arrogant. Because you want to show us how clever you are.’
‘Oh, I’m arrogant,’ he agreed. ‘You got me. But I don’t plan on telling you anything. And, by the way, Lena’s really not your concern. Your concern should be how we resolve your situation here.’