I’m trying really hard to be sensible about this but the thought that we’re now in a worse position than we were in when we were waist-deep in the flood keeps creeping back and freezing my head.
Noah comes out of the storeroom. “I wouldn’t go in there for a bit,” he says, hopping from one foot to the other, the chain around his leg clanking. Now that I can see it properly I can’t imagine how we’re going to get it off without a key.
“Thanks,” I say. “You seem very calm about all this.”
“Well, it’s all a lot better than it was five hours ago.”
“Is it?”
“I was on my own, in a shed filling with water, chained to the wall – and no toilet.”
Five hours ago I was eating a noodle soup in a warm flat with a dog.
Oh, Tai. Poor Tai. I imagine him lying on the side of the river, the water rising. Don’t think about it.
This morning feels a lifetime ago.
“What are we going to do, Noah?” I say. “They’ve got guns, we’ve got nothing – not even shoes.”
He rubs his feet with the blanket and arranges his socks on the heater.
“D’you remember we used to play games where you had the gun and I had the sword and we fought and – and it was fun … and we trusted each other.”
“Hmm,” he says, and I see his eyes fill and suddenly everything goes blurry and I realise that I’m crying too. I wipe the tears away with the back of my hand and sniff the rest of them back.
Without a word we both start walking again, and this time I go over to the cardboard box and pull open the flaps. “A block of cheese, some bread, two chocolate bars and a packet of custard creams,” I say.
“Six cushions, covered in dog hair,” says Noah.
“What colour?” I ask.
“Dog colour,” he says, peering closely. “Sort of black and white. And grey – and brown.”
I try to think of people with dogs. Everyone here has dogs. Did Sanjeev have a dog? Actually I don’t think he likes dogs. I help myself to a custard cream, pinging the top layer off with my teeth and feeling the delicious sweetness coating my tongue. The best.
Noah goes to the back room and opens the door again. Offering him a custard cream, I join him to examine what’s in there. Cardboard. There’s a lot of cardboard. Most of it is from dog food boxes, some of it from those banana boxes from supermarkets. We haul it all out and Noah tries lying on a row of fruit boxes. “Not bad,” he says, tugging a blanket around his shoulders and curling up his legs. “Can we just go to sleep and think about everything else in the morning? Pass that bread, I’ll make myself a sandwich.”
“You’re going to go to sleep?” I say.
“Why not? There’s nothing else happening.”
“For god’s sake, Noah. We should be trying to escape, not just lying down and sleeping.”
“They’re not going to do anything to us – they’ve just rescued us from a river. We’re perfectly safe. When Uncle P pays the ransom we can go home.”
“Just now they were pointing shotguns at us.”
He sniffs and pulls the blanket up higher. “Turn the light out when you’re done.”
“Hang on,” I say, remembering something I’ve just seen and swinging back into the tiny storeroom. There’s a bag on the shelf, it’s got the St David’s logo on the side. I lug it down. It’s heavy. “Is this yours?” I ask him.
Noah looks up. “No, I don’t have one of those – only the rugby team have them.”
“Odd,” I say pulling it under the light and drawing the zip open. “What’s all this…?” I pull out two neatly folded rugby shirts, two pairs of shorts, some socks and those things you put down your socks to stop your shins getting kicked. And then, underneath, a scrumpled receipt. “S. Gupta,” I read out loud. “S. Gupta – that’s Sanjeev.”
“Who’s Sanjeev? You mentioned him before.”
“He’s the teacher at St David’s who went missing when you did. He teaches sport – rugby.”
“Well, that would be why I don’t know him – I managed to get out of rugby. Too dangerous, Mum said.”
“But the shirts are stellar – here.” I pass one to Noah. “Put it on. Just a sec while I change.” I run back into the little room, peel off my wet shirt and pull on the rugby shirt, which is massive and dry and warm and hangs right down below my bum.
“Oh – thanks, Viv, that’s lovely,” says Noah, pulling the collar up and rubbing his arms. I push my feet into a pair of socks. I can feel every thread enveloping my cold toes. Delicious.
“But why’s it here though?” I say, sitting back on the cardboard box and dragging a blanket over my legs. “I mean – why’s Sanjeev Gupta’s kit here? It means he must be connected. His disappearance must be connected.” I stare at the floor. “But I just don’t have him down as a kidnapper. And he always wore the strongest aftershave – I’d be able to smell him. Sniff this bag,” I sniff it myself and pass it to Noah. “See? It really smells of manly sprinkly stuff.”
“Dunno. Look, Viv – I’m so tired. Can I just go to sleep?”
Further inside the bag I find nothing more than some mints and a stopwatch so I turn the bag over, and that’s when I see it.
“Oh, no – oh, god!” I say, staring at the black blotches across the underside of the bag.
“What?” says Noah, his eyes closed.
“You know when you bled all over the car, all over my bag? It looked exactly like this. It’s blood. And lots of it.”
We lie, almost not frozen, in the dark, listening to the storm outside subside. The wind stops. Foxes bark. Something squeals, something calls – a duck? So we’re still by the river then. Our little room is getting warmer. The cardboard makes a kind of mattress and with the dog cushions and the blankets we can be almost snuggly. Noah’s breathing goes slow, nearing a snore, but I don’t sleep. I can’t sleep. I’m trying to work out what’s going on with Sanjeev. If he was the kidnapper, he wouldn’t have blood on his bag – not unless he’d killed someone, or Noah had had another nosebleed. And he hadn’t. I asked him.
Which means the only other possibility is that the blood is Sanjeev’s. That somehow, when Noah was being kidnapped, Sanjeev got involved. I think back to his kind face, lovely warm eyes. He’s the kind of person who’d have a go. He’d probably try and grab a gun that was being pointed at someone.
“Wake up!” I say, bashing Noah’s arm.
“What?” he says.
“When you were taken – grabbed. Where were you?”
“Don’t you ever sleep? Why do you even want to know that?”
“I just do – tell me.”
“If you have to know, I was behind the sports hall, on the way to the music block. I had my headphones on so I didn’t hear anyone, and then there was a bag over my head and then I was in the back of a van – probably that van. That’s it.”
“And was there no one else around?”
There’s a long silence and I wonder if he’s gone back to sleep.
“Someone came out of the back door of the hall – I think.”
“Who was it?”
“No one I know – a tall man. Probably one of them.”
“Black hair?”
“Possibly – I don’t know.”
“He’s very tall,” I say. “And what about cars – were there any cars around?”
“Well, yes, it’s a car park, duh…” he says.
“Yeah – OK.”
I stare into the darkness above me and listen to the wind.
“Did you hear anything?”
“Oh, my god, Viv – are you going to let me sleep, or what?”
“Possibly,” I say. “When I’ve worked it out. Do you think there’s any chance that there was anyone else in the van with you?”
“What?”
“A body, say.”
“Oh, god, that’s horrible!”
“I know, but I can’t come up with another reason for Sanjeev’s bloodstained kit to be he
re. Unless he got caught up in it somehow and they … well, they…”
“Killed him? To kidnap me?”
“They might not have done it on purpose – I mean, it could have been accidental.”
“Or it could be murder.” I hear a long breath from Noah, like he’s deflating. “Actually, Viv, there might have been someone else in the van with me. Someone groaned. I thought it was the driver, but it could have been a person. He might have been alive.”
“What happened next?”
“We stopped, and they led me out of the van.” He pauses. “No, hang on. There was a scuffle, some shouting – they were really angry. I fell down and for a second I didn’t have anyone holding me. I got to my feet and started walking even though I had a bag over my head and my hands tied so I’d no idea where I was going.”
“And?”
“They grabbed me and pushed me into a room, a shed – something with a wooden floor – and shut the door.”
“Did you listen?”
Noah goes quiet for the longest time.
“I cried,” he says in the end. “I couldn’t hear much over that, but…”
“What?”
“I might have heard a shot.”
“Oh!”
We lie in the dark, listening.
And something else occurs to me. I spring upright and switch on the light.
“What now?” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I need to sleep. I’m so tired.”
“No, Noah – just no. Listen to me. They’ve got you because they want lots of money. You’re worth money. But me – I’m an unplanned extra.”
He blinks and stares at me, his brain processing the information.
“Just like Sanjeev must have been an unplanned extra. Except, of course, that his disappearance just helped them pin the crime on someone who was vaguely connected to you.”
“What d’you mean?”
“That I need to get out of here, and well away from here. You, they need to keep safe. Me, they can…” The words get stuck in my throat. But I wanted to say, kill.
At that point, Noah does climb off his cardboard bed. We search the walls. We examine the door. The tiny window in the back room is ruled out as being too small. After a few minutes of hurried searching we’re standing by the radiator, warming our hands.
“Where do you think we are?” asks Noah.
“I reckon we’re upstream near the watercress beds. There’s loads of empty countryside there – above the Blackwater Estate.”
He nods.
I look back at Sanjeev’s bag and shudder.
“Do you think they … shot him?” says Noah, reading my mind.
“What do you think?”
“There are other ways of bleeding,” he says, sticking his finger up his nose and pulling down something that might be a leftover of his nose bleed.
“Yeah – but where is he? If it was Sanjeev, and he was in the van with you, and he was alive, and they didn’t shoot him, where is he?” I get up and go into the back room again and look at the little window. It’s got a plastic frame. Unhooking one of the shelf brackets, I pick at the plaster until it begins to come away and the corner of the window becomes clear. Outside, it’s still dark, but it must be getting towards morning. Everyone will know I’m missing. Maria will have said. The waterkeepers should be looking for me. Even angry Lord B might start to try and find me. The thought makes me feel very slightly better. Only very slightly.
After ten minutes I’ve taken a few centimetres of plaster away, revealing some huge screws that seem to go through the window frame and into the wooden uprights of the shed.
“Ugh.” I sit back on the toilet lid and sniff back a tear. “It’s hopeless.”
Noah’s next door, still trying to work it out. “But if they did … kill him, where have they put the body?”
“I don’t know, and just now, I don’t care. We have to get out of here. Come on, please, think…” I scrub my knuckles against the side of my head as if my brain might work better that way.
“What about the roof? That’s how we got out last time,” he calls.
Through the doorway, I hear him clamber on to the freezer in the big room, and I do the same in the storeroom. The ceiling is polystyrene tiles, easily pushed aside, but beyond it, the roof is made of solid sheeting that I can’t even begin to move. It doesn’t seem to be attached in any way, it’s seamless.
“That’s not going to work,” I hear from Noah, his voice disturbingly close. I look to my left and see his head sticking up into the roof space too.
“We could hide up here and jump down when they come again?” I say.
Noah thinks about it. “Nah. One of us might get out, but not two. And we don’t even know what’s outside.”
He’s right. We’d probably run a few metres before getting caught again. After making one more attempt at moving the sheet of whatever it is above my head, I give up and drop down to the storeroom floor. This is hopeless. There’s nothing here. We can’t flush ourselves down the drain, or float through the window. We can’t call anyone.
Something, a random thought, nearly occurs to me but disappears the moment I try to pinpoint it, and then Noah shouts from next door. “Viv!” he calls. “What do you think about this?” Sticking my head round the doorframe, I see him buffeting the enormous freezer. “Momentum – or something,” he says.
“Er – what exactly are you thinking?” I watch him struggling with the huge white box, rolling it back and forth on its tiny wheels, a centimetre or two with each shove.
“It’s really heavy – right?”
“Yeah.”
“We could use it as a battering ram – go straight through the side of the shed. It’s only made of wood. What d’you think?” He straightens up, looking doubtful.
“Um,” I say, thinking that this could be a complete waste of precious time. “We can try it.”
“I knew you wouldn’t like it. I don’t know why I bother.”
“I don’t think it’s an idiotic idea,” I say. “It’s just…”
“There’s this too.” He looks down at his foot. The metal collar has left a black ring around his ankle, and underneath that, a glowing, unhealthy redness. In the light, I can see that the collar is hinged and padlocked. “I think I’ m stuck with it, aren’t I?” he says.
Kneeling down, I pull it away from his calf. “There’s quite a lot of room around it. Did you try and pull it off?”
“What do you think?” he replies. “Duh, I didn’t just stand there waiting for you to come and rescue me.”
“Stay there.”
“I’m not going anywhere, am I?”
I go through to the storeroom and look around for anything that might help. Big cardboard, small cardboard. Wood. a mug. Getting more and more frantic I tell myself that the water is not rising – that we are not going to drown. That I don’t need to panic. But still I feel the fear taking over. We have to get out of here and soon. Perhaps we haven’t got time to lose this ankle chain but we could run with it, bashing and clanging behind us.
No we can’t. It has to come off. I start pulling things out of cupboards, cleaning polish, gun cotton, fish hooks. And then, behind the downpipe from the tiny basin next to the toilet – “Yes!” – a bottle of washing-up liquid, almost full, and pleasingly slimy.
“What are you going to do?” says Noah when I come back into the bigger room, holding my prize. “Wash it off?”
“Oh, shut up, Noah,” I say, in a super-ordinary voice. Controlling my trembling hands, I squirt the green liquid all around the band and his foot. “Now, if I just hold this …” The green runs down his foot. “… and you pull – let’s see.”
Kneeling on the floor, I grip the metal ring, my fingers hooked over the top, and I guide it so that it wedges by Noah’s heel. “If…” I wriggle the ring a little sideways and flakes of rust ping off and stick to his foot.
“Ow!” he says.
“Try pointing your toes, and pulling,” I s
ay. His heel is actually wedged part of the way through the ring, and I tug. Once. Twice.
“Ow!” he says again, and his foot comes free.
“Yay!” I say, as he rubs his ankle and a series of conflicting emotions cross his face. He still doesn’t want to be grateful to me any more than I want to be grateful to him. “Now, let’s get dressed.”
Taking my jeans from the heater, I discover they have dry knees. That’s the best I can say for them, but they’re warmer than they were when I took them off. I’ve still got no shoes, but I do have Sanjeev’s socks. For Noah’s part, his trousers are wet, but we both have the rugby shirts and it has stopped raining.
I grab two plastic carrier bags and knot them over the socks, over the soles of my feet. Noah rips a hole in the middle of two blankets and makes us a couple of ponchos.
We each take a bite of cheese and cram several slices of bread in our mouths and the chocolate bars in our pockets.
I have a wee.
Noah has a wee.
We do all this calmly, trying not to panic. Trying not to listen out for the van returning, for the gates rattling. Trying not to just sit down and cry or scream or fall apart.
“Right,” I say. “Freezer.”
Putting wheels on freezers might seem stupid, but when you think about it, how else are you supposed to move such enormous things? We unplug it.
We decide to go for the wall on the opposite side to the window. It might not be as solid and it will give us more time if they return while we’re escaping because hopefully the hole we’re about to make won’t be visible from the van.
“Shall we empty it?” I ask peering inside. It’s full of dead pheasants, all trussed up for the oven. I point at the neat rows of carcasses. “Connor?”
Noah raises an eyebrow. “He’s got a gun. Plenty of guns. He runs the shoot. But I don’t think anyone on the Blackwater Estate would…”
Murder at Twilight Page 9