by Paul Finch
Heck darted at the internal door without warning, but stopped to grab the extinguisher and twirl around, knocking out its safety pin. The exploding fountain of foam caught Klausen full in the face. The Dane coughed and choked, clawing at it with both hands, but gallons of the stuff had been compressed into the sealed vessel, and jetted out in a frenzy, filling his eyes, nose, mouth, coating him from hairline to crotch. As the counter lady squawked in outrage, Heck launched the extinguisher over Klausen’s shoulder, the white spray arcing, the cylinder catching the Nice Guy behind him on the left temple. The Nice Guy went down, the one behind him falling over as well.
Blinded and coughing, Klausen dug through foam to reach under his coat, but Heck now swung a foot, making a crunching impact in the Dane’s groin. As Klausen dropped to his knees, Heck spun to the door, pulling down a postcard rack. Two more of them fell over it, while he dashed out into a bare corridor.
On his immediate left stood a room with nothing in it except coats hanging on hooks. The other way, a stone stair spiralled up into dimness.
Heck took the stair, and within seconds was in the ruined section of the gatehouse. There was no modernisation here: no lighting, no heating. The first window he came to was a recessed arrow embrasure, too narrow to fit through. Guttural shouts echoed after him as he hurried up to the next level. In several places here there was no roof – just crumpled polythene supported by scaffolding, but passages still led off in various directions. The immediate one on his right terminated at an open aperture with a knee-high chain looped across it. Heck estimated there’d be at least a thirty-foot drop from there, so he went left, and then left again, now hearing many pairs of feet on the spiral stair. He came abruptly to a door-shaped gap with pitch-darkness beyond it. Some vague instinct prevented him blundering straight through it – and with good reason. Venturing forward, he found himself teetering on the brink of an abyss, which stank of mould and damp.
Hair prickling, he gazed up a hollow stone cylinder, some twenty-five feet in diameter and ascending maybe seventy-five feet to a diminutive patch of sky. In the faint bluish light this cast down, some thirty feet below – his estimation had been correct – lay nothing but stones, thistles and a few bits of broken scaffolding.
More shouts bounced along the passage behind. Heck contemplated the gutted tower. There was no obvious way he could climb down – but as his vision adjusted, he saw there might be a way he could climb up. The eroded stubs of a stairway wound up the interior wall, but at no point protruding out more than a foot or so. It was so narrow he’d only be able to ascend with his back braced on the stonework, much of which was rugged and thick with vegetation. And how greasy would those stair treads be?
‘Find him and kill him!’ came Klausen’s semi-hysterical voice.
Ben Kane had been right about that at least. The Nice Guys should be fleeing this place by now; they were acting beyond reason, or at least their leader was.
Just to reach the internal stair, which began on his left, Heck had to cross a crevice of nearly four feet. He made it with a single leap, but the tread he landed on was loose, grating out of place under his weight. Only by hooking his fingers into the moss-damp wall did he avoid toppling into the chasm.
‘No fucking arguments!’ an American voice snapped. ‘It’s the company phone, Goddammit!’
Heck started up, his body flattened backwards against the bricks, the horrific drop only inches in front. To avoid looking down, his eyes remained riveted on the doorway. Shadows flickered inside it. It was a miracle they hadn’t already reached this point. There were various places to search in the gatehouse – but not many.
Another tread shifted under his foot. This one jutted out no more than seven inches as it was. He could barely perch both heels on it. He held his breath as it shifted again in its rotted socket. Only a rash, desperate lurch took him onto the next step, but there were further perils after that. In some cases, treads were not just short and slippery, they actually sloped downward. In others, entire treads were missing; he had to step sideways over those, constantly sure that he was about to overbalance; the blackness below yawning in expectation.
But he was ascending. The entry door was soon directly opposite, and lower down by a good ten feet. Such signs of progress emboldened him. He increased his pace, the entry door sliding round to his left; in a minute or so, it would be under him again. That would be the opportune moment for one of the bastards to stick his head through – Heck would be completely out of sight.
But he’d never had much luck.
A dark form appeared in the narrow slice of light when Heck was perhaps at eleven o’clock to it. He froze, flattening himself again, arms outspread, not daring to breathe. Whichever Nice Guy it was, he scanned the interior of the tower from top to bottom; for several moments he peered straight at Heck – and then withdrew.
Heck’s breath burst from his chest with such force that he almost toppled forward. He was briefly baffled, but then it occurred to him that he was wearing dark clothing. And whoever that was, they couldn’t possibly have taken sufficient time scanning the tower for their eyes to attune to the gloom.
He continued up, sidling ever higher, though his calves and hamstrings ached from the stress he placed on them. It must now be fifty feet down to the rock-strewn floor, but he tried not to think about that. He heard the Nice Guys’ voices again: angry, squabbling. Some of them must want to leave. They had too much to lose by not leaving. But then again, he had the company phone. It occurred to him to fish it from his pocket and conceal it, perhaps insert it into a chink between the stones, on the off-chance they caught up with him. But that would mean he’d have to let someone know it was there, and if he wasn’t able to do that it would never, ever be found. He couldn’t even text the information to Gemma – the mere act of fiddling around with the phone in this gloom would take up valuable time and threaten to overbalance him; being an adult, it had never come natural to Heck to text with one hand. The good thing was that such extreme action might no longer be necessary. They’d lost him – they’d checked this part of the castle and seemed to have missed him.
Heck had now circled clockwise around the inside of the tower two and a half times. The aperture overhead looked larger, but it was still a significant distance away. He didn’t know if the stair led all the way to the top. If it didn’t, he resolved that he’d climb as high as he could and then perch there, hanging by his fingernails if necessary. They’d be mad to hang around much longer.
And then he noticed two things at once.
Firstly, way before the top of the tower, the stair passed a large hole in the wall through which light shone. The second thing was a sudden silence; the shouting and arguing had abruptly ceased.
The vibration in his pocket came next.
It was the company phone.
A second later its trumpeting ringtone sang raucously down the tower.
Heck clawed at his pocket, but with a thunder of feet, several figures had already crammed into the doorway below, heads swivelling. The phone continued to jangle before cutting to voicemail. Heck sidled up what remained of the stair with desperate, reckless speed, slipping on another mossy tread. He scrabbled desperately, catching the wall behind with spiderlike hands. Fragments of ancient mortar fell, clinking on the rusty scaffolding at the bottom. The result was a burst of gunfire trained downward. Stroboscopic flashes filled the barrel-like interior. Sweating, Heck continued up. The doorway was only a couple of yards above and to his left. He almost slipped again; the tread wobbled, but he kept his balance and now was slapping around the door jamb with his left hand.
‘There!’ came a harsh shout.
He swung himself out of range just as the fusillade erupted, a storm of lead ricocheting around the doorway, caroming past with spatters of fire.
Gasping, he found himself in a turret room, a squat, boxlike chamber, with another square aperture facing him, presumably the point where decayed masonry had fallen out around an arrow p
ort. Beyond that he saw only the sea, though from much higher vantage than before. He limped forward and gazed down – to find that it had not been an arrow port, but the entrance to another stair. The overarching masonry might have collapsed, but the stair itself remained. It was horrendously narrow, with no safety rails and strong wind gusting across it, but the treads were intact, and they descended twenty feet to a battlemented walk along the gatehouse’s north side.
With a speed bordering on the suicidal, Heck scampered down. It seemed he was going to have even more to tell Gemma about than he’d first thought. Assuming he didn’t murder her for her deception first.
A few yards along the wall walk, a scaffolding frame was clamped to the outside of the curtain wall. Heck stepped onto it, and descended through its bars, monkey-like, half-falling at the bottom, but so relieved to land on solid, grassy ground that he barely felt the impact through the soles of his trainers. He ran along the side of the gatehouse, slowing as he approached the front. Some of the Nice Guys might have been posted there. From the sounds of it, there was much consternation inside, but that was perhaps understandable after the commotion in the castle shop.
He glanced warily around the north gatehouse tower, and spied an unexpected opportunity. At the foot of the slope, a blue Bedford van bearing an English Heritage logo had pulled up at the end of the track. The driver, unaware of the problems inside the castle, was at the vehicle’s rear, unloading boxes.
Jamming his hands into his pockets, Heck walked down there. From the corner of his eye, he could see people milling at the front entrance. The tour guide was among them, gesticulating wildly as he shouted at a mobile phone that some maniac was discharging firearms. Heck increased his pace, making a beeline for the van. One glance through its windshield showed the keys still in the ignition. Heck didn’t like doing this, but saw no other way.
He opened the driver’s door and slid inside. The driver only noticed when the engine rumbled to life. He charged around to the front, but the vehicle was already in motion, swerving away from him and pulling a smart U-turn at the head of the track, turf spurting from its tyres.
Through the wing mirror, Heck watched the driver, red-faced with outrage and falling steadily behind. He didn’t feel good about this, but reminding himself there were more important things, and patting the iPhone in his pocket, he gunned the vehicle on – only to note the needle on the petrol gauge resting just above empty. It was several seconds before the reality of that struck, and then he swore volubly. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was now passing the entrance to the castle car park, the track broadening out into a proper road – and he saw a caravan of vehicles approaching from the opposite direction. At the front was a tan Ford Mondeo estate.
Heck snatched a cap from the passenger seat, pulled it on and tried to tug it down. But it was too small. At the same time, he veered past the Mondeo, which carried several men, but unavoidably exchanged glances with its driver – there was no mistaking the smashed, plaster-covered nose of the Australian.
Heck hit the gas, but he had almost certainly been spotted – even if they didn’t recognise his face, they only needed to glance at his behind, and the van’s swinging rear door would be a massive giveaway. As if proof of this were needed, the Mondeo jack-knifed around in his wake, the other cars shunting together in their efforts to brake.
Heck glanced into his mirror as he drove hell for leather, seeing frantic figures emerging along the track from the castle. In no time at all, it seemed, the whole posse was on his tail again. He slammed his pedal to the floor, passing various turn-offs. Embleton, Craster and Stamford didn’t sound like the kinds of villages he wanted to lead a bunch of killers to. However, another idea – a real wildcard – was now unfolding. He didn’t know exactly how much fuel remained in the tank, but it was a reasoned guess there wouldn’t be enough to get him back to a major centre of conurbation like Berwick or Alnwick, where the Nice Guys might be loath to follow. Fortunately there was somewhere a little nearer than that. Again, innocent bystanders would be endangered, but the innocent were in danger anywhere and anytime while this gang were loose.
He reached the end of the access road, barely breaking speed as he swung right onto the A1, horns blaring from other vehicles as they screeched out of the way. He threw a glance at his petrol gauge. It was right at the bottom of the red. Behind him, one by one, the Mondeo, the Toyota, the Peugeot and the others, swerved out into the traffic, more road users skating across the carriageway to avoid them. He floored the pedal again, but the van was old and struggling to bypass seventy. Heck swore. If those bastards got alongside him, they’d shoot his tyres out – and they were gaining fast.
It was pure good fortune that cardboard boxes, apparently loaded with books and toys, now began to fall from the back of the van. At this speed, they broke apart spectacularly, bouncing and spinning across the blacktop, scattering their contents. The Mondeo was the first to come unstuck, a particularly large box still loaded with goods jamming under its front fender. It skidded and slewed, tyres squealing, before sideswiping the Toyota, which struck sparks from the central barrier. Behind that, the Renault Mégane spun off onto the hard shoulder.
Heck whooped as he drove, his clutch of foes falling further and further to his rear – only for the van to start juddering and shaking.
He glanced nervously at the gauge. It hadn’t dropped since he’d last checked, but there could scarcely be a speck left in the tank. Just then a signpost flickered by – literally in the blink of an eye, but he’d seen it, and it gave him new heart. It read:
Holy Island 4
Chapter 35
Holy Island’s warning notices slipped by as Heck raced along the approach road.
This Could Be You
(framed above an image of a car door handle deep in rippling waves)
Please Consult The Tide Tables
Danger
Do Not Proceed When Water Reaches Causeway
Picturesque scenery lay ahead; immense tidal flats extending in every direction, broken by the occasional upturned hull or hummocked by dunes crowned with marram grass. Beyond those was the sea, deceptively flat as a millpond.
Heck didn’t bother to check the tide tables, which were arrayed at the side of the road on a tall pole; partly because he already had a vague idea the tide turned on this coastline at around six in the evening, which was about twenty-five minutes ago (memories of childhood holidays had to be good for something, if only as a basis for educated guesswork), and also because he couldn’t afford to stop. His pursuers had been delayed by his shedding cargo, but not halted.
He drove straight onto the raised roadway that passed over the causeway, though as wavelets were already swimming over it, it was only clearly discernible by the reflector posts arrayed along its parallel verges. It seemed crazy – he had two miles to go, by the end of which the tide would be up to his wheel-trims, but the alternative was worse. He was perhaps a quarter of a mile out when he glanced into his wing mirror and saw the procession of battered cars also risking the causeway, froth billowing around their tyres. His own vehicle was cutting a V-wash as he pressed boldly on. But he’d already passed the refuge tower, and the landmass of Holy Island itself drew steadily nearer. Though the causeway would bring him ashore at the island’s bleak, largely uninhabited western tip, the point they called ‘The Snook’, he could already see the roofs of the shops and cottages southeast of there.
He also felt his first real twinge of guilt.
Heck was making this up as he went along. It had only become his intent to bring the Nice Guys here in the last fifteen minutes. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for the two hundred or so islanders, though it wasn’t as if this ancient, sacred place – better known these days as Lindisfarne – hadn’t suffered a brutal assault once before. In truth, despite his one-week childhood holiday here, Heck only had a rudimentary knowledge of the place, mainly that it was made famous because Vikings had once sacked and burned its monastery, mu
rdering all the monks. It was about two and a half miles square, he thought, and it only had the one village on it. The ruins of the Norman monastery, built after the Vikings had gone, were still present, and it boasted the impressive remnant of a sixteenth-century castle on its southeast corner. It also possessed the usual smattering of coach parks, visitor centres, shops and pubs, though in his youth much of it had been given over to agriculture – and as he rolled up onto the Snook, that didn’t appear to have changed. He saw meadows and flat fields, many broken by low fences or dry-stone walls, extending away to the north and east, while to the south there was lower, soggier ground – salt marsh riddled with minor tidal inlets.
The road now ran due east along the island’s southern coast. Heck slammed his foot down and tore along it, glancing again into his wing mirror. One by one, the Nice Guys’ vehicles were also reaching dry land, though not without difficulty, having first to negotiate a tide surging to their wheel-arches. Was the company phone really so important that they’d risk this? Was it the key to their entire operation?
Increasingly, Heck felt certain it was. There were so many reasons now why he had to make this thing work.
Thanks to the turning of the tide, it looked as if most day-trippers had already departed the island. The streets of Holy Island village were largely clear. He hurtled into its centre along Crossgate Lane, screeching to a halt beside the green. It was an almost impossibly well-kept place: the cottages and shops whitewashed or built of local pale-grey sandstone. There were treed areas, gardens and flowerboxes. And despite initial appearances, it wasn’t empty. A woman walking a dog along the other side of the green had stopped to look at him. A few curious faces appeared at windows. Again, Heck felt guilty about having brought the Nice Guys here; the trick now was to draw them away from this centre of population.
There was a ‘No Parking’ sign opposite, which he ignored as he abandoned the van – the more people who called the police now, the better. Heck bolted away on foot, heading northeast along a passage between the houses. Again, if residents saw him and thought something amiss, that could only be good. He threaded across several allotments, and vaulted a low, slatted fence onto rough pasture. Open, flat countryside now lay ahead. As he vaulted a second fence, he heard a skidding of tyres from the village, and the sound of car doors slamming open.