by Ken McClure
Steven recoiled in horror as he realised that he was in the process of unearthing a body lying in a shallow grave. Some of the flesh had come away in his hand when he had pulled the arm and he scraped his palm against the wall in an effort to free himself from the horror of it. Although badly decaying, he could see that the hand was a woman’s. It was small and slim and still had two rings on it. He realised now what Merton had meant by ‘joining the ladies’. This must be where the bodies of the snuff film girls had been buried.
Steven pushed the arm back down into the hole in the earth, feeling more of the rotting flesh peel away as he did so and having to fight the bones of the girl’s hand that seemed to have other ideas about being buried again. Finally he placed the tea caddy in the hole and scooped earth on top. He tamped the surface down with his knees and then crawled to the opposite corner of the room where he threw up until his stomach was empty. The flow of sweat from his brow was stinging the open wound in his head and the pain inside it was reaching crescendo pitch as he retched and blinked back tears of anger, fear and frustration.
Another wave of heat followed in the wake of yet another explosion and the air inside the cellar momentarily became too hot to breathe. Steven looked to the side to avoid the bright orange glare at the window and his gaze fell on the old sacks. The bright light had made the contents label on one of them just legible: it contained sodium chlorate.
Three thoughts came to him in rapid succession. One, sodium chlorate was a very effective weed killer; two, it was a very strong oxidising agent that made any fire infinitely worse by feeding the flames pure oxygen and three, it could be explosive when mixed with certain other compounds. One of these compounds was sugar…
Steven’s heart missed a beat as he looked at the bag sitting on the bench. He might well be deluding himself but he believed that he had the makings of an elementary bomb. He grabbed at the sugar bag and found that the contents had congealed into a solid lump. He slammed it repeatedly down on the bench to break the lump and then ground the smaller lumps feverishly with the heel of his hand until it looked more like granular sugar. He had to keep clearing the sweat from his eyes, trying at the same time to avoid it falling into the sugar. When he had generated a respectable pile, he tore at the sodium chlorate sack to get at its contents, praying that it was old enough to have avoided the modern requirement for a fire retardant to be added to it.
What he needed now was some kind of hollow pipe in which to confine the explosive mix otherwise it would just flare up and he would have constructed an incendiary device. Talk about coals to Newcastle… He also needed to decide what he going to do with his bomb. The walls and door were so thick that any blast big enough to breach them would almost certainly kill him… but that might be preferable to being burnt alive, he concluded. He would at least go down fighting.
Steven could not find any hollow pipe or tubing. He was almost at his wits end when he saw the possibility that a hollow tined garden fork held. The tines on the end were in effect hollow metal tubes although they were very small compared to what he had in mind. But he suddenly saw that being that size meant that he could insert one of them into the keyhole on the door!
The temperature in the cellar was now almost unbearable but he set to work with a vengeance, twisting and bending one of the tines until it finally gave way. He closed off one end of it by hammering it flat with the edge of the old spade and then bending it over the edge of the bench to form a seal. He mixed sodium chlorate and sugar in an approximate 2:1 ratio and packed it tightly into the tube by pushing it down with the blunt end of his biro pen until it was full.
He had to take more care with the sealing of this end. He couldn’t hammer it for fear of creating a spark, which could easily result in his arm being blown off. He put the tube on the floor and used his right foot to press the blade of the spade down on its end, slowly directing all his weight down on to it until it closed.
There was one more thing to do. He had to create a small hole in the side of the tube in order to ignite the device. He didn’t have his rucksack with him in the cellar — Merton must have taken that away — but he hadn’t bothered to empty his pockets so he still had his Swiss army knife. He used the spike to work a small hole in the side of the tube, nearer to one end than the other so that he could still see it once it was in position in the keyhole. He moved the spike very slowly when he felt it was just about to penetrate the metal and suddenly it was through.
It was done. He was holding his one chance at life in the hollow if his hand but there was little time to ponder that. He knelt down in front of the door and slid the tube into the keyhole, turning it so that he could just see the hole in its side. What he needed now was a spark and that was easier said than done, despite the world outside the door being full of crackling fire and flame. He needed a spark right next to the tiny hole in the side of the tube.
Steven took off his shirt and ripped it into shreds. He fashioned some of the pieces into a long cord-like strand, which would reach from the keyhole down to the floor and then rubbed sodium chlorate into it before pushing one end lightly into the keyhole. He laid a trail of sodium chlorate, starting where the cord touched the floor and stretching across the floor into the far corner of the cellar. He knelt down and repeatedly struck the blade of the spade against the stone flagging until the rust and corrosion on the end of it was ground away to expose bright metal. The blows now created a small shower of sparks every time that metal hit stone.
On the third strike Steven’s fears that the sodium chlorate must have had fire retardant added to it after all disappeared in a blinding flash as the chlorate ignited and the flame raced across the floor and up into the keyhole. The blast that followed threw Steven against the wall and deafened him momentarily but when the smoke cleared he could see that the door was swinging free. Its lock had been blown clean off.
The blast had also created a small gap in the fire outside but Steven knew that this would only be a momentary respite. He dragged himself across the floor as quickly as he could, his head pounding and coughing as the smoke invaded his lungs but the pain and discomfort was as nothing when viewed against the fact that he was now free. He dragged himself up the steps and tried getting to his feet to run but was only partially successful. He had to be satisfied with a combination of running, stumbling, crawling and finally rolling across the grass in front of the old tower until he was far enough away from the fire to feel safe.
As he looked back, a great belch of flame and smoke spewed out from the cellar where he’d been imprisoned as the flames reached the sacks of sodium chlorate. As he thought about what might have been, Steven was forced to look up as something caught his eye. The great East wall of the old ruined tower was moving. As if in slow motion, it leaned more and more to the right until finally, it gave way and crashed down on to the roof of the cellar, burying it completely under hundreds of tons of rubble.
The buildings used by Cine Bruges had already been reduced to roofless stone shells containing little more than smoking piles of ash but Merton’s scorched earth plan to destroy all evidence would be of no avail, thought Steven because he had survived and he knew where the bodies were buried. It would take a bulldozer and many men with shovels some days to recover them but it could and would be done. Forensic science would see to it that a man who had abused it so badly would be brought to justice by it.
With a heavy heart, Steven looked at the road stretching over the moors and knew that he had more than four miles to go before he could alert anyone. In his present physical condition this represented as big a challenge as he’d ever faced. He’d be covering a great deal of the ground on his hands and knees because of the dizziness that still plagued him whenever he tried to stand up.
‘ Well, my son…’ he murmured as he reached the start of the single-track road, ‘as Chairman Mao once said… a journey of ten thousand miles… begins with but a single step. He had barely taken ten when it started to rain.
At
first he found the rain refreshing. It felt cool after the heat of the fire and the water helped wash the mess of blood, sweat and earth from his face. He was very thirsty so he drank rainwater from pools that formed in holes in the road as the rain persisted. It tasted of mud but that didn’t matter.
After fifteen minutes however, he began to feel cold and started shivering. Four miles was beginning to seem like a journey to the ends of the earth. He hadn’t felt this bad physically since his early training days with the paras in the Welsh mountains when, having completed a particularly arduous exercise and reaching the end — as he had thought — an NCO had simply said, ‘Very good, Dunbar, let’s do it all again, shall we?’
Steven looked at his watch. He had trouble focusing but when he finally managed he saw that nearly an hour had gone by and he had covered less than a mile. He sank down on all fours and stared at the ground while rainwater dripped off his nose and chin. He was in trouble. The basic survival gear he had been carrying had all been in his rucksack and God knows what had happened to that.
He was concussed, soaked through and very cold. Night was falling and the temperature with it. He was close to complete exhaustion but still had a long way to go. He concentrated hard on one single thought. He had to keep moving. If he gave in and lost consciousness it was odds on he would never wake up. He would have escaped fire to die of hypothermia.
As time went by he tried to aid progress by singing dirty songs at the top of his voice. He had never been very good at remembering song lyrics so the lines tended to get mixed up — if not made up — as he went along. He was making a rhymeless mess of, The Ball of Kirriemuir, when he saw two lights coming towards him. At first he peered through the rain at them on all fours, not sure if he was hallucinating but then he heard the engine. He stood up unsteadily in the middle of the road waving his arms above his head and making largely unintelligible noises until the police Land Rover came to a halt.
‘ No very well-equipped for walking on the moors, are we sir?’
Steven managed a silly grin before passing out.
Later, in hospital, he discovered that the pilot of a light aircraft had reported seeing a large fire on the moors and the police had been sent to investigate. The officers had summoned a rescue helicopter which had taken Steven to hospital and possibly saved his life by avoiding any delay. He in turn was able to furnish the police with the registration number of Merton’s car and Merton was stopped and arrested at Dover some four hours later. Steven was discharged from hospital two days later and returned to London, none the worse for his ordeal, the local police having recovered his car for him. He called John Macmillan as soon as he got back.
‘ You know, Dunbar, you’re the reason our health service is in such a perilous state. You’re never out of hospital. You’re a tremendous drain on our resources, you know.’
‘ I’ll try to be more careful in future,’ said Steven. He liked John Macmillan but, at times, he found his sense of humour about as amusing as a heart attack.
‘ Seriously, you did a fine job.’
‘ Thanks,’ said Steven.
‘ I’ve warned Miss Roberts you’ll probably be wanting a few days off and quite right too.’
‘ Two weeks,’ said Steven flatly. ‘I’m having two weeks off.’
‘ Well, if you feel you must,’ said Macmillan.
Steven rang off. He called his sister-in-law in Dumfriesshire and asked if it would be all right for him to come up and stay for a bit. ‘I need to get away.’
‘ Mission accomplished?’ asked Sue.
‘ All over,’ said Steven.
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