by Zoe Sharp
“William,” I snapped into the radio, shouting over the siren. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Oh shit,” William said. “He’s hit the manual override on the fire control system. Get out of there, Charlie! You’ve got thirty seconds before the compartment seals.”
“What?” I yelled, wrenching the bolt-cutters off the wall and racing for the stairs. “What the hell happens after thirty seconds?”
“The whole of the compartment floods with CO². It takes less than two minutes.”
Oh shit, I echoed silently. I jumped the last half-dozen steps, landed badly and staggered on.
The vibrations through the deck had changed, I realised, the engines were shutting down as well. As our forward momentum dropped, the stabilisers began to lose effectiveness. The ferry had already been pitching in the swell but now it began to roll more violently as well.
“Shut it off, William,” I managed. “Jamie and Isobel are stuck down here. Shut it off!”
“You can’t,” William said, anguish twisting his voice. “Once it’s been activated, that’s it. It’s supposed to be a last resort if there’s a fire. Anybody still in there when it goes off is as good as dead. Just get out!”
“Daz,” I shouted. “Get to the door. Wedge it open!”
“With what?” Daz demanded, lurching to his feet.
“Anything you can damn well find!”
Sean had cornered Eamonn by this time. Eamonn took one look at the deadly intent in Sean’s face and tried to bring the baton up, but the confined space was against him. He backed up and prepared to make a stand but Sean just swatted the baton aside and put one hard deliberate blow straight into the middle of Eamonn’s face, shattering his already broken nose. Eamonn gave a squeal of pain and dropped to the grating with his hands to his face.
Sean didn’t bother trying to finish the fight. He’d heard my brief exchange with William on his own radio and now he spun back to where Jamie and Isobel were tied.
I braced myself steady against the railing to operate the big bolt-cutters. They sliced straight through the inside band of the handcuffs without any fuss. Jamie was still on his knees and I had to cut him loose from Isobel completely so Sean could hoist him to his feet.
Isobel gave a gasp. We turned to find Eamonn was back on his feet with a length of heavy chain in his hand and blood running freely down his face.
Sean dumped Jamie’s almost senseless body onto me. “Get him out,” he said.
The fear grabbed me by the throat but there wasn’t time to argue. I half-carried, half-dragged Jamie to the staircase, shouting at him until he put one foot in front of the other and began to climb.
We reached the upper walkway. I glanced back briefly as Eamonn launched a frenzied attack on Sean, just had time to see Sean dance out of the way, agile despite the heaving floor under him, and kick Eamonn’s legs from under him.
“Come on, I don’t know how long it will hold!”
Daz was by the doorway. He’d found a small pallet truck and had jammed that into the door aperture. The door itself was attempting to close on hydraulic rams that were designed to seal the engine compartment in the event of disaster, come what may. Over 2000psi of pressure was slowly and inevitably crushing and distorting the legs of the pallet truck. Our last exit was shrinking with every passing moment.
And then, our thirty seconds were up.
I heard a hissing noise from above my head. A series of pale green pipes with flat nozzles was strung across the ceiling of the compartment. Now, gas was spraying out from each nozzle. The carbon dioxide, heavier than air, cascaded down into the engine room like misted water.
Desperation lent me strength. I heaved Jamie over my shoulder with a thankful prayer that it wasn’t William I had to lift. Gritting my teeth, I charged for the doorway, almost throwing Jamie through the gap into Daz’s waiting arms.
I turned. Isobel was staggering along the walkway about six metres behind me but of Sean – and Eamonn – there was no sign.
“Come on!” I bellowed, starting to gasp now as the carbon dioxide flooded in, and trying not to let the panic show. “Time’s up!”
Sean’s head appeared from the other side of the engine. He scrambled up onto the massive diesel, ran along the top of the casing and jumped for the walkway near where I was standing. I grabbed his forearm as he landed, but his grip was tight. He vaulted over the railing in a flash and dived for the steadily closing doorway. I followed him through, dimly aware of hands grasping me and hauling me clear.
“Who else is inside?” demanded a man alongside me. He was in uniform like a naval officer and carrying a walkie-talkie. Through the haze of little black dots that the carbon dioxide had starred across my vision, I realised that Isobel wasn’t right behind me.
“Two,” I said, still panting for breath, just as one leg of the pallet truck buckled with a terrible graunching noise and the door lurched a little further closed.
“Mum!” Jamie cried, coming out of his nausea enough to realise who was left behind. “Where is she?”
As I watched, Isobel’s head and shoulders appeared through the gap. Two crew members grabbed her arms and started to pull, but she was suddenly yanked backwards with a dreadful wailing cry. Eamonn’s bloodied face thrust out of the doorway instead.
Jamie flung himself forward and Sean and I grabbed him before he would have tried to force himself back into the engine compartment. He struggled wildly in our arms, tears streaming down his face.
The crew, meanwhile, started to pull Eamonn clear without making any judgements on who deserved to be saved. The door was edging towards its goal all the time, the pallet truck little more than a compressed and twisted mass of scrap metal. But Eamonn was nearly out, only his legs remained inside.
I could see the triumph blooming on his face but then the triumph changed to horror. He began to yell, struggling against something still inside the engine room.
Through the ever-diminishing gap I could just make out Isobel’s face, teeth bared. She’d abandoned any last hope of making it out of there, but she had a death grip on Eamonn’s shins and she wasn’t for letting go.
“Mum!” Jamie cried again.
“I’m sorry,” she said calmly. “Tell your father I’m sorry, too.”
Eamonn’s struggles unintentionally loosened the crew members’ grip on his arms and Isobel managed to drag him another few inches further backwards. His eyes met mine and for a second I saw resignation and defeat in them.
“Was it worth it?” I asked him.
Eamonn didn’t reply. At that moment the structural integrity of the pallet truck finally failed. It folded up completely. With that last piece of resistance gone, the hydraulic ram on the compartment door achieved its aim, quietly and without fuss.
Isobel still had Eamonn’s legs pinned inside the engine room when the door closed. The steel plate cut through both his thigh bones, just above the knee, as neatly and as precisely as a guillotine.
Epilogue
“It was a mess,” I said. “They airlifted Eamonn back to Belfast and they reckon he’ll live, but they had to take what was left of his legs off completely, just below his hip joint. He’ll be lucky if he can even wear prosthetics.”
Clare, who’d come so close to amputation herself, blanched in sympathy inside the framework surrounding her hospital bed.
“And Isobel?” she asked with a mix of emotions running through her voice.
As she spoke she glanced warily across at Jacob who was sitting on the other side of the bed. I’d already told them who was responsible for the accident that had claimed Slick’s life, and so nearly cost Clare her own legs. Jacob had not taken the life or death of his estranged wife well.
I shook my head, shifting a little in the plastic visitor’s chair. “The carbon dioxide system is designed to totally douse a major engine fire, apparently,” I said. “Usually it’s the captain who has to take the decision to set it off but, as William said, it’s a last resort. Anyon
e left in the engine compartment simply suffocates.”
That had been Eamonn’s great escape plan all along, we’d realised. He’d intended to get out while we were still scrabbling for the keys to unlock Isobel and Jamie, as one of his men manually overrode the CO² system from the rear fire control centre on the deck above.
As it had done, he knew the stricken ferry would eventually limp back into Larne, its nearest port. There Eamonn had intended to slip away in the confusion, leaving the rest of us dead in the engine room to tell no tales.
And if Daz hadn’t decided to scatter the diamonds instead of handing them over, it might just have worked.
“You were so lucky, Charlie,” Clare said, sober.
“Yeah,” I said tiredly. “But it doesn’t feel like lucky.”
We sat for a moment and said nothing. I thought of Slick, dead under the wheels of Isobel’s van. Of the diamond courier, and Tess, Paxo, and finally Isobel herself. Not to mention Jamie, who’d watched his mother die, and little Ashley, who’d lost both her parents inside a week. So many casualties that might have been avoided. So much damage left behind.
The driver of the Merc van had survived but lost his eyesight. Perhaps that was for the best, so he’d never see children crying in the street at the sight of his disfigured features. Sam was going to need further surgery on his shattered leg and Gleet was in line for a replacement elbow, when the police were done with him. As for Clare herself, my father was fairly confident she would regain full use of her limbs. But it was going to take months, if not years, to put it right.
“And what will happen to Eamonn?” Jacob asked.
“He’s hired a fancy legal team who are using his injuries to delay like mad,” I said. “But MacMillan is pretty certain he’ll go down for what he’s done. They’re just manoeuvring about the length of his sentence.”
If the authorities hadn’t been so delighted to be handed Eamonn on a platter, the rest of us would have faced some serious charges over our ambush on the Merc van. As it was, they were prepared to overlook our somewhat unorthodox methods in return for evidence that would help to convict Eamonn on a whole host of charges. I suppose it didn’t do our case any harm that we’d also handed over a rather large quantity of conflict diamonds. Although they’d be tearing up the grating in the ferry’s engine room for weeks before they found them all.
“You’ll be interested to hear that you’ll get most of your ten grand back,” I said, my voice bland. “After we ran the Merc van off the road, Daz grabbed the money along with the diamonds. It isn’t quite the return on your investment that Jamie promised you, but at least you won’t lose everything.”
Clare’s face registered a kind of startled hurt. “As if that matters now,” she muttered.
“It must have mattered at one point,” I said, keeping my voice even and non-confrontational only with a supreme effort. “Because you knew right from the start, didn’t you, what Jamie was up to?”
Clare’s jaw dropped as she stared at me. Her eyes flicked sideways towards Jacob but I don’t know what message passed between them. I didn’t take my eyes off her pale face. One of the nurses bustled across the ward behind me, chattering with a colleague. I ignored them.
Eventually, Clare said, “Yes,” so muted she was almost inaudible.
“So, why didn’t you tell me the truth back then?” I said quietly, aware of a lancing pain. “What difference did you think it was going to make?”
She shrugged, awkward. “You see everything so black and white, Charlie,” she said, finally looking up at me with eyes that shone bright with unshed tears. “You see the right thing and you do it. No doubts. No deviations.” She stopped, swallowed determinedly. “You saved my life once and damned near got yourself killed in the process and you’ve never blamed me.”
Jacob reached out and silently took one of her hands in his, entwining their fingers together. “How can I ever live up to that?” Clare went on, her voice breaking slightly. “How can I live up to the fact that you were prepared to make that kind of sacrifice for me.”
I stared at her a little blankly. Oh, if only you knew the demons that ride me. “You’ve got it all wrong, Clare,” I said. “I don’t expect you to be worthy of anything. You’re just you. My friend.” At least, I thought you were. “I just wanted the truth from you. I would have gone to the wall for you regardless.”
Jacob sighed. “It was a mistake,” he admitted with a weary smile. “And I’m sorry for it, Charlie. We both are.”
I got to my feet, stood a moment. “Yeah,” I said, “so am I.”
I started to head for the door but found I couldn’t leave it there. At the foot of the bed I turned back, took in the pair of them. They hadn’t moved, still sitting with their hands grasped together.
“You should have trusted me,” I said, and walked out without looking back.
The Royal Lancaster Infirmary still looked and smelled the same as I made my way along the corridors to the front entrance and out into the breezy sunshine. I paused outside the doors, letting the sun warm my face, the wind comb the taint of the place out of my hair.
A black Shogun swung into the car park and stopped alongside me. I got in and closed the door behind me, fastened my seatbelt and leaned back against the headrest, briefly closing my eyes.
“You OK?” Sean asked.
I opened my eyes again, found him watching me with that faint little half-smile hovering round his lips.
I sighed. “I suppose so,” I said, giving him a rueful smile in return. “If only they’d trusted me . . .”
“Trust’s a funny thing,” he said softly. “Sometimes people make you wait for it longer than you think they ought to.”
He put his hand on the centre console between us, palm upwards. After a second I put my own down on top of it, felt his fingers close around mine. And I was suddenly aware of not being quite so alone in this any more. I sat up, squared my shoulders.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said.
“Where to?”
“Anywhere away from here,” I said. “Find me a job, Sean. It’s time I went back to work.”
From the Author’s notebook
ROAD KILL came about because of a snippet I spotted in a local Lancaster newspaper. It reported that during the summer months an unusually high number of motorcyclists had been killed on the country road between the motorway turnoff and a popular weekend bikers’ haunt at Devil’s Bridge, near Kirkby Lonsdale.
The police were dismissing the accidents as “rider error”, but it got me thinking, What if it wasn’t accidental? What if it was deliberate . . .?
The story also gave me the opportunity to explore two themes that had been on my mind for some time.
The first of these was that all bikers on page and screen seemed to be portrayed as gun-running, meth lab-running outlaws. Yes, the members of the Devil’s Bridge Club do break the law, but they’re hardly career criminals, and I wonder how much their attitude towards the legal and illegal is coloured by their usual contact with the police – being stopped for speeding.
The second was that Ireland often got the unpleasant end of the stick as far as the media went. I’ve spent quite a bit of time there, both north and south of the border, and loved the place. On the whole, it’s very different from the gloomy, violence-ridden image gleaned from the news reports.
Finally, when I was writing this book, I knew the ending was going to take place on the ferry coming home, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it was all going to happen. Then I had the chance to spend a day crawling all over an Irish Sea ferry, learning the ins and outs of its complex fire-fighting systems. The way it operates is exactly as described in the story – a nice example of how the truth is often so much better than anything you could invent.
Acknowledgements
As always, various people generously allowed me to pick their brains in order to write this book. These include Robert J Breden FGA DGA of Banks Lyon Jewellers in Lancaster; medical expert
Kate Merriman BMBS MRCS; John Morris, Managing Director of Mondello Park race circuit in Naas, near Dublin; John Robinson at Safety Services Agency in Belfast; and former RAF bomb disposal expert, Robert Roper. Thank you all. The facts are yours, but I take the blame for any artistic licence.
Yet more people waded their way through the typescript and pointed out the glaring plot-holes. Therefore, my grateful thanks go to Peter Doleman, Claire Duplock, Sarah Harrison, Caroline and Robert Roper, Tim Winfield, my editor Anna Valdinger, and my copy editor Sarah Abel.
Also big thanks to ZACE eBook Conversion for immaculate conversion of the printed book to e-format; to Jane Hudson of NuDesign for the brilliant cover; and to Lee Goldberg for generously allowing me to include an excerpt from KING CITY as a bonus feature at the end of this novel.