The Overlooker

by Fay Sampson

  Nick stared at her, speechless. He was appalled. How could he have forgotten? His mind had been a mill race of churning memories, struggling for the cause. But not of this. The scene came back to him in vivid clarity.

  ‘Someone had been there,’ he said huskily. ‘There were footprints in the dust. They led to a locked door at the end of the weaving shed.’

  ‘There was something else, Dad. On the outside of the mill. All those graffiti. Remember? Out of the Book of Revelation, Mum said. Their torture was like the torture of a scorpion. Stuff like that.’

  Nick stared at her, wide-eyed with shock.

  Tom looked from one to the other. ‘Why the hell didn’t you say so?’

  Millie rounded on him. ‘Because we thought it was all to do with Hugh Street, you daft pig. Who wouldn’t? There was a crime going on there. It was only that last phone call that told Dad we’d got it wrong . . . Dad!’ She whirled round to him. Her pointed face blazed with realization. ‘That explains it! You know you said you couldn’t think how that man at Hugh Street had got your mobile number, when you only told him your name? Well, in the mill you took off your jacket to crawl under the loom and show me. Idiot! Why didn’t I remember? When I passed it back to you, some stuff fell out of your pocket. Your mobile. Business cards and stuff. We were scrabbling all over the floor picking them up.’

  Nick’s hand went slowly to his inside pocket. His phone. And yes, a little sheaf of cards. He drew them out and looked at them. His name and architectural qualifications. Just the information with which that first call had mocked him. His office address. Phone numbers, both landline and mobile. Email address of the firm. Some of them were still smudged with dirt from the abandoned mill floor.

  He thumbed through them. There was a piece of paper wedged between them. It seemed to be torn from a small notebook and folded in four. He could not remember what it was.

  He unfolded it. There was a list scrawled on it. Words he did not recognize. The writing was not his.

  ‘What’s the matter, Dad? Tom asked.

  ‘I don’t know this piece of paper. Do you remember picking this up, Millie?’

  ‘Sort of. I suppose it was on the floor with everything else. Some of them had slid under the loom. I fished out everything I could see.’

  ‘It’s not mine. I don’t even know what half these words mean. I didn’t write this.’

  Tom took it from him. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  His waving black hair fell across his face as he bent his head to read the words in the paling evening light.

  Suddenly he straightened up. There was shock in his face.

  ‘Dad! We have to get there! Straight away!’

  ‘Why? What does it mean?’

  ‘Caesium-137? TNT? At least he doesn’t mention uranium. Run!’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tom’s long legs sent him hurtling up the slope, outstripping the others. Nick’s mind was reeling. The letters TNT hammered in his brain. A bomb factory? In the derelict mill? Who? Why? The thought of Suzie imprisoned there suddenly galvanized him into action. In a few moments he had caught up Millie’s running figure.

  They broke out on to the level drive behind Tom. He was making for their car.

  ‘Have you got the keys?’ he flung over his shoulder at Nick.

  ‘Yes!’

  Constable Riley leaped from the seat of his own car, where he had been keeping surveillance. He started to run towards them, shouting into his radio as he did so. Nick ran round to the driver’s seat of the Fewings’ car.

  Riley had reached them and was grappling with Tom.

  ‘What’s the hurry? Wait! You can’t go anywhere without telling us.’

  ‘How about a bomb factory?’ Tom shouted at him. ‘They’ve got my mother.’ He thrust the piece of paper at the constable. ‘It’s all there. TNT. Caesium-137. Detonators. You know what that means.’

  Sergeant Bray was running from the house.

  Nick shouted at Millie as she folded her legs into the car. ‘No! Stay here.’

  ‘Not likely. Look what happened the last time we split up.’

  She leaned out of the window and called to Constable Riley. ‘It’s a derelict mill beside the canal. About halfway between the weaving museum and Canal Street. You can’t miss it. It’s painted all over with slogans about the end of the world.’

  As Nick put the car into gear, those last words broke over him with renewed meaning.

  The end of the world. They had thought the graffiti on the mill was the work of some nutter who had merely used those walls as a convenient backdrop. It had not occurred to him that it might have anything to do with what was going on inside. Had it? Was this some volatile mix between the manufacture of explosive devices and the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world? What madmen were they dealing with?

  Sergeant Bray hammered on the window, but the car sprang away, leaving the two police officers helpless in its wake. In the mirror, Nick saw them race for their car. It was the detective sergeant who was now talking rapidly into her radio as she leaped into the car beside Riley.

  Then he swung on to the downhill road and lost them. A few moments later, he thought he saw them emerge from the drive, already a long way back up the hill behind him.

  Would they see him as he turned the car into the residential streets through which the Fewings had threaded their way back from Hugh Street yesterday?

  He tried to damp down the feeling that he was running away from the police, evading capture. They had got away from High Bank before their escort could stop them. But now they would surely need the backup of the police.

  All he could think about was the need to find Suzie and be with her. What happened next he could not imagine.

  He blessed the accuracy of his memory as the car shot out of a street of terraced houses on to the huge, desolate area where the houses had been demolished. For a moment, he was disorientated. Then his sense of direction reasserted itself and the car roared forward on to Canal Street. Horns blared as he sped across the oncoming traffic into the far lane and turned downhill for the canal bridge.

  ‘Dad!’ Millie exclaimed. ‘It’s not going to help Mum if you get us killed.’

  She was right. He steadied his hands on the wheel.

  ‘What’s caesium-137?’ he asked Tom.

  ‘Radioactive isotope. They use it in university labs and hospitals. Easiest place for radioactive material to go AWOL. Combine it with explosives and you’ve got yourself a dirty bomb.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Millie asked. ‘Aren’t all bombs dirty?’

  ‘Not like this. The aim is not to blow people up, unless they’re really close, but to spread contamination over a wide area. Streets, houses, drinking water. You can’t see it, so you don’t know what’s safe and what’s not. Result – panic.’

  ‘And you think . . . Inside that mill . . . Where Mum is . . .?

  ‘We don’t know for certain she’s there,’ Tom said grimly. ‘But, from what you say, I’ve a pretty clear idea now what’s going on there. It sounds like the perfect place for a clandestine bomb factory.’

  They were level with the steps that led down from the bridge to the canal. Nick hesitated. Should he ditch the car and run along the towpath? But it was some distance away that they had found and entered the mill. On a hunch, he turned the car right, being a little more careful this time to find a gap in the traffic. He drove into a narrow side street that seemed to run parallel to the canal.

  He was in unknown territory here.

  ‘Keep your eyes open,’ he ordered Millie. ‘It should be somewhere over there on our right. Shout if you think you see it.’

  There were more abandoned mills with lifeless eyes. Would the one they had entered look any different from this direction than the others? Were there graffiti on this side too?

  ‘Got it!’ Millie yelled. ‘Over there. THE END TIME IS COMING.’

  ‘For them, it is!’ Tom said.

  Nick stopped the car abruptly.
The three of them got out.

  ‘Stay here,’ Nick told Millie again.

  She threw him a look of exasperated scorn.

  The factory was only a block away. They threaded a narrow alley and stood beneath its forbidding bulk. It stood darkly brooding against the grey evening sky. No light showed.

  Nick began to feel a chill uncertainty.

  Warning letters were painted across the wall in metre-high letters.

  PREPARE TO MEET THY DOOM.

  ‘This is evidently the front entrance,’ Nick said. ‘We got in round the back.’

  ‘Three doors, but all boarded up,’ Tom observed.

  ‘There was a thingy on the canal side,’ Millie said. ‘You know, like where they swing things out and lower them into barges.’

  ‘We went in through a window.’ Nick was urgently scanning this side of the building to look for a weak spot. ‘But these grilles look pretty secure here.’

  ‘We’re wasting time,’ Millie urged him. ‘Why don’t we just go round to the towpath, where we were before?’

  ‘There’s a light!’ Tom said suddenly.

  It was a tiny bud of illumination in an end window. Nick drew his breath in a gasp so sharp it was almost painful. Someone was there. His hunch was becoming reality. No one should be in this derelict mill. And if someone was, it meant almost certainly that Suzie was in there too.

  Panic was receding. He felt an almost steely determination. He knew what he had to do now.

  ‘I’m going round the back. Tom, you come with me. Millie, you stay here and wait for the police.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we all wait? What if the people inside have got guns?’

  ‘I’m not sure they’re that kind of criminal. Religious fanatics, by the sound of it. The sort that want to hurry on the end of the world. But from that paper you found, our guy seems to be more into using chemistry than firearms.’

  ‘You hope. Who’s to say he hasn’t got both?’

  Nick and Tom began to move towards the corner of the mill. An inner voice was telling Nick that Millie was right. The police knew what was happening here. Tom had given them the alarming ingredients scrawled on the piece of paper. Millie had told them how to find the mill. Any moment now, police cars would come racing down this side street, lights flashing, sirens blaring. They would have the manpower, the equipment, the weapons, the experience to deal with this far better than him and Tom unarmed.

  But a more urgent voice was telling him that it might not end like that. The police might come and surround the building – from a safe distance. Tom seemed certain that whoever had taken Suzie was constructing a dirty bomb. The police would surely have safety regulations. They wouldn’t risk going in unprepared where a bomb might be detonated. Would they send for a specialist unit? The SAS?

  How did Tom know about these things? Nick had no idea how big an explosion they were talking about, or how wide an area might be contaminated with radioactivity. He was pretty sure that anyone in the immediate vicinity would be in serious danger.

  How powerful was the explosion? How close did you need to be for that itself to blow you apart? The tall mill ahead of him suddenly seemed not nearly big enough.

  He reached the wall. Shouldn’t he order Tom to stay behind too? He took a sideways glance at his son’s set face and knew he would be wasting his time. From close underneath its shuttered walls, the mill loomed huge. They were working along the front wall, away from that bead of light, towards the further corner. They had to climb over a crumbling wall into a patch of waste ground, where the neighbouring mill had been demolished. As they dropped down, a cat fled yowling from almost underneath them.

  ‘Why do they sound so scary?’ Tom attempted to laugh. ‘I can see why they associate them with witches.’

  Their footsteps sounded loud in the silence that followed. The evening light was fading, but soon there was a glimmer from the canal ahead.

  ‘Round here,’ Nick whispered. ‘It wasn’t far from this end.’ He found the window. They had not been able to flatten the metal grille back over the opening as completely as it had been before they broke in. Nick’s fingers closed round the rusted metal and tugged.

  The grille sprang open. The gap was wide enough to let them through. Nick straightened up and looked at Tom in the dusk.

  ‘I’ll go first. Stay here. I’ll call if I find anything.’

  ‘Thanks, but I’m coming in too. We’ve no idea how many of them there are. If necessary, one of us can take them on, while the other gets Mum out.’

  ‘If she’s here.’

  ‘Those phone calls as good as said she was. He was goading you to come and find her.’

  ‘That’s what worries me. Why?’

  ‘If those slogans on the walls are his – or theirs – then they’re not quite sane. They want to see the end of the world.’

  Nick kept his private fears to himself: that this was personal. That the bomb maker wanted to punish the Fewings family for discovering his factory. That he was going to make them the first victims of his device.

  The crazy thing was that they had had no idea what was going on in the mill. All their attention had been on Hugh Street and the criminal activity there. If the bomb maker had not made those threatening phone calls, their break-in at the mill would have passed off without further thought.

  Nick drew a deep breath to steady himself. Whoever had made those threats, he was in there now. He must be driven by a death wish to wreak havoc on an evil world, even if he killed himself with the rest of them.

  He put a leg over the sill into the darkness beyond.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  As his foot connected with the floor, Nick had the uncanny feeling that he was stepping into another world. The former weaving shed was in almost total darkness. The deepening grey sky of evening should have glimmered through the ranks of high windows that had once cast light on the weavers’ intricate play of weft and warp. But most were obscured now by boards or grilles.

  He sensed, rather than saw, the rows of looms rising on either side of him.

  Then he saw it. A thin line of light at floor level, far down the end of the vast room. It was so faint he had to blink to be sure he was not imagining it.

  ‘Do you think he’s got a battery lamp in there?’ Tom’s voice murmured at his elbow. ‘Or has he patched into the mains supply?’

  ‘Go back!’ hissed Nick, startled.

  ‘Like I said. Two of us are better than one.’

  Nick felt a cold uncertainty. It had seemed simple from outside. Break in, find Suzie, free her and flee. The gloom of the weaving shed was silent around them. He had no idea where Suzie might be held.

  ‘I should have brought a torch,’ he cursed himself.

  Tom was whispering. ‘That guy was taunting you to find him. Now’s your chance. He’s got to be the other side of that door, where the light is.’

  ‘I was rather hoping to avoid a confrontation. Just get Suzie out and run.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Tom stopped abruptly.

  ‘What? I didn’t hear anything.’

  ‘Over there. Among the machines . . . No, it’s gone now. I thought I heard a sort of thump.’

  They listened intently. No further sound came from that direction. But ahead of them now rose the sound of voices from the other side of the end door.

  ‘Sounds like they’re having an argument.’ Nick could almost hear the grin in Tom’s voice. ‘So much the better for us. The bad news is that there’s more than one of them. The good news is that they’re falling out with each other. Should add to the confusion when we meet them.’

  ‘I only wish the way out wasn’t such a long way back.’

  ‘Maybe there’s a door at this end of the mill. We went round the far end. But from what I saw, you could probably break out through any of these windows and the grilles would just give way.’

  ‘I hope you’re right. I wouldn’t want to be trapped inside. I’m not as sure as you are that they won’t be arme
d.’

  ‘Have you noticed something?’ Tom muttered.

  ‘No. What?’

  ‘It’s not just quiet inside here. I can’t hear a sound outside either. What’s happened to the police? I thought they’d come screaming after us when Millie told them where we were going.’

  Nick stopped again. Now that he tuned his ear to the wider distance, he realized that Tom was right. The derelict area around the mill was ominously silent. He thought of Millie waiting out there alone in the gathering dusk and felt guilty. It was growing harder to know what to do to keep his family safe.

  His attention was suddenly wrenched back to the scene in front of him. Some twenty paces away, the door at the end of the weaving shed burst open. The artificial light in the room beyond was not brilliant, but it seemed to flood the space with unexpected dazzle. Huge shadows of the looms were thrown back on either side.

  Directly in front of him, where the light was strongest, stood two men.

  Within the small room was a ginger-haired young man with an angry face above a stubbled chin. He wore glasses and a stained and ragged jersey. Nick was not sure whether the first impression was of an impoverished student or a down-and-out. But something about him was naggingly familiar. The face within the shadow of the cyclist’s hood? He didn’t think so. That had been thinner, younger.

  The student type in that fair-isle jersey, lingering in the precinct yesterday afternoon.

  He had a frightening glimpse of a workbench behind the young man. An array of parts which might be the things Tom had read out from that list. A small collection of tools. A bundle from which wires protruded.

  But it was the other man, now coming through the doorway, who seized his attention. Nick’s jaw fell open. Striding towards him, then stopping abruptly as he saw Nick and Tom, was the plump-faced figure he had confronted before. Harry Redfern, the Baptist minister who had driven the blue Honda.