Incinerator

by Niall Leonard

  eleven

  There are few sounds I find more depressing than the rattly rumble of a wheeled suitcase being dragged along a pavement. It always puts me in mind of someone stumbling through life lumbered with crap too heavy to carry. There were dozens of those cases being trundled around the smoky strip-lit caverns of Victoria Coach Station by knackered, grumpy travellers too broke to catch a train. I queued at the travel counter—I hate reading off ticket machine screens while a queue builds up behind me, sighing and tutting—and paid my fare with a tenner and some odd coins I’d found in the pocket of the jacket I’d stolen. I felt bad about it, yeah, but I’d already taken the jacket, how was I going to give the owner his spare change back? Before leaving the counter I asked for directions, and trudged past a long line of waiting coaches before I came to the right bay for the Chelmsford service.

  The weather had turned cold and I shivered as I curled up in a seat towards the back, keeping an eye through the tinted windows for police. I doubted they’d be looking for me here. Catching a late-night coach to Chelmsford made very little sense, and that was what clinched the decision for me. The only other option was to chuck that coffee receipt into a litter bin, head to Delroy’s to beg a bed for the night, and to lie awake waiting for the police to pitch up on the doorstep.

  Dean’s new friends had gone to a lot of trouble to set me up, which suggested I’d been getting too close to the truth. But what truth? I’d been rattling a lot of cages—which one held the nutter who’d turned Dean and had Sherwood gutted? Who was that bald guy with the rings? Thinking about it, I couldn’t believe Sherwood had been sacrificed just to screw me. He must have been a loose end, a liability, so that killing him and framing me had been two birds brained with one stone.

  Harry Anderson’s gambling addiction had left him in debt. If I was right about the painting, he’d borrowed money from Sherwood, and he couldn’t pay it back, and he couldn’t afford his bosses finding that out. But Anderson was a banker, not a gangster—he could never have arranged the bloodbath I’d just seen. The only man I’d ever met capable of that sort of sadism was the Guvnor, and he wasn’t even in the country … was he?

  The coach engine revved to a roar, the doors beeped for a minute before hissing shut, and we backed away from the parking bay. Only a handful of passengers had boarded so I had room to stretch out, though the stiff seats with their locked-down armrests seemed designed to keep travellers sitting rigidly to attention like crash-test dummies. Muzak started leaking from the sound system, never rising above a vaguely tuneful burbling as the coach roared and swayed through the heart of London, past tall buildings that had once been crammed with servants and were these days crammed with desks and filing cabinets. As the coach’s air conditioning circulated warm germs I felt my eyelids starting to droop, and I let them; I hadn’t slept, and I’d eaten nothing except a stale bean salad wrap since the fire had woken me up beside Susan twenty hours ago.

  I dozed for a while, vaguely aware of London flickering past, a maze of dark streets, lonely night-time walkers, and gleaming rivers of sodium light. I closed my eyes completely somewhere in the East End and when I opened them again I was miles from anywhere, thundering along a dark divided highway, and the bright square shapes of buildings had given way to the vague soft outlines of trees against a hard black sky. I panicked briefly, wondering if I’d slept through a stop, but when I looked around I saw no new faces among the passengers and nobody missing. The late-night coach wasn’t an express service, but took its passengers on a rambling mystery tour of Essex, with three stops before it reached Chelmsford. The second stop, I’d been told, was Churchfield Services, so I wouldn’t need to ask anyone else to read road signs for me.

  The first stop was some commuter town where an old lady had stepped gingerly down and waited for the driver to manhandle her huge suitcase out of the luggage compartment on the side of the coach. We drove off and left her standing there in the dark like we’d stranded her to die on an ice floe. Churchfield Services took another forty-five minutes.

  The coach nosed into a space in the parking lot and pulled up with a grunt and wheeze like a clapped-out carthorse. When the driver cut the engine, silence rushed in with the chill night air, broken only by the hum of cars passing on the distant road. “Fifteen minutes,” he bellowed to the pass engers, before opening the doors, climbing down and scuttling away in the direction, I assumed, of a bathroom. A kid who looked like a student followed him; I clambered down and headed in the other direction, towards the fuel station, wondering what the hell I was doing in this godforsaken dump in the middle of the night. Hopefully it would take less than fifteen minutes to get nowhere, then I could travel on to Chelmsford and use the return half of my ticket. Even though it was the wee small hours three or four customers were browsing the filling station’s racks of sweets and crisps and chocolate, all different forms of sugar and starch cooked up by one huge global conglomerate that probably owned shares in dental clinics and diabetes treatments too. The two servers at the counter were Asian. I knew those guys worked 24-hour shifts sometimes, and I hoped I hadn’t caught these ones at hour 23. But either they hadn’t been in the country long enough to understand what I was asking or they were too knackered to care. They might have seen a black Merc—they saw a lot of black Mercs, none today though, yes they had, no, that was the day before. Did you want any fuel with that, sir?

  It was every bit as hopeless as I’d thought it would be, and I headed for the hot food section to find something edible, hopefully with a vitamin in it. The waitress wiping down the counter looked vaguely Slavic, with high cheekbones and pale green eyes, but when she opened her mouth to talk she was pure Essex.

  “What you looking for?”

  “I dunno, a BLT maybe?”

  “No, I mean, a car, I heard you asking.”

  “Er—yeah. A big black Merc. Expensive. I was wondering if it filled up here, you know?”

  “Late reg? Like, this year?”

  “Yes, I think so.” I hadn’t clocked the year, which was stupid, because it would have been the middle two numbers, and even I could have managed that. But it had looked pretty new.

  “There’s one just like that, comes here for a jet wash every week.”

  “Seriously? Do you have the registration?” I had no idea what I was going to do with it—I hadn’t thought that far ahead.

  “No. But I know where the driver lives. Young guy, doesn’t speak much English?” She picked up her tongs. “Did you actually want a BLT? We might have one out back.”

  “What? No, forget the BLT—I mean thanks, but—did you say you knew where to find it, the Merc?”

  “There’s this big house down the road from here”—she gestured with her tongs—“used to be a stately home, then it was a loony bin or a special school or something—anyway someone’s moved in, a whole bunch of blokes. I seen that car pull into the drive when I was headed home, that’s how I know.”

  “How far down the road?”

  * * *

  The gateway was unremarkable—two concrete pillars set wide apart with black steel railings on either side and matching gates that didn’t look as if they’d been closed recently. No signage or post boxes, though the wooden posts standing about two metres back from the gates must have supported a notice board at some point. No CCTV either, which suited me. After walking for forty-five minutes along the hard shoulder of a dark wet divided highway I didn’t fancy cutting across fields to find a side entrance to the house or mansion or stately home or whatever I’d find in there.

  Dawn was starting to leach through the clouds, and as I passed through the gates I quickened my pace, feeling exposed and vulnerable. The long tarmac drive stretched away into the night, dotted with potholes and bordered on either side by gloomy, dense, dark green shrubs.

  After about half a mile there was enough light to make out the road ahead dipping downhill and curving off to the left, where tall brick chimneys poked up among a copse of scraggy firs. No
w I left the road and walked over the grass, which hadn’t been cut in months. The dew soaked through my trainers and up the legs of my jeans, so my feet soon squelched and my calves froze under the wet flapping denim. I barely noticed; I focused on what I hoped to find—the reason all this was happening, and who I had infuriated by trying to discover what had happened to Nicky.

  Nothing grew beneath the scraggy firs surrounding the house and my soggy shoes made no noise on the thick brown bed of pine needles underfoot. I could make out the walls of the mansion now, pale grey stone and render. It was an ugly, institutional building, set in a hollow, with lots of rippled glass at ground level to stop its inhabitants looking out. I could guess what it was like inside—dark, airless, cold, damp and gloomy. It certainly looked as if it had been a mental hospital at some point. If the patients weren’t insane when they got here, they’d have soon ended up that way.

  Nearer the house the fir trees thinned out and thick holly bushes took their place, their rubbery thorns ripping at my skin as I pushed through them. The forecourt was a broad expanse of grey gravel bordered by flower beds, or rather beds of empty clay dotted with weeds, and the black Merc was parked there, between an anonymous silver saloon and an unmarked box van that had once been white but was now a dingy grey. The silver saloon was parked with its nose facing outwards, and the hood was dented as if it had collided with something heavy … Winnie?

  I could see no lights and no movement. If I’d done it on purpose I couldn’t have arrived at a better time. This was the hour when babies were born, and police squads kicked your doors in. I surveyed the ground-floor windows, trying to recall some of the house-breaking tricks my fellow hoodlum, Genghis, had shown me. I’d never burgled anyone’s house back then, I’d just been the lookout. At the time it had made me feel less guilty about what we were doing; now I knew I’d been lying to myself.

  But my youth hadn’t been totally misspent—I spotted a small sash window in a corner that wasn’t fully closed. Not too small for me to get through either, as long as I didn’t have to smash it. I walked as softly and swiftly as I could from the shelter of the holly bushes across the gravel to the side wall. The gravel barely crunched, as if it was too soggy or tired to make the effort. I checked out the window from close up; as I thought, the frame had warped and the window didn’t shut properly. There was a screw-down latch on the bottom of the upper section that was supposed to sit in a U-shaped catch on the top of the lower section, but it didn’t quite reach, and someone had simply flipped it into position and left it.

  I worked my fingers into the tight gap between the window frame and the lower sash and lifted gently. It didn’t budge. I tried to rattle it in its frame, but it seemed the whole window was so warped it might have been jammed like that for years. I gritted my teeth, dug my fingers in further, shook the frame and pulled, and abruptly the whole pane shot upwards so hard I thought it would fall out of the frame and shatter. It hit the top with a muffled bang, but the sound seemed to die away almost instantly. The room beyond smelled of damp and the magnolia paint was peeling. Apart from a metal trolley behind the door with a wheel broken off, and a plastic chair gathering dust in the corner, it held no furniture.

  I clambered over the sill and lowered a foot to the floor, hoping there’d be no grit or glass to crack underfoot, but all I heard was the faint squelch of my wet trainer. Turning back I tugged at the sash and it slid back down to the almost-shut position it had started in, making barely any noise. Best to leave as few signs of my presence as I could. I crept over to the door and tried the handle. It turned, and gently I cracked the door open, and listened.

  Voices down the hall. Talking, arguing, laughing. Three men, by the sound of it—what the hell were they doing out of bed? But it didn’t sound like anyone was keeping watch in the corridor, so I pulled the door open wider and I craned my head round it. The long hallway was harshly lit by neons screwed to the cracked ceilings. Their light washed what little warmth there was out of the yellowing beige paint on the walls and doors. A threadbare carpet ran down the centre of the floor, over parquet flooring missing plenty of blocks. The interior was even more dismal than I’d expected; dawn had broken properly now but only the most feeble daylight penetrated the fir trees and holly bushes crowding round the house.

  The voices were coming from a large room with double doors about three metres away. Opposite the doors a wide staircase led upwards, curving off to a landing I could not see.

  “I tell you now, don’t play.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You have no money left.”

  “The big man owes me two weeks’ money. Deal.”

  “No credit.” More laughter.

  I recognized one voice anyway. Dean was playing cards, and losing. His opponent had a deep gravelly voice and an accent that sounded Mediterranean—Greek, maybe? His voice was good-humoured and amused right now, but something told me you didn’t want to be around when he stopped laughing. I suspected that was the big bald guy with the moustache and the rings. There was a third man in the room who seemed younger, with a high-pitched giggle that somehow sounded foreign as well.

  “Look, here, right, it’s a Rolex, all right? Deal?”

  “I have watch.”

  “It’s a fucking Rolex, it’s worth six grand!”

  “Not to me. Is worth maybe one.”

  “Hell, fine, deal!”

  From what I could hear Dean would soon be reading the time off his mobile phone, if he managed to keep hold of that. I moved out quickly and tiptoed down the hall in the other direction from the voices, keeping clear of the carpet. Walking on it would have muffled my steps, but my sneakers might well have left prints or damp marks.

  The first door I came to was open, revealing a narrow staircase heading downwards, to a cellar or an old scullery. I wasn’t sure about going down there; chances were there’d be no other way out. Then again, it wasn’t likely anyone would be sleeping in the cellar. I might have more chance to look around without being caught.

  The staircase was solid and barely creaked under my weight. I expected to see low-ceilinged rooms piled high with junk or papers or maybe rows of wine racks, but instead I found myself in another long corridor. This one looked newly decorated, with vinyl flooring and a row of doors off one side, each with a window at eye level glazed with wired glass. Every door, I noticed, had a bolt on the outside, although none of them were bolted right now, as far as I could see. On the wall by each door was a light switch.

  I glanced into the nearest room, a small bare cube with pale green walls and a ventilator but no window apart from the one in the door. It reminded me too much of a room in my old youth detention centre—a sink, a plastic chair, a single metal bed with a quilt rolled up at the foot of a thin mattress. I could guess what that bucket in the corner was for. The wired glass in this door had crazed where someone inside had rammed something hard into it—the leg of a chair, I guessed. Maybe this place had once been a special school, but even the grimmest special schools didn’t have cells in the basement—these features were a recent addition to the house. It looked more like a prison, waiting for a fresh crop of inmates. But where did they come from, and where did they go?

  I was about to turn back for the stairs when I noticed one door at the far end of the corridor was still bolted shut. Jesus, I thought, there’s someone locked in here? That was bad news. I had no idea how I was going to get out of this place, and if I tried to help anyone else we’d both be caught. Should I run for it, get help? But I knew that wasn’t really an option. I crept up to the door and pressed my face to the wired glass.

  The only light in the cell came from the hall where I was standing, and it was hard to see anything beyond my own reflection. I could just about make out a figure asleep in the bed. This cell wasn’t as bare as the others; a track-suit lay folded neatly on the bedside chair, and there was even a TV on a little table, plugged into a DVD player, although there seemed to be more books scattered around than
DVDs. After staring very hard I realized the prisoner was a woman, small and slight, with blonde hair that hadn’t been washed in a while …

  I scrabbled at the bolt and nearly slammed it back before I remembered where I was and eased it home softly instead. Turning the handle slowly I opened the door, glancing over my shoulder before I crept inside, terrified now of getting caught. The room was stuffy and smelled of stale breath and piss, but the woman slept on. I reached out to touch her shoulder, and her eyes opened, and she scrabbled backwards in the bed as if I had come to kill her. I couldn’t risk her crying out, so I clapped my right hand over her mouth, and she twisted her head and sank her teeth into the heel of my right hand. I gritted my jaw and bore the pain, whispering urgently, “Nicky—

  Nicky, it’s me! It’s Finn!”

  Either she heard what I was saying, or she recognized me from the taste of my blood, but Nicky finally heard what I was hissing at her, and I felt her relax. When she opened her teeth I tugged my hand away, and she flung herself at me, her arms so tight around my neck I nearly choked. But I could feel the fear and relief in her slender body, and I gave her a moment to realize that I was really there and that she wasn’t dreaming. I knew that at any minute Dean or one of his friends could come downstairs, but I sat there and held her for as long as I could, because I’d wanted to take her in my arms long before I’d lost her.

  Finally she pulled away, but before she could speak I raised a finger and held it to her lips. I had as many questions as she did, but explanations could wait. She flung the bedclothes aside, grabbed the sweatpants from the plastic chair and pulled them on. I ducked down and felt under the bed for shoes, and found a pair of expensive trainers—the ones she was wearing when she was abducted, presumably. Nicky snatched them from me and tugged them on while I checked the corridor to see if anyone had heard us.

  The starkly lit passageway was still empty. When I stepped outside Nicky followed me, wide-eyed, and tense as a wound spring. I raised a hand to indicate she should wait a second, then ducked into the cell next door, where I grabbed the pillow from the unmade bed. There were no other props I could use, and no time to set up anything more elaborate anyhow. While Nicky stared at me, clearly desperate to run, I returned to her cell and stuffed the pillow under the blankets, hastily arranging them to try and make it look like Nicky was still asleep, curled up and facing the wall. The finished arrangement would barely have fooled a two-year-old, I thought, but it was better than nothing.