‘Yup.’
After some moments’ silence, Barry Farrier said, ‘Their business in France – there was an insect, a scorpion, always present somewhere in the photos and films.’
‘Alive or dead?’
‘Dead. Why are you asking, can I enquire?’
‘Sounds like he’s well into his entomology,’ Grace said. ‘If it’s the same man, he’s now using scarabs – dung beetles.’
‘Very fitting.’
Grace thanked him, agreed to keep him fully in the loop and hung up. Norman Potting immediately strode over to his desk and laid the sheet of paper he was holding down in front of him.
‘Sulphuric acid, Roy. I’ve got what I think is a pretty comprehensive list of all the suppliers in the UK. There are five down in the south, two of them in our patch – one in Newhaven and one in Portslade.’
Grace, still absorbing the information he had been given by Barry Farrier, picked up the list and quickly scanned through the names and addresses. He clocked the two local ones.
Suddenly, the door burst open and Glenn Branson came in, his face lit up with excitement. ‘I’ve got a result!’ he said, his face inches from his SIO’s.
‘Tell me?’
Branson slapped the photograph of the VW Golf driver down triumphantly on the desk. ‘I’ve just had a phone call from a taxi driver mate of mine.’
Frivolously, and for no real reason, Grace asked, ‘Not the one who sneaked on me and Cleo to you?’
‘The very same.’ Branson grinned, then continued, totally elated, ‘I circulated this photograph to all my contacts. He just belled me. He just picked up a fare who he says is a dead ringer for this fellow – in central Brighton twenty minutes ago. He’s convinced it’s this man. Dropped him off at a warehouse in Portslade. At this address.’ He gave a handwritten scrap of notepaper to his boss.
Grace read it. Then he looked again at the list Potting had just given him. At the distributor of sulphuric acid based in Portslade.
It was the same address.
83
Tom remembered something. He did not have his mobile phone, but he had something else. He had felt the hard lump – he had been lying on it some of the time. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of it before? he wondered.
He dug his hand into his trouser pocket and extricated his Palm Tungsten PDA. He pressed one of the four buttons on the bottom. Instantly the display lit up. The machine emitted a glow that, at this moment, suddenly felt as good as a thousand torches.
He could see!
‘What’s that?’ Kellie called out.
‘My Palm!’ He could see her, actually see her face!
‘How did – you – you can move?’ she hissed.
‘My hands.’
The beam did not have a long throw, it was wide and short, but for the first time he could begin to orient himself. They were in a huge store, with a ceiling maybe twenty feet high, stacked all the way round with racks of chemical drums; there were hundreds of them, if not thousands. There was a concrete floor, no windows, and the beam did not get as far as the door. From the temperature and the total absence of light, he guessed they were underground.
There must be a door big enough to get a forklift through for these drums, he thought. And almost certainly a lift.
He examined the shackle around his ankle. It looked like one of those police manacles for criminals he had seen in the movies: a wide metal clamp, locked, with a chain running off it secured to the wall by a metal hoop which was not going anywhere. Kellie was chained to another hoop some distance away. Her chain was fully extended. He stood up and moved towards her, but when his chain went tight there was still a gap of about ten feet between them.
‘You can’t dial with that thing, can you?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘What about email?’
‘I could if I had my phone.’
He urinated into the orange bucket which had arrived a few minutes earlier with a relief that was, for a few fleeting moments, close to bliss.
‘Don’t forget to pull the chain,’ Kellie said.
He grinned, suddenly loving her courage. If you could still smile, keep your spirits up – that was how people survived ordeals. ‘I won’t,’ he said. ‘And I’ll put the lid back down.’
He took the few paces the chain allowed him over to the drum he had opened, then shone the light on its side, looking for the label he had felt earlier in the darkness. He found it.
It was white, with a yellow and black HAZARDOUS SUBSTANCE! warning label next to it. On the white part was written: H2SO4. CONCENTRATE. 25 LTRS.
Tom again thought back as hard as he could to his schoolboy chemistry lessons. Would this stuff eat through metal? How quickly?
There was just one way to find out.
He put the Palm down on the floor and picked up the bucket. As he did so, the display went out. For an instant his heart sank as he feared the battery had died, then he realized it was on an automatic power-down after two minutes. Quickly, he reset it to stay on permanently. Then he picked up the bucket and hurled its contents away from himself and Kellie, as far as he could.
He turned his attention to the drum. He had removed the cap earlier, and there was a fierce acrid smell as he neared it. He took a deep breath and, holding the drum as firmly as he could, very aware and scared of the consequences of knocking it over, tilted it so that some poured from the top and splashed on the floor beside the bucket.
‘Shit.’
Steam curled up from the floor. The acid was reacting with something, which was a good sign.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just trying an experiment.’
‘What? What are you trying?’ Kellie asked, her voice pitifully tight.
From his poor memory of chemistry some acids would not dissolve both plastic and metal. The fact that these drums were plastic told him they should not dissolve the bucket.
The burning acrid reek was getting worse; he could feel it right down his throat. He stepped back, took a deep breath, then eased the drum back a few inches and tried again. This time the acid rattled into the bucket. He kept going until it was just under half full, set the drum back down, upright, then picked up the Palm, examining the bucket carefully to make sure no acid was on the handle nor anywhere else he would touch.
He poured a small amount of the acid onto a couple of links of the chain.
Nothing happened. Wisps of vile-smelling steam rose from the floor on which the two links lay, and immediately around them, but there was no apparent reaction with the steel at all.
He stared down in agonized frustration, and swore. He might just as well have poured water onto them.
84
Carl Venner waddled up and down his office, a freshly lit cigar clamped in his mouth, wringing his hands, directing his anger alternately at Luvic, who was chewing gum and smoking a cigarette at the same time, and the Russian. ‘Boys, this is not a good situation. It is just so not good.’
He raised his hand to his mouth, removed his cigar, then began biting the skin on the end of his index finger again. Tearing at it.
The Russian, who rarely spoke, said, ‘We need get Yuri out of hospital before he wake.’
‘Either get him out or silence him,’ Venner said.
‘I don’t kill my brother,’ he said darkly.
‘You work for me, Roman; you do what I fucking tell you.’
‘Then I no work for you.’
Venner strutted up to him. ‘Listen, you piece of shit. You’d be fucking driving a tractor in the Ukraine if it wasn’t for me, so don’t ever threaten to quit, because I just might accept your resignation, and then what the fuck do you do?’
The Russian looked sullen but said nothing.
Luvic mimed a chop across his own neck with his hand. ‘I fix.’
The Russian walked across to the Albanian and planted himself squarely in front of him; he stood a good head taller than the former bare-knuckle fighter. ‘You kill my brother,’ he
said, ‘I kill you.’
The Albanian stared mockingly back at the Russian, still chewing his gum. He brought his cigarette to his mouth twice in rapid succession, taking two quick drags, inhaling sharply and blowing the smoke out, then said, ‘I do what Mr Smith say to me to do. I obey Mr Smith.’
‘We have an even more urgent problem,’ Venner said. ‘That fuckwit creep John Frost – Gidney – with his goddamn weather reports, well there’s one fucking report he got wrong!’
The two men looked at him quizzically.
‘Acid rain! Bad-hair day for him today.’
The Russian grinned; the Albanian, who had no sense of humour, did not get it. He had put the Weatherman’s body in the sulphuric acid tank, as was normal; in a couple of days he would move the bones to the hydrochloric tank. After that there would be no trace of him left.
‘Our problem,’ Venner went on, ‘is we don’t know what he did, what he said to anyone. And he lied about his phone, right?’
The Albanian nodded his confirmation. ‘It was in his car, outside, switched on.’
‘We know what that means, right?’ Venner said.
Both his employees nodded.
‘The police can get his phone company to plot his route across Brighton and Hove – exact times and places. Gentlemen, we need to bail, I’m afraid. We need to get out of here and go back to base in Albania until things calm down.’
‘I prefer stay here,’ the Russian said.
Venner tapped his chest. ‘I’m fifty-nine. You think I want to spend any part of what’s left of my life in that shithole country, if I don’t have to? It’s even got the world’s ugliest women. We’re here in this country because we like it here. But you guys have fucked up.’
‘How?’ the Russian said, looking angry now.
‘How?’ Venner said, as if astonished by the question. ‘Mik gets followed from somewhere in Kemp Town to a car park in the centre of Brighton—’
Interrupting him, the Albanian said, ‘Yes, but I lose him in the car park.’
‘Yes – and your goddamn Golf and all.’
‘I will get that back.’
Ignoring him, Venner turned his rage back to the Russian. ‘Your idiot brother attracts the attention of the police, then gets in an automobile wreck and lets them get their hands on his laptop with our film of D’Eath on it, and you don’t think that’s a fuck-up?’
The Russian was silent.
‘Here’s what we do,’ Venner said, his tone suddenly more conciliatory. ‘We shoot the film of Mr and Mrs Bryce right now, and get rid of them. Then we’re out of here. We’ll go to Paris this afternoon. Then on from there. OK?’
Two silent, reluctant nods.
Then the Albanian said, ‘Where we do the film?’
‘Here,’ Venner said. ‘In this room. I have some very creative ideas. Mr Bryce has put us through a lot of grief; I want to hurt him. And I’d like to see him watch all the things we are going to do with Mrs Bryce first.’
He looked at the Russian. ‘Roman, go bring them up here. Just untie their legs and gag them with gaffer tape – I always like tearing that stuff off.’
And suddenly, his mood buoyed by the thought of some very inventive things he was going to do to the Bryces, Carl Venner began to hum.
85
‘Tom!’
The sudden, hushed urgency in Kellie’s voice made Tom look up. Shit! The rectangle of light had appeared again at the far end of the room. Someone was entering, a tall, thin man in black. The eastern European.
Tom dived to the floor, on top of the Palm to smother the light. Quickly, groping with his hands, he found the PDA, located the power button and pressed it in hard to switch it off. Had the man come to empty the bucket? Tom wondered, a little irrationally. He pulled his arms tight to his sides and squeezed his legs together, faking the original position he had been trussed up in as best he could. He lay still, watching the torch beam steadily jig across the floor towards them.
Then it was right in his face.
‘Mr Bryce, I take you upstairs now. We make you and Mrs Bryce movie stars!’
Tom, quaking with terror, was thinking that any second now the man was going to see that his cords had been removed. He must see that, unless he was blind!
‘What do you mean, “movie stars”?’ Kellie said, her voice cracking with fear.
The man swung the beam onto her face. ‘We enough talk! Maybe you like quick fuck? Mr Bryce, you like watch me sex your wife for you?’
Tom’s terror suddenly switched to fury. ‘Touch her and I’ll kill you,’ he said.
The man rounded on him and shouted imperiously, ‘ENOUGH TALK I SAY!’ He stabbed the beam of the torch right into Tom’s face. ‘YOU QUIET. YOU ARE NOT THREAT ME!’
Then the man knelt down. Tom heard the sound of tape ripping and realized what was coming next. Blinking hard, he could see the man was leaning over him. He could smell cologne on him, a sharp, masculine tang.
Tom stiffened.
He knew he had just one shot at this, that was all. He hadn’t thought it through, he just had to do it.
The man was holding a wide strip of gaffer tape between his hands. ‘You close mouth,’ he said.
‘Can I just blow my nose?’ Tom asked.
‘No blow!’
‘I’m going to sneeze!’
And in that moment he detected the hesitation, just the briefest wavering by the man. It was enough.
He sprang sideways, rolling over once, grabbing the bucket with both hands and lifting it, then turned and found the torch beam straight in his face. Kellie was safely to the left, well out of range. With all his strength he hurled the contents of the bucket straight at the flashlight beam.
He felt a few sharp pains on his hands like stings, droplets of the acid, but barely registered them as his ears filled with a terrible, piercing scream of agony.
The torch fell to the floor. Tom could just see the man staggering back clutching at his face. Had to get him! He had to grab him before he got out of reach!
Had to.
Tom lunged, launching himself forward in a full rugby tackle, aware there must be some acid on the floor but beyond caring. This was his only chance. Somehow, his arms almost leaving their sockets, he just managed to grab the man’s right ankle before the chain snapped tight against his own, jolting him to a halt. Then, with a strength he did not even know he had, he yanked the ankle back towards him.
The man fell back across him, writhing, screaming, howling pitifully, clawing at his face with his hands. Kellie was screaming also.
‘Tom! Tom! Tom!’
‘HELP!’ the Russian cried. ‘HELP, YOU HELP, YOU HELP, PLEASE HELP!’ Then he just started bellowing in agony, clawing at his face, at the same time writhing, trying to wriggle away from Tom.
The man had come to get them, which, Tom realized, meant he must have the keys to the shackles. He seized the torch and cracked it down with all his force on the back of the man’s head. There was a tinkle of glass and the light went out. The man was silent, motionless, and for an instant the only sound in the room was the ghastly hissing coming from the man’s head, accompanied by a new smell, a vile stench of burning flesh and hair. Tom retched; the acid seeming to fill the air with an invisible caustic haze. He could hear Kellie coughing too.
He found the Palm, switched it on and rummaged in the man’s jacket pockets. Almost immediately he found a small chain with just two keys on it, and pulled it out. He stood up, shaking from shock and fear, not knowing if someone else was about to appear at any second, knelt and using the light of the Palm found the keyhole. But his hand was shaking so much he could not get it in.
Jesus, come on, please!
Finally it slipped in. But it would not turn. It must be the other one, he realized. Somehow he got the second one in straight away; turned it. The lock sprang open, and seconds later he was limping across to Kellie. His hands were really stinging now, but he had no time to think about that.
Cr
ouching beside her, he kissed her and whispered, ‘I love you.’
She was staring at him, wide-eyed, near motionless with shock. He unlocked her ankle shackle, then started working on the tight knot on the cord binding her legs. His hands were shaking again; the knot was so tight, so damned tight. It wasn’t moving. He tried again. Then again. ‘Are you OK, my darling?’
She said nothing.
‘Darling?’
Nothing.
Then, in a tone that sent a shiver rippling beneath every inch of his skin, she said quietly, ‘Tom, someone’s coming into the room.’
He looked up. Straight into a torch beam coming from the doorway. Then he heard the chiding voice of the obese American. ‘You are one silly boy, Mr Bryce. Very foolish indeed.’
The beam swung away from Tom’s face, around the room. In seconds it would find the Russian on the floor. Tom, his nerves jangling, made a snap decision; he had no idea what the outcome would be, but it could not be any worse than waiting here, crouched down, for the American to come over.
He sprang up and ran at the doorway, aiming straight for the man in the puce shirt standing in it. He just ran, head down, screaming at the top of his voice, ‘YOUUUUU HIDEOUS BASSTAAAARRRRD!’
He vaguely took in that the man was trying to pull something from his pocket. Something black, metallic. A gun.
Then, running flat out, he struck the American full in the stomach with his head. It felt like hitting a massive cushion. He heard a winded gasp, felt a sharp jarring pain in his own neck, and a moment of blackness. The American tumbled backwards, and Tom fell with him, hitting the floor with his head between the man’s legs.
Then a hand grabbed his neck from behind, a hand that felt cold and hard, more like a metal pincer than human flesh. It released his neck and a split second later grabbed his hair, jerking his head painfully up, then pulling him right over onto his back, thudding the back of his head down on the floor and holding it pinioned there.
Tom looked straight up into the stubby barrel of a handgun, and the eyes of ice behind it.