Dead Man's Grip

  ‘Do you have any news?’ Carly blurted.

  Branson took her bag for her and steered her to one side, away from the crush of emerging passengers. She looked at him, then at DS Moy, then at the stranger who was in uniform, desperate to read something positive in their eyes, but she could see nothing.

  ‘I’m afraid not yet, Carly,’ Bella Moy said. ‘Presumably you’ve heard nothing?’

  ‘I rang all his friends – the parents – before I got on the plane. No one’s seen him.’

  ‘They’re certain he’s not anywhere in their house or their garden or garage?’

  ‘They’ve all searched thoroughly,’ she said forlornly.

  ‘How was the flight?’ Glenn Branson asked.

  ‘Horrendous.’

  ‘One positive thing, Carly,’ Branson went on, ‘is we are fairly sure that Tyler is still within the Brighton and Hove area. We believe he may be in Shoreham or Southwick or Portslade. Do you have any friends or relatives over there that he might go to if he runs away?’

  ‘From his captor, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have some friends on Shoreham Beach,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think Tyler knows where they live.’

  ‘We’ll get you home as quickly as we can,’ Bella said, ‘and we’ll keep you constantly updated.’ Then she gestured to the uniformed officer. ‘This is PC Jackson from the Metropolitan Police – we’re in his jurisdiction here at Heathrow. He’s very kindly going to fast-track you through the Immigration process.’

  Carly thanked him.

  Fifteen minutes later she was in the back of a police car, heading through the airport tunnel. Glenn Branson drove and Bella Moy sat in the front passenger seat. Moy turned to face her.

  ‘We have a number of questions we need to ask you about Tyler, Carly. Are you happy to talk in the car or would you rather wait until we get you home?’

  ‘Please, now,’ Carly said. ‘Anything I can give you that might be helpful.’

  ‘You’ve already given us the names and addresses of his friends. We’re looking to see who he’s been in contact with, outside of his immediate circle, on his computer and iPhone. They’re being examined by the High-Tech Crime Unit.’

  ‘His iPhone?’ Carly said. ‘You have his phone?’

  DS Moy’s face froze. She glanced at Branson, then awkwardly back at Carly. ‘I’m sorry – didn’t anyone tell you?’

  ‘Tell me what?’ Carly began shivering and perspiring at the same time. She leaned forward. ‘Tell me what?’ she said again. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘His iPhone was found in that underground car park – the one you alerted us to on his Friend Mapper.’

  ‘Found? How do you mean found?’

  Bella Moy hesitated, unsure how much to tell the woman. But she had a right to know the truth.

  ‘There were broken fragments on the ground – then it was discovered in a waste bin in the car park.’

  ‘No,’ Carly said, her voice quavering. ‘No. Please, no.’

  ‘He may have dropped it, Carly,’ Glenn Branson said, trying to put a positive slant on the situation, trying to give her some cause for optimism – to give them all some cause for optimism. ‘He might have dropped it while running away. That’s our best hope at the moment, that he’s hiding somewhere.’

  In utter desperation, and shaking with terror, Carly said, ‘Please don’t tell me you found his phone. Tyler’s bright. I thought he was going to keep Friend Mapper on. I thought that would take us to him. I really, really felt that was our best hope.’

  She began to sob uncontrollably.

  104

  By 9.30 p.m. it was dark, the wind had risen and rain was falling. Tooth returned to Shoreham in a Toyota Camry he had rented from Sixt in Boundary Road, Brighton, just a short distance away, using a different ID. He drove around the side of the apartment block and into the pitch-dark parking area at the rear. The space next to the Toyota Yaris was free. He reversed into it, then switched off the engine and lights.

  He was in a bad mood. No matter how well you planned things, shit happened. There was always something you hadn’t accounted for. On this particular job now, it was tides. It just had not occurred to him. Now in the rucksack he had bought, lying beside him on the passenger seat, he had a tide chart which he’d printed out at an Internet café half an hour ago. He’d study it carefully in a few minutes and get his head around it. Meanwhile he was anxious to move the boy on. The area was crawling with police and it looked as if a massive systematic search was in progress. A quarter of a mile further up the road there was a roadblock, but the only vehicles they seemed interested in were Toyota Yaris saloons.

  Too much heat on those vehicles. Too much danger of his being found. The search line still had a while to go before they reached this locality, he worked out, an hour and a half, maybe two hours. He would make sure they didn’t find anything.

  He climbed out of the car, popped open the boot, then swiftly walked across to the rear of the Yaris.

  Tyler, clenched up, fighting an urgent need to pee that was getting worse and worse, and craving water for his parched mouth and throat, had heard the sound of a car moving close by, then stopping. He was about to start kicking again when suddenly there was a sharp, metallic clunk and the boot opened. He felt a blast of fresh, damp air, but could not see any daylight now, just darkness with an orange streetlighting tinge to it.

  Then he saw the dazzling beam of a torch and the shadowy shape of a baseball cap and dark glasses beyond. He was truly scared. If he could just speak, maybe the man would get him some water and something to eat?

  Suddenly he felt himself being lifted. He was swung through the air, feeling spots of rain on his face, then dropped, painfully, inside another space that smelled similar, but different. Maybe even newer?

  There was a thud and he was entombed once more in pitch darkness. He listened for footsteps but instead heard the car starting up. From the bumping motion, he could tell they were moving.

  The car accelerated harshly, sending him rolling backwards and cracking his head painfully on something sharp. He let out a muffled cry of pain. Then the car braked sharply and he tumbled forward a couple of feet.

  Whatever he had hit had definitely been sharp. He wormed his way back, as the car accelerated again, then felt with his face, rubbing his nose up against what he thought must be the rear of the boot. Then he found something that was protruding. He didn’t know what it was – perhaps the back of one of the rear light housings. He tried to press his mouth up against it and rub, but the car was swaying too much and he was finding it hard to keep steady.

  Then he felt the car brake sharply and turn, and keep on turning. He was rolled, helplessly, on his side. There was a massive bump and he cracked his head again on the boot lid, then the car halted, throwing him forward.

  Tooth looked carefully as he pulled off the side of the road above the harbour, bumping over the kerb and on to the grass, driving far enough away so that the car was almost invisible from the road. The lights of traffic flashed past above him and he could see the glow from the houses across the road, most of them with curtains or blinds drawn.

  He halted beside a small, derelict-looking building, the size of a bus shelter, directly opposite the massive edifice of Shoreham Power Station, across the black water of the harbour. The little building was constructed in brick, with a tiled roof, and had a rusting metal door with a large, rusted padlock on it. It was the padlock he had put on last time he was here, six years ago. Clearly no one had been in, which was good. Not that anyone had any reason to go in there. The place was condemned, highly dangerous, toxic and in imminent danger of collapsing. A large yellow and black sign on the wall displayed an electricity symbol and the words KEEP OUT – DANGER OF DEATH.

  In the distance he could hear a helicopter. It had been flying around, on and off, for most of the afternoon and evening. From his rucksack, with his gloved hands, he pulled out a head-mounted flashlight, strapped
it around his baseball cap and removed the bolt cutters he had acquired in a hardware store. He switched on the flashlight, then snapped the padlock on the door of the brick building and switched the light off again. He checked the windows of the houses once more before lifting the boy out of the car and carrying him inside the building, along with his rucksack. He pulled the door closed with an echoing clang.

  Then he switched on his flashlight once more. Directly in front of him was a short, narrow flight of concrete steps going down, between two brick walls. A pair of tiny red eyes appeared momentarily in the darkness at the bottom of the steps, then darted away.

  Tooth put the boy down on his feet, still holding him to stop him falling over.

  ‘You need to take a piss, kid?’

  The boy nodded. Tooth helped him and zipped him back up. Then he carried the boy down the steps, brushing past several spider webs. At the bottom was a gridded metal platform, with a handrail, and a whole cluster of pipes, some overhead, some on the walls, most of them bare, exposed metal, rusting badly and covered in what looked like fraying asbestos. It was as silent as a tomb in here.

  On the other side of the handrail was a shaft, with a steel ladder, that dropped 190 feet. Tooth looked at the boy, ignoring the pleading in his eyes, then tilted him over the handrail and, shining his flashlight beam down, to enable the boy to see the vertical drop. The boy’s eyes bulged in terror.

  Tooth pulled a length of blue, high-tensile rope from his rucksack and tied it carefully around the boy’s ankles. Then he lowered the boy, who was struggling now, thrashing in terror and making a whining, yammering sound through the duct tape across his mouth, a short distance down the shaft and tied the rope around the guard rail.

  ‘I’ll be back in a while, kid,’ Tooth said. ‘Don’t struggle too much. You wouldn’t want your ankles coming loose.’

  105

  Tyler’s glasses were falling up his nose. He was scared that at any moment they would drop into the void below. But worse, he could feel the rope slipping, especially down his left ankle. He was swaying and starting to feel giddy and totally disoriented.

  Something tiny was crawling over his nose. A cold draught blew on his face, the air dank, musty and carrying the fainter, noxious odour of something rotting.

  The rope slipped a little more.

  Was the man going to come back?

  Where was his phone? Was it in the car? How would anyone find him here without Mapper?

  He began to panic, then felt the rope slip further. His glasses fell further, too. He froze, stiffening his legs and feet, pushing them against the bindings to keep them as tight as he could. The creature was climbing over his lips now, tickling his nose. He could feel the rush of blood in his head. Suddenly, something touched his right shoulder.

  He screamed, the sound trapped inside him.

  Then he realized he had just swung into the side of the shaft.

  The walls had looked rough, he thought, in the brief moment he had seen them in the beam of the torch. The edges of the ladder would be rough, or at least sharp. As gently as he could, he tried to swing himself around, swaying, bumping into the shaft again, and again, then painfully against the ladder.

  Yes!

  If he could rub the bindings around his arms up and down against the rough edge, maybe he could saw through them.

  His glasses moved further up his forehead. The insect was now crawling over his eyelid.

  The rope slipped further down his ankles.

  106

  This place had worked well for him last week, Tooth reasoned. It was dark, no one overlooked it and there were no cameras. Aside from the power station, there were only timber warehouses, closed and dark for the night, on the far wharf. And the water was deep.

  Someone had replaced the padlock on the chain-link fence. He cut through it with his bolt cutters and pushed the gates open. The southerly wind, which seemed to be rising by the minute and was coming straight off the choppy water of the harbour basin ahead, instantly pushed one gate shut. He opened it again and hauled an old oil drum, lying on its side nearby, in front of it.

  Then he jumped into the Yaris and drove it forward on to the quay, passing the skip crammed with rubbish that had been there last week and the old fork-lift truck that had been conveniently left for his use. Not that he would need it now.

  He got out of the car and took a careful look around. He could hear the lapping of water, the distant clack-clack-clack of yacht rigging in the wind. He could also, in the distance, hear the clatter of a helicopter again. Then, with the aid of his flashlight, he did a final check on the interior of the vehicle, pulling out the ashtray, taking the contents to the water’s edge and throwing the butts and melted SIM cards into the dark, choppy water. Satisfied he had left nothing else in the car, he prepared himself by taking several deep breaths.

  Then he backed the car up a short distance, opened all the windows and doors and popped the boot lid. He slid back behind the steering wheel and, keeping the driver’s door open, he put the car into gear and accelerated hard at the edge of the quay. At the very last minute, he threw himself sideways and rolled as he hit the hard surface. Beyond him he heard a deep splash.

  Tooth scrambled to his feet and saw the car floating, submerged up to its sills, pitch-poling backwards and forwards in the chop. He was about to snap on his flashlight, to get a better view, when to his dismay he heard an engine. It sounded as if it was approaching. A boat coming down the basin.

  He froze.

  Bubbles rose all around the car, making a steady bloop-bloop-bloop sound. The car was sinking. The engine compartment was almost underwater. The sound of the engine was getting louder.

  Sink. Sink, damn you. Sink!

  He could see a light, faint but getting brighter, approaching from the right.

  Sink!

  Water lapped and bubbled, up to the windshield now.

  Sink!

  The engine sound was louder now. Powerful twin diesels. The light was getting rapidly brighter.

  Sink!

  The roof was going under now. It was sinking. The rear window was disappearing. Now the boot.

  It was gone.

  Moments later, navigation lights on and search lights blazing, a Port Authority launch came into view, with two police officers standing on the deck.

  Tooth ducked down behind the skip. The boat carried on past. For an instant, above the throb of its engines and the thrash of its bow wave, he heard the crackle of a two-way radio. But the sound of the vessel was already fading, its lights getting dimmer again.

  He breathed out.

  107

  Tyler heard a loud, metallic clang. Then a sound like footsteps. For an instant his hopes rose.

  Footsteps getting nearer. Then the smell of cigarette smoke. He heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Enjoying the view, kid?’

  Tooth switched on the flashlight, untied the rope from the balcony and began lowering the boy further, carefully paying the rope through his gloved hands. He could feel the boy bumping into the sides, then the rope went slack.

  Good. The boy had landed on the first of the three rest platforms, spaced at fifty-foot intervals.

  With his rucksack on his back and the light on, Tooth began to descend the ladder, using just one hand and taking up the slack of the rope as he went with the other. When he reached the platform, he repeated the procedure, then again, until the boy landed face down on the floor of the shaft. Tooth clambered down the last flight and joined him, then pulled a small lamp from his rucksack, switched it on and set it down.

  Ahead was a tunnel that went beneath the harbour. Tooth had discovered it from an archive search during the planning for his previous visit. Before it had been replaced because of its dangerous condition, this tunnel carried the electricity lines from the old power station. The tunnel had been replaced, and decommissioned, at the same time as the new power station had been built and a new tunnel bored.

  It was like looking
along the insides of a rusted, never-ending steel barrel that faded away into darkness. The tunnel was lined on both sides with large metal asbestos-covered pipes, containing the old cables. The flooring was a rotted-looking wooden walkway, with pools of water along it. Massive livid blotches of rust coated the insides of the riveted plates, and all along were spiky cream-coloured stalactites and stalagmites, like partially melted candles.

  But it was something else entirely that Tooth was staring at. The human skull, a short distance along the tunnel, greeting him with its rictus grin. Tooth stared back at it with some satisfaction. The twelve rats he had bought from pet shops around Sussex, then starved for five days, had done a good job.

  The Estonian Merchant Navy captain’s uniform and his peaked, braided cap had gone, along with all of his flesh and almost all of the sinews and his hair. They’d even had a go at his sea boots. Most of his bones had fallen in on each other, or on to the floor, except for one set of arm bones and an intact skeletal hand, which hung from a metal pipe above him, held in place by a padlocked chain. Tooth hadn’t wanted to risk the rats eating through his bindings and allowing the man to escape.

  Tooth turned and helped the boy to sit upright, with his back propped against the wall, and a view ahead of him along the tunnel and of the bones and the skull. The boy was blinking and something looked different about him. Then Tooth realized what that was. His glasses were missing. He shone his flashlight around, saw them and replaced them on the boy’s face.

  The boy stared at him. Then flinched at the skeletal remains, his eyes registering horror and deepening fear as Tooth held the beam on it.

  Tooth knelt and ripped the duct tape from the boy’s mouth.

  ‘You all right, kid?’

  ‘Not really. Actually, no. I want to go home. I want my mum. I’m so thirsty. Who are you? What do you want?’