Broken Heart (31 page)

‘I told you, I don’t know where she is.’

He turned, the scalpel clasped inside his hand.

‘Are you listening to me?’ I said. ‘I don’t
know
where she is.’

‘I love cooking.’ He paused, watching me. ‘But have you ever cut yourself chopping vegetables? You know the type of cut I mean: the ones where you just nick the skin. Man, those cuts hurt the absolute worst. Those really painful
small
cuts – the ones here, right on the end of your finger – they throb for
hours
.’ He held up his other hand, revealing the flat of his palm. ‘Now imagine one cut on every finger. Imagine twenty. Imagine an arm full of them, a leg. Imagine them all over your face.’ He smiled at me, the dying tooth visible at his gum. ‘And you know the
really
bad news? By the time I’m done showing you what else I’ve got in that pouch, you’ll be begging me to go back to this scalpel.’

‘No,’ I said, looking beyond him, searching for a plan – for
anything
– but then I looked down at my ankle chained to the radiator, and I realized there was no way out. My heart began a savage thump against the inside of my ribs, battering the bars of its cage like an animal trying to escape. I felt weakened and tired. I felt woozy.

Focus
.

Egan moved closer, the scalpel out in front of him like an extension of his body. I went to hold up a hand, an automatic reaction to the weapon, to Egan, to everything that was about to come – but then I felt the binds tug. They locked in place and pain flashed through my left arm, shoulder down to hand. I twitched, sucking in a breath, listing slightly to the side.

As I did, I felt something tear.

The duct tape
.

Some of it had come away – a fractional abating of the pressure on my right wrist. I straightened as adrenalin charged through my body.

‘Wait a second,’ I said.

Lightly, I pulled my wrists apart, disguising the movement behind a roll of the shoulders. Egan paused briefly, then came forward again, the tip of the blade no more than four feet from my body. I shifted from side to side, as if scared, and used it to hide another attempt to pull my hands apart. This time, I felt more of the duct tape split, my right hand dropping away, as if totally freed, my body lurching. Egan stopped, frowning, eyes flicking to the floor beneath me.

For the first time, he saw the blood.

I sprang from my seat, whipping my right arm round from behind me, and drilled a punch into the centre of his throat. As Egan staggered back, clutching his neck, air wheezing out of him, the handcuffs locked against the radiator and hauled me back towards them. I fell clumsily, into the radiator, into the wall, and then into the chair I’d been sitting on. It tipped as I hit it, and I tumbled across it.

Scrambling to my feet, I looked for Egan again.

He was beyond my reach – bent over about five feet from me – fingers at his throat, the scalpel still in his right hand, its point dragging against the carpet. I looked around me, desperate, knowing I couldn’t get to him, knowing that all I was doing now was waiting for him to regain control – and then I thought of something.

The chair
.

I picked it up, gripped the legs and drew it back. Egan glanced up, his eyes – marbled with blood vessels – widening as he saw what was coming. Swinging with every ounce of energy I had, I felt the impact tremor up my arms as it caught him in the head. He staggered sideways into the desk, the pouch shifting, its tools rattling, and the scalpel dropped to
the floor with a faint
ping
. As he rebounded, his back leg seemed to collapse from under him and he folded.

He hit the floor face-first.

Pausing there for a moment, chair still gripped in my hands, I watched for any sign of movement, any indication this was part of the game. But he was out cold. I could see him breathing, a mixture of blood and saliva bubbling at his lips.

I need to get the hell out of here.

Putting the chair down, I checked my left arm. There was a four-inch gash gouged into it, the wound still oozing, blood criss-crossing like routes on a map. My hands and wrists were all marked with smaller cuts, bruises and grazes, dirt and grease from the screw smudged among them. Dropping to my hands and knees, I shuffled in Egan’s direction as far as the handcuffs would allow me to go, then got down on to my belly. Flat on the floor, I could reach his midriff, his arm, his waist.

I checked his jacket. His phone, a set of car keys, my wallet. Removing them and setting them aside, I tried his trouser pockets. In one I found my own mobile. In the other was a silver key with a distinctive O head. It had to be for the handcuffs. I shuffled back towards the radiator and then slid the key into the lock. They popped open.

Getting to my feet, I moved to the sink – keeping half an eye on Egan – and washed down the wound on my arm, then headed to the toilet to get some paper towels. Wrapping my arm to try and stem the blood flow, I used an elastic band from the other desk to keep everything in place, and then returned for my phone and wallet, Egan’s mobile and his keys. I had no idea where he’d put my own car key, but I wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

Grabbing my boot, which they’d removed, I glanced back
at Egan again. He was starting to stir, his breathing becoming less cadenced, his eyelids flickering. Hopping into my boot, I laced it up and headed to the door, yanking it open.

Sunlight erupted past me, painting the interior of the cabin a chalk-white and blinding me for a moment. It took me a few seconds to realize where I was.

A scrapyard.

Towers of vehicles, cadaverous and rusting, rose like metal buildings. I stepped on to the stairs and tried to get a sense of where I was, in what direction I should be heading, but it was like a maze. Rutted mud tracks wove in and out of countless vehicles, some of the stacks eight or nine cars high, huge pieces of scaffolding erected with more cars lying inside – as well as doors, tyres, wheel trims, bonnets.

I moved down the stairs, looking left and right. It was a labyrinth, nothing visible beyond the scrapyard except the vague hint of distant rooftops. I began moving right, towards the place where the rooftops seemed closest. The tracks had been baked in months of summer sun, hardened and calcified, and a couple of times I almost turned my ankle. But the further I went, the more something else started to dawn on me. There was no one around. No employees, no customers.

Because it’s bank holiday Monday
.

It was why they’d brought me here. This place was shut for the weekend. No one was working today, no one was coming. No one would hear me, see me.

Egan had this place to himself.

I glanced at my watch, and then recalled that Egan had removed it – he’d kept it, dumped it, got rid of it somewhere. I wasn’t sure which and I wasn’t going back to check, so I got my phone out instead. There were twenty missed calls, a mix of friends and potential clients, a central London
number I didn’t recognize, and three from Craw. I remembered, then, how she’d wanted to talk to me about something. She’d also sent me a text.

Where are you? We really

need to talk asap x

It was 10.52 a.m. She hadn’t heard from me in nearly forty hours. I hadn’t returned her calls or her texts. But I couldn’t worry about that for now.

I had to get out of here.

In front of me, the tower of cars finally ended and a massive corrugated-iron fence emerged. This close to it, the rooftops beyond the scrapyard, the ones I’d glimpsed earlier, had disappeared and all I could see were the bones of the dying vehicles that encircled me. I tried to listen for telltale sounds beyond the fence, but there were no voices, no hint that this place was close to suburbia, to houses, to people, to signs of life. Instead, all that came back was the distant hum of traffic, a monotonous rumble that made me think it might be a motorway.

I got out my phone and went to Maps and, as it loaded, I looked along the fence, trying to figure out a plan of attack. If I followed it around, there had to be an entrance somewhere. This place was big, but if we’d come in, I could get back out again. Returning my attention to the phone, I watched as the map continued its slow load in, chunk by chunk, a weak signal making the process a frustrating crawl. And then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something else – a movement from light to dark.

I glanced back at the Portakabin.

Egan, knife in hand, was coming for me.

44

I headed right, following the path of the corrugated-iron fence. In front of me was a canyon of cars, a stack of six propped against the fence itself, another tower of eight – windowless, engineless – slotted into holes in purpose-built scaffolding.

As I sprinted between them, shadows started to settle around me, the sun vanishing behind barricades of oxidized metal. The track softened beneath my feet where the sunlight couldn’t get to it and, in this stretch of scrapyard, the path was littered with small, shallow puddles, grey with mud. At the end, the canyon kinked left like a turn in a maze, and I glanced back over my shoulder to see how far behind Egan was. Except he wasn’t there.

He’s not following me.

I stopped, my pulse starting to quicken. I should have been able to see him by now. Edging to the corner of the next turn, I looked along it. It ran for a long way, perhaps two hundred feet, endless vehicles stacked up on either side. At the end was an opening, a yellow flash of a crane and the side of another machine.
The crusher
. Long bits of metal poked out from a gap close to the top of it, like arms reaching for help. As I kept my eyes on both directions – the way I’d come, and the path down to the crusher – I got out my phone again and returned to the map.

It had loaded.

I was on an industrial estate in a barren patch of land
three miles west of Ealing. It was why I could hear cars but no domestic life: to the south was the M4, to the east was the River Brent, to the west were patches of park and woodland. It was a smart place to bring me: no one lived close enough to hear anything, and as it was a bank holiday weekend, the whole industrial estate was a ghost town.

I put the phone away and listened. There were gaps in vehicles that I could see through, windows without glass, and bodywork punctured with jagged holes. I could hear the popping and groaning of the cars, a choir of old frames creaking and expanding under the sun, as they climbed their way to the sky. But I couldn’t see Egan, and I couldn’t hear him either.

Quickly, I searched for something I could use, and found what looked like a drive shaft with part of the transmission still attached, sitting discarded under the shell of a purple Vauxhall Cavalier. It was black and flecked with rust, but it was heavy. Gripping it tightly, I began moving in the direction of the crusher.

More puddles littered this area of the yard, collecting in the grooves of the track like spores. I tried not to land in them, to disturb the water, to give any sense of where I was located. Despite the heat, goosebumps scattered across my back and the throbbing pain of my left arm faded in, reminding me that I was carrying an injury; if it came to it, I couldn’t rely on my left being as strong as my right. I looked down at the paper towels, bound to my arm with an elastic band, and tore them away. Blood was caked to my skin, the gash raw and angry, but it had dried.

I got closer to the crusher. It was huge and ugly, like a shipping container with a mouth torn along it. To its left was the gap in the maze that I’d seen earlier.

It led through to a small car park.

This, I started to realize, was why Egan hadn’t followed me. He knew I’d end up here. As I stood there, I thought briefly about a retreat, but mostly all I could think about was getting the hell out of there as fast as possible. I needed to regroup, reorganize.

If there was a car park, then it was a safe bet I was somewhere close to the exit. But it was also a safe bet that Egan was waiting for me, that – familiar with the layout of this place – he’d made it look like he was coming after me, then made a beeline for this end of the yard instead. I might have been closer to the exit here, but one bad decision and I’d be leaving with a knife in my back.

I paused there, trying to think through my next move, my arm throbbing, the drive shaft greasy and becoming more difficult to hold – and then I clocked movement through the gap. I took a couple of steps back, trying to seek refuge in the shadows, expecting to see Egan emerging into view.

But it wasn’t Egan.

45

It was a man I didn’t recognize. He was dressed in blue overalls, the front stained with a mix of engine oil and mud. He must have been in his fifties, was grey-haired and corpulent, and wore a pair of glasses too small for his face.

He had an odd gait, his right arm hidden from me and pressed to his body on that side. I wasn’t sure whether it was due to his weight, his caution, or some injury that he’d never fully recovered from. I shifted left, behind a column of cars, using a window to look over to where the man was. That was when I saw his right hand. It wasn’t his weight or an accident that was making him walk that way. It was what he was holding close to his leg.

A gun.

He stopped. I felt my heart shift as his eyes zeroed in on a spot close to where I was hiding. The silence seemed absolute for a second: no hum from the motorway, no birdsong, no pops or groans from the cars piled up around us. It took everything I had not to make a break for it, the instinct to take flight was so powerful. But I couldn’t outrun a bullet. Instead, I stayed exactly where I was, gripping the drive shaft harder than ever, and watched as the man headed right, in the direction of the cabin.

Wait until he’s out of sight – and then run.

He was almost completely gone from view when, somewhere above me, I felt a change in the stillness of the
air – and then a low, doughy moan, as if one of the cars was about to come loose.