Authors: Belinda Bauer
He put his hand in his pocket and found Ang Nu’s phone.
Bollocks. He’d have to call Brady now to come and take it in for evidence.
Suspended.
Shit
.
He’d never even come close before. He’d had a few run-ins with arseholes in senior positions, but nothing like this.
Never chased someone to their death.
In his other pocket he found his cigarettes and his lighter. Without rising from his knees, he lit one and felt a bit better. By the time he was halfway done, he thought he might be able to make it to the chair.
It wasn’t a comfortable chair, but it was all there was and it wasn’t the floor, so Marvel shuffled over to it on his knees with his big head lolling and buzzing. He hauled himself up on to the seat like a man who’s been tipped out of his wheelchair, then sat there for a moment, getting his breath back around the cigarette.
He took the phone out of his pocket again and stared at the little screen. He fiddled idly until he found the contacts list, but it was empty.
He put it down on the side table, but it fell on the floor, which was when he realized Debbie had taken the side tables too.
He sighed and stubbed his cigarette out on the arm of the chair, then lit another one.
He thought of Ang Nu, draped over the fan of spikes like a magic-show illusion. He thought of the moment before that, when he’d grabbed his warm ankle as he went up the fence. If he hadn’t stopped in the alleyway to press a hand into his stitch, he’d have run straight past Ang Nu, just the way Brady had. The boy would have slithered over the lip of the skip behind him and run out on to Northborough Road.
Disappeared.
Survived.
It would have been annoying, but it would have been better than this.
Suspended.
Dumped.
Debbie
had dumped him. He hadn’t seen that one coming. Although now he thought about it, he wondered if he should have.
The envelope with his name on it was still there, unopened, on the floor next to the TV. He didn’t think he’d bother reading it. He had no interest in a litany of his shortcomings.
Marvel smoked for a bit and brooded. Then he remembered the small beeping noise that had alerted him to Ang Nu’s presence in the skip yesterday.
He leaned out of the chair and fumbled around on the floor for the phone.
He pressed the Dial key. That was the beep he’d heard.
He pressed the Stop key. It was the same sound.
Marvel took a long drag on his cigarette and thought about things.
Ang Nu had called somebody. While he was crouched in a skip filled with toys and crayons and old powder paints, being chased by the police, the boy had made a phone call. All Marvel had heard was him pressing the key to end it.
Who the hell did he call? He had no family. And if he’d had friends, Marvel imagined he’d have been living with them instead of in that tiny shithole of a workshop kitchen.
Who would someone like Ang Nu call in his hour of need? A solicitor? A taxi? A hit man?
He pressed the Dial key again and peered at the screen to read the last number dialled. Marvel had to hold the phone further away and pull his head back on his shoulders to read the landline number, but it meant nothing to him.
He hit Dial once more and winced his eyes closed while he listened to the great clanging of the ringtone.
‘Blue Circle Cement. Can I help you?’
Marvel hung up.
He stared at the phone. The cigarette burned down until his fingers got hot.
He stared at the phone.
Blue circles on the wall of Anna Buck’s bedroom.
The sound of the radio seeping through the walls.
What was it she’d said?
Sometimes I hear him crying
.
Chasing Brady chasing Ang through the garage. Almost falling into the inspection pit …
From where you’d have the perfect view of a Billy Boat exhaust on an Audi TT.
MARVEL WAS SO
drunk, he drove.
And as he drove he hit Dial again.
‘Blue Circle Ce—’
‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Marvel from Lewisham police. Have you got a job booked at Pigeon’s garage in Bickley?’
There was a pause while someone decided whether it was a prank call. Then she said, ‘Yes. Why?’
‘What is it?’
‘Ummmm … filling in an inspection pit.’
‘When?’
There was a suspicious beat. ‘Can I ask what this is about, please?’
‘No you bloody can’t!’ he shouted. ‘
When is the job? WHEN?
’ An offended silence.
And then the woman said, ‘Now.’
Open the door.
Open the door.
Edie watched the door through the smallest of slits in her eyelids.
Even that hurt.
Everything hurt. Her empty tummy, her ripped fingernails, her raw, swollen lips and tongue and throat.
She had stopped trying to swallow when one got stuck halfway like a lump of coal, and only slowly, slowly relaxed. Next time she might not be so lucky.
Her lips had stuck together and she didn’t try to tear them apart. Her nostrils were so dry they bled now and then, but she barely noticed any more.
She drifted between sleep and this, whatever this was. She hoped it wasn’t death, because death should be better than this. All she knew was, it was always a blow to wake up and find herself still in this tiny room.
Open the door.
Open the door.
She saw it happening. A thousand times she heard the bolt click; she saw the door swing open on to the black velvet sky, and the diamond pinpricks of other worlds guiding her home.
Edie Evans hoped she was in space.
Otherwise, dying seemed like such a waste.
ANNA PUT THE
toast in the bin and washed the mugs.
As she dried them, she looked out of the kitchen window and her heart clenched painfully.
Daniel
.
She dropped the mug. It smashed silently at her feet.
There was a cement lorry parked on the garage forecourt.
Just as there had been on 5 November.
The smell of fireworks and the dull, white light of the coming winter. James’s arms slipping around her from behind, and the little chocolate frog that kept hopping in and out of Daniel’s lunchbox.
The horror of hindsight unfolding once more outside her kitchen window.
A man in overalls, boots and gloves was laying broad white corrugated piping up the forecourt and through the open garage doors.
As Anna watched, he went back to the cab of his lorry and, somewhere deep in her guts, she felt the machinery thrum into life as the giant drum on the back of the vehicle slowly rotated, mixing the cement and the stone into concrete.
And every time it turned, there was a blue circle.
It was only when she began to feel faint that Anna realized she had stopped breathing some time ago. When she started again the air dried her mouth so fast that it hurt.
She reached for the tap. Then stopped.
No time
, she thought.
No time for water
.
She went downstairs and opened the front door. A bitter wind slashed at her body.
No time for a coat.
She crossed her arms for warmth and stepped outside.
By the time she reached the lorry she was almost running and almost crying.
She didn’t know why. She didn’t know what she was doing and she didn’t know what she would do when she got there.
‘Hello!’ she shouted and banged on the driver’s door. ‘Hello!’
She reached up and yanked it open. The driver wasn’t there.
Her stomach cramped and she doubled over and cried out. People looked at her, then looked away. She ran across the forecourt, past the five footprints and into the garage.
The radio wasn’t on. Nobody was there.
‘Stop!’ she shouted –panic making her voice small and squeaky. ‘Stop!’
She followed the juddering pipe across the floor, under a car on a lift, and to the back of the garage.
Too late.
It was too late.
The white pipe was draped over the lip of the old inspection pit, and thick grey concrete sprayed from the end in great juddering pulses.
Something hit the steel door.
It shuddered and bumped. Was the key turning? Were the hinges about to squeal? Who was out there?
What
was out there?
And what was coming in?
Sssh! Sssh!
The door vibrated and the noise was like a million stones hitting it all in a rush.
BUH-BUH-BUH-buh-buh-buhbuhbuhbuhbuhbuh
‘Hey.
Hey!
’ The words fell dead to the ground like autumn leaves – too small to make a sound.
But the apprehension was
huge
.
Something amazing was about to happen! Better get ready!
The rumbling got louder and louder and the note of it against the door changed to something deep and underwater.
Whatever was outside, it was getting …
…
more
.
Edie’s in the pit. Edie’s in the pit. Edie’s in the pit.
The bees in John Marvel’s head were like Spitfires.
He could hardly hear the responses from the woman at Blue Circle over the buzzing and the roar of the BMW. But that wasn’t important. What was important was that
she
heard
him
.
‘You stop it!’ he shouted. ‘Call him and stop it!’
‘Szzshwwzzzszzshwss,’ said the woman.
‘If he hasn’t got a phone, call the garage. Tell them to stop pouring!’
‘Ssshwzzzsshwwzzzshsssh,’ said the woman.
‘Right now! You understand me? This is a matter of life and death!
Call him right now or I’ll fucking arrest the shit out of you!
’
Then he hurled Ang Nu’s phone on to the seat beside him, and crashed into a bench.
The bees swarmed away, leaving a single boy soprano holding a top C in his head.
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Somebody tapped on his window and he got a flash of déjà vu.
Circles
, he thought. Then he pushed open the door and stumbled out.
‘You all right, mate?’
The man was wearing an England football shirt and had a swastika tattoo on his neck.
Marvel surveyed Jimmy the Fix’s steaming, dripping car as if from a distance, and saw that it was a write-off.
The garage wasn’t far though.
He started walking.
‘He’s drunk!’ said his mother, or somebody just like her.
‘Hold on, mate,’ said the man with the tatt. ‘You can’t just walk away!’
Marvel realized he was right.
He started to jog.
‘STOP!’ ANNA SHOUTED
. ‘Stop it!’
The driver was there. Was it the same one as last time? The man who had run up and down, showing people how tall Daniel was with a hand at his hip? Anna didn’t know and didn’t care. She bent and hugged the big pipe and tried to pull it away from the edge, but the driver grabbed her arm.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Hey!’
‘Stop it!’ she shouted hoarsely. ‘James! James!’
‘Hold on!’ said the man. ‘That stuff’ll burn you and blind you!’
‘You have to stop it!’ said Anna. ‘Please!’
‘Who are you?’ said the man.
James ran out of the office and said, ‘What’s going on?’
Anna gripped his wrist so hard that he winced.
‘James,’ she croaked. ‘Open the door.’
‘What door?’
‘She’s trying to stop the pour!’ said the driver.
‘It’s OK, Anna,’ said James. ‘It’s where the new lift’s going to go.’
‘No!’ Anna dropped slowly to her knees, as if she’d been shot in the back in an old Western movie, and James looked down into her pale face. She was not the woman he’d left at home twenty minutes earlier. Her eyes were huge and bruised, her lips were dry and cracked. She pointed at an old mattress propped against the far wall of the pit and her voice was so papery he had to lean down to hear her.
‘
James
,’ she whispered. ‘
You have to open the door
.’
Anna Buck was crazy. Anyone could see.
Except
…
DCI Marvel’s voice rang in James Buck’s head like a bicycle bell.
Except
…
Except there
was
a door. Behind the dirty old mattress. A door to the tiny tool room that meant you didn’t have to climb out every time you needed a fourteen-mill socket. But it didn’t
lead
anywhere. It just—
Anna’s eyes closed and her grip on his wrist loosened as she slid to the ground.
James jumped into the pit.
Somewhere behind him, the driver shouted ‘
Shit!
’ and then he heard nothing else.
The concrete was like hot stone porridge. It was up to his knees and every step took a lifetime. It clung and it squeezed and he could feel the catalytic heat through his overalls. He hadn’t expected it to be hot! He had to fight panic and keep moving towards the mattress.
So slowly …
James fixed his eyes on the mattress as he twisted and lifted his heavy, hot legs.
Two more agonizing steps.
He reached too early and stumbled …
He scared himself upright, his heart thumping with the near miss. If he fell in this stuff he was dead. He calmed his breathing and made himself take a more careful step.
He finally grasped the mattress and hauled it aside. It flopped awkwardly, half in his way; he had to wade around it now to grip the knob on the bolt.
He drew it back and pulled, but the rising tide of concrete kept the door shut.
With only the bolt to hold on to, he strained to open it even an inch and, when he did, the concrete slid through the gap in a vicious, viscous eddy. Trying to beat him to the prize – whatever that was. Squeezing ahead of him, seeking out what was rightfully his.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No no
no!
’
He got his fingers around the crack in the door and strained.
Another two inches.
Not enough! He was just making it easier for the greedy grey sludge.
It wouldn’t beat him. It
mustn’t
! Anna had told him to open the door and he was going to do it or die trying.