Severed (15 page)

I've made a mistake. I should have thought of that. But I've also bought myself a few seconds of time. I use my thumb to feel for the sharp edge of the blade and touch it against the leather restraint. Slowly I start sawing, hoping that he's not going to notice that my right hand is moving ever so slightly backwards and forwards.

'No, I didn't mean the police.'

'The army? Did you serve in the army with him?'

These guys may well know a lot about me, but they don't seem to know much about the man blackmailing them, and it strikes me that I shouldn't be helping them fill in the gaps. Ferrie might be dead, but it's possible he can still provide clues. I think back to Lucas's advice, that we should concentrate on conventional detective work rather than run into the hornets' nest, all guns blazing, and I realize that he was
right. If I get out of here, we're definitely going to do things his way.

'Yeah,' I answer, 'that's where I know him from.' But I say it in a relieved way so that once again he'll think I'm bullshitting.

Playing for time. I am playing for time.

He gets to his feet and turns towards the door, shouting something in Serbo-Croat. I saw frantically for three or four seconds, until he turns back.

'I've had enough of your lies, man,' he says dismissively. 'I gave you the chance. You fucked me around. Now you're really going to pay.'

He returns to his seat as the door opens, and as I catch sight of the man who comes in, my eyes widen.

He's naked from the waist up, his body muscular and only just showing signs of running to fat around the midriff. I recognize him instantly, even though his face is concealed behind the tight black fetish mask, criss-crossed with metal zips, that covers his entire head. The one he was wearing last night when he plunged the knife into Leah.

The fear evaporates in an instant, replaced by an intense rage that shoots right through me. I struggle violently in my seat, trying to break the restraint. I want nothing more in the world right now than to kill this man, and know with an absolute certainty that I cannot die before I do.

As he turns to draw a bolt on the door, I see
that there are no signs of the scars on his back from last night. He turns back to face me again, and for a moment he stands there studying me through the eyeholes in the mask. His eyes flash with an undisguised hatred that I know is reflected in mine.

In one hand, he's got a two-litre bottle of vegetable oil; in the other, a metal saucepan and a ladle.

I stop struggling as he walks towards me and stops by the side of the ancient cooker. He turns on one of the hotplates, puts down the saucepan and fills it almost to the top with the oil. He's beside me now, almost within touching distance. If he looks in the right place, he'll see the knife in my right hand.

But he doesn't. He's staring me out. I stare back, not daring to resume the sawing.

The guy opposite smiles malevolently. 'You know what my man here likes the most? Burning. It's his passion, man. He gets the oil nice and hot, and when he ladles it on, the flesh just drips off like water. And the screams, man. You should hear the screams.' He leans forward in the chair. 'Now, tell us the truth. Who gave you the briefcase?'

I don't speak. My interrogator gestures to the guy in the mask, who produces a cut-throat razor from the pocket of his trousers. He flicks it open. I wonder then if he's the one who's just killed Snowy, the contract killer Ferrie called the Vampire. The blade on his razor shines brightly, but there's no blood on it.

'I want you to have a little taste of what's to come,' says my interrogator. 'Radovan, while we wait for the oil to heat up, cut one of his eyes out.'

Radovan leans forward, and I struggle wildly again, but the strap holds. I desperately crane my neck away from him, trying to tip over the chair, but he grabs my chin and wrenches me round, holding it steady. The curved tip of the blade takes up my whole field of vision, approaching inch by inch.

I break. 'I'll tell you, I'll tell you. I swear it. I'll tell you everything.' I mean it, too.

The blade stops moving. It's an inch from my right eye. I can feel Radovan's breath on my face. It smells savoury, like meat on the turn. I can smell something else, too, something coming from outside the room. Smoke. And although I can no longer see him, I can hear my
interrogator moving about in his chair. Can he smell it too?

Then, just as I'm about to speak again, a fire alarm goes off, its shrill ringing reverberating through the building. I can hear faint panicked shouts which sound like they're coming from downstairs.

There's a loud knock on the door.

Radovan steps back, the blade retreating with him. His comrade is out of his seat, looking concerned.

'Who the hell is it?' he shouts.

'It's me, Alannah,' answers a female voice. 'We've got to get out. The place is on fire.'

She bangs frantically on the door, and my interrogator pulls across the bolt and opens it a few inches. Smoke drifts in, and the smell gets a lot stronger. I catch a glimpse of blonde hair - it's the girl who caught me with the stun baton. But I'm not concentrating on her. Instead, I'm sawing once again, this time as fast as I can. Because if they don't kill me, the fire will, and I wonder why the hell Lucas set it because surely he must have known that if I was trapped in here, then burning the place down isn't likely to help.

I feel the material beginning to give way, and luckily Radovan is looking towards the door, the razor still held tight in his hand.

'All right, we're coming,' says the interrogator. 'We're coming.'

'Is he still in here?' the girl asks, trying to push her way inside.

'What do you want to know for, bitch?' he demands, trying to push her back out again. 'This is none of your fucking business!' He turns to Radovan, and beneath the spectacles his eyes are wide with tension. 'OK, no time for fun,' he shouts. 'Cut his throat.'

Radovan is still only a couple of feet away from me, and in one movement he swings the razor round in a neck-high arc. But I'm prepared for him and I lash out with my right leg, knocking him off balance. The blade misses the flesh of my throat by inches, but I've only bought myself a split second. I stop sawing and strain against the leather, knowing that this is my last chance. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the interrogator pulling a revolver from one of the pockets of his boiler suit; but in this single moment he's utterly irrelevant because my whole existence stands or falls on whether
or not I have the strength to break free from my restraint.

Radovan has danced off to one side, out of range of my legs, and the razor's coming back again.

And this time it's not going to miss.

There's a splitting sound. The material has finally come apart, and I'm flung forward onto my knees. I feel a hot, very intense pain as the razor catches me on the scalp, slicing open the skin, but it's not a deep enough cut to slow me down. Almost as soon as I've landed, Radovan grabs me by the hair, lifting me to my feet as he moves in for the killing slice. I catch the briefest glimpse of his colleague through a thin pall of smoke. He's raising the revolver and pointing it calmly at my chest, preparing to fire. I am caught between a rock and a hard place, but I can do no more than deal with one thing at a time, and as I'm dragged back into Radovan's choking grip, I reverse the flick knife in my hand and drive it up to the hilt in the murdering bastard's thigh. He lets out a deep gasp - the first sound I've heard him make - and I dive clear as he staggers backwards, knowing that I've got to avoid a bullet. I can see the revolver's
barrel tracking me as I slide across the carpet, and without my vest I know I'm a sitting duck. A shot rings out but it misses, and I hear the gunman curse. 'You bitch!' he cries, and to my surprise and relief I see that the blonde girl's struggling with him. The revolver's raised towards the ceiling, both their hands on it. It goes off a second, then a third time.

The smoke's really billowing into the room now; I can even hear the faint roar of the fire. Already I'm beginning to choke on the fumes and I sneak a look over at Radovan. Rather than wasting time with the knife in his thigh, he's limped over to the cooker where he's now picking up the saucepan of sizzling oil.

The gun goes off again, the bullet a lot closer to me this time, and I see that the struggle between my interrogator and the beautiful blonde continues unabated.

Radovan's turning round now, holding the saucepan with both hands. The blood from the stab wound is pumping out fast and running down his trouser leg, but he ignores it. He may be a ruthless, cold-hearted torturer, but the fact remains that I've killed his cousin, and whether it's about honour or emotion - and I'm
guessing by the look of him that it's going to have to be about honour - I've still got to pay. But his hands are unsteady, and he's having difficulty walking. Oil drips over the top, splashing onto his shoes, where it sizzles away angrily.

This is the bastard who butchered Leah on camera while she lay helpless and terrified, who probably cut Snowy's throat as well, and now's my opportunity to make him pay. I launch myself from the floor with a speed that I'm certain he wasn't expecting, and before he can react I lash out with an ungraceful but accurate karate kick that catches the bottom of the saucepan and sends a much bigger splash of oil over his torso. This time he howls in pain, and it's a sound that pleases me. He drops the saucepan and smacks wildly at the fat as it eats away at his flesh. As he does so, I charge him low, smashing my head into his groin and sending him crashing backwards into the cooker. I can smell burning meat, and my scalp feels like it's on fire as I make contact with the oil that runs down him. He gasps, winded, in no position to fight back, and I slam the palm of one hand onto his masked head and drive it
down onto the hotplate. At the last moment, he puts up some resistance, but it's too late, and his head hits the hob side on with a sound like bacon sizzling in a pan. He screams and tries to struggle free, but the leather of the mask is already melting and he's stuck fast. I push down harder, this time with both hands, ignoring the waves of heat emanating from the metal and remembering the DVD I was forced to watch of Leah being torn apart. His hands slap uselessly at me and his legs kick out, but he's finished, there's no doubt about that.

The room's filling with smoke now, and I'm having difficulty breathing. I can see no sign of the other guy or the blonde girl, and I can't hear them either. But I can hear the roar of a spreading fire.

It's time to go.

As I feel my way out I'm assailed by more thick waves of choking black smoke as it pours up the stairs. There's surely no means of exit down there, which doesn't leave me much in the way of alternatives. I can feel panic rising in me, but I force it down and stagger blindly away from the stairs along a short corridor. I bang into something and stumble, only just managing to regain my footing. Through the haze, I see it's the prone figure of my interrogator, and he's unconscious. I won't be getting any answers out of him now, and there's no way I'm going to make it out of here carrying him, so I step over him and keep going.

There's a door at the end of the corridor and I
open it, grope my way through, then slam it shut behind me. I'm in what appears to be a storage room. There are various bits and pieces - mainly boxes, and the occasional solitary item of furniture - piled high against all the available wall space, but my attention is immediately drawn to a large aluminium beer barrel standing in the centre of the room. I feel a rush of relief. It stands directly beneath an open skylight. Someone, it seems, has already made good his or her escape from the building this way. It's got to be the girl. I hope so.

I am exhausted, panting, breathing in acrid smoke, running on empty, but a desperate desire for fresh air drives me on and I clamber onto the barrel, reach up on tiptoes and just about manage to get a decent grip on the edge of the frame. I heave myself up, push my head through the gap in the window, and gulp down the fresh, warm summer air.

An explosion comes from somewhere below me, and the whole building shakes. Christ, what are they storing in this place? Dynamite? I'm not out of either the frying pan or the fire just yet. Using my arms as leverage, I drag the rest of my body through the gap until I'm lying on the tiles
of the warehouse's sloping roof, facing out towards the canal and the buildings on the other side. Joggers and shifty-looking kids in school uniform are lining the towpath on the opposite bank, staring towards the inferno in front of them, and I can see Lucas's car parked up on the pavement on the bridge over the Kingsland Road, with the hazards on. He's stood beside it, and when he spots me he waves enthusiastically like I'm the long-lost cousin he's been waiting for in Airport Arrivals. He's at least forty yards and a very long drop away. At the very least, I think he ought to be looking for a ladder.

I roll down the slope of the roof until I reach the guttering on the edge, and look down. I'm right about the drop - it's far too high for me to jump, even with my training. Below me I can see smoke billowing out of windows and flames licking the walls on the ground floor. The wheelie bin in which I deposited the guard is completely engulfed by fire, and I wonder whether he escaped or whether, more likely, he's another person who's been killed today.

I can hear fire engines approaching from several different directions, but I'm in no
position to wait for them. An old building like this one is going to come down fast. Already I can feel the tiles beginning to grow hot.