Touch (16 page)

Afterwards. Would there be an afterwards?

The uncontrollable shaking returned, refusing to go away despite the warmth of the duvet.

Get a grip. Pull yourself together. If you are going to get through this you had better start thinking rationally and try to find a way out of here.

She stood up, letting the duvet fall from her, not caring about her nakedness now. The door didn’t offer any hope so she needed to find another exit. She couldn’t spot anything obvious, but the light from beneath the door did not banish the deep shadows so she decided to try and work her way around the walls. Starting at the door she explored along one wall and the next, searching from floor level up to as high as she could reach with her fingertips. Along the third wall she found a set of doors to some sort of cupboard. Running her fingers over the wooden surface she discovered a little latch and she undid the bolt and opened the doors. Strange, the cupboard had no depth; the recess was only set a few inches into the wall and at the back her hand touched something smooth and cold. Then she realised why. The recess wasn’t a cupboard at all, it was a window with a pair of shutters on the inside.

No light shone through the glass. Nothing. Utter black. She ran her hands around the window. It had a metal frame but didn’t seem to open. She touched the glass again and noticed a slight texture and now she understood why no light was able to get through from outside: the glass had been painted.

Using a fingernail she started scratching at the paint until a pinprick of light flared in. She worked away and the paint began to flake and soon she had made a hole big enough to peek through. She pushed her face up against the glass, blinking against the harsh daylight on the other side.

She could see a green field bordered by a grey stone wall and beyond an area of woodland, the leaves of nearby trees all autumnal: burnt sienna, rust and gold. Behind those trees a dark forest of conifers climbed a steep hill. There was no sign of any other houses, no roads, no people. Her location, wherever it was, must be remote, deep in the countryside.

Deep in the shit more like.

She focused on the ground below the window and realised she was on the second storey. If she smashed the window she would have to jump down ten feet or more and if she hadn’t sprained her ankle or worse she could run.

Where?

She scratched away at the paint again, expanding the hole until she had a better view of the back yard. A set of bean poles made a wigwam shape beside a neat row of raised beds not long dug over. A vegetable garden. In one corner a compost heap with a wheelbarrow upside down on top sat next to one of those dustbin incinerators with–

Shit!

A man stood throwing small sticks into the incinerator as flames licked out of the top. He had his back to Alice, but the black hair seemed somehow familiar. The fire roared away and the man kept feeding in sticks for a few minutes. Then he bent to pick up a cloth from a pile of rags on the ground, he held the material up to his nose and appeared to take several deep breaths before shaking his head and dropping the rag into the incinerator. Now he was stooping again and picking up something else, something bright red, an item of clothing. It looked like the blouse she had been wearing before–

Oh fuck!

It
was
the blouse she had been wearing, the one she had bought in the Debenhams’ summer sale. The pile of rags wasn’t rags at all, it was her clothing: her top, her cardigan, her jeans, her shoes, her
underwear!

Alice turned from the window and collapsed on the mattress. She stifled a sob by biting her lip, but then the tears came and she let her emotions all out, just crying and crying and crying.

She must have drifted off to sleep because the next thing she was aware of was a sound at the door. A key turning in the lock. She grabbed the duvet and scampered under, like a snail retreating into its shell.

The door opened and a hand pushed a tray along the floor and into the room. The tray held a bowl of fruit – apples, bananas, grapes – and a bottle of spring water. The door swung shut.

‘Wait! Who are you? Please let me go!’ Alice jumped off the mattress and ran to the door.

Click. The key turned and footsteps walked off into the distance.

The final time he saw Carmel was three weeks after Mitchell’s Christmas party. He wished he could purge the memory from his mind, but he couldn’t. The images would stay with him forever.

The phone had shocked him awake sometime after two in the morning. Mitchell! Mitchell? What the hell was Mitchell doing ringing at that time? He sat up in bed, half asleep, listening to Mitchell asking for help. Mitchell wanted to meet him out at Wembury, in the car park next to the beach. As soon as possible. And no questions.

Harry got dressed and went out into the night. Got in his car and drove at a crawl through town and out east across the Plym, turning south into the country and toward the sea. At one point he passed a patrol car going the other way and he willed the police to stop and turn in the road and come after him. He’d tell them all about Mitchell and perhaps then the nightmare would end.

It didn’t happen and he drove on through the dark lanes to Wembury. Down past the village and along a track to the car park that stood next to the beach. A cafe sat perched on the rocks right on the seafront and Harry recalled going there one summer morning years ago. He had drunk a coffee while he waited for the crowds to arrive.

He parked the car overlooking the bay and sat and waited. Drizzle misted the windscreen and he set the wipers to intermittent. Somewhere up in the clouds the moon cast a strange washed-out glow over the sea. Harry could see the tide was ebbing and more and more beach became exposed as the minutes ticked by. Harry remembered the last time. The hot sun, the drip, drip, drip of ice creams, the screaming kids. But most of all he remembered the girls. Their firm, young bodies, the colourful bikinis, the wet T-shirts, the curves, the smiles and the laughter. Click, click, click with his camera and their flesh was captured forever. Preserved. Harry chewed his tongue and swallowed spit. His eyes surveyed the cold, grey sand, the rocks and the dark clumps of seaweed. The place had transformed into something different now and so had he. Frigid. Empty. Plain absent.

Swish. Another five seconds. The dashboard clock glowed out 3:00 AM and he realised that he had now been sitting in the car for twenty-three minutes. Too long. Mitchell had told him to hurry so where was he?

As if in answer he saw headlights coming down the track. It was either Mitchell or he was busted. The car crept along, as if checking the roadside and then stopped perhaps twenty metres away. The lights were on full beam and it was hard to make out the make and model. Then the lights dimmed. Bright white to a dim yellow, fading all the time, first like a torch, then a candle, then a glowing cigarette, then off.

Mitchell’s Jag.

Harry was shaking now. Mitchell scared him and as he grasped the door handle to get out he was aware of the sweat on his fingers. He wiped his hands on his trousers, clambered out of the car and walked back to the Jag.

The driver’s window purred down and Mitchell sat staring ahead.

‘Harry,’ he whispered. ‘Thank God you’ve come!’

‘Well, you know–’

‘You and me, Harry, we understand the world, we understand things don’t appear as they should, plans don’t transpire the way we want them to. The brave press on. The accomplished performer improvises. The fallen runner gets up and attacks with renewed vigour.’

Harry’s mouth hung open. Mitchell spouted gibberish, but it went with the territory he supposed. He let Mitchell continue.

‘Check the boot. Bit of a problem.’ Mitchell didn’t move. He just continued gazing into the distance.

Harry went round to the rear of the car and sprung the boot lid. There was a rubber dinghy folded up and crammed in there, not the sort you could buy on the seafront, but a heavy inflatable from a chandlers. He didn’t say anything, just stared and wondered what the hell was going on in Mitchell’s head.

‘Get the fucking dinghy out and see what is underneath.’ Mitchell’s voice floated out from the window.

Harry tried to pull the dinghy out but it took all his effort to get even part of it over the lip of the boot. Then he saw the hand poking out from underneath the rubber. Pink nail varnish. The odour of perfume mixing with the PVC smell of the new dinghy.

Clunk.

Mitchell got out of the car and stood beside Harry.

‘Bit of a problem,’ he repeated, as if Harry hadn’t heard him the first time.

Harry groaned. This was bad. He didn’t need this sort of trouble. The rapes were one thing, but Mitchell had gone too far this time.

‘Let’s get this pumped up and down to the beach.’ Mitchell grabbed the dinghy, his voice calm and ordered as if they were on a day out at the seaside. The dinghy rolled over the lip of the boot and flopped onto the floor, lifeless. Harry peered in the boot. Hand connected to arm, to body, to some hessian material. The girl was hooded with a sack tied tight around her neck. He looked down at her body. Light brown skin wrapped in a baby-doll nightdress, a silver cross on a chain nestling in ample cleavage, toned muscles, a little tattoo of a dolphin high on her left inner thigh.

‘The Spanish girl?’ Harry said, feeling quite unwell and putting a hand out to steady himself against the car.

‘Precisely.’ Mitchell said. ‘The pretty Spanish girl who knows a bit too much about the English. I’ve given her a little something to help her forget.’ He reached into the boot and took a bellows-type foot pump out. ‘Possibly a bit too much of a little something. Couldn’t call an ambulance, could I? Too many questions. Too many silly little questions.’

‘I thought she had gone back to Spain?’ Harry struggled to get the words out, aware of the quiver in his voice.

‘She had.’

‘And?’

‘She came back again. Unwillingly, of course. Came through customs with her on the back seat covered with a blanket.’

Harry could imagine Mitchell doing that. Crazy.

Mitchell began to pump the dinghy. The air made short hissing noises as it forced its way passed the valve. Like sharp intakes of breath. Like the sound the girl had made as Mitchell and RT had fucked her as she lay tied to the bed.

‘But why?’ Harry asked. ‘Wasn’t it better with her over there? Out of the way?’

‘Out of the way. Exactly.’ Mitchell said. But he shook his head. ‘RT’s fault. The blindfold came off. Afterwards he realised that he knew the girl.’

‘Richard? Afterwards?’

‘That’s what I said to him. A bit bloody late in the day. Fucking idiot. Anyway, couldn’t risk her blabbing once she was safely home so I brought her back. Kept her round my place for a bit. Had a bit of fun. Seemed a shame not to!’

Harry said nothing. He didn’t know what to think. Mitchell was grade one rocket fuel. Unstable. One little spark and he would blow and take Harry with him into oblivion.

‘Help me!’ Mitchell lifted one end of the dinghy and nodded at Harry to grab the other end. He did so and they stumbled across the car park and down the steep path to the beach. They manhandled the little boat across the wet sand and rock to the sea and Harry felt icy cold water surge around his ankles as they staggered into the surf. Mitchell left him holding the painter as the boat bobbed around on the swell and he ran back to the car park. A couple of minutes later he staggered into view again, the girl thrown over his right shoulder in a fireman’s lift and a grab bag with something heavy in it in his other hand.

Mitchell dumped the girl down and she slumped onto the edge of the dinghy now, a pretty marionette with all the life gone out of her.

‘Get her out there,’ he said, gesturing with his arm somewhere in the general direction of France. ‘Chuck her overboard with something to weigh her down.’ He pulled a length of heavy chain from the bag, bent down near the girl’s ankles and grinned. ‘This should do!’

Harry wondered if Mitchell was quite right in the head. But of course he wasn’t. The two of them were here on a beach in the middle of the night with a corpse and Mitchell was smiling.

‘Harry! What has happened to you? We are living man! That was why I told you to stop taking the pills. Experience things as they really are. Live on the edge. Did you think that was only talk?’

Harry gazed down into the inky water, feeling the sand shift beneath his feet as another wave frothed by. The dinghy bounced against his legs, spinning, alive. The girl lay still, the only noise the surf and a small hiss as if air was escaping from a leak somewhere. Harry prayed the police would be along soon and they would be caught, but at least he would be safe. Pulled back from the brink before he went one step too far. He was aware of Mitchell staring at him, but he didn’t say anything. Couldn’t. He was too scared.

Suddenly the girl twitched and a leg shot out catching Mitchell on the left knee. He staggered backwards and fell into the surf, cracking his head on a rock. Blind from the sack the girl flailed her arms at nothing, jumped up, stumbled and tripped on the painter line on the dinghy. For a second she thrashed in the surf, but then she was on her feet, running away across the beach, her hands clawing at the sacking, a nightmarish figure disappearing into the gloom.

Mitchell was up now, grabbing the bag in his right hand and roaring at Harry.

‘Bloody bitch! Come on!’

Harry jumped up and followed him, the sand already sapping his energy with every stride. Mitchell loomed somewhere ahead, thump, thump, thump, thump. He looked back and gestured for Harry to hurry up. The girl had run along the beach, but she was running west, away from the car park, where there was only a rocky foreshore with steep cliffs blocking the way to the coastal path. A vast plateau of rock stretched out to the sea and the girl was stumbling across it. Harry could see her ahead now and it was plain that they were going to catch her. All of a sudden she disappeared from view, she had gone down a fissure in the rock, a sandy finger that led to the sea. Mitchell gestured again and Harry understood his plan. He wanted him to go to the next crack farther on so he could cut off any chance she had of escape, for that was the only other way out from the plateau.