Very clearly, a cry, Sadie’s cry, went up into the freezing sky: “Don’t!”
“So,” Will said, trying to keep the edginess from his voice. “Where is she?”
The fires were burning down. Before long they would be dead, plunging the wasteland into complete darkness. Any advantage that the knife was giving them would be lost. Sadie shrieked again.
“What’s happening to her?” Elisabeth demanded, passing the knife to Will.
“We only wanted you to dance for us,” Fleece said. “Now look at what you’ve done. I think, after we’ve fucked your daughter, we’ll kill you and bury you in the cow shit in that field.”
Will, as if in slow motion, stepped forwards and slid the point of the knife almost nonchalantly into Fleece’s shoulder. He yelled to Elisabeth to run, and they did, Will dropping the weapon in his shock and panic. He followed her towards the caravans while shouts and curses raged behind them. Catching up, he grabbed Elisabeth’s hand.
“We’ll lose them in there somewhere. Try to be quiet and keep your head down. Just for a little while. Till I find Sadie.”
Towards the rear of the cluster of caravans, they found another scattering of spent fuel drums. They huddled among them, shivering. Sometimes the voices came close and then drifted away. Will couldn’t work out whether it was proximity or a trick of the wind. He held Elisabeth close to him, and after what felt like hours, the voices faded until they were rewarded with complete silence.
Will lifted his head above the rim of an oil drum. The caravans were little more than grainy pale blocks against the night. One or two windows pulsed with waxy, orange light. The camp was asleep.
“I should go,” Will whispered. “I should find Sadie. That fucking girl.”
Elisabeth’s eyes broadened under the skimpy moonlight. “I have to come with you,” she urged.
“No. Please stay here. If something goes wrong, you have to get away. Contact the police. Sort it all out.”
“Why don’t we do that now?” Elisabeth said, but the tone of her voice had already answered her own question.
Will said nothing, but gradually worked at Elisabeth’s hands until he was free. “Give me twenty minutes,” he said. “If I’m not back by then, get out quick. Promise me?”
Elisabeth drew him to her and kissed him clumsily, almost desperately. “Hurry. Please,” she whispered, looking away from his face.
“Wait, Eli,” Will said. “Twenty minutes.”
And then he was away. She tried to keep track of him as, crouching, he crept towards the first of the caravans, but it was too dark. Did he stumble? Was that what caused the sudden confusion of noise? And now a shape approaching her. Pale. Was it him? Was it Will, returning already?
CHAPTER TWENTY: THE WALL
SEAN MET THE others for breakfast at 8.30. The sky was teeming. Figures without umbrellas were bent double, their coats and jackets drawn up around their heads. Water sluiced along the street, reflecting the miserable black seam of cloud.
“It’s just sitting there,” observed Robbie, a huge mug of tea obscuring most of his face. “A big, black bladder of piss. Pissing on us.”
Lutz flicked a baked bean at him from his plate. “That… is poetry.”
Trio’s was like any other breakfast hang-out. Populated mainly by the men working on the demolition site, it was also first-stop for a number of ashen-faced office workers poring over briefcases filled with pages and mobile phones that never seemed to cease ringing. The windows were simultaneously drenched with condensation and fogged with heat. The place was run by three Italian guys. During the rush, when plates of chips, sausage, egg, toast, and bacon were being passed around and devoured, their voices ricocheted off the walls as they called out fresh orders or lambasted the help: two women dwarfed by the huge steel tea urns, apparently doomed to a lifetime of scraping a layer of butter onto bread or hunting down the carousel of red and brown sauce.
Sean was sitting with his back against the wall, watching the smears of colour hurry past the window. He felt nauseated by what had happened the day before, but the boys around him were helping to make him feel normal again, part of a crowd, rather than someone picked out for the limelight.
There was one customer he had noticed who visited every day and seemed to end up bickering with the staff about his order. Here he came now. He wore a red, corduroy jacket and blue jeans. Caterpillar boots. Simple black T-shirt. He shed his earphones and dug in his pocket for some change with one hand while the other marked his place in a paperback.
“No,” the chap was saying now. “I said mustard. Who has tomato sauce on a hot beef sandwich? Mustard. Anyway, it doesn’t even sound like tomato sauce. Or ketchup.”
The old Italian guy said sorry maybe a dozen times, his voice thick with accent. Sean liked Luigi. He had a kind face, even though it was heavily lined. He had friendly, sorry eyes magnified by unflattering glasses; his hair was oiled and swept back from his forehead. His brothers were younger, beefier. Sansone had a series of diagonals shaved into his right eyebrow and wore a Fiorentina football shirt; Pepe sweated profusely and rarely lost his expression of bewilderment.
“Reminds me of Salty, that,” Robbie said, gesturing towards the counter. “Every day is the fucking same for Salty in this caff. He asks for marmalade on his toast. Every morning. They stick Marmite on it. He says something about it and some of them, especially the hard-looking one, complain, make a big song and dance. I half-think he does it on purpose. Fucking Italian stereotype game. Scowling like he’s some mob fuck with an itch up his shitter. He goes: ‘Fack, meester, iss like you ask Marmite I give you Marmite but iss no facking good. Iss marmalard you want. Haysoo facking Chrize, man. You thin’ I here for your good health an sanidy?’
“So this morning, right, he gets it spot on, first time. Without Salty having to ask for it. Marmalade. No problem. Salty, mad bastard, tells him he wants Marmite. The fucker barred him. Barred him from a caff, for fuck’s sake.”
“This weekend,” Nicky Preece was saying. “What do you say?”
A friend of the family was getting married. Nicky, as best man, was organising the stag do, which would be an all-day affair. The celebrations were due to begin on the Saturday morning: a game of football at Victoria Park. Nicky was trying to recruit some ringers.
“It’s nothing serious, just a kick-around, really.”
“Will there be nets?” Jez asked.
“Does it matter?”
Jez shrugged. “I find you can’t have a really decent game of footie unless you get some nets. It’s the sound of the ball hitting the back of it. That kind of wet, whipping noise.”
Robbie laughed. “A noise you and your mother know all too well, eh, Jezzer?”
“’K off.”
“Look, we need five more people. That’s all. It’d be great if you lot turned up. We’d have a laugh.”
“This Saturday, you say?” Lutz asked. “Only I can’t make it.”
“Fuck,” Nicky spat.
“Me either,” said Jez.
“But you were just asking about nets.” Nicky looked around him, as though for confirmation that this was so.
“Yeah, but I was just asking for the others. You can’t have a decent game without nets.”
Sean said, “I’ll go. If you want me.”
“That’s great,” Nicky said. “Anyone else? Robbie?”
Robbie nodded, his mouth full of bread.
Nicky gave him an OK sign. “Come on, Tim. You look like a footballer.”
Tim was bent over his poached egg on toast, still bovinely chewing his first mouthful. In this time, Lutz had gobbled his breakfast and was half-way through his second mug of tea. Tim sat up at the mention of his name and swivelled his large, moth eyes until he was staring at Nicky.