Peter James - A Twist of the Knife

His eyes closed and he sank like a stone into sleep.

Michael awoke with a start in pitch darkness, his mouth parched, tried to sit up and hit his pounding head on something hard. He lay back down, confused and disoriented. Was he in bed with Ashley?

He tried rolling over and reaching out for her, but his arms went into something soft, inches away. He raised them and instantly they touched something hard and unyielding.

He tried rolling to his left. But again, instantly his hands touched something soft. His nostrils were filled with the smell of wood.

Where the hell was he?

He felt as if he was waking from a bad dream. He rolled right, then left, then raised his arms again. Slowly it was coming back. The pub crawl. They’d put him in a coffin. Surely to hell he wasn’t still in it?

He raised his hands and felt the hard wood above him.

Shit. Oh shit. Panic enveloped him. ‘Hey!’ he cried out. ‘Hey!’

His voice sounded oddly flat.

‘Hey!’

He lay still for a moment, desperate for water, his head agony. ‘Hey, guys, enough! OK? Get me outta here!’ he shouted.

Silence greeted him. Utter silence.

He felt a sudden shiver of fear. What if something bad had happened?

‘I’m claustrophobic, OK? Enough! Get me out, NOW!’ He began pushing with all his strength at the lid, but it would not budge. He kicked out hard, pushed up again, banged his arms sideways. ‘LET ME OUT!’

More was coming back to him. The journey in the van. The strange glances between them all. Yelling and yelling, he hammered with his fists on the roof until they hurt so much he had to rest for a moment. Then he stopped. Remembering.

Remembering a newspaper article he had read some years back about coffins. About how much air was in them. Three to four hours if it was well made and you breathed normally. But you could knock that down to less than an hour if you hyperventilated.

Instantly, he tried to calm his breathing down.

As he did, more details came back to him. The torch. The walkie-talkie.

He put his hand on his stomach and felt something hard, long and thin. He fumbled with it, twisted the end. Twisted it again. A feeble glow emerged, for a few seconds, then faded. Shit, the battery had died.

Then he found the walkie-talkie. Pressed a button on it. There was a weak, green glow. Enough for him to see the wood inches above his face and quilted white satin to his right and left. He held the instrument in front of his eyes, squinting at it, and pressed a button marked talk.

‘Hello!’ he said. ‘Pete, Josh, Robbo, Luke, Mark? Enough, OK? Get me out of here, I’m scared.’

He heard a bip-bip-bip and a signal flashed on the display. ‘LOW BATTERY’.

‘You stupid bastards, you could have charged the bloody thing for me! Hello! Hello! Hello!’

Static came back at him.

He tried again, with the same result.

There was another sharp bip-bip-bip. Then the display light went out.

‘God no, please no!’

He pressed the talk button again. Again. Again. Nothing. It was stone dead.

Then he remembered his iPhone in his pocket. Slowly, with difficulty, sliding his hand down against the white satin, he reached his pocket and teased the phone out. Then he dropped it. Fumbled. Found it again, brought it to his face and pressed the power button. The display almost dazzled him.

Three minutes past one.

Friday morning.

He was getting married tomorrow.

There was no signal.

A shiver of fear rippled through him. He tried to remember what time they had been in the van. It must have been around 9 p.m. Four hours?

They hadn’t come back. Two hours they had said.

He remembered the scream. The clanging sound.

What the hell had happened?

It was hard to breathe. How much air did he have left?

He pressed the green button on the walkie-talkie again, but still heard no sound. ‘Guys,’ he said. ‘Joke over, OK?’ He was having to suck harder and harder to get air into his lungs. ‘Guys!’ he said desperately. ‘Hey, come on!’

Silence.

He took another long, deep breath that barely filled his lungs.

Ashley darling, he thought. His eyelids were feeling heavy. He was drowsy and calm, and growing drowsier and calmer. His headache had gone. Almost delirious he murmured, ‘Ashley, darling... if I’m not there in the church tomorrow, you are so not going to believe my excuse, are you?’

The police never found Michael. The boys, who had all died instantly in the crash, had kept their plans such a tight secret that no one else had an inkling what they were going to do that fateful night. It was a secret that Michael, unfortunately, took literally to the grave.

Tony Trollope was a man of routine. He would arrive home from the office at almost exactly the same time every weekday evening, other than when the train from London to Brighton was delayed; kiss his wife, Juliet; ask how the children were and what was for supper. Then he would glance upwards, as if at the masthead of a yacht, and announce, ‘Sun’s over the yard arm!’

That was Juliet’s cue to make him a drink, while he popped upstairs to change — and in earlier days, to see their children in bed.

‘Sun’s over the yard arm’ became, to Juliet, almost like Tony’s mantra. But she had no idea, any more than her husband did, just how ironic those words would be one day.

After a few minutes he would come back downstairs in an oversized cable-stitch sweater, baggy slacks and the battered, rope-soled deck shoes he liked to slob around in at home as much as on their boat. Then he would flop down in his massive recliner armchair, feet up, TV remote beside him and the latest edition of Yachting Monthly magazine open on his lap. A couple of minutes later, Juliet would oblige him with his gin and tonic with ice and a slice of lemon in a highball glass, mixed just how he liked it.

Over the years, as the stress of his commute and his job at the small private bank increased, the quantity of gin got larger and of tonic smaller. And at the weekend the timing of just when exactly the sun appeared over the yard arm steadily reduced from 1 p.m. to midday and then to 11 a.m., regardless of whether they were at home or away on the boat.

‘Eleven in the morning was when sailors in the British Navy traditionally took their tot of rum,’ he was fond of telling Juliet, as if to justify the early hour of his first libation of the day. Frequently he would raise his glass and toast 31 July 1970. ‘A sad day!’ he would say. ‘A very sad day indeed!’

It was the day, he informed her, that the British Navy abolished the traditional tot of rum for all sailors.

‘So you’ve told me many times, darling,’ she would reply patiently. Sometimes she wondered about his memory.

‘Yes, I know I have, but traditions are important, they should never be allowed to die. Now the thing is,’ he would go on to explain, ‘a tot is actually quite a big measure. Half the ship’s company would be totally smashed by midday. That tradition was there for two reasons. Firstly to ward off disease, and secondly, as with many military forces around the globe, to give the sailors courage in combat. Historically, many soldiers went into battle totally off their faces on alcohol or drugs. The Zulu warriors were sky high on drugs during the Zulu wars. Half the US troops in Vietnam faced the enemy stoned on marijuana or heroin. Dutch courage indeed! Didn’t get its name for nothing.’

Tony had never actually been in the Royal Navy, but the sea was in his blood. From the age of ten, when his father had bought him a Cadet dinghy, which he sailed out of Shoreham Harbour near Brighton, he had been smitten with the sea. On their very first date, when he was twenty-three and Juliet was just twenty, he had sat opposite her in the little Brighton trattoria and asked her if she had ever been sailing. She replied that she hadn’t, but was game to try it.