Peter May: Cast Iron

Alarm bells rang deafeningly in her head. Something felt wrong. Something was different. They had not come to take her to the toilet. The routine was broken. And everything about the last few days had been defined by routine. Suddenly it seemed that if she didn’t go now she would never go at all.

She didn’t stop to think, or reason, but acted on pure, naked instinct, crossing the room in three strides to wrench the frame of iron bars from the window. As before, she let them dangle from the padlock, and hurriedly opened the window, pulling herself up to brace her feet in the crouching position she had adopted previously.

She glanced down and saw the white SUV there once more, almost immediately below the window. Again, she had not heard it arriving. On the wall opposite she could see her silhouette crouched in the square of light projected through her window and on to the facing brickwork.

Tentatively she manoeuvred herself into a position where her whole body was leaning out of the window, secured only by the grasp of her fingers on the window frame, and she reached for the downpipe. Infuriatingly, the length of her arm left her fingertips inches short. She felt the rain on her face and a sense of desperation so acute it seemed as if a hand, fingers spread, was squeezing her heart.

From inside the building she heard voices raised once more, and then those same footsteps coming back down the hall. Only, this time, it felt as if there was a sense of purpose in them that had not been there before. Adrenalin surged through her body, overcoming fear, and she drew herself back into the window before swinging into the night, letting go her grip of the window frame only at the last moment, reaching out with her other arm and trusting to God that her fingers would find the downpipe.

She felt cold, wet metal and closed her fingers around it. But even as she grasped the pipe with her other hand, she heard the fixings tearing themselves free of the wall. She glanced up and in the light from the open window saw the gutter overhead peeling itself away from the roof. The brackets holding the downpipe to the wall above her sprang loose, and with the most awful sound of rending metal filling her consciousness, both gutter and pipe tore themselves away from the building.

Sophie swung her legs up to wrap around the downpipe and braced herself for the fall. But almost immediately the whole disintegrating structure came to a juddering halt. The downpipe and its attached gutter had bridged the gap between the two buildings, arcing between them and jamming at a point higher up in the facing brickwork. Sophie was dangling now in mid-air, still twelve or fifteen feet from the ground. She began to shimmy down the curve of the pipe, wet fingers desperately trying to maintain their grip, skin flaying and burning as she slipped one hand over the other.

Then, from the room above, she heard the bellow of a man’s voice. They knew she was gone.

A quick glance down, then she simply let go of the pipe and dropped the rest of the way to the ground, landing heavily and tipping on to her side in the wet. She rolled over and slammed hard into the wall below the window. She flattened herself against it, hoping that she could not be seen from above.

Looking up, she could see the silhouette of a man leaning out of the open window, looking down into the darkness. She heard his oath filling the night air. ‘Fuck! The bitch is gone.’ And his shadow disappeared from the light.

Sophie looked around in a blind panic. If she ran, they would catch her. And there was nowhere to hide. She slid along the wall until she was level with the back of the SUV. She could hear its engine ticking in the dark as it cooled, and she reached forward to try the handle on the tailgate. It opened. The vehicle was not locked. Fleetingly she wondered if the driver might have left the keys in the ignition, but shouting voices from the far end of the abandoned factory stole away any illusion of time that she might have had. She lifted the tailgate and jumped inside, pulling it shut behind her and curling up in the foetal position, arms wrapped tightly around her shins.

She tried very hard to control her breathing as she heard the sound of several men running in the dark, splashing through the puddles in this cracked and pitted alleyway. She braced herself, waiting for the tailgate to be thrown open, angry hands reaching in to pull her out. But they passed her by and continued on down between the buildings. More raised voices and angry shouts. It seemed so obvious to her that she was hiding in the boot space of this SUV that she couldn’t believe they would not think to look.

Now she heard the woman’s voice again. Just the tone of it, not the words. Angry, ugly and abusive. Someone smacked a fist or a boot into the side of the SUV and the whole vehicle shook. They were all gathered just outside. Just a touch away. Sophie held her breath for so long she thought her lungs would burst.

Then the driver’s door opened and someone slid in behind the wheel. The door slammed angrily and the engine coughed to life, revving violently before the vehicle pulled away with a spinning of tyres that sent Sophie rolling back to slam into the tailgate. The driver was oblivious, picking up speed across the broken tarmac, lurching side to side and front to back, tossing Sophie around the boot like some tattered little rag doll.

After less than a minute they seemed to find the smoother surface of a proper road, and the driver accelerated hard, off into the night.

Dominique glanced at the digital clock for the fourth or fifth time in as many minutes. 04:56 . Again she felt her eyelids grow heavy, and a comforting sense of nothingness began to steal her away. Then her whole body convulsed from what felt like an electric shock, as consciousness shouted in her head that she was falling asleep. She blinked furiously at the road ahead caught in her headlights. The endless white lines flashing past on either side. Her heart was hammering against her ribs. She adjusted the drift of the car, but oversteered it and had to correct.

She glanced at Enzo, asleep in the passenger seat. God knows, he needed his sleep, and she didn’t want to waken him. But she knew she couldn’t carry on much longer. All she wanted to do was to pull over on to the hard shoulder and close her eyes. Just for a minute. Just for one wonderful, stressless minute when she could let her mind and her body go.

Concentration and focus wavered again, and she forced herself back from the brink. It was no good. She had to stop.

Like manna from heaven, a large blue and white road sign ballooned into her headlights. Services in two kilometres. Just two kilometres. She could hold out for that long. She stretched each arm in turn, then flexed her neck and rubbed a hand over her face. Anything to keep herself awake for the next minute and a half.

Three hundred metres to go. She began to indicate. At least the rain had stopped, and there was almost nothing else on the road at this hour.

She crossed the broken white line and decelerated into the curve, following the signs for Essence and services. A floodlit forecourt simmered emptily before the rows of vacant parking bays that welcomed her, and she pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine.

She released a long, slow breath, closing her eyes and letting her head fall back on to the rest.

‘Why have we stopped?’

She turned her head to see Enzo rubbing his eyes. ‘I was falling asleep. I need a break.’

‘I’ll take over.’

‘No, you need a break, too. Let’s get a coffee and stretch our legs. Then just shut our eyes for ten minutes. Just long enough to get us back on the road.’

For a moment she thought Enzo was going to argue, but if he was he thought better of it and nodded.