Peter May - Runaway

And one by one we followed him down the corridor, moving as fast and as quietly as we could towards the stairwell.

We got as far as the first landing, the echo of our footsteps following us down, when we heard voices and stopped in time to see three youths coming round the bend on the landing below us. They stopped, too, looking up in surprise through the gloom and graffiti, and there was the briefest hiatus. Then the tallest of them, a pale, good-looking boy with blond hair greased back in a quiff, bellowed Rachel’s name. The force of it in the confined space of the stairwell was almost shocking.

‘It’s not what you think, Andy.’ Rachel’s voice seemed feeble by comparison, like the plaintive cry of a seagull against the roar of a storm.

But Andy’s eyes had found and fixed themselves on Maurie. ‘You?’

And I saw knives glinting suddenly in the light that came up the stairwell from below. We turned to run back up the way we had come.

‘Keep going,’ Rachel said breathlessly. ‘All the way to the top. We can get on to the roof.’

Then what? I thought.

And almost as if she had heard me, she whispered in the dark, ‘We can get down another stairwell.’

As we ran up to the next floor I could hear raised voices shouting below, Andy’s rising above the others. ‘Don’t worry. They’re not going anywhere. I want to check the flat first. Guard the stairs.’

Then the echo of footsteps running along the hall. I replayed Luke pouring the bag of heroin down the toilet, and I knew then that Rachel’s worst fears would almost certainly be realized.

Andy would kill us if he caught us.

Four floors later, lungs bursting, we staggered up the final flight of steps to the door that opened on to the roof. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Jesus, it’s locked!’ Dave’s voice exploded in the dark.

There was no light here and we could barely see a thing. Jeff and I put our shoulders to it. On the third attempt, we heard the splintering of wood and the door flew open.

We spilled out on to the huge, open expanse of flat curving roof. A combination of fear and oxygen-starved muscles very nearly stole away the ability of my legs to hold me up. I staggered, gasping for breath, and felt the cold rain mingling with the sweat on my face. I became aware of the almost eerie, yellow-misted cityscape that stretched off to the north, the occasional car or lorry passing seven floors below us on New York Road. On the other side, the lights of Quarry Hill twinkled in suffocating silence. For several minutes it was all we could do to catch our breath, and it took a blood-curdling yell rising up through the dark from the stairwell below to get us on the move again.

The roof was peppered with obstacles. Chimney cowlings, the openings to stairwells, square blocks housing lift gear for each stair. Rachel led the way, running between them, arms pumping, head thrust back, and I realized that I was still carrying her bag.

We were running west, I think, towards Eastgate, even though that sounds contradictory. As we got towards the end of it, the roof dropped down a floor, and we had to turn back to the last stairwell. To our great, collective relief the door was not locked, and we went charging noisily down the stairs. For some reason there were no lights here, and the presence of each and every one of us was felt and heard rather than seen. Heaving lungs and breath catching in throats were the sounds that accompanied us through almost the entire descent.

By the time we got to the second floor there were lights again, and on the first-floor landing we stopped, trying hard to hold our breath and listen for any sounds coming from below. With luck, Andy and his friends would have no idea which of seven or eight stairwells we might have come down. But we didn’t want to run the risk that somehow they might be waiting for us below.

Luke volunteered to check. We watched him from the top step as he moved carefully, quietly down to the next landing and then disappeared from view. We heard nothing for so long that I was starting to fear the worst.

Dave put that fear into words. ‘Something’s happened to him.’

But then, almost immediately, we heard his short, sharp whistle, our signal that it was all clear, and we hurried down after him. It was only when we reached the last few steps that I realized Rachel was clinging to my arm. When we reached the lobby I looked at her, and she became suddenly self-conscious, letting go of me as if my sleeve might burn her.

As if she needed to find something to say, to cover the moment, she muttered, ‘Thanks for carrying my bag. I’ll take it now, if you want.’

But I held it away from her. ‘It’s okay. We need you to show us how to get out of here.’

Maurie came back from the door that led out into the complex. ‘Yeh, which way, Raitch? I can’t see anybody out there.’

She gave me a small, uncertain smile, and hurried with Maurie back to the door. She leaned out, glancing both ways, then turned to look at our anxious assembled faces. Our lives, it seemed, were now dependent on this scared and unreliable teenage girl who had been injecting herself with a Class A drug.

‘To our right,’ she said, ‘and then out through the Neilson arch.’

It was still raining, and a mist was rising now from the ground all about us, cold and damp and forming haloes around the street lamps. But even as we ducked into the Neilson arch, and the world outside was framed by its curve beyond the darkness, angry voices rang out behind us, and we heard footsteps running down the road that ran the length of Moynihan. They were only two or three hundred yards away.

I felt almost gripped by panic, sensing the anger in their voices, and the intent in those sprinting feet. Rachel darted out across the deserted New York Road, and we followed her blindly along an alleyway that ran down the side of the green-tiled City of Mabgate Inn, where we were swallowed by darkness.

I could hear the sound of rushing water, and skinned the palms of my hands as we dropped down from a moss-covered wall into what seemed like a river below. Although we landed on solid ground, the roar of water was deafening now, catching what little light there was down here as it gushed past our feet. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, I could see brick warehouses with dark, arched windows rising up around us, and the crumbling Victorian stonework of walls that led off into the blackness of a tunnel ahead.

‘What is this place?’ I heard Maurie’s voice struggling to make itself heard above the rush of water.

‘It’s a stream that they made into a canal.’ Rachel’s voice came back in the dark. ‘The Meanwood Beck. There’s walkways along either side. It’ll take us into the Mabgate tunnel.’

‘And where will that take us?’ I could hear Dave’s panic. He didn’t like the dark.

‘Right under the city, for about half a mile. Until it reaches the river. But we won’t go that far. There’s several culverts that’ll take us back up on the other side of Eastgate.’

‘You’ve been down here before?’ There was incredulity in Jeff’s voice.

‘No. But it was Andy’s planned escape route if we were ever raided by the cops.’ She took her holdall from me and crouched down to unzip it. ‘He kept essentials in this bag in case he had to run for it. I chucked most of the stuff out except for this.’

She drew out a long-shafted metal torch, and I realized what it was in the bag that had done most of the damage to Johnno’s head.

We heard voices then, whispered calls reverberating not far off in the dark, and we knew that Andy and his friends were close by.

Rachel stood up quickly. ‘This way.’

And we followed her into the tunnel.

Only when we had been completely enveloped by the utterly dense, velvety blackness of it did she switch on the torch, and its beam played out ahead of us in the misted underground distance. The dark shapes of what could only have been rats scuttled off up ahead, then stopped to turn and look back at us, tiny eyes glowing like pinpoints of light in the shadows.