Shaun Hutson: Captives

He lay beneath the remains of the bike, the flames devouring his flesh, stripping skin from his bones. Blisters rose, burst and then blackened as the fire engulfed him, turning him into a human torch.

Those who'd been in the store when he crashed through the window fought to escape the scene of devastation. Members of staff fled past fire extinguishers in their haste to flee what could rapidly become an inferno.

Uniformed men now forced their way in, held back by the flames that had engulfed the Bonneville and its rider, who now lay beside two blazing mannequins. As the fire destroyed them they dissolved, their false limbs melting in the ferocity of the inferno. One, still wearing the remains of a silk camisole and knickers, its false hair scorched off, seemed to roll over onto him, the heat twisting its plastic limbs into grotesque shapes, bending and moulding its arms so that they seemed to close around the dead man in a final fiery embrace.

FOUR

29 DECEMBER 1976

They had pulled three bodies from the wreckage.

The fourth they had found at the roadside, obviously thrown clear when the Metro first crashed.

The car was on its roof, a tangled mass of metal that looked as if it had been attacked by a gang of thugs wielding sledgehammers. The field in which it had finally come to rest was strewn with pieces of metal that had been torn from the chassis as the car had cartwheeled into oblivion. Other objects were also scattered around.

A high heeled shoe.

A handbag.

A couple of cassette tapes.

A watch.

A severed hand.

Wally Hughes gathered them all up, moving slowly round the wreckage, dropping the personal effects into a plastic bag. They might help with identification when the time came. The occupants of the car certainly couldn't. So bad were their injuries it was even difficult, at first glance, to tell which were male and which female. The driver had been impaled on the steering column. It had taken Wally and two of his companions over twenty minutes to remove the corpse, one of them vomiting when the body came in half at the waist as the torso was finally freed. Whoever had been in the passenger seat had fared no better. The head had been practically severed by broken glass when the windscreen had shattered. Portions of skin still hung from the obliterated screen like bizarre decorations.

Christmas decorations?

Wally shook his head and sighed, stooping to pick up a blood-flecked wallet. Death at any time of the year was a terrible thing, but at Christmas it seemed even more intrusive. In his twelve years as an ambulanceman he had noticed how the public seemed to take on an almost lemming-like mentality. Despite warnings every year not to drink and drive, to take more care in dangerous road conditions, men and women (sometimes children too) were pulled or cut or lifted piece by piece from car smashes. Huge pile-ups or single-vehicle accidents. What did it matter? Death was death, whether it happened to one or twenty at a time.

This time there had been four.

The car had come off the road at speed, obviously, hit a grassy bank, ploughed through a low stone wall, cartwheeled and ended up on its roof. How had it happened?

That was always the first question that came into Wally's mind as he approached the scene of an accident. He didn't even consider things such as, 'Will the victim be alive? If so, how bad will the injuries be?' Besides, it was usually simple to tell, on first glance at the scene of carnage, how likely it was that there would be any survivors. In this particular case he had taken one look at the wreck and decided that the ambulance would be driving straight to the morgue, not the emergency wing of the hospital.

He picked up a glove, dropped it into his plastic bag and straightened up, wincing slightly at the pain from his lower back. Rheumatism. The cold weather always exacerbated it and tonight was cold. There was a thick coating of frost on the grass and the road was icy, especially on the bend.

Perhaps that was what had happened. The driver had lost control on the slippery road. Perhaps he'd been going too fast. Perhaps he'd been drunk. Perhaps he'd been showing off.

Perhaps. Perhaps.

None of that seemed to matter now. They wouldn't know why it had happened, not for a few days. In the intervening period, Wally and his companions would have countless other accidents to deal with. At Christmas time the ambulance service in Greater London alone dealt with upwards of 3000 emergency calls a day.

Merry Christmas.

By the roadside two ambulances stood with their rear doors open, the blue lights turning silently. The glare of their headlamps cut through the blackness of the night, one set pointing at the wrecked Metro. In the gloom Wally continued with his task of recovering personal effects. He noticed that blood had sprayed over a wide area around the car; it glistened on the frosted grass, appearing quite black in the blinding whiteness of the headlights. There was little talk among the other men as they went about their tasks. There was a weary familiarity about the whole thing. It wasn't the first time they'd seen it and Christ alone knew it wouldn't be the last.

The head of one of the passengers in the rear of the car had hit the back of the driver's seat so hard they had found three teeth embedded in the upholstery. Now, as he flicked on his torch and shone it over the ground, Wally found two more teeth. He picked them up and dropped them into the bag.

A police car was also parked close to the bend, and one of the officers was making notes. As soon as identification of the victims was made it would be the job of the police to notify the next of kin. Wally was glad he didn't have to do that job. It was one, thing to pull a man from a car, a man who was still screaming despite the fact that he had no face, but it was something else to sit calmly opposite a mother and inform her that her son was dead. To tell a father his daughter had been crushed beneath a lorry, that it had taken twenty minutes to scrape her brains up off the road.

Wally shone the torch over the ground once more, then headed back towards the wall, stepping through the gap the car had made on its fateful passage.

He was heading towards the closest ambulance, glancing across at two of his companions lifting the fourth body on a stretcher, when he heard the shout.

'This one's still alive.'

FIVE

'We drew the short straw again.'

Detective Sergeant Stuart Finn fumbled in his jacket pocket for his Zippo, flipped the lighter open and lit the Marlboro jammed between his lips.

As the lift slowly descended he glanced across at his companion who was gazing distractedly at the far wall.

'I said…'

'I heard you,' Detective Inspector Frank Gregson told him, his eyes still fixed on a point on the wall.

Finn looked at his companion then across to where his gaze seemed fixed. He noticed a fly on the wall, sitting there cleaning its wings.

The lift bumped to a halt and Gregson glanced up to reassure himself that they were at the right floor. As he stepped towards the door he swung the manila file he held, squashing the fly against the wall, where it left a red smudge.

'I know how he feels,' murmured Finn as he stepped from the lift. The doors slid shut behind him. 'Flies eat shit, don't they?'

Gregson didn't answer.

'I certainly know how he feels,' the DS added wearily. 'Well, come on, Frank. Any ideas who this joker might have been?'

'How the hell am I supposed to know?' Gregson said. 'They drag the bloke out of a fire after he's been chased halfway across the West End. By the time they get him out he's so badly burned his fucking mother wouldn't even know him. If he's got one.'

Their footsteps echoed dully in the long corridor as they approached New Scotland Yard's forensic labs. Signs proclaimed: PATHOLOGY. Gregson looked down at the file again, glancing at the number in the top right-hand corner. That was all the man was to them at the moment. A number. No name and certainly no face. That had been burned away along with most of the rest of him. But he had to be identified and that job was to be done by the Yard's forensic pathologists.