Then he hurled Ang Nu’s phone on to the seat beside him, and crashed into a bench.
The bees swarmed away, leaving a single boy soprano holding a top C in his head.
Laaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.
Somebody tapped on his window and he got a flash of déjà vu. Circles, he thought. Then he pushed open the door and stumbled out.
‘You all right, mate?’
The man was wearing an England football shirt and had a swastika tattoo on his neck.
Marvel surveyed Jimmy the Fix’s steaming, dripping car as if from a distance, and saw that it was a write-off.
The garage wasn’t far though.
He started walking.
‘He’s drunk!’ said his mother, or somebody just like her.
‘Hold on, mate,’ said the man with the tatt. ‘You can’t just walk away!’
Marvel realized he was right.
He started to jog.
46
‘STOP!’ ANNA SHOUTED. ‘Stop it!’
The driver was there. Was it the same one as last time? The man who had run up and down, showing people how tall Daniel was with a hand at his hip? Anna didn’t know and didn’t care. She bent and hugged the big pipe and tried to pull it away from the edge, but the driver grabbed her arm.
‘Hey!’ he said. ‘Hey!’
‘Stop it!’ she shouted hoarsely. ‘James! James!’
‘Hold on!’ said the man. ‘That stuff’ll burn you and blind you!’
‘You have to stop it!’ said Anna. ‘Please!’
‘Who are you?’ said the man.
James ran out of the office and said, ‘What’s going on?’
Anna gripped his wrist so hard that he winced.
‘James,’ she croaked. ‘Open the door.’
‘What door?’
‘She’s trying to stop the pour!’ said the driver.
‘It’s OK, Anna,’ said James. ‘It’s where the new lift’s going to go.’
‘No!’ Anna dropped slowly to her knees, as if she’d been shot in the back in an old Western movie, and James looked down into her pale face. She was not the woman he’d left at home twenty minutes earlier. Her eyes were huge and bruised, her lips were dry and cracked. She pointed at an old mattress propped against the far wall of the pit and her voice was so papery he had to lean down to hear her.
‘James,’ she whispered. ‘You have to open the door.’
Anna Buck was crazy. Anyone could see.
Except …
DCI Marvel’s voice rang in James Buck’s head like a bicycle bell.
Except …
Except there was a door. Behind the dirty old mattress. A door to the tiny tool room that meant you didn’t have to climb out every time you needed a fourteen-mill socket. But it didn’t lead anywhere. It just— Anna’s eyes closed and her grip on his wrist loosened as she slid to the ground.
James jumped into the pit.
Somewhere behind him, the driver shouted ‘Shit!’ and then he heard nothing else.
The concrete was like hot stone porridge. It was up to his knees and every step took a lifetime. It clung and it squeezed and he could feel the catalytic heat through his overalls. He hadn’t expected it to be hot! He had to fight panic and keep moving towards the mattress.
So slowly …
James fixed his eyes on the mattress as he twisted and lifted his heavy, hot legs.
Two more agonizing steps.
He reached too early and stumbled …
He scared himself upright, his heart thumping with the near miss. If he fell in this stuff he was dead. He calmed his breathing and made himself take a more careful step.
He finally grasped the mattress and hauled it aside. It flopped awkwardly, half in his way; he had to wade around it now to grip the knob on the bolt.
He drew it back and pulled, but the rising tide of concrete kept the door shut.
With only the bolt to hold on to, he strained to open it even an inch and, when he did, the concrete slid through the gap in a vicious, viscous eddy. Trying to beat him to the prize – whatever that was. Squeezing ahead of him, seeking out what was rightfully his.
‘No!’ he shouted. ‘No no no!’
He got his fingers around the crack in the door and strained.
Another two inches.
Not enough! He was just making it easier for the greedy grey sludge.
It wouldn’t beat him. It mustn’t! Anna had told him to open the door and he was going to do it or die trying.
James gripped the door with both hands, braced his right foot against the wall and leaned perilously backwards.
Slowly, slowly, the door edged open.
The child was sitting on the bed, cross-legged and wearing a helmet with a tinted visor, as if waiting to be launched into space.
‘Daddy!’ he shouted, and held out his arms.
47
‘DADDY!’
Daniel Buck ran across the fresh cement with a drawing in his hand – two goldfish in a pond – to show Daddy.
Ang shouted at him and Daniel looked up, and then down at the wet, sticky greyness under his feet. It wasn’t his fault! He had run across the forecourt a hundred times to see Daddy and it had never been like this!
He twisted away and jumped clear of the cement.
But Ang was angry. He ran and grabbed Daniel’s arm and pulled him roughly into the garage – all the while being angry in words Daniel couldn’t understand, but which he knew meant he’d done something very naughty.
‘You bad!’ Ang told him. ‘You bad. Brian angry. You daddy angry.’
Then he shouted above the noise of the cement mixer, ‘James! James!’
But James wasn’t there and Daniel started to cry. He wanted Daddy, but he also didn’t want Daddy to be there if he was angry with him. He didn’t know what he wanted, except to go home.
‘Ssssh!’ Ang said. ‘Ssssh!’
He jerked Daniel’s arm and the goldfish picture tore across one corner.
‘Ang bad!’ cried Daniel, and the verdict rang off the wide workshop walls. Ang bad!
‘Ssssh!’
More yanking of his arm, and then the ground disappeared below Daniel’s feet and he squealed in fear as he dangled like a doll in the air, and then he touched ground again, down low, in a big square hole, and then Ang jumped in beside him and opened a secret door to a tiny room with waxen black walls.