Shallow Be Thy Grave (34 page)

“Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Well, I do,” said Lily. “It’s happening whether you help us or not, Stuart.”

Stuart stared at Lily so long she became embarrassed. She crossed the room to the window and lit a cigarette. “Ok,” said Stuart. “Against my better judgement. Count me in.”

Lily cheered. Stuart looked pale.

“They might not come,” said Jo.

“They’ll come,” said Lily. “I know they’ll come.”

Jo handed them each a knife and tucked the gun down the waistband of her black leggings. While she strutted around the flat in a balaclava, Lily tried to appease Stuart. “How was your day?” Lily asked Stuart.

“Ruth’s got them to agree to release Fiona’s body. She’s going to be flown back to England, maybe tomorrow evening.”

“Is Ruth going back with it?”

“No. She’s got to go back to America first. You know what she’s like. There’s some work that needs tying up, apparently. She’s letting David handle the funeral arrangements.”

“She’s not coming to the funeral?” asked Jo.

“Oh yes, she’ll fly over for that.”

“But Fiona will be flying home alone?” asked Lily. She didn’t want her sister making her final journey alone.

“Well, if Brigitte’s family do turn up tonight, maybe we can all fly back with her.”

Lily nodded. “That’s what we’ll do.”

“I feel bad for David,” said Stuart. “His dad’s funeral, then having to collect Fi’s body from the airport.”

 “They’ll come tonight,” said Lily. “I know they will.”

“What time do you think I should go outside?”

“As soon as it gets dark.”

“So I’m going to be spending the whole evening hiding out the back of a block of flats in the dark?”

“I really appreciate it.”

“You know that I’d do anything for you,” he half sang The Cure’s line and tried to smile. His smiles never reached his eyes these days and Lily felt like crying.

“There’s a place to hide,” said Jo. “I had a look. An old tool store or something. It’s under the stairs. It’s empty and it’s dry. You could take a chair down there.”.

They ate the tea that Stuart had brought, watching the Parisian sun slink slowly down the horizon. Lily stashed a knife under one of the pillows on Bruno’s double bed, Jo kept the gun in the back of her trousers, and hid the masking tape in the bottom of the wardrobe. It didn’t get dark ’til almost ten o’clock. Stuart had already put one of the kitchen chairs in the tool store downstairs. “Right, I’d better go. Are you sure these things work?”

He picked up one of the walkie talkies and turned it on. They whined because they were too close together. He went downstairs. Five minutes later Lily heard his voice through the walkie talkie, “Testing, testing,”

“Sssh,” she radioed back. “You’ll have to be quiet.”

“This is going to be a long night, Lily.” His low voice brought her skin out in goosebumps. She turned the volume right down.

Lily and Jo moved into the bedroom. They kept the lights on in the hallway, but not in the kitchen. Lily smoked fag after fag, but no reefer. She had to be alert. Her whole body was wired, alert, adrenaline fuelled. She checked the time every three minutes on the radio alarm clock by the bed.

“What time would you come?” she asked Jo, when the clock showed it had gone past midnight.

“Dunno. Depends what they’re trying to do, I guess. Do you think they want to kill her or take her back?”

“Take her back.”

“Then I think they’ll come when it’s quietest. Fourish.”

“We’d better get into positions.”

Lily climbed into bed, Jo got into the bottom of the wardrobe and pulled the door to, but not quite closed. Lily put her hand on the knife under the pillow, reassuring herself at ten-minute intervals that it was still there.

Twenty minutes later, Jo climbed out of the wardrobe. “My leg’s gone dead. If they don’t come ’til four o’clock, I’m not going to be able to move. I’ve got a better idea. I’ll lie under the bed. Then when Stuart says they’re on their way, I’ll get behind the door.”

As it was they came before four, but only ten minutes before.  Lily and Jo didn’t hear a sound from Stuart, nothing over the walkie talkie. They didn’t hear the sound of breaking glass, or of the boarded window being knocked out. Lily thought she heard a floorboard creak but before she could prod Jo under the bed, Lily felt a hand clamp itself over her mouth. She tried to fight back but then the smell of something she couldn’t quite place, and for some reason she found herself remembering school, and some experiment with fruit flies. Colours seemed to swirl in her mind, like a kaleidoscope, until everything went black.

Lily woke up slowly. She had no idea where she was, who she was. The time when those moments had been comforting to her was past. Her first thought was that she was in a coffin, about to be buried alive, but the space was larger than a coffin, she could move her arms. Then she connected the smell of petrol and it dawned that she was in the boot of a car. A large boot, large, deep and square. She was in the foetal position, her face pressed against a coarse carpet. She brushed her hands against it and felt pieces of grit or mud spring up.

The car was moving, not particularly fast, not really slow. Lily guessed they were in residential streets, not motorways. Her head was fuzzy and to form any kind of thought seemed to take ages. She had no idea how long she’d been out, but yesterday had been baking hot and she was trapped inside a metal box and she wasn’t sweating. Therefore, she deduced, barring a sudden drastic change in the weather or location, it was still early in the morning, before the sun had climbed too high. Either that or it was evening and she’d missed a whole day. Her head ached with the thought process. What if she had been out for hours and they were taking her back to the East? She tried to steady her breathing. Surely no one would keep her in the boot of a car for a full day? She would have suffocated by now. As soon as she thought about suffocation, she could feel panic rise in her stomach. But the feeling went, and was followed by the realisation that actually, she felt quite calm, all things considered. She was being kidnapped by the people who had murdered her sister, she was trapped in a car boot, with no idea where she was, or where she was headed and for perhaps the first time in her life, she felt calm and in control. It didn’t make any sense, but for once she was just going to go with the flow.

She used the palms of her hand to feel around her metal coffin. She felt around the edges of the boot, until she managed to get her fingers underneath the carpet she was lying on, and lifted it up. She squashed herself as small as she could, into a corner and felt the cold metal of the boot floor. Then her fingers came into contact with a wooden board, a board that had some give in it, she was reminded of Rolf Harris and his wobble boards. Squashing herself into the smallest ball she possibly could, she found a finger-sized hole in the wood and managed to pull it up, just enough to form a gap big enough for her to get her hand inside. She felt the black rubber of the spare tyre and remembered the time she’d had to help Jo change the wheel on her brother’s Mini. Lily suddenly knew what she was looking for.

In the centre of the tyre was a heavy package, wrapped in cloth. She squeezed it through the gap between the ply-board panel and the floor of the boot, her shoulder muscles screaming as she did so. She pressed the panel down again and allowed herself to sprawl out, on her back, while she unravelled the cloth. Inside were cold metal tools, slotted into the fabric. She felt each one of them in turn and then selected the one that felt the sharpest, a screwdriver she thought, and shoved it down the back of her tight black canvas trousers. She took the heaviest one too - the one might have been a crowbar, and then wrapped the rest back up and stashed the packet right at the back of the boot. She twisted position to lie on her back and felt around the rim of the boot. She found a ridge in the metal, which she tried to ram the crowbar into. The car went over a bump. Lily swore as she banged her forehead on the low ceiling. She used the crowbar to prise at the metal, but it didn’t give way.

She’d grazed most of the skin off her knuckles but not made much headway on the boot seal, although she’d forced a slight gap, just big enough to smell the air outside. It smelled like the countryside, she thought, or maybe she was still hallucinating. Her upper arms were aching and her faith in her ability to force the boot open waning, when the car made a sharp turn, bounced down what could only be a bumpy track as opposed to a road, and then came to a standstill. She lay back down, stashed the crowbar at the rear of the boot, and pulled the screwdriver from out the back of her trousers. It was quiet, she noticed, when the engine stopped. Really quiet. She tucked the screwdriver up her sleeve and pretended to be out cold. There was the sound of car doors opening, and then being slammed shut. She held her breath as a key turned in the lock and the boot lid popped ajar. The sudden influx of light made her want to screw up her face, even though her eyes were closed.

A pair of hands grabbed her, and dragged her out of the boot. She felt herself being lifted and thrown over a shoulder as if she were a sack of coal. She heard the boot lid slam shut and risked opening an eye, but as she was hanging upside down, all she could see was a pair of blue Levis and brown work boots. She knew it was a man. She allowed the screwdriver to slip gently out of her sleeve, into her hand, and then she pulled back her arm, and slammed the screwdriver through the man’s jeans and into his bum.

He crumpled immediately, which resulted in Lily falling head first to the ground. Luckily, she was practically in the dive position so her hands hit the ground first and she rolled herself over in a forward roll, like she was Lee Majors in
The Fall Guy
. She was back on her feet, weapon in her hand and ready to pounce, before the man had pulled himself back up to standing. Blood pumped through a tear in the denim, slowly turning the back of his jeans dark red. She noticed that first, before she noticed that she recognised the hair, the broad shoulders.

“Merde.”

The man stood up, hopping on his right leg, and Lily nearly fell over. “Alain?”

“What did you hit me with?”

“What the fuck are you doing?”

He put his hand to his arse and looked at the blood that was covering his palm. His eyes widened. “You stupid bitch.”

She stayed crouched, the screwdriver still in her hand and pointed towards Alain. “Your English is improving.”

“They just want to talk to you.” He dabbed at the blood running from his arse cheek. “That’s all.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him as she tried to work out her options. It wasn’t looking good, even by her standards. They were in the countryside, at the bottom of a farm track, surrounded by fields and open spaces. The only building she could see was the one behind Alain, an old, deserted farmhouse. There was nowhere to run to and few places to hide. “They killed my sister.”

Alain put some weight on his left leg, testing it out. It gave way on his first attempt, but then he seemed to find his balance. “I told you not to get involved in things that don’t concern you.”

“They killed my sister. Which part of that doesn’t concern me?”

“I don’t know anything about your sister.”

“You used me.”

“Brigitte has something that belongs to them. They just want it back.”

“They’re paedophiles, child abusers. They raped Brigitte every week of her life. She was a kid, seven years old.”

Alain shook his head. He took a step towards her. “I’m afraid Brigitte has told you lies.”

Lily took a step back. “You don’t know Brigitte.”

“I’m afraid I do.”

“You’re her uncle?” This was getting worse and worse. Lily wished Jo was here.

“Of course not. She is not French, for one thing. I meet her only a few months ago. One day, I am smoking a cigarette in the street, by the apartments. She comes to me. I never seen her before. She says she has a business idea for me. I let her use a flat, she gives me a thousand francs a month.”

All the time Alain was speaking he was edging closer to Lily. Lily kept the screwdriver out in front of her, and moved slowly backwards. She tried to turn them both round, circling each other, so that she could put the car between them. 

“Beaumont’s flat?”

“No. I didn’t know they knew each other. Not ’til you show Marcel the photograph. I gave her 417. It is always empty. The guy who owns it, he only comes one time or maybe two times a year and he always tell me before, because I have to put the heating on.”

“Easy money,” said Lily.

Alain held up his hands. “There is no harm. At first, she only want it one day a week, to meet her boyfriend.”

Lily pulled a face at him. Her back was now to the house. Alain was squinting into the early morning sun, which was rising behind the house.

“I know she use it for sex. But everybody in the building is doing the same thing. Why not make some money? The wages are shit.”

Lily stayed crouched, her knees bent. She kept bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to leap at him if necessary.

“But this is not enough for her. Next she want more days. Then she hides a camera in the apartment, and blackmails her clients.”

“Blackmail?”

“Yes. If it gets out that I let her use the apartment, I lose my job. She doesn’t think about anyone except her own person.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“It is the truth, I swear.”

“So, why kill Fiona? It was nothing to do with her.”

“I never kill anyone. But Brigitte chose the wrong person to blackmail.”

“Who?”

“I cannot tell you who he is.”

“Convenient.”

“All he wants is the film.”

 “God, Alain, can’t you see this is just bullshit? They’re just feeding you a line. They killed my sister. They beat up a woman in Amsterdam.”