Lula Does the Hula (33 page)

‘Jack will send Sergeant T,’ I whispered. ‘He will. He really, really will!’

Alex nodded, and we both knew we just had to think about that and nothing else, or we’d be doing a Diggle.

A few minutes later the van came to a stop and the back doors crashed open. Mickey grabbed Alex, and Gavin got hold of my arm. It was dark now, the night cool and clear. It was obvious Gavin thought I was the cause of all this, because he yanked me out with more force than necessary. I reckoned he’d been given a bollocking of epic proportions for being the reason two girls had stumbled upon their dirty little secret. I was glad I was wearing my boots, and no silly wedges, or I’d have broken my ankle. You could drop Alex Thompson from the moon in stilettos and she’d still land elegantly upright.

‘Here’s hoping neither of you are claustrophobic,’ said Healey Senior, and he dropped his cigarette butt on the ground, and started heading for a huge, sleek building on the shores of the lake. This was no boathouse. Half hidden behind dense foliage, the building looked like something from the future. It seemed to be made of a strange composite metal and hugged the ground, just three metres in height, and I had no idea how long. Painted a dark matt slate colour, it was pretty much invisible at night, and I imagined was perfectly camouflaged in the day. The structure of it was entirely seemless. No windows as far as I could see, and no doors.

Then Healey Senior pressed a button on a remote in his pocket and an entire area just slid away.

Once the doors were completely open, Healey gestured us all inside. I caught a glimpse of a powerboat in the shadows before we were shuffled towards a hole in the floor.

No, not a hole. A stairwell. Going down. Just as I was about to panic, lights fizzed on, and Healey barked at Gavin to move out of the way of the sensor so he could shut the doors.

‘Don’t need any nosy neighbours spotting activity out here tonight, do we, boyo?’ he asked. ‘You stay here. We’ll be back in a sec.’

‘Er,’ started Gavin. ‘Granddad, just because they know about the dumping doesn’t mea–’

‘Quiet, boy!’ barked Mickey. ‘Who said anything about the dumping?’

‘But you said they knew about the barrel leaking into Frey’s Dam! I think we should . . . What are you –’

‘That’s enough, that’s enough,’ said Healey hastily, his eyes flicking to us and then away.

I was frozen in place.
So it’s true. They’ve been dumping toxins, and there’d been a leak, and Parcel had seen it, and maybe Emily too, and now here we are . . .

My heart began to pound, and sweat prickled across my skin.

‘Don’t worry, Gav,’ continued Healey. ‘Leave it to us, eh? Everything’s going to be fine.’

‘Fine,’ said Gavin warily. ‘Okay, Granddad.’

Okay?
I thought wildly.
Are you out of your mind? Your gramps is taking two girls down into the bowels of the earth, a gun to their heads, and you think this is OKAY?

My body tensed, and I would have done something stupid for sure, but Alex nudged me gently in the small of my back, quietly saying, ‘Lula . . .’

Mickey giggled, making goosebumps scatter across my skin. ‘Come on, Lula,’ he crooned. ‘We just want a little chat, like.’ He grabbed my forearm in a painful grip and pulled me towards the gaping stairwell.

A little chat. Sure.

I resisted and Mickey’s mouth curved into a yellowtoothed grin of delight. He glanced back at Healey and cocked an eyebrow. I tried to move along quietly, I really did, but my heart was drumming like mad, and my blood was up. Way up. Then an image of Jack flashed into my head. Him racing along the roads towards us, Mona on the phone to Sergeant T beside him, squealing occasionally at the twists and turns taken at high speed. The wild panicked urge to kick the bad people in their groins passed, and I took a hesitant step forward.

Mickey’s grin faded.

Down we went, a good way below the surface of the
earth, with spotlights overhead casting deep shadows at our feet. The stairwell seemed to narrow the further we descended, and our footsteps echoed eerily.

‘It smells down here,’ I whispered to Alex. ‘Like when the birds died at Frey’s.’

‘Quiet!’ barked Healey. ‘You can talk all you like in the fuse room.’

At the bottom we came to a metal door, snug in its solid concrete surround. Healey slipped a key-lock access card into a rectangle on the wall. It winked at us and bleeped. He punched in a code and leaned on a huge steel bar handle. It grated in protest and then the door swung open into total darkness.

While Mickey pushed us forward, Healey reached for the light switch on the outside, and clicked it on. A glass box on the wall inside above the door whirred to life and a green glow fizzed into the room. Along the left was a steel workbench, with wires and tools and bits and pieces on it. On the other side was a single mattress, and curled up on it the still figure of a young girl.

How do you describe a feeling of fear and anger and horror so intense that it renders you motionless? If I thought I’d been afraid before, I’d been wrong. Mickey stepped over to the girl and felt her neck for a pulse.

‘Geez,’ he said to Healey. ‘Still going. Faster than ever.’

‘Fast is good. Not long now,’ said Healey. ‘Let’s lock ’em in. They got their bags? We don’t want any more mistakes. Everything together.’

Without another word, he’d shoved us both right the way in, flicked the light switch off and slammed the door.

‘WAIT!’ I yelled. ‘You can’t just leave us here!’

Mickey’s voice came lilting through the air grille at the bottom. ‘It’s for the best, girlies. You get a peaceful departure, and we get to dump your sorry dead asses in Morgan’s Bay.’

‘Quiet, Michael,’ ordered Healey. ‘That’s enough. Less said, understand?’

Alex grabbed my arm, and I didn’t need to see her face to know the expression on it. Dropping to our knees, ears to the air grille, we heard Gavin call from the top of the stairs, ‘Granddad?’ His voice was quavery. ‘I-I . . .’

‘I-I nothing, son,’ replied his grandfather. ‘These
girls just need a little quiet time.’ His voice faded as they clomped up the stairs. ‘Don’t worry, they just need to realise that nosing about where they’re not wanted leads to . . .’

The faint light coming through the grille at the bottom was extinguished and Alex grabbed my arm again. ‘We’re gonna die!’ she hissed.

‘No,’ I said firmly, ‘but it looks like Emily Saunders might.’

Morgan’s Bay was the stuff of legend in the halls of Hambledon High. You could only get to it by sea, surrounded as it was by sheer cliffs that reached high on all three sides. It was a big stretch of sand, beautiful, but those clifftops were treacherous and locals had long lobbied to get it fenced off. Every now and again a silly nutter would try to climb down. If they made it to the sand by some miracle, there was no getting out, unless by boat. Two people had died there in recent history, of dehydration mainly, trapped by the high sandy cliffs and the undrinkable salty water.

The corpse of a runaway girl found in Morgan’s Bay, dead of dehydration, would arouse no suspicion, though plenty publicity. But three of us? Surely that was pushing it a bit far.

I reached for the phone in my trouser pocket and pressed a button. The screen light came on – no reception, obviously – and we could see the girl curled up in the corner. Yes. Emily, definitely. Alex hurried over, rummaging in her goody bag.

‘Emily,’ she said quietly, ‘Emily. You okay?’

There was no response from Emily. Looking around the room by the light from the phone it was obvious there were no regular meals going on here.

‘Maybe . . . Maybe they just left her here. Literally,’ I ventured.

Alex’s voice was uncertain. ‘To . . . to die?’

I didn’t say anything.

‘No,’ whispered my friend. ‘No way. Gavin’s ridiculous, but he’s not
bad
. . . is he?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think Gavin knows about Parcel Brewster. I think Gavin has just been aiding and abetting his grandfather in dumping hazmat at Frey’s Dam. Y’know, from what he was saying up there? What do you think? Forest found parabens, ethanol and mercury in the water. Those are all used in cosmetic products. No one would know, because the barrels would stay hidden underwater, but if one of them leaked . . . If Parcel saw them damage a barrel . . .’

Alex’s brow cleared. ‘Oh, geez.’

She took a shaky breath, and nodded towards Emily, lowering her voice: ‘We can’t wait for Jack. We need to get her to hospital, like,
now
.’

I went closer with the phone and we stared at the face of a girl we hardly recognised. ‘Emily, can you hear me? We’ve got water here.’

‘She’s got so thin,’ observed Alex.

Emily moaned and we both jumped, startled, then we went, ‘Emily? Emily? Emily?’ in crazy high-pitched whispers, even though no one could possibly hear us down here.

Alex got beneath her and eased her head and shoulders into her lap. The girl moaned again and Alex looked up at me, her gaze hopeful. ‘Come on,’ she said urgently, uncapping the sports-top of her drinks bottle. ‘Drink.’ She drizzled a little water across her lips, and Emily sighed.

Alex talked and talked, dribbling water across Emily’s mouth, and it sounded as if she was getting somewhere. I held the phone up high and looked towards the table. On the back corner of it was something that looked familiar. An old car battery. I moved closer to the bench. There were wires and screws and tape and a whole bunch of engine-fixing things. Nothing weaponish, like a mallet or a hammer, but there were long-nosed pliers . . .

‘I’ve got an idea,’ I said to Alex.

‘Yeah?’

‘You know when you bunk in and out of your house and last summer you lost your card over at Barry Bruce’s house?’

‘Don’t go there,’ said Alex, concentrating on Emily.

‘I’m serious. You jimmied the entry device, didn’t you? How did you do that?’

‘Easy,’ said Alex. ‘You’ve got to short it out, with the . . .’

I tuned out. Mechanics I could do.
Really
basic electricity. But this was sounding a little techy. ‘Leave Emily for just a sec,’ I begged, ‘and come and look here. Before this phone battery gives out.’

Alex was at my side in an instant and we both stared at a panel just below the light at the door.

‘Ed’s Electrics. Same company that did our house.’

‘And all of Hambledon, probably,’ I added, barely daring to hope. ‘Can you do it?’

‘It’s different . . . I don’t know . . .’ she said. ‘I’m not that good. Last week when I did the entry pad, I messed up the doorbell, and I still haven’t got that working again.’

‘You’ve got to try, Al.’ I handed her the long-nosed pliers.

She sighed and hefted the tool in her right hand. ‘I’ll need your boots.’

I grinned and began unlacing. ‘Got to have some rubber soles,’ I agreed.

‘Who are you?’ We barely heard the whisper from the mattress, and Alex only glanced over there, already intent on the keypad. I gave her the phone and went over into the darkness. I could hardly see Emily.

‘Alex Thompson and Tallulah Bird,’ I said. ‘Can you drink something?’

I got down next to her and helped her with the bottle. She spluttered and choked, and I leaned closer to hear what she was rasping out.

‘Pardon?’ I asked politely.

Emily coughed and cleared her throat. I bent closer still. ‘I said,
fantastic
. I get locked away to die and then they throw in the witch girl, just to finish me off.’

‘Ha! SOH still intact,’ I said, sounding like a surgeon. ‘How are you still so chirpy?’

Emily retched a little, her skin clammy under my hand. ‘Okay,’ I murmured. ‘Maybe not so chirpy.’

Suddenly there was a fizz and a spark from the keypad and Alex lunged for the door handle before the lock could reset.

‘Yessss!’ she whispered, one hand on the handle, the other punching the air.

We were free!

Sort of . . .

‘Oh my God!’ I hissed, jumping up. ‘Alex! You’re frikking BRILLIANT!’

‘Let’s get going,’ she murmured. ‘Do you think the Healey clan will all have left?’