Saving Sophia (12 page)

Escape

My dreams are filled with images of Mum and Dad setting off on an expedition. Ned’s with them and they all look really excited, but I can’t hear any of them, I can’t hear the words, I can just see their lips moving. They reach out to me, and I reach out to them, but Pinhead and Miss Sackbutt stand between us, waving golf clubs, and Sophia’s way off to the side, singing loudly and dancing with a tennis racquet.

I pull at Mum’s hands but they shrink from mine, until she’s nothing more than a tiny speck, vanishing into the dark.

I wake before light, trying to work out where I am. Sophia is fast asleep. But something has woken me.

I look outside the window. It’s raining, but there’s a police car parked down by the entrance to the building opposite.

Poo.

“Sophia.” I nudge her awake. “We need to go. Now.”

“What?” She’s still asleep.

“Now – let’s get out of here.”

I stuff the remains of last night’s food into Ned’s bag along with the spare clothes.

Sophia slides off the bed and on to her feet. She leaves two twenty-pound notes on the side, stuffing the rest of the bundle into her jeans.

I open the door, fully expecting to find a policeman out there, but the corridor’s empty. We tiptoe away from the lift towards the stairs at the end of the passage. Everything is utterly silent.

The fire door to the stairs is heavy, so I hold it for Sophia, and pull hard so that it barely thumps back into place. Sophia points down, but I point up.

“Not the roof again?” She opens her sleepy eyes wide.

I shake my head and set off up the stairs. My legs complain; yesterday was the worst of all the days we’ve had so far and I could have stayed asleep forever.

We climb two flights, our feet tip-tapping on the steps, our breath far too noisy. I pull open the fire door on to the seventh floor. Silence. We tiptoe past a tray of dirty crockery left outside a bedroom door; instinctively I check it for leftovers but it’s just crusts, nothing worth having, and we go on until we reach the lift.

It’s clanging somewhere down the shaft. Doors opening? Closing? Sophia shrugs and presses the call button. We stand outside the doors before ducking out of the way seconds before the lift arrives. It stops and the doors open. I creep back until I can see inside. It’s empty.

“Quick, Sophia.”

We stand inside the lift, looking at the buttons.

“If we go to the bottom, we have to go through reception to get out,” she says.

“If we go to the basement, we probably have to go through the kitchens or something.”

We choose the first floor and step out into another silent corridor. At the end is the staircase again, so we take it and tiptoe downstairs. A glass window in the door allows us to look through into the lobby. It seems deserted. I push open the door. It’s still absolutely quiet.

Our feet don’t sound on the thick carpeting, and there’s this soft tinkly music in the background that muffles everything anyway.

Sophia heads towards the main entrance. I follow, holding my breath, expecting the police to jump on us at any moment.

The door opens quietly as we approach. Looking back, I see a man in reception, his back to us, shuffling through post, drinking coffee.

“Bye,” whispers Sophia and we creep out into the street.

“Sophia and Charlotte.”

I look up from the shiny black shoes.

Pinhead.

And he looks furious.

I turn to run, but he grabs me by the elbow. Sophia makes it a few metres down the road only to be stopped by Wesson, who leaps from a parked
car and sprints after her.

“Right, tie them up,” says Pinhead, gripping my arm so tight that it hurts. “Here – to the car.” I’m dragged over the pavement, pulled by my elbow, until my arm reaches the bar of the front passenger seat headrest.

“Help!” I shout, my voice sharp across the empty streets. A flock of pigeons jump into the air and Pinhead laughs, but nothing else happens.

No one runs to help us.

“No one around, see. Good timing, by the way. We thought we’d have to get you later on, pick you out of the crowds – but you made it easy.” From his pocket, Pinhead takes a bundle of small black plastic things. I recognise them as cable ties; Dad uses them to hold the car together. Pinhead tightens three around my wrist and loops another three through the front headrest chaining me half-in, half-out of the back seat of the giant car. Seconds later and Sophia joins me, her hand looped to the door handle on the other side.

“You two have caused me a lot of trouble. But you’re not as clever as you think, are you?”

I stare at the carpet. I don’t want to look up at
him, see the satisfaction on his face.

It doesn’t seem to bother him. He keeps talking. “I don’t know how you got hold of the phone, but it made you easy to find.” I look up and he taps his nose. “Smart phone, see – not a stupid phone. Right, let’s get moving.”

Stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid.

“Get in,” says Wesson, a faint sheen of sweat on her top lip. She pushes me up on to the seat and shuts the door. Pinhead slams the other side and clambers into the front, locking all the doors. We’re trapped. No one can see in; the car’s tinted windows see to that, although it’s irrelevant, there’s still no one around at this time in the morning. I look back towards the hotel. The doors are closed. It looks asleep.

Across the road, the police car seems deserted.

Poo.

I got it all wrong.

Fear

We drive out of town along a fast and empty road. I’m so scared that I can’t make myself breathe properly. I’m panting, but feel as if I might explode from lack of oxygen. Compared to this, climbing off the roof of the office building was a picnic. This is like a gangster movie – except it’s real.

After a few minutes, the dog sticks its nose over the back seat.

“Hello, dog,” I whisper.

He responds by licking my neck and panting in my ear.

“Buster!” shouts Wesson. “Down.”

The dog slinks back. If I turn my head really hard I can just about see him. “Hello, Buster.” I smile at the dog.

He smiles back.

“I’m really sorry about this,” says Sophia under her breath.

For a nanosecond I feel like telling her life was boring but safe until I met her; now it’s exciting but I’ve been kidnapped by a madman murderer and his moll. Instead I say: “It’s OK, Sophia, I’m sure you’d do the same for me – let’s just get through it.”

My voice sounds really calm and ordinary, but I don’t feel like that – I feel panicky and screamy and like leaping up in the air and leaving my spine behind.

But there’s nothing I can do.

The road winds into woodland. Beech trees with a thick carpet of fallen leaves stretch away from us. It looks very lonely. It makes me think of the Gravelly sisters in
Body in the Waves
. They were fed poisonous mushrooms in the woods and then hidden in a wardrobe wrapped in gingham. But I don’t say anything to Sophia. I glance across at her. She’s gone white. The thing about the Gravelly sisters was that they left a crucial letter for Verity
Potsdam to find, which is how she discovers their bodies in the gingham wardrobe. I can’t write a letter. Instead, I reach into the bag and fumble until I feel the flash-drive that Sophia used to copy the files.

I slip it into the palm of my hand. If I could throw it out of the car I would, but that’s not going to work. I’ll have to hide it where I am. It slips into the crack between the seats. It may never be found, but it’s possible that it might in years to come be discovered by some mechanic, and then someone’ll know. Someone’ll know exactly why what happened to us happened. Whether they find the bodies or not…

Pinhead pulls into a layby next to a spewing rubbish bin. “OK then, time for a chat,” he says, looking in his mirror.

Wesson turns around and glares at us over the back of the seat. “Let’s have the phone for starters,” she says. “What’ve you done with Trevor’s phone?”

“In the bag,” I say, nodding at Ned’s bag lying on the seat between us. The phone’s sticking out of the top.

“Pass it over,” says Pinhead.

Sophia reaches into the bag and hands the phone
over the seat. “Here,” she says quietly.

“And the money?” he says over his shoulder.

For a moment I think she’s going to pretend that we never saw the money. But she rummages in her pocket and sprinkles a confetti of mangled bank notes over the seats. “There,” she says.

“Thank you,” says Pinhead. His voice is crisp with fury. He rescues the money and jams it in his jacket pocket. “And while we’re about it, we’ll have the bag – hand it over and Maria can check through it.”

Sophia sighs and heaves the bag up on to the seat back. It’s got all the photocopied entries from the diary. I catch her eye and try to smile, but she doesn’t seem to see me.

I want to tell her that I’ve left a legacy, that the flash drive will survive us. That I’ve had a good idea from a book and actually carried it through. But she’s not looking.

Wesson searches the bag and pulls out all the photocopies. “This is – this is what?” She waves the papers under Pinhead’s nose.

Pinhead sits back, looking through the windscreen. “Give those here. Actually, I think you’d better search the girls, Maria. Check their
pockets. I’ll just take a look at the oil and the tyres.”

Something crosses his face; a flicker of irritation that suggests that he didn’t want her to know about the papers. And she looks worried, just for an instant. It’s the first time I’ve seen them anything other than united.

He climbs out of the car, opens the boot, takes out a small tool box and crouches down by the front wheel. Things clunk against the side of the car and I hear the sound of a pressure gauge. Somehow I didn’t have him down as the pressure-gauge type. I imagined he handed a car over to a garage or a hotel and got it back in perfect shape.

Perhaps he’s avoiding her.

Maybe he likes her less than she likes him. In
Gold Under the Aspidistra,
Dana Scour gives up everything for Denzil Johnson who turns out to be a complete scoundrel. The only difference is that I like Dana Scour.

Wesson clambers in with us. Anchored as we are by the cable ties, there’s no point in struggling. Although she looks as if she dislikes it as much as we do she enters into the squirmy business of searching us with her usual speed and efficiency. She starts with me, checking the pockets of my hoodie,
my skirt, inside my shoes, and comes up with some chips and a load of hairbands. She’s far too close, and she smells of aftershave, Pinhead’s aftershave. After she’s given up on me, she crawls across the back seat to Sophia, and I hold my breath as her hand rests briefly on the gap between the seats, but the flash drive must be nice and deep because she doesn’t find it. Sophia pouts her mouth as if she’s going to spit at Wesson; she doesn’t.

Through the window I watch Pinhead take the papers to the verge. He pulls a lighter from his pocket and lights the corner of the first sheet. He burns each one, corner to corner, then stamps the ashes into the grass. Then he climbs back into the car.

Poo.

“Nix, nada,” says Wesson, opening my door and going round to the front of the car.

“Thanks, darling.” Pinhead leans across and plants a cold peck on her cheek.

Wesson turns and kisses him back. Properly. I glance at Sophia. She’s turned to stare out of the window.

“Good,” he says, starting the engine, and the car glides out of the layby. “Swap over at the station?”
he says to Wesson.

“Yeah.” She looks at her mobile, and plugs it into the little stand by the radio. “You should make the 9.15. I’ll take the cargo to the warehouse and meet up with the boys. Are you sure you’ll be all right, Trevor?”

Pinhead stares straight ahead as we drive out of the woods and the view opens up towards the sea. A long way off, a squall scurries over the water, changing the silver to grey and back again.

“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Don’t you worry. I’ll sort it out at the other end – and I’ll meet you on Wednesday.

“What about
her
?” says Wesson.

Again, Pinhead stays quiet. Eventually, he says, “Don’t you worry – there’s nothing to worry about. Everything’s sorted.”