Saving Sophia (9 page)

Tarmac

“We need to feed something under the back seat, poke her with it. That’ll attract her attention. She stops the car; we run. In
The Dark is a Lonely Place,
Simon Strange uses a ship’s flare to distract the helicopter pilot for long enough to jump out.”

“He jumps – from a helicopter?” says Sophia.

“He’s a very experienced sky diver,” I reply.

“But we’re not in a helicopter, we’re in a speeding four-by-four – skydiving wouldn’t really help us,” says Sophia. “And we don’t have a flare.”

“Whatever,” I say. “It worked for him.”

Sophia falls silent. I can practically hear her thoughts squeezing out through her ears.

The dog rolls over so that Sophia can scratch his tummy. “Pinhead really will kill me if I keep this going much longer,” she says. Her voice sounds worried.

“Would he actually?” I ask.

She looks across at me. “He wouldn’t hesitate – honestly.”

“But if we went back to Bream right now – we wouldn’t really have caused any problems – would we? We could do that, you know – it might be the best thing.”

“Lottie, he’s nasty – he really is, I know I said he killed someone, well it might have been more than one – his brother went missing a year or so ago…”

“His brother?” I ask, pushing the dog’s nose out of my face.

“Yes – he used to have a brother, they fell out and … the brother disappeared.”

“How d’you mean – disappeared?” I say.

“He vanished. Pinhead just stopped talking about him – just as if he never existed. I think he might be dead.”

“How – dead?” I ask.

“Under the motorway extension in West London, dead.”

I feel as if another of those buckets of icy water has been emptied over my head. “Wearing a concrete overcoat?”

Sophia nods.

Mary Thirsk loses her husband to a concrete overcoat in the first chapter of
Death by Technology
. That’s why she ends up pursuing the Mexican gun runners all the way to Berlin.

I do not want to go the same way, so I look around the back of the car for anything that might possibly help.

Sophia pulls herself out from under the dog and passes me a roll of green garden wire. “Found this in Ned’s bag. Any good?”

“Brilliant.” Feeling terrified, but not wanting to show it, I unroll the wire and poke it through the underneath of the back seat. I can just see Wesson’s elbow. “Are you ready if I manage to get her to stop the car?”

Sophia nods.

I could try sticking it through Wesson’s seat but there’s always the chance that the wire’ll get
hooked up in the springs, so instead, I jab her elbow. Nothing happens the first time, so I jab it again and pull the wire back.

“Ow!” yelps Wesson, and rubs her elbow, but keeps driving.

I wait about half a minute and jab again.

“OW!” and this time she pulls the car violently to the side and slows down.

“Now!” I hiss at Sophia, who pulls the bootrelease catch and disappears from sight. As the car almost stops, I jump too, taking the wire with me.

THUNK.

I hit tarmac and it hurts, but I realise there’s only a split second before the car comes to a stop and Wesson gets out.

I scramble to my knees, but the dog’s right with me, standing barking on the tarmac.

“Stay! Good dog, stay dog,” I yell, leaping the crash barrier and stumbling down the embankment at the side of the road into a filthy stream. I look back to see if the dog comes too, but miraculously he doesn’t. While I’m still staring, Sophia pushes my head down until I’m an inch from the fetid water and we lurk in a ditch with two beer cans and a dead badger.

The dog stands at the top and barks.

CLUNK.
The door? Or the boot?

“Stupid animal, come on, back in.” Wesson’s voice.

She takes a minute to shut the boot.

CLUNK.

I hear Sophia’s feet splashing behind me but I daren’t look up to see if Wesson’s worked out that there’s a connection between the boot opening and being poked in the elbow.

We creep into a large drain that runs under the road and make silent whoops, slapping each other on the back and kicking the wet leaves into the air before realising that we never actually heard the engine start.

Which way's north?

We stay down there for hours. Well, not hours, probably about twenty minutes, waiting for Wesson to find us. I know that if she appears all we'll be able to do is run in the opposite direction.

I'm thinking that although we didn't see one in the car, Wesson's probably got a gun.

She's probably going to shoot us, and leave us here in this drainage ditch.

I'm braced to see her at any moment.

A robin lands at the end of the tunnel, examines us, and takes off again.

A few minutes later he reappears, hops further
into the tunnel, takes a microscopic bug and hops off.

Perhaps Wesson's car's really quiet. Perhaps we wouldn't hear it start from here.

I realise that my heart has slowed to normal, that I've stopped sweating, that I'm breathing again, and that I've stopped feeling like I'm about to be murdered.

Murdered? I think about Pinhead leaning back against the kitchen counter and not drinking my dad's gooseberry champagne. He can't possibly actually be a murderer? Can he?

Sophia rustles behind me.

I glance down. She's examining the contents of Ned's bag again. “I just thought I'd check and see if Ned had a map or anything.”

“Did he?”

She shakes her head. “Would this help?” she says, handing me the SAS survival guide.

I shrug. “He didn't leave the watch-compass thing by any chance?”

“He had it on his wrist, I saw him with it. But he left us the snails.” She holds up the clear plastic box. The shapes of the two snails are quite clear inside.

“That's fantastic. Now we've got four mouths to feed, unless we let them go.”

“We can't do that, can we?” says Sophia, clicking the lid off the box. “They're Ned's pets.”

“They're also a food source,” I say, flicking through the SAS guide, my eyes resting on the chapter title:
Get food where you can find it.
“We could eat them.”

“You don't mean that,” says Sophia. “Do you?”

I peer at Ned's snails; they have little grey antennae that seem to peer back. The fact that the snails are Ned's makes me want to eat them, but they look too curious and innocent, and anyway the only time we ate snails was with Dad and it was like eating elastic bands. “Maybe not. Look, this book's got a page about using the sun and moss on trees to find your direction. It says:
Moss grows on the north side of trees
.” I look around us in the tunnel. Everything's mossy, so everything in here is north.

“In
Long Afternoon of Death
there's a man who builds a compass out of a magnet and some iron filings.”

“Have you got either?” says Sophia.

“I, um – no,” I say.

She lets out a long sigh. “Thought not. Anyway, we can't stay here for ever, Lottie.”

I try to think of a story with any other hints on direction-finding. I can't. There aren't any. I wonder how Irene made it across Scotland.

“Ok, we'll just have to read road signs.”

Hours later, long after we've finished our water supplies, Sophia says: “I loved doing these sorts of things with my mum.”

“Getting lost in the West Country?”

“No – adventures, out in the wild, no mobile phone, no car – just us and the elements.” We clamber over a gate. “We trekked across Siberia one summer.”

“Did you?” I ask. I thought Siberia was largely frozen, but I don't want to show my ignorance, so I say nothing.

“And we spent a few weeks in the Australian outback. Mum killed a snake and then we ate it.”

“Fun,” I say, surprised that Dad's never fed us snake and leading the way past some road works. A concrete lorry's dumping a load of soft concrete into a large hole.

“Sophia,” I say. “When Pinhead's brother
disappeared, were they building the motorway? Only I thought it was built in the 1970s?”

There's a long silence, broken by distant dog barking. “Yes,” she says quietly. “Or it might have been the new runway at Stansted airport.”

“Oh,” I say.

Seagulls

By the next day, we’ve stopped walking in straight lines. Instead we meander over open spaces peering into bins, searching behind food shops.

We’re no better than seagulls.

In a children’s playground, we find most of an abandoned picnic and a soggy bag of face paints.

Sophia crams the remains of a packet of salty biscuits into her mouth and hands me a net bag of tiny cheeses. I suck on a waxed cheese. I play around with it on my tongue. I make it last at least fifteen seconds.

Afterwards, I feel sick.

As we walk along footpaths, a haze appears before us. The large fields break down into smaller fields, and the lanes widen. Houses appear on the horizon, along with sheds, garages, trimmed hedges.

It’s a town. Maybe a city, maybe it’s Bristol, but as we haven’t walked down a main road there’s no way of telling.

I find myself looking for phone boxes. Ned’s bag has the two fifty pence pieces that Dad gave us. I hope it’s enough to make a phone call.

I imagine Mum and Dad sitting by the phone, waiting, the house quiet and empty without Ned and me yelling at each other, and I feel guilty.

At last, we round a corner behind a pub and I see a phone box.

But it doesn’t take coins.

Nor does the next one, and the one after that’s been turned into a book swap.

It is Bristol. But we must be miles out of the centre, because nothing looks like a city, it all
looks like suburbs. We sit on a damp bench, shivering. I’m very hungry, very tired, and desperate for a bath, even in our bathroom where most of the time you have to flush the loo with a bucket. I expect Sophia feels the same. If I were able, I’d definitely ask Mum to come and get us, and risk being killed by Pinhead. It occurs to my sugar-starved brain that none of the heroes in Irene’s books get hungry, and they don’t seem to need sleep, either.

Although: “
In Footsteps to Timbuktu,
Anthea Sweetling is dying in the desert, and she does walk miles before begging food from the old woman in the village wash house,” I say. “Hopefully we’ll find something like that here somewhere.”

Sophia sighs. “Do they have wash houses in Bristol?”

The back of my neck prickles first, and then my face as the blush spreads like ink across my skin. “Sorry,” I mutter, mostly to myself.

We stumble on, cutting across the backs of gardens, scrambling through a newly scraped house plot, and emerging into an estate of yellow pretend-stone houses. Before long it becomes difficult to
work out which way we’ve come from and which way we’re going.

“But we’ve already walked down this road,” I say, staring at a line of identical white plastic front doors. “Look, I’m sure we’ve passed that post box twice.”

I sink down next to the post box. It’s getting dark, and I watch as two crows fly to roost on a telephone line. Did Irene do this? Collapse on the edge of civilisation and watch birds going to sleep? Or did she tighten her brogues and keep marching?

A cat crosses the road.

I can’t help thinking that Irene was tougher than I am.

I glance up the street, as Sophia sits down next to me. No sign of anyone else. Lights go on in the houses, a telly booms behind me.

The light fades really quickly and a street lamp comes on. It’s lonelier here than it is in the middle of nowhere.

I’m feeling hungry and silly.

I thought my stories would provide answers – but they didn’t. Not one of my heroes could give me realistic solutions and Sophia’s obviously
unimpressed. The way she sighed when she asked if there were wash houses in Bristol!

Stupid.

Stupid stupid stupid.

I must look like such an idiot. But here’s the most stupid thing of all: that I promised to help Sophia in the first place. That was
really
dim. And now we’re here, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to eat.

I scratch my back against the post box and shift my weight on the tarmac. I could fall asleep here. I think Sophia already has.

A fine drizzle starts to fall and I stick out my tongue hoping to catch a mouthful.

There’s also the small matter of Pinhead and Wesson: a “murderer” and a mad woman with a dog, and probably a gun. When I think of it, no matter whether or not Pinhead’s a murderer, Wesson’s bound to have a gun. She’s that kind of woman. She probably does the actual killing, with a tiny silver revolver she keeps in her iPod, before getting some thug to drop the victim into the concrete. Presumably, she doesn’t even need a gun, she can just tie the victim’s hands behind their back and
shove them into the hole so that they slowly drown.

I imagine dropping into waist-deep wet concrete and adrenaline kicks in, waking me up completely and bringing on a dose of panicky breathing.

I should have stayed in the castle with Ned. We should have stayed together in fact, we should have all stayed in the castle, all met the Chief Constable, explained it all to Miss Sackbutt. This was never going to work. It wasn’t the fact that there were three of us, just that the whole thing’s faulty. We’ve got no proper plan, no proper proof. We’ve got a load of stories, some possible, some incredible. And I no longer know what to believe.

They all come from Sophia.

What do I know of her? Really, truthfully?

I can see she hasn’t spoken to her mum in months. She gets emotional about that, so it must be true, and that’s wrong. No one should be kept from their mother. I know that Wesson’s after her, but then, Wesson would be after her whatever the background story was. All that stuff about dead people? It could be true. It could be rubbish. But then again – it might not be. A tiny part of me
trembles with excitement; the rest trembles with fear. And I think of Irene again.

Just then, it starts to rain in earnest.