Restraint

Stephen Gallagher

Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

* * * *

Stephen Gallagher’s novella ‘Doctor Hood’ appears in Ellen Datlow ‘s new anthology The Dark and his ‘Jailbird For Jesus’ in Maxim Jakubowski’s Best British Mysteries. As well as two more stories underway for US anthologies plus The Memory Of Water, a two-hour drama for British TV. This year will see the appearance of Steve’s first short story collection— the mammoth Out Of His Mind, due from PS in the summer—though he may not even notice it because he’ll be hard at work on Eleventh Hour, a new series of 90-minute science thrillers for ITV.

* * * *

“Did you get a look at the driver who forced you off the road?”

The woman in uniform had pulled up a chair to put herself right alongside Holly’s hospital trolley, so that she could speak close and keep her voice low.

Holly made the slightest movement of her head, not even a shake, and was instantly sorry.

The policewoman spoke again.

“Your son thinks it was your husband’s car. Could that be right? We’ve called your house and there’s nobody there.”

Holly meant to speak, but it came out in an unrecognisable whisper.

“Where are the children?”

“Out in the waiting room. They’ve been checked over and neither of them’s hurt. Your neighbours said you left after some kind of an argument.”

“I’d like some water.”

“I’ll have to ask if that’s all right.”

Holly closed her eyes, and a moment later heard the sound of metal rings sliding as the policewoman stepped out of the cubicle. Only a curtain separated her from the Saturday night crowd out in Casualty, and a pretty lively crowd they sounded.

She lay with a thin blanket covering her. They’d brought her back here after the X-rays. It was a relief to hear that the children were unhurt, even though it was what she’d half-expected. That short trip down the embankment would have shaken them up, but it was only their stupid mother who’d neglected to put on her own seat belt after making sure of theirs.

That car. It had come out of nowhere. But if there was one thing that Holly knew for certain, it was that Frank couldn’t have been at the wheel.

Why? Because she and Lizzie had struggled to lift him into the boot of their own car, not forty-five minutes before. And assuming he hadn’t leaked too much and no-one had lifted the lid for a look inside, he had to be lying there still.

He certainly wouldn’t be going anywhere on his own.

The young policewoman was back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I had to stop an argument. I forgot to ask about your water.”

“Where’s the car?” Holly croaked.

“Still in the ditch,” the policewoman said. “The accident unit can get it towed away for you, but you’ll have to sort out the rest with your insurers.”

This was seductive. The linen smelled clean, and felt fresh. Holly was all but exhausted. She’d been lifted, laid down, tended to. It would be so easy to drift. The racket right outside was almost like a lullaby.

But her husband’s dead body was in the boot of her car, and the police were all over it even as she lay there.

“Can I get that drink now?” she said.

As soon as the policewoman was gone, Holly tried to rise up on her elbows. The effort it called for surprised her at first, but she made it on the second attempt.

She was in her underwear, her outer clothing piled on a chair that stood against the wall. She started to climb off the trolley and it hurt, but it wasn’t too bad; nothing grated and nothing refused to take her weight. Her head ached and she felt a great overall weariness, but there was no one part of her that screamed of special damage.

The floor was cold under her bare feet. She stood for a moment with her hand resting on the trolley, and then she straightened.

At least she could stand.

She tweaked open the side-curtain and put her face through the gap. In the next cubicle sat a young man on a chair, holding a spectacularly bloodstained dressing to the side of his head. He was in formal dress, with a carnation in his buttonhole and his tie all awry. He looked like the type who owned one suit and wore it for all his weddings, funerals, and court appearances.

“I wouldn’t call you a shitsucker,” Holly said.

He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

“The man you came in with just did,” she said.

He was up on his feet in an instant, and as he flung back the outer curtain she got a glimpse of the scene beyond it. The rest of the wedding party was out there, arguing with the staff and with each other. The bride in her gown could be seen in their midst. They rose in a wave as the bloodied guest was spotted hurtling toward them, and then the curtain fell back as if on the world’s most energetic Punch and Judy show.

That ought to keep her policewoman occupied for a while.

Holly could feel the adrenaline pumping now, flushing her of all weariness and pain, leaving her wired and edgy and ready to roll. She dressed as quickly as she could, and then instead of emerging into the open she started to make her way through one dividing curtain after another toward the end of the row. In the next occupied cubicle, an elderly West Indian man lay huddled under a red blanket. In the last sat a scared-looking woman with a small boy. They looked up apprehensively as she appeared out of nowhere.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Holly said. “Where’s the children’s waiting room?”

* * * *

It was around a corner and separated from the main area by a short passageway and a couple of vending machines. Under a mural of misshapen Disney characters stood a basket of wrecked toys, some coverless picture books, and some undersized chairs across which a sleeping form lay. She woke up Lizzie, and dragged Jack protesting out of the corner playhouse in which he’d made a den. He quietened suddenly when he looked at her face. She took them both by the hand and they followed a yellow line on the hospital floor toward the exit.

As they approached the automatic doors, Holly saw herself in the glass. But then the doors slid apart, and they sailed out into the night to look for a taxi.

In the presence of the driver they asked her no questions, and they gave her no trouble. Lizzie was twelve. She was dark, she was pretty, good at her lessons and no good at games. Jack was only six, a beefy little fair-haired Tonka truck of a boy.

The roads were quiet and the taxi got them to the place on the ring road in twenty minutes. It was a good half-mile on from where she’d expected it to be. The police were gone but the car was still there.

“Do you want me to wait?” the cab driver said, but Holly said no and paid him off.

She waited until the cab was out of sight before she descended to her vehicle.

The children hung back on the grass verge, by the deep earth-gouges that marked the spot where their car had left the carriageway. Spray-painted lines on the grass and on the tarmac showed where the accident unit had taken measurements. Down in the ditch, they’d left a big POLICE AWARE sticker on the back window of her Toyota.

The Toyota was old and it wasn’t in the best of shape, but it was a runner. Usually. Right now it was stuck nose-first in the bushes along with all the windblown litter at the bottom of the embankment.

The keys had been taken, but Holly groped around in the wheel arch where she kept a secret spare. As she crouched there, she glanced up at the children. They were watching her, two shapes etched against the yellow sodium mist that hung over the road.

Her fingertips found the little magnetic box right up at the top of the arch, deep in the crusted road dirt.

“Got them,” she said. “Come on.”

Lizzie was nervously eyeing the Toyota as she and Jack came scrambling down.

“What are we going to do?” she said. “It’s stuck here. We can’t go anywhere.”

“We don’t know that for certain yet,” Holly said, tearing off the police notice and then moving around to open the doors. She didn’t know what the procedure was, but they couldn’t have looked inside the boot. However quick the glance, Frank would have been hard to miss.

Jack climbed into the back, without an argument for once, and Lizzie got into the passenger seat.

Once she was behind the wheel, Holly checked herself in the rear-view mirror. At least when she’d hit her head on the roof, her face had been spared. Her vision had been blurred in the ambulance, hence the need for an X-ray, but that had mostly cleared up now.

Still, she looked a sight. She ran her fingers through to straighten her hair and then she rubbed at her reddened eyes, but of course that only made them worse.

“Here goes,” she said, and tried the engine.

It started on the second try. It was sluggish and it didn’t sound at all right, but it caught just the same.

There was no point in trying to reverse up the banking, but she tried it anyway. The wheels spun and the car went nowhere. So instead she put it into first gear and tried going forward, squeezing on through the bushes.

For a moment it looked as if this wasn’t going to work either, but with a jarring bump they lurched forward into the leaves. Switches bent and cracked as the Toyota forced its way through. She glanced in the mirror and saw Jack watching, fascinated, as foliage scraped and slid along the window only inches from his face. God alone knew what it was doing to her paintwork.

They came out onto what looked like a narrow limestone track, which was actually a soakaway at the bottom of the ditch. Staying in low gear, she began to follow its irregular line. After about a hundred yards she was able to transfer across to a dirt road, which led in turn to a lane. The lane took them under the ring road and then around and back onto it.

Once they were on hard tarmac again, Holly permitted herself to breathe. But not too much. There was the rest of the night still to be managed.

And then—perhaps even more of a challenge—the rest of their lives thereafter.

* * * *

She hadn’t seen it happen. She hadn’t even been in the house. She’d come home to find Frank lying awkwardly at the bottom of the stairs and Lizzie sitting with her head in her hands at the top of them. It might have passed for an accident, but for the letter-opener stuck in Frank’s neck.

He wasn’t supposed to be in the house. The restraining order was meant to take care of that. He wasn’t even supposed to come within a hundred yards of his daughter, regardless of where she might be.

So, technically speaking, by being in the boot of the car he was in breach of the order right now.

Holly’s first thought had been to pick up the phone and call the police. Her second had been that perhaps she could first wipe off the handle and put her own prints onto it and take all the blame. Then a sudden rage had risen within her. She’d looked down on his twisted body and felt no horror, no awe. No anguish or dismay. Just cheated. Frank had contrived to poison their existence while he was around; was there to be no end to it even with him gone?

She’d made the decision right then. They would not enter that process. If they moved quickly enough, they could put him right out of their lives and make a clean beginning. It would be a credible move; Frank could make an enemy in the time it took him to buy a newspaper, and any suspicion would be dispersed among the many. She’d looked at Lizzie and told her exactly what she had in mind.

We can’t, Lizzie had said.

So Holly had sat her down and for ten solid minutes had laid out the choices for her, making sure that she understood how much depended on the next few hours. What was done was done, she’d said to her, and there’s no changing it now. Don’t feel you’re to blame. It isn’t a matter of right or wrong. Your father made all the choices that caused this to happen.

It had worked. Kind of.

They couldn’t use Frank’s car. Being in the motor trade he’d use whatever vehicle was going spare on the lot, and of late he’d been favouring a red coupe that was hardly practical for the job in hand. So Holly had backed her Toyota into the garage on the side of the house, lined the boot with a plastic decorating sheet, and together they’d dragged Frank through the connecting door and manhandled his body into it. Handling him was less of a problem than Holly had expected. In the unpleasantness stakes, Frank dead was hard-pressed to match up to Frank in life.

Once he was safely stowed and covered in a couple of old towels, they’d driven out to collect Jack from school and then set off for the coast. Fish and chips on the pier, Jack. It’s a surprise treat. We just have to make a call somewhere, first. Somewhere quiet. You’ll stay in the car.

And then the accident, and the plan forced off-course.

But back on it, now.

* * * *

From the ring road, they got onto the motorway. The traffic was heavier here, and it slowed when the carriageway narrowed to a single lane. For a long time there was no visible reason for it, and then suddenly they came upon a surfacing crew laying down new tarmac under bright worklights; a colossal rolling tar factory that belched and stank like a dragon as it excreted a lane-wide ribbon of hot road, men with shovels and brushes working furiously in its wake, supervisors in hard hats chatting by their vehicles.

“Look, Jack,” Lizzie said. “Big-trucks.”

“Big, big trucks!” Jack said with awe, and turned in his seat to watch through the back window as they left the staged drama behind.

“You like the big trucks, don’t you, Jack?” Holly said as the lanes cleared and the Toyota picked up speed again, but Jack didn’t answer.

Holly couldn’t put a finger on it, but the Toyota didn’t feel quite right after the accident. She could only hope that it wouldn’t let them down, and that the outside of the car wasn’t messed up too much. A police stop was something that she didn’t dare risk.

The next time she checked on Jack, he was asleep. His mouth was open and his head was rocking with the rhythm of the car. He slept the way he did everything else . . . wholeheartedly, and with a hundred per cent commitment.

For a moment, Holly experienced a sensation in her heart that was like a power surge. This was her family. Everything that mattered to her was here, in this car.

And then she remembered that Frank was in the car with them, too. Good old Frank. Consistent as ever. Bringing a little touch of dread into every family outing.

They left the motorway, took a back road, and drove through a couple of darkened villages. There was a place that she had in mind. Out to the north and west was a great bay whose inland fields and marshes were almost unknown beyond the region. At low tide, saltings and sand-flats extended the land almost to the horizon. Much of what was now solid ground had once been part of the sea. In places the sea was claiming it back, pushing the coastline inland so that fields and even some roads were being lost forever. Hide something well enough in the part that was disappearing, and ...

Well, she’d have to hope. It was the best she could come up with.

Somewhere along here there was a causeway road that had once led to a farm, long-abandoned. People had trekked out to it for a picnic spot when there was something to see, but then the shell had become unsafe and it had all been pulled down. Now there was just rubble and the lines of a couple of walls, and that only visible at a low spring tide.

They crawled along, following the causeway with the Toyota’s dipped beams. It didn’t so much end as deteriorate steadily for the last couple of hundred yards. The concrete sections of the road had become tilted and skewed as the ground beneath them had given up any pretence of permanence. The sections had drifted, and in places they’d separated completely.

She had to stop the ear and get out to locate the cesspit. When she turned back, Lizzie was out of the car and standing beside it.

She was looking around and she said, “Have I been here before?”

“Once,” Holly said. “Before Jack was born. I brought you out here to show it to you, because it was a place my mother and father used to bring me. But it had all changed.”

Lizzie tried to speak, but then she just nodded. And then her control went altogether, and her body was suddenly convulsed with an air-sucking sob that was shocking both in its violence, and in its unexpectedness.

Holly moved to her quickly and put her arms around her, holding her tightly until the worst of it passed. There in the darkness, out on the causeway, with the moon rising and this thing of such enormity to be dealt with. It would be no easy night, and no easy ride from here. Holly was only just beginning to appreciate how hard her daughter’s journey would be.

“I can’t do this,” Lizzie whispered.

“Yes we can,” Holly told her.

They got him out of the car into the pool and he floated, just under the surface, a hand drifting up into the pale shaft of dirtwater light from the Toyota’s beams. The first stone sank him and then they added others, as many as they could lift. A sudden gout of bubbles gave them a fright. Holly was convinced that it caused her heart to stop beating for a moment.

They stood watching for a while to be sure of their work, and Holly sneaked a glance at Lizzie. Her face was in shadow and impossible to read.

“We should say a prayer,” Lizzie said.

“Say one in the car,” Holly said. “We need to get back and clean up the stairs.”

* * * *

Back on the motorway she watched for police cars, but she saw none. She did become aware of some lights that seemed to pace her for a while, but when she slowed a little the vehicle drew closer, and she was able to see that it lacked the telltale profile of roof bar and blue lights.

They had unmarked ones, of course. There was always that risk.

After a while, the headlamps in her mirror began to irritate her. She slowed even more to let the car pass, but it didn’t. So then she picked up speed and tried to leave it behind; two minutes later and as many miles on, it was still there.

It surely meant nothing, but now it was making her nervous. Lizzie seemed to pick up on this. She saw Holly’s frequent glances in the mirror and turned herself around in her seat, straining at her belt to look out of the back window.

“It’s the same car,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The one that pushed us off the road.”

“It can’t be,” Holly said.

Lizzie clearly wasn’t certain enough to argue the point.

“Well, it’s similar,” she said.

Holly increased her speed even further, up and over the limit, and the wheel began to vibrate in her hands as if the Toyota was beginning to shake itself apart. It couldn’t be the same car. She couldn’t imagine who’d want to follow her, or why.

It seemed to be working. They were leaving the other car behind, but then she saw something out of the corner of her eye. She looked down. The oil light was on, the brightest thing on the dash, and the one thing she knew about a car’s oil light was that on a screaming engine it signalled imminent disaster.

She slowed, but it didn’t go out. Other warning lights started to flicker on around it. So Holly quickly put the car out of gear and indicated to move off the motorway and onto the hard shoulder.

They coasted to a halt. The engine was already silent by the time they reached a stop. It had died somewhere during the deceleration, she couldn’t be sure when. As they sat there, the cooling engine block ticked and clanked like coins dropping into a bucket.

In the back, Jack was stirring.

“Fish and chips on the pier,” he said suddenly.

“I’m sorry, Jack,” Holly said. “It’s got too late. Another time.”

The other car was pulling in behind them, hazard lights flashing. Right then a big bus passed them at speed in the inside lane, and its slipstream rocked the Toyota on its wheels.

“Who is it, then?” Lizzie said, peering back as the other car came to a halt about fifty or sixty yards back.

“I don’t know,” Holly said. “Nobody.”

Jack said, “Is it daddy?”

Holly looked at Lizzie, and Lizzie looked at her. There was a risk that Jack might have picked up on something then, but all his attention was on the road behind them. The following driver was getting out. Just as the car was an anonymous shape behind the glare of its own headlights, the driver’s figure was a slip of shadow against the liquid stream of passing traffic.

“No, Jack,” Holly said, an inexplicable anxiety rising up within her. “It can’t be your daddy.” She glanced down at the dash. All of the warning lights were on now, but that meant nothing. Everything always came on when the engine stalled.

“It is,” Jack said.

Holly could tell him it wasn’t. But she couldn’t tell him why.

She heard Lizzie draw in a deep and shuddering breath, and let it out again. She found her daughter’s hand in the dark and squeezed it once.

Traffic flew by, and the driver kept on coming. He was silhouetted against the flashing hazard lights of his own vehicle, pulsing like an amber heart.

Maybe he was your regular Good Samaritan, coming to offer them a hand.

Or maybe he was one of any number of things, as yet unrecognised and uncatalogued.

“He’s been in the rain,” said Jack.

Forget the oil pressure. Forget the ruinous cost of a thrown piston or a seized-up engine. Suddenly it was far more important to get herself and the children away from this spot.

But all the Toyota’s power seemed to have gone. The engine turned over like an exhausted fighter trying to rise after a long count. She tried turning off the lights, and as their beams died the sound of the starter immediately improved.

It barked, it caught. All the warning lights on the dash went out, including the oil. She crashed the gears, checked her mirror once, and pulled out. Right now her only concern was to get moving again.

Jack was turned around in his seat, straining to see.

“Who is it, if it isn’t daddy?” he said.

“It’s nobody,” Holly said. “Face forward.”

“He’s running after us.”

“Jack,” she said sharply, “how many times have I got to tell you?”

She was expecting him to give her an argument. But something in her tone seemed to make him decide, and he complied without another word.

Nothing that she was supposed to hear, anyway.

“It was daddy,” she heard him mutter.

* * * *

She knew it wasn’t, but the thought was planted now and it spooked her. The sooner this was over with, the better. She wondered how they’d recall this night. Would it be etched in their minds so they’d relive it, moment by moment, or would it move to the distance of a remembered nightmare?

Jack must never know the truth. For him, the story would have to be that his daddy had gone away. He’d keep on looking forward to his father’s return, but in time he’d grow and the hope would fade and become part of the background noise of his life.

For Lizzie it was going to be a lot trickier. But at least she was safe from her father now. Whatever problems she might have in dealing with the deed and its memory, that was the thing to keep in mind.

Over a wooded hill, down into a valley, heading for home. Out there in the darkness were the lights of all those small towns that didn’t rate exits of their own, but were linked by the road that the motorway had replaced.

That following car was back in her mirror. Or perhaps it was some different car, it was impossible to say. All she could see was those anonymous lights. This time they were staying well back.

Here came the roadworks again. Same stretch, opposite direction. Again, one lane was coned off and the carriageway lights were out. A few moments after they’d crossed into this darker territory, the driver behind her switched on his beams. They were the pop-up kind. She saw them swivel into view like laser eyes.

Just like on Frank’s coupe.

Jack said, “Can we have the radio?”

“Not right now,” Holly said.

“It was working before.”

“I’m trying to concentrate.”

He was closing the distance between them. Holly knew she couldn’t go any faster.

She looked down and saw that her ignition lights were flickering and that, once again, her oil warning light was full on.

They passed what remained of a demolished bridge, with new concrete piers ready to take its wider replacement. Beyond the bridge site, just off the road, stood a mass of caravans and portable buildings. It was a construction village, a shantytown of churned up mud and giant machines. A temporary sliproad had been bulldozed into the embankment to give access to works traffic.

Holly waited until it was almost too late. Then she swerved across the lanes and into the sliproad.

Something thumped against the car, and in the mirror she saw one of the cones go tumbling in her wake. The car behind her was swerving to avoid it. It made him overshoot the turnoff, so he couldn’t follow her. Now he’d be stuck. The traffic wouldn’t allow him to stop and back up again. He’d be heading in the same direction for miles and miles.

Good Samaritan? Good riddance.

All the lights in this temporary settlement were on, yet nothing moved. Jack was craning, eagerly looking around the various site office buildings as they entered the main area. But Holly got in first.

“Yes, Jack,” she said. “They have big trucks here.”

* * * *

It was almost as bright as day, and completely deserted. The yard was floodlit and every portakabin office had its lights on. Holly could see through all the uncurtained windows that every one of the offices was empty.

She slowed, and stopped, and looked around.

A few vans, a couple of big diggers. Some concrete bridge sections waiting to be trucked out and assembled elsewhere. The site had the look of a frontier fort, obviously not intended to be here for ever; but it was hard to believe that the scars it would leave on the land could ever easily heal.

They would, of course. The big machines would simply put it all back when they’d finished. It wouldn’t quite be nature, but everybody would be going by too fast to notice.

She got out. There was the sound of a generator, banging away somewhere in the background.

“Hello?” she called out, and then glanced back at the car.

Jack and Lizzie were watching her through the side-windows. Pale children, out on the road past their bedtimes. They looked hollow-eyed and tired. Jack with his little round face, Lizzie like a stick-version of the teenager she’d soon be.

Holly gave them a brief smile, and then moved out to look for someone. She didn’t want to get too far from the car. She didn’t want to let them out of her sight.

She called again, and this time someone came out from behind one of the buildings.

He stood there, and she had to walk over to him. He looked like a toothless old shepherd in a flat cloth cap, knuckly hands hanging down by his sides. He could have been any age, from a well-preserved seventy down to a badly done-by fifty. Too old to be one of the road gang, he looked as if he’d been on road gangs all his life.

She said, “Is anyone in charge around here?”

“Never, love,” the man said. “They all do what they sodding well like.”

“Well... what do you do?”

“I’m just the brewman.”

Holly looked around her at some of the heavy plant that stood under the lights, looking as if it had all been airdropped in to remodel the face of Mars.

She said, “I’ve been having trouble with my car. Is there anyone who could have a look at it for me? I’ve got some money.”

“Andy’s the mechanic,” he said.

“Is he here?”

“He’s never here.”

“Is it worth me waiting for him? Can I do that?”

“You can do whatever you want,” and then added, as if it was his all-purpose charm to ward off evil, “I’m just the brewman.” And then he trudged off.

She went back to the car.

“I’m fed up of this,” Jack said.

“I can’t help it, Jack,” Holly said. “Try to understand.”

“No,” he said, barking it out like a little dog with all the passion and venom he could manage.

Rather than argue or get angry, Holly got out of the car again to watch for Andy the Mechanic.

The site wasn’t quite as deserted as it looked, but it took a while to become attuned to it and to pick up the signals; the sound of a door opening and closing somewhere, a glimpse of a figure passing from one building to another.

She paced a little. She looked toward the motorway. For something to do, she raised the Toyota’s bonnet and took a look at the engine in the vague hope that her car problems might have some blindingly obvious solution. But it looked like engines always did to her, grimy and complex and meaningless. There was a smell as if something had been burning, and when she held her hand out over the block she could feel the heat rising from it. She poked at a couple of the leads, to no effect other than to get her hands dirtier than they already were.

A voice called out, “Are you looking for someone?”

A man was walking across the open ground toward her. He was short, dark, powerfully built. He had at least six upper teeth missing on one side, but from the way that he grinned the loss didn’t seem to trouble him.

“Would you be Andy?” she said.

“I might.”

“Then I’m looking for you.”

She quickly explained her problem in case he started to get the wrong idea, and he moved her out of the way so that he could take a look. It didn’t take him long.

“Look at your fanbelt,” he said. “If your drawers were that slack, they’d be down around your ankles. When that starts to slip, your battery runs down and you run out of power.”

“Is it hard to fix?”

“If I said yes, you’d be more impressed,” he said, and it was then that he noticed the two children inside the car. They were staring out at him.

“Yours?” he said.

“Yes,” Holly said. “We’ve been to the seaside.”

He looked at her, and then he looked at the car.

And then he said, “You take the kids and wait in the brew hut while I have a go at this. Tell Diesel to make you a cup of tea.”

“Is Diesel the brewman’s name?”

“It’s what his tea tastes like, as well.”

The brew hut was the oldest-looking and most battered of the site buildings. It was up on blocks, and reached by three stairs. The floor sagged as they stepped inside. There were about a dozen folding card tables with chairs around them, and a sense of permanent grime everywhere; it was as if engine oil had been ground into the floor, rubbed into the walls, coated onto the windows.

The brewman was sitting by a plug-in radiator, reading a copy of The Sun. It wasn’t a cold night, but the radiator was turned up high and the air inside the hut was stifling. He looked up as they entered.

Holly said, “Andy told us to wait in here. Is that all right with you?”

“Whatever you like,” the brewman said. “I’m Matty.”

“He said you were called Diesel.”

Matty’s face fell, and he looked out of the window.

“The bastard,” he said, and he got up and stamped off.

Given his mood and the likely state of his crockery, Holly decided not to press him about the tea. She ushered the children onto grimy plastic seats that stood against the wall. On the wall itself was tacked a selection of yellowing newspaper cuttings, all of them showing the debris of spectacular motorway crashes.

Jack said, “It stinks in here.”

“Shh,” Holly said.

“It does.”

She couldn’t tell him it didn’t, because it did. And she couldn’t agree that it did in case Matty was listening. So she only said, “It won’t be for long.”

They waited. There was a clock on the wall, but it was wrong. Jack swung his feet, Lizzie stared at the floor. Outside, a massive engine began to rev up somewhere close behind the building, making their chairs vibrate.

Jack said, “I’m bored.”

“Play I-spy,” Holly suggested.

“I’m not playing with him,” Lizzie said. “He can’t spell.”

Holly said, with an unexpected tightness in her tone, “Then why don’t we all just sit here quietly?”

There was silence for a while and then Lizzie muttered, rebelliously, “It’s true. He can’t.”

And Jack agreed with her. “I’ve got a giant brain,” he said, “but I can’t spell.”

Holly covered her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether she was laughing or crying and the two children, equally uncertain, were watching her closely for clues.

This night would pass. It would somehow all be fine.

Keep thinking that, she told herself, and it might even come true.

“Mum...” Lizzie said.

Holly looked at her and saw the unease and the apprehension in her eyes. She might be sharp, but she was still only twelve years old.

“When this part’s over,” she said, “What then?”

She was choosing her words carefully because of Jack, but Holly knew what Lizzie was trying to say.

“We’ll carry on as normal,” she said.

“Can we do that?”

“We’ll have to,” Holly said.

There was a tap on the window. Andy was standing there outside, raising himself up on tiptoe so that he could look in, and he beckoned to her.

She went out, and they walked over to the car together. He told her he’d left the keys inside it.

“Best I can do,” he said. “I’ve tightened your fanbelt and cleaned off your plugs. They were blacker than Matty’s fingernails.”

“Thanks, Andy.”

“You’ve got a lot of oil down there. I don’t know where it’s coming from. You might need a new gasket.”

He showed her what he’d done and got her to feel the difference in the fan-belt, which she pretended to appreciate. She offered him twenty quid and he took it with no embarrassment. Then she went back for the children.

The brew hut door was open. Lizzie was alone inside.

Holly said, “Where’s Jack?”

Lizzie had slumped down into her coat as if it was a nest, hands in her pockets and legs outstretched, looking at the toes of her shoes as she clacked them together. She said, “He followed you outside.”

“I didn’t see him.”

“He wanted to look at the big trucks.”

Holly went out. Jack hadn’t gone over toward the car, or she’d have seen him. She stood in front of the brew hut and called out his name.

Nothing.

Lizzie was in the doorway behind her now.

“It’s not my fault,” she said defensively.

Holly went around by the side of the brew hut and found herself in an area lit by the most powerful of the overhead floodlights. Under the lights stood a few parked cars and a variety of dormant machines. She could hear the massive engine whose note had been shaking the brew hut’s foundations, and could tell that it was somewhere close.

She looked back and saw that Lizzie had followed her some of the way.

“You look around the buildings,” Holly said. “I’ll look here.”

She didn’t wait to see how Lizzie responded, but started to make her way through the machine yard. It was like a giant’s bazaar of heavy engineering, the night sun casting deep, dark shadows under the gear. These were machines for ripping up the land, and they had spikes and claws and teeth on a saurian scale. Encrusted with clay and battered by hard use, they stood like bombed-out tanks.

She hauled herself up and looked in the cab of a well-rusted bulldozer on tracks. Jack wasn’t in it, but by hanging on she could look out over the yard. Down the next row, a wagon was being inched up onto a flatbed trailer by some driver she couldn’t see. The tyres on the wagon were enormous, and the ramps were bending under its weight.

She looked all around and called Jack’s name, but she had little chance of being heard. The big engine roared and the great tonnage slowly rolled. In her mind’s eye she saw Jack crushed or falling or struggling to get free of some unexpected snare. She saw gears turning, teeth meshing, pulling him in.

She called his name again, louder, and then hopped down to continue the search. She stumbled a little when she landed. The ground here was nothing more than churned-up dirt into which stones had been dumped to give it some firmness. It was no playground.

“Jack!” she called, moving forward.

As she came around by the bulldozer onto a firmer stretch of concrete road, she saw him. She could see all the way to the perimeter fence, where he was climbing.

Climbing? What was he doing?

And then she understood, and started to run.

* * * *

It was a storm fence, about eight feet high. Jack was already over the top of it, and climbing down the other side. The fence rocked back and forth under his weight as the concrete posts shifted in their holes, but he clung to it like a bug; its close weave offered ideal purchase for his small feet and fingers.

Holly stumbled on the rough ground, but caught herself and went on. On the other side of the perimeter fence was an unlit country lane.

Out on the country lane stood the red coupe with the pop-up headlights.

“Hey,” she shouted. “Hey, Jack, no!”

He was descending with his face set in a look of utter concentration. Behind him, the car was making a low purring sound with its engine off but its electric fan sucking in the cool night air. The driver hadn’t stepped out, and she could barely see anything of him. She could only guess that he was watching her.

Holly reached the fence, looking through it and up at him. “Jack,” she said. “Come down, Jack, please. You can’t go over there. That’s not your daddy. Believe me. There’s no way it could be.”

But Jack didn’t look at her, and didn’t even show any sign of having heard. He was moving like a monkey. He reached down with his foot, found another space in the diamond pattern, and hooked his scuffed trainer into it before lowering the rest of his weight.

She could touch his fingers as they hooked through, right in front of her eyes; her breath through the wire could fall onto his face. “Jack,” she said, “no!”

But he wouldn’t look at her, and although he was only inches away she couldn’t reach him. She was powerless.

“Jack,” she said, “Look at me, please. Don’t do this. Don’t go to him.”

She made a move as if to try and catch his hands through the wire, but it was pointless. She couldn’t hold him if she caught him. All she could do was risk hurting him.

“Lizzie’s looking for you as well,” she pleaded. “Oh, Jack...”

He jumped, and hit the dirt on the far side with a thump. Holly made a leap at the wire and felt the entire fence lean before her, but she didn’t have his agility and couldn’t begin to climb the way that he had.

He was running for the car, now, and the car’s passenger door was opening to receive him.

Holly was screaming, although she didn’t immediately realise it. The car door slammed and its laser eyes opened. The engine started, and its nose swung around as it began to turn in the narrow lane.

Her hands were up at the sides of her head. She’d heard of people tearing at their hair, but she’d always thought it was just an expression. She looked around wildly.

Then she started to run along the inside of the fence, ahead of the turning car.

The country lane ran close on the other side. If there was a gap anywhere, she’d get through it. The car wouldn’t pass her. No way was she going to let that happen.

Here was a gate. It was a back way into the site, little-used. A big double gate, wide enough for a lorry but chained and padlocked in the middle. There was enough play in the chain to make a gap of a foot or so.

It was a squeeze, but not an impossible one. She came out on the other side and all that she could see were the twin lights, the laser eyes of the beast that she had to impede.

She put on a burst and dived into its way, sliding to a halt in the middle of the lane and raising both of her hands. When it hit her, she felt nothing other than her own sudden acceleration; no impact, no pain, just the instantaneous switch from rest into motion as her legs were knocked from under her and she was spun down the side of the car.

Afterwards she’d never know whether she really saw it or only imagined the memory, but Holly went down hard in the wake of the moving car with a mental picture of her son’s blank face only inches away on the other side of the glass.

She lay there.

She couldn’t move. She could hear that the car had stopped and she wanted to lift her head to look, but nothing happened. Oh God, she was thinking, I’m paralysed. But then when she made an enormous effort, her hand came up and braced itself against the ground. As she was doing it, she heard a car door opening.

She wasn’t paralysed, but she’d no strength. When she tried to push down with her hand to raise herself, her arm trembled and nothing happened.

Someone was walking up behind her.

Before she could muster the energy to turn and look, strong fingers gripped the back of her head and thrust her face down into the mud. In an instant, she was blinded and choking.

She found her strength now, all right, but it did her no good as a sudden knee in her back pinned her further to the ground. She struggled and flapped like a fish, but her face stayed under. The blood roared in her ears and lights exploded before her eyes.

Then in an instant, the pressure was off.

That first deep breath nearly drowned her on the spot, as she sucked in all the mud that had filled up her mouth. She retched and coughed, blowing it out of her nostrils and heaving up what she’d both swallowed and inhaled.

She felt a lighter touch on her shoulder and lashed out, only to hear a cry from Lizzie. She was there when Holly’s vision cleared, keeping back and holding her arm where she’d been struck.

“I’m sorry, mum,” she said.

Holly stared dumbly for a moment before an understanding started to form. Lizzie was backing toward the waiting car.

“No, Lizzie!” she said. She tried to rise, but one of her legs wouldn’t support her.

“I know how you want me to feel about it, but I can’t. I wish I could. I’m sorry. It’s never going to be right after tonight, whatever we do. Ever.”

Holly made another massive effort and this time made it up and onto her feet, putting all of her weight onto the uninjured leg.

“Wait,” she managed.

Lizzie had reached the car.

“I’m the one that he wants,” she said. “But he’ll take Jack if I don’t go with him.”

The passenger door popped open about an inch.

“I’m sorry,” she said again, and she reached out and opened it all the way.

Holly wasn’t close enough to see how it worked, but Jack popped out of the vehicle as if propelled on a spring.

He landed on both feet, and Lizzie quickly slipped around behind him and into the car.

The door closed like the door on a well-fitting safe, and the car’s engine started to rev. It was all as swift and as decisive as that.

Holly started toward them, half-hopping, half-limping, but the car was already moving off and starting to pick up speed.

“Frank!” she shouted. “You bastard! Give her back!” and at the sound of her voice, Jack seemed to wake as if from a daze.

He looked about, as if suddenly remembering something, and spotted those red tail lights receding off into the darkness.

He gave a strangled cry.

“Dad!” he called out, and started to run down the lane after the car, slapping down his feet so hard that the ground almost shook.

Holly hadn’t yet reached him, and her cries couldn’t stop him. Neither of them had any chance of catching the car. But both of them tried.

She caught up with him a full ten minutes later, still standing on the dark spot where his breath and his hopes had finally given out.

“He forgot me!” he wailed. Holly dropped to her knees and pulled him to her.

For once, he let her hold him.