Chapter 12
I had no idea how long I was out for. I came round, feeling sick, with my face pressed half into the planked floor of the shed and half into a pair of jeans, which turned out to be Sally’s leg. We were crumpled together in one corner of the wooden building and from outside I could hear the sound of the wind whipping the waves into ferocity.
It was dark inside the shed, even darker than it had been before. My head was thumping and it felt as though my brain had come loose inside my skull as I tried to work out whether the darkness was meteorological, nightfall or because I’d lost my sight. I had to lie very still for a moment before I could even feel my arms and legs through the nausea, and every time I tried to move anything the sickness would flood over me and force me back to immobility.
An extra loud whump! as a gust of wind caught the planks, shaking the shed, gave me the imperative to finally move. Grabbing Sally, the wall, my own knees and anything else that was firm enough to hold onto, I inched my way up to standing, even though I had to bend forward and breathe very carefully in order not to throw up on the way. Then I crept my way along the side of the shed, hand over hand, until I reached the door, which I gave a hopeful shove, but it didn’t so much as rattle. I didn’t know what had been done to it, but it was completely rigid. Outside, the sea sounded close and angry, and from the roof there was a constant plop of things falling onto it.
With a lot of blinking, I managed to force my eyes to focus. Sally was lying, unconscious on the floor, arms flung above her head as though she’d been dragged there by her wrists. She still looked pale, her red hair was tangled up around her face and I had to suppress the urge to give her a hearty kick for getting me involved in all this.
The men would be long gone. Taking, as threatened, the van and the SUV. The sea sounded as though it were right outside the door, the constant gusts of wet, salty air that billowed through between the planks were also a bit of a giveaway and it sounded as though the promised storm had arrived. I looked around for anything I could use, but the shed was empty, apart from the recumbent Sally and me.
She was making little groaning noises now and, as I watched, her eyes flickered open. ‘Where am I?’ she managed between lips that looked cracked.
‘You tell me,’ I said, despite wanting to invoke every kind of wrath from any passing deity on her head. ‘You’re the expert.’
‘Oh God.’ She gave a little moan and closed her eyes again.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I said, as another sharp shower of gravel hit the roof. ‘Before everything comes down on top of us.’
Sally groaned again. ‘There’s no point,’ she breathed. She looked as though the nausea was catching up with her now. ‘I know where we are. We’re on Wanscombe Tip. Most of the cliff came down last winter and it’s too unstable now for anyone to go near.’
‘That “anyone” excludes us, of course,’ I said tartly. I wanted to make a plan, wanted to escape, get out of here and, if necessary, float myself to safety on Sally’s corpse, but point-scoring seemed to be all I could manage. ‘Why the hell did you agree to meet those two here, if you knew it was unsafe?’
Sally struggled to sit up. ‘They’ve been bringing stuff ashore in the bay. You can get across the beach at low tide, so they told me to come here.’
‘You could have just driven us to the nearest police station!’ I shouted, but it made my head bang. ‘Turned yourself in, told them everything and then we wouldn’t be trapped in a shed!’
Sally had gone whiter than pale now. Her skin was almost transparent. ‘But then I’d go to prison,’ she whispered.
‘Well, yes, but you’d be alive! As would I, because that seems to be a decidedly temporary state at the moment.’ I hit the door with my elbow. It still refused to budge. ‘Sally, that cliff sounds as though it’s going to come down on our heads in a minute. Ivo is out there and he has no idea where we are. They’ll be looking for him, and we have to get out of here!’
‘But then what?’ Her eyes were wide, as though her lids had been stapled to the back of her head. ‘The tide’s in so we can’t go across the beach. Half the cliff is coming down, and the other half is unstable, there’s nowhere for us to go.’
Another, and more sustained, scuffle and scatter at the roof and walls made me screw one eye to a gap in the planking. Rain was a curtain now, belting in with the force of the English Channel behind it, and a large amount of Solent for good measure. The sea roared.
‘At least we’re dry in here,’ Sally said, with an attempt at looking on a bright side that wasn’t visible with a telescope.
‘Dry and about a millimetre thick, if that lot comes down.’ I jerked away from my little hole in the wood and looked up. ‘Out there we at least stand a chance of not being flattened, even if it does mean we drown. Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.’
I kicked ineffectually at some of the lower planks, but they were firmly fixed and not as prone to splitting as I’d hoped, and the kicking made my ears whine and my head thump. ‘We need something to use.’
‘There’s nothing in here.’
She was right. The hut was just four wooden walls and a flat plywood roof, which wasn’t offering a lot of protection against the elements and was about to offer even less to thirty thousand tonnes of loose earth and cliff face. Whoever had forecast the landslip was right, it was going to fall. It only needed a bit more rain, some powerful waves or the alluded to ‘men with explosives’ and we’d be the filling in a clay and boulder sandwich.
‘Come on. Maybe if we both?—’
Sally was searching her pockets. ‘They’ve emptied my pockets. I’ve usually got a screwdriver.’
I stared at her. ‘An absent screwdriver isn’t much help, is it?’
‘I was only saying.’
I looked at the planking. ‘What would a squirrel do?’ I mused, absently.
‘Chew their way out,’ Sally responded, so quickly that I knew she’d been thinking of the squirrels too. ‘And I don’t really think we’ve got the right teeth.’
‘We’re just going to have to try kicking then.’
Cautiously, because, presumably, her head was banging as much as mine, she kicked in a desultory way at the wooden walls. I joined her, trying to co-ordinate our kicks to get enough force to split one of the planks. We were both holding our heads and moaning with the effort and must have looked like a couple of people with hangovers trying to get out of a cupboard.
‘That’s it. This one’s going.’ Our joint attempts on one of the planks were causing a tiny crack to appear. It was feeble and might even have been more of a fault in the wood than our kicking, but the renewed sounds of soil bouncing off the shed roof gave us impetus and we channelled all our ferocity into more strenuous attacks on the wall. The wood fractured. The whole plank split along its length and we booted it in ferocious desperation until it dissolved into splinters and shards, leaving a gap about a metre long and twenty-five centimetres wide. We looked at it.
‘I don’t know if I…’ Sally began, and then we heard the rumbling from somewhere above. Some, by the sound of it, quite large rocks hit the roof, and both Sally and I suddenly discovered that we were a lot more agile and a lot skinnier than we thought, squeezing ourselves out through the single plank gap like two miners escaping a disaster.
Hand in hand we dragged one another clear as part of the cliff overhang that had loomed threateningly over the shed stopped looming and came hurtling down in a glossy wet mess, the surface broken with large trees and most of a field. It hit the shed as Sally and I, emitting screams, hurtled a little way further down what had been that white-flowered stretch of grass and was now a sodden, slippery patch of land where the sea was hurling huge drifts of foam and spray as the tide advanced over it.
The wind was fierce, the rain was intense and the sea came at us from the remaining direction. We were instantly soaked, but at least we were alive. For now. There was still an enormous imposition of cliff above us, fraying its edges a little more with every gust, and if it all came down then it would fill the entire space and we’d have no option but to jump into a sea that was boiling and whirling just below. We were either going to be flattened or drowned, with a small possibility that we’d be dashed to death against rocks.
I looked at Sally. Her hair was roped against her head, her shirt was stuck to her skin and her jeans flapped dismally in the wind. I suspected that I didn’t look any better.
‘I’m sorry!’ She had to shout it above the noise of the wind and the waves. ‘This is all my fault!’
‘You’re bloody right there!’ I shouted back. A particularly large wave broke nearby and threw spray over us both in a breath-holding chilly shower that made us gasp and grab at each other.
‘I just wanted to raise enough money to keep us afloat,’ she went on. ‘To pay the wages and make sure we could feed the squirrels in the rehab. For petrol and night shifts and – all that.’ Her voice petered out. Or maybe she carried on talking and I couldn’t hear her over the noise of the storm and the blood lust that was making me want to push her into the water right now.
‘You started moving drugs to pay for the squirrels?’ No, drowning was too good for her. I wanted to shove her face down in the gleaming wet earth of the landslip that stretched like a glossy chestnut-coated beast beside us. ‘Do you know how stupid that was?’
We looked at one another again, both of us soaked, barely able to stand upright for the force of the wind, with a mobile landmass at our back and an unruly tide in front of us.
‘I’m beginning to get the idea, yes.’
Lightning flickered out to sea, highlighting the navy black of the clouds. More rain was coming and the instability of the cliffs wasn’t going to stand another downpour.
‘Well, we’re not dead yet,’ I said firmly.
‘But what do we do?’
I looked up again. The new landslide was still moving, added to by continual slithers of turf and bits of fencing evidently coming down from the erstwhile cliff edge. The hut was mostly gone, only jutting fragments of roofing material showed where it had been buried under the clay. To either side of it lay the sea. The Tip was well named, it stuck like a boxer’s battered nose into the water, and there was no way out except up its unstable face.
‘We’ll have to climb.’
Sally stared at me. ‘We can’t. It’s clay. When it’s wet and moving it’s like trying to climb up ice.’
I gave her an evil look. ‘What do you suggest then, Pablo Escobar? Building a raft out of the remains of the shack, like the Kon-Tiki?’
She looked at me blankly. Another jag of lightning flicked an angry yellow tongue over the sea. It looked as though we could also add electrocution to the ways we were going to die, just in case the list needed elongating.
‘Oh shit,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to try.’
Sally watched me approach the nearest part of the landslide where it was dusted with small trees and random rocks. The wind howled at me, coming around the cliffs with enough force to make me stagger, and the constant wash of spray from the waves dug at the Earth’s surface hard enough to leave pockmarks. The face wasn’t sheer, it was loose, clay and soil, wood and greenery all mixed together. Everything drooped, as saggy and tumbled as wet washing straight from the machine.
Sally gave a little moan as I approached the nearest part of the slip and tried to climb up. It looked as though it ought to be no more effort than walking up a steep path, albeit a steep path that kept moving and shifting and was muddier than the average path, but I hadn’t accounted for how loose the surface was. I got a grip on a large rock and tried to pull myself up, but sank immediately into the scree and mud until I was fighting to get my legs clear enough just to gain a foothold. Meanwhile, loose stones kept hurtling down and only missing me because they were bouncing off the rock I was grasping, and being deflected.
I’d only just come around from being punched in the head, I was probably concussed, I was certainly frozen to the marrow and soaked right through my clothes and I’d skipped breakfast to get an early start to meet Sally. It all meant I had to give up the climb less than my own body length up the cliff. As it was, Sally had to come and grab my legs to help extricate them from the slimy, earthen mess so that I could drop back down to the ground and lie, exhausted and covered in mud, like a competitor in a particularly gruelling cross-country race.
We crouched together. The only plus side of the sliding cliff face was that it formed a barrier between us and the wind, and a measure of shelter from the rain and spray, as long as we kept an eye above us for the imminent detachment of the huge overhang.
‘If we can wait until the tide drops…?’ I asked hopefully. ‘We can walk off the beach?’
Sally jerked her head, coils of hair swinging, at the threatening sight of the continuous roll of earth and rock from above. ‘That won’t last out until the tide turns, never mind until it’s shallow enough for us to swim round the headland,’ she said, depression in her every word. ‘Besides, the Tip’s only passable at really low tide; there’s gulleys and rips as soon as it starts coming back in. It’s not even fully in yet.’ She stared at the booming, foaming water, only a few metres from where we crouched. ‘And the Tip has been slipping for months. This whole part of the island is a no-go area.’
‘Aren’t you a cheery soul,’ I muttered, sitting down hard again on the urge to push her into the sea.
‘That’s why I took you over the cliff to the unit. I was checking on the state of the tide, because I was meeting the guys here after you’d gone, to pick up another consignment.’
‘Only they found out about us before that,’ I added, putting my head onto my knees to try to stop it aching. ‘Probably heard from whoever was supposed to receive the drugs that they never arrived and then put it together with you telling them about the squirrel return.’ All my energy was gone. Right now, I hoped hypothermia would get me before the cliff or the sea, because I’d heard it was a quiet way to go. I hoped Sally boiled in some randomly spilled oil. ‘You absolute melt, Sally.’
‘I know, I know.’ She huddled next to me. ‘Drugs. Just say no,’ she added, dismally and began to cry.
Everything in me wanted to abandon all hope and join her. A few tussocks of grass bowled down past us, scuttering to a halt at our feet. When I looked up, there was an ominous crack across the cliff face that towered above this little scrap of land and, given the wind, the rain and the high tide, it probably wouldn’t be long before it came down and engulfed everything.
‘Come on.’ I hauled myself to my feet, pulling the still-weeping Sally with me. ‘We can at least go out fighting.’
Solemn as a suicide pact, we faced the least ominous end of the land slide and began trying to climb. It went about as well as my previous attempt, but being a few metres off the ground meant that we were at least not swept into the sea or pulverised, when the inevitable happened and the cliff overhang came barrelling down to obliterate the patch we’d been sitting on previously. It did, however, mean that the part of the slip we’d been hanging onto was swept further towards the sea as it came, and Sally and I found ourselves clinging to a few random sods while the sea licked at us like an affectionate dog.
We were plunged up to our waists in loose soil, fighting the sea and the land. I didn’t know about Sally, but my head was still banging in a routine that competed with the slamming of the waves against the shore.
But sheer bloody-minded determination not to let my body sink without trace kept me going. The thought of Ivo not knowing, and the need to alert him to what was going on; a desperate, driving urge to get to him before Mr Polite and Mr Thug; the fear that something may already have happened to him – it all kept me going in a blindly instinctive clamber and drag through the mud slide.
I reached a hand back, grey to the shoulder and what few nails I’d had now mere lines of black against my fingertips. We’d made about ten metres, but were now trapped in a kind of quicksand of mud, unable to move any further forward. The ground sucked like treacle and slid like butter. We were exhausted, and the best we could hope now was that we’d get bopped on the head by a falling boulder and it would be over quickly.
Sally found my hand and gripped it. I closed my eyes.
Rocks tumbled. Soil moved in a cascade alongside me and there was a sudden sensation of hands. Hands reaching across me. For a second I thought I was having a near death experience, and that the Other Side was going to involve a lot more groping than I’d been led to believe. Then I opened my eyes.
‘Who the fucking hell are you?’