Maybe Detective Sergeant Davis was off to work? With any luck the bastard would be on nightshift and not back till tomorrow morning.
Unless itwasn’thim.
What if someone else lived in the caravan too? Maybe they were the one who’d driven off, and Davis was lurking nearby?
Or maybe this was all a test and he’d just driven down theroad a bit, parked up, and right now he was hurrying back on foot to see if she’d try to escape?
Or maybe...
A big lardy bluebottle settled on her arm, feasting on the crust of dirt and sweat.
Maybe it didn’t fucking matter, because the bastard was going to kill her anyway. And would she rather be trapped here, starving away till she was little more than a skeleton, begging for every sip of water, so he could drag her out and bury her alive? Or go outfighting.
Deep breath.
...
Did you come here to win?
Or did you come here to fuck spiders?
Natasha unscrewed the top off her bottle and drained the final half-mouthful. Then got down on the ground and tipped the galvanised bin over.
The dust was still settling when she struggled upright and shoved at the thing with her filthy feet. Turning and rolling her anchor towards the door.
And yeah: getting the door open wasn’t going to be easy – what with her wrists shackled to this bloody collar. But there was no way in hell she’d get her anchor out through the window hole, so it was this or nothing.
As long as Davis hadn’t padlocked the door shut, of course...
She put her shoulder against one of the door’s wooden struts and pushed. And pushed. Digging her bare feet into the hard-packed dirt...untilfinallythe metal rollers squealed in their brackets and the huge slab of wood moved. Not much, maybe just an inch. But she staggered forward, barging her shoulder into the strut, and shoved again – getting up a bit of momentum.
The thing howled and groaned about two more feet, before the chain on her anchor snapped tight.
Which was astart, but nowhere near enough to get the galvanised bin through.
She rolled it closer, giving herself a bit of slack to manoeuvre with, and heaved again – which was a hell of a lot easier now she had the stone doorway to brace her feet against and the edge of the door to push. The whole thing rumbled and screeched open.
Yes.
Natasha sagged against the ancient wood, breath whooshing against the leather mask, pulsewhump-whump-whumping in her ears, sweat glistening in the sunlight, as her head throbbed inside its own personal hot box.
Took a minute for everything to settle down, but soon as she could breathe again, Natasha rolled her anchor into position and out into the courtyard.
After the stifling heat andstenchof the outbuilding, it was like stepping into an air-conditioned hotel room. She stood there, elbows raised, so the merest wisp of a breeze could get at her sweaty pits. Bliss...
But not for long, because who knew when the wanker could come back?
Up close, the caravan looked even more decrepit. And so did the barn. And the other outbuilding – the other prison.
Weeds choked the courtyard’s edges, creeping inwards across the dirt-and-gravel surface: nettles, thistles, and tall, jagged docken, bindweed strangling great clumps of it with its garotte-thin tendrils.
Temptation was to do a runner, right now.
Well, a lurching stagger.
Roll this bloody anchor ahead of her, one miserable step at a time, and get the hell out of here. But the only road out wasthe one DS Davis had driven off to work on. So that would be the way he’d come back too.
What the hell was she supposed to do when he caught her, halfway down the track, moving at a snail’s pace, with her anchor. ‘Ah, yeah, sorry, mate. Just thought I’d take me binful of concrete for a walk.’
