Dead if You Don’t

73

Sunday 13 August

11.00–12.00

Mungo didn’t know what time it was. He kept drifting towards sleep, only to be instantly jerked out of it by the noose digging into his neck or by cramp. Listening to the lapping of water made his thirst worse.

He struggled repeatedly with his arms behind his back. So far as he could work out, his wrists were tied with cord of some kind and attached to a length of chain. He kept trying to rub the cord against the chain, over and over.

Were they coming back, ever? Or just going to leave him to drown as the tide rose further?

Suddenly he heard voices.

Outside.

Through the slit in the wall.

Kids playing, messing around.

‘Hey, Mick!’

The tinkle of breaking glass. A burst of laughter.

‘Get in there!’

It sounded like two boys. Right the other side of the wall. He tried to call out to them, tried for all he was worth. But all he could make was a feeble yammer: ‘Mnnnnmmmm. Mwhrrrrrrrr.’

The voices faded. Silence again.

He wanted to be home, in his room, on his computer. It was his birthday in a fortnight and he’d asked for a new Xbox like the one Aleksander had. He’d been excited for the past month about it. Was he going to die without ever getting it?

A faint metallic clang.

Had he imagined it?

A scraping sound. Another clang, louder. Voices. Footsteps. The splashing of feet through water. Was it Aleksander, finally come to rescue him?

His hopes were instantly dashed as two figures in balaclavas, black windcheaters, jeans and gumboots appeared. One holding a carrier bag, the other a camera.

‘Mrrrrrrhlmmmmmm!’ he tried to call out to them.

One leaned down, and with a leather-gloved finger picked at something on his face. He shrieked in pain as tape was ripped away from his mouth and cheeks, leaving them stinging. A plastic bottle was held up to his mouth and he drank greedily, gulping the cold water, not daring to stop in case they took the bottle away, gulping the contents until the bottle was empty.

Next, he saw the man dig a hand in the bag and produce a sandwich. He removed it from the packaging, held it out to Mungo’s mouth. It was too dark to see what it was but he bit into it, ravenously. It was egg. He chewed and devoured both halves in just a few bites, followed by another — ham. After he had swallowed that, another bottle of water was shoved in his mouth.

Mungo drank until it was pulled away. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What do you want? What do you want?’

The man crammed the plastic bag into a pocket, without speaking, and his colleague held up a sheet of paper with some kind of graph on it, close to Mungo’s face. The other man raised a camera and took a series of flash photographs.

‘Please, who are you?’ Mungo begged again. ‘Who are you? Please — please let me go. Please let me—’

The man holding the sheet of paper stepped away. The one with the camera remained in place. The other one reappeared with a roll of grey duct tape. He pulled a length tight across Mungo’s mouth, slashing the end with a knife and wrinkling his nose. ‘You’ve messed yourself,’ he said in a coarse voice, with a foreign accent.

‘Less than six hours to high tide,’ his colleague with the camera said, in a similar accent. ‘Hope you are good at holding your breath, little boy.’

The other laughed. ‘Let’s hope your daddy’s pockets are deeper than the water, eh?’

The men splashed away.

‘Grmmmmmmm! Grmmmmmmmmm!’ Mungo cried out desperately.

He heard a distant metallic clang.

Then just the lapping of the sea.

The dead crab washed past his line of vision.