SEVEN DEADLY THINGS (Henry & Sparrow Book 3), A FOX [good books to read for adults .TXT] 📗

‘Do you really want them dead?’ Lucas went on. ‘Because… if it’s punishment you wanted to give out, you’ve done it. You’ve taken their friends from them and you’ve put them in a state of terror. Maybe that’s enough.’

‘It’s not enough. I want all seven of them and then I’m done.’

‘Even Kate? Did Kate hurt your sister?’ Lucas was hazarding more guesses here, but his instincts were rarely wrong. He could not imagine Kate ever knowingly hurting an innocent. Kicking the balls of a guilty man, yes, but picking on a young woman — never.

‘I did think about sparing Kate,’ the man went on, almost conversationally. ‘Because she was probably nicer to Tessa than anyone else. But it’s not enough to be nice. It’s not enough to stand by when others are doing wrong. They crushed my sister’s confidence… they caused her panic attacks and her anorexia, and they didn’t give it another thought. They never said sorry. So I made them sorry.’

‘When did you lose Tessa?’

‘In February,’ the man said, a catch in his voice. ‘I spent seven years trying to make her better and I failed. She just hated herself. And it was those fucking Bluecoats… the self-anointed Magnificent Seven… who were the death of her. When she died, she weighed less than five stone.’

‘That must have been awful,’ Lucas said.

‘Oh no! It was just what Julie had told her to do! I told Julie that before I strangled her; told her that Tessa had lost loads of weight, just to be accepted. Stones and stones of weight. I told her that before I poured lard down the skinny bitch’s throat.’

‘Mike!’ The tinny voice emitting from the guy’s two-way radio was Kate’s. Lucas felt his insides crunch up in hope and fear. She was still alive — so were the other two — but the unusual movement of the man, with his sacks of sand and the metal guttering, were putting an intolerable pressure on both the bunker and the bank of unstable sand, grit and flimsy root networks above it.

‘Please… can you stop the sand now?’ Kate said. She coughed and then went on: ‘You’ve made us all sorry now. You’ve done what you set out to do. Come on, Mike! I don’t believe you really want it to end like this.’

‘Shut up, Kate,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hear from you any more.’ And he switched off the radio and hurled it down to the beach, where it bounced and broke apart. He reached for another sack of sand.

‘Mike… I’m not going to let you do that,’ said Lucas.

‘Try and stop me,’ said Mike, turning and pulling a handgun from a holster under his Buntin’s security blazer. Lucas was pretty sure it wasn’t standard issue for a holiday camp. It looked like the real deal and was probably how he’d managed to get Nikki and Craig into the bunker. Sid was fairly certain it was loaded, too.

So here it was — Kate and her two friends were trapped and drowning in sand. The man attempting to kill them was armed and determined. And even without him, the crumbling promontory beneath them was screaming its intention to collapse at any moment. What the hell was he going to do?

The sand was at waist height. Nikki was now free, and she and Kate were grappling through the growing drifts to release Craig. He’d managed to push himself up against the wall into a semi-standing position, his cuffed wrists as high as he could raise them behind his back so Kate could pick the lock, but her pin wasn’t finding the way in. Sand was blocking the keyhole.

‘This can’t be happening,’ sobbed Nikki, shining the torch beam from Kate’s phone onto Craig’s cuffed wrists. ‘I can’t believe this is happening.’

Kate ran her hands up and down the semi-submerged pipes, trying to find a weakness. Her fingers located a bubbling, rusty texture on the metal and felt a slight give. She abandoned the pin and dragged the cuffs to the weak point. ‘We’re going to have to pull him,’ she said to Nikki.

A fresh deluge of sand hit them as they grabbed Craig’s shoulders, putting a foot up against the wall behind him, and pulled. Craig screamed as the cuffs cut into his wrists, the noise thin and dull against the incessant hissing. But the pipe pulled away from the wall and began to bow out. A few more seconds of dragging, screaming and trying not to inhale sand, and finally there was a dull twang and the weak point gave. They all tumbled headlong into the dark dune surrounding them.

Craig’s hands were still pinned behind his back but there was no time to try to free him. The buckling of the pipe had done nothing for the stability of the bunker and once again there was a gritty, shifting groan above them. It was no longer possible to run at the door. Kate didn’t believe Mike had enough sand to literally bury them all, but she did believe there was enough weight building up on the roof above to collapse the whole bunker. She could hear more twangs in the metal piping, which told her there was way too much movement. If the ceiling caved in they were going to be crushed to death.

‘Come on!’ she yelled. ‘We have to push together!’ She waved her phone torch towards the blocked door. ‘I can’t move it on my own — but all three of us might.’

Choking and gasping, Craig and Nikki waded across with her. There was another metallic yelp as another pipe buckled under the strain. Kate felt, rather than saw, one of the broken slabs of roof tip inwards.

‘NOW!’ she screamed. ‘We have to get out of here NOW!’

‘Shiiiiiiiit!’ cried Francis, as Barney shifted violently into third gear and drove them along the bumpy, rutted farm track, heading for a field which ran along the low cliff top.

‘That’s your mate, yeah?’ called