With Hammersmith Bridge just ahead of him, Alex left the river and swung his bike through the lights and down the hill towards Brookland School. The bike was a Condor Junior Roadracer, custom- built for him on his twelfth birthday. It was a teenager’s bike with a cut-down Reynolds 531 frame, but the wheels were full-sized so he could ride at speed with hardly any rolling resistance. He spun past a Mini and cut through the school gates. He would be sorry when he grew out of the bike. For two years now it had almost been part of
him.
He double-locked it in the shed and went into the yard. Brookland was a new comprehensive, red brick and glass, modern and ugly. Alex could have gone to any of the smart private schools around Chelsea, but Ian Rider had decided to send him here. He had said it would be more of a challenge.
The first lesson of the day was maths. When Alex came into the classroom, the teacher, Mr Donovan, was already chalking up a complicated equation on the board. It was hot in the room, the sunlight streaming in through the floor-to-ceiling windows put in by architects who should have known better. As Alex took his place near the back, he wondered how he was going to get through the lesson. How could he possibly think about algebra when there were so many other questions churning through his mind?
The gun at the funeral. The way Blunt had looked at him. The van with STRYKER & SON written on the side. The empty office. And the biggest question of all, the one detail that refused to go away. The seat-belt. Ian Rider hadn’t been wearing a seat-belt.
But of course he had.
Ian Rider had never been one to give lectures. He had always said Alex should make up his own mind about things. But he’d had this thing about seat-belts. The more Alex thought about it, the less he believed it. A collision at a roundabout. Suddenly he wished he could see the car. At least the wreckage would tell him that the accident had
really happened, that Ian Rider really had died that way. “Alex?”
Alex looked up and realized that everyone was staring at him. Mr Donovan had just asked him something. He quickly scanned the blackboard, taking in the figures. “Yes, sir,” he said, “x equals seven and y is fifteen.”
The maths teacher sighed. “Yes, Alex. You’re absolutely right. But actually I was just asking you to open the window.”
Somehow he managed to get through the rest of the day, but by the time the final bell rang, his mind was made up. While everyone else streamed out, he made his way to the secretary’s office and borrowed a copy of Yellow Pages.
“What are you looking for?” the secretary asked. Jane Bedfordshire was a young woman in her twenties, and she’d always had a soft spot for Alex.
“Breakers’ yards…” Alex flicked through the pages. “If a car got smashed up near Old Street, they’d take it somewhere near by, wouldn’t they?”
“I suppose so.”
“Here…” Alex had found the yards listed under “Car Dismantlers”.
But there were dozens of them fighting for attention over four pages.
“Is this for a school project?” the secretary asked. She knew Alex had lost a relative, but not how.
“Sort of…” Alex was reading the addresses, but they told him nothing.
“This one’s quite near Old Street.” Miss Bedfordshire pointed at the corner of the page.
“Wait!” Alex tugged the book towards him and looked at the entry underneath the one the secretary had chosen:
 |
“That’s in Vauxhall,” Miss Bedfordshire said. “Not too far from here.” “I know.” But Alex had recognized the name. J.B. Stryker. He
thought back to the van he had seen outside his house on the day of the funeral. STRYKER & SON. Of course it might just be a coincidence, but it was still somewhere to start. He closed the book. “I’ll see you, Miss Bedfordshire.”
“Be careful how you go.” The secretary watched Alex leave, wondering why she had said that. Maybe it was his eyes. Dark and serious, there was something dangerous there. Then the telephone rang and she forgot him as she went back to work.
J.B. Stryker’s was a square of wasteland behind the railway tracks running out of Waterloo Station. The area was enclosed by a high brick wall topped with broken glass and razor wire. Two wooden gates hung open, and from the other side of the road Alex could see a shed with a security window and beyond it the tottering piles of dead and broken cars. Everything of any value had been stripped away and only the rusting carcasses remained, heaped one on top of the other, waiting to be fed into the crusher.
There was a guard sitting in the shed, reading the Sun. In the distance, a crane coughed into life, then roared down on a battered Ford Mondeo, its metal claw smashing through the window to scoop up the vehicle and carry it away. A telephone rang somewhere in the shed and the guard turned round to answer it. That was enough for Alex. Holding his bike and wheeling it along beside him, he sprinted through the gates.
He found himself surrounded by dirt and debris. The smell of diesel was thick in the air and the roar of the engines was deafening. Alex watched as the crane swooped down on another of the cars, seized it in a metallic grip and dropped it into a crusher. For a moment the car rested on a pair of shelves. Then the shelves lifted up, toppling the car over and down into a trough. The operator – sitting in a glass cabin at one end of the crusher – pressed a button and there was a great belch of black smoke. The shelves closed in on the car like a monster insect folding in its wings. There was a grinding sound as the car was crushed until it was no bigger than a rolled-up carpet. Then the operator threw a gear and the car was squeezed out, metallic toothpaste being chopped up by a hidden blade. The slices tumbled on to the ground.
Leaving his bike propped against the wall, Alex ran further into the
yard, crouching down behind the wrecks. With the din from the machines, there was no chance that anyone would hear him, but he was still afraid of being seen. He stopped to catch his breath, drawing a grimy hand across his face. His eyes were watering from the diesel fumes. The air was as filthy as the ground beneath him.
He was beginning to regret coming – but then he saw it. His uncle’s BMW was parked a few metres away, separated from the other cars. At first glance it looked absolutely fine, the metallic silver bodywork not even scratched. Certainly there was no way this car could have been involved in a fatal collision with a lorry or anything else. But it was his uncle’s car. Alex recognized the number plate. He hurried closer, and it was then he saw that the car was damaged after all. The windscreen had been smashed, along with all the windows on one side. Alex made his way round the bonnet. He reached the other side. And froze.
Ian Rider hadn’t died in any accident. What had killed him was plain to see – even to someone who had never seen such a thing before. A spray of bullets had caught the car full on the driver’s side, shattering the front tyre, then smashing the windscreen and side windows and punching into the side panels. Alex ran his fingers over the holes. The metal felt cold against his flesh. He opened the door and looked inside. The front seats, pale grey leather, were strewn with fragments of broken glass and stained with patches of dark brown. He didn’t need to ask what the stains were. He could see everything. The flash of the machine-gun, the bullets ripping into the car, Ian Rider jerking in the driver’s seat…
But why? Why kill a bank manager? And why had the murder been covered up? It was the police who had brought the news, so they must be part of it. Had they deliberately lied? None of it made sense.
“You should have got rid of it two days ago. Do it now.”
The machines must have stopped for a moment. If there hadn’t been a sudden lull, Alex would never have heard the men coming. Quickly he looked across the steering-wheel and out the other side. There were two of them, both dressed in loose-fitting overalls. Alex had a feeling he’d seen them before. At the funeral. One of them was the driver, the man he had seen with the gun. He was sure of it.
Whoever they were, they were only a few paces away from the car, talking in low voices. Another few steps and they would be there.
Without thinking, Alex threw himself into the only hiding place available, inside the car itself. Using his foot, he hooked the door and closed it. At the same time, he became aware that the machines had started again and he could no longer hear the men. He didn’t dare look up. A shadow fell across the window as the two men passed. But then they were gone. He was safe.
And then something hit the BMW with such force that Alex cried out, his whole body caught in a massive shock wave that tore him away from the steering-wheel and threw him helplessly into the back. At the same time, the roof buckled and three huge metal fingers tore through the skin of the car like a fork through an eggshell, trailing dust and sunlight. One of the fingers grazed the side of his head – any closer and it would have cracked his skull. Alex yelled as blood trickled over his eye. He tried to move, then was jerked back a second time as the car was yanked off the ground and tilted high up in the air.
He couldn’t see. He couldn’t move. But his stomach lurched as the car swung in an arc, the metal grinding and the light spinning. It had been picked up by the crane. It was going to be put inside the crusher. With him inside.
He tried to raise himself up, to punch through the windows. But the claw of the crane had already flattened the roof, pinning his left leg, perhaps even breaking it. He could feel nothing. He lifted a hand and managed to pound on the back window, but he couldn’t break the glass, and even if the workmen were staring at the BMW, they would never see anything moving inside.
His short flight across the breaker’s yard ended with a bone- shattering crash as the crane deposited the car on the iron shelves of the crusher. Alex tried to fight back his sickness and despair and think of what to do. He had seen a car being processed only a few minutes before. Any moment now, the operator would send the car tipping into the coffin-shaped trough. The machine was a Lefort Shear, a slow-motion guillotine. At the press of a button, the two wings would close on the car with a joint pressure of five hundred tonnes. The car, with Alex inside it, would be crushed beyond recognition. And the broken metal – and flesh – would then be chopped into sections. Nobody would ever know what had happened.
He tried with all his strength to free himself. But the roof was too
low. His leg and part of his back were trapped. Then his whole world tilted and he felt himself falling into darkness. The shelves had lifted. The BMW slid to one side and fell the few metres into the trough. Alex felt the metalwork collapsing all around him. The back window exploded and glass showered around his head, dust and diesel fumes punching into his nose and eyes. There was hardly any daylight now, but looking out of the back he could see the huge steel head of the piston that would push what was left of the car through the exit hole on the other side.
The engine tone of the Lefort Shear changed as it prepared for the final act. The metal wings shuddered. In a few seconds’ time, the two of them would meet, crumpling the BMW like a paper bag.
Alex pulled with all his strength and was astonished when his leg came free. It took him perhaps a second – one precious second – to work out what had happened. When the car had fallen into the trough, it had landed on its side. The roof had buckled again … enough to free him. His hand scrabbled for the door – but of course that was useless. The doors were too bent. They would never open. The back window! With the glass gone, he could crawl through the frame, but only if he moved fast…
The wings began to move. The BMW screamed as two walls of solid steel relentlessly crushed it. Glass shattered. One of the wheel axles snapped with the sound of a thunderbolt. The darkness closed in. Alex grabbed hold of what was left of the back seat. Ahead of him he could see a single triangle of light, shrinking faster and faster. With all his strength, he surged forward, finding some sort of purchase on the gear column. He could feel the weight of the two walls pressing down on him. Behind him the car was no longer a car, but the fist of some hideous monster snatching at the insect that he had become.
His shoulders passed through the triangle, out into the light. But his legs were still inside. If his foot snagged on something he would be squeezed into two pieces. Alex yelled out loud and jerked his knee forward. His legs came clear, then his feet, but at the last moment his shoe caught on the closing triangle and disappeared back into the car. Alex imagined he heard the sound of the leather being squashed, but that was impossible. Clinging to the black, oily surface of the observation platform at the back of the crusher, he dragged himself clear and managed to stand up.
He found himself face to face with a man so fat that he could barely fit into the small cabin of the crusher. The man’s stomach was pressed against the glass, his shoulders squeezed into the corners. A cigarette dangled on his lower lip as his mouth fell open and his eyes stared. In front of him was a boy in the rags of what had once been a school uniform. A whole sleeve had been torn off and his arm, streaked with blood and oil, hung limply by his side. By the time the operator had taken all this in, come to his senses and turned the machine off, Alex had gone.
He clambered down the side of the crusher, landing on the one foot that still had a shoe. He was aware now of pieces of jagged metal lying everywhere. If he wasn’t careful, he would cut the other foot open. His bicycle was where he had left it, leaning against the wall, and gingerly, half-hopping, he made for it. Behind him he heard the cabin of the crusher open and a man’s voice call out, raising the alarm. At the same time, a second man ran forward, stopping between Alex and his bike. It was the driver, the man he had seen at the funeral. His face, twisted into a hostile frown, was curiously ugly; greasy hair, watery eyes, pale, lifeless skin.
“What do you think…!” he began. His hand slid into his jacket. Alex remembered the gun and instantly, without even thinking, swung into action.
He had started learning karate when he was six years old. One afternoon, with no explanation, Ian Rider had taken him to a local club for his first lesson and he had been going there, once a week, ever since. Over the years he had passed through the various Kyu – student – grades. But it was only the year before that he had become a first grade Dan, a black belt. When he had arrived at Brookland School, his looks and accent had quickly brought him to the attention of the school bullies; three hulking sixteen-year-olds. They had cornered him once behind the bike shed. The encounter had lasted less than a minute, and after it one of the bullies had left Brookland and the other two had never troubled anyone again.
Now Alex brought up one leg, twisted his body round and lashed out. The back kick – Ushiro-geri – is said to be the most lethal in karate. His foot powered into the man’s abdomen with such force that he didn’t even have time to cry out. His eyes bulged and his mouth half-opened in surprise. Then, with his hand still halfway into his jacket, he crumpled to the ground.
Alex jumped over him, snatched up his bike and swung himself on to it. In the distance, a third man was running towards him. He heard the single word “Stop!” called out. Then there was a crack and a bullet whipped past. Alex gripped the handlebars and pedalled as hard as he could. The bike shot forward, over the rubble and out through the gates. He took one look over his shoulder. Nobody had followed him.
With one shoe on and one shoe off, his clothes in rags and his body streaked with blood and oil, Alex knew he must look a strange sight. But then he thought back to his last seconds inside the crusher and sighed with relief. He could have been looking a lot worse.
