Dead Simple

suddenly. His brain was racing now, remembering bits of all kinds of stuff.
    He remembered reading some years back a theory about Circadian rhythms. All other living organisms on this planet lived a twenty-four-hour cycle, but not humans – our average was twenty-five and a quarter. Tests had been done putting human beings down into dark places for weeks on end, with no clocks. Invariably they thought they had been down there for a shorter period of time than was the case.
    Great, I could be one of their fucking lab rats now.
    His mouth was so dry his lips stuck together and it hurt to part them. It felt as if their skin was ripping.
    Then he shone the torch straight up, looked at the ever-deepening groove he had made in the wood above his face, picked up his leather belt and again began to rub the corner of the metal buckle backwards and forwards against the hard teak – he knew enough about wood to know this was teak – and that teak was just about the hardest wood – closing his eyes tight, in pain, as specks of sawdust struck them, and gradually the buckle became hotter and hotter until he had to stop to let it cool down.
    ‘Sorry, can’t talk, he’s in my face – know what I mean?’
    Michael frowned. Who the hell was this putting on the fake American voice?
    How could any of them think this was funny? What the hell had they told Ashley? His mother?
    After a few minutes, he stopped scraping, exhausted. Had to keep going, he knew. Dehydration made you tired. Had to fight the tiredness. Had to get the hell out of this damned box. Had to get out and at those bastards, and there was going to be hell to pay.
    He struggled on for a few more minutes, scraping, sometimes catching his knuckles, trying to keep his eyes screwed tight against the sawdust that fell and tickled his face, until he was too tired to go on. His hand dropped down and his clenched neck muscles relaxed their grip. Gently his head dropped back.
    He slept.

19
    The evening was prematurely dark. Mark parked his car just beyond a bus stop a short way up the road, then waited for some moments. The wide street, lacquered black by the torrential rain, was quiet, a trickle of cars passing. No one seemed to be out walking; no one to notice him.
    He pulled on a baseball cap low over his face, then, turning up his anorak collar, ran to the sheltered porch of Michael’s apartment block, glancing at each of the parked cars in turn, looking for someone seated in there in the dark. Michael was always telling people that Mark was the detail man in their partnership. Then he would qualify that with a remark that Mark hated. Mark is incredibly anal.
    But Mark knew that he was right, that was exactly why Double-M Properties was so successful, because he was the one who did all the real work. It was his role to scrutinize every line of the builder’s estimates, to be there on site, to approve every single material that was purchased, to watch the schedules and to cost everything down to the last penny. While Michael spent half his time swanning around, womanizing, rarely taking anything too seriously. The success of the business was his, he believed, and his alone. Yet Michael had the majority shareholding, just because he’d had more cash to put in when they had started up.
    There were forty-two bells to choose from on the entryphone panel. He pressed one at random, deliberately on a different floor to Michael’s. There was no answer. He tried another, with the name ‘Maranello’.
    After a few moments a crackly male voice in a thick Italian accent said, ‘Hello? Yes? Hello?’
    ‘Delivery,’ Mark shouted.
    ‘Delivery what?’
    ‘FedEx. From America, for Maranello.’
    ‘You what? Delivery? I – I not – I – I no—’
    There was a moment’s silence. Then the sharp buzz of the electric latch.
    Mark pushed the door and walked in. He went straight to the lift and took it to the sixth floor, then walked down the corridor to Michael’s flat. Michael kept a spare key under the doormat in case he locked himself out – which he had done once, drunk and naked. To Mark’s relief it was still there. A single Yale key, covered in fluff.
    As a precaution he rang the doorbell and waited, watching the corridor, anxious in case anyone should appear and see him. Then he opened the door, slipped in and quickly closed it behind him, and pulled a small torch from his pocket. Michael’s apartment looked out onto the street. There was another apartment block