‘Against the wall to your left. There are three boxes, lined up.’
‘In front of me, level with me or behind?’
‘The middle one is level with you. Why? What are you going to do, Nige?’
Chapter Thirty-Seven
‘What time is it?’ Jane’s head was on Dixon’s pillow, her eyes closed.
‘Just before six.’
A long, slow sigh. ‘And what’s his problem?’
Monty was sitting on the end of the bed staring at the gap in the curtains, tipping his head from side to side, growling softly.
‘There’s a car outside.’
‘Tell him it’s a road, there are bound to be cars outside.’
A loud knock on the front door of the cottage, and Monty was gone, paws thundering down the stairs. Then the barking started.
‘Who the hell is that at this time in the morning?’ hissed Jane, rolling over. ‘We didn’t get to bed till gone two, for heaven’s sake.’
Dixon picked up his phone; four missed calls and four texts. All from Louise. ‘It’ll be Lou,’ he said, trying to see through the gap in the curtains as he pulled on a pair of jeans.
The knocking on the door only stopped when he switched on the landing light.
‘Come in, Lou,’ he said, opening the front door on the way to the kettle. ‘What’s going on?’
She was squeezing past Monty, who was still grumbling. ‘There’s no sign of Sarah,’ she said. ‘And Nigel Cole’s missing too, apparently. No one’s seen them since yesterday afternoon and we’ve got his wife and her parents at Express Park. Out of their minds they are.’
‘Any sign of their phones?’
‘Mark put a trace on them and they’re both at the Premier Inn at junction twenty-four. The Bridgwater Gateway, or whatever it is.’
‘And we’ve tried ringing them?’
‘Loads of times. They’re not answering.’
‘Get someone over there now to pick them up.’
‘Nigel and Sarah?’
‘Their phones,’ replied Dixon. He had abandoned the kettle in the sink and was heading for the stairs. ‘They’ll have been dumped somewhere in the grounds, close to the building. The bar area, even. Get them to look at the CCTV as well, see if they can see who dumped them.’
Jane had appeared on the landing, rubbing her eyes. ‘Did I hear that right – Nige and Sarah are at a hotel together?’
‘Their phones are, which tells me they’re in deep shit.’
It was slow going; about an inch at a time. And if he lost his balance and fell over, he’d never get back up.
The cable ties were biting into his ankles and wrists, but at least his feet had been left in contact with the ground when he’d been tied to the chair. That gave him some leverage, off his toes.
Shifting his weight, lurching to the left, the sound of the wooden chair legs scraping across the concrete floor the only real evidence that he’d moved at all.
It was pitch dark, so he couldn’t see where he was going; he just had to keep moving, hoping to find the boxes of cider bottles in the darkness.
He had managed to turn, although it had been a sixteen-point turn that had taken too long and too much out of him, but at least he was lurching forwards now, feeling for the boxes that should be in front of him now with his toes.
‘How are you getting on?’ asked Sarah, her voice a faint whisper.
‘Slowly.’
‘What if he comes back?’
‘We’ll worry about that when the time comes, shall we?’ Cole’s sentence was punctuated with another scrape of the chair legs on the concrete floor. ‘How far away were these bloody bottles?’
‘About eight feet.’
He was moving an inch or so with a good heave, so what was twelve eights? Too bloody many and his head hurt far too much for maths calculations.
The rests between lurches were getting longer too. It was all taking too long.
‘What’s twelve times eight?’ he asked.
No reply.
