Front Runner Read online

  He shook his head. “No thanks, I’m going the other way.”

  I was half inclined to allow the older man to take the taxi, but I was in serious danger of missing Dave altogether if I was delayed any more. Rather ashamedly, I climbed in and slammed the door shut.

  “I’m the only taxi working in Hungerford today,” said the driver as we drove away. “He’ll be there for quite a while—until I get back, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Was the driver trying to make me feel even worse? If so, he was succeeding.

  —

  THE TAXI pulled up in front of Dave’s front door, which was wide open.

  I was tempted to ask the driver to wait for me, but then I thought about the old man waiting at the station. So I paid the fare and the taxi hurried away, spinning its wheels slightly on the gravel driveway. Dave would have to give me a lift to a station on his way to the Towcester races.

  “Anyone in?” I called through the open door.

  There was no answer.

  I stepped through the door and shouted again. “Dave. It’s me, Jeff.”

  No reply. Perhaps he hadn’t heard me. It was a big house that Dave had once shared with an attractive young wife and the hope and expectation of having children, but she had long ago left him and now he lived alone in this mansion.

  I went down the long hallway to the kitchen. That too was deserted.

  “Dave,” I called again loudly.

  Still no reply.

  He must be in the sauna, I thought. That’s why he can’t hear me.

  I opened the door from the back hall into the garage and I could instantly feel the heat, and the door to the sauna was open.

  I took off my quilted anorak and hung it over the handlebars of a bicycle.

  “Dave,” I called again. “It’s Jeff.”

  I walked over and put my head through the sauna door. No one was in there.

  I was just about to turn around when a heavy shove from behind sent me sprawling forward onto the hot wooden benches.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “What are you doing?”

  But no one answered. The only sound was of the wooden door of the sauna being slammed shut behind me.

  I tried to push it open but it wouldn’t move.

  “Open the door,” I said loudly, banging on it with my fist.

  There was no response.

  “Dave, please open the door.” I used a much more measured and reasonable tone, but still no answer.

  I was hot. Damn hot.

  I removed the cashmere sweater I had put on to ward off the late-November chill, but it made no difference to the searing heat in my nose, mouth and chest.

  The readout of the thermometer on the wall showed 110 Celcius, five degrees hotter than when I had been in this sauna the previous day and that had been almost more than I could bear then.

  I pushed hard on the door, but it wouldn’t move so much as a millimeter.

  “Open the bloody door,” I shouted once more. Again, no reply.

  I could hear footsteps. Someone was moving about in the garage.

  “Dave,” I shouted, “is that you? Let me out. It’s too damn hot in here.”

  Again, no reply, but I knew someone was there. I could hear the garage door being opened.

  “Let me out,” I shouted again, this time banging my fist on the wooden wall of the sauna.

  A car engine was started close by, the noise of it suddenly filling the space around me. The smooth hum of the Mercedes, I thought, not the roar of the Jaguar. The volume of it diminished as the car was reversed out of the garage, and dropped considerably more as I heard the garage door being closed again.

  “Let me out,” I shouted once more while banging on the sauna’s door, but nobody did.

  My anxiety level rose considerably when I heard the car being driven away—whoever had shut me into this furnace was leaving me here.

  I patted my pant pockets, hopeful of finding my phone, but I knew it was in my coat and that was hanging on the bicycle in the garage outside.

  By this time, I was sweating profusely and my clothes were becoming wet and clinging to my body. I peeled off my shirt, pants, shoes and socks so that I was wearing only my underpants, but it did nothing to cool me down. If anything, the effort required made me feel even hotter.

  I needed to get out of this heat, and soon.

  I could already feel my heart pumping rapidly in my chest as it sent blood to my extremities to try to cool my core temperature. Sadly, far from cooling me, the heat from the sauna was making the blood under my skin even hotter and circulation was taking that heat back to my heart, further warming my core and causing the heart to beat yet faster.

  It was a positive feedback loop that would be broken only when my heart gave up this no-win struggle and ceased to pump at all or my brain started to cook. Either way, I’d be dead.

  I threw myself against the door, striking it with my shoulder, but again it refused to budge. I tried kicking it, to no avail. All that happened was that I became hotter still.

  And I was thirsty.

  There was a small wooden pail about a quarter full of water on the floor, together with a wooden ladle. I went down on my knees and used the ladle to drink some of the hot liquid. It did little to diminish the dryness of my mouth.

  I had been in the sauna for only five minutes or so, but time was already running out. If I didn’t get away from this heat soon, it would be too late.

  OK, I thought, time for some strategy.

  If I couldn’t get out, I had to disable the source of the heat.

  An open-topped metal box stood in the corner of the sauna, about a foot square and thirty inches high. It was full to the brim with gray rocks, each about the size of a clenched fist, and they were far too hot to touch.

  I searched around the side of the box looking for an electric cable, but it was fitted tight to the corner, the power coming straight through the wall.

  I tried to move the box but it was too hot to touch, so I kicked at it as hard as I could, which made no impression whatsoever.

  And still it poured out heat.

  Using my shirt and sweater as oven gloves, I took the rocks out, stacking them on one of the bleached wooden benches. There were twenty rocks and underneath them was a flat metal tray. I tried to get my fingers around the edges of the tray to lift it up, but it was much too hot to touch unprotected and my fingers were too big and cumbersome when covered.

  I grabbed my house key from my pant pocket and used it to lever the tray up.

  Below were four spiral heating elements much like those found on some electric stoves except that these were positioned vertically, as opposed to horizontally, and each was glowing red-hot.

  Try as I might, I couldn’t touch them even with my clothes acting as gloves. The heat cut instantly through the material, and one leg of my pants even caught fire. I used my shoe to beat out the flames on the floor.

  By now, I was desperate.

  If anything, removing the rocks and the tray had made things worse, as I was now feeling the radiant heat directly from the elements.

  I was tempted to throw the bucket of water over the elements in hopes of causing a short circuit, but I might need that water to drink.

  I picked up one of the rocks and threw it hard at the elements. One of them bent slightly, but it continued to glow.

  I tried another rock and then a third. It wasn’t enough.

  The heat was beginning to overwhelm me and I was getting close to panic.

  Calm down, I told myself, take some deep breaths.

  I tried to take my own advice but the air was so hot it made me cough violently.

  I went back to taking small, slow, shallow breaths. Somehow, the coughing fit had helped me to refocus on the matter in hand rather than on the fearsome outcome that aw
aited me.

  I put my socks and shoes back on, stood on one of the benches and tried kicking down on the three rocks that were now sitting on top of the elements. As I did so, I could smell the rubber soles of my running shoes melting.

  One of the elements went out and that gave me heart to continue.

  I jumped onto the rocks with both feet, bending all the elements down.

  There was an almighty flash in the box beneath me and everything went dark. I had clearly caused a short, and a fuse must have blown. The elements went out, but, unfortunately, the light fixture on the wall went out too, plunging the sauna into darkness. But that worry was more than offset by the relief of cutting off the heat.

  Not that my troubles were over—not by a long way. For a start, my right leg was being burned by something inside the metal box, my core temperature remained extremely high and my heart was beating so fast it felt in danger of bursting out of my chest.

  And I was still sweating buckets.

  I quickly climbed out of the box, feeling my way back onto the bench and then onto the floor, where I lay down on the wooden slats. It was the coolest spot.

  Gradually, the temperature began to drop.

  I noticed it because, unbelievably, I began to shiver.

  I searched around in the darkness for my shirt and put it on.

  It was now time to get out of this prison.

  4

  As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I noticed, in fact, a small amount of light in the sauna.

  There was a very small gap around the door and another spot on the far side where the wooden planking of the walls must not be quite in line, allowing through a tiny sliver of illumination.

  I held my watch up to the gap around the door. It read ten-thirty. I reckoned I had been in this sweatbox for about half an hour, much of that time with the temperature well above the boiling point of water, and of blood.

  It was a wonder that I was still able to think at all.

  But think I did.

  Why would Dave Swinton lock me in his sauna with the temperature turned up to maximum and drive away? He must have known my life would have been in grave danger. Even if I’d had my phone in here with me, it would have probably taken the police more than twenty minutes to come to my aid. By that time, without me having disabled the heating elements, I would have been dead.

  What did he have to gain in killing me?

  True, I wouldn’t then have been able to report him to the BHA Disciplinary Committee for purposely losing a race, but that would surely be the least of his difficulties with a dead body in his sauna to explain away.

  It didn’t make any sense.

  Now I had to get out of here—maybe before Dave came back to finish off the job properly.

  But how?

  I tried again to shove the door open, but it didn’t move. I threw all my weight against it. Still nothing.

  I wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed I was missing.

  It was Sunday and the offices of the BHA in London would be closed, not that it would have made any difference. Although I had a permanent desk at HQ, I spent much of my time working away from it and it was hardly unusual for me not to appear there for days, sometimes even for weeks.

  A year ago, my absence would have been noted by my then fiancée, Lydia, but not anymore—Lydia was no longer a part of my life.

  I suppose it was my own fault.

  I had procrastinated and evaded for so long, finding it difficult to commit to marriage, that by the time I had finally got around to it, Lydia was already casting an eye elsewhere.

  And I hadn’t seen it coming.

  I had believed all was well, apart from the fact that I knew she didn’t like my job. It had become a source of increasing friction between us. She thought it was too dangerous and maybe she had a point, especially if one considered my present predicament.

  But it was not as if she had given me an ultimatum or anything. There had been no choose between me or the job stipulation.

  I had come home from work one day the previous January to find that she had simply packed up and gone.

  She had left me a letter on the mantel to say that she was very sorry but she had met someone else whose job was safer and she was moving in with him—and thanks for a great five years. The envelope had also contained the engagement ring I had bought for her only eight months previously.

  I remember having stood there reading the letter over and over in total disbelief. It might have taken me much too long to get around to asking her to marry me, but, having done so, I had been fully committed and we had started discussing a venue and a date for the wedding.

  At first, I’d been angry.

  But I was angry more with myself than with Lydia. How had I not realized? I was an investigator, for goodness’ sake, accustomed to piecing together the reality from fragments of evidence, yet I hadn’t spotted what had been happening right under my nose.

  I had tried to get her back, but what was done was done, the trust between us had been shattered and there was no going back.

  I even spent an unhealthy amount of time finding out everything I could about her new man, a commodity trader called Tony Pickering who worked at the London Metal Exchange in Leadenhall Street, at the very heart of the City of London.

  I suppose I was fascinated to discover what Lydia thought he had that I didn’t.

  Money, for one thing. As a trader he would probably be earning several times what I was getting from the BHA. And he had a family fortune to go with it.

  I tried to tell myself that it must have been more than just the money, but, if so, I couldn’t see it. I would have found his job deathly boring—buying and then selling derivatives involving thousands of tons of yet to be mined copper for meaninglessly large sums in the hope that the selling price was a tiny fraction above the purchase price in order to make a “margin” and hence a profit.

  He never actually saw any copper. The transaction was all on paper or on a computer and may as well have been for buttons, for all it seemed to matter.

  How could Lydia have preferred him to me?

  My wandering thoughts were brought back to reality by the ringing of my cell phone. I could hear it through the wooden walls of the sauna, tantalizingly close yet so far out of reach.

  It rang six times, as always, before switching to voice mail.

  I wondered who would be calling me.

  Faye maybe.

  Faye was my big sister, twelve years my senior, who had acted as a mother to me after our real mother had died when I was just eight. She still called me regularly to check that I was eating properly and to make sure I had washed behind my ears in spite of the fact that I was now thirty-two years old and she had more serious problems of her own to worry about.

  The phone rang again.

  It would be voice mail calling. Great.

  —

  THE SAUNA had been well made—far too well made for my liking.

  It was a pine cube, each side being about six feet long, set on the concrete floor of the garage.

  I tried to lift the whole thing, but it wouldn’t move. I couldn’t even shift it sideways across the floor.

  Next, I tried to separate the walls in the corners, to no effect. I even lay on the top bench and tried to lift just the roof off with my feet, but it wasn’t budging, even when I kicked at it ferociously.

  All I did was expend a lot of energy and aggravate my thirst.

  I had been trying to ration the water in the small wooden pail. I took another tiny sip.

  The only movable part of the sauna was the set of wooden slats on the floor, three five-foot lengths of pine held together by three shorter crosspieces. I picked them up and used the slats as a battering ram against the door.

  Nothing.

  Think.


  The door was probably the strongest part of the structure, with all the extra wood used to make the frame. How about one of the other sides?

  I started to batter the opposite wall at the point where the thin sliver of illumination was visible, but the slats were too long and unwieldy to be able to get a decent swing.

  I switched to using one of the rocks from the heater, searching through the pile until I found one with a nice sharp corner on it.

  After ten good hits, I tried to convince myself that the sliver of light was bigger.

  I struck the wall again and again, using both hands on the rock to apply as much force as I could. I tried my best to always hit at the same point just beneath the point of light.

  After another twenty or so strikes, I took a rest. The wood was beginning to splinter. I could feel it with my fingers.

  I went back at it, standing with one knee on the wooden bench to give me a better angle. Over and over I lashed out at the wood until I was sweating again as if the heat were still on.

  And now the sliver of light was definitely bigger.

  —

  IT TOOK ME nearly an hour to make a hole large enough for me to get a finger through.

  I put my eye up to the hole and looked out, but there wasn’t much to see, just the far wall of the garage and a space where the Mercedes had been when I’d arrived. But it lifted my spirits no end that I could at last see beyond the walls of the sauna.

  I went back to my hammering at the edges with the pointed rock and it wasn’t that long before the hole had grown sufficiently for me to get my hand outside.

  I then used one end of a floor slat as a sort of crowbar and gradually split the planking farther, both above and below the hole, until there was space enough for me to stick my head out.

  By this time the sauna walls had no chance against me. I attacked the hole like a man possessed, kicking away the planking, and before long I was out, standing in the garage.

  I walked around to the sauna door.

  A garden fork had been jammed between the door and the garage wall with such force that the tines had dug grooves in the brickwork.

  I picked up my coat from the handlebars of the bicycle and removed my phone from the pocket.