Once they had the photo they texted it to someone, conferring on the wording to accompany the photo. Crystal would be able to track his location, he thought, he had put a GPS app on her phone. He felt buoyed up by this thought, but then he heard one of them mutter, ‘Need to get rid of this fucking phone before they track it.’
Harry decided to give the two men nicknames so that he could remember them. He imagined himself later, sitting in the back of a police car with a kindly policewoman beside him asking about his ordeal and him saying, ‘Well, the one I called Pinky had a scar on his chin, and Perky had a tattoo on his forearm – I think it was of a lion,’ and the kindly policewoman saying, ‘Well done, Harry. I’m sure this information will help us catch these dastardly villains very quickly.’ Of course, Harry knew the kindly policewoman wouldn’t use the phrase ‘dastardly villains’ – neither would he, for that matter – but he liked the sound of it and she was imaginary, after all. (‘The thing about the imagination, Harry,’ Miss Dangerfield had told him, ‘is that it knows no bounds.’)
Pinky and Perky were puppets from long ago. Harry had seen them on YouTube – they were unbelievably awful. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have found them on the bill at the Palace. He had only heard about them because Barclay had referred to a couple of the stage hands (in a derogatory way, he had no other) as ‘Pinky and Perky’.
Harry thought that robbing the kidnappers of their anonymity might somehow make them less threatening, but in fact it made them seem even more terrifying. He tried to focus on the idea of the kindly policewoman, but he kept seeing her standing over the ditch that his lifeless body had been rolled into.
He wondered what Pinky had texted and who he had sent it to. (Or was it ‘whom’? Miss Dangerfield was very strict about grammar.) His dad, he supposed, a threatening ransom demand. Pay up or we kill the kid. Harry shuddered. There were now two bodies in his imaginary ditch.
Pinky seemed to be having trouble sending the text – he was walking around the field holding the phone above his head as if he was trying to catch a butterfly.
‘There’s no fucking signal,’ he concluded finally.
‘Send it later,’ Pinky said.
Pinkie was also the name of the character (‘protagonist’ he heard Miss Dangerfield say in his head) in Brighton Rock. Harry was supposed to be reading it for next term. Perhaps he never would now. Whole fleets of world literature would sail unread over his head as he lay bleeding out in that ditch, staring at the sky.
‘You!’ Perky commanded.
‘Yes?’ (He almost said ‘sir’.)
‘Bring the kid over here.’
‘My name’s Harry,’ Harry said. He had read somewhere that you were supposed to humanize yourself to kidnappers.
‘I know what your fucking name is. Bring the kid over here. And don’t try any funny business or you’ll be sorry.’
It was evening, a soft glow of twilight was coming through the caravan’s windows. They were imprisoned in one of the wrecks. Candace had woken up not long after they were locked in and had since gone through more than half of her Seven Dwarfs repertoire – grumpy, happy, dopey and sleepy. Hungry, too, but thankfully the kidnappers had left him with a plastic Co-op bag containing a packet of white bread sandwiches and a bottle of Irn-Bru. Harry supposed that Crystal would have made allowances given the circumstances.
Harry passed the time (and it passed very, very slowly) by playing several silly games with Candace, telling her endless jokes that she didn’t understand but made an effort to laugh at. (‘What’s a pirate’s favourite cheese? Chedd-aargh.’) Not to mention reciting every tale in the fairy canon and singing ‘Let It Go’ on a loop. Now, thankfully, she was back to sleepy again. He used the opportunity to pick some of the dancers’ sequins off her face. Once she’d dozed off, Harry was left with nothing to do but ponder the situation he found himself in.
There were things to be thankful for, he told himself. They weren’t tied up, they weren’t gagged, and if they were going to be killed they wouldn’t have been left with food, surely? Nonetheless, they were definitely imprisoned. Harry had tried very hard to break out of the caravan. He had tried smashing the