Robin Hood by Robert Muchamore

Author:Robert Muchamore [Robert Muchamore]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bonnier Publishing Fiction
Published: 2020-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

30. DOWN IN THE DUNGEONS

Sherwood Castle had existed for almost a thousand years and was in a ruinous state for most of them. When Marjorie Kovacevic won her first term as Sheriff of Nottingham, the castle was a mystical ruin, with crumbling turrets and fat stone walls bedded in ivy.

Anyone who drove the muddy track from Route 24 could pull up in a parking lot with vandalised toilets and dead telephone boxes and spend an afternoon rambling over castle ruins for free.

But the young Sheriff loathed anything that didn’t turn a profit. Luckily the government had recently made Sherwood and Locksley a Special Enterprise Zone.

This offered generous grants to businesses that invested in the deprived area and gave Sheriff Marjorie special powers to blast through red tape and bypass the kind of pesky planning regulations that would normally stop someone turning a historic one-thousand-year-old castle into an ultra-posh hotel resort, with lavish golf courses and a million acres of managed hunting grounds.

No accurate restoration of a tenth-century castle would have created spaces for hotel suites and lavish three-day conferences for divorce lawyers, so a trendy architect had created something she called A bold statement that protects and enhances Sherwood Castle’s original historic beauty.

As the bus got closer, Little John decided it looked more like a glass-and-metal spaceship had crash-landed and squashed a nice old castle beneath it.

The bus turned away from an imposing lobby with a revolving door and went down a ramp into an underground car park. The first basement level was brightly lit and had the sorts of cars owned by people who stay in a resort where a champagne-and-lobster breakfast costs more than the chef who made it earns in a week.

The next level down was gloomier. A smell of rotten food crept into the van as it rolled past rows of huge wheeled bins and a gang in high-vis vests throwing mounds of cardboard boxes into a waste compactor.

‘All male guests, kindly depart here,’ the driver said, adopting an overly polite tone as he stopped and blasted the horn.

This drew two solidly built men out of a metal doorway. They both wore rubber boots and protective suits with full face masks. One opened the passenger door as the other showed off a ferocious-looking stun-stick with razor-sharp barbs.

‘You gonna behave, big fella?’ he asked, as he made sure Little John saw how nasty his weapon was.

‘What you waiting for?’ the other one demanded. ‘Shift!’

Little John had been sitting for ten minutes, during which his left ankle had ballooned. The heat and trash smells were overpowering, and he dreaded the pain when he put weight back on his feet.

He only managed one stumbling step before crashing forward onto his knees.

‘Up!’ one of the men demanded, as the bus rolled off with the four hooded females.

Little John feared a zap from the stun-stick, but the two men looked at his feet and realised no amount of volts would get him walking.

His knees scraped as they dragged him through the door.

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