DEAD AIR (Henry & Sparrow Book 2)

by A D FOX

  The gate opened automatically for him and he hoped someone back in the security hub, somewhere in Swindon, would take note of the activity down in Salisbury and maybe look into it. He doubted it though. He’d long since reached the conclusion that the remote security system was manned by a Miniature Schnauzer called Derek. Or someone just about as useful.

  ‘Come on Carnegy,’ he said as he turned left and gunned the 1.6-litre engine sluggishly up the hill towards the ring road. ‘Let’s see if the jock botherer’s gone back to his birthplace…’

  25

  It was dark out here. Countryside dark. Behind them was the pale glow of the city and ahead was nothing but an inky tree-lined horizon and starlight. There was a moon, but only a crescent. Lucas pulled up into an off-road track and brought the Triumph to a halt. Kate hopped off the back, relieved to be able to stretch. She couldn’t see anything except a rutted farm track ahead of them, picked out by the headlamp on the front of the bike.

  Lucas put down the kickstand and dismounted, switching off the engine but allowing the light to play out over the ground. He took off his helmet and shook his messy dark hair off his face.

  ‘Are we lost?’ asked Kate, flipping up her visor and inhaling the scent of cold earth and dying leaves. Not far away a male tawny owl called to its mate and got a mournful reply.

  Lucas shook his head. ‘I just need to take a moment,’ he said, unzipping the leather jacket and snagging the pendulum out on its chain. ‘What does Sid say?’ she asked, pulling one heel up to her buttock and stretching through her stiff thigh muscles.

  Lucas turned away from her and let the glass stopper drop and swing. She couldn’t see much of what he was doing but as she did the other heel and thigh she caught glimpses of the chain, links glinting in the pool of headlamp light. She shivered as the thought occurred to her that she was out here in the dark, in the middle of nowhere with a man she barely knew; a man whose actions as a teenager had caused a great deal of doubt over his innocence. Oh, stop it, she told herself. If you really think he’s dangerous, why the hell are you here, risking your bloody career again?

  ‘Sid says this way,’ he finally answered. He pointed along the track.

  ‘Should I call for back up?’ she said.

  He shook his head. ‘We need to go in quietly. I think we can ride a bit further but soon we’ll have to leave the bike behind. We’ll need to go in on foot.’

  ‘Coppers do know about stealth,’ she said, feeling she ought to defend her colleagues, although she saw his point.

  ‘When we know what we’re looking at,’ he said, ‘then you can call whoever the hell you want. It’s just that… there’s more than one pattern I’m picking up here. They’re tangled. They’re connected but they’re coming from different places. We need to be careful.’

  ‘I’m always careful,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’

  He nodded, putting his helmet back on, and they both remounted the bike. He pulled away, taking care not to allow the engine to rev too loudly.

  Finley got out of the car and looked around the field. He wished it wasn’t so dark; he would have liked to see the scene he was about to create more clearly. He put the handbrake on and looked at his passenger.

  ‘It’s time, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  He got a nod and he killed the engine, but left the headlamps on, carving a white channel through the midnight gloom, picking out grass and thistles waving in the breeze. He opened the door and stepped out, using his phone torch to check the sky above him for overhead lines. You never put up the mast near overhead lines.

  But all he could see was a fathomless dark picked out above him; no power lines. No trees either. With a grin he reached back into the car and across to the console in front of the passenger seat where he found the big red button. He pressed it up and felt elation trip through him as the old motor immediately kicked in, driving the first stubby section of antennae up out of the roof of the car. It hummed its loud and purposeful song for a good thirty seconds until the mast was up at its highest height, reaching for the heavens, ready to bounce its signal from here to Shrewton or Tisbury or even across the Solent to Rowridge on the Isle of Wight - and then back to base, through the antennae up on the roof of Salisbury Broadcasting House.

  He loved this thing. He knew it was just machinery but he loved everything about it. He’d sign away his soul to be its owner; had signed in fact.

  He went around to the passenger door and opened it, grinning and shaking his head at the wonder of it all.

  ‘Best bit comes next,’ he said.

  Rob Larkhill had managed to get a message out, quietly, when Finley was out of the car, sending the mast up, too excited to notice. He’d made the call using Siri. Now help was on the way.

  ‘I know where you are,’ said Donna, sounding much more together than he would have guessed she could be in the circumstances. ‘I’m getting in the Jeep now. Don’t worry. I’ll get there in time… and I’ll be prepared. I'll bring the twelve-bore.’

  Now he just had to stay calm and keep Finley talking for as long as he could. As if his life depended on it. Which it very much did. The door opened and Finley’s fanatical face swung down towards him. ‘Best bit comes next,’ he said.

  Rob gulped. ‘Take it easy, Finley, eh? Let’s just have a little talk first.’

  ‘OK,’ said Finley. ‘How about some brownies from the tin while we talk? And some more hot chocolate?’

  The farm track was rutted and bumpy and Kate had to grab handfuls of Lucas’s leather jacket so she wouldn’t be pitched off into the undergrowth. The tin of what must by now be sticky oat granola jarred against her through the satchel and she began to wish that she’d just taken it to the evidence room and gone home to bed. What time was it now? It had to be past midnight. She wasn’t sure how far they’d travelled because it had been pretty stop-start, what with the traffic boys and then the pendulum consultation.

  She wasn’t at all sure where they were, either. She’d felt as if they were heading west at first but it was long past the point where she had any bearings at all. They could have driven to the Cotswolds for all she knew. God, when would they ever get there? When could she take some kind of action… or find out this was all a wild goose chase and get Lucas to take her home?

  She was startled out of her inner grumblings by a sudden flare of light throwing long shadows ahead of them. She felt Lucas start and he glanced in his handlebar-mounted mirror before turning to peer back over both their shoulders.

  She glanced back with him and saw two bright, full beam headlamps heading up the track behind them. What the hell? Who would be out here at this time of night? Squinting, she could make out that it was some kind of four-by-four - a farmer’s vehicle? Oh hell. What if they were just about to be accused of sheep rustling? She’d heard of thieves on bikes taking a whole flock away in a single night. It was the kind of thing her more rural colleagues were called out to deal with from time to time.

  She could tell that Lucas was trying to decide what to do… speed up or pull over? But there was no room to pull over. The track was wide enough for a tractor but overgrown thickly on either side with hedgerows. The car, though, wasn’t slowing down. If anything it was getting closer to them. Dammit. Some furious farmer was on their tail. She would have to get off the bike and get out her ID; talk him down. Maybe get his help.

  She tapped Lucas on the shoulder, trying to shout this at him, but Lucas seemed to have other ideas. He was speeding up; the engine roaring up through the seat and bumping them harder over the ruts, ridges and potholes.

  ‘Lucas! Shit! Slow down!’ she yelled as her teeth jarred with each brutal landing.

  But he wouldn’t slow down. And nor would the vehicle behind them. It was suddenly coming for them at great speed, the bouncing headlights growing bigger as it gained on them, its engine growling. Shit! This was getting serious!

  Lucas yelled back 'HANG ON!’ and the bike suddenly lurched forward at full throttle, knocking the
breath out of her for a second. She flung the satchel to one side and pulled in to him, anchoring her arms tightly around his waist and pressing her cheek to his back while her eyes rolled sideways, taking in the frightening acceleration of the vehicle on their tail.

  It wasn’t going to bump them, was it? Seriously? She couldn’t believe a farmer would do that but she’d met a few on her patch and they could get very worked up. It was a stressful job, farming. Even so…

  She let out an involuntary shriek as the metal grille of the four-by-four suddenly surged towards them, so close that the Triumph’s red rear light was reflecting in it.

  She turned around to wave a furious arm and shriek: ‘GET THE FUCK AWAY!’ at the driver.

  Lucas swerved violently to the left and then to the right, trying to dodge the oncoming menace but finding nowhere to go. The undergrowth was thick, prickly and unforgiving; there was no way off this track - and no way to slow down and try to negotiate with this psycho driver because he was already nipping at the rear wheel and they were flat out now. Lucas must be doing seventy - maybe more. She could feel her loose hair flapping madly around her chin. If she had only been armed she could have turned around and unleashed a volley of bullets through the windscreen, but she was a British copper and she didn’t think a stern warning was going to save them.

  ‘HOLD ON!’ screamed Lucas and suddenly they were slewing sideways towards a blur of twigs and leaves and thorns; some of them whipping against their shoulders. He must have found a way off this deadly track. It wasn’t quite in time, though. Even as she spotted the dark break in the foliage zooming towards them she felt the massive jolt of the four-by-four striking the rear of the bike and sending its back wheel into a skid. She screamed as the full beam-lit night began to whirl around her, spinning her up and over and hurtling onward and downward and into an oblivion that could only end with a

  CRUNCH

  Yeah. That.

  26

  Lucas had no idea how long he’d been there. He awoke wrapped around the base of a slender tree trunk, his face in a prickly pillow of leaves and sticks, one leg pinned underneath the cooling engine of the bike. It was dark. Something liquid was running across his chin.

  Light flashed. A torch beam. A rescuer?

  No. Stay still. Stay completely still. Be dead.

  The torch beam flailed through the dark, lighting twigs and shrivelled leaves for a second as it passed. Lucas thought about Kate for the first time. Where was she? Was she dead? If she wasn’t dead, would she have the instinct to pretend to be? Because there was no rescuer out there; just someone hoping they were a pair of corpses.

  The light faded; darkness reclaimed him. Then someone was touching his face.

  ‘Lucas! Lucas!’

  He felt her warm breath on his mouth as she leaned in to check whether his own was ever coming out again. He groaned something like: ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Stay still,’ whispered Kate. ‘Stay quiet. I don’t know if they’ve gone yet. I was playing dead.’ He felt her grab his wrist and run her fingers across his pulse point, double-checking.

  There was a rumble of an engine and a distant red glow as the tail lights of the four-by-four moved on up the track and then the light faded out altogether and they were in pitch darkness. Whoever had run them off the road seemed to be satisfied that they were no longer a problem. They might very well be right. He wasn’t sure he could move. He might be in a bad way; he couldn’t feel his left leg at all.

  ‘I’m going to lift the bike off your leg,’ said Kate. ‘Try to stay still, OK?’ There was a sudden beam of mobile phone torchlight. ‘I’ve tried to call for back up,’ she said. ‘But I can’t get a bloody signal - not even for 999.’ She rested her rectangle of light against a tree and moved across to the bike.

  He heard her grunt and shift and then felt the weight lift away. More grunting followed as she tilted the whole thing up and over, so it fell onto its other side, with a crackle of torn undergrowth. There was a sudden warm surge of extra light as she found its headlamp switch and turned it on again; the crash must have knocked it out. He hoped the maniac driver was long gone and wouldn’t notice.

  The feeling was coming back into his leg. Spitting out leaf litter, he rolled over carefully, wincing at a belt of pain. ‘Shit,’ he grunted. ‘Shit. Fuck. Bollocks.’

  ‘Are they OK?’ Kate was back at his side, her hands on his shoulders.

  ‘My bollocks?’ he asked.

  She nodded, grimacing. ‘Classic bike crash injury. Scrotums catch on handlebars. I’d hate to think there’ll be no little Henries in the future.’

  He checked. ‘All present and correct,’ he muttered. ‘Leg hurts like hell, though. How about you?’

  ‘Probably going to have whiplash tomorrow,’ she said. She held up one bleeding hand. ‘And I’ll never play the cello again.’

  ‘You play the cello?’

  ‘Not since primary school,’ she said. ‘By the fourth lesson my mum made me promise to stop.’

  He laughed, slightly hysterically.

  ‘Let me take a look at that leg,’ she said. ‘And your head. How is your neck - your back?’

  He sat up and moved his shoulders and head.

  ‘Shit - stay still!’ she said. ‘You could have a spinal injury!’

  ‘He took off his helmet before she could stop him. ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘It’s my leg that took the biggest hit. I put out my foot to slow us down; I don’t think I’m concussed.’

  ‘But you’re bleeding,’ she said, kneeling in front of him and touching his jaw.

  ‘A scratch from a branch,’ he said. ‘And you’re bleeding too. If it’s not a big deal for you…’

  ‘The point is - can you get up?’ she said. ‘Just in case psycho driver decides to come back. I kept my eyes open, staring like a corpse, and I think that fooled him, but he didn’t get to look at your face, did he?’

  He struggled to stand up in the low cave of branches and found that although his knee was complaining bitterly, he could put some weight on that leg. ‘I think I’m just going to have a nasty bruise,’ he said. ‘A bit of tendonitis maybe. It’ll be worse tomorrow. But right now, yes, I can walk. Where to, though?’

  ‘You’re the pendulum guy,’ she said. ‘And we still have a killer to catch.’

  He nodded and felt around for Sid, panicking slightly when he couldn’t feel the old stopper under his jumper and then calming again as he realised it had worked around and was hanging down his back. He hooked it out and did what he could to steady himself.

  ‘Biscuit tin,’ he said, holding out his hand.

  Kate passed him the satchel. ‘You might as well put it on,’ she said.

  He did and immediately felt the connection again and a very strong frequency pulling him further west, higher up the farm track. He’d half hoped to find nothing; no connection left. Sometimes that could happen and a glitch like that would have given both of them an excuse to get the hell out of here. He really did want to get the hell out of here, with Kate, and get to somewhere safe. Because everything he was dowsing told him that one hell of a tangled up clusterfuck was awaiting them, half a mile up that track.

  He sighed. ‘Do we have to be heroes?’ he said.

  ‘If we know we can be,’ she said, patting his shoulder. ‘Or give up and lose all self-respect.’

  He nodded, wearily. ‘Let’s get going then.’

  ‘Is the bike any good to us?’ she asked.

  He stared at the fallen Triumph with an ache in his heart. ‘It’s not too bad but the noise of it - and the light - we can’t afford that. We’ll have to go on without it. On foot we stand a better chance of getting close enough to Clusterfuck Central to have some idea of what’s going on. We get back on Hugh, and Psycho Driver will be coming after us again.’

  ‘Hugh?’ she queried, picking a twig out of her hair.

  ‘It’s a Triumph Bonneville.’

  ‘I never had you down as a Downton Abbey fan,’ she laughed
, carefully making her way back to the track.

  ‘It’s more his Paddington Bear oeuvre that rocked my world,’ he said.

  27

  The hot chocolate was all drunk before Donna made it to the radio car. Rob didn’t think he could hang on much longer.

  The headlights suddenly swung across the back window. Finley leapt out of the car before Rob could say anything. In the rearview mirror he could see Donna getting out of the Jeep; the interior light flicking on and casting her face into golden highlights and shadow. God, he loved her. She had come. She would do this for him.

  Finley ran straight for her and then stopped dead as she got the twelve-bore out of the car and raised it, levelling both barrels at him. The shocked reaction of the jock botherer was palpable even from here, as he slowly raised his hands. Rob put the empty mug and the reel of tape down in the footwell and slowly got out of the car. This was going to be tricky. They would have to be very, very careful if they were to have any hope of a happy life after tonight.

  He walked across the springy turf, taking long, slow breaths as Donna - a farmer’s daughter with nerves of steel - held Finley in a horrified trance.

  ‘Mr Larkhill..?’ Finley burbled. ‘What’s going on? Why is Donna pointing a gun at me? Is this… is this part of the OB thing?’ The wobble in his voice betrayed that he didn’t believe that slim hope.

  ‘It is part of the OB thing,’ said Rob. ‘You need to play along, Finley.’

  ‘But… isn’t Josh coming?’

  ‘He’s on his way,’ lied Rob. ‘Isn’t that right, Donna?’

  ‘He’ll be here as soon as he can,’ she said. ‘And in the meantime, Finley, I’m going to need you to go back to the radio car and climb on top of it.’

  Finley glanced back over his shoulder at Rob, as if seeking his permission. As if being held at gunpoint was genuinely part of a remote outside broadcast set up. Seriously - what a cretin. ‘Do what she says,’ Rob said. ‘Get on top of the radio car.’