DEAD AIR (Henry & Sparrow Book 2)

by A D FOX

  Finley turned around slowly. ‘Can I put my hands down now?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Donna. ‘Just keep them where I can see them.’

  Finley stumbled a little on the uneven field and then made a beeline for the vehicle of his dreams. At least that was something, thought Rob. At least he was doing something he loved.

  ‘Climb up,’ said Donna, marching up behind, the gun lowered but at the ready with a second’s notice.

  ‘Um… OK,’ said Finley. He scrambled onto the bonnet of the Ford and then reached up and across towards the base of the antennae. ‘Is it safe?’ he asked. ‘I mean…’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Rob. ‘Get up on the roof and sit yourself right up against the mast.’

  Finley planted his lace-up boot on the windscreen, his face puckered with concern and confusion. However deluded he was, it was clear he was finally picking up that this night’s adventure wasn’t panning out quite the way he had hoped. No favourite presenter making a surprise OB appearance on air, alongside his all-time number one fan. No chance to be the assistant tech op, making it happen. Instead, he was up on the roof of his beloved radio car, well away from that big red button and the other smaller buttons and backlit dials he had been so diligently learning to use.

  Rob walked around to the passenger side, reached down into the footwell and retrieved the reel of gaffer tape that his gloved fingers had been clasping, on and off, for the past couple of hours. ‘Take this tape, Finley, and tape up your legs.’

  ‘What..?’ Finley squinted at him, his confused face uplit by the Jeep’s headlamps.

  ‘Tape your legs together,’ repeated Rob. ‘Around the ankles and then around the knees. Make it tight.’

  ‘But… but I can’t get down again if I do that,’ said Finley, with a break in his voice.

  ‘He’s bright, this one, isn’t he?’ said Donna, raising the shotgun again. ‘Do as he says.’

  Finley’s teeth were beginning to chatter. He bit his lips together and nodded, taking the heavy reel of silver-backed tape and pulling out a stretch. He wound it around his ankles and then ripped the tape off at the reel end.

  ‘Good,’ said Rob. ‘Now around your knees.’

  Finley wordlessly wrapped his knees three times and ripped the tape off again. Then he looked up at them both, realisation dawning over his simple features. ‘You… you killed Dave Perry,’ he gasped. ‘I heard he got taped up like this.’

  ‘Focus, Finley,’ said Rob, ‘I want you to wind the tape around the base of the mast and around your waist, until you’re nice and secure.’

  ‘Why?’ Finley asked, incredulously. ‘Why do you want me to do this?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you to fall off the car when I start driving it,’ said Rob.

  ‘But,’ squawked Finley. ‘But… you can’t drive the radio car with the mast up. An alarm will go off!’

  ‘True,’ said Rob. ‘An alarm will go off, strongly advising against driving the radio car with the mast up. But you can actually ignore the alarm. It doesn’t immobilise the car. ‘

  ‘But it’s dangerous,’ said Finley.

  ‘So’s this,’ said Donna, levelling the shotgun at him. ‘Better hurry up.’

  Finley began to wrap the tape around the mast and his waist, passing it from hand to hand, back behind him, in awkward loops.

  ‘Keep going,’ said Rob. ‘Three or four times, nice and tight.’ He walked across to Donna and said, in a low voice, ‘What kept you?’

  ‘I had a bit of a problem on the track, on the way up,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of problem?’ He felt a surge of fear. As if this night wasn’t stressful enough.

  ‘Two people coming up here on a motorbike,’ she said.

  ‘Shit! Who?’

  ‘I don’t know, but don’t worry; they’re not a problem any more. I ran them off.’

  ‘What?’ He felt a pulse of amazement at what this woman was capable of. ‘You mean..?’

  ‘They’re deep in the undergrowth,’ she said. ‘They’re not coming out again any time soon. If at all. Problem solved.’

  He shook his head and let out a shaky breath. ‘This time tomorrow, we can forget about all of this. Put all of this behind us once and for all.’ He turned and saw that Finley was now fully taped up to the mast.

  ‘Did he sign?’ asked Donna.

  ‘He did,’ said Rob. ‘I made him sign all kinds of stuff; said he had to so he could have clearance to drive the radio car. He didn’t waste a second checking anything, stupid bastard.’

  ‘Show me.’

  He pulled an envelope from his pocket and extracted a piece of paper. On it, printed in Times New Roman, were the words: I’m sorry. I just wanted to be part of the BBC Radio Wessex family. But Dave Perry laughed at me and called me stupid, so I killed him. I killed Sheila Bartley too, because she said I couldn’t be her friend and she didn’t want my cakes. But now I’m sorry. I can’t stop feeling sorry. And I can’t take it any more.

  At the foot of the paragraph was Finley’s big, scrawly signature.

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ she said. ‘And it’s got his prints all over it, yes?’

  ‘I got him shuffling the papers around a bit,’ said Rob. ‘His prints will definitely be on it.’

  ‘But not yours?’

  ‘Gloved up all the way,’ said Rob, waving his vinyl-clad fingers.

  ‘One thing I’ve been wondering,’ she said. ‘How could he have put the mast up when he’s taped to it? That’s a dead man’s switch, isn’t it? You have to press and hold or it stops.’

  ‘There’s a remote, too,’ said Rob. ‘It’s in the car. We’ll put it into his hand afterwards.’

  ‘It is a really cool way to do it,’ said Donna. ‘If that bloody radio car was the centre of my world I might do the same.’

  ‘I’m done!’ called Finley. ‘What’s going to happen? What is all this about?’

  ‘Are you going to tell him?’ Donna asked.

  ‘I might as well,’ said Rob. ‘Poor little shit deserves to understand it, considering he’s taking the fall.’ He walked up to Finley and took the diminished reel of tape from him.

  ‘Finley, would you believe me if I told you it’s all about love?’ he said.

  28

  ‘Shit - my battery’s down to six per cent,’ groaned Kate, waving her phone in the air. ‘If I can keep it alive a bit longer, we might get high up enough for a decent signal. Bloody hell - there should be at least ONE provider covering 999 on this patch!’

  ‘Haven’t you got a radio?’ asked Lucas, limping along as fast as he could, beside her.

  ‘No. I’m off duty. Signed it back into the charging bay back at the station before I left.’ She waved the mobile a little higher, groaning with frustration.

  ‘Forget it,’ said Lucas. ’Your guys won’t get here in time anyway.’

  ‘How can you know that?’ asked Kate, tucking the phone away in her pocket and leaving Lucas to use his - equally hopeless for signal - for the torchlight. ‘I mean - I thought dowsing was just about finding stuff… or people. I didn’t think it could tell the future!’

  ‘It can’t,’ he said. ‘But… the patterns… the frequencies I pick up, they all vibrate in a way which tells me things. I can read extreme emotions in rocks and bricks and trees, even, if something violent or just really intense has happened there. I can also pick up a sense of… I don’t know… velocity, I guess you could call it. A sense of how fast something is travelling or unravelling. I can read trends and patterns like a weather forecaster… or like a doctor, reading symptoms.’

  He stumbled in a muddy pothole and she put her hand out and grabbed his arm, doing a bit of her own reading at this point. He was in pain. A lot of pain. God, she needed back up. Why the hell had she jumped on the back of a motorbike with him? She should have brought a team with them.

  But Lucas would never have gone for that. His talent was seriously blunted by the presence of those coppers, who still hated his guts
for embarrassing them back in the autumn. In truth, this had been her only option. It was going to be very difficult to explain at the morning briefing, though. If she ever reached the morning briefing.

  She wasn’t too great herself. The bike crash had left her feeling woozy and shivery. Regaining his balance, Lucas pulled his arm away from her, steadier now, as they journeyed on up the dark track, and she instinctively put her hand into her jacket pocket and found the smooth lump of plasticine. Digging her nails deeply into it gave her a faint sense of control. She let out a long breath and pushed on. ‘We must be close, surely, by now,’ she said. ‘This track has to end somewhere!’

  ‘There,’ said Lucas, pausing to point to a pale glow on the horizon.

  ‘That looks like headlights to me,’ said Kate. ‘Is Psycho Driver waiting up there for us?’ Before he could answer there was a burring in her pocket. She whipped out her phone. ‘There’s a bar!’ She waved it in the air. ‘I’ve had a message come through!’ She accessed the screen with her thumb print and opened the voicemail.

  A familiar voice rang out of the speaker. ‘Um… DS Sparrow? This is Josh Carnegy from Radio Wessex. You said to call if I thought of anything… suspicious. Well… I’ve just seen something suspicious outside. Finley Warner… the guy who’s been kind of stalking me… he just drove out of here in the radio car. I think he’s taken it off on some kind of… I dunno… joy ride? I think he might be going to the Wiltshire Showground, out near Devizes. He’s got a big thing about that site because that’s where he first saw the radio car. I’m going to follow him in a pool car. You might want to send someone.’ The call ended.

  Kate and Lucas stared at each other. ‘Is this the showground?’ Kate asked.

  Lucas nodded. ‘It’s just fields… but yeah, it could be. A lot of farmers rent them out for events in the summer.’

  ‘Was Finley our psycho driver?’ asked Kate. ‘Did he just try to kill us? Shit! I didn’t have him down as a killer. I really didn’t. Fuck, fuck, fuck! Michaels was right, I should have kept him in overnight and we wouldn’t b-’

  ‘Stop it.’ Lucas grabbed her wrist; his fingers cool against her skin. ‘Your instincts are good. Don’t assume anything. We need to get over to that light source and then we’re going to find out.’

  ‘Wait - I’ve got a signal now,’ said Kate. ‘I can call for back-oh shit on a stick!’ She nearly threw the useless chunk of metal and glass into the bushes as the whole thing conked out, battery spent. ‘Why now? Why?!’

  ‘Kate,’ said Lucas, clasping Sid against his chest with one hand and pressing on. ‘We don’t have time for this. We really don’t.’

  She hurried after him, dread tying a knot in the pit of her belly. For the second time in an hour, she wished she was an American cop, carrying a gun. Although she had no desire at all to see the UK go the way of the States, with a gun-toting vigilante in every street of every town, at times like this her martial arts prowess seemed woefully inadequate. She would love to be packing a Glock or a Beretta right now.

  The track was reaching its summit and broadening out into a field. Although her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark it was still difficult to make out much about the land around them, especially as the bright source of light, a two or three minute run across the field, was throwing everything else into deeper shadow. There were headlights - two sets of them - and a warmer glow spilling from inside the vehicles. The sky above was almost purple and she could just about make out hills on the horizon and the looming shape of a pylon in the distance.

  Lucas broke into a limping run. ‘This isn’t good,’ he puffed. ‘This isn’t good at all.’

  ‘Wait! We need a plan!’ she called out, running to catch him up. He didn’t reply but kept moving, lurching along determinedly, in spite of his injury. ‘Where are you going?’ she hissed, catching up with him. Because he wasn’t heading towards the headlights. If she wasn’t mistaken, he was running at a wonky, painful, full pelt for the distant pylon. What did he plan to do? Climb up it and get a better view?!

  But no. Suddenly he stopped dead. ‘Here,’ he said.

  ‘What - here?!’ she gasped, skidding to a halt. ‘There’s nothing here!’

  ‘No…’ He spun slowly around, suspending Sid by an inch of chain between his knuckles. ‘There’s nothing here yet.’

  ‘Dave Perry was a shit,’ said Rob Larkhill.

  In spite of everything that was happening, Finley was still shocked at the language. BBC personnel didn’t talk like this.

  ‘He was a shit from day one,’ went on Rob. ‘Right back at the start of his career. I started my career at Radio Wessex too, you see, all fresh-faced and idealistic, straight from university. I adored radio, every bit as much as you do, Finley.’

  Finley nodded, dumbly. He didn’t really know what to say. The roof of the radio car was cold and damp through his jeans and he was deeply confused about why they wanted him to be here, all taped up to it.

  ‘I was a BA… you know, a broadcast assistant,’ said Rob. ‘But I knew that I was going to go a lot higher than that. I had big plans. I did all the usual stuff, planning shows, jacking guests, recording packages, doing the What’s On bullies. I took the listener calls in tele-in, I went along as a gopher on the summer roadshows, I learned the radio car and did OBs in the middle of nowhere. I loved it all.’

  Finley nodded again, vigorously. He would love all of that too.

  ‘I even got together with a girl; someone I really loved,’ said Rob.

  ‘You’re so sweet,’ said Donna. She wasn’t holding the gun up any more. She had broken it so that it folded over like she wanted to reload it. Although she had no need to because she hadn’t fired it. Finley was glad she hadn’t fired it.

  ‘And she liked me, too,’ said Rob. ‘We were getting on just fine. Apart from Dave Perry. She worked on his show… he was the afternoon jock back then. I used to do packages for it and sometimes help in tele-in. I had a s-stammer back then,’ he said. Finley wondered if he’d just stammered on that ‘s’ deliberately. It hadn’t sounded like it.

  ‘He would take the piss out of me all the time; rip my packages to shreds if I got the tiniest thing wrong… He’d point out all the edit points; he was always going on about how he could hear an edit on any package. He said I edited like a sh-sh-sheep. Really baaaa-aadly. He’d even make jokes about it on air. He’d say: “And that was another Lanky Larkhill offering for you. Hey, Rob, don’t worry. We didn’t notice the joins!” and other crap like that. To the listeners! And I just had to take it. Because he was this big shot presenter, you know? So full of confidence and already being lined up for the breakfast show.’

  ‘He… he was a shit to me too,’ said Finley, trying to build a bridge with a word he’d never normally use.

  ‘He was a shit to everyone,’ said Donna. ‘But some of us got special treatment.’

  ‘He loved the ladies,’ said Rob, rolling his eyes. ‘He seduced Donna.’ Donna shrugged and looked at her feet as if she was sorry. ‘I didn’t blame her. He was Dave Perry. Why wouldn’t she be bowled over? He took her off me. And anyway… it was worse for her in the end.’

  ‘What… what happened?’ asked Finley, trying to stop his teeth chattering so loudly.

  ‘He got me pregnant and then dumped me for a newer, cuter researcher,’ said Donna. ‘And then, when I told him I was having the baby, he said he’d spread stories about me shagging the entire sports team and say it wasn’t his. He started calling me Kleenex. He said I was just something men used and chucked away. So I had the baby aborted.’

  Finley blinked. It all sounded horrible. Nothing like the BBC was meant to be. Was he supposed to feel sorry for Donna? He supposed he did… but he just didn’t understand what all this had to do with him.

  ‘So - twenty years later I come back,’ said Rob. ‘And this time I’m the one calling the shots. I’d gone off to other stations - Solent and Berkshire - and learned everything I needed to. Rose up through the ranks to take the
managing editor job at Wessex. And there he is… still the same piece of shit, The Voice of Wessex, for fuck’s sake. All chummy and matey, now I’m the boss - like we’d been best friends back in the day.’

  ‘Why didn’t you just sack him?’ asked Finley. ‘Because, like, I would.’

  ‘I would have loved to,’ said Rob. ‘And his RAJAR figures aren’t so hot. I might have done it in time.’

  ‘But..?’ asked Finley.

  ‘I got back together with Donna,’ he said, reaching out a hand and squeezing her shoulder. ‘We’d both been through a lot and we found each other again. We’ve been together for the past six months and we’ve been really happy. We might even get married.’

  ‘So… you did OK in the end, didn’t you?’ said Finley. ‘Um… I’m getting really cold up here. Can I get down now?’

  ‘We did OK?’ echoed Rob. ‘You think? Because, I don’t. Not really. We want kids, both of us. Donna’s only thirty-eight - it’s not too late. Except… a week ago we found out why she can’t. You want to know why? Because of Dave fucking Perry. Aborting his kid wrecked her ovaries and now she can’t ever have another baby.’

  Finley looked at Donna, who was staring at the ground again. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Even twenty years later he’s still having the last fucking laugh!’ said Rob, his voice rising and choking.

  ‘Um, OK… so…’ said Finley.

  ‘So? SO? So I KILLED HIM,’ said Rob. ‘It was me who grabbed him and took him out to the Shrewton mast and made him tape himself to it - and then I choked him with his own mic sock. And he fucking deserved it. He got what he had coming. For Donna, for me… for all the women he was feeling up whenever he got the chance. If anything, his death was too easy. But it was good to make him finally shut up.’

  There were a few beats of silence. Finley began to think about the TV shows he’d seen where the killer confesses everything to one person, usually in a deserted warehouse or up on the roof of a tall building. The person getting the confession quite often ended up dead. Finley gulped. Keep him talking. That’s what they’d say on the TV show.