by A D FOX
There was a click and something cold came to rest on the back of her neck. ‘Don’t say a fucking word,’ growled a female voice. ‘Don’t move. Just lift your hands up where I can see them.’
Kate realised, too late, that in standing up she had turned herself into silhouette against the light of the cars. Keeping equally still, watching in the dark, the gunwoman had easily found her. ‘Who are you?’ Kate said, quietly, raising her hands, Lucas’s mobile in one of them. ‘I recognise your voice.’
‘Shut up or I’ll blow your head off.’ The cold nose of the gun slid up to the base of her skull. ‘Turn around slowly.’
Kate turned, and as she did so her contact with the shotgun remained unbroken; her adversary was turning a wider circle, keeping the barrel tight against her skull. Kate considered dropping suddenly and dashing left or right into the darkness, but she sensed that this woman was too sharp for that and the chances of getting a bullet through her skull, her shoulder blade or her spine were better than good. So when the woman growled ‘Walk’, she did just that.
‘Drop the phone.’
She did; hearing her last contact with the outside world thud into the grass.
‘Keep walking. Don’t turn around. Don’t make any noise. I am seriously fucked off at you and I’m that close to pulling my trigger.’
Kate didn’t say anything. She just kept walking; her misty little dream of wrapping up this murder case in a matter of three days evaporating into the night. She only hoped Lucas would get Finley away and go for help. There was a further three or four minutes of silent walking, during which she stumbled twice and fully expected to be shot when her captor assumed she was doing a runner. But there was a dim light throwing her shadow ahead and she realised the shotgun sight must have a torch attachment, meaning the woman wielding it could see that her stumbles were genuine.
Eventually a dark shape loomed ahead of them… some kind of barn or shed. Kate was marched up to it and instructed to push against a lichen-furred wooden door. She did so and it gave after a couple of shoves, held shut only by its rain-swollen frame. Inside it smelled of damp straw and diesel. There was a click and a single dangling lightbulb in a cage lit up the room. It was a large shed, rather than a barn - perhaps twice the size of the average double garage. The floor was compacted mud and straw. There were sacks of feed along the far wall and an old Kubota tractor in one corner, its shovel nose resting on the ground.
‘Sit against that,’ said the woman, whom Kate was beginning to recognise.
‘Donna..?’ she murmured. ‘Donna Wilson? Really? It’s you?’
‘Shut up and sit down,’ said Donna. Her hair was tucked into a woollen beanie hat and she was wearing a padded Barbour coat, jeans and wellies, but her smooth, well-preserved features held the same control and reserve that Kate had seen in Rob Larkhill’s office.
Suddenly, Kate realised who the man with her was. As recent memory flashed past she recognised the thinning hair and the slightly stooped gait. It was bloody Rob Larkhill! Sinking to the ground against the tractor she felt quite stunned. She had not seen that coming. A reel landed by her feet. ‘Tape up your ankles,’ said Donna. ‘Tightly.’
‘No,’ said Kate.
‘What?’ Donna waved the gun at her.
‘No. I won’t. Because then you’ll just suffocate me,’ she said. ‘You can shoot me instead. It’ll be much harder to cover your tracks that way, though.’
Donna stood staring at her for a few seconds, looking furious. As she opened her mouth to speak again, Kate grabbed her moment, picked up the heavy reel of tape and threw it. It struck Donna hard on the jaw, eliciting a shriek, and then Kate was on her feet, hands raised. She struck out with a high kick, aiming to dislodge the shotgun. She didn’t miss - the gun spun out into the air and sailed across the shed. Donna shrieked again and dived for it and Kate got a kick in to the other side of her face. Donna jerked sideways and hit the ground with a loud grunt of pain.
Kate ran for the gun but Donna was already scrambling for it. She would never have reached it in time if Kate hadn’t tripped on some rusty iron chains coiled on the floor, hidden in the shadow of the tractor. Tipping through the air, she let loose her own shriek of fury as Donna grabbed the gun, twisted up onto her knees and drove the butt in a sharp jab towards her foe’s head.
Kate felt the impact for a moment and had enough time to curse herself again, before she lost consciousness.
Lucas spotted a reel of gaffer on the turf within easy reach of his squirming, whining captive. He grabbed it, flipped the man onto his front and snagged both his hands together, glad of his large hands, strong fingers and enough angry momentum to get the tape wound tightly around the man’s wrists before he could break free.
Once done, his captive sagged onto the ground, face in the grass, and fell silent.
Lucas paused, sorely tempted to kick him in the head for what he’d just seen him attempt to do, but then a whimper from the roof of the radio car caught his attention. The young man by the mast was still pulling at his bindings, tears tracking down his face, shock permeating through his energy patterns. Lucas realised he needed to free the guy and get him inside the car and wrapped up warm, or he was going to go into shutdown. ‘Come on,’ he said, striding across to the car. ‘Let me help.’
It wasn’t easy. The tape was wound around the mast and his waist several times and locating the end of it was impossible in the dark. Lucas reached into his pockets, trying to locate his Swiss Army knife. ‘Finley… is it? What the hell happened?’ he asked, as much to keep the young man talking as to find out the answer. Where was that bloody penknife?
‘I… I don’t really know,’ said Finley, through chattering teeth. ‘They wanted to k-k-kill me.’
‘Who are they?’ asked Lucas.
‘They’re from the BBC. That’s Rob Larkhill - the station manager - and the woman is Donna, his secretary. They… they wanted everyone to think I w-was a murder-er-er…’
‘OK,’ said Lucas, still rummaging. ‘Breathe… deep and slow. You’re going to be OK.’
‘Oh, he’s really not.’ There was a click and Lucas closed his eyes. Well, he hadn’t dowsed that, had he? The return of Shotgun Bitch had eluded Sid.
‘Step away from the saddo on the roof,’ said the woman. ‘Hands up.’
Lucas was all out of moves. He recognised the confidence with which she held that weapon - and read the cold determination in her patterns. It didn’t take a master dowser to work out that she meant business. He stepped away and raised his hands.
‘Now, slowly, bend over and - keeping one hand up - pick up that tape,’ she said. Lucas did. ‘Now tape up his wrists. Properly.’
Lucas let out a long sigh, holding up the reel. ‘What’s the point of all this, really?’ he said. ‘You must know it’s just got way too complicated for you to pull this off, whatever the hell it was you thought you were doing.’
‘Shut up and do it.’
‘Your best bet now is to do a runner,’ he said.
She suddenly swerved around him and pressed the barrel of the shotgun right up against Finley’s temple. ‘I am SO done with all this,’ she said as Finley squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lips together in a compressed white line. ‘And I am this close to blasting his face off. So do up the FUCKING TAPE or his brains will be all over your nice leather jacket. Followed shortly by your own.’
Lucas did as he was told. She was too far away to risk lunging for that shotgun. He could only play for time and hope that Kate would come back to intervene somehow. She’d vanished with his phone. She might finally have found some signal and called in that legendary back up she’d been promising all night.
But Kate did not come back. He finished taping Finley, giving his joined hands a sad little squeeze which was not going to be any reassurance and then stepped back. ‘Done,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Finley… just stay put like a good boy and I’ll be back soon. Rob,’ she grinned across to the man on
the floor. ‘Hang in there, babe, I’ll be back for you too. I can’t risk dropping the gun to release you just now.’
‘It’s OK,’ grunted Larkhill, still nuzzling the ground. ‘Just hurry back, OK?’
‘I will,’ she said. ‘I’ll sort out these two jokers and then we’ll carry on as planned. Don’t you worry.’
She marched Lucas up the dark hillside, the barrel nudging between his shoulder blades. He stumbled once or twice but she was locked on to him and he couldn’t sense a moment to get away. The patterns around them both signalled that his odds of doing a successful runner were slim… and he was also picking up that this woman had put Kate somewhere. He needed to know where. Whether she was OK.
They walked towards the outline of a door sketched in electric light. He recalled he had vaguely sensed an outbuilding off to his left when they’d first entered the field.
‘Push open the door and go in,’ he was instructed. He did so, stepping into what turned out to be a shed containing a load of feed sacks, a tractor and the body of Kate Sparrow.
For a second his heart seemed to ricochet around his chest and he felt suffocated with horror… but then his dowsing sense elbowed the personal panic away and informed him that she was still breathing. She lay on her side, eyes closed and blood dripping out of her hairline. Her feet were tethered to the tractor with more of that fucking gaffer tape and her hands were bound in the same way, behind her back.
‘Take the bag off and drop it.’ He shrugged Kate’s satchel off and dumped it. There was a central post in the shed. The gunwoman made him sit down with a leg on either side of it and then tape up his ankles. Then she paused. How was she going to get his wrists secured? She would have to put the gun down. It was a two-hander. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Attach one wrist to the post. Now.’
‘Jesus. Have you got shares in Duck Tape?’ he muttered. But he did as he was ordered and then, managing to keep the gun cocked and pointed at his face, she did a fair job of taping his free wrist to it too.
She stood back and then checked the satchel, finding only a few papers and the biscuit tin inside it. She chucked it all into a corner and then stood and looked at him. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she smirked, and then left.
‘Kate!’ he called, as soon as she’d gone. Kate didn’t reply. ‘Detective Sergeant Sparrow!’ he yelled.
She stirred and groaned. Her eyelids flickered apart and she struggled to focus. ‘What..?’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit stuck up.’
She lifted her head, wincing. ‘Where’s Donna gone?’
‘To rescue lover boy, I think,’ he said. ‘She’ll be back.’
‘She’s the Terminator in wellingtons,’ mumbled Kate.
Their captors returned five or ten minutes later. Larkhill was still picking gaffer tape glue off his wrists as they stood in the shed doorway, planning what to do next. Kate looked dazed and only half aware and Lucas thought it best to say nothing.
‘We can still make this work,’ Donna said, walking straight over to him and searching his jacket pockets. ‘Bingo!’ she said, holding up the remote control he’d wrestled off Larkhill. ‘OK. Finley’s still in place. All we need to do is now is get that mast up as planned. Nothing’s changed there.’
‘But what about these two?’ said Larkhill, glancing from Lucas to Kate as if they couldn’t hear him.
‘I know her - DS Sparrow, isn’t it? But who the hell is he?’ said Donna.
‘I think it’s the dowser guy who was on Louella’s show this week,’ said Larkhill. ‘Lucas something. Helped solve the Runner Grabber case.’ He glanced at Lucas as if for confirmation. Lucas stared stonily back at him.
There was an upended crate near the door. Donna sank onto it, looking tired. ‘Well, as much as I’d like to shoot them, it’s better if I don’t.’ She broke the shotgun, leaned it against the crate, and took a small leather cartridge bag off her shoulder, dropping it next to the twelve-bore. ‘It’ll be too easy to trace back to me. No… dead in the bushes is where they belong. I thought they were dead. My bad. I should’ve checked properly.’
‘OK - so we get them back to the bike crash site - but how do we..?’
Donna looked at Lucas, narrowing her eyes speculatively. ‘He was going too fast, trying to impress, when he lost control and killed himself and his girlfriend.’ She turned to look at a stack of metal farm implements in the corner near the door. ‘A spade to the head will look a lot like blunt force trauma from a bike crash, won’t it?’
Lucas saw Larkhill gulp and nod his head, flicking his beloved a glance which was a mixture of love, admiration and fear. ‘Same for her?’ he said, staring down at Kate who now seemed to be unconscious again.
‘Better,’ said Donna, pulling a small plastic bag from her Barbour pocket. ‘She looks out of it but you can’t be sure. I’ve got Rohypnol left over from the Sheila thing - we can get that into her. It’ll look like he tried a bit of date rape drug on her and convinced her to go out on a ride with him.’ She shook the white powder inside the bag. ‘There’s enough here to finish her off.’
Larkhill rubbed his face. ‘It’s all a bit close to the site of Finley’s suicide though, isn’t it? Won’t the police make a connection?’
‘I don’t fucking know,’ snapped Donna. ‘Maybe they will. Maybe they’ll think the pair of them were chasing Finley… maybe they’ll think this Lucas guy drugged her first and then they saw the radio car and went on a jolly to catch up with it. Honestly? Who gives a shit as long they don’t connect it to you or me? And let’s be honest, Wiltshire Police aren’t exactly ace criminologists, are they? Look how long it took them to solve the Runner Grabber case? Probably never would have if it hadn’t been for dowser boy, here.’
‘Hmmm. And maybe they won’t find the bodies of these two for a while,’ mused Larkhill. ‘How deep into the undergrowth did their bike go?’
‘Deep enough,’ she said.
Larkhill looked at Lucas warily. ‘It’s going to be heavy work… getting him all the way to the crash site… it won’t be easy. Bodies are dead weight. And I’m worried about tyre tracks. If the Jeep tracks are noticed…’
‘Or for god’s sake, it’s fine,’ said Donna, rummaging in the corner. ‘We’ll drug them both. Then, when they’re off their heads, we can just lead them back there like a pair of sheep, bash him on the skull, top her up to a fatal dose and put them back in the bushes.’
‘Jesus Christ on a bike,’ said Lucas, unable to stay quiet any longer. ‘Do you have any idea how insane the pair of you sound? You’re never going to pull this off. You’re not criminal masterminds. You’re just a pair of overexcited am drams with a BBC email.’
Which was probably the wrong thing to say because three seconds later Donna hit him in the face with a spade.
‘I’ve stunned him,’ he heard her say as he drifted away. ‘We’ll do the Rohypnol plan; get it down his neck now while he’s out of it.’
He felt them move his head, tip his chin upwards, then drop some powder into his mouth. He groaned and jerked his head away. The plastic bag fell onto the floor and Donna cursed. ‘Shit. Half of it’s spilled. We’re going to need more. I’ll give the copper a bit of what’s left - make sure she stays under. Then I’ll have to go back to the car for some more. Shouldn’t take too long.’
‘Donna… how do you come to have all this Rohypnol..?’ Larkhill asked, a touch of anxiety in his tone.
‘My old dad used to have insomnia,’ she said, crouching down over Kate. ‘He got it on prescription. I found shedloads of it in the bathroom cabinet after he’d died last year.’
‘It’s for insomnia?’ queried Larkhill, going very quiet as Lucas began to slip further away.
‘Well, that’s what he told me. He could have been drugging and murdering women for the last decade his life, I suppose. Wouldn’t put it past the nasty old bastard…’
31
Pool cars were meant to be kept topped up with fuel at all times. It was a rule. You
went out on a job and then, on your way back, if the needle was even a hair’s breadth lower than half a tank full, you had to take it to the local garage and fill it up on the BBC tab. Malc would give you a seriously hard stare if you failed in this; Josh remembered this from his early radio car days.
That’s how it should have been, but of course, on the night when Josh Carnegy needed to use the pool car, in a state of emergency, he found the bloody thing running on fumes. So only fifteen minutes into his hair-raising adventure out in the wilds of Wiltshire in the depths of the night, he’d been forced to pull in to a garage. Still, it was probably for the best. With any luck he would arrive at the showground just in time to see a flood of blue flashing lights and Finley Warner getting slammed up against the side of the radio car, frisked and arrested.
All he would need to do was lean against his vehicle, hands in pockets, and wait for that rather hot detective to come over and thank him for the tip-off while they drove Finley off to the slammer. He imagined the attention he would get at work the next day when he rolled in mid-morning and everyone knew he’d got the police onto the psycho jock-killer and had been there at the end of the chase. ‘Look, I was just at the right place at the right time when I saw him drive off,’ he would shrug, nonchalantly. ‘You would’ve done the same.’
But would they? Who else would jump into a car and go off in hot pursuit? Well… maybe not exactly hot pursuit, because he was now a good twenty or thirty minutes behind Finley and really more in lukewarm pursuit. This was more reccying than chasing. Following a hunch. He reworked his nonchalant speech. ‘Look… it’s no big deal. I just remembered where Finley first fell in love with the radio car - god knows he’s told me often enough - and then decided to go and check it out.’
Yeah. That was better.
He overshot the turning to the West Wiltshire Showground; the sign was small and it was very dark. He realised pretty soon, though, U-turned on the deserted B-road, and located the entrance. It was only after he’d been bumping along the long narrow track for four or five minutes that he began to feel a sense of misgiving. Perhaps this wasn’t such a great idea. Maybe he should just go home and call the police again. Problem was, he couldn’t turn around on this track and by now he was too far along it to reverse. It would take him all night to navigate those ruts and potholes in reverse. No. He needed to reach the field, turn around, and go home. Have a bit of common sense.