by Carl Goodman
‘Do you think there’s a connection with Nicholson and Yu?’ Flynn asked.
‘Nicholson referred to parties.’ Eva paused. ‘I had the impression they might be significant social events for the church. Yu said the previous women had not attended them, but I’m not sure she wasn’t lying. Then again, why mention them at all if there is any connection? We wouldn’t have known about them.’
‘Nicholson and Yu?’ Jamie Newton wondered.
‘Predatory,’ Eva said. ‘I’m pretty sure Nicholson was after Harred and Yu seemed to be after anything with a pulse. It makes me wonder what these parties are about.’
‘So what did Harred mean by destroyer?’ Flynn asked.
‘Damned if I know,’ Eva said.
* * *
The mist became a fog. That afternoon it settled over the county, rolling in up the river and turning nearby buildings into grey silhouettes. Eva stood at the window and stared out. The world beyond lay wreathed in a dense autumnal blanket that dampened the noise of the town and hid its sins from sight. Car headlights drifted like chiffon ghosts through quietened streets.
She needed to meet the relatives of Alicia Khan, if only to give them a personal update. Family support had been on hand, and Raj had kept in close touch with them, but part of the job involved showing her face. Khan had been a local girl. Her parents lived near Dorking. She could have probably commuted to university, Eva thought, but then again who of Alicia’s age would not have relished the opportunity to have their own place, albeit a small one, in a lively student town?
Eva left the others in the incident room and let the control room know where she was going in case anyone urgently needed her. She drove slowly through obfuscated streets, up the rise of Kingston Hill and on towards the A3.
She checked to make sure her fog lights were on when she reached the A-road. Most cars seemed to be driving sensibly, showing some accommodation for the weather conditions. The occasional moron hacked past in the outside lane, accelerated between traffic cameras and then braked hard as they reached the canary-yellow boxes. We need more patrols, Eva thought as she stuck to the inside lane. It’s no good issuing a speeding ticket after one of these stupid bastards has killed someone.
Somewhere around Chessington her phone chimed. It sat in a cradle above the dash; she saw she had a message. It was just two words. A name: Robert Isherwood.
Who the hell is Robert Isherwood? She checked the number. It meant nothing to her, nor did it mean anything to her contacts book. She spoke the keyword and dictated a text to the phone. ‘Who is this?’ she asked. She waited for a minute but there was no reply. ‘Call Rebecca Flynn,’ she told her phone. Flynn picked up after four rings. ‘Are you near a computer?’ Eva asked her.
‘I am now,’ Flynn said after a second, just as Eva saw a flash. Something caught her eye as Flynn spoke and she had to glance in her wing mirror. The headlights of a lorry. One that had presumably realised it was going too fast for the road conditions and decided to slow down. After another hundred metres it tucked in behind her.
‘I’ve just had a text. I don’t know who from or what it’s about. Could you look into it for me, please?’
‘No problem,’ Flynn said. ‘What do you need?’ Eva gave her the number. ‘PNC says that’s a pay-as-you-go SIM,’ Flynn told her. ‘I’ve put in a request for details. It’ll take a minute or two. What did the message say?’
‘It was just a name. Robert Isherwood.’
‘Weird,’ Flynn agreed. ‘I’ll do public and PNC searches.’ Eva could hear the sound of a keyboard being hammered. She glanced in her rear-view mirror. The lorry was a little too close, and so she accelerated slightly.
Flynn spoke again after a few seconds. ‘Robert Isherwood was another local businessman. He was killed in a car accident in April of this year.’
‘Any suspicious circumstances?’ The idiot of a lorry driver had sped up too. He was riding her tail lights, Eva guessed, a stupid way of driving in fog if ever there was one.
‘Depends what you mean by suspicious. Isherwood was killed when his car crossed the central reservation of the M3. Fucking hell,’ Flynn added.
‘You’ve got photos, I take it?’
‘Yeah. He front-ended a lorry coming in the opposite direction. He was driving a Mercedes sports and it flipped and went right under the lorry. The lorry driver was in intensive care for two weeks but he pulled through.’
More than this wanker is going to do if he doesn’t get off my arse, Eva thought. She sped up again. ‘So what was it?’
‘That’s the thing. There’s no explanation. The car was mechanically sound, there was light traffic, it was a clear, sunny day, and Isherwood was not on the phone. He was speeding to be sure but nothing crazy.’ She could hear Flynn clicking through screens. The lorry decided to overtake. ‘No drugs in his system, no history of mental illness, nothing that would suggest outside influence, but according to witnesses Isherwood seemed to suddenly lose control of the car, hit the central reservation, flipped, became airborne and was crushed by a lorry in the opposite lane. The centre lane,’ she added. ‘He really took a tumble.’
A scaffolding lorry, some bloody builder. When he passed her she would make a note of his licence number and have him sent him a warning letter for driving like an idiot. ‘Do one more search for me? Check him against patient records from the Chatham Centre?’
More keystrokes. An intake of breath. ‘Guess what?’ Flynn said. ‘He was a patient around the time of Stepanov, Swain and Markham.’
‘Guilty as charged,’ Flynn said. ‘The report on the phone number has come back.’
‘Go on,’ Eva said. The lorry was a bit sodding close. She slowed down.
‘Pay-as-you-go SIM, I’ve got the supermarket details but it looks like it was bought with cash. It’s been put into an expensive handset, though. Not somebody who knows about covering their tracks.’
‘Location?’
‘A car park, about a mile down the road from the Chatham Centre.’
For some reason the name of Nicola Milne sprang instantly to mind. ‘CCTV?’
‘I’m on it,’ Flynn said.
The Cobham exit was coming up. The lorry eased past her. She checked her dash. She had let her speed creep up to nearly seventy, which wasn’t clever in this fog. The lorry was doing more than that. She started to pull back again.
He swerved.
She felt the jolt as he slammed into the side of her. A sudden screeching of metal that sounded terrifyingly familiar. Not an accident, she thought as she struggled to keep control of the car, there’s no way that was an accident. It wasn’t. He hit her again.
She screamed. She could hear Flynn yelling down the phone, demanding to know what was happening but she couldn’t make coherent sounds. He was trying to shove her into the crash barrier. She was on the hard shoulder. He scraped against her. Her windscreen shattered. She was locked against him, she couldn’t get away. Another screech of metal, this time from the other side. She looked in horror at the passenger door as it was ripped away.
She tried to brake but she was locked to him. She couldn’t get free. He was going to crush her. The junction was going up. It sloped. If he pushed her through the barrier there she would have a thirty-foot drop down to the slip road below. Realisation struck her. She would not survive that.
Do something! The constellation of Orion, suddenly disappearing. The image flashed into her head. Not again, she snarled. Not fucking again.
The car was trashed. So use it, she thought. Eva slammed the gearbox into reverse then shoved her foot to the floor. Half the bodywork on the driver’s side came away, but she felt herself sliding backwards. The lorry cut into her lane, onto the hard shoulder and tried to crush her again. Eva pulled on the handbrake.
Suddenly she was spinning. She hit the crash barrier and bounced. The airbags in the side of the car finally decided to deploy. Thank Christ they hadn’t done that before. The force on her neck dragged her sideways, the sea
t belt cut into her throat. Horns blaring as cars tried to avoid her. A sudden crashing sound. The lorry was spilling its load. An avalanche of twenty-foot steel poles came tumbling along the road but she was facing the wrong way on a three-lane highway with traffic hurtling towards her in the fog. She felt the poles slam into the back of her. One careened off the roof and rolled towards the central reservation.
Silence.
The engine died. The lorry had limped away, halfway up the slip road. When she looked around she saw the door was open. The driver had made a run for it, into the fog. Eva gripped the steering wheel. Sweet Jesus, she thought. I’m alive.
Then a car hit her.
Chapter Sixteen
Lights exploded behind her eyes as her head struck the wheel. For a moment she didn’t know who she was or where she was, but then the pain hit her and she lifted her head, saw what was coming and screamed again. A car had struck her three-quarters on. Now it blocked the outside lane. Through its shattered window she could see the pale glow of headlights that were not slowing down fast enough.
Another impact. The car slammed into her once again. She felt her neck snap back with the force of it, but before it could twist she hit the headrest. A wall of headlights slewed to a halt. Cars at every angle across the road. And for a moment, silence.
She tried to focus. She could see at least two other cars that had collided, one was in almost as bad a way as hers. Something stung her eyes. She felt a gnawing in the pit of her stomach as she recognised the acrid stench. One of the cars was leaking petrol.
Her door wouldn’t open. She shoved against it, but it wouldn’t budge. When she pressed her seat belt it unclipped, though. She crawled over the passenger seat and fell out of the wrecked vehicle onto the road.
Eva dragged herself to her feet. The world spun around her, but she managed to stay upright. She could now see three cars twisted together besides hers. The driver of the middle car had managed to get out. A man in his thirties, white and shaking. ‘What the fuck happened?’ he demanded.
You were driving too fucking fast in fog, she wanted to yell at him. Instead she lied. ‘Scaffolding lorry shed its load.’
‘Jesus,’ he gasped. Then he said: ‘I can smell petrol.’
It came from the first car that hit her. The airbag had deployed, but the driver wasn’t moving. Eva staggered towards it. When she reached it she saw a man in his fifties, face covered in blood. Eva tried the door but it wouldn’t open. ‘Help me,’ she yelled at the man from the middle car. He hesitated so she yelled again. ‘Now!’
Together they pulled at the door but it wouldn’t budge. Eva leaned through the shattered window and tried to undo the man’s seat belt but she couldn’t reach it. ‘Let me try,’ the man said, but the partially deflated airbag blocked him. ‘Hang on, I’ve got a knife in the car.’ He ran back to his own vehicle.
Why? Eva wondered, but it wasn’t the time to ask. The man seemed to be trying to open the glove compartment of his damaged car. He kept tugging.
She didn’t recognise the sound at first. It took another moment before a pale-orange flicker registered itself in her mind. The man from the middle car saw it before she did. She saw him waving his hand through the wreckage in front of her. He’s still alive, she thought when she saw flames rising from near the fuel tank. He can’t die. He survived the crash. He’s still alive.
She tried to reach his seat belt again. She could feel the heat now. The back seat was starting to burn. Acrid smoke drifted into her eyes and throat. Somebody was yelling. She couldn’t hear what.
She couldn’t undo the buckle of the seat belt. She lay across his chest and reached down, but something still blocked her hand. The smoke was choking. She tried to hold her breath, but the heat from the flames was becoming painful. Suddenly, she felt an arm around her waist, pulling at her. She tried to stop herself being dragged back through the window, but she didn’t have the strength. She had to let go of the door frame. As she did so she saw the man in the driver’s seat open his eyes.
The man from the middle car dragged her away, but in any event she could no longer stand the heat. They fell against the tangle of the crash barrier and watched, both with hands pressed tight over their ears, as flames consumed the wreckage.
* * *
Corrine Sutton hobbled to meet her. The look of horror on her face said everything. ‘What the hell happened?’ she demanded.
‘I had a car accident, ma’am,’ Eva said. She sat on a bed in a cubicle in A&E and pulled a hospital gown around her. ‘I’m okay. A few bumps and bruises but I got off pretty lightly considering.’
Sutton stared. ‘Sure it was an accident?’
There had been witnesses. There was no point in lying. ‘No.’
‘So somebody tried to kill you?’
That much was bleeding obvious, Eva thought. ‘It would appear so.’ Sutton did not know about her investigation into Razin’s man, nor could she. Eva did not know how to square that particular circle, but luckily Sutton closed the loop for herself.
‘Is this something to do with Colin Lynch?’
She felt like one small weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Eva lied. ‘I can’t say for certain. It seems likely.’
Sutton kept staring. ‘So his people are still after you?’ Eva could only shrug.
Flynn, Newton and Chakrabati appeared at the curtain shortly after that, all of them with horrified expressions painted on their faces. Newton started to say something but it was Flynn who surprised her. She stepped into the cubicle, threw her arms around Eva’s neck and hugged her so hard that after a minute or so Eva had to ask her to stop.
‘Sorry,’ Flynn muttered after a while. She turned suddenly and left. Eva, Newton and Chakrabati stared at each other in astonished silence.
* * *
Even Alastair Hadley looked unsettled when he saw her bruised face. ‘Did the doctor give you a clean bill of health?’
Still covering your arse, Eva thought. ‘I don’t really know, sir, I discharged myself. It’s funny but I find I’ve lost interest in hospitals.’
They met at the station again, near their usual spot. The mist still clung. Not so dense now, but the beams of car headlights still formed pale glows that pushed in front of them like bow waves. Street lamps flickered into life and lit another layer of haze that hung in diffuse strands over pavements shining with rainwater.
Hadley paused when he heard the note in her voice, but for once he didn’t slap her down. ‘I take it there’s no doubt this was an attempt on your life?’
Eva didn’t blink. ‘None whatsoever. Sir,’ she added.
Hadley scowled. ‘I accept that you must be upset.’
She did her best not to scream in his face. ‘I’m not upset, sir. I’m absolutely fucking furious.’ His face twisted itself into a snarl, but before he could speak Eva continued. ‘Leaking news about my background to news websites, well I didn’t like it obviously but it seemed like a legitimate ploy. A distraction, sort of within the rules of engagement, if you know what I mean. If he’d just tried to scare me on the motorway, well again it would have been a ploy and I’d have had to roll with it. But he didn’t. Instead he sent some reckless motherfucker to try and smear me all over the Cobham intersection and in the process burned to death a bloke with two teenage kids whose only crime was to be a mediocre driver. So I’ve got to be honest with you, sir,’ she spat. ‘Up until now I was only interested in this case because I had you breathing down my neck, twisting my arm and making threats. But now it’s fucking personal. I’ll take my chances any day of the week. I know what the game is and how it’s played. That poor bastard who screamed himself to death though, all he was doing was sloping off home early because of the fog. That doesn’t merit a death sentence in my books. That’s not something you get to die for.’
‘Easy, Harris,’ Hadley said. For one perverse moment he almost sounded sympathetic.
‘With respect, sir, no, sir,’ Eva yelled. ‘The time for easy is
over. Razin needs to be sent a message. He needs to be slapped down. We need to reassert our authority over this fucking county. How do we hit back, sir?’ she demanded. ‘How do we rattle that motherfucker’s cage?’
Hadley stared at her. For a moment he was speechless. She expected him to turn on her, but despite her rage she was astonished when he didn’t. ‘You may actually be right,’ he said after a moment. ‘Razin acts with impunity, and that has to stop. He needs to know there are consequences. How do we do that?’
Her thoughts raced. She hadn’t dared believe he would pay attention to her, but now it seemed Hadley was actually looking to her for an idea. ‘There’s a pub on the Allen estate that has a reputation,’ she told him. ‘The landlord’s thought to be involved in all sorts of crap but weirdly enough nobody has ever been able to pin anything on him. Does that sound familiar, sir?’
‘Both familiar and fitting of the profile,’ Hadley agreed. ‘Are you thinking of paying a visit?’
‘I’d want to find more evidence of a connection to Razin, but yes. I’d need some excuse to turn the place over. I reckon a dozen uniforms stomping all over the bar should send a message.’
She had never previously seen the look she now saw on his face. Hadley seemed almost contemplative. ‘I agree about firmer evidence of a connection to Razin because we wouldn’t want to waste the opportunity. Leave that with me, though. There are people I can talk to about that.’ He meant phone taps and who knew what other forms of electronic surveillance, Eva guessed. She almost shuddered. Cowan had been right. Hadley was not a run-of-the-mill police officer.