The Anagramist

by David W Robinson

  To compound matters, news had reached him via Iris Mullins that Sam had taken a step backwards. At their last appointment, a week previously, she had been in a much better frame of mind, and had opened up a little more to him. Drake confidently expected her to accept the Landshaven post within the next couple of weeks, after which, he could move on to preparing her for a return to work.

  Despite warnings from Dr Southam that she was still at a stage of finely balanced indecision, Iris had pressed too hard, and Sam had slipped back into her previous mood of surliness, and was refusing to cooperate or even speak to the staff once again.

  In relating the tale, Iris was full of apology, in response to which, Drake vented some of his annoyance on her, delivered in a forthright lecture on the need to read his reports closely, and not put groundless interpretations on them. He was due to see Sam in a little over twelve hours, and he anticipated a torrid time at Peace Garden.

  Climbing the steep hill out of Howley centre, turning onto Moor Heights Lane, his turgid thoughts mumbling and grumbling, only half his mind on his driving, all he really wanted for now was to get in the house, take a quick shower, and flake in front of the fire until Becky got home at about eleven o’clock.

  He passed the last of his neighbours, almost half a mile from his home, and the area plunged into darkness as the last of the sparse streetlights disappeared behind him. He had always thought it one of the loneliest areas in the town, but then, that had been half the appeal of the place when they bought it. His job entailed dealing with people; so did Becky’s. What better antidote than living in splendid isolation on the edge of the moors?

  The address was 196 Moor Heights Lane, which had long been a puzzle to him. How had the powers that be calculated the number? His nearest neighbours were half a mile away, and consisted of a row of cottages, numbered two to twenty-six, and according to his researches there had never been any property on the intervening land. Was his house numbered purely as a guess? Had the post office decided that it would be number 196 if someone had built on the intervening gap? Or was it simply a case that they needed a house number, and they were leaving a suitable space for future building developments?

  His was also the last house on the road. Beyond it there was nothing but the moors, grazing land for sheep and dotted with the occasional reservoirs. There were several lanes leading off to the left, all of which led back into Howley, but only farmland and moors to the right, and straight ahead the road wound its way to the A59 in the vicinity of Bolton Abbey, one of the recognised gateways to the Yorkshire Dales.

  But that very seclusion presented problems of its own, especially in the winter, and not all of them related to the weather. In the early days, they had found themselves the infrequent target of burglars, and they were compelled to invest a considerable sum of money in advanced security precautions. At the slightest hint of movement, a PIR system automatically switched on powerful lights flooding both front and rear of the house, and they stayed on for several minutes. The intruder alarm met with all the necessary legal requirements, but the house’s location in total darkness meant that the flashing blue light fixed to the front wall could be seen from river’s edge in the town centre.

  It was always his policy to reverse into the broad drive. It was marginally safer than driving in, and then having to reverse out onto the lane. As he pulled past, he noticed a Renault Clio parked thirty yards further on, and the alarms began to ring in his head. Intruder.

  Other than a breakdown, or workmen repairing the dry stone walls and fences, there was nothing out here which would account for a car parked on the roadside, but in this instance, it was too late in the day for any workmen, and a breakdown looked unlikely. As far as he could ascertain, there was no one in the car, and in this day and age of the mobile telephone, it was even less likely that the driver would leave the vehicle and go in search of a phone box, the nearest of which was almost a mile back down the lane.

  Senses on full alert, he reversed into the drive, killed the engine, and flipped the switch to unlock and open the boot. As he climbed out, the floodlights came on and brought false daylight to the concrete drive and surrounding areas.

  His was a large property, and even with the security lighting on, there were many places where an intruder might hide, particularly in the deeper shadows on the inside of the dry stone walls to the left side and rear of the house. He reached into the boot and took out the wheel brace/tyre iron. Only about nine inches in length, bent at one end to facilitate the removal of the wheel nuts, it was nevertheless forged of steel, and it would be enough to persuade unwelcome visitors that the best course of action was to scram.

  He took out his smartphone, activated the torch, and walked to the left corner of the house, from where he shone the light along the line of the front and side dry stone walls, adding to the illumination of the floodlights. At that distance, the torch was poor, but it was still enough to let him see that there was no one in hiding.

  He switched off the torch, and made his way back to the front door, fished into his pocket for his key, and inserted it into the lock.

  The door was composed of white uPVC, but there were two, decorative glass panes set into the upper quadrants. As mirrors, they were poor. Painted roses and the general frosting of the glass yielded nothing other than dim reflections, but as he inserted the key in the lock and turned it, he noticed movement in the glass. It came from behind and to his right. Whoever it was must have been hiding on the other side of the dry stone wall to the right, and he had climbed over while Drake had his back turned to check the side and rear gardens. Now, according to his estimate, the intruder stood at the front of his car.

  He began to turn.

  There was no sound. The first Drake knew of anything was intolerable pain radiating from the back of his left shoulder, accompanied by a thud as the knife hacked through his jacket and shirt, and sank into the muscles on the outside of his shoulder blade.

  With a cry, he fell to the ground, dropped the tyre iron and reached frantically for the source of pain. It was beyond the reach of his right hand, and the agony in his left arm made twisting it up his back all but impossible.

  Footsteps padded rapidly towards him. The attacker coming at a sprint. The Anagramist. The words rang through Drake’s pain-ridden mind. Before he could turn over, the assailant’s hand pressed his back, and he gripped the knife, sending fresh spears of torture through his prone victim.

  He lowered his head close to Drake’s ear.

  “I’ll kill them all. I’ll make every one of them pay for what your father did to mine. Including that crazy bitch in Leeds. I thought you’d want to know that before I send you to Hell.”

  Through the blinding fury of pain, Drake realised he had only a matter of seconds to save his life. The tyre iron was still within reach of his right hand. He gripped it, and ignoring the agony of movement, half-rolled to his right. He had a blurred glimpse of a balaclava-covered head. He brought the wheel brace round. It smacked into the side of the attacker’s head. Through the thick wool of his balaclava, the Anagramist screamed, released the knife still buried in Drake’s shoulder, and rolled away.

  Drake, too, rolled, and pinning his left arm to his side, struggled to his knees, but by then, the attacker was gone, running hell for leather from the drive to his parked Renault.

  He was tempted to go after him, but even the smallest of movements was intolerable cruelty. He collapsed to the ground outside the door. Unconsciousness threatened to overtake him. If he blacked out in these near freezing conditions, there was no telling whether he would ever recover. Ignoring the torture, he dug out his phone, unlocked the screen, and punched the speed dial for Becky.

  “Yo, Wes, what’s cooking?”

  His voice was not much better than a strangled gasp. “Hurt. Stabbed. Anagramist. At home.”

  “Jesus. I’m on my way.”

  “No. Need an ambulance. Ambulance, Becky. Quick.”

  And with that, oblivious
to his partner’s repeated appeals coming from the telephone speaker, his eyes closed and he floated into blessed darkness.

  ***

  A mile along the road, the Anagramist pulled into a passing place, climbed out of the Renault, removed the fake number plates, and dropped them in the boot. He would need to dispose of them properly, but that could wait.

  His face ached where Drake had struck him, and when he got back in the car he removed the balaclava. A check in the cockpit mirror revealed a large bruise on his cheek.

  He was seething. His planning was meticulous. He had been tailing Drake for most of the day, and when he confirmed his target’s late shift, and that of his partner, he had made his way to Moor Heights Lane and crouched in the darkness of the dry stone wall outside Drake’s property, waiting, biding his time.

  Everything planned to the last detail… but one.

  He had not anticipated Drake’s resilience; his tolerance of pain. It was an imponderable. Different people reacted differently. Scratch one person with a fingernail, and they would scream the house down. Jam a knife deep into a muscular area like the shoulder of another target, they would pull the knife out and turn it on you. At best, he could only estimate, and he had guessed that Drake would be tough, but not that tough.

  The knife’s trajectory was dead on target, which was an excellent shot from a range of fifteen feet. But the bastard turned at the last second, and instead of hitting him square in the back, it sank into his shoulder. Even then, Drake dropped to the ground as the Anagramist had anticipated, allowing him to cover the gap between them in a couple of seconds.

  According to his estimates, Drake should have been on the verge of unconsciousness; but he was not. He still had the wherewithal to bring the hooked wheel brace into play. And it hurt.

  With hindsight he should have suppressed the pain, and gone on with his plan: remove the knife, and sliced Drake’s neck open. But the move took him by such surprise that he panicked, turned and fled, and now he’d made life doubly difficult for himself. He’d given Drake a hint of his underlying motive, and his skill in delivering knives from a distance.

  Pulling away from the layby, accelerating further along the road and looking for the first turn back to Howley, he counted his blessings. Luckily, there were contingencies in place. Drake was officially target number three, but he could choose an alternative or, at a pinch, bring number five forward, and slot Drake in at that point.

  His anger decided him. Drake, he concluded, as the lights of Howley appeared a mile ahead, would have to suffer for this evening’s audacity. And this time, that sufferance would not be the painful drifted into eternity, but the agony of losing someone else.

  Fifteen minutes after driving hurriedly away from Drake’s place, he tucked his car into the parking place behind his dingy home, and let himself into the house. A little while later, tending his minor injuries, applying ointment to the bruises, he smiled at his reflection. He was still confident of ultimate victory.

  February 11

  Chapter Eighteen

  Light filtered in only slowly. At first it was nothing more than a distant, grey blur, offsetting the total blackness of a dreamless sleep. It began to grow in strength, gradually increasing until colours of the longer wavelengths, the browns and reds, began to appear soon followed by the more general spectrum, the blues, greens, yellows. And as his vision cleared, other senses were kick-started: the mutter of voices, the rattle of… something, assaulted his ears, the roughened, parched surface of his tongue, the pressure of something attached to his index finger, and then there was the faint tang of antiseptics in his nostrils.

  He carried out a mental examination of himself. He lay on his right side, and he could feel the pressure of his left knee on the right. He wiggled his toes, moved his fingers, flexed his right hand. Everything seemed to be normal. He made an effort to roll onto his back.

  Agony!

  He gave an involuntary cry, and there was a sudden flurry of activity. A door opening, a pair of dark blue coveralls fronted by a white, disposable apron, hands, encased in similarly disposable gloves, fussed with machinery, a clipboard detached from that same machinery, and a pen scrawling across it.

  “Take it easy, Mr Drake.” A soft, concerned, female voice, flooded with reassurance. “You’re all right now.”

  Hospital. That’s where he was. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, shook his head to clear it, and once again suffered unimaginable pain in his left shoulder. He winced and suppressed the urge to protest again. When he opened his eyes, he became aware that the light was not artificial. It was daylight, flooding in through a window.

  How did he come to be here? Had he been in some kind of accident?

  The nurse rolled back the sheets covering him, and once again fussed, this time at his left shoulder, gently peeling away a dressing. She was behind him, and he was unable to see exactly what she was doing, but he felt the sting of a saline solution, heard the tearing of a fresh sterile dressing, and then the niggling as she applied it to his skin.

  In the meantime, the memories assailed him. The hammer of the knife driving into his back, the manic tones of the Anagramist, the wheel brace, the crack against the side of his enemy’s face. His screams, the Anagramist’s cries, and the blinding, inconceivable agony.

  He glanced around as far as he could see. A complex machine, its information fed by the clamp attached to his finger, read out his vital signs. Even as he looked at it, a blood pressure cuff on his left arm began to inflate, increasing the pain in his shoulder. An intravenous drip stood to alongside the machine, feeding… whatever it was feeding into a cannula in the back of his hand. As far as he could tell, he wore only a hospital gown, and there was no sign of his clothing. A carafe of water stood on the bedside cabinet, beyond his reach, reminding him of his raging thirst.

  The nurse came round, and crouched to look him in the eye. A pretty, Asian face, her almond eyes reassuring, matching the pleasant smile on her lips.

  “You’ve been in the wars, Mr Drake, but you’re safe now. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “Yes, please.” His voice was an unrecognisable croak, a caricature of his normal, mellifluous tenor, almost as if it was someone else speaking. “And I’ll need the police.”

  “They’re already here. One of them’s been here all night.”

  Becky. He knew without being told.

  The nurse left. He threw back the sheets, and made to sit up. His shoulder reminded him of the trauma, and he gave up the attempt.

  The door opened, and Becky and Kirsty stepped in. His partner rushed to him, cradled his face in her hands, smothered him with kisses until he hinted that she should back off.

  She sat alongside him, holding his hand, her free hand applying a tissue to her tears.

  Kirsty was just as concerned, but emotional detachment made her more practical. “We’re going to need a statement, Wes, the moment you feel up to it.”

  With his eyes, he indicated the carafe of water. Becky poured a small glass, held it to his lips, and let him drink. It felt good. It cleared the fur from his tongue, lubricated his vocal chords.

  He cleared his throat. “Right now, we have more important matters to think about. What time is it?”

  Becky made an effort to soothe him. “Don’t worry about the time. You’re going nowhere in a hurry. I’ve already told Quentin, and—”

  He cut her off. “I don’t care about Quentin. I have an appointment at eleven, and I have to rearrange. What time is it?”

  Kirsty checked her watch. “Half past eight.”

  “Get me my phone. Please, Becky, this is urgent.”

  While Becky looked in the bedside cabinet (where she had put his personal affects the night before) Kirsty asked, “Who is so important that you have to go to this trouble? Becky can rearrange—”

  He interrupted her, too. “I can’t tell you. It’s confidential, but knowing what I know, it’s more urgent than it was yesterday.”

  Bec
ky found his smartphone, handed it to him, and with some difficulty, he unlocked the screen, and hit the speed dial for Iris Mullins.

  “Wesley. What the hell are you doing ringing at this time of day? I’m still at home.”

  Drake cleared the fog from his mind. “The Anagramist. He hit me last night. I chased him off, but I’m in hospital. I’m due to see our special friend later today, and I’m not gonna make it. But, he mentioned her. The Anagramist, I mean. She’s a target.”

  “Oh my God. How did he find her?”

  “Not a question I can answer right now. You need to double up on her security. I’ll get to see her tomorrow, if I can find a chauffeur. Becky will oblige I’m sure, but that will necessarily involve bringing her and others into our confidence.”

  “I’m not entirely happy with that.”

  “It has to be, Iris.”

  In order to divert him from matters of security, she switched tack. “Are you badly injured?”

  “I’ll survive.”

  “And will you be able to see her tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I’m sure of it.” He glanced at Becky’s disapproving features. “Others may not be so happy, but I’ll get there one way or another.”

  “All right. Leave it with me. I’ll speak to Lumsden, and let you know.”

  Drake cut the call, handed the phone to Becky, and began, “Right. I’ll need clothing—”

  His partner cut him off. “Not right. You’ve been stabbed. You need to stay here for at least the next twenty-four hours, and even then, you’re going nowhere.”