by N Williams
The car further along the road was a black Mercedes. It was another twenty metres or so past the junction. There was no sign of life inside the car, and she couldn’t risk wasting time checking it out.
Rachel doubled her efforts and ran down the dark side street up towards the town library in the direction of her home. The heavy holdall was slowing her down. She thought about dropping it, but she needed the contents for her trip. She also had her laptop inside the bag. Although she had erased the file from her computer, Rachel knew that the files could sometimes be recovered. She wasn’t prepared to take the chance. She thought about stopping to take the laptop and drop the bag, but that would just slow her down even further.
*
The black Mercedes saloon had travelled without lights and pulled up sharply outside shops in the town centre. The driver had seen the woman run across the road ahead towards a post box. She was too far away to make out clearly in the dark.
He took a drag on his cigarette and then ducked below the dashboard as he recognised the woman. He stubbed out his smoke as his partner slid down in her seat beside him.
If the woman ran to the car, their cover would be blown.
The driver peeked over the top of the dash. Two men were now at the box. One had his hand in the letterbox, but within seconds the two men were chasing the woman along the street.
The driver ducked down again and held his finger up to his lips. His partner didn’t dare move.
Another quick glance and the woman and her pursuers were gone.
CHAPTER 8
Rachel passed the town library, stumbling into a lane near the Workmen’s Institute.
The large glass doors were locked. Shit!
She hobbled along the car park in the direction of the main road.
She could call for help, but that would alert the thugs to her location. The houses along the main road, and any possibility of help were now close, yet still seemed too far away.
Her newly bought knee-length leather boots were pinching her feet and adding to her problems. If only she didn’t have the heavy holdall, she’d be able to sprint up the hill and into the safety of her home.
Not far to go to the safety of home, but the faster she tried to run the slower her legs seemed to move. Home was so close; only another thirty or forty metres, and she’d be safe.
Rachel finally reached the main road through the village and could see her battered car on the short driveway at the front of her house. Those thirty or forty metres were going to be the hardest, being all uphill.
A development of three brightly painted new homes had been built on the site of an old cinema and snooker hall. Part of the site had also been the old coroner’s office until the nineteen-seventies. Locals joked that the new houses were dead smart.
Rachel stopped briefly by the new houses, listening for sounds of running footsteps behind her. Nothing! She began to breathe a little easier. Why was the street so quiet? She cursed her luck.
The bag seemed to be getting heavier, the effect of her muscles tiring. Her lower back was burning. An old hockey injury began to flare up again, and the nerve down the back of her left leg began to tingle.
Not far to go. At least her house alarm was state of the art. She’d call the police and barricade herself in until they arrived.
Rachel doubled her efforts. Sanctuary was so close, but for some reason she couldn’t go any further.
Something was holding her back.
A heavy hand pulled the bag backwards off her shoulder. The force of the tug, along with the weight of the contents spun her around. She gasped in horror at the sight of the huge man.
Rachel tried to run but the burly bald man had a tight grip on the bag.
Lashing out at the man’s head, her perfectly manicured nails dug deep into his cheek and nose. The last thing Rachel expected was to see the man smile.
Bollocks! She struck again, this time with a low, left punch to the man’s groin. She knew she had connected with the soft target but again the monster seemed oblivious to pain. He grabbed her arm as she pulled it back to throw another punch and twisted it inwards, taking her off her feet and onto her knees.
‘Look, take the bag. Just let me go, please!’
The man laughed a low, almost theatrical, evil laugh. Boris-bloody-Karloff.
He stopped smiling. He punched down onto the top of Rachel’s head. His sledgehammer fist shattered the top of her skull. Her eyes widened in shock. She no longer had any strange thoughts of horror movie stars, or anything else. A single ferocious blow had ended that. Rachel fell slowly forward onto the wet pavement, her outstretched arms punctuating her downward progress briefly before her upper body crumpled into the gutter.
The light rain began to spit and wash the blood from her head down the hill towards the "dead smart" houses.
*
The big man quickly checked around for witnesses. It was quiet as the grave. He slung the heavy bag over his shoulder and dragged Rachel’s lifeless body behind the new houses and dropped it in a dark corner of a concrete parking area, oblivious to the ironic coincidence that her lifeless body now lay where the old town mortuary used to stand.
*
Frederick Bourse sat in the front passenger seat of a hired black Porsche Cayenne and unzipped Rachel’s holdall. He rifled through her belongings, flinging her clothes unceremoniously onto the back seat of the big 4x4. He unzipped the wash bag and tipped the contents into the foot well. Nothing. No diary.
At the bottom of the deep bag, beneath a towel, was a large brown envelope. The big man smiled. He ripped open the top and pulled out a single A4 sheet of photocopy paper. The sheet was a copy of the first page from a small book - probably the diary - but it was all handwritten in Italian. Although he couldn’t understand the writing, he could certainly read the note and the names and addresses written in a different hand at the top of the first page:
Zac Woods. Flat 24a Meridian Quay, Swansea.
Sally Walker. Flat G, Prospect House, Cardiff Bay.
This was not what he expected. Bourse knew that he had failed in his mission, but there was at least now hope of redeeming himself and that would be enough to satisfy his employer. He would start by paying Sally Walker a visit. The man might be a bit more of a problem, but if he could find what he wanted at the woman’s apartment, there would be no need to visit Zac Woods.
CHAPTER 9
Somewhere over the Gower Coast.
The little Ikarus C42 hung high over the ridge, riding the thermals rising from the cliffs above the vast expanse of beach.
Zac had enjoyed the flight over Swansea and Llanelli. The pilot had flown him out from Swansea airport down the Loughor Estuary and over the new Ffos Las racecourse before banking left over the bay.
The beautiful Rhossili Bay was a magnet for surfers and holidaymakers, but Zac didn’t have time to admire the view.
The pilot of the aircraft searched for a safe place to land the two-seat aircraft. Without the engine, they could only ride the up-draughts for so long before they had to get the plane safely down on the ground. Zac watched every move she made.
The young woman banked the little aircraft around to the left and pointed the nose towards a large field perfectly positioned into the wind. Zac knew that the beach would be the best option for a forced landing, but in the middle of the summer the place was full of tourists.
The silence of a powered aircraft without its engine is unnerving. The young woman adjusted her approach towards the centre of the field at the top of the cliff. Level, long and wide, the field appeared to be the best option, and there was only a handful of sheep at the far end, near a low bramble hedge.
The pilot began to sweat. Zac could see her mentally running through the checklists and monitoring the instruments as the aircraft sank down towards the ground.
‘I’m too high, and I’m losing speed. I’m going to drop the nose. Don’t worry, it should get us to the right height for a safe landing.’
‘Should?’ said Zac.
The woman laughed nervously.
The quick descent had increased the speed of the aircraft to a little over 70 knots. Zac could see her relax as she set the plane up for the landing.
The pilot quickly ran through the pre-landing checklist. There was no way they would get to another field if this one turned out to be unsuitable. They were committed.
Before the aircraft reached fifty feet above the ground, Zac flicked on the two magnetos and pressed the engine start button. The propeller roared into life as the revs reached idle speed.
‘Okay, full throttle and get us back up to fifteen hundred feet,’ ordered Zac. ‘A good effort! I’d prefer you to keep the speed at the optimum glide rate on the approach. We have a good margin for error before the stall, but it’s essential to pick the landing site and get lined up early.’
The young woman nodded and smiled. ‘I enjoyed that.’
‘Good! You did well. Another couple of hours on circuits next time out.’
The two-seat microlight aircraft was an ideal training machine. Zac had been instructing out of Swansea airport for just over a year but had clocked up hundreds of hours on the aircraft since then. It was a fantastic place to teach. He was glad he’d made the decision to take the instructor’s course. He wanted something to keep him occupied when he retired from the police, to combine his love of flying with something to top up his pension, and this was perfect.
CHAPTER 10
The lounge bar’s ear-splitting rock band drew in the regulars and, in addition, a dozen or so of those attending the retirement party.
Packed in like sardines, old friends gathered in small groups in the Oddities Bar of the Adam and Eve public house. Several of the group had already managed to down enough alcohol to pickle a calf, much like the collection of specimens kept in jars on shelves which lined the walls. Animals of various sizes, and some odd-looking parts of unidentifiable creatures were preserved in formaldehyde. The macabre display was not something that was socially or politically correct, but seemed to attract people from miles around. A mangy-looking moggie took pride of place above the bar, the first of the many and varied specimens to be pickled since the nights of the blitz.
The Luftwaffe had levelled most of Swansea’s old town, and the pub had taken its share of damage from the bombs but had stubbornly remained open for most of the war. When the dust settled on the morning of the 22nd of February 1941, two hundred and thirty people had lost their lives, along with the pub cat, Thomas. The stuffed remains of the tabby began a long tradition of collecting and preserving dead and curious things, a tradition seemingly embraced by all of the subsequent landlords. Each new owner seemed more than just keen to add to the collection, with an odd twist occurring in the sixties when a retired coroner bought the pub. It was to be the start of a long and often colourful relationship between the hostelry and the local police. It soon became the regular haunt of the beat-bobbies with the collection becoming ever more bizarre as old specimens from the coroner’s office began appearing on the shelves.
The enormous flat screen television set, mounted high on one wall on a steel girder, jutting out between the shelves, silently projected the ticker-tape headline of the Sky News channel.
Zac Woods swallowed the last of his Guinness and ordered another.
The retirement party was quiet compared to some that Zac had attended over the years, but that was fine. He hadn’t wanted a party, or any sort of fuss. He had “done his bit for society” and now wanted to slip into retirement without a fuss. But that was never going to happen.
Handel Fenwick, Zac's former boss, pushed through the crowd of music lovers to make his way to the Oddities Bar at the rear of the pub.
'Don’t usually come to these things. Hate police functions. But for you, my lad, I’ll make an exception.’ He smiled. ‘Not my kind of music,' he shouted. 'Obviously popular with the locals though.’
Zac ordered another round of six pints for the others and a glass of water for the painkillers in his wallet.
‘Still taking that shit?’
‘Not as often as I used to - just when it gets bad.’
Fenwick took a long drink of his pint and thumped the empty glass onto the bar. ‘You need to look after yourself, Zac. Retirement is a strange beast. Not all policemen live long and happy lives after they finish. It's the shift patterns that do for us. Takes years to get them out of your system. They bugger up your internal clock; takes a while to get back into the natural rhythm of things.’
‘Yeah, well, I suppose the flying will keep me occupied for a while.’
Fenwick nodded. ‘Yeah. That's a good idea. An idle retirement is a sure-fire way to an early grave. Keep yourself occupied. Look at me, I've got the boat and I'm going to make that trip I promised Stella.’
Zac touched Fenwick gently on the shoulder. Fenwick's wife, Stella, had died within a year of her husband's retirement. It had hit Fenwick hard, especially as he was the focus of a corruption inquiry at the time. ‘I’m sorry about Stella. Cancer's an evil bastard. Taken a few of my family over the years.’
‘Not many families haven't been affected by it,’ Fenwick agreed. ‘I'm getting it sorted in my head. I don’t know if I’ll ever truly get over it. It’s a damn shame Stella never got to take the cruise we promised ourselves.’
Fenwick had been good to Zac over the years of his service. He had looked after him and even seconded him into the firearms squad. He felt he owed him something but knew that what the old man most needed was the company of his wife.
Zac had finally made it to the finish line. He finished his pint and ordered a Jameson's chaser. He might as well make the most of it.
By nine-thirty, the potent combination of the Guinness and codeine was finally taking its toll. Whilst he was still sober enough to recognise his approaching saturation point, he put his empty pint onto the bar and covered it with a cardboard drip mat. ‘No more booze for me, you ugly shower of shit. I’m done! Got to pay a visit and then I’m off.’
The Sky News presenter was silently mouthing some breaking story. The perpetually scrolling red headline tape running from right to left caught Zac’s increasingly blurry eyes.
Valley of Death - Museum Curator found murdered...police are appealing for anyone with any information relating to the murders of Benjamin Perkin and his niece Rachel Powell to call the incident room at Ystradgynlais police station…
Zac stopped dead in his tracks as the images of the victims appeared.
Swaying unsteadily on his feet, he fumbled for the back of a chair for support.
A poor but unmistakable image of his former girlfriend Rachel Powell and her uncle Ben filled the large screen.
CHAPTER 11
Sally Walker yanked the handbrake and left her Ka on the road outside a barber’s shop at the bottom of the steep hill. Blue and white police tape and warning signs blocked any further progress. Sally checked her watch; not quite ten-thirty. What could have happened?
Her friend’s house was on the hill and seemed to be at the centre of the activity. Several people in white coveralls were also milling around near new-build houses to her left.
The roof of Rachel’s car could be seen over the small wall of her drive.
Sally was anxious. She hadn’t seen Rachel since Friday and she hadn’t come in to work for two days and the scene before her did nothing to relieve her anxiety. The envelope from Rachel had arrived in the post, and the contents of the disc inside had unnerved her. They had to speak. Rachel wasn’t answering her work phone, her house phone or her mobile, so Sally drove the fifty miles from Cardiff to see her at her home.
She fished in her bag for her phone and dialled Rachel’s number for the fourth time. ‘Please pick up the bloody phone.’
Sally locked her car and walked towards the police cordon. A woman in uniform nodded and stepped forward to intercept.
‘My friend lives in a house on the hill and I’m a bit worried because I haven’t been
able to contact her,’ said Sally. ‘She’s not at work, and I’ve been calling her all morning.’
The policewoman nodded sympathetically. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I can’t let you through. I’m sure your friend is okay. As soon as the crime scene boys pack up I’ll be able to let you have access. Until then, I’m afraid that no one can go up or down.’
Sally sighed. ‘So what’s happened...why is it closed off?’
‘Been a murder. A woman was found dead across the road there this morning. Nasty it was too.’
Sally suddenly went cold. ‘A woman you say? Can you tell me her name?’
The policewoman’s previously friendly expression turned serious. ‘I’m sorry. I can’t. Not until her next of kin are informed.’
All sorts of images and ideas began to flash through Sally’s head. ‘Please don’t say it’s Rachel Powell?’ The officer’s grim expression was all the confirmation Sally needed.
*
Nigel Boyce felt a little guilty because he was secretly pleased. Two murders in less than twenty-four hours; this was unheard of. The whole of the county of Powys only ever had a handful of murders recorded, and here he was, officer in charge of two newsworthy incidents in one day. This was what being a Detective Inspector was all about - something to chew on. Pity about the victims of course, but it was up to him now to bring the killer or killers to justice, and this was his opportunity to prove he could do it quickly.
‘Want one of mine, boss?’
Boyce dropped the remnants of the cigarette butt on the pavement and accepted the offer of another.
Garry Mann popped the pack back into his pocket and offered a light.
‘So, what do you think then...are they connected?’ asked the Detective Sergeant.
Boyce blew half a dozen rhythmic rings before he answered.
‘I’d bet my pension they are. Neighbour seems to think the other bloke was her uncle.’