No Middle Ground

by Jack Slater

  ‘There’s no need for you to join in,’ Dave protested.

  ‘Why not? You would if the shoe were on the other foot.’

  Dave pursed his lips then tipped his head. ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘So, what you’re suggesting,’ Pete broke in, trying to get things back on track, ‘is they’re prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless and so on.’

  ‘Well, yes. They wouldn’t be missed, would they? And if they were, they’d be much less likely to be reported as such. Or taken seriously if they were.’

  Pete nodded. ‘Which gives us at least one other place to search: the PND. But that’ll wait for morning. In the meantime, I want to focus on our man himself. We know where he’s been living for the past twenty-plus years but where was he before that? Where was he raised? What was he like? How did he treat his family and how did they treat him? And his schoolmates, work colleagues, clients? And what else was he up to that we can find witnesses or records for? Are there any outstanding cases from times and locations we can tie him to? Nobody starts something like this out of the blue. There’s got to be a lead-up somewhere. Burglary, rape, assault, indecent exposure: something.’

  ‘Damn!’ said Dick. ‘Did you draw breath anywhere in there?’

  ‘So much to say and do and so little time,’ Pete responded. ‘Pass me that stuff we got from his lock-up, whoever’s got it. The first thing we need is a time-line.’

  ‘I did that already, boss. I thought I’d emailed it to you.’

  Pete checked his emails. ‘Ah. That’ll be “receipts etc,” will it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have we all got a copy?’

  ‘I was letting you have a look and send it on if it was OK.’

  Pete pursed his lips. ‘Just do it. We trust you.’

  ‘Thousands wouldn’t,’ Jill said, giving Ben a wink.

  ‘Don’t do that to him,’ Dick protested. ‘You’ll ruin him for the rest of the day, poor kid.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s not you you’re talking about, old man?’ Ben retorted.

  ‘At my age, I’m too old to care.’

  ‘Well, you need to,’ Pete told him. ‘At least until we get our hands on Jonas Hanson.’

  ‘I was talking about Jill’s flirting.’

  ‘Oh, ah?’ Dave joined in, turning to face her. ‘How come you never flirt with me?’

  ‘Because flirting’s meant to be innocent and you haven’t been that for decades.’

  Dick laughed. ‘She’s got you there, mate. Guilty as charged.’

  ‘How come everybody’s picking on me?’

  ‘They’re not,’ Jane told him. ‘I haven’t had my turn yet.’

  Pete was about to intervene when the phone on his desk rang. He let it ring again to confirm it was an outside call and picked it up. ‘DS Gayle, Exeter CID.’

  ‘Hello.’ The voice had a soft northern accent. ‘I gather you’ve been looking for a green Peugeot estate car, reg ending BBW.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘This is Tony Parsons, Lincolnshire traffic squad. Your man’s been spotted. Unfortunately, it was mutual. He lost our guys for long enough to ditch the car and get away into a housing estate on the outskirts of Mablethorpe.’

  Pete barely managed to hold back a curse. ‘So, he’s on the loose in – that’s a seaside resort, isn’t it? While we’re busy proving multiple cases of kidnapping, torture and murder against him.’

  ‘Christ. I didn’t realise it was anything that serious. Not that it’d have made a difference. At least now he’s got no transport, we’ve got all his stuff and he knows he’s being hunted.’

  ‘When you say, “all his stuff,” does that include a laptop? Because, if so, we need to see what’s on it ASAP. And if he knows we’re after him...’

  ‘We’ve got five more cars on route plus a van and a dog unit,’ Parsons interrupted. ‘We’ll have him. And we’ll send you the files from the laptop.’

  ‘I won’t say I’ll look forward to it, knowing what they’re likely to contain,’ Pete said. ‘But I will look forward to hearing you’ve caught him.’

  ‘We’ll talk soon’ Parsons ended the call.

  I bloody hope so, if only for the people of Mablethorpe, Pete thought as he put the phone down.

  ‘Yes!’

  The shout came from behind Pete. It was Alan Jacobs, one of Mark Bridgman’s DC’s.

  ‘Got him. He’s still in that red Focus. He went in the farm shop at Rowe and bought some supplies. The flag on his credit card came up and they’ve got a security camera in the car park.’

  ‘I said he’d make a mistake,’ Mark announced as Pete turned in his chair. ‘Which way did he go?’

  ‘Towards Tiverton.’

  ‘That could be a ploy,’ Pete pointed out. ‘He could loop back to where Ben traced him to, a mile or so south of there.’

  ‘And at the same time be daft enough to use his debit card?’ Mark argued. ‘I doubt it. And we can’t afford to spread ourselves that thin. I’ll give the Tiverton station a buzz, get them mobilised, and Alan can call the traffic squad. Maybe we can box him in.’

  An image flashed into Pete’s mind: a stand-off, Steven Southam surrounded by police, Tommy held tight against his broad chest with a knife to his throat. Would Southam care enough about evading capture not to kill the boy and throw him at them?

  Pete wasn’t at all sure and the uncertainty made him feel suddenly queasy.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Pete pushed his chair back. ‘We’ll come with you, then.’

  ‘No,’ Bridgman said firmly. ‘If we’re going to arrest him we want the charges to stick. We want him in jail for life, not walking the streets on bail in a couple of days.’

  But Pete’s blood was up. ‘That’s…’

  ‘Right, boss,’ Jane cut him off. ‘The rest of us could go, but you can’t.’

  He rounded on her, was about to snap a sharp reply when a part of his brain realised she was right. He drew a deep breath. ‘OK. Do it. I’ll stop here and start on this stuff.’

  How he’d be able to concentrate, he didn’t know, but he had to do something. He couldn’t just sit idle and nor could he go home at this point. Louise, especially, would want to know why he was there and not here until there was something he could actually tell her.

  Chairs scraped back all around him and bodies trooped out.

  Inside, Pete felt as hollow as the half-empty squad room. He allowed himself to dwell on the feeling for a few moments, hating the sense of everything happening remotely and out of his control despite his deep connection to all of it, almost as if he were being punished for something. Then he broke out of the slump and pulled the first of the stack of Joe Hanson’s files towards him.

  With his radio beside him on the desk, the volume set so that he could hear anything that went on in the search for Southam and Tommy, he started going through the first of the files for anything with a date on it. He opened the first of the envelopes in there and pulled out receipts, work dockets, delivery notes, bank statements and empty cheque books, sorting them into date order.

  While he worked, information was passed back and forth over the radio. Positions, directions of travel, sightings and dismissals. For some time, once the search commenced, he broke off from his paper-sorting to listen every time the radio came to life but finally he reached the point that all police were trained to where he could half-listen while continuing with what he was doing, sure that he’d pick up on anything significant.

  Once he’d finished sorting the envelope contents, he took a large piece of paper from his desk drawer and drew a line along the middle of it, long-ways, dividing it into segments for the days of the month. He labelled it at the top: June 2005. Then he started going through the sorted papers again, marking them off on the time-line with date, time, location and a quick note of what they related to: food, fuel, hotel, tools, building materials.

  Having done that, he wrote a location summary underneath. Hanson had spent the f
irst two weeks of the month in Exeter, the next in Wisbech. Pete looked it up and found it was in Cambridgeshire. The final week of the month, Hanson had been in Devises, Wiltshire.

  Then he checked the missing persons database. There were three young women who had vanished in that month and had still not been found. Two were from London, the third from Daventry, Northamptonshire. She had been last seen while the records showed Hanson was still in Cambridgeshire.

  He moved on.

  The next envelope he took from the top of the pile turned out to be October. He sorted the contents into order and took another A3 sheet from his desk to compile another timeline. This time, the records showed time spent in Bristol, Taunton and back home in Exeter. He checked the missing persons list. Two women had disappeared that month and had yet to be found: one in Lancashire, the other in Barnstaple, during the week Hanson was working in Bristol.

  Still no match.

  He was sorting the papers from another randomly picked month when his radio crackled again and this time something within him picked up on what was being said. ‘… seen him! He’s turned left, left, left in Stoke Canon, heading east towards….’

  ‘Huxham,’ Dave clarified. ‘I’m in Hayes Barton, heading north. I’ll try to cut him off.’

  Dave would be on that black beast of a motorbike, his radio wired into his helmet. Pete was sorely tempted to pick up his radio and intervene as he pictured the pretty white-painted thatched cottage-style hotel in Huxham – one of the many he’d taken Louise and the kids to over the years to give them an appreciation of country as well as city. But what could he do? Dave knew those lanes and he knew what he was doing. Still, it was a struggle not to get involved.

  ‘I’m just coming up to the cross-roads on Stoke Hill. I’ll turn off and come up from there.’ That was Jane. Her little green Vauxhall wouldn’t be big enough to block even the narrowest of lanes unless she parked across it.

  Wasn’t there a junction down there somewhere? She’d need to boot it to get past that before blocking him off. Again, Pete almost picked up his radio to tell her so but stopped himself. He had to trust his team. He did trust them. They’d proved their worth on countless occasions over the years. But this time it was his own son’s safety or even life at stake. His hand itched to reach for that radio. His jaw clamped, his lips pulling back into a grimace as he fought the almost overpowering urge to interfere. He tried to return to what he was doing, but it was no good. His ears were tuned in, his attention focussed in the wrong direction and there was no stepping back from there. He shifted the radio across to the middle of his desk, both hands clamped around it.

  ‘Anybody up around Rewe?’ Dave asked. ‘If so, we need you to come across to Columbjohn and south through Brookleigh.’

  Yes. Pete had been right. Dave knew those lanes and villages better than anyone who didn’t live round there. All Pete knew of them was that they were like a high-hedged maze, some of them only one car wide with passing places at intervals.

  ‘Where the hell’s that?’ Someone came back.

  ‘Head east at the cross-roads north of the railway crossing in Rewe,’ Dave told him. ‘When you get to Columbjohn – it’s a tiny little place with a couple of left turns close together – stay on the road heading south. Come through Brookleigh – its only three or four houses - and you’ll come to a left turn. Take it in case he tries to loop back around.’

  ‘Right Got you.’

  Which should box him in nicely as long as he doesn’t ram Dave off his bike, Pete thought. And this time he couldn’t resist. He pressed the button on the side of the radio. ‘Watch yourself on that bike, Dave. He’s got a car, remember.’

  ‘If he comes at me he’ll know about, boss. Don’t you worry.’

  I do, though, Pete thought. At least it was light enough for Dave to see who was coming towards him and block the right vehicle. But how he planned to do that, even with his big old 1000cc bike, Pete had no idea.

  And what the hell was Southam still doing around there anyway? Had he stopped for tea or something? It seemed crazy when he was on the run. But then, neither of the Southam brothers was anything like anyone else Pete had ever encountered. Which, unfortunately, made them completely unpredictable. For example, if Dave put the blue lights on… He keyed the mike again. ‘Dave, don’t use your blue lights for God’s sake. If you do, he’ll be more likely to run you off the road, not less.’

  ‘Yeah, I… Here he is.’

  Dave cut the radio and all Pete could do was wait.

  *

  Seconds passed. Tension crackled through Pete’s body and mind. Then his desk phone rang, jolting him almost out of his seat. He snatched it up.

  ‘Gayle.’

  ‘Is that DS Gayle of the Devon and Cornwall police?’

  ‘Yes.’ Get on with it or get off the bloody phone!

  ‘Evening, sir. This is officer Jarvis of the Lincolnshire traffic squad. We’ve got Jonas Hanson in custody.’

  ‘Yes! How’d you manage that?’

  ‘Officers tracked him down to a garden shed he was hiding in. They had to send the dog in, in the end, but they got him.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that. Can you arrange for transport down here?’

  ‘Already in hand, Sarge. He’ll be on his way within the hour.’

  ‘Brilliant. Thanks.’ Pete checked his watch. The drive down from Mablethorpe would take six or seven hours, all of which would be taken off the twenty-four they had before they had to charge or release him, once he was in custody. Plus the hour it would take to get him underway. It was going to be tight. Very tight. And the last thing he wanted was to have a man like that freed into the community, knowing that he’d been caught once already. Talk about a flight-risk…

  Pete’s attention was snatched away by the radio on his desk.

  ‘Officer down, officer down.’ It was Jane’s voice and she sounded almost in a panic. ‘Ambulance needed, and vehicle recovery. Killerton Road north of Ratsloe. Urgent.’

  Pete snatched up the radio. ‘What’s happened, Jane?’ Then he returned to the phone. ‘Thanks, mate. Got to go,’

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Yes. Tell me.’

  ‘Dave tried to stop Southam and Tommy. It’s a mess.’

  ‘Is he OK?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s who the ambulance is for. I found him in the ditch.’ She paused. ‘Dave? Dave, hold still, mate.’ Then she must have realised she’d still got the transmit button depressed. She released it, cutting Pete off abruptly.

  ‘Dammit, Dave Miles, what the bloody hell have you done?’ he moaned aloud.

  But there was no-one to ask. He couldn’t phone Jane at a time like this. He’d be getting in the way of whatever she was doing and that was the last thing he wanted. Again, he just had to wait while fear and frustration twisted up his insides, his fists clenching as he leaned his elbows on the desk and let his head sink onto the cool wood between them.

  *

  It was twenty minutes before Jane called him back. His brain had been in turmoil the whole time, unable to concentrate on anything useful as it swirled this way and that. What had happened to Dave? Was he all right? And what about Tommy? Had Southam got away with him? Were they also hurt? Jane hadn’t mentioned them, but what did that mean? What was he going to tell Louise and Annie?

  And if Southam had got away, he now knew that the police were after him despite his warnings about Tommy’s safety. What would he do now? Would he take out his fear and anger on the boy?

  Was he even capable of fear or would it be just anger, resentment, revenge? The man had to be a seething mass of rage and his obvious psychopathic tendencies made him even more dangerous – not only to Tommy but to anyone else who got in his way. Clearly, he was already dangerous, or Dave Miles wouldn’t be waiting for an ambulance out there on that narrow country lane.

  He might simply run, at least for now - get as far away as he could from the epicentre of his troubles, give himself room to breathe, to regroup.
And if so, would he swap cars yet again? How the hell were they going to find him if he did? They were back to square one: except they weren’t – they were further back than that.

  What had Dave tried to pull on him, that had caused him to react that way? He recalled Dave’s own words, spoken just moments before the incident must have taken place: ‘If he comes at me he’ll know about. Don’t you worry.’

  And his own reaction. I do. Evidently with good reason.

  His phone rang at last. He snatched it up. ‘Gayle.’

  ‘The ambulance is here, boss. They’re taking Dave to A&E.’

  ‘What happened? Is he OK? Stupid question. How bad is he?’

  ‘He’s not as bad as his bike. That’s completely wrecked. But it took most of the impact, shielded Dave to some extent. He’s got damage to his leg, hip and shoulder. I think the leg may be broken; not sure about the shoulder and the hip. The ambulance crew are worried about internal bleeding but at least he’d got his helmet on so his thick head’s not damaged.’

  ‘How the hell did it happen?’

  ‘It seems like his plan was to park up at the roadside, headlight still on, crouch behind the bike and throw a stinger across the road as Southam passed. But either he was too late or he was spotted or both. The stinger was out of his pannier but not deployed. The bike had been knocked back over him and you know what a big bastard it is. No way he was shifting it from underneath like that, especially injured as he was.’

  ‘So Southam must have spotted him. What about the car? Tommy?’

  ‘There some bits on the road from the impact. Headlight glass, bits of metal, but it kept going, There’s no sign of it round here. I’d imagine it was pretty well banged up, though. Again, with the weight of the bike, the impact, even if it was a glancing one, would cause a fair bit of damage.’

  As she spoke Pete’s brain began to regain some semblance of normal function. ‘So he’ll need to swap it for another one again. We’ll need to keep a close watch on stolen vehicles from the area, especially in his last known direction of travel.’