No Middle Ground

by Jack Slater

  It was only minutes before his email pinged with a reply: “It was just like picture four.”

  ‘Yes!’ He looked over at Jane. ‘Confirmed,’ he said. ‘The car’s a match for Hanson’s.’

  ‘So, we’ve got him.’

  Pete’s phone rang on his desk. He picked it up, expecting it to be Mr Johnson, confirming his identification.

  ‘DS Gayle.’

  ‘Did you really expect to pull a stunt like that and not have any consequences?’ asked a voice that he recognised. Steve Southam.

  A cold feeling gripped his innards. ‘I didn’t pull any kind of stunt. I was here.’

  ‘Well, some of your oppos did. And you’ll be the one paying for it. Or your boy will.’

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Pete said quickly. ‘He’s done nothing to you.’

  ‘But he’s here and handy.’

  Then a more distant, higher pitched voice sounded over the line. ‘What? No. NO!’ A scream.

  The phone on the other end of the line was picked up again. ‘Look out for the post in the morning.’

  ‘What the hell have you done, you…?’

  The line went dead, humming gently in Pete’s ear.

  ‘Bastard,’ he finished softly.

  He sat there, stunned, for several seconds. When he blinked and looked up from his cluttered desk, the rest of his team were all staring at him.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Jane asked.

  Pete swallowed and worked his tongue around his suddenly dry mouth.

  ‘Not really. Better than Tommy, though, by the…’ His throat clogged and he squeezed his eyes shut. Opened them again after a couple of seconds to find them moist and blurry. ‘He’s...’ His voice sounded strangled. He cleared his throat. ‘Hurt the boy somehow. He said to look out for the post in the morning.’

  ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Evil son-of-a-bitch,’ Dick said.

  ‘To get it here for the morning, he’d have had to drop it directly at the sorting office. Not that we need CCTV to know who’s sent it, of course. Where’s he sending it, though? Here or your place?’ asked Jill.

  Pete hadn’t thought that far. ‘I hope it’s not at home. It would destroy Louise. Annie, too, probably.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Jane gasped. ‘What are you going to tell them?’

  Pete drew a breath and let it slowly out, trying to calm his roiling stomach. ‘Nothing until I have to.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘It’s probably best,’ Dick said. ‘No sense worrying them until you need to.’

  Pete grunted. ‘I need to let Mark know, though.’ He picked up his desk phone.

  ‘What time’s Hanson likely to get here?’ asked Dick before he could begin to dial.

  Pete paused. ‘It’ll be after midnight. Maybe even one or half past.’

  ‘We’ve got a bit of time then. How about you go off home for a bit. We can carry on here for another couple of hours unsupervised, see what else we can find. I’ll call Mark Bridgman and the custody desk can call you when Hanson gets here.’

  Pete grimaced. ‘I’d rather stay here, keep going.’

  ‘You’d rather not face Louise, you mean,’ Jane countered with a twinkle in her eye.

  ‘Saves lying to her,’ Pete said. ‘And I’d have to until they’ve got Tommy back and Southam in custody. How else am I not going to tell her what’s happened?’

  ‘Yeah, never thought of that,’ Dick admitted.

  ‘Still, you can’t run yourself into the ground,’ Jane said. ‘Especially with the extra pressure from Tommy’s situation. You’ve got to go home sometime.’

  Pete sighed and slumped in his chair. ‘What’s that about a rock and a hard place?’

  *

  Pete was glad he’d only had one slice of the pizza he’d ordered, leaving the rest for his crew. If he’d had any more, he’d have thrown it up by now. His stomach heaved repeatedly as he drove home. He’d stayed on for another couple of hours, trying to gain as much ammunition against Jonas Hanson as he could before interviewing him the next day. They’d found another three cases that they could link him to, if only tenuously. Dave had still been in surgery when he left the station, but he couldn’t put it off any longer. He had to go home and face whatever Louise was going to throw at him.

  At least, by now, Annie would be in bed and hopefully asleep.

  It was a cowardly delay in some ways, but at least it would allow her a night’s sleep.

  As he drove past the Co-op a couple of streets away from his house he was still trying to figure out how he was going to tell Louise what had happened. He’d faced killers, rapists, child-molesters and just about every other kind of vicious, unpredictable and despicable human being you could think of in his time on the force as well as victim’s families at the worst moments of their lives, but this was probably going to be the most difficult conversation he’d ever had. And that he hoped he ever would.

  How should he handle it?

  Just say it? The quick knife cuts cleanest as the saying went.

  Or should he be as gentle as possible? Lead up to it with all the kindness and sensitivity he could muster, despite being in the same boat as she was?

  His training suggested the former but there was no one-size-fits-all answer and this was his wife. And their son who was the victim.

  He got home without reaching a conclusion.

  Pushing the car door gently shut, he locked it and walked up to the front door. He opened it quietly, not wanting to wake Annie.

  ‘It’s only me,’ he said, just loud enough to be heard in the sitting room.

  Louise was on the far end of the sofa, one leg tucked up under her. ‘I was beginning to wonder if you were ever coming home,’ she said without looking away from the TV, which was playing on low volume because of Annie being asleep upstairs.

  ‘Yeah, they caught the bloke we’ve been after up in Lincolnshire. We had to make as much progress as we could before he gets down here. Don’t want him getting bail and doing a runner.’

  She looked up at last. ‘So, what’s up?’ she asked, seeing immediately that something was wrong with him.

  Shit. She knows me too bloody well.

  And that decided it. Sitting beside her, he took a deep breath and reached for her hand.

  ‘We… You know we nearly caught Southam this evening. Dave was knocked off his bike in the process. Broken bones. Internal injuries. They rushed him to hospital, but some idiot didn’t manage to join the bloody dots before they opened him up so… They’ve been struggling to stop him bleeding out.’

  ‘Oh, my God. Is he all right?’

  Dave was a friend as well as a colleague.

  ‘They’re still trying to stabilize him. But that’s not the worst of it. The fact that we nearly caught Southam means we didn’t. And he’s still got Tommy, so… He called me. Threatened him.’

  He felt her hand clamping onto his.

  ‘What do you mean, threatened him? With what?’

  ‘I don’t know, but… While I was on the phone, there was a bit of shouting. And a scream.’

  She snatched her hand away abruptly, her eyes going wide. ‘A scream? What does that mean? He’s…’

  ‘He said he’d hurt him. That’s all I know for now.’

  ‘What the bloody hell does that mean? That’s all I know for now?’ Her voice had got louder and was getting louder still. ‘Our son’s with a fuckin’ psychopath. He’s been hurt, maybe even killed, and you come here telling me you don’t know?’

  Pete reached for her hand again but she pulled away, avoiding it. He put a hand on her leg, desperate for contact, but she stood quickly and moved away across the room, staring at him with an angry, accusatory look that felt like a knife to his heart.

  ‘What are you doing here when you should be out there tracking the evil bastard down? Bringing our son back, regardless of what Steven bloody Southam’s done to him?’

  ‘Keep it down, will you, or you’ll wake Annie up. Do you think I’d
be here, telling you this if I had a choice? If I could be out there looking for the boy, of course I would. Christ, I’d do anything if I thought it’d help.’

  ‘Except jeopardise your precious job,’ she retorted.

  ‘Jesus! I’d lose the damn job in an instant if it’d save Tommy. But Mark’s got half the county force out there looking already. One more pair of eyes wouldn’t make any damn difference. You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘It only takes one pair of eyes to see him and you know that. You might not be allowed to join in as a police officer, but they can’t stop you as a private individual. People join in searches all the time. Members of the public. Even the damn perpetrators, half the time. What’s wrong with doing that?’

  ‘What’s wrong is that you’re talking about cases with a known death, a missing kid – things like that. Not cases where there’s a direct risk to the searchers and not cases like this where, if I found them, it would mean any case against Southam would be screwed. I want him in jail. Hell, I want him dead, but that’s not going to happen.’

  ‘Accidents do,’ she argued. ‘And that one bloody well would if I was out there and could do it without harming Tommy.’

  ‘Me, too. And that’s exactly why officers aren’t allowed to work on cases involving family members.’

  ‘Dammit, screw the rules! This is our son we’re talking about. Bloody do something.’

  Pete felt like screaming back at her, I can’t! ‘There’s…’ He started but then a thought struck him. ‘…one thing I could try. Hold on.’ He took out his phone and found the number he needed. It was answered in a couple of rings. ‘Ben? Did you manage to unlock the source of that call from Southam and ping it?’ He’d asked Ben to do it almost immediately, but it wasn’t a quick job. It meant Ben calling the provider, Pete giving his permission for the search and then the search itself which would result in a call back to Ben as the requesting officer with the official aim of making it easier to direct the search.

  ‘Yes, boss. I passed the information onto DS Bridgman.’

  ‘Well, you can pass it onto me as well. The location, at least.’

  ‘Boss, you can’t get involved. You…’

  ‘As of this moment, Ben,’ Pete cut in over him, ‘I’m off-duty and, as such, I’m a private citizen. There’s a search going on for my missing son and I need to join it, but I need a place to start.’

  ‘I know you’ve been over this loads of times with the Chief, boss.’

  ‘And I’ll take full responsibility. Just give me the location.’

  ‘I can send it relevant parties and accidentally include your home email. But I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Fair enough. Thanks, Ben.’ Pete ended the call and headed upstairs to his office in the small room next to Annie’s. Closing the door to save disturbing her, he switched on the computer and logged onto the Internet. Calling up the email account, he checked the in-box. A new email from Ben Myers was at the top of the list. He opened it and read, “Weston near Honiton.” In small text at the bottom of the page, it said, Sent from my i-phone. Which would mean his personal one.

  Weston, Pete knew, was a small village just west of Honiton, north of the junction that led off the Roman Road into Honiton itself. There was a mobile phone tower there as well as one in the town. If he could make the stolen car driveable after the impact with Dave’s bike, it would be far better for Southam to get to a place the size of Honiton, dump it somewhere quiet and steal a new car in the town, rather than taking one from a remote area where it would be missed faster and identified more easily. But he wouldn’t stay still, so where would he have gone from there? He’d stay fairly close to Exeter and his brother, but he’d want to get away from Honiton before the vehicle he’d taken was missed. And he’d want somewhere quiet and out of the way to dig in for the night.

  There was a large area of woodland between Honiton and Ottery St Mary with several minor roads running through it. It wasn’t an area Pete knew well but he was sure there’d be plenty of places to park up out of sight for the night. Picnic areas and so forth.

  Ben had passed the information onto Mark - that was the purpose of finding it, after all - so the search would have moved across to that area.

  Would Southam be aware of this possibility or would he rely on having blocked his caller ID to keep him safe?

  He could go round and around in circles, second-guessing himself all night but he didn’t have time for that. He had to make a decision and act on it. And if it meant being out all night, he’d have to do just that.

  He deleted Ben’s email and shut down his computer before heading back downstairs. He poked his head into the sitting room. Louise was pacing up and down the room, the tension plain to see in her pinched expression.

  ‘Stay here and stay safe,’ Pete told her.

  She spun around to face him. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘What you don’t know, you can’t tell.’

  ‘No, but…’

  ‘I’ll see you later.’ He stepped back and reached for the front door. Outside, he backed the car out of the drive and headed off into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  His first port of call was the picnic area off Argyll Road on the northern edge of Exeter, not far from where Jonas Hanson lived, but it was deserted. He went from there to Ashclyst Forest, a few miles north of the city. There were two spots up there he thought Southam might take shelter in for the night – an off-road picnic area and a bridleway that led across the open heathland at the top of the hill and down into a narrow valley to the west. If he’d taken a 4x4, then it was perfectly possible to get down there into the trees and hide up, at least until morning.

  Pete checked the picnic area first. His Ford saloon car was not designed to go off-road. But there was no-one there so, leaving the easier option, he parked on the roadside, among the bracken and ferns and headed down the track on foot.

  About half way down the hill the dirt path was interrupted by a wide patch of muddy ground. Pete stopped and examined the soft dirt with his torch in the moonlight. No wheeled vehicle had been this way in some time. He returned to the car and moved on.

  There was another wooded area a short way beyond where Southam had encountered Dave on his motorbike. Pete went there next. It was less likely, but still possible. When he got to the gate that opened onto the only track into the woods he found it locked with no sign of anyone having entered illegally.

  Again, he moved on. There were a lot of places to check and not a lot of time to do it in. The only advantage he had was that Southam was not local and wouldn’t have had the time to research likely spots. He’d have to choose from the more obvious and easily found ones while at the same time, needing to stay hidden.

  Pete pictured the wide, exposed area where the Exmouth road crossed the river at Ebford behind Topsham. He and Louise had parked up there many times to watch the herons fishing below the weir or the pair of rare Marsh Harriers wheeling in the sky above. A location like that was definitely out of the question, as was the lane that led from there down to the Exe, below the ancient little port town. Although it was secluded, narrow and twisty, there were a few large, expensive houses down there, the owners of which would undoubtedly notice a strange vehicle parked up overnight.

  On the other hand, the kind of private track that led down to the barn where Malcolm Burton had kept Rosie Whitlock and the other girls he’d abducted would be perfect. But how many of those were there in the area? He had no idea, but he imagined the answer was a lot.

  A thought struck him.

  Did Southam know about the place? Certainly, his brother did. And after all, with Burton in prison, no-one would be going there. It was too early in the season for the meadow adjoining the barn to be mown and baled. That wouldn’t happen for another month or more.

  Should he try it? Or was it too obvious?

  Pete pursed his lips.

  It would be the ultimate irony for all this to end where, as far as
he was aware, it had all started. It wasn’t that far and if he didn’t, he’d be thinking about it all night. Best cross it off the list, he decided, heading back towards the edge of the city before cutting west towards the village of Holcomb Burnell and the farm the barn had belonged to. The glow of his headlights swept along high hedges and through tunnels of overhanging tree branches, oppressive in the night.

  When, twenty minutes later, he reached the entrance to the dirt track leading through the trees towards the barn, he turned off his headlights and drove slowly through to the meadow beyond. He could see no vehicle parked in front of the ancient stone building so continued past it.

  Nothing.

  It had been a wasted journey.

  He switched his headlights back on and turned back towards the road with a feeling of deflation that was quickly swamped by the knowledge that he was at a total loss. There were endless farm tracks, dead-end lanes, parking places and bridle ways where Southam could be holed up within a mile or two of the city and Pete was one man alone, the rest of the force concentrated out towards Honiton, several miles away. They might as well have been in a different county.

  But he couldn’t give up. He had to keep searching. His son’s life quite possibly depended on it.

  If only he had some clue of where to start.

  *

  He was still searching when his mobile phone rang in his pocket. He hit the button on the car’s Bluetooth. ‘Gayle.’

  ‘Pete, it’s Karen on the custody desk. Your man Hanson’s just arrived.’

  ‘Blimey, that was quick. What time is it?’

  ‘Twenty past twelve.’

  Pete blinked in surprise. ‘Jesus! I hadn’t realised. Just book him in, will you? We can let him stew until morning, see what he has to say for himself then.’

  ‘OK. You sound like you’re driving? Been out on the razz?’