Nomads

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I don’t know. We haven’t caught him yet.”

  Richmond looked at me a few moments longer, then made another note.

  “And what happened after that?” Sachs asked.

  “As I said, Sergeant Beck checked the property while I was taking statements. I issued the Hallams with a crime number, and we left.”

  “And Sergeant Beck found no sign of an intruder?” she said.

  “That’s right.”

  “Were there any other intruder reports that night?” asked Richmond.

  We seemed to have drifted quite a distance from the purpose of this interview. “There were a couple. We get at least one, most nights.”

  “Did you see anyone else at Dronfield Farm?” Sachs asked. “Maybe had an impression that someone else was in the house?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  She smiled. “We’re just trying to get a sense of your state of mind that night. It must have felt quite strange to go from a high-speed chase to something as mundane as a prowler report.”

  Thinking of Leonie Hallam’s call to the station, I said, “Have the Hallams made a complaint as well?”

  “No,” she said. “No, they haven’t. Is there any reason why they should?”

  “Not so far as I can recall, but presumably I was so traumatised by the pursuit that I wasn’t able to do my job properly.”

  Richmond put down his pen again and looked at me. Sachs looked sad. “No one is suggesting that you weren’t, Frank.”

  I started to wonder whether it had been a good idea not to have a Fed rep in the room with me. “So what is the suggestion here, Ms Sachs?” When neither of them answered, I stood up. “I’m done.”

  “We’ll tell you when you’re done, Sergeant Grant,” Richmond told me. “Sit down.”

  “Frank,” Sachs said in a gently chiding tone of voice. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  I stayed where I was.

  “This is all completely routine,” Sachs explained patiently. “We’re required to investigate when a complaint is made.”

  It was not remotely routine. I’d had a run-in with the IOPC a couple of years ago, when a drunk driver I’d arrested made a complaint that I had damaged his car. That had involved me sitting down with someone for half an hour and going through my report, not trying to establish my state of mind in the hours after the arrest.

  I said, “I’d like to speak to my Fed rep.”

  “Oh, Frank,” said Sachs, sitting back in her chair and crossing her arms. “You were doing so well, too. Coming here voluntarily, unrepresented, as if you’re completely innocent.”

  “I am completely innocent.”

  She wrinkled her nose at me. “Come on,” she said. “Nobody’s completely innocent.”

  Richmond opened one of his folders, took out an A4-sized printed photo, and held it up so I could see it. The quality was grainy, but there was no problem making out the little group of dead sheep propped upright on the hillside, front legs round each others’ shoulders. You had to work a little harder to identify figures in the background, but there I was, captured at a moment where I looked utterly clueless, which to be fair wasn’t hard to do. Richmond gave me a few more seconds to consider the scene, then he put the photo away again.

  “We’re keeping a lid on this for the moment,” Sachs told me. “But we still haven’t identified everyone who was at the scene. There’s no telling when this will leak.”

  “We?”

  Richmond pushed a pen and a blank sheet of paper across the table towards me. “If you could give us a list of everyone you remember seeing there, it would be helpful,” he said.

  “I already did that in my report,” I told him.

  “Well it’ll be easier to do it again then, won’t it,” said Sachs.

  I stood looking at them, weighing up possibilities. Richmond and Sachs were not from the IOPC, and this interview was not about Ursula Hinchcliffe’s complaint. I knew that, and they knew I knew it, and how I reacted in the next few minutes was going to tell them whether their suspicions about me – and surely they could only be suspicions, unless someone had leaked in a catastrophic way – were correct or not.

  I nodded at the pile of folders on the table. “That circus was nothing to do with me,” I said. “And before you tell me I should have stopped it, you should have been there.”

  Sachs was watching me with a little smile on her face. She said, “You didn’t mention anything about it in your report. Just ‘ensured the scene was secure, then responded to a report of an intruder at Dronfield Farm’.”

  “The scene was secure,” I said. For an hour or so, it had probably been the most secure place in the county. It had certainly had the highest density of police officers. I sat down again and picked up the pen. “I’ll never be able to remember everyone who was there.”

  “Just do your best,” Richmond told me. “There’s a good chap.”

  Afterward, I went back up to the flat and stood for a while at the window, looking down on the High Street. Presently, Richmond and Sachs’s car emerged from the yard behind the police station, paused for a moment, then turned in the direction of Sheffield and drove off. I scratched my head and wondered what they knew, what they thought they knew. They couldn’t possibly know everything; their body language would have been entirely different. They’d been relaxed, in control, and I couldn’t imagine anyone being able to pull that off if they knew the truth.

  They knew something, though. That business about Dronfield Farm was suggestive. So, what did they have? A rumour? A hint? Something in the breeze?

  I had a plan for this eventuality, of course, caches of identities scattered around the country and here and there in Europe. I’d never seriously thought I would need them, but it had seemed rational to have the option. Down the years I’d thought about it less and less, and I wondered if that was a symptom of me getting comfortable, getting sloppy.

  On the other hand, if they did think they knew something, they – whoever they were – would be waiting for me to bolt. Until I knew what this was about, until I got a handle on whether I could ride it out or not, it might be best to carry on as normal.

  Sod it. I went and cooked myself dinner.

  Five

  Nothing much happened for the next couple of days. John informed me that pending the IOPC’s report I was still on administrative leave. I thought we might be waiting a while for any ‘report’, but I didn’t share my suspicions about Sachs and Richmond. I spent most of my time up at the house, helping Mr Keoshgerian’s sons cable the place before the plasterers moved in. It was work I could do almost literally with my brain in neutral, and it helped take my mind off what was going on elsewhere in my life, although I couldn’t help the nagging feeling that it was all for nothing, that I was going to have to leave it all behind.

  Every day, driving home, I passed Dronfield Farm. There was no choice really – any other route would have taken me five or ten miles out of my way – but I had a feeling that I would have been doing it anyway. Most of the time, the farm seemed deserted, but once I saw a figure standing in the lane. It could have been Leonie Hallam, it could have been her husband. It could, for all the brief glance I had of it as I went by, have been Cary Grant.

  Evenings, I cooked, read, took care of paperwork that had been building up. Late at night, I did some discreet research online. I sat at the window and looked down on the High Street. Apart from the Black Bull at the other end, and a couple of takeaways, the street pretty much shut down around eight in the evening. By midnight it was completely deserted, save for the occasional car. I liked it here, and I liked being a police officer. It was a quiet, simple life, and now it was becoming complicated again and I needed to know why before I could decide what to do about it.

  The police station had been built in the mid-1930s, a faintly grim three-story piece of West Yorkshire civic architecture rendered in local gritstone. It could have been a smallish town hall, if you ignored the blue lamp hanging
over the front door and the big glass-fronted noticeboard in which various ancient posters were bleaching slowly in the occasional sunshine. Its walls were thick, its floors covered with lino, and its central heating charmingly outdated. The most modern thing about it was the enormous transmitter mast in the yard at the back, which carried our comms and formed part of the civil defence network,

  There were three flats on the third floor, but only mine was occupied. The only ways to reach it were either past the front desk and then through two security doors and up the stairs, or via the rickety fire escape attached to the end of the building. It made getting in and out without being seen tricky, but I’d long ago spoofed the alarm on the door which led to the fire escape, and the building’s security cameras had belonged to me since not long after I’d moved in. I checked them quickly on my laptop just after midnight, clicking from one view to the next. Everything seemed quiet; most of the shift was out on patrol, the cells in the basement were empty, the canteen was closed, the duty sergeant at the front desk looked as if she was tackling the local newspaper’s crossword. I typed a couple of commands which captured a few seconds’ footage from the cameras on the third floor and outside and played it back into the system on a loop, then I got up and quietly and unhurriedly left the flat.

  The door to the fire escape was at the end of a short corridor. I unlocked it, stepped out onto the platform beyond, locked it behind me. I stood for a few seconds, looking and listening. Nobody about, no vehicle engines. I walked quickly down the metal stairway, then climbed over the fence which surrounded it at the bottom. Another moment to look and listen, and then I was walking away from the police station.

  I habitually parked my car down a side street a hundred yards or so from the station, partly because the secure compound was too small for all our vehicles and there was never any space, but mostly so I could do what I was doing now without having to go through the noisy and noticeable palaver of opening the gates. Five minutes after closing the door of my flat, I was on the road and no one knew I was gone. No one was going to come visiting the flat at this time of night – I barely had any visitors as it was – and I was on leave, anyway. Short of a complete breakdown of civil order and the need to call out every available warm body, nobody would miss me.

  Ten minutes out of the village on the Barnsley road, I passed Dronfield Farm. I didn’t slow down. About half a mile further on, I came to a junction where a twisty forestry road met the main road. I turned onto it and drove slowly until I came to one of the Forestry Commission plantations dotted about the area, and I parked. The chances of anyone being out here at this time of night were vanishingly small, and I was hidden from the main road. I got out, locked the car, and set out to walk through the forest.

  It wasn’t, to be honest, much of a forest. You could walk across it from edge to edge in less than twenty minutes, and I soon reached the edge of the trees and found myself looking out across a field at the boundary of the Hallams’ property.

  By the standards of the natives, my night vision was abnormally good. I hung back just inside the wood and walked along until I reached the corner nearest Dronfield Farm. The place looked deserted; the house and its outbuildings were in darkness and I couldn’t see any vehicles. Keeping the wood behind me, I walked straight out across the field until I reached the fence around the farm.

  It wasn’t much of a fence, just four strands of wire strung between a line of posts. Long grass grew up against it, where the owner of the field hadn’t bothered to cut up to the edges. The wire was old, patinated, the posts moss-stained concrete. No obvious countermeasures. I walked along the fence until I was hidden from view of the main house by one of the outbuildings. Here, the long grass was trodden down a little, as if a fox or something larger had come this way a few days before. I looked around on the ground, but there were no signs that a person had been here, no discarded cigarette ends or sweet wrappers or empty soft drink cans.

  Thus far, I had not really done anything wrong. I’d gone for a midnight drive because I couldn’t sleep, and I’d stopped and got out to stretch my legs, and my word, was I really that close to Dronfield Farm, Inspector Weller? John might frown at me, if he ever found out I’d been here, and it would colour our working relationship, quite possibly permanently, but really there was nothing he could do about it.

  What I did next, though, felt a lot like stepping off the top of a tall building, that moment when gravity takes over and there is absolutely no way to go back. Crouching down, I slipped between two of the strands of wire and onto Dronfield Farm.

  On the other side of the fence, I stood very still, listening. Apart from the ever-present sigh of the wind blowing across the moors, the world seemed completely silent. No cars on the road, no animals moving in the undergrowth, no sounds from the buildings of Dronfield Farm. It was as if I was the only person on earth. I wasn’t sure whether that was a good or bad thing.

  I walked up to the back of the outbuilding and peeked around the corner at the main house. There was no sign that anyone was home. Staying out of range of the intruder light sensors, I moved round until I could get a good look at the yard. It was laid with gravel that showed the marks of vehicles, and the outbuildings that had once contained various bits of agricultural equipment and general farm stuff had been repaired and cleaned up. One large newer outbuilding was fronted with two large doors with little round portholes in them at head-height. I peeked through one of them; it seemed to be kitted out as a garage, although there was no car inside. Ditto for the next one.

  I walked around the perimeter of the property, staying just inside the fence. At the back of the main house there was a little formal garden, surrounded by a waist-high wall. A pair of french windows that I remembered from my visit a few nights ago looked out into the garden. Beyond the doors, the lounge was dark and deserted. I stood there looking at them for quite a while. A car passed, out on the road, one of our patrol vehicles making a visit, judging by the sound of the engine. It barely slowed as it passed, which was sloppy. I stood where I was until it had disappeared into the distance.

  Out here beyond the edge of the village, the presence of an intruder suggested either burglary or violence. Back in Stockford, you got drunks wandering into peoples’ gardens or getting confused and trying to open the wrong door, or opportunity theft when some toerag spotted an open window or an unlocked door. But here, out on the moors, it signified real intent. Pretty much all the farms in the area had had something stolen down the years, whether it was livestock or bits and pieces of agricultural equipment or actual vehicles. A couple of years ago we’d had a crew of lads from Coventry who came up here nicking tractors and quadbikes to order from outlying farms. They were pretty efficient, but one night, returning down the M1 after a successful raid, their truck jacknifed and crashed through the central reservation, causing a twenty-vehicle pileup and killing themselves and thirty-seven others, and that was the end of that.

  One theory was that the intruder at Dronfield Farm was the advance man for a gang which had been looking for new targets using maps to identify properties labelled ‘farm’. When it became obvious that it wasn’t a working farm any more, the theory went, the gang would have moved on, but by now we knew they were in the area. John Weller had circulated an advisory to all the outlying farms and properties, asking people to keep their eyes open for strangers, but there had been no reports so far, and I doubted there would be, because there was no gang. There was only Cary Grant, and that was a problem I couldn’t share with anyone.

  There had been closed-circuit cameras at the farm, installed by a previous owner, but the Hallams had told Andy Newman, our security expert, that the system had malfunctioned not long after they moved in and they hadn’t got round to repairing it. Andy had wagged a finger at them and tut-tutted, but he’d told me that Leonie and her husband hadn’t seemed particularly bothered. He’d got the impression that the most important thing for them was to let him finish his security assessment and then
leave as soon as possible. John Weller thought this was another indicator of some sort of domestic violence situation at Dronfield Farm, but I suspected there was a wholly different explanation.

  There was no point in going any further onto the property. If I was right, in the absence of cameras, there would be other, less obvious, countermeasures and I didn’t want to tangle with those. I walked back to where I’d crossed the fence and stepped back into the field.

  I was halfway back to the car when I heard the sound of rapid footsteps in the short grass behind me. I just had time to half-turn and see a figure rushing towards me, and yes, it was Cary Grant.

  The pain woke me, and it was so severe that I almost passed out again. My head and chest were in agony; every time I took a shallow breath there was a razoring of broken ribs. My left leg felt broken, and peering down at my left hand I saw it was useless, crushed, the fingers sticking out at odd angles. There was blood in my mouth.

  I must have made a sound because Wally said, “Frank?”

  I slowly, agonisingly, turned my head and looked at him. We were in his car and he was hunched over the wheel, concentrating on the road. “Why are we in your car, Wally?” I asked. Then I had to say it again because my mouth was swollen and the words came out mushy and malformed.

  “Jesus, Frank,” he said. “What happened to you? What were you doing out there at this time of night?”

  “Why are we in your car?” I asked again.

  “You phoned me, don’t you remember?”

  It was hard, just then, to remember my own name. I kept catching myself on the edge of drifting back into unconsciousness. “Where are we going?”

  “A&E,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “No, no. No hospital.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” he said. “Look at the state of you. Who did this?”

  “No hospital,” I said again. “Take me home.”

  “We’ve only got first aid at the station, Frank. You need a hospital.”