Changelings

by Jo Bannister

  Liz wasn’t sure if he said it loud enough for Wingrave to hear. She hoped not. ‘Are you trying to get me killed?’ she gritted in her teeth.

  He did the wolfish smile, fanning it between her and the man at the door, and reached under his coat. ‘No sweat.’

  She wasn’t expecting a pocket Derringer – Tyler wasn’t a man to do anything on a small scale – but she wasn’t expecting a cannon either. She’d never seen a Colt .45 up close before, had no idea how much gun it actually was. She thought, If Tyler was pointing that gun at me I’d wet myself.

  But Martin Wingrave had no imagination. He couldn’t anticipate how it would feel to have a bullet that big punch through his flesh, or the devastating effects on the entire body of losing that amount of blood and tissue between one breath and the next. Perhaps he thought that if John Wayne could swap his gun into his other hand and go on shooting, he could do the same with his rock. He lacked the sense of personal vulnerability that should have warned him that real people shot with a .45 round fall on the floor, all their mental and physical processes profoundly disrupted, and they don’t get up again without a lot of skilled medical intervention. If at all.

  The carefully modulated voice was mocking. ‘You’re an American! You’ve no authority here. You shouldn’t even have that gun. If you shoot me they’ll put you in prison.’

  ‘You’re absolutely right,’ Liz said firmly. ‘He has no right to carry a firearm in this country.’ She put her hand out, palm up, demanding.

  Tyler looked at her, at first incredulously, then with an uncharacteristic uncertainty in his strong features. She raised her eyebrows and snapped her fingers at him like Brian confiscating a stink bomb.

  He thought she hadn’t understood the consequences of what she was asking. ‘Inspector Graham,’ he began in a low, warning voice.

  ‘Now, please!’ She held her hand out until, with deep reluctance, hardly able to credit what he was doing, he put the gun into it.

  The weight swung her arm down. But it didn’t stay down. With both men watching, one smugly, the other with profound misgivings, she brought it up again and held it, rock steady, the foresight on Martin Wingrave’s chest.

  ‘I, on the other hand,’ she informed the wanted man coldly, ‘am trained and authorized to use firearms when the need arises. You’re endangering a house full of children: I think that qualifies. They won’t put me in prison for shooting you, they’ll give me a medal.’

  For the first time Martin Wingrave appeared to consider the possibility that he might get hurt. He looked at the gun. He looked at Liz’s face, then at Tyler’s.

  Then he smiled and turned back to what he was doing. ‘You’re not going to shoot me in the back. Stupid slag. How would that look on your annual report?’

  She breathed steadily. ‘You’ve been watching too much television, Mr Wingrave. Nobody’ll care how I shoot you, only that the situation made it necessary. The rules of engagement are, we don’t shoot unless there’s a serious risk to human life. But if there is we end it as quickly as we can. We don’t try to wound: if you’re lucky enough to escape with your life it’s because that was the only shot available. We don’t take up arms at all unless we’re prepared to kill.’

  He didn’t believe her. He swung the rock again, hard. The glass rang and shook under the assault.

  ‘Shoot him,’ said Tyler, low and urgently. ‘Now. If he gets in there, so do his bugs. Do it. You’ll have to in the end. Finish it. Now.’

  ‘Shut up, Mitchell,’ she said briefly.

  He thrust a broad hand at her. ‘If you don’t want to do it, let me. We can sort the paperwork out later. Nobody’s going to be too upset that I was in a position to deal with a homicidal maniac. Shoot the animal, now, or I will.’

  The rock rang again on the armoured glass. Lightning cracks spread out from where it struck.

  ‘Liz!’

  She didn’t shift her eye from Wingrave’s back but her fury was all for Tyler. ‘Mitchell, if you don’t get the hell out of my way I’ll shoot you! This is my job, I know how to do it. Now watch or walk away, but don’t presume to tell me what to do!’

  ‘Somebody has to,’ he flung back. ‘Or we’re going to have dead kids to explain.’

  The rock fell again. The glass cracked from side to side.

  ‘Mr Wingrave,’ she said, her voice quaking with intensity, ‘if that glass breaks it’ll be the last sound you hear. I will shoot you. I will shoot you dead.’

  Incredibly, his answer was to laugh. ‘Stupid, stupid, stupid! You can’t shoot me. My pockets are full of glass vials: if you shoot me with something that size the contents will go everywhere. I’m not sure what I’ve got here, but they all had bio-hazard markings on them. Release them into the air and it won’t be me killing the children, it’ll be you.’ He laughed again, pleased with himself. ‘Didn’t think of that, did you?’

  Her voice came back like ice. ‘I’m a good shot, Mr Wingrave. I can drop you without going anywhere near your pockets.’

  He didn’t believe her. He wielded the rock once more.

  The glass broke and fell out of the frame. With a snort of triumph Wingrave reached through and felt for the latch.

  Tyler cast one last despairing look at Liz. He didn’t think she’d fire either. Not everyone can. Training is one thing, actually shooting another human being is something else. Some people can never do it; some can do it once but never again.

  And whoever Wingrave was, whatever he’d done, whatever he meant to do, he was an unarmed man with his back to her. The training programmes never envisaged that. They presented you with targets which were, figuratively as well as actually, black and white: scowling men, heavily armed, racing at you in a menacing crouch. Nothing ambivalent about a situation like that: it’s kill or be killed. Most people could shoot someone like that.

  It took a different mentality to shoot someone posing this more academic sort of threat. Harder, or perhaps just cooler. You had to see past the target’s defencelessness to the threat posed by his very existence.

  The trouble was, it wasn’t a now-or-never situation. Liz didn’t have to fire immediately because that would be the only chance. She could follow him inside, repeating her intention to shoot, and still be following him when he reached the children and started breaking the vials.

  She’d given Tyler two choices: neither of them appealed to him. There was another option. He thought he could reach Wingrave before Wingrave could get inside. He knew he could bring him down. Ten years older than his opponent, carrying a couple of stones that his doctor disapproved of, Mitchell Tyler still met very few men he couldn’t bring down. He’d never raise his head again if he couldn’t beat a man who’d spent the last three days in bed with gyppy tummy.

  That hit home. Typhoid, legionnaire’s, hepatitis: nasty, messy, painful, dangerous, indignity-heaping diseases every one. Catching, too.

  It didn’t have to matter. There were bigger things at stake. Mitchell Tyler wasn’t a sentimental man but he wasn’t going to expose small children to something he wouldn’t face himself. He launched himself at Martin Wingrave.

  Who saw him coming and calmly pulled a wood-chisel out of his belt.

  Tyler didn’t make a lot of mistakes but that was one: assuming the man had only one offensive weapon. It was a rudimentary error, but he might not get the chance to kick himself for it. A hostage to his own impulsion, it was too late to back off. The only evasive action he could manage was to twist and hope the waiting blade buried itself in his shoulder rather than his heart or throat.

  Pain shot him through, explosive, concussive. He gasped with the shock and curled into a ball around it. But that defensive ball exposed his skull and his spine to a man with a blade designed to penetrate hardwood: it took a real effort of will but he had to straighten out, find the man and the blade, fight his way clear of them. Whatever damage he’d sustained he had to absorb it, put it to the back of his mind for the next two or three minutes while he fought for sur
vival. Nothing that could have been done to him was such a threat to his life as a psychopath armed with a wood chisel.

  Ignoring the pain as best he could – a detached portion of his brain had traced it to the left side of his chest, was still puzzling over the noise in his ears and the blood in his eyes – he located a bit of his opponent and yanked hard. The next thing he knew they were tangled together on the ground. Shaking the blood out of his eyes Tyler groped for Wingrave’s right hand. Typhoid be damned: if he didn’t grab that chisel soon he wouldn’t live long enough to get typhoid.

  The sting of his skin parting told him better than his obstructed vision that he’d found it. One powerful hand closed over Wingrave’s as Tyler struggled to free the other from under him. He wished he could see. At least the man was no match for him physically. It was as if Tyler’s ill-judged assault had been the last straw and he’d given up.

  Given up? Psychopaths don’t give up.

  A hand on his shoulder made Tyler squirm like a bulky snake; the voice in his ear stopped him. ‘Mitchell, it’s all right. It’s over.’

  Liz helped him out from under the still form. Even now he was reluctant to release the chisel. But when he did, and wiped his sleeve across his eyes, finally he understood that the danger had passed. Martin Wingrave was dead. There was a hole in the centre of his forehead and the back of his skull was gone. It was Wingrave’s blood in Tyler’s eyes, not his own. The momentum of his charge had carried him on to the chisel, but even then it was held in a dead hand.

  ‘You shot him,’ he grunted, pain suddenly clamping up his chest.

  ‘I did,’ Liz agreed. She sat him down on the steps and parted his clothes to find where the blade had cut him. An inch-wide wound pumped blood from his left side. Liz wadded a handkerchief against the injury and pressed his hand over it. ‘Hold tight, help’s on the way.’

  ‘I didn’t think you would.’

  ‘I was always going to shoot him rather than let him inside. I didn’t expect to have to get round you to do it’

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbled. The afternoon light was fading faster than it had any business doing.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s over. Everyone’s safe now. Well, nearly everyone.’

  Tyler looked at the man crumpled at the top of the steps. He was a long way away and receding by the moment.

  Liz read the look, and the comment he lacked the strength to make. ‘I wasn’t thinking of him. He’s in the only place he’d ever be safe. No parole; no gullible psychiatrist thinking he’s cured because he says so. I was thinking of Donovan.’

  But Tyler wasn’t listening. Liz sat on the step beside him to spare him the indignity of toppling over and propped him up until a siren heralded the ambulance.

  8

  On his own bike and on a level playing field – roads and tracks that he knew as well as those pursuing him – Donovan would have given anyone a run for his money. He’d ridden motorbikes, quite illegally, since he was twelve years old. The sense of proprioception which tells most people where the various bits of their bodies are and permits them to perform complex manoeuvres without conscious thought extended in Donovan’s case to a pair of wheels. He could make a bike do things that the makers never thought of.

  But not today. There were too many factors working against him. This wasn’t his bike, or any bike: it was a hybrid whose dynamics and performance envelope were quite different. It wasn’t a level playing field: the men behind him worked in these fields every day, they knew where the tracks ran, how wide and how rough they were. He had a passenger to look after. And the power of the engine throbbing between his knees could not totally compensate for his lack of physical strength. It was like coursing a three-legged hare: the poor little sod would give all it had but the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

  The quad had seemed a good idea at the time. Donovan knew now that he wasn’t going to make his escape on it.

  In times of difficulty the psalmist lifted up his eyes unto the hills. In the same way Donovan looked for the canal. It drew him like home. Whatever hazards he faced, gut instinct always told him to put water at his back. It was his faithful friend and would not let him down.

  But there were two fields and three fences still between him and the Thirty Foot Drain, and he couldn’t stay ahead of the pursuit long enough to get there. Even if by some fluke he did – if two of the men behind him collided and the others turned back to render first aid – he wasn’t sure it would do much good. There was no drawbridge he could cross and then pull up. There was no bridge at all, and no roads, no dwellings, no phones. The nearest sure help was at the Sinkhole engine house, five miles east, or the Posset Inn four and a half miles west. With or without Elphie to care for, he hadn’t a hope in hell of reaching either of them.

  When he first saw it he thought he was hallucinating. That his desperate need had conjured up a mirage. He wiped his sleeve across his eyes and looked again. But it was still there: a small narrowboat, black below and cornflower-blue above, chuntering along between the sedgy banks at a steady three knots.

  It was October, well past the tourist season. A pleasant autumn might have tempted people out for a late holiday, but it had hardly stopped raining since August. Come September, even in a good year, the visitors thinned out and withdrew to the cosier core of the inland waterways: the Grand Union, the Ashby & North Oxford, the Avon Ring and the Thames above Reading. The Castlemere Levels weren’t picturesque in the same way, were a long haul from any of the pleasure-boating centres, and had a daunting, godforsaken look except at the height of summer. Mostly, only people like Donovan – boat owners, people who lived on the water or kept their boats out year-round – would be out here after mid-September. Which meant he should have recognized the little cornflower-blue narrowboat; but he didn’t.

  It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to get so many chances that he could afford to squander one. Whoever they were, they probably had a phone. Five minutes with a working phone and they were safe. There was nothing to be gained by hurting either him or Elphie once the police were on their way.

  If he could reach the canal before the pursuit reached him. Which he couldn’t just by opening the throttle. If he tried to go as fast as the men behind him, either he’d bounce Elphie clear off the quad or he’d turn the damned thing over.

  Which left dirty tricks. If he could lock the gate … Oddly enough he wasn’t carrying a padlock today, but maybe he could find something that would serve. Barbed wire? You’re never far from a loose bit of barbed wire in the country, and this field was no exception. A coil of the stuff, left from last time the fence was mended in anticipation of it needing mending again, had been thrust into the hedge beside the gate. Donovan hauled it out, found the end and began weaving. He took no care over it, ignoring the pain of his torn palms. Thirty seconds from now when the men got here the wire would have ravelled up tighter still, the in-built tension of the coil twisting it like a spring until the barbs meshed together. It would take longer to undo than it had taken him to do it; and because he was running for his life and they weren’t the prospect of injury would worry them more. They’d waste a minute trying to find a way round; when there wasn’t one they’d waste another minute deciding who should tackle the job and a third looking for gloves.

  It might be enough. If he could turn a minute’s lead into three it just might be enough. As the quads raced down the slope he dropped the wire and ran, blood on his hands, and chased the machine up through the gears as fast as he could.

  As they fled Elphie looked back over Donovan’s hunched shoulders and waved. ‘That’s Uncle Jim! Uncle Jim, Uncle Jim – it’s me!’

  Donovan couldn’t think of a single comment he could make in front of an eight-year-old so he just gritted his teeth and drove.

  Periwinkle wasn’t a hire boat but nor was she in the hands of experts. In an unguarded moment her owner had promised to lend her to his two nieces as long as they avoided the busy tourist season. They’d been out f
or three days now, had got the hang of stopping, starting and steering, were less familiar with the map.

  ‘This is the Thirty Foot Drain,’ said Stella Merrick with laboured patience. ‘Not the Sixteen Foot Drain. Look at it: it’s thirty feet wide!’

  ‘Not all the way,’ said Sylvia; which was perfectly true. When the canals stopped carrying commercial traffic there was little incentive to maintain the banks. Consequently, the width of the Thirty Foot Drain varied between ten metres and about six. Interestingly enough, the Sixteen Foot Drain wasn’t five metres wide all the way either. Sometimes it was wider.

  ‘Look,’ said Stella, shaking out the map on the coach-house roof. Then she turned it round. ‘Look. We came through Sinkhole, and we followed the right-hand bank. If we’d followed the left-hand bank we’d have gone down the Sixteen Foot Drain. This is the Thirty Foot Drain.’

  ‘Then why haven’t we come to Posset yet?’

  ‘Because we haven’t gone far enough!’

  ‘We came through Sinkhole yesterday afternoon! Four hours max should have got us into Posset.’

  ‘You can’t count the time we were tied up last night,’ Stella said reasonably. ‘Or the hour we spent with our nose stuck in the bank this morning. And untangling the mooring rope from the propeller must have taken another hour.’

  ‘In that case,’ snapped her sister, ‘maybe you should be more careful!’

  ‘And maybe you should do a bit of the work around here instead of posing at the tiller in the hope of impressing muscle-bound farmhands!’

  ‘What was that splash?’ asked Sylvia.

  Quarrel forgotten, Stella went to Periwinkle’s side and peered over. ‘An otter?’

  Even a small narrowboat like Periwinkle is ten metres long, it doesn’t move much with the weight of the people on board. So the first warning the sisters got that they were no longer alone was when something as wet as an otter and the same streamlined shape but bigger and with an Irish accent levered itself out of the dark water and slumped on the forepeak, shivering and coughing like a sixty-a-day smoker.