Strangely, she felt relief. With the tension between her and Ian recently, although she needed him to come home, she also dreaded it, not knowing how he would react. Or how she would react to him. For months, she’d known the marriage was dead. But that didn’t make dealing with it any easier. Ian not being there meant that she didn’t have to face up to that for a while longer.
Martin was standing just inside the kitchen. He looked expectant. She assumed he must have heard her coming down.
“How are you?” There was a certain wariness about the question. As if he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. Oddly, she could relate to it, and it reassured her.
“I’ve had better days.” Her voice sounded weary, and she realised just how exhausted she suddenly was.
He smiled at her, his own tiredness obvious. “Haven’t we all?”
Stepping to one side, he gestured to the table. “Want to come and sit with me?”
“Why would I want to do that?” For a moment, she was transported back to two days ago. When they’d first met, they had been playful and flirty. She’d enjoyed that, and she was sure he had too.
“Keep an old man company?” he suggested.
“Are you an old man?” She had moved closer, as if she was going to sit at the table.
“I definitely feel it at the moment.”
Only a foot or so separated them. She stopped and looked up at him. Far from looking old, he seemed like a child. The tiredness he was feeling had stripped some of his protective layers away. Instead of the cool surfer dude, the real Martin was showing through. All signs of confidence were gone. Wariness and uncertainty prevailed. Her anger towards him slipped away. Instead she just wanted to be close to him.
“Will you hold me?” she asked.
He studied her cautiously.
“I won’t bite,” she assured him.
Then he grinned. “Unless I ask nicely?”
Eighteen
Sex hadn’t really been on his mind. But seeing her like this, aware of her proximity, he felt himself stir. He reached out and touched her face. His fingers glided down her cheek, the softness of her skin exciting him.
She looked up into his eyes, and her expression only served to arouse him further.
His intention had been to talk to her. There were things he needed to say. But perhaps this was a situation where actions would speak louder than words.
He dipped his head down and kissed her. Her lips didn’t part immediately, but that didn’t bother him. He knew they would and, sure enough, moments later he was enjoying the warmth and wetness of her mouth. It spurred him on. His arms slipped around her, pulling her against him as he thrust his hardness into her stomach.
Coming up for air momentarily, he noted the dilated pupils and felt his own excitement rising. Then he was pushing her against the wall, reaching frantically down for the hem of her skirt. Kissing her again, his lips crushed harshly against hers. Lust had taken over. She was his now, and nothing was going to stop this happening.
There had been moments over the last couple of days when he had thought about this. In his heart, he’d known this moment would come. But the time hadn’t seemed right. And he’d had other things to do, which meant leaving her out of the picture while he got on with his plans.
But those plans were almost complete. Very soon he’d be able to leave. There might have been another opportunity later, but now just seemed the right time to act.
Her skirt was pulled up around her waist now, and his fingers were pulling aside the flimsy fabric that lay between them and her sex.
She bucked against him, and he pushed her back, letting her know that he was in control. He knew she wasn’t used to having someone else in charge. That knowledge alone was stimulating.
As he pressed into her, he left a gap between them on his left. Enough of a space for his free hand to access her breasts. The contact with the outside of her shirt was brief, then he was tugging at the buttons, virtually ripping it open. Creamy flesh was exposed. The lacy underwear was no match for his fingers. He caught a nipple between thumb and forefinger, squeezing it. She gasped into his mouth.
His other hand had found what it was looking for. Fingers pushed roughly into her. She wasn’t ready for him yet, but it wasn’t something he was going to dwell on. This was animal passion, not a physical declaration of love.
In a way, this position he’d manoeuvred them into was uncomfortable. To lie down with a woman was probably the most practical way to do this. But it was boring. The impracticality, the uncertainty of what they would do next and how it would work, that only added to the stimulation.
As did the possibility that they might be seen. Anyone coming close enough to a window would be able to see them. The married woman with her breasts and legs exposed. No doubts at all as to what she was doing with her house guest.
Slipping his fingers from inside her, he grasped one of her hands and placed it over his crotch, holding it there long enough for her to get the message. Then he felt his zip being lowered. Her other hand reached for his belt. Satisfied that she would do what he wanted, he pulled her underwear aside and ran his fingertips over her. The jolting reaction told him all he needed to know about the state she was in.
He felt his trousers open and her hand hesitate.
“Take it out,” he told her, his voice heavy with the excitement. Then he was kissing her again, thrusting his tongue on to hers.
The soft warmth of her hand sent an intense thrill through him. In part it was the physical sensation, but it was more a result of the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong. Regardless of how good or bad her marriage was, she had made a commitment in the eyes of God, and now he was doing everything he could to tear that commitment apart.
Both hands moved beneath her skirt now and he tore through lace, letting the ruined garment fall to her feet. He cupped her buttocks and lifted her slightly, pressing her back against the wall for support. A glance at her face revealed the shock in her eyes. He grinned, fired up by the spontaneity, the ferocity of his actions. Then he was pushing forward, his groin rising to meet hers.
Remarkably, and apparently to her surprise, his aim was true, and he was immediately sliding into her and savouring the soft dampness around him. Holding her tightly between himself and the wall, he drove himself in and out, taking her roughly and urgently. She gasped and shrieked as he did so, her responses only serving to arouse him more.
He was distracted briefly by movement to his left. He glanced over and smiled. Many things could energise him. Most of them involved other people’s pain. He fed off their suffering like a vampire feeds on blood. And to a man there is very little more emotionally painful than watching your wife being taken by another man.
His climax was one of the most intense he had experienced in a long time.
Nineteen
Fourteen hours had passed since Collins had been roused from his bed. His own office didn’t have windows, but he’d caught a glimpse of daylight when he’d ventured out to the loo, so he knew it was still fairly early. Even though the unsocial hours went with the job, sometimes they could be hard to accept, especially when you had a family at home. Not that they’d be waiting for him – from past experience, they knew better than that.
It was tempting to knock off early and leave it until tomorrow. The phone calls from the Ministry of Defence seemed to have slackened off. At one point, he’d been getting demands for updates every fifteen minutes. But since he’d patiently pointed out to them that every minute he spent talking to them was a minute less he could spend on his investigation, they’d tailed off. It was nearly an hour and a half since the last call. And bearing in mind the way the Civil Service worked, that probably meant they’d reached the end of their working day, so they were unlikely to call again before nine in the morning, especially as it would be Sunday. Besides, their main concern had been retrieving the device. And as far as he’d been able to tell, they weren’t missing any more of them.
He smiled at his own flippancy. The situation this morning had been deadly serious. There were a lot of people at the farm who’d been wishing they were elsewhere, and that was on the basis that it was just an ‘ordinary’ bomb. For those in the know, the reaction was stronger. The first instinct for Collins had been to gather his family together and jump on the first long-haul flight that he could, but those thoughts hadn’t stayed with him for long. He was pretty sure that if the bomb had gone off this morning, it would have been long before his plane took off. Besides, if there was fallout, how would he know where it would end up? Before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d assumed that if anything went wrong in Russia, it wouldn’t affect the UK. Even now, he refused to eat lamb in case it came from Wales.
Self-preservation aside, at heart he was a copper, and a bloody good one. Not because he was a budding Sherlock Holmes – and definitely not a Starsky or Hutch: those days were long gone. What made him good was his determination to get to the truth and nail the bad guys. There was plenty of injustice in the world that he couldn’t do anything about. So if he came across a situation that he could do something about, he would. It was why his wife put up with the long and unsocial hours, the time he spent away from her and the boys. He knew that, and he was grateful to her. It was also why he wasn’t ready to leave the case alone just yet.
There was something not right about it. Not that there should be anything right about a nuclear device being stolen and then left in the back of a van in an old barn on the edge of Sherwood Forest.
The what-ifs were endless. What he really needed was evidence that would point him in the right direction. But the evidence about the theft itself was being gathered by the Royal Military Police’s Special Investigation Branch, and it was doubtful that anything meaningful would be released by them. The MOD would want this hushed up as much as possible. Alarming the general population was one thing, but this was bloody embarrassing.
So all he had to go on was at this end, and that wasn’t much. His boys had been given limited access to the van when it was found and the Army had taken it with them when they’d left.
Their departure from the farm had been surprisingly discreet. Roadworks had been contrived to block civilian access to that end of the village, and they had used the track that passed The Barns to leave the farm. The military presence wouldn’t have gone completely unnoticed by the locals, but its scale and significance would pass them by.
What was less impressive about their departure was the complete inability to preserve any evidence they had bothered to leave behind. In manoeuvring off the main track to pass through the farm yard, lorries and Land Rovers executed three point turns that churned up any imprints from feet or tyres. Collins had also been given reports of deliberate wheel-spinning by some of the squaddies.
Physical evidence was sadly lacking, then, for either CID or SIB. Which left him with witness statements. The three he’d taken earlier, and what appeared to be a random collection of statements from other villagers, the latter relating to the theft of the Sherpa. It seemed PC Oakes had been busy the previous day. Not particularly methodical, but busy.
Collins had several folders on his desk, together with an A4 notepad. Three sheets from the pad were divided into columns. Each of the columns had jotted headings: Dog, Sherpa, Post Office and Gates were on the first sheet. As he’d read through the statements, he’d tried to find patterns in them. If there was anything referred to in more than one statement, he’d cross-referenced them, with each heading representing a different pattern or theme. And for each heading there was a separate folder containing copies of the statements that referred to it. He’d almost worn out a path to and from the photocopier.
O’Neill wouldn’t have had the patience for this. He could do the paperwork, but only as much as he had to. This wasn’t required paperwork, though. This was the methodical, plodding analysis that Collins felt was necessary to make progress. Very often, it wasn’t finding the clues that was the hard part. It was eliminating the clutter around them.
The dog, for instance. Was that important, or a red herring? Its death had been brutal and violent. As well as statements, the file with the word “DOG” written neatly across the tab contained a series of photographs. Collins wasn’t an animal lover, but that hadn’t made the images any less sickening. Still, how did that fit in with the theft of a nuclear device?
Another puzzle was the references he had seen to a growing tension in the village in the past few days. A Mrs Fuller had commented on the number of arguments she’d witnessed, and the increasing instances of bullying in the pub she ran. If it had just been her report of this, he would have dismissed it. But there had been another statement referring to the pub bullying, and a further two referring to the “tensions” building up around the village in general.
This issue was also cross-referenced to another heading he’d jotted down on the second sheet of A4: Disabilities. Because the bullying seemed to have been directed at people who were disabled, either physically or mentally. One of them had even been Martin Gates’s brother (cross-referenced to the Gates file). Although it wasn’t bullying, Mrs Fuller had also commented on remarks made about Peter Salthouse. It had taken only a couple of phone calls to establish that Salthouse was also disabled. Along with Ronald Dakin, that made three disabled people in the village. Not outstanding in itself, but there was something else nagging at him.
It took him nearly ten minutes to find it. A photocopy he’d asked Brian Oakes to take of his own notes. A single word, jotted at the side where the margin might have been. Deformed.
He picked up the phone.
Oakes did his best to be helpful, but his pissed-off tone was predictable. More concerned about the case, Collins ignored it.
“You’ve written the word ‘deformed’ in your notebook.”
“Yeah.” As if it was the most natural thing in the world to have done.
“Can you tell me why?”
“I don’t understand. How’s this important? I thought you were trying to find out who’d stolen the van?” Oakes was still oblivious of the true nature of the case, and Collins had no intention of enlightening him.
“I am,” Collins said patiently. “And I’m sure this means nothing, but it was a random word in your notebook, and I just wanted to eliminate it.”
At the other end of the line, he heard a long breath being let out. He guessed it was supposed to signify either exasperation or indignation, but he wasn’t really bothered. Whatever Oakes was feeling was his problem.
“It was nothing to do with the investigation. Or the statement I was taking down.”
Not that it was much of a statement, Collins thought, glancing at the notes on the rest of the page.
“Humour me,” he said.
“Well, I was in the shop.” Something Collins already knew, but he maintained his patience. “And we were talking about the van being stolen. When I say ‘we’, I mean the owners of the Post Office...”
“Mr and Mrs Payne,” Collins reminded him helpfully.
“Yes... Mr and Mrs Payne. And then there was the other woman...”
“Mrs Fuller.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I didn’t talk to her for too long.”
“I’m sure. But what about...”
“Oh, yes. I’m coming to that.” A brief pause, presumably while the young PC collected his thoughts. “Actually, if I remember rightly, we’d moved on from talking about the van, and they were talking about odd things happening in the village. You know, like the tractor accident the day before. That Fuller woman made it sound like it’d been more than an accident, by the way...”
“I can see that from your notes. What about the ‘deformed’ bit?”
“Oh, God, yeah. That was horrible.” There was another pause, possibly for dramatic effect. Collins reined in his frustration and waited. “It was the daughter.”
Collins scanned the notes, flicking through other pages for an indication of what Oakes w
as talking about. “Daughter? What daughter?”
“The Paynes’ daughter. It was her hands.” Another pause, and this time Collins was starting to feel a rising sense of anticipation. “They were horrible.”
“In what way?” He could tell that, in spite of his irritation at being disturbed while he was off-duty, Oakes was clearly beginning to savour the story, and Collins didn’t have time for this.
“They were deformed.”
“I’d already guessed that. How were they deformed?” Not that the answer to that really mattered. There was something more important that was occurring to him.
“Well, she only seemed to have a thumb on each hand. There weren’t fingers, as such. It looked like she just had one lump where her fingers should have been. As if they’d been – I don’t know – melted together. You know how mittens look? A bit like that, only thinner, as if there were only two fingers there.”
“And were both hands the same?”
“As far as I could tell.”
Collins thought for a moment. “Okay. One last question. How old would you say she was?”
“About my age, I suppose. Early twenties.”
More reading. Scanning statements and looking at reports. He found some of what he wanted in the incident report about Peter Salthouse. His date of birth. 23rd June 1965. That made him twenty four. The statement from Norma Fuller referred to Ron Dakin and Colin Gates as young men. More specifically, it said that Colin was only in his mid-twenties. And the Payne’s daughter was in her early twenties.
Odd, that. Four disabled people in a village, even the size of Ravens Gathering, wasn’t unusual. But four of a similar age? Surely that was more than just a coincidence?
He dropped his pen and sat back, rubbing his eyes. It was interesting. But was it relevant? He couldn’t see how it could be. Not unless there’d been some kind of nuclear fallout in Sherwood Forest twenty-odd years ago. That thought made him hesitate, but he pushed it aside. He was only thinking that because of the stolen bomb and his thoughts about Chernobyl earlier. In any event, it was unlikely that a nuclear disaster would result in only a handful of victims.
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