Sandman

by David Hodges

  Stuffing a wad of chewing gum in his mouth, Roscoe forgot to remove the silver paper first and spat it out with an oath after the first bite. Throwing it into the wastepaper bin, he produced a battered packet of cigarettes instead and lit up a bent filter-tip, seemingly unaware of the tobacco strands curling out of a tear in the paper.

  Where the hell was Kate Lewis? He needed to talk to her before the whatnot hit the fan and she should have been back to the station ages ago. How long did it take to make just a few routine inquiries? He was on the point of ringing the control room to call her up on her radio, when a knock on the office door preceded the looming bulk of Hayden Lewis.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ Hayden exclaimed, ‘but I’m worried about Kate.’

  The DC’s face was very red and his eyes had the sharp gleam of someone in near mental panic.

  Roscoe felt insects crawl around his insides. ‘Worried?’ he snapped. ‘Why?’

  Hayden dumped himself in a chair opposite, without invitation, and went on in a rush, ‘Got called to a burglary in Mark while we were doing some house to house on the Landy job. Had to leave her to it. That was at least two hours ago and I haven’t seen or heard from her since.’

  ‘House to house? Why were you doing that? I told her to wrap this inquiry up.’

  Hayden looked uncomfortable. ‘That’s what we were going to do,’ he replied after some hesitation, ‘but Kate thought we’d make just one or two more inquiries at a hamlet near where the girl’s body was found.’

  Thinking of what he had learned from the pathologist, together with his own emerging doubts, Roscoe didn’t press the point. ‘Tried her radio?’ he said instead.

  Hayden hesitated, looking uncomfortable. ‘I found it on the floor of the CID car,’ he said lamely. ‘She – she obviously left it behind when we were doing our house to house and forgot about it afterwards.’

  Roscoe looked as though he was going to explode. ‘She did what?’ he rasped. ‘An experienced DS leaves her personal radio in the car? What sort of DS is she?’

  Hayden winced, then gave a heavy sigh. ‘These things happen, sir,’ he said, keen to move on. ‘But the thing is, we now have no means now of contacting her to make sure she’s ok.’

  Roscoe glared at him for a moment then shook his head in disbelief before stubbing out his cigarette and reaching for some more gum. ‘Exactly where did you leave her?’

  ‘By some cottages – maybe half a mile from the village of Lowmoor. Said she wanted to finish checking them out before packing the job in. That should only have taken her another twenty minutes or so at the most.’

  ‘What about Lowmoor? She could have decided to extend her inquiries there?’

  ‘If she did, she’d have needed to be a good swimmer. Place is cut off by the floods.’

  Roscoe stared at him in mid-chew, gum wedged between his front teeth like a large wad of white Plasticine. ‘And she’s been out of contact for two hours?’

  Hayden glanced at his watch. ‘Nearer three actually. My burglary job tied me up for longer than I’d anticipated and I didn’t get away from Mark until an hour ago.’

  Roscoe chewed rapidly again, at first saying nothing. Then he barked, ‘OK, better get some initial inquiries carried out. Might be nothing in it – the silly cow is a bloody maverick and she’s has done this sort of Lone Ranger thing before, so we don’t want to hit the panic button too soon.’

  Hayden scowled at him, plainly not appreciating his offensive description of his wife. ‘And what if she’s in trouble – fallen in the water somewhere or been hit on by some pervert?’

  Roscoe met his gaze levelly. ‘Hardly likely, is it? Your missus may be a bit of a loose cannon at times, but she’s a pretty tough cookie.’

  ‘Perhaps we could get the chopper up anyway?’

  The agony of indecision was etched in Roscoe’s expression and he blew a bubble with his gum, sucking it back in under his moustache almost immediately. ‘We could, but if this turns out to be a false alarm, we’d look bloody stupid – and Kate certainly wouldn’t thank us for it.’

  Hayden’s mouth tightened and his blue eyes flashed angrily. ‘So we just sit tight and do nothing then – is that what you’re saying?’

  Roscoe’s slab-like face hardened. ‘No,’ he rasped, ‘that isn’t what I’m saying. You grab a couple of uniforms and get out to where you left her pronto; maybe someone in one of the cottages will know where she went. If we draw a blank there, then I’ll think about sending the balloon up. Satisfied?’

  ‘No,’ Hayden retorted. ‘I’m not.’

  Roscoe glared at him. ‘Tough!’ he said. ‘She should have hung on to her radio then, shouldn’t she?’

  The staircase was wide and heavily carpeted. Kate’s leather boots made little sound as she headed for the upper floor, acutely conscious of the fact that, if anyone happened to come down at the same time, she had nowhere to hide. She had no idea where the killer, Tommy, had gone; hopefully he was still fully occupied dumping Leroy’s body somewhere outside, which meant he was unlikely to be making for the attic yet to interrogate Gabriel Lessing. But she knew she still had very little time at her disposal. She had to find the room, somehow gain access, as the door would almost certainly be locked, and get away with Lessing before Tommy reappeared. And even then, the pair of them would still have to get out of the grounds of the house and away from what had become an island with possibly an army of thugs in pursuit. No mean task!

  Her heartbeat had become a hammer against her chest when she reached the top of the staircase and checked the top-floor corridor in both directions. Nothing, save the same ubiquitous white doors with their gilt embellishments and a thick carpet. So where was the access staircase to the attic? Then she remembered her first sight of the house and the tower at one end. That had to be where the attic room was located.

  Closing her eyes tightly for a second, she tried to visualize the front of the building as she had first seen it. The tower had been on the right and, as far as she could work out with the curve of the staircase, she was now facing the front, which meant the tower was to her left. Taking a deep trembling breath, she turned in that direction – and seconds later spotted the deep recess on her right, with a narrow staircase ascending to another floor. She breathed a sigh of relief.

  The staircase reminded her of one she had once climbed to a church bell tower as a child, though this tower was nowhere near as high, and there was a light switch at the bottom. Nevertheless, as with the church bell tower, it curled round and round like a corkscrew until she reached a stout wooden door. She tried the handle. The door was locked and no key was in evidence. She swore under her breath. Now what?

  She was actually on the point of admitting defeat and retracing her steps when, quite by chance, her hand scraped the left hand wall and something jangled. Glancing down, she saw a black mortice-type key swinging gently on a hook close to the door frame. Eureka! Obviously the Sandman and his crew hadn’t envisaged someone having the nerve to break into the house and had chosen convenience over security where access to the tower room was concerned. Well, they were in for a shock!

  Unhooking the key, she carefully inserted it in the lock, breathed a quick prayer, and turned it to the right. The lock snapped open and, turning the ring handle, she lifted an iron latch and the door swung inwards on well-oiled hinges.

  The room beyond was only about seven foot square, lit by a three stem chandelier, and it contained an assortment of furniture, boxes and rolls of carpet. It had obviously been used as a storeroom at one time – what Kate’s Irish mum would have called a ‘bogey hole’ – but it was serving a much more sinister purpose now.

  Gabriel Lessing was sitting on a wooden crate in one corner, his hands tied behind him and, as it turned out, then secured to a metal pipe attached to the wall, and his ankles lashed together. He was wearing just a shirt, which was badly soiled and ripped in one place, and grey corduroy trousers. The khaki coat he had been wearing when Kate had last seen him by the
River Parrett was lying on the floor at his feet with a pair of gumboots dumped on top of it.

  His face was puffed and bloodied and there was a look of terrified expectancy in his brown eyes when she first appeared. But it quickly began to fade when he saw who his visitor was.

  ‘I – I’ve been kidnapped and beaten,’ he said unnecessarily. ‘I – I demand police protection.’

  She smiled grimly at his farcical comments and dug one hand into her pocket, producing the small clasp knife she always carried and pulling out one of the sharp blades.

  ‘Keep still,’ she ordered as she leaned over him to begin cutting the thick cords off his wrists. ‘What the hell were you doing here?’

  ‘Just taking pictures of the gates and wall. Then this big thug grabbed me from behind and hauled me inside.’

  Kate paused in the middle of cutting through the cords, her curiosity aroused in spite of their predicament. ‘You knew about this place all along, didn’t you?’ she accused. ‘Did Ellie Landy tell you about it before she died? You’ve been lying to us, haven’t you?’

  Lessing swallowed hard, his eyes darting from side to side like a trapped animal. ‘She – she only said she was chasing a big story. I didn’t know what.’

  ‘And what else? You’d better tell me or I’ll leave you here.’

  ‘She – she just said it was some sort of criminal conspiracy centred on a big house in – in a hilltop village cut off by the floods. I got hold of a map and made a few in–inquiries. …’

  She finished cutting through the cords binding his wrists and turned her attention to those around his ankles. ‘And put two and two together?’ she finished for him. ‘So how did you get here?’

  He sniffed miserably. ‘The morning supply boat.’

  She finished cutting through the last of the cords and straightened up.

  ‘Right, get your boots and coat on. We’re leaving.’

  He grabbed the sleeve of her coat, panic in his eyes. ‘They said they would kill me if I made a sound,’ he blurted. ‘Were – were going to gag me until I told them I was asthmatic—’

  ‘Shut it!’ she hissed, cutting him off, and dumped his coat in his lap. ‘They’ll be on their way up here in a few moments. We have to get out.’

  ‘They took – took my camera and notebook,’ he wailed. ‘I want them arrested.’

  Kate’s hand struck him hard across the face. ‘I said, shut it, you stupid little turd!’ she snarled. ‘I don’t give a shit about your camera or your notebook. If they find me here, we’re both dead, got it?’

  He was crying now, Kate’s none too gentle blow releasing the floodgates of pent-up emotion as if he were a hysterical child, but she felt no sympathy for him, just a sense of revulsion. ‘Get your coat and boots on,’ she repeated, ‘and keep close to me.’

  There was no one on the stairs as they left the room and Kate had the foresight to re-lock the door and pocket the key. That would hold up Tommy for a vital few minutes while he tried to find it, she mused.

  Surprisingly, they made the corridor and the main staircase to the ground floor without encountering anyone, but then their luck ran out.

  Kate heard the voices just as she was about to head along the downstairs corridor towards the toilet through which she had entered the house. Grabbing Lessing by the collar, she took a chance and hauled him through an adjacent door into what turned out to be a broom cupboard as at least two men, talking loudly, strode past.

  Giving them a few seconds, she risked a check and saw that the corridor was empty again. ‘Come on!’ she rapped at Lessing and went to drag him out of the cupboard again. But to her surprise he hesitated, holding back.

  ‘I can’t,’ he moaned. ‘I need my inhaler.’

  Kate stared at him incredulously. ‘Your inhaler?’ she exclaimed in a hoarse whisper. ‘You’ve got to be joking.’

  ‘Can’t – can’t breathe properly,’ he said. ‘It’s the stress.’

  Unceremoniously she jerked him out into the corridor, then pushed him ahead of her. ‘Move!’ she ordered. ‘Or, so help me, I will leave you here!’

  He stumbled, but kept going, his breathing now issuing in ragged gasps as she prodded him forward. They reached the toilet without event and, once inside, Kate allowed him the luxury of a very brief rest as she struggled with the window, which seemed to have stuck somehow. His moans and ragged breathing seemed to fill the place and, briefly glancing once over her shoulder, she saw in the fading light filtering in through the window that he was holding on to a towel rail as if his life depended on it.

  She could feel her heart making loud squishy noises, like an overworked water pump, as she hauled on the window. It rose a few inches, then jammed again. ‘Shit! Shit! Shit!’ she snarled, and at the same moment Lessing began to hyperventilate behind her and she heard the sound of thudding footsteps above her head accompanied by the faint sound of shouting. Their escape had been discovered. Then the window flew up, nearly taking her hands off.

  ‘Quickly! Outside!’ she rapped at Lessing and, heedless of his obvious breathing problems, dragged him to the window. ‘Up on the toilet seat and through the window – unless you want to die here now?’

  How much of the agency man’s condition was down to asthma and how much plain hysteria was unclear, but after some difficulty, he managed to get up on to the seat and over the sill, dropping headfirst on to the hard-standing below the window. Kate was right behind him and she did not allow him any relief, but hauled him to his feet and pushed him towards the archway through which she had entered the yard earlier. As far as she knew, there were no dogs on the premises, so if they could reach the shrubbery at the front of the house, they might be able to lie low there and wait for an opportunity to get out through the electronic gate. It was a long-shot, but it was also their only chance and she felt a sense of hope when she saw and smelled the damp spirals of mist rising from the paving stones; the infamous marsh mist was coming to their aid. But then fickle fate decided to change sides and threw a major obstacle in the way.

  That obstacle was what appeared to be a heavily built man whose fuzzy shape appeared in the very archway they were heading for, like a spectral visitant from an alien world.

  CHAPTER 15

  Hayden didn’t bother to ask the uniformed shift inspector for two of his officers to assist him with his house to house inquiries, as Roscoe had proposed. He knew without being told that, with government cuts, the uniformed branch was desperately short-staffed and probably only had half-a-dozen bobbies on duty as it was; he had no intention of wasting time making pointless demands for resources that were not available anyway. Instead, he retrieved the keys of the CID car he had been using from the hook beside the door and headed for the police station yard at almost a run.

  Twenty minutes and several miles of burned rubber later he slid to a halt in the same gateway he and Kate had used just a few hours before and stumbled out on to the familiar muddy lane. It had stopped raining now, but the flooded fields beyond the lane were fast disappearing in a late afternoon dusk thickened by an emerging white marsh mist, and lights already burned in the windows of most of the cottages. There was no sign of Kate – or anyone else for that matter – and, as he unlatched the gate of the first cottage, he couldn’t help wondering whether this was as much a waste of time as it would have been trying for uniformed support. After all, how could any of the local residents possibly know where Kate had gone following her house checks – if, in fact, she had been capable of finishing them in the first place? He frowned as he knocked on the door. Get a grip on things, man, he told himself in an attempt at reassurance, this isn’t some awful Psycho-type drama! You’re over-reacting. Kate’s probably got tied up somewhere, nothing more. But that line of thought didn’t help him much at all – especially the phrase ‘tied up’!

  The local residents weren’t much use either and he grew increasingly frustrated as his inquiries at cottage after cottage produced nothing but the shake of a head or the shrug o
f the shoulders. ‘She called here, yes,’ was the usual response, ‘but don’t know where she went afterwards.’

  Hayden had all but given up when he knocked on the door of the last cottage in the row and he was totally unprepared for the reception he received.

  ‘Borrowed my bloody dinghy,’ the thin, sallow-faced young man snapped at him, ‘and she ain’t returned it yet.’

  ‘Yeah,’ the buxom woman said, pushing past him. ‘We co-operated with the police and this is what happens.’

  Hayden held up both hands to calm them down. ‘When was this?’ he queried.

  The woman frowned. ‘’Bout three hours ago.’

  ‘But why did she borrow your boat?’

  ‘Tell him, Sam,’ the woman encouraged. ‘You brought it on yourself, you know, by not reporting things in the first place.’

  ‘Reporting what?’

  Sam said nothing, but stared down at his feet. The woman took a deep breath, then said it all for him. ‘That girl – the one who drowned? She got Sam to take her across to Lowmoor in his dinghy a couple of days before she was found. The detective sergeant who came here got quite excited when we told her that and leaned on him to lend her the dinghy so she could go there herself.’

  ‘What, to Lowmoor?’

  ‘No, Bristol – what do you think?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Sam growled, suddenly activating, ‘and that dinghy cost me a bundle. I’ll be suing you lot, if she’s totalled it.’

  But Hayden wasn’t interested in his complaint. ‘Do you have another boat?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Anyone else around here have one?’

  Sam snorted. ‘Why, so you can total theirs as well?’