Living Dangerously

by Dan Latus

  I called the others together, including the newly awakened Julie.

  ‘We could hold out for a little while here,’ I said, ‘but not for long. They’ve got enough men, and enough weapons, to force their way inside pretty quickly.’

  ‘The police will be here soon,’ Tom said. ‘Just as soon as the snow ploughs get through—’

  ‘That’s not going to happen in the next fifteen minutes,’ I broke in to say.

  ‘You’re being pretty damned pessimistic, Frank! What the hell are you trying to do – scare Julie?’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Tom!’ Senga intervened before I could tell Tom what I thought of him and his analysis.

  ‘Don’t you—!’

  ‘Tom, you’re being a baby,’ she said sharply. ‘And you’re the one who got us all into this mess in the first place, remember?’

  ‘It could be hours before anybody from outside the village reaches us,’ I pointed out. ‘Face it. We’re on our own.’

  Julie began to weep. That felt like the last thing I needed.

  ‘So what I’m going to do,’ I told them quickly, before a discussion could develop, ‘is get outside and lead them away from here. If I run, they’ll think I’m Tom and follow. There’s woodland at the edge of the village. I can lose them there.’

  ‘Great plan,’ Senga said stonily. ‘Oh, yes. You look such a lot like Tom. I can see that working.’

  ‘I’ll go myself,’ Tom said. ‘Then they’ll know it’s me.’

  ‘We’ll both go,’ I said quickly.

  ‘You might manage,’ Senga said, looking at me and shaking her head, ‘but how is Tom going to keep up with you? He won’t be able to.’

  In a sense that was the elephant in the room. Tom wouldn’t get five yards. He wasn’t strong enough.

  ‘They’ve got guns, as well,’ Tom said listlessly. ‘I’ve seen them.’

  Julie sobbed. Senga looked at me. I shrugged. Not for the first time, I wondered how the hell I’d got myself saddled with idiot people like Tom and his pathetic girlfriend.

  ‘Right,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘We’ll have to think of something else – and fast.’

  I was in the kitchen when I heard an almighty crash, followed by a man shouting and a scream from Julie. I rushed towards the door, and then stopped as Senga held up a hand.

  ‘Right, kid. Outside – now!’

  Shit! One of them had arrived, even though the main party was still two houses away.

  ‘You should have kept away from the window,’ the unseen man said with a chuckle.

  I grimaced, more in frustration than anger. Bloody Tom – again!

  ‘Get stuffed!’ I heard Tom say defiantly. ‘Go on – shoot me!’

  I winced at that. Don’t! I was thinking. For crissake don’t encourage him!

  Senga shook her head when I looked at her. She was out of the sight of whoever had caught Tom but she could see what was happening. I grimaced. Not good.

  I headed for the back door of the cottage, opened it and slipped outside. I was under no illusions. Whatever Tom said, and whatever he did to hold things up, he too would be outside in the next minute or so.

  I ran round to the other side of the cottage and waited just outside the front door. There was a commotion in the hall. Then Tom came sprawling out, landing flat on his face in the snow. Julie squealed. Senga shouted with anger, and by the sound of it got clouted again in response.

  ‘Keep out of it!’ I heard the same man snap.

  Moments later, Blue came through the door, gun in hand.

  There was no time to think. But his surprise was greater than mine. I grabbed the hand holding the weapon and kicked hard at his knee. His leg collapsed and he went down with a grunt. To keep him down, I hit him hard across the head with the gun.

  Tom got up and kicked him a couple of times for good measure before I pushed him aside. ‘Bastard!’ he snarled.

  By then, a couple of Blue’s men were running towards us. I grabbed Tom and pushed him back inside the cottage. Then I stuck the gun in Blue’s face and held up a hand to stop his men. They hesitated for a moment and then kept on coming, cautiously, as if they didn’t believe I was serious. I moved the gun aside and fired a single shot at their feet.

  That stopped them.

  ‘Get back!’ I told them.

  Blue raised a hand towards his men and swivelled round to look up at me. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he demanded, shaking his head to clear it. ‘You look familiar.’

  ‘It’s that Doy bloke,’ one of his men growled. ‘The one Steele went to see, and then we visited.’

  ‘Ah!’

  Blue was satisfied. Mystery solved. He had placed me.

  ‘We’ve come for Steele’s lad,’ he said then, as if he was talking about emptying the rubbish bins – and for all the world as if he held the upper hand.

  ‘That’s not going to happen,’ I told him.

  ‘We’ll see.’ He cleared his throat, spat and then sat back and glanced skywards. I looked up too. We’d both heard it, a droning noise coming from somewhere up there.

  The faint drone became louder, and then became a roar. It was accompanied by a whop-whop-whop sound that we all recognized. A helicopter appeared, swooping over the hills that surrounded the village. The relief I felt was indescribable. The cavalry – at last!

  ‘You boys left it too late,’ I said, grinning at Blue.

  He grinned back. ‘You think so?’

  Then another of his men stepped out into the middle of the street and started waving the helicopter down, putting an end to my assumption that it was coming for us.

  My phone vibrated. Keeping the gun in Blue’s face, I fished it out. The noise was such I had to press the loudspeaker button to hear.

  ‘The plough’s nearly here!’ James shouted excitedly. ‘They’re just outside the village.’

  Blue heard too. He looked at me with a calculated look and said, ‘How about a deal?’

  By then three of his men had guns pointing at me. I wondered how close the plough really was, and if the police were with it. I couldn’t be sure.

  ‘You shoot me,’ Blue said calmly, ‘and they shoot you.’

  Probably.

  ‘Or maybe they just shoot you first, and worry about me afterwards?’

  Even more likely.

  ‘Neither of us gets out alive,’ he added unnecessarily.

  He was right. I should have got him inside the house before his men arrived. Then I might have been able to hold on for a while. Out here I couldn’t. Stalemate. Or worse.

  I stepped back and motioned to him to get up. He got to his feet and walked away, ushering his men in front of him. Neither of us said another word.

  The chopper came down fast and settled in the middle of the street, making a great booming noise that reverberated around the village and shook the walls of the cottage. Its rotor blades created a snowstorm that filled the air with swirling white clouds. The houses on the other side of the street vanished from view.

  I stepped back into the doorway of the cottage and watched. Within two or three minutes the gang were all gone. The chopper powered away over the rooftops and then over the hills, with its infuriating whop-whop-whop. As the storm it had created settled, I turned to watch a snow plough arrive outside The Shepherd’s Rest. A council lorry followed, then a second snow plough and more vehicles. But there was no police car.

  I went inside to see how Tom and the others were. They all seemed fine, shaken but relieved to know help was here at last.

  ‘So that was Blue,’ I said with a grimace.

  Tom nodded. ‘Prat!’ he said.

  I wasn’t sure if he was aiming that barb at Blue or at me, but I ignored it anyway.

  ‘How are you?’ I asked, turning to Senga instead.

  ‘My other eye will be black, as well, now,’ she said, squinting and giving me a rueful smile.

  I smiled back and gave her a hug. She seemed to welcome it.

  My abiding thought as thing
s settled down was to wonder why no one had sent a chopper for us. We could have been spared all this. Most of it, anyway.

  Chapter Thirty

  By the time I got back outside, things had changed even more. It looked as though the Red Army had arrived, fresh from a battle in the winter of 1944–45. A third snow plough had appeared, and a fourth, along with another wagon and an assortment of mechanical diggers, tractors and utility vehicles. Local people were pouring out of their houses to greet the rescuers, who looked suitably celebratory and heroic as they acknowledged the delight their breakthrough had inspired. Soon, I fancied, James would throw open the doors of The Shepherd’s Rest to add to the sense of occasion.

  ‘No police, though?’

  I turned to find Tom at my shoulder.

  ‘Not yet,’ I said with a forgiving smile. ‘No doubt they’ll be along soon.’

  ‘So I was wrong about that, as well,’ Tom said bitterly. ‘And you were right.’

  ‘We can’t have been top of their agenda, Tom. That’s all. They have a lot on at the moment. But don’t let it worry you.’

  ‘It’s one more thing, though, isn’t it? I just fuck up all the time.’

  ‘Come on, Tom! That’s no way to think. You’ve had a bad time this past year, that’s all. Things are looking up for you now.’

  He didn’t seem convinced but there were limits to my ability to cheer him up. Fortunately, I noticed something else I’d been right about: the throng was moving towards James’s front door.

  ‘Come on!’ I said. ‘Let’s get the others, and see what’s happening in the pub.’

  Coffee. Mostly it was coffee happening, sometimes with a shot of something else to liven it up. Breakfast orders were also being taken. James’s staff must have arrived for work.

  Already a celebration was in progress, the rescue party just as excited as the locals.

  ‘Sixteen hours we’ve been going,’ one of the drivers announced triumphantly to me. ‘All through the blizzard. But we made it!’

  ‘You deserve more than coffee,’ responded Julie, who seemed to have woken up at last.

  ‘Aye, well,’ the man responded modestly. ‘James knows that. He’ll look after us.’

  Senga grinned happily at me. ‘Party time!’ she said.

  I nodded. But my thoughts had gone back to the helicopter. I was wondering where it had taken Blue and his gang, and I was still wondering why one hadn’t come for us.

  Twenty minutes later flashing lights outside announced the arrival of the police.

  ‘At last!’ Tom muttered.

  ‘Better late than never,’ Senga said.

  I didn’t bother saying anything. I had never really held high hopes of the police rescuing us. I had known all along that we were on our own.

  I shouldn’t have been astonished when Bill Peart walked through the door, but I was. At least he wasn’t first man in. He followed a uniformed officer in an inspector’s cap and a couple of other uniforms, obviously all local men. I could see more of them in the doorway.

  The inspector stood in the middle of the room, and by his very presence commanded attention. The room fell quiet. He announced himself with a couple of wry asides about having been delayed by the conditions and then got on to serious matters.

  ‘We know you’ve had a difficult night in this village, and we’re determined to get to the bottom of it. First, though, is there anyone injured or ill? We have paramedics with us, and they will deal immediately with anyone requiring medical attention.

  ‘After that, we will start taking statements from each of you. If people wish to return home in the meantime, that’s fine. We’ll catch up with you there.’

  It didn’t seem that there were any serious casualties, but there were plenty of cases of bruised feelings and egos – and plenty of people eager to talk about them. Tom wasn’t the only one feeling badly used.

  I looked around. Nobody was heading for the door. Everyone who had made it here seemed intent on staying put, determined to have their say. They’d probably all had enough of being incarcerated in their own homes.

  Introductions over, Bill Peart made a beeline for our little group. Having established who everyone was, he took me outside for a chat. I noticed armed police in and around a couple of Range Rovers. We could have done with them a little earlier.

  ‘Logan’s gang got away, I gather?’ Bill said.

  I nodded. ‘A helicopter came for them.’

  ‘A helicopter?’

  ‘That’s right. You never thought of sending one for us?’

  ‘We didn’t have one available.’

  ‘Logan found one.’

  ‘His budget must be bigger than ours. What time did they leave?’

  ‘Just before the snow ploughs arrived. Actually, that was what saved us. They were searching the houses, one by one, and had just found us. We got lucky.’

  ‘You said they were armed?’

  I nodded. ‘All of them, probably. That’s why I advised you to bring an armed response unit. Here’s a pistol I took off Blue, by the way.’

  I handed it over.

  ‘Northumbria weren’t terribly interested,’ he confided. ‘There’s people in trouble all over the region, and they took some convincing as to how serious the situation here was.’

  He was being unusually frank. Internal police matters were usually a no-go area. But his explanation suggested why help had been a bit late arriving.

  ‘What are you doing here anyway, Bill?’

  ‘Assisting with inquiries,’ he intoned, ‘given my role in the ongoing investigations in Cleveland.’

  ‘That can’t have been easy to arrange.’

  He looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, ‘Our chief plays an occasional round of golf with theirs.’

  ‘That right? And are they both Masons?’

  He glared at me and changed the subject.

  ‘Have you worked out what this is all about?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really. What I told you was right enough, but there’s more to it than that, a lot more. Business dealings between Steele and Logan went wrong, it seems. A budding relationship turned sour. A boy got killed. Scores are being settled.’

  ‘Is Logan really trying to kill the Steele boy in revenge?’

  ‘That’s a tough one. It’s what I was told, and was brought on board to prevent happening. Now I don’t know. They could have killed him easily enough last night, when they had him for several hours. So why didn’t they?’

  Bill didn’t know the answer to that any more than I did.

  ‘They wouldn’t even have had to shoot him,’ I added. ‘They could have just left him out in the snow for hypothermia to do the job for them. The lad was knackered.’

  ‘Maybe Logan wants the satisfaction of doing it himself?’

  I grimaced. That was entirely possible.

  ‘Or he wants to use the lad as a bargaining counter?’ I suggested.

  ‘To get what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m still working on it.’

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Bill said tartly. ‘But just remember which side you’re on.’

  It was a good point. Which side was I on, though? I was no longer quite sure.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  ‘Is he your cop friend?’ Senga asked. ‘The one you told me about?’

  ‘Yes. DI Bill Peart.’

  ‘Don’t tell him what I told you about Josh’s business problems, will you?’

  I just looked at her for a moment. Then I sighed. ‘Maybe it should come into the open? Maybe that would help?’

  She shook her head vigorously. ‘No! It wouldn’t. I’m quite certain of that. Not now, anyway. Tom would never forgive me.’

  I wasn’t sure that Tom’s sensitivities were a big concern for me, but they seemed to be for Senga. So I agreed to keep quiet, at least for now.

  Presumably she thought the problems could be sorted, or perhaps she just didn’t want to see her entire extended family behind bars.
I didn’t either, actually. Tom might have been a pain in the backside the past few days, and Josh an idiot, but criminal prosecution, financial ruin and imprisonment weren’t going to help anybody. That’s how I looked at it. There’s the law, and then there’s justice. But then, I’m not a cop.

  So we gave Bill what information we felt we safely could, and then he reluctantly agreed to persuade his local colleagues to let me take our little group back to Cleveland. We were glad to be on our way, but we hadn’t reached the end of it. There was still Blue and Logan to deal with. And now there was also a frustrated DI Bill Peart, who knew we weren’t telling him everything we knew. From a personal perspective, I didn’t know which bothered me the more.

  We left as we had arrived, in two cars. Senga was taking Julie home to wherever it was she lived. Tom was with me. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with him. Taking him back to Josh and Anne in Marton, and confessing failure to look after him properly, wasn’t an appealing option. But what was the alternative? I didn’t fancy just holing up with him somewhere else. That probably wouldn’t work any better than it had the first time.

  It took us twenty minutes to clear the cars of snow and dig a way through to the track cleared by the ploughs. Then we were off. Tom and I led the way in the Volvo, with Senga’s Golf not far behind.

  From the start, it was obvious why the rescue convoy had taken so long to reach the village. I had never seen such snow in England. The ploughs had dug only a single-track lane across the moor and on either side the drifted snow was at times ten-feet high. It was like driving through one of those Olympic toboggan runs. What we would have done had we met a vehicle coming the other way was anybody’s guess.

  Tom was understandably subdued. He had a lot to think about. I let him be and concentrated on the driving, which at times was tricky. The gritter following the plough had done its best but there were sections of road where the grit must have run out. Then we were on ice. It was a time to be cautious. I wanted to get us away safely, not be stranded somewhere until someone came along to pull us out of a snowdrift.

  ‘I hate fucking snow,’ Tom said suddenly.

  The sound of his voice was so unexpected I almost jumped.

  ‘You don’t think it makes the world look a better place?’

  ‘Definitely bloody not!’