He pulled up and leaned to push open the passenger door.
‘I thought this was going to be a Land Rover off-road expedition,’ she said, hesitating before climbing in.
‘Father wanted to play with it today so I didn’t ask. Off we go. Should we stop for lunch on the way?’
‘I’m not going to be hungry for a while. But if you are …?’
‘Nope. I want to see those carriages and it shouldn’t take too long to get there. Should we go into Moreton-in-Marsh to eat afterward?’
‘Let’s see how we feel.’ She wanted to get back.
‘The building where they’re keeping the carriages isn’t far from that arboretum that’s supposed to be so good. It’s a big old rail shed – or it is now. I don’t know what they used it for initially. I suppose they put down rails to keep them on, but I don’t know. Seems they’d be difficult to move otherwise.’
Why had she pretended to be interested?
Because she was a softy! For once she needed to give herself a break for wanting to make everyone feel better. ‘Do we stay on this road?’
‘As far as Upper Swell. Here, I sketched this. There isn’t a cartridge for the printer so I copied it off the computer screen.’
She looked at his stylishly drawn map and smiled. Elyan was unlikely to do anything poorly.
He drummed his fingers on the wheel, rocking back and forth to music – or perhaps just a beat – he heard in his head.
Elyan took his eyes off the road to tap the map. ‘Do you see Sezincote House there? There should be a sign to it soon. Then, very shortly, there’s a marker for something called Bishop’s Nob. A right turn. It’s there.’
‘The house sign,’ Alex said. She leaned forward and peered toward a little turn between tall firs. ‘We just passed it. Is this Bishop’s Nob? We’re coming to it.’
Elyan made the turn sharply and she grabbed the dashboard. ‘Show me the map,’ he said.
Alex held it up, aware of how close the trees were on either side of them.
‘Yes, I remember that,’ Elyan said. ‘Look at this in here. It’s so beautiful. Absolutely peaceful. I bet no one ever comes here. They don’t want peace, not one of them. More and more of everything is all that gets them going.’
Her heart took a jump. ‘They?’
‘Everyone. They have to get stuff around them so it blocks out the mirror. They can’t see themselves in the mirror, just their stuff. They forget who they were before. Look at this place. It’s a cathedral of trees. It’s good here. No one paid to make it look like this but they don’t believe that’s possible. I don’t want any of it anymore. Just Annie.’
Alex pressed her lips together and hung on to an overhead strap. As he talked – shouted – Elyan waved his arms, sometimes both arms. The car skewed and bumped.
‘All I wanted was for everyone to leave me alone.’ He gave her a wild-eyed look. ‘I played for them. I played for me but not as much as I played for them. They took anything I wanted for myself. I was never a kid – that would have taken too much time. If I talked they told me empty vessels make the most noise. If I didn’t talk they told me still waters run deep. I was always wrong.
‘Laura was the best of them. The best. The very best … and now she’s gone. I had a model of a steam engine made of brass. I found it in an old trunk and cleaned it till it glittered. And I put it in the music room. I was fourteen. You could take it all apart then build it back, piece by piece, to make the engine again. It taught you how a steam engine went together. My father saw it and went mad. He took it away and then it was gone, like anything I wanted.
‘He wouldn’t tell me why but Mrs Meeker did. My father’s grandfather worked on the railways. He drove a train. And he taught young men who wanted to do the same thing all about how they worked. My father was ashamed of that. He was ashamed of a grandfather driving a train.
‘I should have killed him.’
Alex sat very still. Her eyes stung at the pain in this young man, but she was also afraid of him. She made up her mind. ‘Please stop.’
‘What do you mean?’ He looked blank and kept on driving.
‘Stop the car, Elyan. We have to talk.’ Alex touched his hand lightly.
He did as she asked, stopping in the middle of the small track with a jolt. ‘Are you all right? What is it?’
She buried her face in her hands and shook her head.
‘What?’ he said loudly, sounding panicky again.
‘Elyan, I think we need to turn around.’
The sharp angles of his face seemed accentuated in the shadows thrown by the tunnel of trees. He was very pale. ‘Why? I don’t understand.’
‘Just turn around. I’ll explain why I need to go back as we go. If you still want to come and do this, we’ll come back another time.’
‘We’re almost there.’
‘It doesn’t take long to get here. Half an hour or so. We can even get back today if … well, let’s see how it goes.’
Elyan nodded his head up and down, up and down, up and down until Alex wanted to grab him and make him stay still.
‘Is that okay, Elyan?’
‘You don’t understand anything. I’ve lost my whole life and all you care about is how you feel. Everything I wanted has slipped away. It’s been taken away. And I can’t get it back. Other people’s ambitions. Their wants. Their needs. Perform, perform – like a sideshow freak. I wanted to believe I’d been wrong about you. I wanted you to be different and I just wanted to see the trains and forget for a bit, but you couldn’t even let me have that.’
She swallowed the retort that he sounded like a spoiled child. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, but this isn’t right.’ Her throat was so tight she struggled to get her words out.
‘She wasn’t supposed to die,’ he said and started to cry. Still gripping the wheel, he sobbed and rocked his forehead from side to side on his hands. ‘They wouldn’t listen to her and without my father’s say so, Laura didn’t have a penny of her own. She wanted to go back to London. She hated it here. Her friends are there and she could have had gigs. She was offered gigs. Wells wanted to help her, too. I think they planned to get together.’
Alex sat very still. The engine was still running. Elyan’s foot still rested near the gas pedal. If she tried to get out and he accelerated, the door might catch her.
‘I’d like to get out and walk for a bit,’ she said. ‘I feel awful.’
‘You feel awful? My sister is dead because we weren’t careful enough. We thought she’d pass out and everyone would think she’d tried to kill herself. They were supposed to say she could go back to London and then leave her alone. She was even ready to agree to a shrink just to keep them off her back.
‘And Annie and I could have been alone when she’s here instead of always having Laura around. We wouldn’t have to have her with us all the time in London, either. She’d have made a good life for herself. Oh, my god, it all went wrong.’ He kept his head down but looked sideways at her. ‘She had her regular dose. She’d taken it for so long we didn’t think it would be a big deal. We even thought she might have to fake passing out. But I came back and you were there. And she was … dead.’ His voice rasped.
What he was saying began to seep in. ‘You two agreed to fake attempted suicide?’
‘Yes. If I’d got there earlier, I might have saved her.’
‘I don’t think so, not from what the doctors said.’
‘I might have.’ He scrubbed the tears from his face. ‘I dropped the thermos bottle in the piano. Then I couldn’t get back in to take it away. If I’d taken it away, no one would ever have had any proof of what killed her.’
‘Why not just tell the truth now?’ The words were out before she could stop them.
‘When did telling the truth ever make anything better? No one believed what Laura wanted. No one believes what Annie and I want. I can’t go back there.’
He put his foot down and drove, his body heaving with his dry sobs. Coug
hs wracked him. He veered wildly, one way, then the other, barely missing trees. ‘They would never let me be happy. I was the goose with the golden egg. Practice, practice. Now it’s over. I’m going away with Annie and never coming back. My mother used me like everyone else.’
‘It can be sorted out, I tell you,’ Alex said. She didn’t want to plead but heard her own desperation.
‘Laura could never get pills down so it was easy to use the medicine. My mother had Jenever and Laura always liked the stuff. It was perfect. She drinks gin and tonic. She loves it.’ Fresh tears streamed down his face. ‘We put too much in, didn’t we? I didn’t think we had, just about half the bottle, but it was too much.’
Through a cut to the right, he drove, a cut barely wide enough for the car to pass, and into a sloping field open on the downhill side. A bleached, grey wood building was falling in on itself to the left. The roof sagged and holes gaped. It looked as if it had been put together from discarded lumber – and many years ago.
In front of great double doors that hung at angles, Elyan stopped the car. ‘Get out,’ he said, and when she didn’t move, he yelled, ‘get out!’
She did what he said, looking around, trying to work out how to get away. All she could do was run, but run where?
‘You can’t get away,’ Elyan said. ‘I knew when you asked all your clever questions about pills and what Mrs Meeker took, that you were going to be trouble. I hoped you wouldn’t be, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I had to do something about you.’
Mrs Meeker.
Alex didn’t say a word, only watched and waited.
‘Aren’t you going to ask any more questions?’ he said.
‘You didn’t set out to hurt Laura. You both did a stupid thing but it’s not as bad as if you’d deliberately killed her.’
‘Like I did Mrs Meeker?’
Alex closed her eyes, closed out the world. ‘How could you have done that?’
‘Someone did, why not me?’
‘You’re not very well.’
‘But I’m not mad, if that’s what you’re hinting at. I had the other half of Laura’s bottle of medicine. Meeker knew everything. Laura talked to her about what we planned! I couldn’t believe it when Meeker said she knew and now everything had gone wrong she was deciding what to do. She was deciding what to do about my life. She would have made sure I lost Annie, too.
‘It wasn’t easy. Meeker fought and I had to force the stuff down her throat with whisky. She liked whisky.’ He stared at her. ‘She didn’t like it then.
‘The idiot police were in the house. I played my own recording while I did it. I fooled them.’
He reached behind the driver’s seat for a small backpack and threw it over his shoulder.
Alex started to run, downhill, legs and arms flying, but he was on her before she had gone any distance.
‘Stop it,’ he said, holding her down when she struggled. Her fists were useless. ‘All I want is to see the carriages. Then we’ll go back.’
She didn’t believe him.
Elyan dragged her to her feet. ‘Where’s your mobile?’ he said.
‘In the car.’ It all felt hopeless.
‘It’s in your pocket. You always carry it there. Give it to me.’
He took it from her jeans’ pocket himself, turned it off and threw it away. She watched it arch through the air. They could still follow those things, couldn’t they? Triangulate the position?
If they knew they needed to.
When he worked one of the doors open enough for them to squeeze inside, she didn’t resist. It was unbelievable that he would try to kill her but if he did, she would need what strength she had to fight. And she would fight.
The holes in the roof let in plenty of light to show four filthy, deteriorating rail carriages standing at different angles. There were no tracks. They had been moved in there somehow and left.
Alex felt the beat of her heart under her skin. Her fingers and toes had their own hard, tingling beat. ‘Elyan, what are we doing here?’
‘Looking at these old carriages. Too bad there isn’t an engine. That would be really interesting.’
He pulled her along by an elbow until she drove her heels into the dry, cinder-covered ground and leaned away.
‘What’s the point of that?’ he said. He didn’t sound mean or angry, just resigned.
‘Are you going to kill me?’
He bellowed at her, ‘Don’t say that. Shut up. Don’t talk any more.’
One carriage looked in better condition than the others. Alex noticed at once that it had no windows and no doors in the sides. Elyan towed her to its back door and pulled down a complicated-looking handle – long, jointed at its center, as if it were intended to be closed, then snapped into place as one solid bar.
‘How about this?’ He pulled the door open with ease. ‘A security car for moving valuable things. Get in.’
‘You’ve been here before,’ she said. ‘That’s been oiled, hasn’t it?’
The sadness on Elyan’s face wasn’t feigned. He sighed and lifted her to kneel just inside the door. Inside was only blackness and a few pinpricks of light where floorboards were rotting. ‘I came here,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know I would need it for this. I don’t want to need it for this.’
Bracing, waiting for a knife in her back, or a felling blow to the head, Alex remained on her knees. ‘Let me go, please. I can help you explain what happened. It all got away from you. It’ll be bad, but it doesn’t have to be …’
‘Be quiet. If you pray, pray. Pray you outlast what’s going to happen here. I want you to – after Annie and I are away and they can’t catch us. These are for you.’
Beside her on the filthy floor, he set down a torch and extra batteries. Then he slid a red thermos bottle beside them. ‘We can live for a long time without food. Not so long without water. I hope someone will find you before you have to give in and drink.’
THIRTY-NINE
‘Do something.’ Tony heard his own voice but it sounded like a stranger’s. He crossed the parish hall toward Dan who stood, surrounded by Lamb and other officers, around a whiteboard.
‘It’s dark, damn it. She’s somewhere and she’s scared. She’s got to be. And you stand there scribbling on your bloody board.’
A clatter, like mini-machinegun fire, followed. Dan had thrown a handful of dry markers at the board. He crossed his arms and shoved a hand into his hair.
‘It may look as if nothing’s happening,’ Bill Lamb said. ‘That’s an illusion. We’ve got people out searching. Many people. And dogs. You name it, it’s out there. And it’s dark.’
‘Cadaver dogs?’ He heard his own words again and felt his knees start to give out.
‘Search dogs,’ Dan said, meeting Tony’s eyes. Worry etched deep into the detective’s face. ‘A blue Range Rover with a known license plate doesn’t just disappear. Bill forgot the choppers. We’re going at this from every angle we’ve got.’
One of the phones rang and a constable snatched it up. ‘Yes. Yes. Yes, sir. I’m listening. But … the parish hall, that’s right.’ The constable hung up. ‘Some geezer who has to tell us his information in person. On his way in. Didn’t give a name. Didn’t register one at this end.’
‘Could be another damn joker,’ Bill said.
‘She’s been gone all day and it’s coming up on nine,’ Tony said. ‘Percy Quillam’s been sedated. Dad said they haven’t heard a word from Elyan and they’re all in their rooms like they’re mourning the death of another family member.’
‘Nobody else has died,’ Dan said, his face stony. ‘You said you couldn’t believe Elyan would hurt Alex.’ He looked at Tony.
‘I can’t. So what’s happened? Are they in a ditch somewhere? What other explanation can there be?’
‘The search will go on until we’ve got them,’ Bill said.
Dan’s mobile gave a jarring beep and he slapped the instrument to his ear. ‘Yeah?’
‘
We should be back out there looking,’ Tony said. They’d searched with crews since mid-afternoon. Sometimes one or two of them had broken away to go alone and check an idea. But every time they’d ended back here.
Dan said, ‘Thanks,’ and returned the mobile to his pocket. ‘Sonia Quillam thinks Elyan’s passport is missing.’
‘Oh, my god,’ Tony muttered. ‘The airports, then. Buses, trains. He could be in London, St Pancras, taken the Eurostar and be in Europe … he could be all the way there already for all we know. If he didn’t have anything to hide, he’d have contacted us by now.’
‘Unless the passport isn’t missing and he’s unconscious,’ Bill said.
Through the doors came Major Stroud, more bedraggled than Tony had ever seen him. His hair stood up as if he hadn’t combed it recently and his Barbour hung away from wrongly matched buttons toward one shoulder.
He approached and sat in the first metal folding chair he came to. ‘Time to come clean,’ he said in his clipped tones. ‘When a man’s wrong, he owns up. Honorable thing to do. Shouldn’t have blamed that girl. Not her fault.’
For an instant no one moved, then he was surrounded and Dan kept a hold on Tony’s arm. ‘Give him time,’ he said. ‘Hear him out.’
‘What is it, Major?’ Bill asked. ‘Have you seen Alex Duggins?’
‘Hurt pride, that’s what it is. Disappointment. Harry always a disappointment. Then that other business earlier in the year and all the trouble. Just about killed his mother, I can tell you.’
Tony wanted to shake the man and make him get to the point.
‘I was angry. She said she understood the boy. Said other people hadn’t given him the benefit of the doubt. Then she didn’t stand up for him after all. I wanted to get back at her.’
A slow, heavy beat began at Tony’s temples. Dan’s fingers dug into his arm but he let it hurt, let it give him a focus.
‘I didn’t set out to do it, y’know.’
Moving away from Dan, jerking his arm free, Tony sat on another chair.
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