Stop the engine. Silence buzzed in my ears. Listen.
We froze in our seats, Toby with his arm uplifted, the truncheon dangling from his wrist, and I trying to get some air through my nose and into my lungs to still my heart.
Time to sit still.
CHAPTER THREE
We waited. A fly had somehow found its way into the tightly closed cab of the van. It flittered its way across the windscreen, rasping at my nerves.
Cautiously Toby leaned on the handle of the window beside him. He slid it down carefully, his other hand firm against the glass.
The blue nose of the genuine security van blustered its way across our line of vision, paused to consider the tracks our wheels had made when crushing through brambles to get onto the road, and decided to follow the false trail which I had set for them. We strained our eyes to see through the screen of holly bushes, watching the broad end of the van lumber onto the road and move off to the left.
Suddenly, I was trembling, and my face was cold with sweat.
Toby said, ‘I’ll see if Sid’s all right. He was making a lot of noise back there. Maybe our cargo’s broken loose!’ His tiny joke relieved the tension. He clambered down, leaving his door open. I pushed up my goggles and tried to wipe sweat off my face with gauntleted hands. I could feel the van shift as Toby unlocked the back doors and then I heard Sid’s voice raised in complaint.
Air! I needed air! I tested my door, but it was still locked. I pushed myself over Toby’s seat and let myself down onto the turf of the wood. My knees threatened to go limp. The faintest of breezes rustled leaves in the trees overhead, and birds sang. Without thinking of any possible consequences, I eased off my gauntlets so that I could rid myself of helmet and scarf. I tore the strapping from my mouth to gulp breaths of fresh air. My hair clung wet to my head. I ran my fingers through it and dried my face and neck on the scarf.
I felt stunned. Presently I went back into the bushes. I heard Toby and Sid laughing as they did the same. Their laughter was loud and uncertain. I couldn’t laugh. In my fear, and my excitement during the chase, I had overlooked the fact that I had committed a number of crimes. In the eyes of the law, I was now as guilty as Toby and Sid. If only I had allowed the real security van to catch up with us, surely they could have sent someone to the cottage to rescue Hob!
Hob! What was the time?
Alarmed, I found we had been away from the house for one hour and sixteen minutes.
‘Toby!’ I called his name as I made my way back to the van. ‘We must be getting …’
And there I stopped, for during the few minutes that I had been out of sight, another car had come up behind us. The security van must have been followed all the way here; I remember glimpsing this elderly sports car during the chase. It must have fallen behind during the time it took us to slash through the wood, and had only now caught up with us. We were trapped.
Toby and Sid were standing beside the van, still in their disguise. The back doors of the van were unlocked, and the packages of money in plain view. The sports car had picked a slightly different path through the wood from that taken by us and the genuine security van, and it was passing the holly thicket on our side, so that they could not fail to see us.
‘Christ!’ said Sid, lumbering into a run. He ran away from the van, diving into the cover of the holly thicket.
Toby said nothing, but checked that his goggles were well down over his eyes before following him.
I screamed, hands to ears. The sports car had stopped and was backing away from the road and safety … backing towards the van and Toby and Sid … backing into danger. In the driving seat sat the wild-bearded young man who had greeted us at the Festival site, and beside him sat the young girl in the frilly skirt. She looked both scared and excited.
‘Oh, pray God, no!’ I cried, knowing exactly what was going to happen a second or two before it occurred. The girl looked across and saw me. I saw her mouth open to say something to the man beside her. I wanted to scream a warning to them to drive forward on—away —to fly for their lives. Toby burst out of the bushes behind them. He raised his truncheon and swung it, bringing it down on the back of the bearded man’s head and neck. I closed my eyes and turned away, gagging.
The girl screamed. She had a good pair of lungs on her. And through the scream I heard metal crunch as the car ran into a tree. The engine coughed and died. There was silence.
I hunched my shoulders to my ears and waited for further screams. There were none. No screams, no yells. Nothing but the sound of men’s heavy breathing.
I took my hands from my ears and peered over my shoulder. Toby and Sid were bending over the driver and his girl, neither of whom were moving, Toby lifted his truncheon and brought it down again, hard—this time on the girl. There was a squelching sound. I stumbled behind a tree and threw up.
There were further noises behind me. Dragging noises. I took no interest in them.
Eventually Toby came and hauled me out. I tried not to look at the sports car, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. The man lay slumped across the wheel, and flies were busy on the back of his neck. The girl had been pulled out of the car and lay on her face with legs and arms twisted; her pretty skirt awry above her knees. A wedding ring glinted on her left hand, and there was blood on her long fair hair. Sid was doing something to the sports car.
‘Your helmet!’ rapped Toby. ‘Goggles—scarf—gauntlets?’
The front of his overalls and his gauntlets were spattered with blood. There were flecks of blood on his false moustache and cheeks, too.
‘Blood!’ I said stupidly.
He slapped me, and all I could think of was that now I would have blood on me, too. He thrust me into the cab of the van, and went to look for my things. In the wing mirror I could see Sid run away from the sports car, which seemed to erupt into flame. I felt him climb into the back of our van as I watched the sports car blaze. A funeral pyre for a jazz fan.
The girl’s body wouldn’t be touched by the flames, which was a pity. At that moment I wished I was lying in her place, close to the earth, where no more trouble or grief could reach me.
Toby was speaking to me. I turned my head stiffly, trying to make sense of what he said. He might as well have been speaking Greek for all I could tell. Impatiently he crammed my helmet back on my head and buckled it lightly. Goggles over that. Scarf round my throat and mouth. The helmet slid sideways, because it wasn’t padded out with the scarf underneath it. I didn’t bother to straighten it. I was all used up.
He dragged me from the driver’s seat and took the wheel himself. All I had to do was direct him. I sat there, dumbly indicating that he should turn right or left at each cross-roads. His gauntlets left reddish stains on the driving wheel. A fragment of my brain was still working, and it informed me it would be wiser to obey him rather than become his third victim. We met three cars on the side roads, but none of them took any notice of us. The most dangerous stretch was the half mile or so of main road we must use to get to our lane, but even there we were lucky. We were lost in a stream of caravans and family cars returning from, or going away on holiday.
At last the lane down to the cottage. Bump, bump. Take it carefully. Would he kill me as soon as we got back home? I had witnessed a double murder, and I had been the driver of the getaway vehicle. I knew too much to live, and surely my usefulness was over, now that I had guided him back to the cottage?
And Hob? Yes, of course Hob would have to die, too, if he wasn’t already dead. I found I didn’t greatly care if he was. Perhaps it would be better for him if the candle had already burned down to the fuse and turned him into a human torch. It would be over all the sooner for him.
I waited patiently while Toby parked the van in the garage, and fished in the flowers by the front door for the key. I didn’t even hurry myself to get inside once he had unlocked the front door.
Hob was still alive, but he looked ten years older than when I had last seen him, even in the dim light of t
he darkened cottage. As Toby drew the curtains, I saw that there were grey lines engraved on Hob’s face, and smelt his sweat. He had strained against his bonds until he had exhausted himself. He had been through a piece of hell while we had been away, but I had no energy left to be sorry for him.
The candle flame was flickering around the fuse which would turn him into a human sacrifice, but I seemed unable to move fast. One, two, three, four paces to the table in my heavy boots. I bent over, steadying myself with one hand against the table while I carefully licked my fingers; and pinched out the candle flame. Where were my gauntlets? Had Toby rescued them for me? Did it matter?
Then, without meeting Hob’s eyes, or attempting to take off my heavy clothes, I climbed the creaking wooden stairs to my bedroom, to the little slip of a room in which I had spent so many carefree nights as a child.
It was no surprise that Toby should follow me. His eyes flashed, his teeth grinned at me, at the mirror, at nothing. I took off the scarf, helmet and goggles. Then slipped out of the boots and unzipped the overalls. I was still wearing normal clothes, underneath. My face looked strange as I scrubbed my cheek clean, watching myself in the mirror. Was that me? It didn’t look like me, so starry-eyed and peaky.
Toby let me lie on the bed, and then tied my wrists and ankles to the four corners. ‘Comfortable?’ he asked me. I stared through him.
He went out, leaving the door open. I remembered then that I hadn’t asked him to set Hob free. I thought it wouldn’t have done any good to ask. I slept.
*
I was drifting under the surface of sleep, uneasily aware of a disturbing dream, yet not anxious to wake. In the next second my eyelids had shot open, and sleep was gone for good. The room was murky in the dusk, but familiar. I was lying in an uncomfortable position. I tried to turn over, but the tug of cords at wrists and ankles prevented me from doing so. Then I remembered. I remembered the bare, bloody neck of the cheerful young man from the Festival … the glint of the wedding ring on the hand of the girl who had delighted in frilly skirts … Hob’s face grey with fear and exhaustion … and my own lack of future. I became angry. Why should I have to die so young and so inexperienced? Why should this have happened to me?
I heard men’s voices, and feigned sleep.
It was Toby speaking, in the next room.
‘… the only question is where? The tickets can’t be changed now, because it would look suspicious. And I’m not going into a Travel Agency around here to ask for them to be changed. They’d remember me and maybe start asking questions. No, we must stick to our original plan.’
‘I don’t fancy staying two more nights here, that’s all.’ It was Sid speaking. The communicating door between the bedrooms had been left open, and I could hear every word. Either they thought me asleep, or else they didn’t care whether I heard them or not.
‘Even Rose shouldn’t object to this bed,’ said Toby. I heard my grandparents’ double bed protest as he bounced on the springs.
‘We’re too close, here!’ argued Sid. ‘The alarm will be out for us, and if we’re seen …’
‘The alarm isn’t out for us, though, is it?’ Toby’s voice grew faint. Footsteps. He was in the bathroom, and then the footsteps returned. ‘We are friends of Miss Sarah Long, whom she’s invited to stay for a couple of nights; that’s me and Rose. As for you, you can keep out of the way if anyone does happen to come down the lane, although it’s not likely that anyone will. Rose and I will sleep in this bed, and you can kip down on the sofa by the fire.’
‘I didn’t know you was going to murder anyone,’ Sid sounded injured. ‘You might have warned me.’
‘I didn’t know either, did I?’ Toby was impatient. I heard the rasp of a window catch. ‘These windows are far too small for anyone but a child to get through, but I think we’ll secure them to their bed, just in case. I did think of shoving him in the back of the van for tonight, but on reflection I think I’ll be happier having them both under my eye tonight. He’s a slippery little devil, and there’s all sorts of tools in that garage which he might be able to get at if he were free.’
‘But if you lock him in the van? Why not?’
‘We don’t want him damaging himself, do we?’ Toby laughed coarsely, and I felt prickles of sweat congeal on my back. He approached the door between the two rooms; I could hear him tinkering with the lock, trying some keys in it. I could have saved him time and trouble by telling him that the lock had been broken years ago, but he eventually found out for himself that it was no good.
‘I reckon my cut ought to be bigger,’ said Sid. ‘Considering what’s happened.’
‘You’ll get what we agreed on at the beginning, and like it.’
‘I didn’t agree to murder.’
‘You helped. And the only way for you to get out of this safely is to continue to do as I say. Got it?’
‘We could just leave them here when we go. All tied up, to give us a good start.’
Toby sighed. He abandoned the lock and went to check on the window. That, too, was small. I hadn’t been able to get out of it since I was ten. ‘They know us by sight, and they could split on us if we left them alive. You want to come back someday, don’t you? So we use them as scapegoats. We dress them in the clothes we used for the job, and we leave the truncheon behind, with his fingerprints on it. We leave the van behind, locked in the garage. We don’t clean the transfers off it, but we do clean it of our fingerprints. We leave behind some of the money we stole, and we make it look as if the rest got burned; yes, I like that idea. We stage it so they’ll think the villains fell out after the robbery …’
‘But there were three of us. They know that. And you’ve burned your overalls already, so …’
‘So the driver got away? Who cares? They can look for him for ever, can’t they? But they’ll be looking for a small man, and as he doesn’t exist and never did exist, they won’t get very far.’ They tramped back into the other room. Their voices were fainter now; I think Toby was trying his bunch of keys on the lock of the door which shut the big bedroom off from the top of the stairs. ‘We arrange the scene very carefully,’ he was saying. ‘We get him to kill her first, using one of the knives in the kitchen. We wreck her car and set fire to it; make it look like his share of the money burned in the car. Then we sprinkle him with meths or whisky, and stage a suicide for him.
Hanging would be easiest, I think, though hanging’s too good for him … all the trouble he’s caused me. The cops will read it right, trust me for that! Thieves fall out, one stabs the other, sets alight to the money in the getaway car, and kills himself. Perfect!’
There was a silence while Sid thought it over. I heard Toby say “Tchah” as he discovered none of his keys would fit that lock, either, and then Sid started back at the beginning again.
‘I still don’t like the idea of staying here for another two nights. It’s too close.’
‘All right. Say we stay here tonight. We’ll have to, anyway. It would be too risky to move now, and we’ve nowhere to go to. I’ve already given up my flat and Rose has moved out of her digs. I don’t want to risk trying to get into hotels where we’re not known, and I don’t suppose you do, either. We’re perfectly safe here. But tomorrow we’ll set the scene, and drive off back to London, you in my car and me with Rose. We take our time on the journey and arrive at the airport terminal at Heathrow some time during the evening. We can meet up in the departure lounge … the restaurant … anywhere. We spend the night at the terminal; lots of people do, so we won’t be noticed. Our plane leaves early the following morning, and heigho for sunny Greece, and a long holiday without money troubles. Is that better?’
‘Ah, that’s better. I don’t fancy staying here two nights, that’s all.’
They banged their way downstairs, just as another car drove into the yard. I heard a car door shut, and then Rose’s voice raised in greeting. She sounded pleased with herself. I began to work on the cords that tied me to the bed. A quarter of an hour
later I was a ball of sweat, my wrists and ankles were raw, and I was still tied to the bed. I started to cry, but no one heard me. No one cared whether I lived or died.
There was a lot of noise going on beneath me. Rose was calling to Toby to lay the table, and subsequently there was a great clatter of plates. I became aware that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and that I was feeling faint from lack of food. And water. I would have given anything for a drink of water.
The electric light next door was switched on, and I opened my eyes to Rose standing in the doorway between the two rooms, looking down at me. She was carrying a suitcase.
I tried to ask her to help me, but my tongue wouldn’t work. She hesitated, but didn’t come into the room.
‘How long have you been tied up?’ she asked.
‘Since we got back.’ My voice sounded unlike me, hoarse and gritty.
She pulled a face, but did not release me. ‘Water?’ I requested, without much hope.
She glanced back over her shoulder. ‘I don’t think …’ she began. And then, ‘I’ll ask him when I go downstairs.’
She disappeared from the doorway, and I heard her moving around next door, unpacking, going to the bathroom.
I said loudly, ‘I shall wet the bed if you keep me tied up like this.’
‘Heavens, no!’ she cried, and I heard her rush to the stairs and clatter down them. There was the sound of an argument, and then Toby came back, with her. He was frowning. I could see his dilemma; he didn’t give a damn if I wet the bed or not, but he didn’t want to appear callous before Rose. He said, grudgingly, that I might go to the toilet, but I’d have to change back into my overalls first. He’d wait for me, and then tie me to the bed again for the night.
Scream for Sarah Page 7