Edge

by Nick Oldham

  More horror almost overcame her when she saw Jake’s body in the loose box and she nearly fainted again – but she ran out into the farmyard and staggered away.

  ‘Long time, no see,’ Flynn said to Jerry Tope.

  ‘Mm,’ the DC muttered. ‘Why are you up here?’

  ‘Inquest.’

  It clicked with Tope. ‘Astley-Barnes?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Hell of a job.’

  Flynn nodded. ‘How’s Marina?’ he asked.

  Jerry gave him a dark look that said, Don’t go there.

  They were standing just inside the stable door, looking across at Rik Dean’s car. The two girls from the cellar steps were huddled in the back of it. Flynn had sussed that their language was Portuguese. Although he had been living in the Canary Islands for a long time, his grasp of Spanish still wasn’t great. He knew that Portuguese and Spanish were similar in many ways, but different in many too, so he hadn’t tried hard to make conversation.

  ‘This doesn’t look brilliant,’ Tope said.

  ‘No.’

  It was idle chatter.

  ‘Where the hell are they?’ Tope asked.

  ‘Dunno.’ Flynn pushed himself away from the door jamb he had been leaning against, stepped out into the driving rain and walked to the farm gate, looking across the lane, over the wall where the stile bridged it to the steeply rising field beyond. He hunched down and walked to the stile, peering into the darkness, knowing nothing, but working through everything he’d learned over the last hour and a half or so.

  For the life of him, he couldn’t see anything but death’s head.

  Then he stepped on something: another used shotgun cartridge, which he picked up and scrutinized. The same as they had found in the stable.

  He swore and looked up into the field – nothing. Then he turned away but as he did, his eye caught a glimpse of something tucked into one of the rungs of the stile where it was joined to the upright.

  He reached out and took the item and a smile creased his face as he said, ‘You really are a sneaky bastard, Henry.’

  Then he looked up and saw the headlights of two vehicles coming towards him on the farm track. Far away, beyond these lights, he could see flashing blue ones.

  ‘Where’s the nearest dog patrol?’ Flynn demanded.

  ‘On the way from Preston; could be thirty minutes,’ Rik said.

  Flynn’s face tightened. ‘Let me go and look up the field in the meantime,’ he insisted. ‘I’m sure that’s where they’ve gone.’

  ‘You can’t be certain.’

  ‘I know – but why else would Fanshaw-Bayley’s warrant card be slotted into the stile?’ Flynn waved his find at Rik. ‘It’s a paper chase – and we need to follow the clues, as it were. Henry’s card in the stable, the chief’s there …’

  The two were standing in the middle of the farmyard, the driving rain beating down on them. Two more police cars had arrived, blocking the farm track, and more were en route at Rik’s insistence, coupled with the weight of authority carried by the deputy chief constable, who had been alerted to the situation and was also turning out. Other ‘circus acts’ were also on the way – crime scene investigators, other detectives and more – as Rik took control of a situation that made him want to crap.

  It was clear to him that the woman who had stumbled in at the farmer’s back door was a key witness, but she veered from hysterical to almost comatose, was in severe pain from injuries and possibly might have had a miscarriage. Rik had struggled to get much sense out of her and had seen that his first priority was to get her to hospital, hence his call on the treble nine from Farmer Pickersgill’s phone, followed by frantic calls to Burnley comms. Only when she was stable and being properly treated could he even countenance questioning her properly, though he wanted to wring her neck and, cruelly, tell her to get a grip.

  He did establish she was called Annabel Larch, a name he instantly recognized. She also continued to repeat, ‘Johnny’s dead, Johnny’s dead … Charlie, Charlie …’

  In his brief conversation with the farmer he also discovered that two officers in a Land Rover had stopped earlier and asked for directions to Britannia Top Farm, but the farmer had put them right – after a bit of verbal messing with them, he admitted: it was Whitworth Top Farm they were after.

  ‘Been like Piccadilly Circus,’ the farmer had grunted. ‘Up and down t’lane all neet long.’

  He also told Rik he had seen the police Land Rover drive back down the track closely followed by another car which could have been a Range Rover, not long before Rik had turned up.

  ‘They could have driven away, be checking up on something, if what that farmer said is true,’ Rik explained to Flynn.

  ‘And they might not have … Look, I’m not going to spoil anything by trudging up the field, am I? Just give me a decent torch.’

  Rik’s mind was racing with everything and trying to make sure he did it all right. Even if Henry and FB turned up safe and well, he knew he had to treat this whole farm as a serious crime scene – which it obviously was. He would rather look stupid at having overreacted than not reacted at all.

  He looked at Flynn through the heavy droplets of rain coming off his forehead. ‘Right – do it.’

  ‘Good. Torch?’

  ‘Boot of my car.’

  Flynn went to Rik’s Vauxhall, found the torch in the boot and headed for the field. Rik watched him go and turned to the equally drenched Jerry Tope who said knowingly, ‘Annabel Larch.’

  ‘Yeah, I know – and Charlie.’

  ‘Charlie Wilder?’

  The torch beam flickered pathetically. Henry groaned, turned it off and leaned back against the side of the tunnel, ankle deep in thick mud. His left turn had proved useless and he had stumbled fifty yards before realizing he had gone wrong, that this was not the way out.

  A tremor coursed through him: dread and disbelief. How had he let FB and himself get into such a stupid situation? Almost in tears he pushed himself away from the wet tunnel wall and turned right, now having no clue whatsoever where he was headed. He knew that quarry workings like these were rarely mapped and once abandoned – as this one seemed to be – were usually forgotten about. He also knew they could go on for a long, long way.

  And people, stupid people, got lost in them.

  At the best of times they were dangerous places. They flash-flooded, they collapsed, they accumulated noxious gases.

  Only fools entered them unprepared.

  Or maybe people who were running away from certain death.

  Possibly that was just about excusable.

  He trudged on, the water from the roof dripping on him, having to slurp his feet through thick sludge. His hands were stretched out in front of him like feelers and their length was about all he could see; even his fingers were hard to distinguish. This was the first time he had ever been in total blackness and it was a sensation that was horrible.

  He tripped, slammed down on to one knee, hitting a chunk of rock hard. His hands slightly broke his fall, but they sank into the mud, making a slurping noise when he drew them out.

  ‘Not good, not good,’ he mumbled as he dragged himself upright.

  He stood there still, cocked his head and listened.

  A swish of chill air brushed his face.

  But he could also hear something else, something that disturbed him. A rumble of some sort. He blinked, wiped his face with a muddy hand and tried to listen again. He could not identify the noise – but he did not like it. It sounded dangerous.

  Life in a tunnel, he thought.

  ‘Henry? Is that you?’ he heard FB’s weak voice call somewhere ahead of him. A feeling of elation made his heart pound. A moment in history, he thought. The first time he had ever been pleased to hear his boss.

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  FB’s torch came on. He held it underneath his chin, uplighting his double chins and face, giving his eyes deep shadows and exaggerating the swelling around his right one.r />
  Henry went to him, then FB turned the torch off and everything was black again.

  ‘Take it we’re lost?’

  ‘Looking that way,’ Henry admitted forlornly.

  ‘You’re a wanker, you know that,’ FB said, returning to his default position of insulting Henry at every possible opportunity. Henry smiled at FB’s bravado, because behind the words his voice was weak and pathetic.

  ‘I agree,’ Henry said. He turned on his own torch and ran the weak beam across FB who was sitting in mud, leaning his back against the tunnel wall, visibly shivering like a person with Parkinson’s disease. He looked awful and Henry’s heart went out to him.

  ‘Are we going to get out of this?’ he asked Henry.

  ‘Course we are.’

  ‘Well, I think I’m shit out of luck.’

  Henry had to agree with that statement, too. He was sure they would get out but was not so certain they would both be alive and kicking.

  Henry cocked his head again, listening. Somewhere, deep in the hillside, he could hear that rumbling sound again.

  Flynn scrambled over the stile and began the slippy-slidey wet climb up the hillside through the deep grass. He pushed on, but did not over-rush, and used the torch beam like a searchlight to criss-cross his way.

  It was hard to say if anyone had actually been up the field recently and part of him knew he was doing this simply for something to keep himself occupied. Although he had been a cop for a good few years, there was no way Rik would allow him anywhere near what was obviously a serious crime scene back at the farm. The professionals were on their way and Flynn had probably contaminated it enough already. Rik was undoubtedly glad to get him from underfoot because once you were not a cop any more, or working for the police, you were of little use to them.

  Some of the grass looked as if it had been flattened by someone walking through it, but it was hard to say for certain.

  Still he pushed on until he reached a low, barbed wire fence which had seen better days. He ran the torchlight along it, then saw another used shotgun cartridge, which he picked up and sniffed. It smelled fresh.

  Flynn put it in his pocket, his face grim, trying to imagine what had happened here.

  He straddled the wire and in so doing spotted something skewered on to one of the barbs. Flynn picked it off and shone the torch on to his find.

  It was a small piece of card, folded into quarters.

  Flynn opened it: one of Henry Christie’s business cards.

  Flynn walked on until his instinct told him to stop. He swayed and stepped back as he realized he was on the rim of a vast, dark hole and had almost tripped and fallen down a precipice into one of the biggest quarries he had ever seen. This huge crater was starting to become visible with the very slow approach of dawn.

  ‘Let’s give it another go,’ Henry urged FB. This time he wasn’t going to leave him behind. He helped him slowly to his feet, FB groaning in agony as he moved.

  ‘My chest really hurts,’ he complained.

  ‘I know, but I think it’s best we move.’

  ‘You think anyone’ll find us here?’

  ‘I’m counting on someone being able to follow a paper trail,’ Henry said, bringing FB up to his feet. Both men wavered unsteadily.

  Suddenly their feet were covered in water above their ankles as if they had stepped into a fast flowing stream. Henry turned on his torch again and looked down, saw that they were in fact in a stream that had appeared from nowhere, was flowing quickly, gathering momentum.

  The water rose and in a few seconds was halfway up their shins.

  ‘It’s flooding,’ Henry said, suddenly understanding what the ominous rumbling sound was. ‘The rain – the tunnel’s flooding.’

  ‘I heard you first time,’ FB said.

  Henry grabbed FB’s upper arm. ‘Let’s move.’

  The water level continued to rise quickly. The force of the flow increased as the two men splashed through the tunnels, feeling the power of the flood push against the backs of their knees. They fell, recovered, found their feet, pushed on, Henry refusing to let go of FB in spite of his own growing weakness and exhaustion.

  They reached a junction and, using FB’s torch, Henry saw it was again a three-way intersection and assumed this was the point he had reached before, where he had chosen to go left and had ended up lost.

  He saw that the water also split here and the power of it lessened as it flowed into the junction, which gave him some relief.

  This time Henry chose to go right and bundled FB ahead of him into that tunnel.

  More police cars and personnel had arrived at the farm by the time Flynn ran back and collared Rik just inside the stable, where a lot of police scientific activity was taking place.

  Rik listened, though he was distracted by the weight of being in charge of all this; to Flynn he came across as being a man on the edge of panic.

  ‘He’s got to be up there somewhere,’ Flynn insisted.

  ‘Yeah, I agree,’ Rik said, ‘but until it comes light I don’t see us doing much as regards a search. I’ll get the teams together and ready to go as soon we can see properly.’

  Flynn saw the logic in this. It would be easy to miss something up there and was also potentially dangerous to searchers. He said, ‘I think it’s a good sign, though. Every chance Henry and FB managed to escape from whatever happened here. Henry left a trail to follow and there may be other stuff I’ve missed.’

  ‘All the more reason for us to get it right when we start searching. There’s a Support Unit team on the way and they’ll do the search, but not before daybreak,’ he reiterated. ‘I know we want to find him – them – but daylight is going to be our best ally.’

  ‘I get that,’ Flynn said, beginning to feel like the proverbial spare prick. ‘What can I do in the meantime?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rik said. ‘I really don’t know. Just keep out of the way, I guess – and I mean that in a nice way.’

  Flynn nodded, seeing Rik’s stress, but still asked, ‘Anything from the techies yet?’

  ‘More blood. Looks like at least two people have been killed or wounded here – killed, probably, I’d say, based on what little I could prise out of that Annabel, who struggled to put two words together. But you know what I say? Think murder, then work back.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Rochdale A&E. She was in a real mess, half-strangled, beaten up; horrible other stuff.’ He stopped and looked at Flynn. ‘The farmer down there says he’s sure the police Land Rover drove back down the track, you know?’

  ‘But not necessarily with Henry at the wheel.’

  ‘I know, that’s what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Bodies in the back of it?’ Flynn ventured.

  ‘Shit,’ Rik said angrily. ‘We can’t have been far off spotting it, we must have almost crossed paths.’

  ‘Such is life, can’t beat yourself up about it,’ Flynn said, then pointed to Rik’s car in which the two prostitutes were still sitting. ‘What’s happening to these ladies?’

  ‘I’m going to get them taken to Rossendale nick, give them a brew, warm ’em up, then speak to them. Comms are trying to contact an interpreter.’

  ‘And what about this Charlie Wilder individual?’

  ‘I’m going to go and knock on his door – now. I’m meeting an ARV on Wallbank estate in twenty minutes – but his tag still says he been at that address all night.’

  ‘OK. I’ll stay here, go with the search team when they land.’ He glanced at the sky. ‘Believe it or not, dawn is coming.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s good.’

  After some car shuffling, Rik and Jerry Tope climbed into Rik’s Vauxhall and started off slowly down the lane. A police car with the two prostitutes in the back followed and they set off, leaving Flynn to kick his heels somewhat as he waited for the searchers.

  The house on Eastgate, Whitworth, was a council semi, nothing special or unusual. The type of house Rik Dean had knocked at
many times. It was all in darkness, no vehicle in the driveway.

  Rik walked to the front door with his ballistic vest over his windjammer, Jerry Tope behind, similarly attired.

  The double-crewed Armed Response Vehicle was on the road and the two AFOs stood by the car. Two more AFOs had already raced to the back of the house.

  Rik banged on the door repeatedly until a light came on upstairs; then came the sound of muted footsteps and the door opened a couple of inches on a security chain.

  A young woman looked out of the gap.

  Rik stuck his warrant card up to her face. ‘Police. I’m looking for Charlie Wilder.’

  ‘Why,’ she sneered, ‘can’t you bastards just let him be? He’s only just come out of prison.’

  Through the crack Rik could see she was dressed in her night things. ‘If you do not open this door in the next ten seconds, I’ll be forced to kick it down and I’ll be coming in mob-handed.’ He did not have the time or patience to mess about, explain anything or be messed about.

  His eyes and her only visible eye locked defiantly into each other.

  ‘Open up, lass,’ Rik whispered dangerously.

  She swore, closed the door. Rik heard the chain slide off, then the door opened again.

  ‘Who are you?’ Rik asked.

  She sneered but did not reply.

  ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Upstairs, back bedroom,’ she said, shaking her head as if a big mistake was being made here. ‘And he’s been here all day.’

  ‘Is he alone?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Is he armed?’

  ‘Like, with what? No, OK? Not as far as I know … maybe his hand’s on his cock.’

  ‘Bitch,’ Rik said and beckoned in the ARV crew from the front of the house.

  ‘You do not need guns, you know?’ the woman said derisively. ‘No guns in this house. At least I don’t think there are.’ She pulled her thin dressing gown around her tightly.

  ‘In that case, you go up and wake him and bring him down to us.’

  ‘No way, not me. Your job, that.’

  ‘Who else is here?’

  ‘Just him and me.’

  ‘You sleep together?’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  Rik jerked his head at the armed cops. ‘Back bedroom.’