by Nick Oldham
Trent made Danny loop round again, cut inland through Blackpool and eventually hit the M55, heading east towards Preston. His directions were as contorted as his thoughts. It became clear to Danny that he had no idea where to take her to finish her off. Obviously the prospect of dealing with Danny was unsettling him.
Before they had gone very far on the motorway, he instructed her to take the next turning off. She found herself being directed along country roads, towards Fleetwood. She knew exactly where she was, though, which made her feel comforted. She was pretty sure he’d be unable to take her anywhere within the county she did not know.
He made her turn right off the A586 and go across Shard Bridge, over the River Wyre. Now they were on narrower, winding roads, with Trent saying little, deeply engrossed in his own thoughts.
Soon they reached the coast again, well to the north of Blackpool, at a small seaside village called Knott End, and were driving down the short promenade towards the slipway near the river estuary. Fleetwood was directly opposite, across the water.
He told her to stop at the top of the slipway.
Fleetwood was lit up and looked prettier than it actually was. The tide was in, quite high, and the water lapped not many feet from the front wheels of the Mercedes. On this side of the water it was dark. No one around. In more ways than one, Danny had reached the point of no return.
‘Switch off.’
She killed the engine. Silence surrounded them like a shroud.
‘Keys,’ he barked, holding out his hand. Danny took them out of the ignition and dropped them into his open palm. He slid them into his pocket.
Trent was now in a dilemma.
The very fact that Danny had to get out of the car gave her a slight opportunity to escape. He knew it, so did she.
As soon as he told her to get out, she was going to run. Trent’s mind, already in turmoil, revolved furiously. Then he hit on a course of action.
He opened his door and placed his left leg out. With his right hand he grabbed Danny’s hair, started to climb out and dragged her behind him over the handbrake and gearstick.
‘This way. You come out this way and if you try anything I’ll stab you.’ The point of the knife wavered dangerously close as she succumbed to the situation. He pulled her across and dropped her onto the ground on her hands and knees. He stepped away from her, waving the blade threateningly.
‘Come on, come on, get up, get up!’
She clambered unsteadily up, using the arm-rest on the inside of the door as leverage. Trent yanked her away from the door, back-heeled the door shut and propelled her towards the footpath which ran alongside the river, underneath the observation windows of the unmanned coastguard station and the golf club to their left. On their right was the River Wyre. The water lapped gently up the man-made riverbank.
Danny stumbled several times when Trent pushed her, but he was remorseless.
Two hundred yards down the path they approached a pretty white cottage at the water’s edge, lit up, looking inviting and homely. Danny willed one of the occupants to come to a window. That did not happen as Trent frogmarched her quickly past. Ahead of them was a small sailing club with many dinghies drawn up on a slipway. Beyond were more cottages which Trent obviously did not know about.
‘Shit,’ he said on seeing them.
He pulled Danny around and marched her back past the white cottage and turned her onto the public footpath which sliced across the golf course. Within seconds the lights from Fleetwood docks were left behind. They seemed to walk into a shroud of blackness where it was impossible to see your feet.
A wave of panic coursed through Danny. This was the ideal place to finish the job. Drag her onto a fairway, into a bunker, then attack her. A hundred yards dead ahead of her, Danny saw the lights from a row of houses which backed onto the golf course, and to which the footpath led.
Trent shoved her, driving his open hand into the middle of her back, making her head snap backwards.
She stumbled.
And saw her chance.
She exaggerated the movement and turned it into a sprint.
She shot off like a whippet. Before Trent realised his error, Danny was five yards away. ‘Bitch!’ he shouted angrily. He lunged at her. The knife cut through the air with a swish.
Danny accelerated away. Having only recently tested her running skills when pursuing Claire Lilton, she knew her capabilities were limited, especially now with a sore ankle. But she had to put as much distance between herself and Trent as possible. She motored.
‘No way! No fucking way!’ Trent screamed behind her.
Danny’s arms pumped wildly, her legs pumped, dismissing the pain in her ankle, her heart pumped to bursting. She knew she would get no help from adrenaline which had already overdosed her system. She had to rely on pure determination and the instinct to survive.
She willed herself to get to the houses ahead of Trent.
His footsteps crashed down in her wake, echoing in her ears.
He was only feet away, maybe only inches.
Danny surged on, motivated by the thought of his hands reaching out for her. She got to the point where the narrow footpath did a 90-degree turn to run directly behind the houses.
‘Ahhh!’ Trent cried. He had lost his footing at the turn and pitched headlong into bushes.
Danny forced herself to go even faster, racing to the point where the path ended and an avenue of bungalows began and street-lights blazed, house-lights burned ... back to an environment of normality.
Before she could get to the nearest door and possibly safety, Trent was on her, having recovered quickly from his fall. He rugby-tackled her, driving her over a low garden wall, through a tangle of bushes, rolling onto a well-manicured lawn.
Trent landed on top, reared up with the knife rising in his right hand, glinting in the sodium lighting. It began a downward descend into her face.
With a superhuman effort, Danny writhed herself away from the weapon’s arc of travel and Trent stuck the knife into the grass where, a split second before, Danny’s eye had been.
Danny’s right hand fell onto a large, hand-sized pebble on the rockery. She grabbed it immediately and with no thought process, just pure basic instinct, smashed it into the side of Trent’s head. He sprawled across the grass, leaving the knife embedded in the lawn.
Danny crawled away from him, completely exhausted, trying to get to her feet, but her whole body had given up responding to anything. Trent had already stood up. He staggered like a drunk around the garden, holding his head and searching for the knife.
‘What the bloody ‘ell’s goin’ on ‘ere?’ boomed a voice from the back door of the house. The dark figures of two burly, handy-looking men appeared and made towards Danny and Trent.
‘Call the police,’ Danny groaned. She slumped down. ‘Please, call the police.’
Trent cursed. He stumbled on the hilt of the knife, extracted it from the grass, stared wildly at the two of them, then, inexplicably but wonderfully to the exhausted Danny, he turned and ran.
Chapter Fourteen
Monday morning, three days later, two battered and bruised figures hobbled into work.
Firstly there was Henry Christie.
He had a collection of swellings on his scalp of various sizes and configurations. Because he had been knocked into oblivion, he had spent Thursday night in hospital, under observation, even after X-rays on his thick skull had shown no fractures. He had then spent a long weekend at home, recuperating.
His brain constantly hummed and his left ear emitted a shriek every so often which, he was assured by the medical profession, would pass in time. He had to walk fairly slowly, though, because if he moved his head too quickly, lights exploded at the back of his eyeballs, making him feel like his brain was linked to a Van Der Graaf generator.
Other than that, he was feeling pretty steady.
Behind him came Danielle Louise Furness on the first day of her official promotion to Detective Serge
ant. She dragged herself into the police station a few feet behind Henry because he had picked her up on the way in.
The first of Danny’s days of sickness had been spent in the same hospital as Henry, where she had been checked over - again - by that same dishy doctor who had treated her before. He appeared to work more hours than she did. They became quite chatty under the circumstances and Danny filed him away for future possibilities.
Her next two days had been at her sister’s house near Preston where she had been fussed over and treated like royalty. Most of Danny’s physical injuries were relatively minor. The weekend gave them some quality time to heal.
Now, as she limped in behind Henry, she was just stiff and sore. So pretty much, Danny’s outer layer had been repaired.
It was her inner self, the psychological layers which concerned her. The chassis which held the bodywork together.
The night demons had been bad, sleep a problem. Each time she closed her eyes, whirling, frightening images came to her, where the faces of Jack Sands and Louis Trent overlayed each other to form a single terrifying monster with only one aim: to destroy Danny Furness.
But she had been determined to fight. She returned home on Sunday evening, resolved to sleep alone in her own house, get back to normal and get back into work to take up her new post.
And though she was suffering mentally, she knew she was tough enough to pull through it.
She and Henry rode up in the lift together.
It was 9 a.m.. Louis Vernon Trent had not yet been captured.
Following the gruesome discovery of a skull in woodland near to Darwen in East Lancashire by two illicit lovers, one very decomposed body was dug carefully out of a shallow grave and transported to the mortuary. It turned out to be the skeletal remains of a young person and the pathologist called in for the job identified them as those of a young girl aged maybe ten or eleven years old; she had been buried there for about five years. The only way to make positive ID would be through dental records, as the jaws and teeth were well-preserved.
He could not specify a cause of death, nor whether the girl had been sexually molested. Even so, the police decided to set up an incident room, allocate half a dozen detectives to it and see where the enquiry led.
The first port of call for the detectives on the case was Lancashire Constabulary’s Missing from Home files. These threw up three possibilities. One was quickly eliminated - she had actually returned home, but no one had cancelled the circulation. That left two girls, both having gone missing several years earlier and never returned.
The second port of call was to dental surgeries. This eliminated one of these girls.
The final port of call was to Blackpool police station.
Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, Assistant Chief Constable (Operations) was waiting impatiently in Henry Christie’s office, sitting behind his desk, leafing through his things. Henry closed his eyes momentarily when he clapped eyes on FB.
What Henry wanted to do was sit at his desk, get his feet comfortably underneath it, take his time, get up to speed with the investigation, see where it was going, see where it was blocked, then get onto Trent’s tail. It had been three days since Danny’s horrific experience and Henry knew the trail was getting colder by the minute. It needed hotting up - but only after he had got himself up to scratch.
Henry had a pretty good idea that FB’s presence would preclude the first part of the action plan.
‘Henry, about time you got in here, for fuck’s sake!’ FB snorted, making a great show of looking at his watch and the wall clock.
Danny had followed Henry up to the office and was standing behind him. ‘I’ll catch you later, sir,’ she said to Henry. She nodded at FB. ‘Morning, sir.’
‘No - you get in here too, young lady,’ FB beckoned regally. Danny bristled, but came in and eased the door shut.
FB made no effort to vacate Henry’s chair. The two lower-ranking officers sat on the seats opposite the desk.
‘What’s all this going off sick shit, Henry? Haven’t I told you before it’s a nancy-boy’s trick?’
‘I think you have, sir.’
FB grunted. His head reared back. ‘Anyway, you both look like shite.’ He glared at Henry. ‘What’s the story behind it?’ He pointed at the DI’s head. ‘Who walloped you?’
Henry shrugged. ‘No idea. Could’ve been anyone of a number of people.’ Deep down he believed he knew exactly who was responsible, but was not about to share it with FB. This was something personal.
‘And how are you, missy?’ FB directed the question to Danny.
She bristled again and bit her tongue. ‘I’m fine.’ She smiled primly.
‘Good, good. Couple of days enough to get over it, I imagine?’ It was a rhetorical question.
Henry regarded FB across the desk and thought he had become even more insufferable since his promotion to ACPO rank. He had been bad enough before. Now his management style resembled a steam-roller, riding roughshod over everyone in his path, making no allowances for people’s feelings.
Henry knew FB had recently been the subject of two grievances, one on the grounds of sexism, the other racism.
‘You wanted to see us, boss?’ Henry asked politely.
‘Yeah, to make sure you don’t do your normal thing, Henry - sit around all morning farting about getting nowhere. I want you to remember that besides a little girl being murdered by this bastard, he killed a cop too.’ Danny winced visibly at the memory. ‘And I am telling you that if you don’t have this cunt - please excuse my French,’ he said to Danny who winced again, ‘in custody by the end of this week, questions will be asked in the big house. Get my drift? Jobs are on the line here, Henry - yours in particular. Remember, it gets bloody cold in uniform.’
Henry opened his mouth to utter something about being unfair, but thought better of it. FB was known for making rash statements before thinking them through, and not really meaning them; however, this did not stop his words from being unsettling.
‘What I want you to do is come back to me in an hour and tell me exactly where this investigation is up to. I’m sure you can manage that. Right - that’ll do for now. I’ll see you later, back here, one hour.’ He rose and left the room.
Henry slumped back and mouthed the word ‘bastard’ to himself, bitterly regretting coming back into work. He could, quite legitimately, have taken the week off. The discordant tunes in his cranium had escalated to full volume by FB-induced stress. He looked sideways at Danny.
‘Is he always such a dick-brain?’
‘That was his good side,’ Henry said. ‘You should see him when he really gets uppity.’
There was a knock on the door. Danny answered it. Two men came into the office and introduced themselves. They were detectives from Blackburn. Henry knew them by sight, not name.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asked. He sidled behind his desk and sat on his chair, noticing how warm it was from FB’s sweaty backside. He swept his hand towards the chairs and the detectives sat.
One spoke. ‘A body was found in a shallow grave a couple of days ago. Young girl, decomposed. We’ve managed to ID her from dental records and an MFH report.’ The detective handed Danny a photograph of a family group with the face of the girl circled in red pen. Danny felt a chill. She handed the photo to Henry who saw the look on Danny’s face. The detective carried on talking, revealing the girl’s name as Annie Reece, aged fourteen. ‘She went missing about five years ago, never turned up. Another girl disappeared at the same time. She never turned up either. You might recall?’
Henry did - but at the time he had been out of the country in Holland, on an operation with the Regional Crime Squad. There had been a big hunt for the two girls which eventually fizzled out. No clues, no leads.
‘Does this mean something to you, Dan?’ Henry asked.
Her face was bleak. ‘I reported them both missing.’
‘Does it link to Trent?’
‘No. He was in prison by then.’ Sh
e shook her head in disbelief. ‘Funny how the past always seems to catch up with me.’
Henry’s phone rang, cutting short any further time for Danny to reflect.
‘Yep?’ Henry answered it bluntly, nowhere near to Force instructions on how a phone should be answered. It was one of the officers from the incident room. Henry listened, his eyes on Danny.
‘Yeah, right, thanks for that ... Where exactly ... What condition is it in? . . . Scenes of Crime, forensics on their way? Right, I’ll be in shortly. Thanks again.’ He hung up. ‘Guess what? They’ve found your car,’ he told Danny. This was a major leap forwards in the investigation because Trent had stolen Danny’s car from Knott End after he had tried to kill her. Its description and registration had been circulated nationwide, but it had only just been found.
Danny perked up. ‘Where?’
‘Stoke-on- Trent, appropriately enough.’
‘Stoke? What the hell’s he doing going to Stoke? And the car?’ She desperately wanted it back.
‘I’m sorry ... it was found by a couple of amateur divers in a flooded quarry just outside Stoke. Looks like it was torched before it went into the drink. I’m told it’s a complete write-off.’
Danny wilted visibly. Despite its recent injuries, it was still her beautiful car. Treasured possession. Lovingly cared for, manicured weekly. First she was abducted in it, then it was stolen, now destroyed.
‘Sorry, Dan. Look - oh, damn!’ Once more the phone interrupted things. Henry picked it up, but continued talking. ‘Why don’t you go and get a brew for these guys and I’ll join you in a few minutes to discuss how we can help them. . . Yep?’ he said into the phone.
A voice he recognised instantly, but had not heard for about six months, said reprovingly, ‘Is this always how you answer the phone, you godamned son of a gun?’ Henry brightened. ‘Hey, Yank! How the hell y’doing?’
It was Karl Donaldson, former FBI Special Agent, now working in the FBI London Office as a Legal Attaché. He was a good friend of Henry’s.