Lane: A Case For Willows And Lane

by Peter Grainger

  ‘Closer to twelve.’

  ‘Oh well. Maybe we’ll have a police escort by the time we get there,’ with a sincere attempt at another smile.

  No, my dear, thought Emily Willows – you might take me for a silly old fool but no-one learns how to do things like that from watching television. Neither do you learn them sitting in an office in the square mile. You were not a banker or a hedge fund manager, as Robert suggested. Her stomach turned over then at the thought of him. What had happened now that they had escaped and the police were involved in this pursuit? Was he safe? Had they made things better or worse?

  She turned to look at Lane again, wanting to ask her something about this, gain some reassurance, and realised then that they were accelerating once more. The fixed expression was back, the slight working of the mouth as if the younger woman was biting the inside of her cheek, the deliberate, controlled breathing. Emily tried to do something similar, steeling herself before she looked into the wing mirror, because she knew exactly what she was going to see there.

  Chapter Seven

  Detective Superintendent Harley listened carefully to everything that the Assistant Chief Constable, Operations, had to say, and agreed with most of it. When the call came to an end, he put down the internal telephone and gave himself exactly two minutes to prepare – that included the scribbling down of a few brief lines on his desk notepad – before he went to find Detective Sergeant Robert Willows. He had hoped by now to be the bearer of better news.

  The station had been purpose-built and had opened less than a year ago; it still felt and smelled new in parts, and they had a superfluity of rooms. Superintendent Harley went into two of the interview suites before he found Willows standing by a window that looked down across the town. Further north and east, the dark mass of Bodmin Moor itself loomed on the far horizon.

  Jennifer Spall sat at the table with two mugs of tea in front of her – her own was half empty but the other had not been touched as far as Harley could see. Spall was a fellow detective sergeant and a friend of Willows. She was there to offer support of course, but also, as they all knew, to make sure that Robert Willows didn’t do anything foolish during this potentially dangerous situation.

  Harley said, ‘Let’s all sit down, Robert. I’ve got an update for you, and a few more questions.’

  Willows did as he was asked, sitting alongside Jenny Spall, but he said nothing – his eyes were locked onto the face of the superintendent. Jenny told him to have a sip of the tea but he shook his head.

  ‘I won’t beat about the bush, Robert – it’s not all good news. We’ve lost contact with the phone. We don’t know why, and there could be a hundred reasons for it.’

  In the silence that followed, Harley thought, he looks calm, looks as if he’s thinking it through. One of our better prospects, and it’s a bloody shame this has happened to him.

  Willows said, ‘Is it just the signal?’

  ‘Technical don’t think so. It looks as if it’s turned off completely.’

  It was important not to hurry, to give him time to process everything, just as he had been trained to do when working a case.

  ‘Anything else, sir?’

  ‘Yes, quite a bit. We have four vehicles in the area, ten officers I think, and the chopper will be on its way up from Truro any minute now. We had a good fix on them until about ten minutes ago, so we know that they were heading east on the A38 and that they were planning to go into Liskeard. They might still-’

  ‘East, sir? The last I heard they were heading this way. I don’t understand that, sir.’

  The Assistant CC had said, “Tell him the minimum, Jack, as little as possible until we know exactly what’s going on here,” but the superintendent’s instincts told him that Willows was a genuine officer, one that he could trust. In the end, he went with those instincts.

  ‘They were, Robert. There was an incident. One of the cars pursuing your mother’s vehicle was involved in a collision. As far as I’m aware, no-one was injured but two men left the scene on foot. They are being actively searched for.’

  ‘They crashed? With my mother’s car?’

  ‘No, we don’t think so from what we’ve got back so far. Somehow the person driving your mother’s car got across the central reservation and headed towards Liskeard. Witnesses at the scene are telling the officers there that the second vehicle, the blue Volvo, then drove against the traffic and went through onto the east-bound carriageway as well. Your mother’s car is red, isn’t it?’

  Willows nodded, an expression of faint incredulity on his face.

  ‘One of the officers there reports damage to the central barrier and red paint scraped onto it, so this looks as if the witnesses have given a good account.’

  Willows looked away from the other two officers, looked into an empty corner of the room. Jenny Spall raised her eyebrows towards Harley, and he nodded in return, understanding what she wanted.

  She said, ‘What about at the house, sir?’

  ‘All as Mrs Willows described it – your mother seems to be a pretty strong character, Robert,’ and he had Willows’ attention back with that. ‘A man has been shot there, a serious leg wound. Paramedics are on the scene, and he should be on his way to Plymouth General by now. There will be an officer with him and a car following – he’ll be under a police guard at all times. Once we have him identified, things will move forward quickly.’

  Willows said, ‘A shooting, in my mother’s house… I was only there this morning. It’s a nightmare, sir.’

  ‘No it isn’t – it’s a situation. We deal with situations, and we’ll deal with this one. You can help, Robert. I need to ask you more questions, if you’re up to it.’

  Jenny Spall looked surprised and Robert Willows momentarily angry, which was fine.

  Harley said, ‘Good. The first officer to get a visual on your mother’s vehicle this afternoon confirmed that it was being driven by a young, dark-haired woman. We have to assume that this is your mother’s next-door neighbour. What can you tell me about her?’

  Not much, Robert Willows had said, and with good reason – his mother had taken to calling this neighbour the woman of mystery. She had found out her surname – and Harley wrote that down – but little more. As far as he knew, the two of them were not really on speaking terms, though his mother, he was sure, would have made attempts to be so.

  Harley said, ‘How long have they been neighbours?’, and when he received the answer, ‘Not quite six months, sir’ his expression altered a little. He didn’t think that either of the sergeants had noticed, and the concern was covered quickly by ‘OK’ and the show of writing all this down. But Harley’s mind was racing now. Not quite six months? The investigation that they were all involved in was eighteen months old, and the evidence they had implied – no, proved – that there was corruption at a high level; a senior member of the civil service and perhaps even of the government might be involved. A young woman had moved in next door to Mrs Willows, a young woman about whom nothing was known except that she was capable of shooting a man accurately enough to disable him but not to kill, and a woman who could perform a handbrake turn on a busy main road - a detail he had not shared with Robert Willows - and evade, at least for now, the men intent on recapturing, or worse, their victims. Who exactly was driving Mrs Willows’ red Citigo, and where exactly was she taking her?

  The Assistant Chief Constable, Operations, closed his office door, opened his wallet and took out a slip of paper. He unfolded it and laid it on the desk in front of him. Eleven digits, just like every other mobile phone number – in that sense at least it was perfectly ordinary but he did not want to press those keys on his own phone, at least not in that particular sequence.

  ACC Martin Russell wondered about the woman who would answer. He wondered, for example, whether her office was very much like his own. He guessed it would be in an old building but had no idea whether it would be something high-ceilinged and grand, or a small cubbyhole at the end of
a long, dim corridor in Whitehall. He had no idea and would never find out, of course, but he was as sure as he could be that her office would be situated somewhere in the centre of the capital.

  She had been pleasant enough to begin with, in that lazy way that certain people have – people who have not had greatness thrust upon on them but who have rather assumed it from a very early age, probably about three weeks old. She spoke with an educated, upper class accent that she made no attempt to disguise, and Russell had been conscious then of his own West-country burr. What conclusions had she come to about him in those opening exchanges? If it came to that, why had he been selected as the point of communication for this swine of a case? Why not the Chief Constable herself? Did these people in London have his own file open in front of them?

  “Delicacy” was the word that she had emphasised – “We would like this to be handled with the utmost delicacy, Assistant Chief Constable”, using his full title more than once. Was that an attempt to flatter him or a reminder of just how much he had to lose should matters become at all indelicate? And she had been, in her superior way, quite brazen about what was going on; she had said to him “When the case comes to court, we can manage the attendant publicity from here – that has all been arranged. All that we require from you is that you manage pre-trial matters on the ground, so to speak. We would like you to keep us informed if there are unexpected developments. We do not want any surprises, Assistant Chief Constable. We do not like surprises.”

  Always the “we”. Russell had wanted to say ‘And who exactly are “we”? Is that a corgi I hear yapping in the background? Should I address you as ‘Ma’am’?’

  He did no such thing, naturally. She had given him a name that might or might not be truly her own – Meredith Carr – and he had been told not to write it down anywhere close to the phone number he was to use. When he called, he was not to use this name but simply to identify himself and wait to see if she could speak to him at that moment, as if to underline that she had even more important matters to attend to than this one.

  ACC Russell had been staring at the piece of paper for five minutes. There was a temptation to wait and see what happened over the next hour or so, but things had already spun out of control – there was a serious danger of indelicacy. Meredith Carr was in for a surprise whether she liked them or not, and if he waited, if he did not make this call, it might turn into a shock when he finally did contact her. A hostage taken, a shooting, a car chase, high-speed collisions and now they had lost sight of the target. There were local journalists perfectly capable of making a nuisance of themselves, and these days anything could end up in the social media within minutes. Russell closed his eyes but that only sharpened the nightmare images of some idiot posting video clips of the police activity in Polcoombe or the pursuits up and down the A38. Good God – if Meredith Carr and her lot saw all that before he had made this call…

  He picked up his phone and dialled.

  ‘How many in the car?’

  Lane had the Skoda into the revolutions red zone on a tight left-hand curve. Emily Willows leaned across and turned back to look, bracing herself against the dashboard.

  ‘Two.’

  ‘Certain?’

  ‘Yes, two. Only two.’

  ‘Good – things are looking up. I’m assuming it’s someone we’ve already met?’

  Emily had recognised him immediately but thought it best not say – now she had been asked directly. She edged back into her seat and pulled down the sun blind, using the mirror to keep the car behind in view.

  ‘Yes. It’s him, the man from the house. You can see his face is red on the left side – he really should have stayed there and kept running cold water over it.’

  Lane had to glance across to see if Emily Willows was being serious, and then she shook her head as she re-focused on the road. This made no sense now. The two in the Golf might already have been arrested, and the whole game was surely up, anyway. The point of taking his mother hostage was presumably to lean on Robert Willows whether or not he was involved in anything corrupt, but that only works if it’s done secretly. The shooting, the car chase, what Emily had told the police on the phone all meant that the plan had blown apart. So why weren’t the pair behind, drawing ever closer, heading back to the smoke at a rate of knots?

  Lane could only explain what was happening in one way – the two men behind had reverted to type, gone native. Or at least Small had, and the other one was doing as he was told, as one might if an angry giant with a damaged face and a wounded ego had got into the passenger seat and said follow that effing car… That much she could picture. And, of course, he had been made a fool of by a woman. The desire for revenge, the insult to his primitive masculinity, could have overridden any ability he might possess to think things through. Taking anyone hostage now was pointless but that’s not what he was after any more; all he wanted to was to get hold of the woman who had done this to him. Lane thought then, so I’m the target now, not Emily.

  What were the options? Keep going, get into the next town. The longer she could stay ahead of them and keep moving, the more chance there was that Small would realise the pointlessness of this and give up – and the more time there would be for the police to get a fix on the phone and make visual contact. Lane did a mental calculation of how long since they had left Emily’s house and spoken with the police – she was mystified as to why they were not already being reassured by half a dozen competent, confident people in dark blue or black uniforms. Surely the talk about country police officers all being clodhopping bumpkins wasn’t actually true, was it?

  OK then, just keep going. But the car behind was much faster. There had been gaps in the traffic and it could have got past them already – why hadn’t it done so? Doesn’t matter, we’re not many miles from Liskeard now. There’s a police station there and they will already have been alerted. There might be a couple of cars waiting on the outskirts of town, ready to-

  ‘He’s got another gun!’

  The Volvo was making a move now, into the outside lane and easing up alongside them. Lane could see the driver clearly for the first time – youngish, brown-skinned, Asian-looking, boy-like beside Small.

  ‘Are you certain?’

  ‘Yes. He could see me watching him in the mirror. He waved it in front of his face.’

  ‘Right. We might have to re-think this race, then. If he shoots a tyre at this speed…’

  But it was too late. The Volvo was alongside and Lane could see that the passenger’s window had been wound down. Small took a long look at her, not smiling, not anything, his face a red-blotched blank, and then he raised the pistol. He wasn’t aiming for the tyres. She braked hard, really hard.

  The bullet struck the side window above her head, in the upper right corner, and the glazing cracked into a thousand diamonds. It passed inches in front of her face, deflected down from the roof and went out through the other side window, the passenger’s, with the same effect except that the glass in Emily’s window then collapsed, most of it falling into her lap. Instinctively, Lane put her elbow through the glass of the driver’s side, creating a jagged hole in it.

  The braking had sent the Volvo far ahead, but now it too was slowing and moving across to block the carriageway in front of them. Ashen-faced, Emily sat staring down at the glass in her lap. Then she said, ‘He means to kill us both.’

  Lane glanced into the rear-view mirror and then manoeuvred onto the outside of the carriageway – there didn’t seem much point in doing the signal part. The road behind was empty for now. The Volvo did the same; at least when they were directly in front, it would be difficult to take another shot.

  Emily said, ‘Do you want the gun?’

  Lane took another quick look. The older woman’s face was very pale but she actually seemed quite annoyed by what had just taken place. This was good – hysteria would have tilted the odds against them surviving quite considerably.

  ‘No, thanks. You can’t have much of a sh
oot-out when you’ve only got two shots. There’s blood on your face. Are you alright?’

  Emily looked into the vanity mirror. A piece of the imploding window had nicked the skin to the side of her nose, and a thin trickle of blood was making its way down towards her chin. She opened her handbag, found a tissue and dabbed it away.

  ‘A superficial injury. It could have been worse…’

  And then, suddenly and most strangely, they were both laughing.

  They had a few seconds of light relief, or was it release, before the Volvo was slowing them down again, just as the Golf had done ten minutes earlier. If Lane tried to overtake, the likely consequences were obvious enough. Quite whether the men in the car thought that the women would actually stop was unclear but Lane knew that the slower she was driving, the more dangerous this became.

  There was a sign ahead, an exit left; she waited until she could read it and then said to Emily Willows, ‘Do you know that road?’

  Emily peered, her eyes not as sharp as those of her companion. No she did not, she had never driven that way. Lane looked again and read the names of three or four villages.

  ‘Any idea where it goes? There must be a way back round to Liskeard.’

  ‘Well, maybe. I suppose so. We’re still on the edge of the moor.’

  ‘OK, it’s decision time. If we go onto narrower roads, these two will find it harder to get ahead of us or take another shot. We’re sitting ducks here. Sharp left coming up.’

  Lane spun the steering wheel anti-clockwise at the last possible moment, hand over hand, and the tyres protested. Emily Willows clung on to anything within reach – there was a dent and a scratch in the driver’s door and two windows had gone. What did a bit of rubber left on the road matter now?

  After the open spaces of the dual carriageway, forty five miles an hour on the narrow, twisting back-road seemed more like a hundred. There were trees close to them on both sides, and it seemed darker here – and that’s because it is darker, Emily told herself. The light is going, and I’ve been having such a whale of time I haven’t realised until now that the sun is setting and it will soon be dark.