by Jacqui Rose
The bastards were trying to cause a pile-up, he realised. Their plan was to create a barricade of car-wrecks. And on top of that, they were still armed. He glimpsed more flickering blue lights in his rear-view mirror, but they were far behind and nobody in the control room seemed to be answering his messages – at which point his quarry suddenly attempted the craziest manoeuvre Heck had ever seen.
There was a double-sided crash barrier down the motorway’s central reservation. A fleeting gap appeared – and the van jack-knifed into it, attempting a U-turn.
A U-turn! At sixty miles an hour! On the motorway!
By instinct rather than logic, Heck did the same. The next junction was a good fifteen miles away, and he couldn’t take the chance that the felons might escape.
But even though Heck jammed his brakes on as he turned, he lost control crossing the northbound carriageway, skidding on two wheels and slamming side-on into the grass embankment with such bone-shuddering force that his Fiat rolled uphill … before rolling back down again and landing on its roof, its chassis groaning, glass fragments tinkling over him. The white van had also lost control, but whereas Heck had lost it at thirty, the Savage brothers had lost it at sixty. Their vehicle didn’t even manage to turn into the skid, but ploughed headlong across the carriageway – straight into the concrete buttress of a motorway bridge. The resulting impact boomed in Heck’s ears.
That sound echoed for what seemed like seconds as Heck lay groggily on his side.
At length, in a daze akin to the worst hangover in history, he began to probe at his body with his fingertips. Everything seemed to be intact, though his neck and shoulders ached, suggesting whiplash. His left wrist was also hurting, though he had full movement in the joint. With an agonised grunt, Heck released the catch of his seatbelt, crawled gingerly across the ceiling of his car and tried to open the passenger door, only to find that it was buckled in its frame and immovable. For a second he was too stupoured to work this out; then slowly, painfully, he shifted himself around and clambered feet-first through the shattered window.
When he finally stood up, he found himself gazing across the underside of his Fiat, which was gashed and dented and thick with tufts of grass and soil. Clouds of steam hissed from his busted radiator. Passing vehicles slowed down, the faces of drivers blurring white as they gawked at him. Multiple sirens approached from the near-distance.
Clamping a hand to his throbbing neck, he had to turn his entire body to gaze along the debris-strewn hard-shoulder. Thirty yards away, the smouldering hulk of the white van was crushed against the concrete buttress, reduced to about a third of its original length. Heck hobbled towards it, but when he got within ten yards the stench of fuel and rubber and twisted, melted metal was enough to make him sick.
So was the sight of the Savage brothers.
Whichever one of them had fired the shots from out of the back had been catapulted clean across the van’s interior, bursting through its windscreen, his head striking the buttress of the bridge and splurging several feet up the concrete in a deluge of blood, brain and bone splinters. The driver had been flung onto the steering wheel, and now lay across it like a bundle of limp rags. From the crimson rivers gurgling out underneath him, the central column had torn through his breastbone and punctured his cardiovascular system.
Heck tottered queasily away from the wreck.
Other police vehicles were now drawing in behind his Fiat. The first of their drivers, a young Motorway Division officer in a bright orange slicker, came running up. ‘Is that him?’ he asked. ‘The Maniac?’
Heck slumped backwards onto the grass. ‘Let’s hope so,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody hell … let’s hope so.’
Find out what happens in Sacrifice by Paul Finch.
Who will be next?
Enjoy this extract? Buy the rest of the book here:
SACRIFICE: 9780007492329
A Note From Mark Sennen
The inspiration for Wunderland came from a couple of abandoned farms on Dartmoor. I wondered who might have lived in these remote, inaccessible places. The first, Teignhead Farm (50.6428N, 3.9316W for those interested in locating the ruin on Google or in real life), lies just to the west of Fernworthy Forest, and back when it was farmed it would have been one of the most remote habitations on the moor.
The second abandoned farm, which is not derelict and gives a better idea of what life out in the wilds might have been like, is on the west side of the moor. Ditsworthy Warren House (50.4791N, 3.9970W), is as isolated as Teignhead, but the house is intact and complete with outbuildings and a walled-in paddock. The house is worth a visit, not least because it is now world-famous thanks to a certain Mr Steven Spielberg. Part of War Horse was filmed at Ditsworthy, which stood in for the fictional Narracott Farm. Duel, the film briefly referred to in Wunderland, was directed by Spielberg when he was in his mid-twenties.
While checking out Spielberg on Wikipedia, I discovered, in an unnerving coincidence similar to the one which befalls the writer in Wunderland, that shortly after Duel he filmed a TV film pilot called Savage …
Which leads me on to this: you might like to check out the two books in my police series - Touch and Bad Blood. They too are set in Devon and feature Plymouth detective DI Charlotte Savage. There’s an extract from Bad Blood after the short story.
I always like to hear from readers and you can contact me via my website www.MarkSennen.com or on Twitter @MarkSennen.
Wunderland
A short story by Mark Sennen
One
South Devon Coast. Present Day.
Jane Keynes enjoyed walking her dog on the beach when the weather was rough. Today the conditions were exactly that and the wind howled over the sand from the south-west, bringing rain and spume in at an almost horizontal angle. Beyond the froth at the tideline, breakers rolled landward, smashing themselves to oblivion as they hit the beach.
Fantastic.
Benny barked and then headed off across the open expanse of sand in pursuit of a piece of flotsam. Jane could see something of the wolf about the dog when the weather was extreme. His instincts became sharpened as he realised this was the ideal situation for hunting. The noise from the wind and the surf covered up the scrape of his paws on the ground, and if he approached from the right direction prey would have no chance of catching his scent.
Not that Benny was used to chasing anything much apart from his toys or the odd stick or the plastic bottle he was savaging at the moment.
Jane shouted at him to leave the bottle, and used the long plastic thrower to launch Benny’s tennis ball way down the beach. The dog yapped in delight and raced off after the ball as it bounced across the sand. Jane pulled the hood of her coat up and trotted after the dog, thinking already about the sticky cinnamon swirl she’d bought earlier from the village bakery. With a strong black coffee to accompany it the combination of sugar and caffeine would get her day off to a flying start. And to be honest she could do with a kick up the backside this morning since the deadline on the story she was working on was fast approaching and she needed to finish the piece by the end of the week.
She shouted against the gale at Benny and turned for home. Now the wind was full in her face and she pulled the hood of the waterproof tight to cover everything but her eyes. She staggered on for a few steps until she realised Benny wasn’t following. She stopped and looked round to see him sniffing something in amongst the foam. He jumped aside as a wave surged up the beach, but once the water had subsided he went back to the object. A mass of seaweed lay wrapped around something, the fronds allowing only a glimpse of whatever was hidden within.
‘Come away, Benny!’
Benny scampered off a few metres, sniffing the air and then barking. For a moment Jane wondered if the thing was a dolphin. There’d been several found around Cornish beaches and current gossip was of French trawlermen trapping them in their nets, only to throw the carcasses back into the sea. The story sounded like typical anti-EU rubbish to Jan
e, but then what did she know?
What she did know, now she was closer, was that this was no dolphin.
She yelled at Benny and this time he heard the anxiety in her voice. He came to heel and she clipped him to his lead. She looked down the beach where a wave had sucked the seaweed back into the surf, the mass floating brown in the white foam.
For a second she thought about just going home and having that coffee. Her privacy was important to her and getting involved wasn’t something she liked to do. But, thinking off on a strange tangent, she figured if she did just go home, the cinnamon swirl wouldn’t taste very nice and the rest of the day would be wasted as she sat in front of the computer brooding.
Her mobile was safe and dry back on her desk so the only option was one of the beach-side houses or the lifeboat station. She tugged at Benny’s lead and set off at a jog towards the village, pausing after a few strides to look back to where brown had now given way to pink and grey. Wrinkled, puffy and very definitely not belonging to a dolphin.
*
Fifteen minutes later and she was guiding two of the local lifeboat crew back across the beach to where she’d seen the body. The taller of the two, Edie Garfield’s lad, Liam, looked into the surf and then back at her.
‘You sure it was here?’
‘Yes.’ Jane pointed a little way up the beach to where Benny had left the plastic bottle. ‘My dog was playing with that.’
‘Right …’ He turned around to his mate. ‘Launch the boat and take a look out there?’
‘Tide’s ebbing, Garf, but I’d be surprised if it had gone very far.’
‘Bloody rough though. At the limits for the IRB.’
IRB. The inshore rescue boat. Jane had watched the lifeboat crew practising in it the other day. They’d zipped back and forth in the orange craft, bouncing over the waves, trying out all sorts of manoeuvres. But then the sea had been much calmer last week.
The other man seemed to accept Garfield’s verdict and shrugged his shoulders. Jane could understand their reluctance. A launch would mean pulling half a dozen people from their jobs, would cost money and that was without considering the dangerous conditions and the possibility of damaging the boat or risking the lives of the crew.
‘And this was definitely a body you say?’ Garfield said. ‘Not alive? A human?’
‘A human,’ Jane said, thinking of the state of the corpse. ‘Definitely. And dead too.’
‘Well then, Garf,’ the other man said. ‘Not worth a shout, is it?’
‘Thing is, we can’t just —’
‘There!’ Jane thrust her arm out, pointing at a patch of seaweed rising on a wave crest fifty metres from the shore.
‘That’s just a …’ Garfield leant forwards, squinting to block out the spray. ‘Bloody hell, you’re right.’
The seaweed parted and a pair of legs flailed in the surf as the body tumbled over on the wave. The two lifeboat men ran into the shallows, wading up to their thighs, but the body had disappeared and anyway, the place where it had surfaced was much too far out for them to wade to.
Garfield reached for the radio he had clipped to the lapel of his waterproof, muttered something into it, and then began to run across the beach towards the lifeboat station.
*
After Garfield had run off, the other crew member told Jane to go home. Nothing she could do, he said. Glad that she didn’t have to hang around to see the body pulled from the sea, she returned to her little cottage which sat on the east side of the village overlooking the harbour and beach. After divesting herself of her waterproofs and giving Benny a rub down with an old towel she put the kettle on.
A few minutes later she was sitting at the desk in her attic room. In front of her a blank screen awaited some sort of input, but at the moment inspiration wasn’t coming. The sight of the body had upset her, but to be honest that was just an excuse; she hadn’t been making much progress even before she’d gone for the walk. The problem was she wasn’t relishing the task ahead of her. She’d been arm-twisted into writing a story for the Devon Artists and Writers fortieth anniversary yearbook. The chair of the association had assumed that Jane, as a successful author, would find it a simple matter to dream up a piece which they could include. Her name on the cover would get the yearbook noticed and help shift hundreds, maybe thousands, of copies.
Jane sighed, thinking not for the first time that DAW had made a mistake. She usually wrote hard-edged crime novels which took place in inner-city Plymouth or the badlands of Torbay or amongst warring heroin dealers in Exeter. DAW wanted something about Dartmoor and the brief was to set it in the early seventies so as to commemorate the founding of the association. Jane thought it likely that no one in DAW had actually read any of her books; they’d just seen her picture in one of the Sunday supplements and concluded the rather mousey fifty-something woman smiling out at them could write a nice little story featuring flower gardens, cream teas and a missing cat. There’d need to be a twee village and a pretty young thing too; certainly nothing scandalous or shocking.
Jane reached for the cinnamon swirl, she took a bite and then drank some coffee. Too hot. She pushed back her chair, stood and turned to the window. She picked up her mug, held it near her lips and blew, the steam billowing from the liquid and for a moment condensing on the window. When the mist cleared she saw the orange of the rescue boat out in the bay, patrolling back and forth, Garfield and his crew searching for the body.
She hadn’t been mistaken, she was sure of that. Someone had died and she’d seen the result. She shivered. Horrible. Death was never nice, never twee.
Sod it. She was going to write something about Dartmoor alright — and set the story in the seventies too — but there’d be nothing about cream teas and no bloody cat either. She sat back at the computer and began to type:
Wunderland. 1st Draft.
Dartmoor, Devon. June 29th, 1972.
As he did first thing every morning …
*
As he did first thing every morning, Sam Tolly stood in front of the mirror in the hall and uttered his number one favourite line from his number one favourite movie.
‘You’re a big man, but you’re in bad shape. With me it’s a full-time job. Now behave yourself.’
Tolly shadow-boxed and made a couple of ‘bam, bam’ noises. The Michael Caine voice was spot on but the effect was spoilt by the reflection smiling back at him: the figure in the mirror didn’t have quite the boyish good looks of the young Mr Caine.
Tolly sighed; Caine was all the rage at the moment, Get Carter having been released only a few months ago. But Tolly wasn’t Jack Carter, Charlie Croker or Harry Palmer, and he certainly wasn’t Alfie. Having been born with neither Caine’s brains or beauty, Tolly’s experiences were limited. Especially with women. There’d been the occasional fumble in a hay barn back when he was in his early teens and, later on as a young man, a misunderstanding at a party.
A misunderstanding.
At least that’s what he’d thought it was at the time.
He’d been twenty and still a virgin. The girl was sixteen and oh-so-pretty. Nice. Name of Helen. She’d danced with him. Smiled. Laughed. Tolly had so much wanted to be friends and he’d thought the girl felt the same way. At first. Later, things had gone wrong. The misunderstanding. He’d said sorry but it hadn’t helped. The incident had resulted in rape charges to which he’d admitted and pleaded guilty. His solicitor had put forward the defence that Tolly wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box. He had no qualifications and a low IQ. There were mitigating circumstances since Tolly was, according to the man in the sharp suit, quite simply ‘backwards’. The court should be lenient.
The judge had disagreed and Tolly went to prison for six years.
Back out under the big skies of Dartmoor he reckoned he’d paid his dues. Inside he’d been bullied, picked on. Stuff in the showers too. Turned out he hadn’t paid enough though. People didn’t forgive or forget. In the little village where he’d been born an
d raised he was now known as a pervert. In the moorland town of Chagford, where he did his shopping, people spat on the pavement in front of him. Parents warned their children about the man who lived up on the moor behind Fernworthy Forest and told them tales to make sure they behaved themselves.
No matter. Out on the moor on his little farm there was no one to taunt him. His nearest neighbour was three miles away and the steading was accessible only along a winding track. Day-to-day he saw no one. Every now and then there’d be a walker who’d strayed from the path, but they were tourists from out of the area. Tolly would chat for a little and then show them the way back to the main road.
He was lonely, yes, but there were always his friends at the cinema; the girls up on the screen. Then there were the women in the magazines he kept by his bed. Both sets were unobtainable, yes, but no less so than the living, walking, breathing specimens in Chagford. Company of any sort was out of reach, a penance for the sin he’d committed. If the church would’ve had him, he’d have joined. But when he’d once tried to speak to the local priest, Father Ryan, the man had shouted at him.
‘Away, boy, away,’ he’d said. ‘God’s got no time for the likes of you.’
Tolly wasn’t sure if the man meant thickos or perverts. Perhaps he meant both. Either way, Tolly felt saddened. As a child he’d gone to church with his mother and father. The music had been uplifting and he’d enjoyed the free biscuits you got afterwards. Back then the priest had been friendly too.
Father Ryan was different though. There was something in the man’s eyes. Cold and dark, knowing secrets. Perhaps, Tolly thought, it was all those sins the man had to hear in the confessional. Wouldn’t countless sordid stories of masturbation and infidelity, lust and envy affect you?
Tolly took a final glance in the mirror and then went to the kitchen. He stood next to the sink where a speckle of black mould ran up the yellow wall like a leopard’s spots. The mould stopped at a shelf which held a tumbler containing a toothbrush, a soap dish, a shaving brush, his razor and a container of pills. He unscrewed the lid on the container and tipped out a pill. He popped the pill in his mouth and dry-swallowed it.