Hung in the Balance (Simpson & Lowe Detective series Book 1)

by Ormerod, Roger

  A torrent of foul language urged me on my way. I glanced at the mirror. They were standing there, fists waving, but already some were beginning to run back to their two cars.

  It was by no means over. I knew this lane, but as a general menace, not in the detail that might allow me to avoid its traps. I had to drive as fast as possible, but not so fast as to finish with half the car in a ditch. The hope was that they would become caught in this way, but there were many willing hands to free them if they did. I couldn’t do that, and had to drive, accordingly, with more care. Which meant slower. They could hardly fail to overtake me.

  At that point in my reasoning, all reason disappeared. I abandoned all caution and charged the car at the bends, swearing it round. And all the while, thinking ahead. There was the gate above the slope at Corry’s Head, not far away now. If I could’ve trusted it I might have turned left into there and fooled them. But…oh dear me, no! Onwards, the lane would turn steadily to the right, around the hillside, eventually reaching the turn-off to the old Corry’s Head farm.

  On beyond that was anybody’s guess. That section of the lane soon plunged downwards, winding through tree cover to the Mattock road below. But Oliver had said it was difficult. Perhaps impossible at night, I thought grimly, as that section hadn’t received the usage of the portion up to Hawthorne Cottage.

  Plunge down there, I thought, and I could be in real trouble.

  But…if I turned up to the right to the old farm? What about that? Yes, the bend and the hillside could well cover that manoeuvre and hide me until I reached the shelter of the farmhouse, and they would then, perhaps, being strangers to the district — all except Anna — be fooled into trying the narrow road downwards. And they would be trapped, with no way to get back.

  Yes, I would definitely have to try that. But it would be effective only if I was far enough ahead for my lights not to be seen.

  Already, their headlights were becoming visible in the car mirrors as brief fans of light thrown up into the mist. My lights, too, would do the same. Too revealing. I slowed as I drew close to the entrance to the old farm drive, not at all sure exactly where it was, but vaguely recalling a collapsing structure for hay storage just beside it. Oliver had driven up here to back into the entrance.

  Very nearly I missed it. The supports had collapsed nearly to non-existence. I poised to turn right. The entrance was now tightly overgrown. All to the good. More hope of their missing it. As I turned in I switched down to sidelights. There! Now work that out, I thought.

  The rise was steep. Because of this it had shed water more easily than the lane I’d just left. I could feel the improved grip of the tyres. It was, however, still rutted from past use. I had to concentrate, slowing more and more, though it continued onwards in an almost straight line. This fact was worrying. My tail-lights would be visible if they stopped and stared up the slope. My engine, too, would give me away, I realized, if they cut theirs and listened.

  I was already down to second gear, maintaining only sufficient speed for traction. There was nothing else for it but to drop into bottom, cut the lights altogether, and crawl the car at slow walking speed — and hope. Certainly, the farm would be my last resort. There would be nowhere else to go.

  I crept onwards. Behind me, the mist glow grew brighter. I bit my lip, and concentrated. There were, blessedly, no ditches or hedges, just a naked, beaten track. And now, with my eyes adjusting after the loss of headlights, I was becoming aware of the grim and menacing bulk of the old building above and in front of me.

  It was all that I needed. Simply aim to miss that bulk, to ease the car along its side so that the two would blend into one shadow. Then I’d be invisible.

  The first indication of success was the disappearance of the slope, and I found myself easing along a flat though broken surface. At my left shoulder the building rose as a blank, black surface. Thankfully, I cut the engine and lights, opened the door, and got out. Better, certainly, in the open air. I could still run, still hide.

  Now, with no glass between me and the surroundings, I could look around me and separate distinct shapes. To my right there was a set of notches against the grey, a run of barns probably. I was standing on uneven cobbles. Somewhere, a gutter was dripping, and the night sounds reappeared. But, from the main bulk of the building there was silence, something deeper and deader than the absence of sound, as though the movements and murmurs of its last occupation had been seeping away over the years, and had not yet ceased its effort, had continued to drain an emptiness from it.

  I had parked the car, I now saw, opposite a side door. Now it was no longer a door but simply a doorway. I discovered this by fumbling my way up the two steps and reaching out for a door, and feeling nothing but space. I was still, in my at present silent fear, scouting retreats and escape routes. But it did not present a pleasant prospect. I withdrew into open space, and looked down towards the lane.

  It was my hope that by that time they would have passed the farm entrance, in which event I could have expected to see the mist glow disappearing down the lane towards the Mattock road. In that case, confident that they would not be able to back out, I would be free to return the way we’d come, past the cottage, and eventually, in a state of nervous exhaustion, to The Carlton.

  But the glow was still there. And it was unmoving. There was, too, no sound of engines. Clearly, somebody had realized the absence of sky-glow from my headlights ahead, and they’d stopped for a bit of a think. My heart began to act up again, jumping around in panic. Would they decide to take a look? Yes, they would. They were. The headlights suddenly stabbed upwards towards me as they turned on to the rising drive. I felt I was revealed helplessly. They could use their lights when I had dared not. In fact, as I glanced quickly around — the hunted animal’s desperate search — I saw that already the outbuildings, tattered and collapsing, were becoming visible. I, too, could well be visible! I felt the glow on the front of my anorak as a hot blast of inescapable flame.

  Instinctively, afraid that a movement in any other direction would betray me, I slipped through that open doorway.

  It was not completely black inside. There was the remnant of a window to my left, the front of the building, and through this their approaching lights glowed. Not enough to guide my feet, though. Enough to reveal that I was possibly in a large entrance hallway or a living room. I did not dare to use my torch, even if it would work. I now needed every last iota of cover I could summon. Yet I had to find a hiding place, perhaps another door, which might reveal a free line of flight at the rear into open countryside.

  I advanced cautiously, but after only two paces I realized that the floor was insecure. The planks or whatever they were creaked ominously. Another step, and I felt actual movement. One more pace, I felt, and I’d go through, into a cellar or the like. I stopped. Had I come to the end of the chase? Might I creep round the surrounding edges of this room, and from the far side shout obscenities at them as a final empty gesture — and hope they would run at me and themselves fall through!

  I was actually contemplating this when I became aware that in front of me, perhaps six feet away, there was a vertical line of light.

  For one second my breath caught. Someone was there! But that was impossible. I tried to focus on it, and then realized that the rapidly approaching headlights had illuminated something…something…

  I had to know what it was. I couldn’t just stand there and feel its presence. I took my torch from my anorak pocket, and switched it on. It worked, but for some seconds I could not hold the rays still. Then it caught and held. For five seconds it gave me all the light I needed, all I ever wanted, then I snapped it off.

  I was standing six feet from a vertical length of blue nylon towing rope.

  Rigidly I stood there, my legs aching with their effort to turn me and run me away, anywhere away. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t prevent myself from switching the torch on again.

  From that moment I gave not one thought to the appr
oaching cars and their appalling contents. I had to know. Starting from the top, I swept the torchlight downwards. The rope was tied over a revealed beam, where the ceiling had fallen in. It went straight down, rigidly down, until it reached a broken section of the flooring. Planks had snapped off, jagged edges pointing at me — recently jagged edges — where something had fallen through their rotten insecurity. Through a gap a yard square the rope hung, not moving, but singing, it seemed, from its tension.

  I had to know. Cold now, chilled through to the hollow void in which my heart was heaving and throbbing to keep me on my feet and conscious, I swept the torch around. There was a black doorway over there beneath the remains of a staircase. Black doorways beneath staircases always lead to cellars. With the dread fascination with which a person afraid of heights approaches a cliff top, I moved towards it, and if there were hoarse shouts from somewhere behind me, bellows of alcoholic excitement, slamming of car doors, they were a backdrop to my personal stage, a false world urging along my tiny resolution. It kept me going.

  Down those worn, dusty, plaster-scattered stairs I stepped softly, one hand brushing a damp and noisome wall, the other attempting to control the shaking and fading beam of the torch.

  Until, four steps from the bottom, I stopped. I could have reached out to touch it. The blue rope terminated in a noose around the neck of my Graham, swinging there — my shaking presence had possessed him — his feet a yard away from the floor that might have preserved his life.

  I dropped the torch and sat down on the steps, and clutched my face together as I screamed and screamed.

  11

  I was sitting on the back seat of a car. It wasn’t moving. I had the impression that I was moving, but the seat was still. Around me was brightness and colour, the piercing lights of a number of vehicles — cars, vans, an ambulance. Orange and blue winkers flicked around the farmyard. Shadows moved behind and in front of them.

  A hand rested for a moment on my knee. Then it moved and took my hand. I felt my pulse taken. A woman’s voice said, ‘How are you feeling now?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’ve been unconscious a full hour. You had me worried for a while.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. I tried to turn to face her, but my neck was stiff. ‘Who’re you?’

  ‘A doctor from the hospital. The ambulance men didn’t want to move you — not with that lane to worry about.’

  ‘Yes. Can see that. Thank you.’

  ‘I haven’t spent all my time with you, you know. Oh no. Drunk and sick and in shock, most of them. And the one they sent to reach a phone…she hit a tree. What a splendid night it’s been!’

  I could see now that she was a lot younger than me, an interne probably. Good experience for her. She seemed to have enjoyed herself.

  ‘I passed out?’

  ‘A long way out, I can assure you.’

  Then I remembered it all, and I was shaking and weeping, while she waited.

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Can I go home now?’

  She laughed lightly. ‘I gather that’s New York. There’s an insane American around somewhere, demanding to take you there. Ship you, he called it. But no, you can’t go. Quite apart from the fact that you’ll be in bed for twenty-four hours, and that’s an order, the police want you. Oh yes. There’s a policeman who’s been very interested. Lucky you!’

  I tried to smile. Both my friends.

  ‘He’s here now,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Both of them.’

  Nel’s crinkled, anxious face appeared at one side window, Oliver’s calm and comforting one at the other. I wound down one window, my doctor the other. Cold, wet air flooded in. I breathed it gratefully.

  ‘Can I speak to her?’ asked Oliver.

  ‘It’s New York for you,’ said Nel heavily. Poor Nel. It’d completely knocked the bounce from him.

  ‘I’d heard the police were persistent,’ said my doctor calmly. ‘But she’s my patient.’

  ‘I’m all right,’ I protested.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘Oh no we shan’t. I’m grateful and all that. But I’m feeling fine, thank you. There’ll be others to see to…’

  ‘They’ve all gone.’

  ‘All the same… Please.’

  She smiled. She checked heart and respiration, she tapped things and peered into my eyes. Then she leaned back.

  ‘Very well. I’m needed at the hospital, anyway. But promise me you’ll rest tomorrow.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said meekly. I felt I’d sleep for at least twenty-four hours.

  She nodded, and got out on Oliver’s side while Nel was climbing in the other. I heard her say, ‘By all means speak to her. But nothing upsetting. You understand? And don’t expect too much. She won’t be feeling too bright.’

  Cheek! Nel bent and kissed my forehead. He whispered, ‘Don’t ever do that to me again, sweetheart.’

  ‘I’ll try. What happened at the hotel, Nel? They turned up too early.’

  ‘I passed out,’ he said simply. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘But you’re here.’

  ‘Your policeman friend was in the bar, tryin’ to bring me round, and a cop came for him.’

  Then Oliver forced his way inside. It was a big, wide car, which I later discovered belonged to his superintendent, but we were pretty tightly packed, with me the meat in the sandwich. And very comforting it felt. Nel smelt of whisky, Oliver of beer. Me of terror, no doubt.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Oliver, very much on duty now, no messing about, no cross-talk.

  So I told him, how and why I’d had to return to the cottage for the briefcase — Your fault that was Oliver Simpson — and how the Treadgolds and the Tonkins had turned up like ravening beasts — that was your fault, Nel. In the end Oliver nodded.

  ‘That’s enough for now, then. You’ll have realized I’m back on duty now, so from this moment on it’s all official. I’ll have to see all of ’em, and maybe a charge of public disorder or something might be appropriate —’

  ‘Don’t trouble, please. Tell me…who went for help?’

  ‘That was Anna. I understand she broke a wrist getting to the call box, but all the same she managed to make the call.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said.

  ‘So now, if you’ll kindly transfer to my car, I’ll run you back to the hotel. And rest. D’you hear? You — Nelson, is it? No… Cornel. Right? You will let her rest. No questions, no fussing. Rest.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir.’

  ‘Right. So…out with you, Phil.’

  I found that standing was a little different from sitting down. My head was woozy and my legs distinctly wobbly. I insisted on doing it myself, tottering to and fro in that uneven farmyard until some of the control came back. Then we got in Oliver’s car, me and Nel in the back.

  ‘Don’t forget,’ I remember saying. ‘Don’t turn in through that gateway.’ Then I put my head on Nel’s shoulder, and slept.

  It was one-thirty when I got to bed, they told me later. So I got in twelve of those twenty-four hours, waking fuzzily at around two in the afternoon to find myself in my pyjamas — which aren’t very different from my joggers — and wondering dreamily who’d undressed me, while I waited for breakfast to be sent up.

  At that time it should’ve been lunch, but all the same they brought me ham and eggs and toast and marmalade, and heavens how splendid it tasted! I absorbed three cups of tea, had a shower, dressed, and was feeling ready for anything afterwards. Until the realization hit me.

  Graham was dead.

  I’d seen him dead, and there could be no mistake that it’d been him. Just his hands. I knew his hands. But I had felt him to be alive, from the time they’d told me he’d died in that car. That feeling, now I came to consider it, had not been with me more recently. I’d had to reach for it, instead of letting it come to me. If I could recall just when that change had come about, I would be able to say exactly when he had died.

  There
was a tap on the door and Nel put his head in. ‘You decent, kiddo?’ As usual, he left the door open behind him.

  ‘Who undressed me, Nel?’

  He shrugged raising his eyes.

  ‘Then it can’t matter if I’m decent or not,’ I pointed out.

  ‘I averted my eyes,’ he assured me primly.

  ‘Of course you did. Not worth a second’s glance, that’s me.’

  ‘And you helped.’

  ‘Did I? How very good of me.’

  ‘Now Phillie…’ Then he beamed. ‘You’re feeling better! That’s real swell. Listen, I can book reservations from Heathrow —’

  ‘No, you can not,’ I said sharply. ‘Quite apart from the fact that the police wouldn’t let me leave, you’re not budging me from here until I know the truth. Now…you might get the okay to leave. Try it, why don’t you. And…’

  ‘You think I’d leave you to handle this on your own?’

  ‘You didn’t help me much last night.’

  He looked hurt. ‘Aw…come on. ‘

  ‘Sorry Nel. Just remembering, though, gives me the screamers.’

  He smacked his palms together as though the memories were fluttering past and he’d swatted them. Good humour returned. His whole frame vibrated with it. ‘We’ll have no more of that. Forget…everything. Wipe it outa ya mind. That’s what poppa advises.’

  Out of my mind? When it was lurking there in the shadows, just waiting to swamp all over me?

  ‘Have you had lunch?’ I asked.

  ‘How can I eat?’

  ‘For pity’s sake! Get down there before it’s too late, and you’ll see…it’ll all come back to you.’

  So, grimacing and flapping about, he got his ungainly frame out of the door, and left me with my thoughts.

  Which, frankly, were blank. I just couldn’t concentrate. Every time I set my mind to it, all I got was that. But it’s no good going on about it. I knew I’d have the damned police wagging it around in front of me soon enough, without undermining myself before they even started.