by David Hodges
Pain, noise and blinding light. Kate groaned and tried to turn away from it all but it was useless. Someone was persistently slapping her face and yelling at her. Then her mouth was forced open and what felt like someone’s fingers were forced down her throat. She gagged on the obstruction, then choked as her stomach reacted violently and voided its contents up out of her mouth in a burning torrent.
‘Wake up!’ a voice boomed. She could smell the acrid stench of vomit and now someone was shaking her violently by the shoulders. More stinging slaps to her face. She partially surfaced from her shadow world, then started to drift back. It was safer, more comfortable there. She didn’t want to leave.
A white blob in front of her – a face? Then the blackness blotting it out. Someone swearing and hoisting her up. Was she lying down or sitting? She couldn’t tell. ‘We’ve no time,’ a voice was telling her. ‘Wake up, you silly cow!’
She felt pressure on her legs as if she were standing up but they were like plasticine and folded almost immediately. More hoisting, rough hands on her hips, visual images flashing before her eyes that lacked any real definition – walls spinning round and round, chairs and a table dancing like live things. Then she was conscious of being draped over something with her head facing downwards – something that moved fast and shook her up and down as it went. Was she being carried? On someone’s shoulder? Where were they going? She just wanted to sleep. . . .
More visual images and she tried to focus on what looked like a rippling carpet beneath her. Further swearing as she vomited again. Then she was spun round, narrowly missing a door frame. The smell of oil and damp concrete, another close shave with a door, then cold air on her face and a dank wet odour she couldn’t identify. Her senses sharpened and she could now smell newly mown grass and glimpse the outline of long legs pounding the ground in the midst of swirling clouds of clinging white vapour. They were outside – in a garden? Running through the mist? But why? And who was carrying her?
Then memory returned and with it the knowledge that she was going to die. He was taking her somewhere to kill her. She had to do something before it was too late. She tensed and tried to throw herself sideways to break the grip of the arm, which she could now feel encircling her waist, and had the satisfaction of making him stumble and almost go over on one knee. But he kept hold and she could hear his breath rasping as if through gritted teeth. ‘Pack it in, you stupid bitch, unless you want to die.’
Something hard and sharp slapped her across the face and she glimpsed the skeletal branches of trees all around them. They were in a wood and she felt his feet crunching on gravel. A path? She raised her head and saw a building looming up through the mist. It looked like a barn of some sort and, as they drew closer, she saw that one of the big double doors was half open. Then they were through into a grey half-light and the smell of rotting straw assailed her nostrils.
Abruptly he stopped and she felt herself being swung around off his shoulder. His hands lingered on her hips as her feet touched the ground. ‘Can you stand?’ he snapped. She tensed and he gave a familiar bitter laugh. ‘Don’t worry, love. I’m not going to rape you.’
He released her and she stood there swaying for a moment before reaching out and grabbing his arm as her legs gave way. Her head was still spinning and she felt weak and disorientated.
‘Lean on me,’ he directed. ‘We’ve got to find somewhere to hide before he realizes where we’ve gone.’
‘It’s Copely, isn’t it?’ she said, her voice still thick and almost incoherent.
‘Well, it isn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury,’ he retorted and suddenly a powerful light blazed into life.
His torch was directed upwards to confirm his identity, giving the thin pale face, with its mop of unruly black hair, an almost waxen appearance.
‘Satisfied?’ he said. ‘Now hurry. He went to get your car and he must be back by now, which means he’ll know you’ve gone.’
Masking his torch in his hand, he led the way past rusted farm machinery to the rear wall of the barn, beneath the overhang of a hayloft, then pushed her in between an old reversible plough and a partially stripped tractor.
‘Et tu, Brute?,’ Kate murmured, turning her head away from him as she brought up more bile and spat into the darkness.
He grunted. ‘Took you long enough to work that one out, didn’t it?’ he admonished.
‘So how did you find out it was Haslar?’
He sighed heavily. ‘I started putting two and two together when I was on the run – had the time, you see – and realized that, with all that had been happening, it could only have been him. But I couldn’t prove it. That’s why I was lurking around the house just now – to see if I could find anything that would directly incriminate him. I thought the mist and the gathering dusk would give me some cover. Lucky for you I did! ’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ she said soberly. ‘But exactly where are we?’
‘Just on the edge of his property. Used to be a farm here at some time, I reckon but this barn looks as though it hasn’t been used for yonks. I found the place after I had scarpered and I hid away here so I could keep an eye on Neville while I decided what to do about him.’
She started to say something but his hand suddenly gripped her arm tightly in warning and she froze. She’d just heard it too – the crunch of feet on gravel. Haslar was coming.
CHAPTER 25
‘Just got here, sir,’ the uniformed sergeant announced, when he met Ansell and Roscoe in the driveway of Haslar’s house. ‘No one seems to want to answer the door and the place is locked up tighter than a duck’s arse.’
Roscoe stared at the blue MX5 sports car parked halfway up the driveway behind a big black Mercedes. ‘And that’s Kate Lewis’s car,’ he commented grimly. ‘Which means she’s got to be around here somewhere.’
Ansell turned back to the uniformed sergeant. ‘So what are you waiting for, Sergeant?’ he rapped. ‘Break the bloody door down!’
The uniformed man nodded and faded into the mist, shouting to his team as he went, leaving Roscoe to launch a savage kick at the tyre of the Mercedes in obvious frustration.
‘That’ll help a lot,’ Ansell snapped sarcastically. ‘Be more useful to check the boot, I think.’
The DI nodded, cottoning on to his meaning straightaway. They were in luck too – the keys were still in the car’s ignition. But the beam of Roscoe’s torch revealed that the boot contained no body, just a sack of what looked like straw and some clothing – and he was about to shut the lid again with a feeling of relief when Ansell stayed his hand.
‘What the devil’s all that?’ he exclaimed and bent down to examine the clothing more closely, impatiently gesturing Roscoe to switch on his torch again.
‘Well, I’ll be buggered!’ the DI exclaimed as his boss produced a floppy hat and a heavy-looking boot.
‘And the other boot and long tattered coat Miss Herbert described look like being there too,’ Ansell said grimly. ‘A little job for forensics to slot into their agenda first thing in the morning, I think.’
Roscoe stared about him in the mist again, his unease palpable. ‘Let’s hope Kate doesn’t end up on their agenda too, Guv,’ he commented grimly.
At that precise moment, Kate Lewis was doing her level best not to end up on anyone’s agenda and she held her breath as the powerful torch probed the barn from the half-open door, focusing on the derelict machinery at the far end before travelling up the wall to the hayloft beneath which Kate and Copely sheltered.
Footsteps squelched through the rotting straw, pausing every few seconds to direct the beam of the torch into every nook and cranny. She felt Copely tense beside her but his hand on her arm squeezed a further warning as the torch grazed the wheels of the tractor they were crouched behind and highlighted the wicked raised blades of the reversible plough before swinging sharply away to home in on a sudden scuffling sound – a rat perhaps – on the far side of the barn.
The footsteps moved away fro
m the tractor, slowly, confidently, unhurried – the torch steady in Haslar’s hand. Kate caught a glimpse of his silhouette within the circle of light in which he moved and shivered. He looked even taller than he had before and, thinking of the people he had already killed so violently, she felt that the chances of Copely and herself being able to overpower him, even two on one, were virtually nil. And it was then that a sudden excruciating cramp in her thigh forced her to move her leg slightly to ease the pain. Already weak from the combined effects of the sedative and the whisky, she lost her balance and in an instant it was all over as she fell against a metal cover that looked to have been removed from the tractor and was now resting against one wheel. The loud ‘clang’ sounded deafening in the confined space and it galvanized Haslar into immediate action. Even as Copely jerked Kate to her feet with the intention of propelling her towards the open door of the barn, Haslar was on to them, cutting off their escape with great loping strides, the torch in his hand pinpointing them as they stumbled through the mounds of rotting straw.
Copely courageously pushed Kate behind him and swung his torch at Haslar’s head but he was completely outclassed. The ex-army man simply sidestepped the blow and tore the thing from his grasp, hurling it into the gloom to one side of him, where it lay, still lit and pointing upwards, with its beam trained on the combatants like the super-trouper on a theatre stage. Then, as Copely shouted desperately to Kate to run, the two figures seemed to fuse into one and Kate heard a choking gasp. It was only when Copely sank slowly into the straw, his hands trailing down Haslar’s chest and abdomen as if trying to find something to hold on to, that she saw the glint of the blade in the other’s hand.
‘No need to pretend any more, is there?’ Haslar sneered, advancing towards her. ‘And I’m as good with a knife as I am with my bare hands, I assure you.’
For a moment Kate found herself unable to move – just as a mouse is temporarily paralyzed by the gaze of a cobra – and she would probably have remained like that too, until Haslar’s knife sliced into her, had not something happened to crash through the ice gripping her brain.
That something was a sudden commotion high up in the roof area of the barn and a ghostly white shape that swooped low over her head, almost parting her hair, then disappeared back into the vault with a single hooting cry. The owl’s intervention was nothing short of providential, providing shock therapy that kicked in instantly and created an adrenalin surge that jerked her out of her trance-like state and sent her staggering back into the gloom.
She fell twice as she retreated to the back of the barn, tripping over the humps of rotting straw and other debris that littered the floor but Haslar made no effort to capitalize on the advantage this gave him – instead following her at the measured deliberate pace of a man who knows only too well that his prospective victim has nowhere to run to anyway.
And the futility of retreat became apparent to Kate within a matter of seconds when she collided with something behind her that brought her to an abrupt, painful halt.
Haslar released a soft chuckle and stopped a few feet away, the beam of his torch blinding her. ‘Oh dear,’ he taunted, ‘the little bird has nowhere left to fly to.’
Kate felt behind her, expecting to touch a wall. Instead, her hand found a series of wooden struts – she had slammed into the loft ladder.
Turning with a panicky gasp, she made a grab for the rung that was just above her head, ironically aided by the beam of Haslar’s torch, and, as her scrabbling foot found the lower rung, she hauled herself up the ladder with a reckless disregard for anything save the need to put distance between herself and the man with the knife.
Haslar seemed to find the whole thing even more amusing and his mocking laugh followed her. ‘What’s that old 1960s song, Kate?’ he called out. ‘You must have heard it.’ He began softly singing, ‘“Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed.” Peter Sarstedt, wasn’t it? Quite appropriate here, don’t you think?’
Shrinking away from the edge of the loft, Kate heard the ladder creak as Haslar put his weight on it and, in spite of her predicament, she found her mind flashing back to what seemed like only yesterday and another barn in which she had hidden from Twister, during her first encounter with the murderous psychopath. Then she had escaped death by the narrowest of margins but her future looked pretty bleak this time.
Her hands scrabbled around in the gloom amongst the straw covering the loft floor, feeling for anything that might be suitable for use as a weapon but she found only sharp stalks that dug into her hands and foul-smelling animal excrement – possibly from rats. Then her gaze jerked upwards as the faint outline of Haslar’s head and shoulders appeared at the top of the ladder.
She retreated further back into the loft on her hands and knees until her back was up against the wall and she could go no further.
‘Ah, now there you are, Kate,’ Haslar said, straightening up with his torch trained on her crouching figure. ‘Bit of a waste of time coming up here, wasn’t it? Nowhere to go and all that. Still, we can amuse ourselves, can’t we?’
She shielded her eyes against the glare of his torch, trying to peer at him from under her cupped hand. ‘What is it?’ she blurted on impulse. ‘An inadequacy thing? You can’t get it up, so you kill instead?’
Even in the gloom she could see him stiffen. ‘It’s got nothing to do with sex, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘This is about gain and revenge, two of the oldest motives for murder—’
‘So you say,’ Kate cut in, ‘but deep down, you know it’s more than that, don’t you? You’re just another psycho, trying to hide from the truth. Erectile dysfunction can be treated, you know.’
He swore and his voice was trembling as he snapped back. ‘I am not a psychopath or sexually inadequate. This was all planned as a business project and, had it not been for Fallow’s blackmail attempt and your own interference, it would have gone off without a hitch.’
Kate sensed that she had touched a nerve and she stayed with it. ‘That’s not what the judge will say when he commits you to a secure unit for an indefinite stay. No insurance pay-out, just needles, electric shock treatment and lots of nice tablets.’
‘I’m not mad, you stupid bitch. I know exactly what I’m doing.’
‘They won’t see it that way. A grown man dressing up as a scarecrow, going around strangling people? Try making that sound normal at Crown Court. Do you fancy Broadmoor or Rampton? Maybe they’ll give you a choice.’
Kate had gone too far. She realized that too late and, as he suddenly lunged at her, she only just managed to throw herself to one side in time. She heard the blade of the knife screech along the breeze blocks that formed the lower part of the loft wall but managed to knock the torch from his grasp before he could recover his balance.
It was only a temporary reprieve, however, and even as she scrambled across the loft towards the ladder on her hands and knees, like a crab racing for the sea, she knew she would never make it. He grabbed her by the hair first, hauling her back and dumping her on the floor at his feet. Then, turning her over, he dropped to his knees, with his legs astride her thighs, and cupped her chin in one powerful hand. She felt the point of the knife in his other hand pressed against her Adam’s apple. God help her, he was going to cut her throat.
As it turned out, he had other intentions. ‘Sexually inadequate, am I?’ he snarled and, bringing the knife downwards, sliced through the front of her blouse. ‘I’ll show you just how sexually inadequate I am!’
‘They’ll be able to trace you through your DNA,’ she gasped as he ripped the blouse off her in pieces.
‘No problem, Sergeant,’ he sneered. ‘They won’t even find you, or that idiot, Copely. This is the Somerset Levels, my dear, with so many convenient bogs in which to dump you both that I’ll be spoilt for choice.’
But Haslar had made a big mistake by allowing himself to be distracted from his original purpose and, with the knife no longer pressing against her throat, Kate was enco
uraged to make one last effort to survive. The fingers of her left hand had already discovered that she was lying only a few inches from the edge of the loft and, taking a deep breath, she found enough strength from somewhere to suddenly slam her hips up into him, at the same time twisting hard to her left. Haslar might have expected her to make a last-ditch attempt to defend herself by going for his nether regions or by trying to claw his face with her nails but he hadn’t bargained for this kind of response. Caught completely off balance, he was thrown right across Kate’s body on to one knee, dropping his knife in the process, and before he could recover, Kate’s own knee had jabbed up into his crotch, sending him further on his way. Then, with arms flailing the air, he pitched head-first over the edge of the loft with a wild cry, which ended with a metallic crash and a bubbling scream of agony.
Grabbing his torch, which was still on, Kate crawled to the edge of the loft and peered over. Haslar had plunged directly on to the raised blades of the reversible plough she and Copely had sheltered behind, impaling himself on them like a barbecue pig stuck on a spit. He was still alive, lying there on his back twitching fitfully and staring up at her with what seemed like an expression of shock and disbelief but as the volume of blood pumping out of his ruptured arteries reduced, Kate turned away from the grisly sight.
Retrieving the remains of her blouse from the floor, she did her best to draw it around herself and waited a few moments for the inevitable. She heard Haslar’s death rattle even from where she was sitting but couldn’t bring herself to descend the ladder to the floor of the barn to check that he was truly gone.
Only when the place was suddenly illuminated by several flashlights and she heard Roscoe’s belligerent voice shouting ‘Kate, are you there?’ did she make her move and leave the loft but she gave the reversible plough a very wide berth and hardly felt the DI draping his own coat over her shoulders as she was led out of the barn into the cold misty night.