by Oliver Tidy
In the interior of the car, lit only by the dim coloured bulbs of the dashboard, Romney’s expression looked a little demonic. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’ His voice betrayed none of the reservation, or anxiety, that Marsh was feeling. If anything he seemed eager and excited at the prospect of some action. Marsh took a deep breath and stepped out of the vehicle following her DI’s lead. Her legs, she noticed, were not as steady as usual.
The absence of the sun’s warmth left a cool chill in the evening air. Apart from the gentle hushing of rubber on tarmac as vehicles hurried by the other side of the boundary wall there was only the noise of their shoes in the gravel and the pumping of Marsh’s blood in her ears as they walked towards the cars.
‘Brian Wilkie?’ called Romney. ‘This is Detective Inspector Romney. Show yourself.’
There was no response. Marsh wished she had a torch or at least something weighty in her grip for its comfort. She was aware of Romney, to her right, crossing over into the darkness. She stayed in the beam of the car’s headlights.
‘Brian?’ he called louder.
His feet crunched around the far side of Wilkie’s vehicle. He was almost at the driver’s door and hidden from her view when she heard the sounds of a brief scuffle, a muffled grunt and something heavy hitting the floor. And then silence. Her imagination and her fear rooted her to the spot.
The radio in Romney’s car crackled and she heard the distinctive, but indecipherable tones of Grimes’ voice drift over the airwaves. She thought about calling to Romney, about going to him, but she instinctively knew that the first would have been pointless and would have betrayed her fear and the second would have been foolish. She turned back to the car and the communication system. Raise the alarm, she thought. Mobilise the troops.
She hadn’t gone two paces before there was an explosion of movement behind her, a scrabbling of footwear on the loose surface of the car park. She turned to make out a fleeting human form burst out of the darkness and before she had her hands up to protect herself she was knocked off her feet, the wind crushed out of her, as the man slammed himself into her. She lay beneath him struggling simply to get the breath back into her lungs.
He hauled her to her feet roughly by her hair and worked one arm up behind her back in the classic police officer’s restraining and incapacitating manoeuvre. Although he hadn’t uttered a sound Marsh knew her assailant was Wilkie.
He jabbed her hard in the kidney and she heard herself cry out in agony. He slammed her against Romney’s car and while she fought the pain and for breath he reached in to extinguish the lights. They were plunged into a rare darkness. He yanked her back upright and Marsh found the strength to kick out behind her with her heels at his shins. She missed, only catching something of his trouser leg. He almost lifted her off her feet with her bent arm, nearly dislocating her shoulder in the process. She screamed. His meaning was clear – don’t do that again.
On her toes she was frog-marched at pace across the gravel, past the two standing shapes of the vehicles and then she was treading on grass and the silence returned, broken only by her harsh breathing and her occasional yelp of agony. She had no air for pleading with him.
Through her tears and as her eyes adjusted to the overwhelming gloom, she began to make out discernable shapes ahead of her. Mostly they were only trees and the odd litter bin. Then the darker expanse of the small lake was clear to her. As they skirted this, their disturbance of the wildfowl that it was home to was protested by calls and squawks and quiet splashing as some of them sought the safety of the open water. She recovered something of her senses to know from a previous visit here that they were heading in the direction of the ruined abbey. She could do nothing about it and was terrified.
Marsh heard the constant little roar of the small waterfall where Dover’s only natural watercourse, the River Dour, that flowed freely through the parkland and fed the lakes, cascaded over rough and treacherous brickwork to plunge ten feet into a deep swirling pool beneath before flowing out under the road and on towards the sea. She picked out the silhouette of the ruined structure and the spindly trees that surrounded it. And she feared about his reason for taking her in that direction.
She found the strength to finally speak to him. ‘I’m a police officer. Let me go.’ Her voice was hoarse and dry and rasped in her windpipe. She was answered by a twist of her arm and another little moan of her own pain. The pace didn’t slacken. She had no strength, opportunity or purchase to alter or interfere with their progress. She was focussed entirely on alleviating the pain in her shoulder.
There was light undergrowth to push through. Young branches pulled at her clothing and scratched her face. She was conscious he was using her as a shield to barge his way through it. The noise of the falling water had increased to make normal conversation difficult, even if there had been normal conversation to make.
She stumbled and her shoulder was wrenched out of its socket. She felt the white-hot-blinding-agony of the dislocation and instinctively opened her mouth to scream only to have her cry muffled when he covered the orifice with his hand. One of his fingers strayed into her mouth and she bit down with everything she had. His warm metallic-tasting blood flowed across her tongue and made her gag. He cried out himself and she had her confirmation that her attacker was Wilkie.
He threw her to the floor and kicked her three times. She felt none of the blows, so intense and numbing was the pain from her shoulder.
‘You bitch! You fucking stupid bitch! You think you’re better than me? You think you can just replace me and I’m going to take that from you, you fucking whore bitch?’ He lashed out at her again with his boot. It glanced off her head. He got down on his knees, put his face up so close she could smell his last meal and his fear. He shouted, ‘You stupid fucking bitch!’ Marsh understood, even in the darkness and through her pain that Wilkie was as frightened and panicked as he was angry with a score to settle. She lay still and quiet believing that to say anything would incite further violence.
He stood and she heard him stumbling around in the undergrowth. She understood that either he didn’t know what to do, or that he was struggling with the only thing they both knew he could do to give himself a chance of remaining a free man. She rolled herself over to try to see him and the agony in her shoulder made her eyes bleed fresh tears. She realised then that she was in fear for her life and completely unable to defend herself.
He came back. He hauled her to her feet. She heard herself scream out of pain and terror. He punched her in the face and she felt the warmth of her own blood run out of her nose to mix with his in her mouth.
By her hair, he dragged her reluctant form towards the constant gentle roar of the River Dour. It fell over the tumbled and collapsed brickwork to eddy and swirl and pound anything that fell into the orbit of the force of its draw. And she knew with a chilling clarity what he intended to do with her. If the fall onto the rocks lying submerged and protruding from the brackish water didn’t knock her unconscious, or kill her, then she would soon succumb to the water’s influence, its cold and its clawing power, and drown helplessly with her one good arm as useless as her damaged one.
She saw it all then. Her detective’s mind showed her the future – a future she would not be part of. She saw how Wilkie would get away with it. How he could claim he’d been knocked cold by the ‘conspirators’ just before the police turned up. How it could be argued that Wilkie was already innocently unconscious before ‘they’ had also clobbered Romney. How ‘they’ had robbed Wilkie of the money. How it could be believed that while Romney had suffered the same fate as poor Wilkie – the brave private security officer who had volunteered to risk himself to deal with the ‘villains’ – Marsh had pursued ‘them’, foolishly, unwisely and without back up or hope across the open ground of Russell Gardens. How she had, perhaps, caught up with ‘them’ and tackled ‘them’ at the waterfall and either fallen, or been thrown into the water where she had dislocated he
r shoulder, struck her head and drowned.
The ‘thieves’ would never be found because there were no ‘thieves’. It was all Wilkie. Wilkie was there only to carry out his charade of an exchange. He was intending to swap the film for the cash and return to the castle having discharged his responsibilities and become a few thousand pounds better off. The police had turned up to ruin his party and his easy money. All he’d have to do when he’d got rid of her would be to hurry back to his vehicle and fake an injury and ignorance.
If he didn’t kill her, he’d be looking at serious gaol time and as an ex-cop that would be no picnic for him. Wilkie was going to take his chance with the evidence, such as it would be, and the authority’s burden of proof regarding any theories of his guilt that they might have.
As an experienced officer, Wilkie would know that crime could pay if one was smart enough, brazen enough, and hard enough. He was going to live to fight another day by getting rid of her, the only witness. He was going to settle a score. And the waterfall and hours of immersion in the cold waters of the Dour would doubtless eradicate all forensic traces of him from her person, including his blood.
‘You’ve brought this on yourself,’ he said, as though he was reading her thoughts. His voice was a low growl in her ear. ‘And don’t think that I’m not going to enjoy it. It’s your Karma, you bitch. You fucked up my life, now I’m going to fuck up yours. What goes around comes around, bitch.’
She had no energy or, it seemed, physical capacity for a reply. Her terror had robbed her of the power of speech. Not that any speech, or any reasoning could have stopped him now. He had no choice. There was no alternative for him. She understood that as clearly as she understood anything. All she could do now was embrace her fate and try to survive it, the fall, the water and its hidden dangers.
He forced her to the edge of the drop. Below was utter darkness. She could smell the fresh cooler scent of the air and the water as it frothed and spewed noisily under her.
He leant close once more and above the clamouring rush of the river’s activity said into her ear, ‘Bye-bye, bitch.’
She braced every muscle in her body and prepared to shield her face with her good arm for whatever good it would do her.
And then to her astonishment, she felt herself being yanked backwards, not pushed over. She was released from his iron grip to fall into the soft long grass. As her senses made order of this sudden and inexplicable change in her fortunes, she became aware of a struggle off to her right. Animal grunting and groaning accompanied the obvious exertions of male forms wrestling, battling for dominance. It lasted only a matter of seconds. She heard Wilkie cry out in pain then a deep resonant unfamiliar roar borne of an obvious rage and physical effort that seemed to momentarily stun and hush even the cascading waters. There was the muted, but unmistakeable, sound of a large mass hitting the water below. And then nothing but nature going about its business. Returning to normal. The fuss was over. Water obeyed gravity and headed for the sea.
As she lay just breathing and staring up at the wonder of the night sky through the almost bare branches of the saplings that surrounded her, a large dark bulk loomed out of the night at the periphery of her vision. She turned her head without the first idea of whether she should be afraid all over again.
‘Oh, Sarge. Shit. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I was so long.’ He was down on a knee beside her and breathing heavily.
She couldn’t make out the big fat features that made up the face from where one of the most welcome sounds she’d ever heard emanated from, but recognised with joy and complete relief the dulcet tones of Detective Constable Grimes. ‘Don’t be sorry you big lump. You just saved my life. Where is he?’ And she realised she was crying again. Big heavy tears of relief and gratitude rolled down her face into her ears and her hair.
‘Gone for swim. He’ll keep. Are you hurt?’
‘My shoulder is dislocated and I think that he’s broken my nose. He might have kicked a couple of ribs in.’
With a gentleness that was as intense and remarkable as the violence she’d suffered at the hands of Wilkie, Marsh felt herself scooped up off the damp grass and carried, effortlessly it seemed, as though she were a small child, back across the open grounds of Russell Gardens in the big comfortable and comforting arms of Grimes.
How he managed to support her weight without faltering and navigate his way back to the car park in the almost pitch darkness without rest or complaint would be something that would stay with Marsh for the rest of her life. It was not a short distance. She was not weightless. He was not a fit man and he’d just expended a lot of energy. For their own and separate reasons, neither of them spoke for the duration.
Romney had managed to get himself upright and back to his vehicle and the police radio where he slumped nursing a sore head by the time Grimes’ feet began to crunch across the gravel surface.
In the distance and over the increasingly heavy and laboured rasping of Grimes’ breathing the unmistakeable wail of the sirens of the emergency services drifted across the ether and the town to them. It was music to Marsh’s ears.
***
20
The last time they had been in hospital together it had been Romney who had been lying prostrate and sedated in a hospital bed. This time it was he who sat at Marsh’s bedside eating his way through her grapes.
‘How did you know, sir?’
‘It was something Grimes said about the Taggart programme. I can’t say why exactly, but it occurred to me then that perhaps all was not as it seemed. Wilkie had been hurt by the theft of the film personally and professionally. I can imagine he would have set the wheels of his own enquiry into motion to find out who was behind it. With his contacts and experience it’s quite possible he could have found out about the Animal Rights Enforcers and where they were holed up. He wasn’t a bad detective, despite his failings as a person and as a police officer. And then it wasn’t a huge leap of the imagination to think that just maybe he decided to profit financially from his re-acquisition of the films. He must have understood because of his close proximity to the film set how valuable they were to Crayfish. And you saw the way Crayfish belittled him in front of us. Maybe there was something personal in it too. In any case, it was just a private theory. And when he didn’t even bother driving around from place to place to give the impression of receiving instructions it smelt even worse. His supreme confidence and arrogance in his own ability was his undoing as usual.’
‘Well, sir, with respect you can think what you like. As far as I’m concerned his undoing was my hero.’ She smiled across at DC Grimes who had surprised everyone by remaining unusually reticent over his dash to the rescue and saving of a fellow officer’s life. Even now, with just the three of them present, he seemed strangely reluctant to milk his position.
Perhaps the fact that Grimes would have to suffer an IPCC investigation into the death of former police Sergeant Brian Wilkie was playing on his mind. Wilkie had been found later the next day down river, drowned with head injuries believed to have been sustained in his fall from the Abbey’s ruined brickwork.
Grimes had been assured by Superintendent Falkner himself that despite the unusual statistic that Dover police had been responsible for a second death of a member of the public – as Wilkie had been – in a year he would have nothing to worry about given the circumstances and his colleagues’ witness evidence. Perhaps, it was this assurance from the station commander that paradoxically gave rise to any feelings of anxiety Grimes might be experiencing over the enquiry to come.
‘What I didn’t expect from him, if I’m honest,’ went on Romney, ignoring Marsh’s comment, ‘was armed resistance.’ Romney’s own role in the night’s events – and head injury – had been not so much overshadowed as totally eclipsed by both Marsh’s injuries and Grimes’ heroics. The DI had an air about him that he was feeling a little miffed, if not resentful, at the lack of attention he had received and, conversely, the amount that his colleagues had. Even Su
perintendent Falkner had visited Marsh. He hadn’t visited Romney when he had been hospitalised by the young woman suffering with Down’s syndrome who had caused the injuries he still suffered with.
‘So who else was involved?’ said Marsh.
‘On the night, no one it seems. The second car was nothing to do with it. It had been left there overnight by someone who had too much to drink on a picnic. Both the film and the money were in Wilkie’s car. He must have had both in his possession when he left the castle. It would fit with his supremely self-confident personality. He takes the money from Crayfish for the exchange, drives around town for a bit to waste some time, finds a quiet spot where he won’t be disturbed to transfer the film out of the boot of his car into the front and hide the cash in the boot. We think he probably just chose Russell Gardens car park to pull into because it was dark, quiet and isolated. As for the raid on the farmhouse, unless someone comes forward with an attack of conscience and owns up to being in on it with him, I doubt we’ll ever know who else was involved.’
‘And we arrived and spoilt it.’
Romney fixed her with a serious look. ‘Do you really think he would have killed you?’
Marsh took a deep breath. ‘Absolutely. No doubt in my mind, whatsoever. The last words he said to me before he was about to push me off were, “Bye-bye, bitch”. I thought that was it.’ Her eyes filled with tears at the memory and an awkward silence followed before Marsh diffused it saying to Grimes, ‘As soon as they let me out of here we’re going back to the Duke of York and I’m buying you all the beer you can drink and then I’ll pay for your taxi home.’
‘What about me?’ said Romney.
‘OK, sir, you can buy him a few too,’ said Marsh.
‘That’s not what I meant, but I suppose that I ought to.’ He looked at DC Grimes, for the first time in a long time, with something approaching grudging admiration and maybe a hint of affection and then almost spoilt it by saying, ‘But only because he saved me the time and bother of breaking in a new sergeant. When are they discharging you?’