by Neil White
A tear left Claude’s eye and tracked through the mud to rest on his beard.
‘Tell me this,’ Joe said. ‘Why couldn’t you resist? You could have kept on running. Why wait until money came into the picture?’
Claude looked at Joe, and then across to me. He wiped his eye and his shoulders slumped. ‘I am sick of running,’ he said quietly, and then tugged at his coat, threadbare around the elbows. ‘Sick of living like this. We can all have regrets.’
‘You’ve got self-pity, Claude,’ Joe said. ‘There is a difference. If you had regrets, you would say you were sorry.’
‘How did you know I was alive?’ Claude said.
‘We didn’t,’ Joe said. ‘It was a bluff. And you bought it.’
‘So where is Laura?’ I said.
Claude looked at me for a few seconds, and then looked down. ‘I said it before, that silence should be observed when under interrogation.’
‘Claude! Tell me. Save another life.’
Claude sighed. ‘Too late,’ he said, and took a swig from his whisky bottle.
I stepped forward and gripped his collar. ‘What do you mean, too late?’
Claude didn’t respond.
‘Tell me!’
Claude shook his head and then held out his hands. ‘Cuff me.’
I looked at Joe. I could taste bile, my stomach churning as my mind filled with images of Laura, of where she might be.
‘Claude, please, tell me where Laura is,’ I pleaded.
Claude lowered his hands, and then he smiled. ‘Maybe there is time for one more turn of the cards,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’ Joe said.
‘I go to my car. You give me your radios, your car keys, and your phone,’ and he pointed at Joe. ‘You let me drive away. I might even go in your car. I’ll call Jack and tell him where he can find Laura and Susie.’ He waved his phone. ‘But I ring just the once. If the phone is engaged because you’re calling your station, you’ll miss the call.’
‘That’s ridiculous,’ Joe said. ‘We can’t just let you go again.’
‘Then it’s your gamble that you’ll find them in time,’ Claude said.
‘What do you mean in time?’ I asked.
‘Like it sounds,’ Claude replied. ‘Think about a life,’ he said to Joe, ‘not the feather in your cap.’
‘It’s not about my ego,’ Joe said.
‘So let me go.’
Joe looked at me, and I looked back at Claude. Joe held out his phone to Claude.
‘You will ring us?’ Joe said.
‘My word is my bond,’ Claude said, and reached out with his hand to take the phone from Joe, but then Joe grabbed his wrist and threw him to the floor. He dragged him out of the shelter and pulled him towards the river.
‘Deal’s off,’ Joe said.
‘Joe!’ I shouted. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Sit there,’ Joe said to Claude, and then he turned back to me. ‘Dig.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Where Claude was sitting,’ Joe said. ‘The soil was too soft after days of sunshine. And his hands when he reached out for my phone were black with dirt, ingrained into the skin.’ Joe turned back towards Claude. ‘If he wanted to run, he’d have done so before we came here. He hasn’t run because he doesn’t know where to go. This was his old courting stop, this fishing shelter.’
Claude hung his head.
I went to my knees and began to scrabble at the soil. It was loose in my hands. There were tears streaming down my face, my lips in a grimace. ‘Don’t be in there, Laura,’ I said, and then I thrust my hands deeper into the dirt, throwing it back like a dog digging out a bone.
The shivering had stopped, but that didn’t register. The water had got higher, so that there were only a few inches between the water and the metal. Laura’s head was as far up as it would go, sucking at the little air that was left, the water cold, making her skin shrink tight against her skull. The rusty metal was rough against her nose. She couldn’t feel her hands any more.
She flung her hands towards Susie, for a hand to hold, but she couldn’t even feel her own hands any more. Laura pushed at Susie, but she was just a heavy bundle of wet clothes.
Laura couldn’t cry. This was it. The end. Bobby left behind.
For a moment, she forgot where she was. She was floating upwards, away from the water, dry and warm, a dream of summer, soft licks of sunshine. But, when she relaxed, she was woken up with a cough as the dirty water seeped over her lips and into her throat.
She thrust her head upwards but it was met by metal, and she coughed some more, but this time she couldn’t spit out the water. And more came in, a gritty silt creeping over her lips and tickling her nostrils. She tried to inhale but it made her choke as she took in more water. Her chest was starting to hurt as she strained for a breath, as her body coughed and racked, but she couldn’t find the air—every deep breath just sucked in more water.
Her hands pushed against the metal, but it was futile. She tried to say goodbye. To her mother. Her father. To Bobby and to Jack. It wasn’t meant to end like this. She still had living to do, but it had been stolen from her.
Laura sank back into the water, knew that the space had filled. There was nothing else to fight. She had lost. The game had ended. She smiled, let the water roar in. Her chest bucked towards the metal. This was it. She saw the light. It was above her. A growing light that spread across the water.
My hands were black with mud and I was on my knees, scraping it back, throwing it out of the hole. I was two feet down, wet, dirty. I looked back at Claude. He was watching us dig, and I thought I detected a slight smile, as if he was waiting for us to realise we were in the wrong place.
Joe was next to me, digging too, his clothes filthy.
‘She’s not here,’ I cried out, as I clawed at the ground desperately.
‘Keep going,’ Joe yelled.
So I did, my hands starting to bleed, driving through the soil, water seeping through my fingers.
Then my hands hit something hard. I looked at Joe, who had seen how my fingers had jarred, and he moved nearer to me. He burrowed quickly, uncovering a patch of metal, brown and old.
‘Under here,’ he said.
I closed my eyes for a moment. I hoped not. Water covered the surface and, even as Joe swept his hand over it, moving more soil, water quickly submerged it again.
‘Jack, dig!’ he shouted.
I started again, working across now, getting all the dirt from the metal, desperately hurling wet soil over my shoulder.
It took us a few minutes to expose it, a wide piece of iron, riveted down the middle, covered in water that bubbled around the edges.
‘Lift it,’ Joe said, and I threw myself to the floor, my fingers clawing at the edge of the metal. It was heavy and it was hard to get in a good position to lift it. We had to get out of the hole and lie on our stomachs, our fingers wedged under the edges. I could feel the water inside, freezing cold against my fingers. Joe counted down so that we could lift together.
It took a few seconds for it to budge, but then we managed it, both us roaring with effort as we strained, the metal sheet moving slowly upwards.
I saw her toes first, bobbing in the water as we disturbed the surface. I slid forward through a small gap to get in the hole, scrambling over the mud piled up at the side, the metal sheet above me, Joe holding it in place. My face hit the water and I almost gasped with the cold, but I wasn’t going to stop.
There wasn’t much room to move in there, but I found the ground and kept on pushing forward until I was squeezed in between Susie and Laura. I could hear Joe straining to hold on to the metal sheet, but I had found some inner strength, was determined to move it.
I scrambled to my knees and tried to take the weight of the metal sheet with my hands, my head out of the water now, and I shouted with exertion as I pushed upwards. My feet slipped on the floor but I wasn’t going to stop, and I heaved the metal higher until it w
as upright, jammed into the mud. I was in water up to my knees and I could feel Laura and Susie banging against my shins, both of them lifeless.
I pushed at the metal. It stayed vertical for a few seconds, wedged into the ground, and then it started to topple, moving slowly backwards towards the wall behind, landing with a loud bang that echoed around the stone walls.
I looked down and saw Laura’s face in the water next to Susie’s. Laura was bobbing, her wrists bound.
I reached down, grabbed at the rope between her wrists and pulled hard.
Laura’s arms came up, but she was heavy, and so I had to get my head under her wrists so that I could use my shoulders. I looked down and saw that her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly open. I started to lift her, straining, shouting, until her head emerged from the water, her hair hanging down, her skin shiny and wet, but she was a dead weight, her clothes sodden, her skin cold. I reached down and wedged my arms under hers. It felt like our last embrace, her hands behind my neck, my face next to hers as I pulled her up, her cheeks icy. I was screaming her name, terrified, and then her body cleared the water and she was in my arms.
I turned her around and put her against the mud, face down, and I held her, to say goodbye, hot, angry tears streaming down my face, through the mud and the cold water.
Then Joe grabbed Laura and pulled her away from me, so that she slithered away from the hole and onto the mud outside the shelter.
I went to her, to make sure I was with her to the end, while Joe slid into the hole to pull at Susie.
I held Laura in my arms, tears streaming down my face, my mind filled with what this would do to Bobby. I saw that Joe had pulled Susie out, and he was looking at her head, laying her down. I saw the deep gash on her temple, and how rigid and pale she looked.
But Laura wasn’t like that. She was flaccid and cold, her lips blue, her skin pale.
Claude stood up and began to step backwards, away from the scene.
‘Stay there!’ Joe shouted.
‘Ignore him,’ I pleaded to Joe. ‘Help me, with Laura.’
Joe looked at me, and then down at Laura.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I said. I felt powerless, Laura limp in my arms.
Claude moved further away, out of the shadow of the stone shelter now and heading along the river bank.
‘Claude, stay there,’ Joe said again.
‘Leave him!’ I shouted. ‘Save Laura. He’s not important.’
Joe faltered, wanting to go after Claude, but then he looked at Laura and he scrambled over to me. He pushed Laura onto her front and began to push hard on her back. Water spewed out of her mouth.
Claude walked away quickly. Joe threw Laura onto her back, and then pinched her nostrils as he tilted her head backwards before blowing two quick breaths into her. The kiss of life.
Laura’s feet looked wrinkled and blue from the water and I held her hand as Claude scuttled along the shingle by the river, heading for his car. Laura remained lifeless, but I was jolted by Joe as he put his hand onto her chest and pressed hard, like rapid pumps. Then he went to blow more air into her mouth…but it felt more pointless with each passing second. We didn’t know how long Laura had been submerged. I thought of Bobby again, blissfully happy at school, not knowing what was happening to his mother, or how his life would change when he came home. And what about me? What would I do now? I had lost too many people close to me. I didn’t think I could take another loss.
I raised my eyes to the sky, let the raindrops hit me like pinpricks, the clouds a blanket of grey as I looked up.
I heard Claude’s Mini turn over and then grumble into life. Joe shot me a glance as it was put into gear and reversed back onto the road.
Then I heard something else. A cough, like a rattle in Laura’s chest. Joe heard it too, because he looked at me, his eyes wide, and then bent down again, renewing his efforts.
There was another cough, and I saw Laura’s chest take a big heave as she sucked on the air.
I put my hands to my face and felt my tears soak my fingers.
Chapter Seventy-Four
I was looking out of the bedroom window, at the dark hills that surrounded our house. I had my face pressed close to the glass, trying to see past the reflections caused by the bedroom light. It was always on now. Laura couldn’t sleep in the dark, not without bringing nightmares, and I wanted her to take as long as she needed to get things right again.
It had been over a month since I had pulled her out of the hole dug by Claude Gilbert, but I still did this every night, looked out of the window, checking for Claude Gilbert, wondering whether his thirst for revenge would bring a visit. He was out there somewhere, I knew that.
And it wasn’t just Claude, because I had made some powerful enemies. Roach had been suspended from his duties as the police waited for DNA tests to be done in Claude’s Belgravia pad. If any came back that matched Claude’s DNA, then he was looking at a spell in prison for assisting an offender. But people like Roach made friends in the force, and those who didn’t know the full story thought I had wrecked a good man’s career. My car was stopped for a routine check whenever I went out, and so I had started to use Laura’s more and more. I worried about how it would be for Laura though when she went back. She had helped to bring down one of her own.
Alan Lake’s status took a dive as well, no longer the poster boy of the northern art set. He had once been a dangerous man. I wondered whether he might pay me a visit, now that he was looking at another spell in prison for perverting the course of justice—his one-time fall guy happy to come forward to clear his own name—but my guess was that he would just try and sit it out, perhaps hoping that his notoriety might improve his sales once things calmed down.
The press had gone wild though, even with Claude gone. Harry English played his part, adapting my article and syndicating it worldwide, but none of that seemed to matter any more. I hadn’t written a word since Claude had vanished.
It had seemed more like relief at first, that I could spend some precious time with Laura, but then I realised something else: I didn’t want to work. As Laura rested, and I insisted that she did a lot of that, I tried to start my novel again, but whenever I was in front of a keyboard, my fingers froze, unable to make the words jump onto the screen. My last story had ended with Laura spluttering for air on a wet Lancashire river bank as I sobbed into her neck, my northern reserve gone, no longer the tough guy. The paramedics had taken over. Oxygen. Blankets. A breakneck rush through the countryside to get her to hospital, but that was all a blur. I just remembered Laura’s hand in mine, the twitch in her fingers telling me that she was alive, and so I gripped them hard and kissed them, just grateful for the second chance.
Laura told me to go back to work, to give it time, but I knew I didn’t want to write any more. I had no stomach left for the chase, and I wanted to settle for my life.
Laura, of course, wanted to go back to work, to take the sergeant’s exam, but her bosses were strict about it. Stay away. Get better. They didn’t want her to get delayed shock and bear the cost of her disintegration.
But I knew Laura. There would be no disintegration. She was strong, much tougher than me, and she was going to get better for Bobby, so that the mother he had wasn’t just some empty shell, but was the mother he’d always known. Fun. Loving.
I looked back at Laura. Her dark hair was splayed across the pillow, her arm draped over my side of the bed, where I should be, instead of staring out over pitch-black Lancashire hillsides.
I wanted to whisper that I loved her, but I didn’t. I still held back my feelings, but I had resolved to open up more. Anyway, I wanted Laura to sleep. Someone had to, because I didn’t sleep as much as I used to. Most nights were spent like this, watching Laura sleep, her breathing gentle, her face bathed in the yellow glow of the lightbulb.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small red box. I opened it and looked at the ring, one diamond set in platinum. I did that a lot, just looki
ng at the ring, waiting for the right time to ask, but there never seemed to be one. I had almost lost her, and I didn’t want that to happen again.
I turned back to the window, one hand cupped around my face; all I could see were the dark outlines of night, a whole world beyond my little cottage in the hills.
But I knew that somewhere out there was Claude Gilbert, the man who had killed his wife and lied about it as if it had never really mattered. The man who had run away again to leave Mike Dobson to face the court on his own, charged with murder, his confessions to Joe Kinsella cleansing his conscience but ending his life as he knew it.
More importantly, Claude had tried to kill the woman I loved and, for as long as there was still life in my body, I wanted to know where he was, just so that I could hunt him down one more time and give him a taste of the hurt he put me through.
I heard Laura move, and as I looked round, I realised that the ring box was still open. Her eyes were open, and I saw that she was looking at the box. I looked down, and then back at Laura. I didn’t know what to say, feeling caught out, worried that I had spoiled a moment, but then she smiled, and I knew then that everything was going to be all right.
Read on for an exclusive extract from Neil White’s new novel, to be published by AVON in 2011.
Chapter One
Rupert Barker nodded to sleep in the semi-darkness, the light coming from the glow of the coal fire, as orange flickers bounced off the Christmas decorations draped over the tree. His favourite armchair did its work, as always, high-backed leather, and he had drifted in and out of a doze for most of the afternoon.
Then he heard a noise.
He sat up quickly and looked around. The newspaper slid from his knee to the floor. He couldn’t hear anything else, apart from the crackle of the fire. Perhaps it had been in his dream. Then he heard it again.
His eyes shot to the window. It sounded like someone was at the fence that ran along the garden at the back of his house, climbing over maybe, the noise like heavy feet kicking against the wooden panels, the fence the only thing that separated him from the darkness of the church yard.