‘He’ll likely come up the M5 to Birmingham and shoot across from there, but let’s play sheep-dog with him, see if we can round him in. He’s not armed as far as we’re aware, but caution is the word.’
‘No worries,’ Thomason said. ‘Are you on your way?’
He checked his watch. ‘Two minutes, I’ll be out the door.’
‘Let me know your RT,’ Thomason said. ‘I’ll keep in touch.’
David dropped the receiver back in its cradle and grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. The rain had begun again and looked like it would only get heavier, but he still expected to be in Oswestry in less than three hours. He’d follow Frankie Catchpole’s most likely route up, skirting around Birmingham on the way, and hoped to have this case wrapped up before the day was done.
Sarah stood by the hotel room window and stared out at the rain-soaked road below, absently looking from one end of the street to the other and back. If she squinted and concentrated hard enough, she could almost see Kevin coming up the street towards her, smiling and waving and running.
She toyed with the curtain, folded her arms, scratched her elbows, picked imaginary lint from her jumper. She felt useless, needed to be doing something, anything. Her mind was ticking over and refused to lull.
When Tessa came out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, drying her short silvering hair, Sarah said, ‘I wish there was something we could do.’
‘The only thing we can do now is go and have a late lunch,’ Tessa said.
‘I’m not hungry.’
‘Neither am I, but it’ll give us something to do, now that we can’t follow David Ellis up to Holyhead.’
DI Ellis hadn’t confiscated their car keys like he had intended. Instead, he made them promise not to follow and told them he’d check in with them when he had any useful information. Sarah dreaded the call that said Frankie had escaped with the boys, that he’d gone around the police road blocks or whatever they were planning and managed to get on a boat to Ireland. Or that he’d gone in completely the opposite direction, heading back towards London like they’d first suspected.
Tessa turned her back and dressed.
‘They will catch him, won’t they?’ Sarah asked.
She heard Tessa sigh forlornly. ‘I hope so,’ she said. ‘If Martin’s come to any harm…’
She left the sentence unfinished, the threat unsaid.
Unspoken, too, was Sarah’s agreement. If Frankie was to hurt so much as a hair on Kevin’s head, she could think of no more fitting punishment than strangling him to death with her own hands.
Chapter Twenty-five
The sun dipped below the horizon by three-thirty in the afternoon and leached all colour from the landscape. Coupled with the gloom of the thick, dark clouds and lashing rain, Frankie had to switch on the car’s interior dome light to study the map.
They had pulled in off Bristol Road just after a spattering of houses and before approaching the M4 motorway, and Frankie now had the map spread out across the steering wheel and dash as he plotted their best route towards Holyhead.
He was loathe to use the major roads, preferring instead to keep a low profile on B-roads, but the motorways would get them to their destination faster. With a bit of luck, they’d avoid any attention on the way and get to Holyhead before long.
In the back seat, Martin continued to cough. Frankie cursed. ‘Give him some more of that cough syrup.’ He refused to look back at the boy. Martin was slumped across the seat, stretching his seatbelt, twisted like a busted rag doll, alternately coughing and wheezing and crying. His face had gone a deathly pale grey and sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip.
Robert seized the medicine bottle from the glove compartment and threw it back to Kevin. To Frankie, he said, ‘What if we head up as far north as we can, like we’re going to Liverpool, then skirt around the coast of Wales?’
Frankie shook his head. ‘It’d take too long. We need to avoid the major cities, but get there as fast as possible. Let’s head towards Birmingham but cut off west before we get there. It’s dark now, anyway, so no one’s going to spot us unless we linger anywhere.’ He looked up. ‘Like here, for example. Everyone belted up?’ He folded the map and handed it to Robert, then pulled back out onto the road. Five hours, tops, he thought. They’d be there no later than nine o’clock and then, somehow, he needed to get them onto a boat. He hadn’t entirely worked that one out yet, but there was always a way. There had to be.
Looking in the rear view mirror at the rain-beaded city they were leaving behind, he realised that once they were out of England there was a possibility he could never return. At least not until everything died down. Maybe then he’d come back and pay Sarah a visit. She’d like that. He wondered, again, how sensible it had been to snatch Kevin off the street the way he did, but he could never give himself over to regret. Once they were in Ireland, settled in some small town or other—father and son, maybe with a dog or two—they’d be all right.
His only problem now was Martin.
Kevin stared out at the dark, wintry afternoon as trees and hedges and the occasional building rushed by. The heavy downpour had started over an hour ago and there seemed to be no end to the single black cloud that covered them. Rainwater gullied at the edges of the road.
Every time he heard Martin cough or rattle phlegm in his throat, he cringed. The sound was harsh and hacking and he looked like he was in so much pain. Since Kevin got in the car after their shopping trip, Martin had sagged towards him, his head almost touching Kevin’s shoulder, and hadn’t moved since, save for the rocking of his cough.
In the front seats, Frankie and Robert were staring ahead at the road. Kevin had come to resent his uncle. How could he sit there and get undermined by his brother without lashing back? How could he allow Frankie to treat him the way he did, let alone accept the fact that kidnapping was against the law? Why would he go along with it?
Kevin felt Martin’s hand nudge his leg and he looked down. Martin laid his hand face up on the seat between them and indicated for Kevin to do the same. When he did, Martin slowly and deliberately drew figures on Kevin’s palm with his index finger.
Kevin couldn’t work out what the first figure was. He questioned Martin with his eyes, urged him to do it again. Martin drew his finger down Kevin’s palm, arced around the top, and stroked out to the right. R, Kevin mouthed. Martin nodded minutely. The second letter was U, followed by N.
Kevin shook his head, no. He couldn’t run away, not without Martin.
Martin drew again, Y-E-S, and again Kevin shook his head. G-E-T, Martin spelled, H-E-L—
Kevin clasped his hand around Martin’s finger before he could draw the letter P. ‘No,’ he whispered, hoping Frankie and Robert wouldn’t hear him over the noise of the car and the sound of the rain drumming on the roof.
Martin nodded his head, and coughed, and nodded some more, and wheezed.
How? Kevin mouthed. Where?
Spelling on Kevin’s palm again, Martin wrote S-I-C-K. H-E-L-P.
Kevin looked away, saw ghosts of dancing rain spirits between the trees. When he looked back, he nodded. He’d get help. He’d escape as soon as he could and he’d find some grown-ups and get help for Martin. He wouldn’t allow Frankie to get to Holyhead or get on a boat. His only option was to run.
But when? Jumping out of a moving car was like suicide. He had visions of rolling out across the road, safely away from Frankie, only to get hit by an oncoming school bus and snap an arm or two, break a neck. And besides, Frankie would just whip the car around and come back for him. Then he’d really have his neck broken.
If they stopped for petrol, that would be better. He could run into the garage and beg for help. He looked out the window again. They had just passed a small collection of buildings on the right. He had another idea.
‘I need to go,’ he said.
‘It’s raining,’ Frankie reply. ‘Hold it in.’
‘But I really need to go,’ Kevin insi
sted. He squirmed in his seat for effect.
Frankie picked up a bottle of Pepsi from the foot well beneath him and propped the bottle between his legs as he unscrewed the cap. He wound his window down slightly, poured the contents out, and threw the bottle behind him to Kevin. ‘Piss in that,’ he said.
Frankie wasn’t going to stop the car. ‘I’ll hold it,’ Kevin said. He looked at Martin who sounded like he was labouring for breath. Martin praised his escape attempt with a smile.
And he coughed.
David Ellis cursed. The incessant swish-beat of the windscreen wipers was giving him a headache, and now the rain looked as though it was fast becoming sleet. Gwen Thomason had radioed twenty minutes ago to confirm extra patrols and several checkpoints on the roads. ‘I hope you’re right about this,’ she had said. ‘These constables don’t take kindly to getting wet.’
‘I’m right,’ David told her. ‘I have to be.’
‘Too right you do,’ Gwen replied. ‘I’m counting on a double Baileys and a chance to beat you at pool when this is over.’
‘It’s a date,’ David said.
‘Oh, what would your wife say?’
‘What she doesn’t know,’ David teased.
Now, he hunched forward over the steering wheel and squinted through the rain. A patrol car was following along behind him and two more were somewhere behind that one. They each had a planned route to follow and shortly they would split into two groups, David and one car staying on the motorway, the other two veering off to take the back roads.
They were coming up into rush hour traffic and David weighed the pros and cons of making use of the hard shoulder. If he put his beacons on he could move up the shoulder with ease, but if Catchpole was ahead of him and saw, he’d likely pull onto a slip road and disappear. David wanted to avoid a good old police chase, especially in this weather when not only his own life would be in danger at such speeds, but there were the lives of two small boys and every other road user in the vicinity to worry about, too. Apprehending the bad guy was never as easy as it should be; he’d been on the force—seven years in CID, four years on the squad before that—long enough to know that if a complication was possible, it was also very probable. There was a fine line between a successful op and a successful op that controlled unnecessary harm.
He was happy with the progress they were making. Rush hour jams were a good cover for a checkpoint. As long as Thomason had told her men not to have their strobe lights on, Catchpole would be practically on top of the stop zone before he knew what was going on.
He and Thomason had discussed the strategy over the radio earlier. They were to set up the checkpoints along certain roads, far enough away from any major junctions or flyovers from which Catchpole could access when spotting the police. They would have a car tucked back out of the way and the plan was to box him in so that he couldn’t flee. A description of the stolen car had been forwarded to Thomason and her crew, as well as that of Catchpole, but the constables were to keep an eye out for any car that left the queue or tried to double back, just in case he’d dumped one vehicle and moved onto another.
Up ahead, a road sign declared six miles to Gloucester and a junction onto the A38. David radioed the cars behind him and gave them their instructions to veer off.
Once again, he cursed the weather.
Sarah and Tessa had returned from a light, late lunch and now sat opposite each other on their hotel beds as Tessa dialled Graeme again. It seemed almost foolish, Sarah thought, the hourly phone calls, especially considering they were now confined to their hotel room with nothing to do other than await a call from DI Ellis—assuming he came up with any useful information for them.
She pushed horrible images from her mind and thought, instead, of Alan—Alan with the hazel eyes, Alan with the kindly face. Was he missing her as much as she was missing him?
Reluctantly, she had to admit her attraction to him, her desire to be held in his strong arms, to feel his lips against her body. It was all too sudden, of course. She knew these feelings were heightened by the strain of their current situation, knew that under normal circumstances she may have admired him but never desired. But now it was too late. Now she was bitten by that attraction bug and was rapidly descending into a fever of romance.
‘Any news?’ Graeme asked when he answered the phone, dispensing with greetings; he knew who would be calling.
Tessa had put the phone on speakerphone again. ‘Nothing new,’ she said. ‘Detective Ellis is on his way to Holyhead. That’s all we know.’
‘You think he’s right? Sarah?’ Graeme said. ‘You think Frankie’s planning on leaving the country?’
Sarah shrugged, looked at Tessa and said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. Maybe.’
‘But out of the country?’ Graeme’s voice sounded shocked, angry and more than a little terrified.
‘It’s certainly possible,’ Sarah said. ‘The way David Ellis told it, Frankie probably thinks he has no other choice. He’ll constantly be chased across the UK, news reports will show his face, there’ll be nowhere for him to hide.’
‘But the all-ports warning,’ Graeme said. ‘Every port and airport in the land will be looking out for him. How does he expect to get passed security when they all know what he looks like?’
‘According to DI Ellis, there’s always a way.’
There was silence from the phone. The rain beat a fierce rhythm against the window of their room.
‘Frankie can’t be that clever,’ Tessa said to both of them. ‘If he was, he wouldn’t have taken the boys in the first place. He’ll never get passed security. If Ellis doesn’t pick him up before he gets to Holyhead—’
‘Assuming that’s where he’s going,’ Graeme interjected.
‘Right,’ Tessa said. ‘But if it is, and Ellis doesn’t get him, the security men at the docks will pull him in before he steps even one foot on a boat.’
Graeme’s sigh was heavy. ‘You’re right. So I guess there’s nothing more any of us can do.’
‘We wait and we pray,’ Tessa said.
Sarah wished she could pray, and she knew that she couldn’t wait. The waiting was slowly killing her.
When conversation turned to the mundane as best it could, Sarah indicated that she would use the bathroom. She locked herself inside, leaving Tessa to a moment with her husband. She put the toilet lid down and sat, studying her fingernails. In the mirror opposite, when she stood again, above the small wash hand basin, she thought that she had aged considerably over the last week. Dark circles hooded her eyes, her cheeks, naked of make-up, were pale and shiny, and her eyes, when she opened them wide, were lacklustre. Her hair, though brushed, still gave the suggestion of windswept gorse.
She raked her fingers through her hair, attempting to straighten the ends, and then resorted to hunting in her toiletry bag for her brush and some hair clips. She also took out her lipstick and foundation. She was getting Kevin back, maybe even tonight, and she wanted to look her best for him. When she cradled him and kissed him, she needed to feel like a mother again.
Chapter Twenty-six
Frankie lay off the accelerator a little. He was going too fast in this torrential rain and risked losing control of the car. The boys in the backseat appeared to be asleep and Frankie hoped they’d stay that way until they got to Holyhead. He also wished Robert would nod off, for he was beginning to be a pain.
‘That’s sleet, that is,’ Robert said. ‘Damn it, turn the heating up a bit.’ He fiddled with the heating control until Frankie pushed his hand away and switched the damn thing off.
A moment passed in silence before Robert said, ‘We’ll have to get something to eat; I’m starving.’ He was like an agitated child, Frankie thought, jumping from topic to topic. ‘Why don’t you let me drive for a while?’
They had hit some traffic a few minutes ago and were proceeding in fits and starts. It wasn’t like proper London rush hour, but in another half hour or so, it could easily get
that way. Frankie wanted to get off the motorway and avoid the crowds. He kept pulling out into the middle lane to overtake other cars when he could, pulling back into the left at every opportunity. He was looking for a road sign, a short cut around the upcoming town.
‘Are you hungry?’ Robert asked. ‘Man, I’m fucking starving.’
‘Don’t swear,’ Frankie said.
‘Fuck off,’ Robert said. ‘You do it all the time.’
‘I’m older.’
Robert sulked for a minute, reached for the radio, glanced at Frankie, and sat back in his seat without switching it on. ‘We still have to figure out what to do,’ he said.
‘What to do about what?’
‘About them.’ Robert indicated the boys with his thumb.
‘I told you what we’re going to do with them,’ Frankie said.
‘Take them to Ireland and ditch the other one? Man, is that wise?’
Frankie looked at his brother. ‘You got a better idea?’
‘I’m just saying.’
‘Well,’ Frankie said, swerving off the motorway at the last minute onto a slip road, ‘stop saying.’ The tyre traction was weak—there was black ice on the road—but he kept the car steady and took the bend at thirty.
Five minutes later, they were on a two-lane road with dense trees and shrubs growing on both sides, the occasional lamppost dropping puddles of murky yellow light that illuminated nothing but the stem of the post. Frankie could tell Robert was itching to say something, but he let the silence grow. Robert fidgeted in his seat, drummed his fingers against his knees, breathed on the window and wiped it with his sleeve.
Finally, he said, ‘We should have called Mum. She’ll be worried sick.’
‘Will you shut up about that woman?’
‘What’s your problem with her?’ Robert asked. ‘Just because she’s getting a bit forgetful doesn’t mean—’
‘She’s going senile,’ Frankie said, his voice raised, ‘not forgetful.’ The road snaked left and Frankie turned with it, only slightly concerned by the patches of ice on the tarmac.
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