‘You saved my life,’ said Mahala. It came out garbled, what with pain and a split lip, but the gratitude was clear.
Elaine had picked up the phone and uttered some crisp orders. Now she said, ‘Mahala, I’ve ordered an ambulance to take you to hospital. You need to be treated immediately. But I’m afraid I’ll have to send a constable with you, if you think you can answer some questions. We need to know all you can tell us about these yobs, as soon as possible. Can you talk a little, do you think?’
‘I will tell you what I know. They meant to kill me. They are bad men, and they are looking for your nephew.’
Elaine turned to Jim and asked sharply, ‘How badly did you injure them? I gather you did injure them, if you broke an oar.’
‘Yes, ma’am. Between the oar and my fists, none of them will be feeling chipper for a few days.’
‘Can they walk?’
‘I reckon – when they wake up.’
‘Right. Tell me where they can be found.’
He did so, and before he had finished there was another tap on the door. The ambulance men were there with a stretcher, accompanied by a uniformed policeman. His skin was very dark, and I thought he was perhaps the Nigerian constable Elaine had told us about.
‘Right then, Richard, I want you to take a report from Mahala about the men who did this to him, but don’t push it. He’s very badly hurt and needs treatment and rest. As soon as you have at least a few details, report back to me. Off you go.’ More phoning, then she turned to Jim. ‘I’d like you to stay for a moment if you will. I need a bit more information about your encounter. And thank you for bringing Mahala to me. What is your name, by the way?’
Introductions over, Jim sat down to tell his story, but there wasn’t a lot to tell. He had been rowing, he’d seen the three men punching someone, had seen it was Mahala, and had run to the rescue. ‘A fair fight is one thing,’ he said, ‘but three against one is quite another. I think Mahala is right. Those lads were trying to kill him. And they had burned him – did you see?’
‘I did. That says to me that they were trying to extract some information from him. Did you hear them ask any questions?’
‘No, mostly they were just swearing at him. He said, though, when we were coming here, that they wanted to make him tell them where your nephew was, and he kept saying he didn’t know, but they didn’t believe him.’
Elaine sagged a bit at that, but she said only, ‘Can you describe them?’
He scratched his head. ‘Can’t say I noticed much about them except what they were doing. They weren’t very big, and they didn’t know how to fight. I didn’t have much trouble with them.’
Elaine almost smiled. ‘I’ll wager you didn’t. Their clothes?’
Jim shrugged. ‘Jeans and tees. What everyone wears.’
She gave it up. ‘All right, if they’re still unconscious and where you left them, we’ll find them easily enough. Jim, I’m most grateful to you. If you’d like a change of clothing before you leave, I’m sure—’
‘Thank you, ma’am, but I’d just get wet again. I left a taxi waiting, so I’d better get home.’
‘Right.’ Elaine pulled a wad of notes out of her handbag. ‘Here, that’s for the taxi. Give the desk sergeant your phone number before you leave.’
‘Well,’ she said when he had left, ‘that’s one missing person accounted for. But if he persisted, while he was being beaten nearly to death, in claiming he didn’t know Tom’s whereabouts, I think it’s safe to assume he doesn’t.’
‘No,’ said Alan. ‘But if goons are looking for him, that means they don’t know where he is, either. Which is a hopeful sign, don’t you think?’
‘I daren’t let myself hope.’
‘Of course you don’t,’ I said. ‘But I’ve had an idea just now, because of what Alan said. If the bad guys don’t know where Tom is, and Mahala doesn’t know, that could mean that he really was taken by those awful people, but somehow managed to escape. I think he was in that stable and buried that trash bag for some reason, and got away. And that means your people could maybe track him from there. I mean, it’s a thought. I know there’s nothing you could call evidence, but—’
‘It’s a thought worth pursuing. I’ll have to draft you into the service.’ Again she picked up the phone and issued orders.
‘Now, as much as I want to go out and look myself, I need to stay here and wait for reports. Mahala may give us some clues. My search teams may find something useful. They also serve who only stand and wait, but my God, it’s hard!’
‘I always used to keep a bottle of brandy in my desk for emergencies,’ said Alan thoughtfully.
She actually smiled. ‘And this is an emergency if ever there was one.’ She opened a drawer. ‘Anyone else?’
We shook our heads. She poured a small tot into her coffee cup and gulped it down. ‘Right. Now, if Andrews comes charging in, he can smell my breath and add tippling to my long list of offences.’
‘And bad luck to him,’ I said. ‘Alan, do we need to stay here in this woman’s way while she tries to organize everything?’
‘We do not. Elaine, you’ll call us the minute you hear anything?’
She nodded. ‘I won’t get embarrassing, but you know … well, there’ll be a better time for thanks.’
We waved and left.
‘Mrs Bradford’s farm?’ Alan asked as we got into the car. It wasn’t really a question. I just nodded.
‘Where else?’
‘If I can find it,’ he said under his breath. I didn’t utter a word as he followed roads that curved and became narrow lanes. We did, indeed, find ourselves once at a dead end, and once nearly in a marsh, but Alan recovered, turned around and began to drive with more confidence.
Meanwhile, we both kept an eye out for any sign of Tom Grenfell. I was irrationally sure that he would be around here somewhere. He’d been in that stable; of that I was positive. All right, laugh at women’s intuition, but now and then it comes through. Tom had been there. He’d been taken away or had somehow managed to escape. Would he have headed for St Stephen’s, or simply tried to stay out of sight until he could find help?
I had no idea what sort of police presence there might be in tiny fenland villages. In the days of Christie and Sayers and the rest, there would have been one constable with a bicycle, living with his family in a house, the front room of which served as the police station. Probably, the bicycle had now been replaced by a car, but I knew for a fact that there were places in the Scottish Hebrides where the police house was still a reality. So if Tom had gone looking for a police station, would he, a product of the twenty-first century, have recognized one if he saw it? He would, I reasoned, have been travelling by night, and the fens on a moonless night were probably as black as the pit. Even if there had been a moon – and I couldn’t remember – moonlight creates deceptive shadows. And the recent hours of rain would have been made life even more miserable for the poor guy.
If I was right. If he was on the run and not lying imprisoned somewhere. Or – I made myself admit it – or dead.
I was so lost in my thoughts that I was extremely startled when Alan brought the car to an abrupt stop. I looked around. There was no house, no farm, no fields in sight. Only the fen, miserably desolate in the rain.
‘What? Why did you stop?’
‘I thought I saw something in the road. I’m just going to have a look.’ He was out of the car before I could ask any questions, and back very quickly. He was holding a bundle of something in his hands, something long and thin and slimy with mud.
‘Eww! Is that a dead snake?’
‘No.’ Alan reached in the side pocket of the door for the rag he always kept there. ‘I’m not an expert on anything to do with the horse world, but I’d say this was once a rein. A very nice one, braided leather. It’s been cut to bits, or rather hacked.’ He wiped off as much mud as he could and showed me the repellent objects.
There were several pieces, varying in length f
rom about three feet to only a few inches.
I looked at Alan. ‘The stable “lad” – what was his name?’
‘Arthur. Art.’
‘He had gone into town to buy some new tack.’
‘And when we first met him, he was working with a bridle. As I say, I’m not an expert, but he could well have been attaching new reins.’
‘And you think this could be the old one.’
Alan nodded. ‘It’s a wild leap of the imagination, but why would someone cut apart a perfectly good rein and then leave it in the road? It’s hard to tell, as badly as it’s been treated, but wouldn’t you say this long bit looks as though it’s been tied in a knot? See how it’s twisted, here … and here.’
‘And look! One end of this one is cut cleanly, but the other end looks as though it’s been sawed through, or even torn. It’s a mess.’
Alan was silent, staring into the rain. At last he spoke, very quietly. ‘I have brought a captive to a stable in a very lonely part of the fens. It is necessary to keep him there until someone can tell me what I am to do with him. I’ve put a plastic bag over his head, but loosely. I don’t want him to suffocate, but he mustn’t see me or the others with me, assuming there are others. I haven’t made very good plans, because this has all happened too fast. I look around for something to use to tie him up and find a lovely long rein. I carry a good sharp knife. I cut the reins into appropriate lengths for hands and feet. Just before my companions and I leave, I take the plastic bag off the victim.’
‘And has he been sedated all this time? How have they kept him under control?’
‘What about that knife? That could be very persuasive.’
I shuddered. ‘And especially since he couldn’t see. He would never know quite where they were, how close the knife was. I’d certainly cooperate if someone threatened me that way.’
‘We’re making this all up, don’t forget.’
‘No, Alan, not quite. I admit we don’t have solid evidence for all of it, but there’s the reins, and the plastic bag with the ampicillin. I wonder why they left that behind.’
‘A sudden noise? Mrs Bradford coming out to take one last look at the horses, perhaps, or even just one of the horses stamping or snorting. You know, I’m getting a picture of these villains as a distinctly amateurish lot. They take Tom there without so much as duct tape to secure him.’
‘You’re starting to believe your story, aren’t you? And so am I. Partly because of the plastic bag. I’m sure Tom hid that so he’d have some kind of proof of his story, when he got to where he was able to tell someone. And I can finish your story for you, too – or almost.’ I settled into a storytelling mood.
‘The bad guys have just left. They took that awful bag off, thank God. I was afraid they were going to use it to kill me, and it was awful not to be able to see. I still can’t see much. It’s so dark that for a while I wonder if I’m in a cave. But there’s the smell of horses, which is reassuring. I was in the country when they caught up with me. I must still be in the country. Maybe – I can smell hay, too – maybe in a stable.
‘They’ve tied me up, but not very expertly.’ Here I dropped back into my normal voice. ‘I don’t know how he got loose. There must have been something rough that he could rub against. Anyway, he managed to get his hands free, and then doing his feet would be easy. Slow, in the dark, but easy. He buries the bag. I wonder if he knew what was in it.’
Alan shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Does it matter, at this point?’
‘Probably not. Anyway, he’s free, and he leaves the stable. I don’t know why he took his bonds with him, though. And when did all this happen?’
‘As to when,’ Alan said, ‘it had to be before they took Mahala. They would have come back and found Tom gone, and then sought out Mahala to make him tell them where Tom was. And the pieces of rein – I don’t have an answer for that. Perhaps he took them so they wouldn’t know how he freed himself.’
‘Would they care? He was gone; that’s all they would notice. Anyway, he did take the bonds. But why did he drop them? It would be a stupid thing to do, telling the villains where he was, or at any rate where he’d been.’
Alan made an impatient gesture. ‘There’s a lot we don’t know. One thing we do know, or think we know, is that Tom was here, right here on this road, not long ago.’
‘Unless we’ve been spinning fairy tales.’
Alan put the car in gear. ‘If we have, we’ll find nothing. But those fairy tales sound reasonable to me, and we have no better ideas. I’m going to find a place by the road to leave the car, and then you and I are going to start searching.’
‘After you phone Elaine to tell her what we’ve found. If we’re going to go for a walk in the rain, in a marsh, I want somebody else sharing the misery.’
TWENTY-EIGHT
I look back, now, on that wretched slog through the fens as one of the most unpleasant hours of a long lifetime. Alan was with me, which was the only thing that made it bearable or even possible. I stumbled countless times when the apparently solid ground under me turned into a mud hole. Once I stepped into something that felt very much like quicksand, and only Alan’s strong arm kept me from absolute panic. We were both wet through in a matter of minutes, and when a cold wind sprang up, our misery was complete.
Elaine was happy to send other searchers to join us, but since Alan couldn’t be very definite about our location, they took their time about getting there, and I was beginning to feel abandoned and, worse, useless.
The last straw was when I caught my foot on some diabolical invisible root. I screamed and went down. Alan managed to keep me from falling on my face, but I landed on some of the bruises that were just beginning to heal, and I hurt a lot.
‘Alan, this is insane. I’m covered in mud, I’m catching cold, and we could do this for hours and never—’
‘Hush!’ He held up a commanding hand. ‘I thought – yes, there it is again.’ Dropping my hand, he strode off, leaving me dripping wet and furious.
Then I heard it, too, and, forgetting my distress, I set off after him.
Two days later, quite a little crowd of us were assembled in front of Elaine’s fire. Tom, newly released from the hospital where he had been treated for exposure and various minor injuries, was the star of the show. He, Alan, Mahala, Jim Ashby, Elaine and I sat drinking various warming and soothing beverages, and exchanging stories. Elaine had invited the Everidges, father and daughter, and Terence, but they’d begged off, having other obligations, and asked to be told the whole story later.
‘We might never have found him if it hadn’t been for Dorothy’s fall,’ said Alan. ‘Yes, thank you.’ He held out his glass for another tot of whisky. ‘She screamed, and then shouted, and Tom heard it and thought he knew that voice. He was well hidden in his little burrow, and not about to come out until he was sure he wouldn’t run into the villains.’
I sneezed. ‘It’s somewhat humiliating to be identified by a scream, but I’m really happy it turned out as it did.’
‘Me, too,’ Tom croaked. His cold had settled in his throat. ‘I was pretty cold and hungry by that time, but too scared to show myself.’
‘Fill us in on the details,’ I requested. ‘I think we’ve figured out the broad outline, but we’re probably wrong about a lot of the little stuff.’
‘It started – what’s today?’
‘Friday.’
‘And, Aunt Elaine, when did I meet you and Dr Everidge in the lab?’
‘Sunday afternoon.’
‘Only five days ago! Feels like forever. Right. I met you. I went up to my lab to get my notes about the prank. While I was there, I happened to look out of my window, and I saw Mahala leaving the building with a bin liner stuffed full of something. I thought that was a bit off, so I decided to see where he was going.’
‘And it never occurred to you,’ said Elaine, ‘to phone and tell us you were leaving the building.’
‘I am sorry about that, truly! But I n
ever meant to be gone for more than a few minutes. If Mahala was taking the bag to a rubbish bin somewhere, that was OK, if a little odd. I didn’t think he’d go far with it; it looked heavy.’
‘This is all my fault,’ mourned Mahala. He shifted in his chair, and I could see that not all his discomfort was caused by his recent injuries. ‘I began by stealing small things, things for my people. But then they saw what I was doing, and said they would tell the police if I did not steal things for them.’
‘Things like drugs?’ asked Alan at the same time as I asked, ‘Who are “they”, Mahala?’
He answered both of us at once. ‘I do not know, still I do not know, who they are. Not students, I believe. They are not intelligent, and they are bad people. They wanted me to get morphine and the like for them, but when I told them we had no such drugs at the college, they agreed to take medical drugs.’
I gave Alan an ‘Aha!’ look.
‘We know a fair amount about them now,’ said Elaine. ‘They’re petty crooks, addicts, of course, in the pay and under the control of … of your father, Tom, I’m sorry to say. And, Mahala, you’re to stop beating yourself up. You pinched nothing that mattered, at least to start. Dr Everidge has told us that he’d have given you the Petri dishes and syringes and that lot if he’d known you wanted them for your people. Of course, the ampicillin is another story, but we can sort that out later. It’s not your fault that the sleaze learned what you were doing and decided you could be useful in his nasty little schemes. But I’m still not quite sure how Tom got snared.’
‘Sheer stupidity,’ said Tom. ‘I followed Mahala because I thought he might be up to something shady – sorry, Mahala – but it didn’t even occur to me to watch my back. I saw him hand the bag to someone in a van, and I moved nearer to see better – and that’s the last I remember until I woke up in the back of the van with a frightful headache.’ His hand moved to the back of his head. ‘There’s still a nasty lump there. And my mobile was gone, and so were the driver and his friend. They weren’t very bright lads, you know. They hadn’t tied me up or anything, and one of them had left his mobile on the front seat. I was just reaching for it when I heard them coming back from wherever they’d been, so I lay back and pretended I was still out of business.’
Blood Will Tell Page 24
