She looked around her with mounting irritation. She had just dusted her cappuccino with slimline chocolate powder, the Mail on Sunday and Hello! were waiting on the kitchen table, and Russell Watson was singing on Classic FM.
Really, she thought. I’m not the woman’s keeper; the whole cleaning arrangement had always been strictly cash in hand. If Elsie Hogan had had a dizzy turn down at the bungalows, then she should have rung that fat lump of a daughter of hers. The pub didn’t open till 11:30 and Cherisse would almost certainly be at home, painting her nails or watching TV or doing whatever people did on Sunday mornings in council flats. Unless of course she hadn’t come home, which was equally within the realm of possibility.
In the normal run of things Diane would have been tempted to ring the emergency services and leave the worrying and the problem-solving to them. On this occasion, however, she hesitated. She didn’t want the police turning up at the bungalow and discovering that the girl was a cash-paying customer. She wasn’t quite sure how the police and the tax people and the health and safety people connected up, but she was pretty sure that if they started talking to each other about her it could lead to problems. So she waited and she sipped at her coffee, telling herself that she should sit tight in case Elsie rang back.
After five minutes, during which the phone remained resolutely silent, Diane reluctantly punched out Elsie’s number again. The mobile phone that she had called, an electronic voice informed her, was out of service. She glanced out of the French windows. It was still pouring with rain. From somewhere beyond Dersthorpe, a slender column of smoke was winding into the steel-grey sky.
Staff, Diane mused irritably, wondering where she’d left the keys to the four-wheel drive. One couldn’t survive without them, but my God they could take it out of you.
On the way out she glanced at the kitchen clock. It was 10:30.
T hey let the first car pass. It was a Fiat Uno covered in unpainted patches of filler, and didn’t look as if it had much life left in it. Parking the Astra at the side of the road between Dersthorpe and Marsh Creake—in the same layby, as it happened, in which Brian Mudie and Wendy Clissold had spent twenty happy minutes the night before—had been a calculated risk. If a police car had passed, that would probably have been the end of it.
But no police car came. The Fiat was followed by a Nissan, in equally poor shape, and as it disappeared a silent mushroom of flame-red smoke leapt into the sky beyond Dersthorpe. The Fiesta’s petrol tank, thought Jean, as the fuel-enriched smoke joined the thickening grey coil from the house. The fire service would almost certainly be on their way already—someone would have seen the bungalow go up—but they probably had to come from Fakenham. With a bit of luck it would be a good five minutes or so before the police were on the case, and at least ten before any roadblocks were set up.
Rain streamed down her face, but strangely, Jean wasn’t cold. Desperation, and the real possibility of capture, had taken her beyond fear to something like calm. She was steady now, and could feel the modest, comforting weight of the Malyah in the pocket of her mountain jacket.
A silver car—she didn’t have time to identify it, but it looked newish and sporty—swung into view, and she heard the thump of a powerful bass speaker. She stepped into the road, arms waving and hair flying, forcing the driver to make an emergency stop.
He was in his late twenties, with an earring and a greasy centre-parting. Techno-trance music poured from the car. “Want to get yourself bloody killed?” he shouted angrily, half opening the door. “What’s your problem?”
Wrenching the Malyah from her jeans, she pointed it at his face. “Get out,” she ordered. “Now! Or I’ll shoot you.”
He hesitated, slack-jawed, and dropping her aim for a second she put a 9mm round into the seat between his tracksuited legs. The wind whipped away the sharp percussive crack.
“Out!”
He half fell, half climbed out of the car, bug-eyed with shock, leaving the key in the ignition and the engine and the CD player running.
“Into the passenger seat, now. Move!”
He scrambled unsteadily inside and she reached in and snapped off the music. In the sudden silence, she was aware of the loud beat of the rain on the car roof.
“Seat belt. Hands on your knees.”
He nodded mutely, and she kept him covered as Faraj exited the Astra, loaded the rucksacks into the boot of the silver car, and took his place in the back seat with the map book and the biscuit tin on his lap. He was wearing the Yankees baseball cap beneath the hood of his waterproof jacket, and his face was all but invisible. For perhaps thirty seconds Jean familiarised herself with the gearing and dashboard controls. The car was some sort of Toyota.
“OK,” she said, reversing sharply into the layby and swinging the nose back towards Marsh Creake. “Like I said, you just sit there, understand? Try anything—anything at all—and he’ll shoot you in the head.”
From his pocket Faraj drew the blunt-nosed PSS, reloaded with SP-4 rounds, and slapped back the magazine, which engaged with a businesslike click. The man, very pale, gave the ghost of a nod. Jean let out the clutch. As she drove off, they passed Diane Munday’s metallic-green Cherokee speeding in the opposite direction.
“Navigate for me,” she said to Faraj in Urdu.
T he call was logged at 10:39. It was taken by Wendy Clissold, and Liz saw the police constable’s face freeze at the significance of what she was hearing. Clapping her hand over the mouthpiece she turned and shouted across the village hall. “Guv’nor! House and vehicle alight at Dersthorpe Strand. Unidentified dead female in the vehicle.”
Clissold’s voice steadied as Whitten grabbed the landline phone in front of him. “I’m putting you straight through to Detective Superintendent Whitten, madam,” she continued. “Can you give me your name and number in case we have to call you back?”
Whitten listened intently as Clissold took the details. “Mrs. Munday,” he cut in smoothly. “Tell me.”
Within a couple of minutes an investigative team had been dispatched to Dersthorpe Strand. Forensic officers were making their way from Norwich, and the local fire crew, it turned out, had just left the Burnham Market station. The burning car had been identified as Elsie Hogan’s by a near-hysterical Diane Munday, and Diane had been pretty certain that its occupant was Elsie too.
Liz watched the activity around her, weighing up the ramifications of Diane Munday’s report. There was a chance, she supposed—although instinct told her that it was unlikely—that this was the work of some deranged local arsonist rather than Mansoor and D’Aubigny. But Elsie Hogan, of all people? What had that poor, self-effacing woman ever done to upset anyone?
At 10:45 a call came through from one of the investigative team to say that, while en route to the Strand bungalows, they had discovered a black Vauxhall Astra matching the description of the vehicle sought in connection with the Gunter murder. The Astra was standing at Dead Man’s Hole layby outside Dersthorpe, and an officer had been left to secure it. Despite the rain, its engine was still warm.
Diane Munday, the caller continued, had arrived before the fire had destroyed the safety glass in the Fiesta’s windows, and had reported seeing what looked like bullet holes in the windscreen. No one, on this occasion, was inclined to doubt her.
As Whitten reported the situation to the Chief Constable in Norwich, Liz called Wetherby at his desk. Like her, he had been at work for several hours. Investigations had kept him informed about the identification of Faraj Mansoor and Jean D’Aubigny, and he was receiving regular reports concerning the questioning of the D’Aubigny parents.
Wetherby listened to Liz in silence as she summarised the events on Dersthorpe Strand. “I’m calling a COBRA meeting,” he said quietly when she had finished. “Can I give them any clue as to a probable target for our terrorists?”
“Guesswork at this stage,” replied Liz, “but one of the USAF bases would have to be most probable. Bruno Mackay’s over at Mildenhall now, l
iaising with the station chief.”
“OK, I’ll go with that. Keep me up to speed.”
“I will.”
There was a faint pause. “And Liz?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful, please.”
Smiling faintly, she replaced the phone. When things got rough, as they showed every promise of doing now, Wetherby seemed to be assailed by a curiously old-fashioned chivalry. He would never have told a male officer to be careful—of that she was certain. In anyone else she might have objected to this note of concern, but Wetherby was not anyone else.
She glanced over at Whitten. If a COBRA meeting was being convened, it was almost certainly only a question of time before the case was taken off his hands. The acronym referred to the Cabinet Office Briefing Room in Whitehall. The meeting would probably be chaired by a representative of the Home Office, with liaison officers from the Ministry of Defence, the police, and the SAS in attendance. Geoffrey Fane would be there too, she guessed, poised crane-like over the discussion. If the situation was considered acute enough, the case would then be nudged up to ministerial level.
Liz had sat up for most of the night in the village hall with Whitten, Goss and Mackay, monitoring the incoming information about Jean D’Aubigny, of which there had been quite a volume, and about Faraj Mansoor, of which there had been almost nothing, beyond the information from Pakistan liaison that someone of that name had attended one of the more radical madrassahs in the northern town of Mardan a couple of years earlier. It had been hard going—they were all heavy-eyed with exhaustion by the end—but it had had to be done. Around 5 a.m. Liz had returned to the Trafalgar and tried to sleep. But she’d drunk too much Norfolk Constabulary coffee and her mind was flying. She had lain there, the pub’s pink nylon sheets pulled to her chin, watching a grey and unwilling dawn slowly illuminate the gap between the curtains. In the end she had drifted off, only to be dragged back to consciousness almost immediately by a call from Judith Spratt’s deputy to alert her to an incoming message.
Blearily, Liz had switched on her laptop, and scanned and decoded the report. After several hours of questioning during the night, it seemed, the D’Aubigny parents had decided against giving any further information about their missing daughter. To begin with, under the impression that her involvement with Islamic fundamentalism had placed her in danger, they had been anxious to help. As the realisation had dawned on them that she was less a potential victim of terrorism than a wanted suspect, however, their answers had become more circumspect. Finally, claiming that their human rights were being infringed, and that they were being subjected to psychological torture in the form of sleep-deprivation—tell me about it, thought Liz wryly—they had refused to cooperate any further, and enlisted the services of Julian Ledward, a well-known radical lawyer.
Urgently repeat urgently need D’Aubigny’s connection w E Anglia, if any, Liz typed in return. Job? Holiday? Boyfriend? Schoolfriend? (Was D’Aubigny @ boarding school or UK university?) Tell parents they’re risking daughter’s life by not talking.
She had encrypted and sent the reply, and hoped for the best. After a shower and a silent breakfast with Mackay in the Trafalgar dining room, she had been back in the village hall by 7:30. Mackay, as planned, had driven off to Mildenhall USAF base, armed with a sheaf of printout portraits of Faraj Mansoor and Jean D’Aubigny.
In the village hall, which she couldn’t quite bring herself to call “the incident room,” she had discovered Don Whitten, alone. The brimming ashtray at his elbow suggested that he hadn’t gone home since she had taken her leave at 5 a.m. They had sat and stared together at a big A3 printout of Jean D’Aubigny. Taken four years earlier, it was an interior shot, and showed a surly-looking young woman in a black sweater standing in front of an out-of-focus Christmas tree. Short, unfashionably cut brown hair framed a pale oval face with intense, wide-set eyes.
“I’ve got one that age,” said Whitten.
“What’s she do?” asked Liz.
“Lives at home and gives us a shed-load of grief. Nothing like this, though. Jesus.”
Liz nodded. “It’d be good to get her alive.”
“You think we won’t?”
She met Jean D’Aubigny’s twenty-year-old gaze. “I don’t think she’ll come out with her hands up, put it like that. I think she’ll want to be a martyr.”
Whitten pursed his lips. The steel-grey of his moustache, Liz noticed, was yellowed with nicotine. He looked exhausted.
Now, three hours later, she watched as, with measured grimness, he stuck an arc of pins into a 1:10,000 Ordnance Survey map. Each pin, and there were twelve of them, marked a roadblock. Whitten had calculated that their targets couldn’t have driven more than a dozen miles from Dersthorpe since abandoning their old car and—presumably—commandeering a new one. He had set his traps accordingly.
“I’ve also requested helicopters and a Tactical Firearms Unit,” he told her. “We’re getting them, I’m happy to say—the TFU are going to be on standby within the hour—but we’re getting Deputy Chief Constable Jim Dunstan too. I’ve been bumped to second-in-command.”
“What’s he like?” asked Liz sympathetically.
“Good enough bloke, I suppose,” said Whitten. “Not over-keen on your lot, though, from what I’ve heard.”
“OK, thanks for the warning.” Earlier she had looked at Jean D’Aubigny’s portrait with a certain detached sympathy, sensing the maladjustment in that over-intense gaze. Now she just viewed their quarry as the enemy—two people who were prepared to murder a harmless creature like Elsie Hogan just because, for whatever reason, she had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They had to be stopped. Stopped before they destroyed more lives, and caused more desperate and needless grief.
J ean had been driving for twenty minutes when they saw the roadblock. They were travelling at a careful twenty-five miles an hour along a rutted single-lane track, enclosed by high hedges of bramble and elder. According to the map the lane would soon connect with another, which after various bifurcations would lead them southwards between the villages of Denton and Birdhoe. The route had been planned on the basis that they were still driving the Astra, and as the one on which they were least likely to encounter a police car. Given their changed circumstances, there had been an argument in favour of heading for the fastest road out of the area, and attempting to outrun any roadblock, but on balance, thought Jean, they had probably made the right decision by sticking to the original route. Farm roads were slow, but they were discreet.
Beside her, the young man whose car she was driving had subsided into a silent, sulking torpor. His immediate fear of their weapons had subsided, to be replaced by a dull fury at his helplessness and at the liberties taken with his precious Toyota.
Jean saw the blue light at the same moment that he did. They were passing a gap in the hedge, a gap through which the junction with the Birdhoe road, half a mile ahead, was momentarily visible. The blue light had flickered just once—a mistake, Jean guessed. Praise be to God, she thought, for the flatness of this countryside, and then the fear kicked in, hard and painful.
“Police,” the greasy-haired young man murmured fearfully. It was the first word that he had spoken.
“Shut up!” Jean ordered him tersely. Her heart was pounding. Had they been seen? There was a good chance that they hadn’t, given the distance and the height of the hedges.
“Reverse,” ordered Faraj.
Jean hesitated. To drive back past the gap would give the waiting police a second chance to see them.
“Reverse,” repeated Faraj angrily.
She came to a decision. A short way in front of them, to their right, was a narrow track leading to a motley collection of barns and farm outbuildings. No actual dwelling was visible.
Pulling the wheel over, ignoring Faraj’s protests, she swung quietly up the track. As far as the roadblock was concerned, they were invisible. They just had to hope that there were no fa
rm workers about. Thirty yards up the track the ground opened out into a walled yard in which stood a rusted tractor and harrow and a silage heap covered by a plastic sheet and old tyres.
Driving round the far side of the silage heap so that the car was hidden by the road, she came to a sharp stop. She turned to Faraj and he nodded, seeing belatedly that the idea was a good one.
“Out,” Jean said to the youth, into whose fearful eyes a faint spark of hope had crept. “Get into the boot.”
He nodded, and did so, tucking himself deep and fearful into the carpeted space. The rain lanced down, cold against Jean’s face after the warmth of the car. For a moment his eyes met hers, frankly imploring, and then she felt Faraj press the butt of the PSS into her hand and knew that the moment had come. Around her, ghostly and transparent, crowded her fellow trainees from Takht-i-Suleiman, silently yelling and waving their weapons. “To kill an enemy of Islam is to be reborn,” whispered the instructor. “You will know the moment when it comes.”
She blinked and they vanished. Behind her back the PSS was heavy in her hand. She smiled at the young man. His knees were drawn up to his face, covering his chest. A head shot, then. The moment was unreal. “Could you just shut your eyes a moment?” she asked him.
The discharge was soundless and the recoil negligible. The youth twitched once, and was dead. It was the simplest thing in the world. The boot closed with a faint hydraulic whisper, and when she turned to Faraj to return the weapon, she knew that nothing now stood between them.
Wading through the thick brown midden they grabbed a corner each of the plastic sheet and dragged it off the silage heap and over the car. A half-dozen tyres came rolling with it, and they heaved three of these on top of the sheet. The rain poured down on the midden and the silage heap and the rusted tractor. It was the sort of scene you drove straight past.
At Risk Page 23
