by Rebecca Tope
As he watched, Gladwin left the knot of police people and began walking towards the house. Tension tightened every muscle, his fists clenched as his instincts screamed at him to stop her.
The farmhouse was constructed of the usual Cotswold stone, the mellow colour suggesting it must be at least two centuries old. The yard was weedy and there was no sign of a properly kept garden. The front door had a large thistle growing beside it, and a creeper straggled across the top, several tendrils bridging the join between doorframe and the actual door. It was obviously very seldom used. Had Gladwin noticed this, Phil wondered?
She came to a halt some ten or twelve yards short of the door, and leant her head back to see the upper windows. ‘Hello?’ she called. ‘Will somebody please speak to me?’
Had they tried telephoning the house? That was the recommended practice these days – to attempt a rapport with the hostage-takers while maintaining a safe distance.
Nothing happened. In frustration, Phil wound down his window and called, ‘They’ll be at the back. Try the back.’ As soon as the words had flown, he wanted to recall them. The woman surely knew what she was doing. He had only betrayed his own presence by his noise.
But it seemed the order was a good one. Smoothly, Gladwin made a ninety-degree turn and marched off towards the side of the house. She gave a little flip with her hand to indicate she accepted his advice. She was far too relaxed, in Phil’s view. Was she wearing a protective vest? Didn’t she know she could be killed by other weapons than a gun? A crossbow bolt or even a well-aimed knife could come whistling down on her from an upstairs window as she stood there so defenceless.
She disappeared around the back of the house, and he heard her calling again. ‘Please will somebody come and speak to me? We’ve had a report of some trouble.’
Who had reported it? How much contact, if any, had she already had with the people inside the house? How come she was being so damned calm about the whole thing?
The other police officers were alert, but did not have the twitchy demeanour that was usual in such situations. They muttered quietly amongst themselves and one spoke into a radio inside his car. After three more minutes, Phil could endure no longer. Stiffly he got out and walked across the yard. Several backbones straightened as they realised he was approaching. Evidently they knew who he was.
‘Sir,’ said one of them. ‘DS Gladwin wanted you to stay in the car, sir.’
‘Maybe she did, but I’m tired of being kept in suspense like this. Exactly what’s going on? Is she safe, going in like that?’
‘We’ve been speaking to the young lady, sir – Miss Wheeler. She sounds quite relaxed, but simply claims that there’s a man keeping her and her father inside the house against their will.’
‘How? How’s he doing it?’
‘She says he’s got some powder that’s poisonous. If they make a move he doesn’t like, he’ll throw it in their faces. She’s not sure he’s serious, but is inclined to believe him.’
‘So how did she manage to call you, without him knowing?’
‘He did know, but he thought she was calling her friend, not us. He ordered her to do that, you see. He was listening in the whole time and prompting her as to what to say. He wants her to run away with him and leave her father, but she refuses. So he’s doing what he can to force her.’
Phil rubbed his aching spine thoughtfully. ‘I’ve never heard anything so bizarre,’ he said eventually.
‘Nor me, sir,’ agreed the officer. ‘She carried it all off brilliantly, though. You could tell she was upset. She pretended to be telling this Fiona the whole story, when really she was speaking to DS Gladwin. She kept warning her on no account to call the police, but just get here and deal with her dad.’
‘How long ago was all this?’
‘Must be an hour or more now. We’ve been here since four-forty, and not seen any sign of life.’
‘So what if they’ve gone? What if he has already poisoned them and himself?’
‘That’s what the super’s gone to find out now, sir,’ said the man, with just enough forbearance to show Phil he was being annoyingly slow on the uptake.
Anger seized him. Why hadn’t the woman explained all this to him in the car? She had deliberately withheld important details – in particular the powder. ‘But it could be ricin,’ he exploded. ‘We need special biological suits, the hospitals alerted – what the hell is the woman playing at?’
‘Here she is now, sir,’ said the man, with obvious relief. ‘You’ll be able to ask her.’
Phil was aware of a certain delicacy in the situation. Gladwin was indisputably the SIO, with authority over the team working on the Temple Guiting case. But he, DS Hollis, was equal in rank to her and superior in experience. He could pull her up if he saw her making mistakes, and would, at the last resort, be expected to report her to the chief constable if she broke any rules. But senior CID officers did have considerable leeway. The primary task was always to acquire solid evidence before charging anyone with a crime, and methods for doing this could sometimes be devious. Watching his colleague’s face now, he knew he had to trust her for a while longer.
‘They wouldn’t answer me,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The door’s locked and I couldn’t see anybody through the windows.’
‘So how do you know they’re still in there?’ Phil demanded. ‘This chap tells me there was half an hour or more when nobody was watching the house.’
‘Not strictly true,’ smiled Gladwin. ‘I had somebody stationed at the road gate, who would have seen if anybody left. Besides, the vehicles are all still here.’ She waved a hand at a battered pick-up and a red Puma, both of which Phil recognised,
He shook his head helplessly. ‘So what now?’ he asked. ‘Am I right in thinking he’s using a biological substance to threaten the Wheelers?’
‘So he claims. I expect it’s just washing powder. Since all that ballyhoo last week, everybody’s thinking about ricin as a means of mass destruction. People really don’t have much imagination, do they? I mean – where would he get ricin from, anyway?’
‘There’s a plant at Hector’s Nook,’ Phil remembered. ‘For a start.’
‘What? A ricin plant? How did you recognise it?’
He explained about castor oil plants and the ease with which their seeds could be turned into toxic dust. ‘But it’s a bit early for seeds yet. They’d have to have been gathered last year, when nobody was talking about the stuff.’
‘So it’s washing powder, bet you a hundred pounds,’ said Gladwin.
‘But we can’t take the risk, can we?’ said Phil, feeling like a dull old uncle, hearing Thea’s voice in his ear chiding him for being so timid, while at the same time knowing it was the only professional stand he could take.
He changed the subject when Gladwin didn’t respond. ‘How did Soraya know your number? Did she call your mobile? It sounds very clever of her.’
‘One of my sergeants gave it to her. We realised this morning that she was associating with a man we had reason to mistrust. I sent Hilary over for a quiet word. All this isn’t entirely unexpected, you see.’
He stared at her. While he’d been stumbling around the village, thinking he knew everything there was to know, Gladwin had been ahead of him. He remembered Giles’s anxiety for Soraya. He reran the complicated story about Graham Bligh and Rupert, his son.
‘So—’ he began, intending to ask once more just who the man with the suspicious powder was. But the sentence was never completed. Another car came hurtling into the yard, hooting its horn. Phil winced and cast a worried look at the farmhouse. The one thing you never did was startle a volatile criminal when he was holding people hostage.
‘Who on earth—?’
Two women scrambled out of the car and Phil wasn’t entirely surprised to see his girlfriend emerge from the passenger seat. The driver was just as unmistakable, festooned with a broad white bandage around her neck. Janey Holmes stood huge and determined, her gaze on t
he house.
‘Leave this to me,’ she said. ‘He isn’t going to do me any harm.’
Gladwin, to Phil’s relief, did her best to intercept the woman. ‘The doors are locked,’ she said. ‘You won’t be able to get in.’
Janey eyed the front door with its unused appearance. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Have you actually tried it?’
Phil and Gladwin’s eyes met. He had diverted her before she’d tried the door. They had simply assumed that it was locked. Both shook their heads, Phil feeling yet more of a fool than on all the other occasions that day.
‘Right, then.’
Short of summoning two or three of the bystanding policemen to physically restrain her, there was little anyone could do to stop Janey Holmes. Even Phil was starting to believe that this was a very tame little siege, appropriate to the quiet country village. Almost as much urgency arose from the unmilked cows as from the goings-on in the house. Janey put her meaty shoulder to the door and easily heaved it open. There was a scraping noise, and a rustling from the disturbed creeper, but it made little genuine protest. Only when she disappeared inside did Phil turn to acknowledge Thea, standing at his side, watching Janey intently.
‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Fancy meeting you here.’
She didn’t smile. ‘Do you know who that is in there?’ she demanded.
‘Not Rupert,’ he said. ‘That’s as far as anybody will tell me.’
‘Rupert’s dead, you idiot,’ Thea said.
‘Right. Can I just say, in my own defence, that this is not my case, I am not the SIO and that I have hurt my back? In these circumstances, I think I can be excused from following the very strange behaviour of the people here.’
‘Shut up,’ she told him. ‘You were lucky I persuaded Gladwin to bring you along in the first place. She didn’t want to spare the time going to fetch you, but I said you’d be extremely useful back-up.’
‘And she believed you?’
‘Obviously.’
‘And now Janey Holmes has entered the dragon’s den, while a large bunch of police officers hangs back, scared of their own shadows. And I include myself in that.’
‘It makes very good sense. Janey knows him better than anybody, and is convinced he won’t hurt Soraya or Robin.’
‘But he – whoever he is, killed Rupert. Is that right?’
‘So it seems.’
‘Which in my book makes him dangerous and desperate. He’s facing arrest and the most serious criminal charges.’ He smacked a fist into an open palm, in a parody of frustration. ‘This is the most ludicrous piece of police work I’ve ever seen.’
‘No, Phil, it isn’t.’ Thea spoke earnestly. ‘Gladwin’s really being very clever. She’s got all these men here for if things get nasty. But there’s no rush, is there? We’ve stirred things up a bit now, hooting the horn and sending Janey in. You’ll see – it’ll all be over in a minute.’
‘And why isn’t Janey still in hospital?’ he grumbled, knowing he’d been defeated yet again.
‘Because she’s only got a cut on her neck, for heaven’s sake. They’ve stitched it up and bandaged it, and let her go. Oh!’
Sounds of raised female voices were coming from the house. Everybody in the yard held their breaths and waited. There were no screams for help, but Phil noticed that two of the waiting policemen were calmly putting on face masks. So, he thought grimly, they were taking the ricin threat seriously after all.
‘Come down here now!’ he heard Janey shout. ‘There’s to be no more mucking about. As usual, you haven’t thought anything through, have you?’
‘Dad!’ came a cry from Soraya. ‘What’s the matter?’
Evidently the whole group was coming down the stairs, their voices increasingly audible as they approached the front door. A new tension gripped the people outside, and the police officers stood straighter, some taking a few steps towards the house. Gladwin flapped a hand at them, her own gaze firmly on the open door.
It seemed to be over. Janey emerged first, and called, ‘He’s coming.’ Then she added, ‘Robin’s been taken ill. Looks as if he’ll need a doctor.’
Phil realised, for the first time, that there was no waiting ambulance, as there ought to have been. Again he felt an angry horror at Gladwin’s lackadaisical methods. ‘So how—?’ he began, but again he was interrupted.
Everything sped up. Janey was just clear of the door when a blurred figure dashed past her. With astonishing momentum, the man they’d known as Rupert Temple-Pritchett almost flew out of the house, head down, legs at full stretch. He headed blindly towards the farm drive and the road beyond, with every prospect of complete escape.
But Phil could not let that happen. Here was a clear and obvious challenge which required no conscious thought. The runaway was bound to pass within a few feet of Gladwin’s car, against which Phil had been leaning ever since Gladwin had returned from her fruitless trip to the back of the house. All he had to do was launch himself at the right moment to intercept the flying figure.
Which is what he did, making contact with his quarry at roughly knee-level. The headlong dash took them both rolling violently onwards for some distance, before Phil’s limpet-like hold on the man’s legs brought him to a halt. A hail of blows from the man’s fists descended on Phil’s head and shoulders, but he kept his arms wrapped tightly around the struggling legs, until reinforcements came and took over.
‘Wow!’ said Thea, in his ear. ‘My hero!’
Janey appeared, the acres of skirt material blocking his view of anything else. ‘Oh bother,’ she said, in a voice that contained profound regret. ‘I didn’t think anybody would catch him.’ She reached down and gave Phil a hearty slap on the cheek. Then she did it again, saying, ‘And that’s from Soraya. She’d do it herself if she wasn’t seeing to poor Robin.’
Her victim tilted his head enough to look at her face. ‘You wanted him to get away,’ he gasped. ‘You planned it so he would.’
‘I tried to give him a sporting chance,’ she admitted. ‘Just for old times’ sake.’
A huff of amusement came from the flattened fugitive. ‘Good old Janey,’ he said. ‘There’ll never be another like you, old girl.’
Thea was crouching close to Phil’s head. ‘Can you get up?’ she asked.
He carefully started to try. ‘No,’ he said. But his attention was still on Janey and the man she had tried to liberate. ‘Who is he?’ he asked. ‘Somebody please tell me.’
‘Sammy Holmes, of course,’ said Thea. ‘This is Janey’s husband.’
Chapter Twenty-One
Although they couldn’t be sure until proper analysis had been done, Phil forced Gladwin to concede that the powder that Holmes had been brandishing was indeed very much like ricin. Some of it was sprinkled on the floor of Robin Wheeler’s bedroom, but it seemed none had been imbibed or inhaled by anybody. Robin had been taken away, breathless and shaking, but Soraya insisted it was his pre-existing condition, and nothing to do with being held hostage by a murderer.
DS Phil Hollis was suffering for his act of heroism in more ways than one. Primarily, his back had been jarred and twisted to such an extent that he had been told to lie flat for at least three days. ‘By rights you should stay in hospital,’ the doctor told him, after a night spent in a side ward at Cirencester General. ‘But if you’ve got someone at home, you’ll probably be just as well off there.’ Thea, with no discernible hesitation, had volunteered to nurse him, on condition the dog could come too.
Secondly, the general reaction amongst the people at the scene had been decidedly frosty. Janey had slapped him; Soraya had wrung her hands and wept; and Fiona – who had appeared moments after the capture of Sammy Holmes – had given him a cold stare and told him he’d ruined everything right from the start.
Thea had defended him angrily. ‘What are you talking about?’ she had flashed at them. ‘He’s just caught a killer, who was holding two people hostage.’ Her fury had effectively silenced their accusations, b
ut Phil felt the effect of their reproaches, despite her efforts.
Order had slowly been restored from the farmyard chaos, although the wretched cows had not been milked until far into the evening.
Thea had handed Hector’s Nook over to Archie, who had arrived on schedule in the middle of Sunday, blissfully ignorant of the excitement that had been going on in the village over the past few days. Now she was in residence in Phil’s flat until he could fend for himself. ‘I know I’m a lousy nurse,’ she said, ‘but I can’t just abandon you, can I?’
They talked obsessively about the events of the past week all through Sunday evening, and Phil lay awake that night going over it in his mind. It was Monday morning before the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place and a revelatory light went on in his brain.
‘I’ve got it!’ he announced.
‘What? What have you got?’ Thea had resorted to drawing diagrams in an effort to make sense of the whole tangled business, with nearly a dozen elements ringed and linked with wiggly lines. ‘Saints and Martyrs’, ‘Soraya and Rupert/ Holmes’, ‘Templars’, ‘The Manor’, ‘Janey’s house’, ‘Janey’s baby’ were just some of them. She’d added dates and likely motives, but still it wasn’t apparent just why Sammy Holmes would have murdered Rupert Temple-Pritchett.
‘It was something Giles Pritchett said. Plus the way everybody behaved towards me yesterday. It suddenly dawned on me that they all wanted Rupert dead, for a whole lot of different reasons.’
