Murder at Twilight

by Fleur Hitchcock

  “Oh – nothing,” I say. I realise I have no experience of learning Latin, or woollen rugby shorts – or even school suet puddings. The life that he lives and the life that I live are so totally different.

  “There,” he says, stopping. “The sawmill at last.”

  And we both let out a long sigh of relief.

  As we enter the yard, Dave rumbles down the track in his pickup and screeches to a halt. “Noah! Viv!” he calls, throwing the door open and stumbling over to us, his engine still running. “What the—”

  “Dave!” shouts Noah, breaking into a shambolic trot. “Dave! Take me home.” He holds his arms out as if he’s waiting for a hug.

  But Dave shies away from Noah and laughs awkwardly. “I think I’d better call the police. Come inside, get dry – what are you wearing? I’ve got some biscuits. I’ll check the state of the milk – should be able to make tea.”

  We follow him as he unlocks the doors and ushers us inside the massive building. The mill is warm – there’s a wood burner slumbering in the corner of the boxed-off plywood office and we rush towards it, holding our frozen hands out in front of us.

  “Oh – sweet!” I say. “Thank you.” Without making eye contact, Dave puts the kettle on. Chucking a load of kindling on the fire he makes the flames leap and the heat doubles. He seems nervous, but then I suppose he’s not very used to people. Normally he’s here on his own, I don’t suppose anyone comes into this office much. He certainly never let us in here when we were younger.

  As we press ourselves as near to the stove as we dare, Dave gets out his phone and wanders out of the office. “Just going to ring the police,” he says, and fumbles with the phone, his big fingers uncomfortable with the screen. It slips out of his hand into a pile of sweepings and he kneels down and picks it up, wiping off the sawdust.

  Noah doesn’t say anything. He keeps his hands about a millimetre from the hot cast iron and starts to shake, a little at first and then great juddering shudders that course through him. I wonder if it’s just the cold, or is it shock too?

  He’s looking at his quaking arms as if they belong to someone else.

  Next door, Dave’s speaking to someone on his mobile. I can see him through the little window. He finishes the call and then rings someone else. I catch a bit of the conversation: “Yes, both of them,” he says, but he doesn’t sound happy.

  Which is odd.

  Putting his phone back in his pocket he wanders back in and sees Noah clamping his hands under his armpits to stop the shuddering.

  “Better have a hot drink.” Dave clatters about with the kettle. “Tea all right?”

  “Yes,” I answer.

  While teabags steep in cups, Dave posts some more wood shavings into the fire and the little glass screen turns from yellow to white hot. My jeans begin to steam. Underneath, my legs begin to scorch, but I don’t care, I’m so bone cold. Lifting the rugby shirt, I let the heat scald my T-shirt until my frozen stomach turns pink. I peel one of Sanjeev’s socks off my feet and examine the holes in my toes that the thistles made.

  Two mugs of caramel-coloured tea arrive in front of us along with a packet of custard creams.

  I hold up a custard cream. “Custard creams keep on happening,” I say, mostly to myself.

  “We’re free,” says Noah after a few minutes. “We made it, Viv.”

  “Yes,” I say. “We did.” But somehow this doesn’t feel like I think it ought to. Where’s the euphoria? I should feel overjoyed, overwhelmed by sudden freedom. For some reason I just feel really nervous. Maybe that’s because we’ve already been rescued once. Or not.

  “They’ll be here soon,” says Dave. “Get that tea down you.” And then, in un-Dave-like chattiness, he asks, “So – Noah – who dunnit then? Who took you? Any ideas?”

  Noah sips his tea; his hand is still shaking. “No,” he says. “I never saw them.”

  “You?” Dave asks me, opening his gun cabinet and popping some shotgun cartridges back into a box. Everyone here has guns, I realise. The estate’s full of them.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t either.” Dave’s hands are shaking as badly as Noah’s.

  “S’pect the police’ll ask you – did you get the voices or nothing? You know, recognise anything?” There’s something awkward in his questions.

  I slurp my tea and leave it up to Noah to speak. Everything is making me more uncomfortable. Every tic of Dave’s face, every biscuit, every blackbird song outside. I eat two more biscuits and drink the tea while it’s still too hot.

  “There was nothing I recognised,” says Noah, staring into the fire. And then, “When d’you think the police’ll get here?”

  Dave considers the question. “Take ’em a while – the river’s up, you see. Can’t cross Elbow Bridge, the weed rack over at Cobber’s Wood’s gone under, the ford’s armpit-deep at Easton – so they’ll have to drive all the way round. Half an hour, I reckon. Unless they got a helicopter.”

  “Oh.” Noah pokes his finger in his tea to remove a dead fly. “OK. Could I ring my mum?”

  “I rung your mum,” says Dave. “She’s coming over directly.”

  “That’s good,” says Noah, looking more cheerful.

  Probably another minute passes while I turn around and let the bum of my jeans toast and feel the cold on the front of my legs, and I begin to wonder if the sawmill has a toilet.

  Then a vehicle pulls into the yard. I glance out of the window; I’m expecting the police, or Lady B, but it isn’t – it’s a van.

  Dave doesn’t seem to notice. “Come and have a look around – you haven’t been here for years, you two, have you? You used to play in here, didn’t you, Viv? Nothing but trouble I seem to remember.”

  “Dave – who’s that?” I say.

  “Dunno,” he says, looking where I’ve been looking. “Someone for wood, I reckon. Or a courier – ordered a couple of bandsaw blades a day or so ago.” Dave shuffles out of the office and towards the big doors at the entrance. “I’ll just be a tick – stay here in the warm.”

  I don’t. Of course I don’t. I never do anything I’m told, which is why the first thing that I notice about the man that’s getting out of the van is a ski mask. The second, something that could be a shotgun.

  Oh, no.

  “Noah – this isn’t good,” I say.

  “What?” he asks. “We’re safe aren’t we?”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Uh?” says Noah, frowning.

  “The van – it’s them!”

  I drag him out of the office and into the middle of the sawmill. There’s no way out except for the main doors. Unless … above us is the long rail that runs the length of the room. From it hang loops of cable, like huge curtain rings. They’re supposed to allow a person to move wood the length of the building without using the forklift truck. When we were little, Daisy and I tried to use it as a zip wire. We pretended that it was how Hansel and Gretel got out of the gingerbread house – that the little window at the end was the only way out, and that the main entrance was the oven. If you got it completely right, you could shoot through the window at the end. If you got it wrong, you hit the wall. Either way, Dave used to shout at us.

  I point up. “We gotta go.”

  Noah heaves a heavy sigh. “Or what?”

  “Them,” I say. Feet sound on the gravel outside. “Tell you later,” I shout, jumping for the cable, hooking my foot into the loop and shoving myself along the length of the rail, punting along the huge shelves of planked wood lining the sides until I’m moving fast towards the little window at the end.

  Noah clatters behind me, his loop crashing into mine, and we jerk our way to the far end.

  Behind us, the entrance doors scrape open.

  “Hey!” shouts Dave. “Hey!”

  “Window – mine,” yells Noah, and he leaps, landing on the tiny plank windowsill and throwing himself forward through the gap until, still flying with the momentum of the zip wire, he drops from vie
w.

  Shoving against the piles of wood on either side, I reach for the exit. Why is Noah faster than me? Five metres, four, three…

  Something hits the ceiling of the sawmill, bringing down a million cobwebs and a ton of dust and just missing my flailing legs.

  A net?

  I make it to the windowsill and drop towards the ground as a short length of wood whizzes past me. Freefalling, I plummet but land in mud that’s soft with rain and lorry tyres and blissfully empty of men in ski masks throwing things.

  Slightly winded, I stagger towards Noah, who’s already trying to get through the fence, but once again his hair’s got caught in the wire.

  “Here, stop,” I yell, and yank his hair out of the barbs.

  “Ow! Viv!” he squawks, and I throw myself through the gap too.

  A dog begins to bark and the throwing intensifies. Missiles fall all around us – some of them making contact. “Ow!” yells Noah, rubbing his thigh.

  The ground’s so squidgy we’re almost wading as we run up the slight hill behind the sawmill, not daring to look back.

  “Did they…?” pants Noah. “What was that?”

  “I don’t know,” I mumble, trying to get past him, trying to get him between me and whoever it is who’s throwing stuff.

  We stumble and lurch and nearly make it over the top of the hill before a large chunk of wood bounces right by my foot and knocks me sideways.

  More spars thud into the turf behind us and an engine roars, tyres whining on the mud at the bottom of the hill – and I suddenly find I can run faster than I ever could before.

  Alongside me, Noah’s gasping and he too seems to have discovered sprinting. We race over the top of the slope and down the other side into a thick belt of river mist where we slow down to a fast run. I know that off to our left, over two fields, is the group of trees that marks the quarry.

  “Run for quarry,” I say. “We need to head that way.”

  “House,” he coughs.

  “Can’t get over the river.”

  “But quarry?” Proper sentences are too much effort.

  “Cos beyond it, we can get to Blackwater Abbas. There’s the village shop. We need to get off the estate.”

  “What?”

  “We do – we need to get clear of here.”

  “I don’t know,” pants Noah. “I just know I’ve gotta slow down.”

  “Slow down and we die. We have to get off the estate.” The words come out as a cough, and I keep on running, one foot in front of the other – one bare foot, one socked foot.

  My mind’s playing over what just happened. What I think just happened.

  “They were the kidnappers – who broke into the sawmill?” asks Noah.

  “Don’t think they broke in,” I say, thinking.

  “What?” he stumbles alongside me, both of us still just about running.

  “Something happened there,” I say, working it all out.

  Now the immediate panic’s over, I can feel my bare foot on the frozen ground. It’s bruised and sore and red, and my socked foot’s not doing much better. My feet really want all this to stop.

  Finally he asks the question that’s been going round and round my brain. “So are you saying that Dave is part of it?”

  We jog about another fifty metres before I answer. “I … I dunno. Yes – almost certainly,” I say. “I heard him shout – like he was arguing with someone, and the missiles were wild. He might have stopped someone actually firing at us. And he was so nervous, dropping things.” I take a dozen deep breaths. “Not sure, but he definitely knows something.”

  The mist swirls around us, thicker and thicker, making it barely possible to see the ground. Distantly, a vehicle grinds a gear. A duck lands on the water.

  “I hope you’re wrong,” says Noah after a while.

  A line of trees rise out of the mist in front of us, their branches bare and cold.

  “You sure that’s the quarry?”

  “Yeah,” I say, stumbling over frozen earth rather than icy grass.

  “But you haven’t been here for years; you can’t be sure.”

  “I came a few days ago – to look for you.”

  “Did you?” He stops, leaning over and putting his hands on his knees, sucking in lungfuls of air. “Really?”

  A crow calls in the distance.

  “I did,” I say, stopping alongside him. “With Chris. At the beginning, we thought you were hiding. Well, I did. I thought you were teaching your parents some kind of lesson – you know, heavy-duty sulking.”

  “Oh.” He walks on, but I can see that his shoulders have lifted. I’ve evidently told him something that’s made him feel good.

  The field runs out and we trace a hedge until we can find a way through. It’s prickly and this time I get caught on a thorn. Noah unpicks my collar from the bramble and we stumble down the slope until we can see the quarry below us.

  It looks very quiet.

  “They won’t think we’d come here,” he says in the end.

  “Maybe not.”

  “Dave doesn’t know anything about us; he’s got no idea where we’d go.”

  “Depends who the others are.”

  I wish I hadn’t said that. We shuffle in silence through the mist, sunlight high above us lighting the red of the beeches and releasing leaves in a slow stream that drifts down and settles somewhere under the whiteness. All I can imagine now is that someone is hunting us – and I’m thinking of Sanjeev and everything feels horrible.

  Brambles catch at my knees and I stop. It might not actually be possible for me to get down to the quarry itself, but we need to cross it to get out towards the village. It’s either that or a whole load of fields with no easy path. This is so much faster but I’d forgotten how scrubby the ground is and with no shoes on my feet it feels silly to walk over it. I squeeze myself past a burdock bush, but a mass of burrs catch on the rugby shirt, just adding to the misery. Each time I move, I pick up more.

  Noah stamps ahead and I hear him open the car door. It creaks and then I hear him yelp.

  “Tigger! You idiot!” And then, “You dozy cat, what are you doing here?”

  It takes me an age to pick my way through the brambles and I fail to avoid some lightly crushed nettles that spring up to brush against my ankles. “Ow!”

  Tigger yowls and pads towards me as if I might produce a bowl of cat food. The sight of him, so familiar, so warm and ordinary – I have to blink back tears.

  I pick him up and hold him to my neck, avoiding the burrs, great warm cat that he is, and he purrs and almost feels as if he might hug me back before he breaks away and leaps to the roof of the old car.

  “Shame you didn’t leave anything to eat here,” says Noah, checking the mouldy interior.

  I decide to ignore him.

  “We need to go that way.” I point off towards another branch of the river that circles the back of the quarry.

  “Yeah,” says Noah, and as if he’s forgotten that we’re being pursued by someone, several people, possibly with shotguns, he shuffles about, poking his head into the back of the car and sniffing.

  I look down at my feet. They’re so grubby it’s hard to tell how damaged they are – but now they’re fizzing from the stinging nettles and I’m pretty sure there’s a thorn in my heel and the cold’s penetrated so deep I’m not sure it’ll ever leave. Lifting my left foot, I try massaging it. It’s numb and in my hand it feels as if it belongs to a dead person. “I’ll just inspect them,” I say, sitting back against the bonnet. Tigger pads down the windscreen and pushes at my back, and then quite suddenly stops. His legs bend into a crouch and his huge yellow eyes scan the hedgerow.

  “What is it, Tigger?” I whisper, putting my hand out to touch Noah’s sleeve.

  All three of us stop. We stop everything, especially breathing.

  The mist is milky and thick outside the boundary of the quarry. Inside, it’s grainy, like someone rubbed the air with ash. It means that everything is
slightly colourless, slightly fuzzy.

  I scan the bushes that make up the ring that surrounds us but I can’t see anything. Tigger might just have spotted a big mouse, but he’s sniffing the air now like there’s an enemy out there.

  And then he leaps – and an angry dog bursts through the gap at the end of the quarry – and we run. All four of us, Tigger well in front, the dog snapping behind us.

  There’s no way I can do anything about my feet and I pound over thistles, brambles and frost to get clear.

  Tigger vanishes into a tree.

  “I can’t climb that,” shouts Noah, a pace behind me.

  “No,” I yell. “Left – go left.”

  A stream with burst banks curls in from our right and we race over a plank bridge and wade through waterlogged grass, ice shells cracking around our feet but the water’s nothing to the dog and it piles on behind us, snapping at Noah.

  “Ow!” yells Noah. “It bit me.”

  Tall burdock plants laden with prickly fruit bend over the water, their stems thin and bent. I grab two, yanking them out of the soil and turn, holding them towards the dog who snaps and barks and growls – but he stops, watching my hand.

  “What are you doing? Run,” mutters Noah, who’s backing away towards a stile in the next hedge, clutching his hand.

  I jab at the dog. It steps backwards and then lunges around the burdock towards me, but I swipe sideways, cracking the burrs on the dog’s nose.

  “Yow!” The dog recoils, whining as the burrs glue themselves across his muzzle. He tries to come forward again, but I lash out with the other branch and this time they fix themselves all over his forehead like a painful crown.

  “Go away,” I shout as he tries to swipe them off with a paw. But the burrs won’t be swiped, and spread themselves up his legs. Thrown by this sudden inconvenience he seems to forget about us, and I step over the stile, leaving the branches still laden with burrs across the wood as a barrier. For a second it looks as if the dog might follow, then he stops, listens to the air for a moment and trots away.

  “Let’s see your hand,” I say, turning to Noah.