“I think he killed them,” Tara said in a barely audible voice that wavered and threatened to die away completely. Her eyes stayed with her brother’s Land Rover as she spoke, watching as he drove through the gateway and into the yard surrounding her family’s house.
“Killed who?”
Tara’s eyes snapped back to what was ahead of her once the Land Rover was no longer easily visible. “Georgie and Lucy and…and…” She couldn’t bring herself to finish. It was a minute or so before she said anything else, by which time they were almost at the gate. “He said he attacked them, and Emily.” It wasn’t what her brother had actually said, but her mind made the leap based on what he had said.
Zack didn’t say as much, but he was pleased to hear that someone else was now in the frame for the murders he had been accused of. Once DI Harrison heard what Tara had to say, his name would be cleared; he just wished his exoneration wasn’t going to come at the expense of Tara’s family. In danger of losing her father because of his attempt at vigilante justice, it didn’t seem fair that it should turn out that her brother was the killer who had brought such heartache to the village.
“Are you alright?” Sophie asked once Zack reached her with the teen he had saved.
“I’m fine,” Zack said, though his back felt anything but. “And I’m sure Tara will be fine once she’s had a cup of tea. Tara, this is my friend, Sophie, Sophie, this is Tara Wright, she lives at the farm up the road.”
The introductions made, Zack guided Tara up the path and into his house. Once through the door, Sophie’s hand on his arm made him stop. “The kitchen’s at the end of the passage, Tara,” he told the the young girl as he looked at Sophie questioningly. “Why don’t you go on through, Sophie and I will be with you in a moment.”
“What’s going on?” Sophie asked quietly once Tara had reached the kitchen, she looked briefly over her shoulder, through the glass panel near the top of the front door. “Did that guy really just try and kill her, because that’s how it looked.”
Zack nodded. “Yeah, I think he did. Hardly a surprise, she said he’s the one who killed the girls I’ve been accused of murdering.”
“Really, Jesus! Did you see who it was? Did you recognise him?”
“Oh yes, I recognised him. I thought I did on the way up the road, and I got a good look at him when he headed back to the farm; it’s her brother, Kieran.”
“Jesus!”
“Just what I was thinking,” Zack said. “Come on, we’d better get along to the kitchen before Tara wonders what’s happened to us.”
While Sophie put the kettle on, Zack dug out his first aid kit to take care of Tara’s knee and her hands. As he did, he questioned her about what had happened that morning; the habits developed during his time as a detective were hard to ignore, and he couldn’t suppress the curiosity that made him want to know what he could about the case he was, however reluctantly, involved with.
53
Melissa was as surprised to see DI Harrison pull up next to Oakhurst’s police station as he was to see her at the top of the steps, about to enter the building.
“I didn’t expect to see you here today, sir,” she said when Harrison reached her. “Not after being stabbed last night.”
“I could say the same of you, constable,” Harrison said as he made his slow way up the steps. “You might not have been stabbed, thank god, but you did suffer quite badly at the hands of that maniac.” He reached for the door with a stifled groan, annoyed to discover that the painkillers the hospital had given him were wearing off.
“Are you sure you should be here?” Melissa asked, alarmed by how white Harrison had gone.
“Not really,” Harrison admitted in a strained voice. “And the hospital definitely isn’t happy with me being here, they were very much against releasing me. I had to insist. I’ve got a job to do, and I’m not the sort to give up until the job’s done. How are you feeling this morning?” he asked in a change of subject.
“About as well as can be expected,” Melissa admitted. Her collar was undone because it irritated the bruises around her throat where she had been strangled, and a large dressing covered the five stitches used to close the sizeable cut on her cheek. “I don’t think I’m going to be all that quick about getting things done today, but I’m fit enough to work. I’d rather be here than at home feeling sorry for myself anyway,” she said, especially since if she stayed at home she would have to put up with the fuss her gran, and her mum when she got there, would make.
“What the hell happened to the two of you?” Johnson asked when he saw the inspector and his fellow constable make their slow, obviously painful, way, across reception. “You both look as though you’ve been through hell.”
“I’d say that’s a pretty fair description,” Melissa croaked. “It sure felt like hell.” She unlocked the security door and made her way through to the rear of the police station without actually answering her colleague’s question; she had no interest in relating everything that she and Harrison had been through during the night, not only would it take too long, but talking was painful, and she intended doing as little of it as she could.
Johnson watched Melissa and the inspector head down the passage, his curiosity far from satisfied. The phone rang before he could try again to find out what had happened during the night, though, and he quickly turned back to the counter to answer it. “Oakhurst Police Station, how can I help you?”
“Inspector, I think you should take this,” he called down the passage after listening to what the caller had to say.
“Who is it?” Harrison asked as he took two strides back towards the counter and immediately had to slow down because of the pain.
“It’s Zack Wild,” Johnson answered. “He says Kieran Wright tried to kill his sister, Tara, a short while ago, and that he all but confessed to her that he’s responsible for the murders.”
Harrison’s step stuttered for a moment as he blinked at the constable. Of all the things he might have pictured happening this morning, that wasn’t on the list. When he reached the counter he took the phone. “Mr Wild, DI Harrison, would you mind repeating what you just told Constable Johnson?” He listened intently to what Wild had to say, taking it all in despite his amazement – he was sceptical, he had never found it easy to believe it when one suspect tried to convince him that another was guilty, but there was enough about the story that rang true for him to accept what he was being told.
Whether he believed it or not, he realised he couldn’t afford to just ignore what he had been told, he had to check it out. “Thank you, Mr Wild, we’ll be there as quickly as we can. Please keep Miss Wright there, and if you see her brother leave the farm again, call us.”
Hanging up, Harrison turned to the two constables, his mind racing as he made plans - he couldn’t help wishing he was back in town, where there would be more options available to him. He considered calling his superior for support, after the way the operation at the hospital had gone it seemed appropriate, but he didn’t like the thought of giving Kieran Wright, if he was the killer, time to make plans of his own, or even to get away. Besides, he figured there was only one way out from the farm, and so long as they were sensible and careful, Wright wouldn’t be able to get away.
“Turner, I want you to come with me, now,” Harrison told Melissa. “Johnson, I want you to call Constables Black and Pritchard and get them, and Sergeant Mitchell, out to Mr Wild’s as soon as possible, we’ll be going on to the Wright Farm from there. I want Inspector Stevens to call the chief inspector and ask for backup to be sent out here straight away. I don’t want to wait for it, but I do want it on its way here ASAP in case it’s needed.” He sincerely hoped it wouldn’t be. He was reasonably confident that Kieran Wright, if he was the killer, would realise the game was up, when he saw that they had come to arrest him, and that resisting would only make his situation worse. “When you’ve finished with the phone calls, I want you out at Wild’s as well.”
“Yes,
sir,” Johnson said, not at all happy with the thought of taking part in the arrest of a vicious murderer; he wasn’t a coward, but he had heard what the killer – Kieran Wright apparently – had done to his victims, and he didn’t want to face that kind of violence, it wasn’t what he had joined the police to deal with.
54
“Damn! Damn! Damn!” With each curse, Kieran slammed his fist down on the steering wheel. He could not believe that so much had gone wrong so quickly; first there was the trap the police had set and almost caught him with, then he had failed to get Georgina’s phone from his sister. It should not have been possible for him to fail to do that when his sister was so much smaller and weaker than him. And finally, he had failed even to stop Tara reaching help.
It took more than a minute for him to calm down enough to leave the Land Rover, and when he did he hurried across the yard to the house. He couldn’t stay at the farm, not now Tara had escaped him – he simply could not imagine that his sister would keep quiet about what had happened that morning – which meant he had to leave the village; to help him make a quick getaway, he left the keys in the ignition and the front door ajar.
He threw open the wardrobe the moment he reached his bedroom, took out his sports-bag and tossed it onto his bed. He was about to start throwing clothes after it when he stopped; he was normally one for acting first and thinking later, but he realised if he wanted to stand a chance of getting away, he needed to go against his nature and think before doing anything.
Standing by the open wardrobe, Kieran thought harder about his situation than he had about anything in a long time. He had no idea where he was going to go, or what he was going to do for money when he got there; fortunately, he wasn’t afraid of hard work, and he was prepared to do almost anything as a job.
For the time being, though, he didn’t think it mattered that he didn’t have a destination or a job in mind, he could work that out later; what did matter was that he got out of the village, and put as much distance between it and him as he could before the police were at his door.
To give him the best chance of avoiding being caught, he needed to take with him everything he was likely to need for the next few days, money, food and water – the less he had to stop, the better his chances of getting far enough away that the police wouldn’t find him. Now that he had some kind of plan, limited though it might be, Kieran reached into his wardrobe again.
His footsteps thundered as he descended the stairs in a rush, and once at the bottom he hurried along the passage to the kitchen. When he had filled the rucksack he had taken from his wardrobe with as much food and drink as he could squeeze into it, he took it out to his Land Rover so he could stuff the bag behind the driver’s seat.
The next thing for him to go looking for was money, and he quickly emptied the piggy bank - really a whiskey bottle they all threw their loose change into - his father kept in the living room; unfortunately, there seemed to be far more one and two pence pieces than coins of any other denomination. Any amount of money was going to be useful, but he would have preferred to see more pound coins in the flow as he poured the contents of the bottle into a carrier he got from the kitchen.
From the living room, Kieran made his way upstairs to his father’s bedroom. He went straight to the chest of drawers under the window and pulled out the top drawer; rummaging amongst the socks and boxers, he soon found what he was after, the small, red lock-box where his father kept his emergency money. It amused him that his father thought the lock-box so well hidden, when he had known where it had been for years; he thought it equally funny that his father thought the money in the box safe. At first look the lock-box appeared sturdy, but Kieran knew it had weak hinges, and with only a bit of effort he had it open so he could get at the contents.
“Sonofabitch,” he swore angrily, throwing the lock-box aside so violently it cracked the door of the wardrobe. “Cheap, useless bastard,” he raged as he counted the money he had taken from the box again and again, failing each time to make it amount to more than the two hundred pounds he had come to the first time. He hadn’t expected his father to have a fortune stashed away, the family had never been well-off, but he had expected to find at least twice what he now held.
Kieran put aside his frustration as best he could and focused on what he needed to do; in the absence of any real money, he needed things he could turn into money, jewellery being the best bet, but anything he could sell at a pawnshop would help. He knew that his father still had some of his mother’s jewellery somewhere, he just wasn’t sure whether it was worth anything; valuable or worthless, it was better than nothing if he could find it, and he went in search of it.
He found a dress watch he had never seen his father wear, but had no luck beyond that until he reached the wardrobe he had damaged; it was there that he found the jewellery box containing his mother’s rings, earrings and necklaces. He didn’t think what he had found would add up to more than a couple of hundred pounds in value, but every penny he could get would help.
He searched Tara’s bedroom next, raiding it rapidly for anything that might have value. He doubted he would get much for the small amount of jewellery he found so he left it behind, focusing instead on his sister’s CD collection and the small number of electronic gadgets she had: mobile phone, iPod, the tablet she had convinced their dad to get for her last birthday, as well as the few other trinkets of possible worth he found.
He was just checking that he hadn’t missed anything when he heard a vehicle pull into the yard. Leaving Tara’s room, he hurried into Emily’s so he could look out into the yard; what he saw made him drop the bag and dash back out of the room and downstairs. He kicked the front door shut on the way past and hurried on down the passage to the cupboard under the stairs.
He yanked open the door the moment he reached it and stepped inside. He didn’t bother fumbling for the light switch or trying to remember whether he had his key on him, he didn’t want to waste the time, he simply put his boot into the door of the cabinet where he and his father’s shotguns were kept locked. The first kick cracked the door, while the second destroyed it, leaving it in pieces, which he quickly pulled out of the way.
He was stuffing extra shells into the pockets of the jacket he had pulled on, having already loaded two into his shotgun, when a loud banging came from the front door.
“Kieran Wright, open up, it’s the police. If you don’t open up, we’ll have to break the door down,” Mitchell called through the door, banging on it a second time.
Kieran left the cupboard under the stairs and hurried along the passage. He raised the shotgun as he went, and pulled the trigger when the muzzle was at stomach height and just a couple of inches from the door.
Intellectually, Harrison knew there was no separation of sight and sound at that distance, he should have seen and heard everything simultaneously, as it occurred. That was not what happened, however. He saw a section of the door explode outwards, and Mitchell fly backwards, a large, bloody hole in his stomach, but he heard nothing until the door swung open. It was then that the sound of the shotgun blast and Mitchell’s quickly cut off cry washed over him.
Mitchell’s death was shocking, but not so much that Harrison was unable to react to the sight of the shotgun when it appeared around the edge of the door. The pain from his knife wound forgotten, and all thought of making a quick and easy arrest pushed from his mind, he turned and dived for the nearest piece of cover there was, his car - he didn’t make it.
Kieran raised the shotgun and fired the moment he saw the inspector. He didn’t care that he was shooting an unarmed man in the back, that didn’t matter to him, all that did was increasing his chances of getting away, and he was prepared to do anything to manage that. The blast took Harrison in the back and sent him sprawling. He hoped the shot had killed Harrison, but it was enough to have another of his would-be captors out of action.
He looked around quickly for some sign of the two constables he had seen when he looked out of
his sister’s bedroom window; when he didn’t see them, he assumed they were using one of the cars in the yard for cover.
He didn’t care as much about the constables as he did Mitchell and the inspector, so he ignored them for the moment and retreated into the house. Ejecting the spent shells, he reloaded his shotgun as he made his way upstairs to retrieve the bag he had been filling with his family’s valuables.
*****
“What was that?” Tara’s head snapped around from Zack’s laptop, which she had been given to distract her from the morning’s events, to point, unerringly towards her family’s farm. It was like she could see what was going on there, despite the walls that prevented her seeing the road, let alone the half a mile up it to the farm.
“What was what?” Zack asked, he hadn’t heard a thing.
“It sounded like a shotgun,” Tara said. She had never handled a shotgun, but she had heard her father and her brother using theirs often enough to recognise the noise. “There it is again.”
Zack heard the noise the second time, and would have guessed at it being a gunshot, but he wasn’t practised enough with the sounds of the countryside to be able to say it was a shotgun blast; four months of country living simply wasn’t long enough for him to become an expert on such things. To his mind, it didn’t matter what variety of gun it was that had been fired, the only thing that did matter was that someone, somewhere was shooting. Given the situation that was ongoing, he didn’t need to be a genius to figure out where the shot had come from, or what it might mean.
Melissa recognised the noise immediately, and felt herself gripped by a wave of panic; since none of her colleagues had gone to the farm with a shotgun, she knew Kieran must be the one who fired the weapon, and that made her worry that one or more of them had been hurt. “DI Harrison, Constable Turner, come in please. DI Harrison, come in please,” she said, snatching her radio from her belt.
Written In Blood Page 30
