Firetrap

by David Hodges

  OK, so he had not been able to find out why she had met Duval under the pier or why she had made her clandestine visit to his cottage, but that was academic now anyway. The only people she would be able talk to about it were the angels.

  Seeing headlights approaching from the direction of Glastonbury, he patted the roof of the car in mock farewell and headed back to his Land Rover at a run. By the time the HGV thundered past the scene, he was gone and the lorry driver was too busy studying the screen of his own GPS to notice the car in the rhyne on the other side of the road.

  Danny Mogg was still hung over from a night out with the lads and, as the lonely marshland road opened up to his headlights in the gathering dawn, he shivered. He was looking forward to the next eight hours like a hole in the head. He had never liked observation duty and he certainly hadn’t joined CID to babysit a villain’s house on the Levels. OK, so he was only a temporary detective constable, but that didn’t mean he should be dumped on like this. Obs was a uniform job, surely, so why couldn’t one of the plods have been given it instead?

  He grinned as he approached a sharp right-hand bend, slowing as his tyres began to slide on the frosty road surface. Still, at least he had missed the bloody graveyard shift, which was one good thing anyway. Poor old Hayden had clicked for that and it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bloke. The Don, as he was called, was always claiming how hard life had been at public school and how cold the dormitories were. Maybe this would teach him a lesson, for he would more than likely have frozen his bollocks off by now – if public schoolboys had them in the first place, of course. And Mogg laughed out loud at the thought.

  He wasn’t laughing as he rounded the bend, however. In fact, all the humour went out of him when he caught a glimpse of the shiny roof of the MX5 in the rhyne, and he swung on to the verge with a slither of locked wheels, nearly ending up in the ditch himself.

  The powerful flashlight he carried in his car pinpointed the hunched figure in the crushed driving seat as soon as he bent down to scrape some of the frost off the strip of visible passenger window and he scrambled to his feet with a sharp intake of breath, depressing the button of his police radio with a shaking hand. Police control responded immediately. ‘TDC Mogg,’ he said unnecessarily and without realizing he was shouting. ‘I’ve got a possible FATACC.1’ Quickly giving his location, he added: ‘I think the driver is DC Kate Hamblin.’

  1 FATACC – fatal accident

  chapter 11

  THE NEEDLE HAD not been particularly clean – in fact, there were traces of something even on the body of the hypodermic syringe she had been given – but Linda didn’t care. The euphoria she’d got from the blast of heroin as it coursed through her veins was enough and she’d barely had time to loosen the strap on her thigh before Mr H took over completely and she sank into oblivion in the corner of the church porch.

  She came round in fragile afternoon sunlight to find an elderly woman with an armful of flowers bending over her. Her jeans were still round her ankles, exposing the collapsed veins in one leg, and the old biddy had an open mouth you could have practically driven a hearse through. Lurching drunkenly to her feet, Linda yanked up her trousers and pushed past the woman into the cemetery.

  ‘My dear!’ the querulous voice called after her, but she kept going, hugging her open coat around her against the cold and trying to focus properly on the gateway at the end of the path. Where the hell was she? She thought she knew Bridgwater, but this part was foreign territory to her.

  A police car drove past the church at speed as she gained the street and she shrank into the doorway of an adjacent house, waiting for the car’s stop-lights to flash, indicating he had clocked her and was coming back. But he kept going and she breathed a sigh of relief, cursing herself for over-reacting. Old Bill had a lot more to think about than some junkie absconder, hadn’t he? Yeah, maybe he had, but police patrols would still be on the lookout for her and sooner or later some eagle-eyed plod would get lucky. She needed to find a place where she could lie low for a bit. The money she had lifted from the bungalow had bought her a couple of extra fixes, so she was all right for a few hours. After that though, it was anybody’s guess.

  So cold, she felt so bloody cold – and hungry too – and the shakes that were starting all over again were not just due to the temperature either. Shit! Not already? Her last fix had only been a few hours ago. It couldn’t be time so soon, surely?

  She grabbed a bottle of milk from a doorstep (no doubt a morning delivery left there after someone had already gone to work. Shame to waste it, she mused cynically, and gulped it down as she kept walking, hardly aware of the fact that the milk was already off. Eventually she made it to a wide main road clogged with traffic. Ah, the A39. Now she knew where she was. A couple of the drivers leered at her through their windows and she glared back at them, knowing full well what they were thinking. Dirty bastards. Yeah, but it might come to that later if she couldn’t get another fix after she’d run out again. A quick screw used to be a good source of bread, but she had no illusions about herself. She might look OK with her clothes on, but naked, it was a different story. Needle tracks and collapsed veins had taken their toll on her physical appearance and her only pick-ups now had to be knee-tremblers well after dark, or with her own diseased kind.

  Another police car drove past and this time the stop-lights came on a little too quickly. The uniformed passenger’s head was turned in her direction. They’d clocked her!

  She cast them a quick sidelong glance (stupid, it only made her look even more guilty) and saw they were now trying to turn round, blue lights flashing at the clogged traffic. As she darted into another side-road and ran, she heard the scream of the siren. But they were too late. She was through a broken gate and had ducked down behind a four foot high wall even as they raced past.

  But she felt no sense of triumph. Crouched among piles of rubble on the dismal piece of waste-ground that had given her temporary refuge, she found herself frantically trying to breathe as she fought against the panic that threatened to engulf her. OK, so she had managed to elude the plods this time, but the odds on her being able to do the same thing again were a bookie’s nightmare. Her only hope was to drop out of sight until all the fuss died down. Trouble was, she wasn’t exactly flush with options as to where to go.

  It was burned into Kate Hamblin’s subconscious. Pain, bitter cold, swirling choking water, accompanied by a confusion of pulsing blue and red lights. Doors banging, loud unintelligible voices, followed by movement all around her. The scream of machinery, metal tearing, someone tugging and lifting; more pain and … emptiness.

  Then quite suddenly unexpected warmth, blazing lights, a choking antiseptic smell, and again the sound of unintelligible voices, this time soft and reassuring. She opened her eyes, but saw only pale blobs floating around her like ethereal balloons, blobs that seemed to lurch towards her, before fading into a pastel blue nothingness. Finally, nausea, a spinning sensation and a return to oblivion.

  More voices – this time stronger – and someone calling her name. She found herself struggling upwards through a heavy blackness; surfacing, responding, seeking. And as the darkness began to fade, just one disembodied white face materializing from nowhere and drifting towards her – a face strangely distorted, unrecognizable, like that viewed through a badly focused camera lens. Then suddenly her vision adjusting, as if someone had manipulated a hidden switch, and everything snapping into place with a jolt.

  The bearded Asian man in the turban and long white coat smiled down at her and she forced a smile back. She was lying on a trolley of some sort, dressed in a cotton gown. She could hear the hubbub of conversation all around her and the sound of footsteps coming and going on hard uncarpeted floors.

  ‘Feeling better?’ he said. ‘You were very lucky. Some minor concussion we think and a little bit of whiplash, plus superficial bruising to your ribs, but that’s all. You’ve been out for quite a while.’

  ‘Where am
I?’ she queried weakly, trying to put things together in her disordered mind.

  ‘A & E,’ he replied. ‘You had a nasty accident, remember?’

  She turned her head, noticing the curtains drawn around her for the first time. Hospital? Now something began to stir in her befuddled brain, began to push up through the mental fog. Moonlight, the gleam of icy water, a sinister black shadow rising up over her – no, not a shadow, a Land Rover, and a man grinning through the driver’s window; bearded, heavy-set, wearing a thick coat and baseball cap.

  Then abruptly, a nightmare montage of flashbacks coming together with bludgeoning force. The police Transit blast, the meeting with Duval under the pier, the run-in with Hayden at the suspect’s house and the collision with the Land Rover which had forced her off the road. All now recalled with sickening clarity.

  ‘We’d like to do a CT scan and blood tests just to make sure,’ the doctor continued. ‘Then we’ll be keeping you in overnight for observation. If all goes well, you should be out of here sometime tomorrow.’

  Keeping me in until tomorrow?

  Kate’s eyes widened as she thought of Duval and his note. What if he had been trying to contact her and thought she had reneged on their agreement? He could disappear for good. Then what? ‘Tomorrow?’ she gasped. ‘But I need …’ Her voice trailed off as she tried to sit up, but fell back on to her pillow with a gasp of pain.

  He frowned reprovingly. ‘Not a good idea to do that,’ he said. ‘Best to lie still and rest. You’ve got some quite nasty bruises. I’ll get you some painkillers and we’ll speak again later.’

  The CT scan took longer than she had expected and, dosed up with strong painkillers, she fell into a deep sleep again as she was wheeled away from the unit; lost in a recurring nightmare of blazing headlights, moonlight on dark water and the screeching of tortured metal. When she awoke she found herself in a small sunlit room, lying in a proper bed – with Roz Callow sitting in a chair beside her, wearing an expression of cynical amusement.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Callow drawled. ‘The voyager returns. You had us all worried.’

  Kate closed her eyes tightly for a second as if she wanted to shut out the vision of the DCI’s cold hard face.

  ‘I must admit though,’ Callow continued, ‘I am rather curious as to what you were doing roaming around the Levels in the early hours of the morning.’

  ‘Went for a drive,’ Kate replied sullenly, her voice distant and slightly slurred.

  Callow raised an eyebrow. ‘Strange that your drive should take you to within spitting distance of Terry Duval’s place though, isn’t it?’

  Kate blinked several times, trying to clear the fug clouding her brain, then winced at the pain in her chest and neck. ‘Wanted to look at murder scene again,’ she mumbled. ‘Needed to lay a ghost.’

  ‘Right,’ the DCI said, nodding slowly. ‘And precisely what ghost are we talking about?’

  Kate managed to ease herself up higher on to the pillow, teeth gritted against her pain. ‘Wanted to see if I could remember anything else,’ she said, her voice now strengthening in spite of her condition.

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘Only what I’ve already told you.’

  Callow sat back in her chair, her dark eyes boring into her. ‘You do seem to like rhynes though, don’t you?’ she said. ‘This is the second time you’ve put yourself in one. Fall asleep at the wheel, did you?’

  Kate felt a spurt of irritation, which had the effect of clearing the last vestiges of fug trying to reinfect her brain. ‘I didn’t put myself in the rhyne,’ she retorted, ‘and I wasn’t asleep. I was hit from behind by another vehicle and driven off the road.’

  Callow feigned puzzlement. ‘But Traffic tell me your car had gone into the rhyne facing in the wrong direction and that, judging by your tyre tracks, you must have crossed from the other side of the road to end up in that position.’

  ‘I did.’

  Callow shook her head. ‘Bit of a strange accident though, you have to agree? If you were struck by another vehicle, I would have thought you’d have ended up in the rhyne on your own side of the road.’

  Kate grimaced as the flashbacks steadied into a more solid picture. ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ she disputed. ‘It was deliberate – an attempt to silence me as a possible witness – and the motor was the same Land Rover I saw at the murder scene.’

  ‘Was it indeed? And did you get the number this time?’

  ‘No, everything happened too quickly.’

  ‘Then how can you possibly say it was the same Land Rover?’

  ‘I recognized it; I’d know it anywhere.’

  ‘What, in the dark – with the vehicle behind you?’

  Kate forced herself to remain controlled. ‘After shunting me into the bend,’ she said patiently, ‘it came alongside and slammed into my nearside wing, forcing me across the road into the rhyne.’

  Callow smirked. ‘Oh, how very convenient,’ she sneered. ‘And what about the driver?’

  Kate met her gaze without flinching. ‘Heavy build, with a full beard and wearing a coat and baseball cap,’ she replied. ‘So, nothing like Terry Duval.’

  The DCI raised an eyebrow. ‘Remarkable description, considering it was dark at the time and you were heading into the rhyne.’

  ‘I know what I saw.’

  Callow leaned towards her. ‘You have a vivid imagination, young lady, I’ll give you that,’ she said, her tone suddenly menacing. ‘But you and I know that that’s all it is, don’t we? Why can’t you just accept that Terry Duval is the man we want and stop trying to protect him?’

  ‘I’m not trying to protect anyone,’ Kate flared, then immediately flinched with a sharp exclamation as her anger triggered more pain in her head and chest. ‘I just want the people who murdered Andy and Alf nailed and I don’t happen to think Terry Duval is the culprit.’

  Heedless of her obvious discomfort, Callow pressed on with her ruthless interrogation. ‘Oh don’t you? Well, whatever you choose to think, Miss Hamblin, the investigation has nothing to do with you anyway, so my advice is to keep your nose out of it.’ She sat back and popped one of her customary mints into her mouth. ‘But on to another matter. A little bird tells me you were checked by a patrol on the beach at Burnham just before the accident. Mind telling me what you were doing there at between two and three in the morning?’

  For a moment Kate was thrown and she seemed to dissolve before Callow’s hard stare. ‘I – I went for a walk to clear my head,’ she said finally.

  The DCI grunted. ‘Is that right? And what were you doing under the pier? Collecting sea shells?’

  Kate swallowed several times. ‘I got caught short and—’

  ‘What again?’ Callow gave a harsh laugh. ‘While you’re in here, you should tell the doctor about your bladder problem. He might be able to give you something for it.’

  She snapped to her feet and stood over Kate like some predatory bird. ‘You’re up to something, my girl,’ she grated, ‘and in the end you’re going to tell me exactly what it is, I promise you.’

  But that was as far as she got, for her interrogation was suddenly and dramatically cut short by an imperious voice from the door behind her. ‘What the devil is going on here?’

  The sister was lean, middle-aged and bristling with indignation as she strode into the room.

  Callow threw her a contemptuous glance and waved her warrant card airily in her direction. ‘Police,’ she said, ‘DCI Callow.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn who you are,’ the sister blazed. ‘This patient is under my care and you have no business being in here.’

  Callow’s eyes flashed dangerously. ‘I don’t think you realize who I am,’ she retorted.

  But the sister was incapable of being intimidated. ‘I don’t need to realize anything,’ she cut in again. ‘In this hospital I am in charge and you will leave here immediately or I will call security and have you ejected. Is that clear?’

  Callow’s expres
sion dripped more venom than a rattlesnake’s fangs as she wheeled and marched from the room, but Kate took no satisfaction from her humiliation. She knew that, as of now, her DCI would be really out for blood and if she failed to deliver Terry Duval at the end of it all, she could say goodbye to everything she had ever worked for. She was still thinking about that when she drifted off into another troubled sleep.

  The local newspaper screamed its headline from the battered billboard:

  MURDER COP IN CRASH

  Twister left his Land Rover on double yellow lines with the engine running and hurried into the newsagents twenty yards away. He reemerged with a grim face and climbed back into his vehicle, scanning the story and noting, with a tightening of his facial muscles, the photograph beneath the headline showing Kate Hamblin’s MX5 being winched out of the rhyne by a breakdown truck bearing the sign: ‘Jury’s of Bridgwater’.

  Unbelievable. The bitch got out alive.

  He dropped the newspaper on to the front passenger seat and sat there for a few minutes, staring out of the windscreen, but seeing nothing as he tapped the steering wheel rhythmically with the fingers of one hand. When his mobile rang, he gave a twisted grin. Right on cue.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ a familiar voice snarled. ‘Been trying to get you all morning.’