by David Hodges
The screech of tortured metal and the crunch of impacting vehicles followed them into the side-street Duval had selected and he managed a fierce grin as he slammed the accelerator to the floor. ‘That should hold ’em up for a bit,’ he said. ‘Bloody road’ll be blocked.’
Kate felt sick. ‘How could you do that?’ she choked. ‘All those innocent people.’
Duval snorted. ‘Why should I care?’ he snarled. ‘No one gives a toss about me.’
‘They will now,’ she retorted. ‘Every copper in the force will be looking for you now you’ve snatched me.’
‘What choice did I have?’ he retorted and, taking his eyes off the road longer than he should have done, allowed the Land Rover to clip a chunk out of the verge before he yanked it back on to the tarmac. ‘Last night changed everythin’.’
‘Last night? What do you mean?’
He scowled. ‘Hadn’t heard from you, had I? So I went to your flat to see if you was in. Found the door open an’—’
Kate took a deep breath. ‘You found Linda?’ she said, her voice cracking open like a nut.
He nodded. ‘If that were her name,’ he replied. ‘Dead as mutton. Neck broke.’
Her expression hardened. ‘You expect me to believe you just found her?’
He threw her another glance. ‘Believe what you like, but I didn’t stiff her, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at – why would I? Thought she were you till I saw you just now in the street.’
She still looked far from convinced. ‘And you didn’t see anyone else at the scene, I suppose?’
He grunted. ‘Oh, I saw someone all right. Come out the flat just before I quit the cupboard where I was hidin’.’
‘And what did he look like?’
‘Couldn’t say. Didn’t see his face. Just a big geezer in a hooded coat.’
‘Convenient.’
‘Yeah, well, what did you expect – his inside leg measurement?’
‘So what were you doing back there just now – especially in the very motor the police are looking for?’
He turned off the road they were following into an even narrower lane, studying his interior mirror intently as he did so. ‘Left me prints all over the flat, didn’t I?’ he replied. ‘Went back to see if I could clean up before the stiff were found by someone, but I was too bloody late. Old Bill was there already.’
She released her breath in a deep trembling sigh, sensing in her water that he was telling the truth despite the glibness of his story. ‘That makes things a lot more awkward.’
‘Don’t you think I can see that?’ He glanced at her again, but tried to keep a weather eye on the road as well this time. ‘So did you get the note?’
She made a tight face. ‘Fat lot of good that will do you now,’ she said. ‘When SOCO lift your prints and match them to your criminal record, you’ll be more oven-ready than a Christmas turkey.’
He scowled again. ‘That’s why I need the bloody thing; it’s all I’ve got.’
She nodded slowly. ‘We had a deal: you get the note and I get to take you in.’
He shook his head. ‘Situation’s changed. I’m splittin’ altogether. But I have to have the note just in case things go pear-shaped.’
They could hardly get more pear-shaped than they are already, she mused, but decided not to labour that particular point. Instead she said, ‘Then you’d better pull over so I can give you the note and you can let me out.’
He shook his head grimly. ‘No way. I can’t risk you callin’ up your mates afterwards. Anyway, I might need you later as insurance.’
Before she could argue the point, her mobile suddenly shrilled.
‘Leave it,’ he rapped as her hand darted towards her pocket.
She hesitated. ‘Let me at least look to see who it is.’
‘I said leave it – better still, throw it out the window.’
‘What?’
‘Do it – now.’
Her gaze darted to the gun still visible in his lap and she moistened dry lips, deciding that a refusal was inadvisable under the circumstances.
They were following a long straight stretch of road, bordered on both sides by the familiar reed-fringed rhynes and, opening her window, she reluctantly tossed the mobile out and saw it bounce once on the road before springing off into some long grass. Now she really was in the cart, with no prospect of calling for assistance even if the opportunity did arise.
Closing the window again, she gripped her hands tightly together in a gesture of frustration at the hopelessness of her situation. She did her best to try and keep calm, but she couldn’t help dwelling on the thought that was uppermost in her mind: what would happen to her when she finally handed the note over to Duval and she was no longer of any use to him? Would it be a bullet in the back of the head, or would she feel his calloused hands round her throat, crushing the life out of her before her weighted body was dumped in a rhyne or allowed to sink into the slime of a convenient peat bog?
And that critical moment was brought a lot closer when the Land Rover suddenly slowed and turned on to a track, bordered by yet another rhyne and bearing a dilapidated wooden sign, ‘Danger. Keep Out’. Almost immediately they entered a stunted copse and a few yards further on the track emerged on to a broken concrete hard-standing scattered with rusted machinery and piles of rubble. Kate glimpsed half-buried narrow-gauge railway lines curling away between derelict sheds and beyond, a massive red brick building dwarfed by an even bigger pencil-like chimney.
‘What is this place?’ she queried nervously, as they pulled up between two of the sheds and he switched off.
‘Old pumpin’ station,’ he replied. ‘Abandoned twenty years ago.’ He pointed the pistol at her again and nodded impatiently at the passenger door. ‘Out – and no Action Woman stuff neither.’
She unclipped her seatbelt and slid from her seat on to the broken concrete, considering taking to her heels while he was still climbing out of his seat, then dismissing the idea as a complete non-starter.
He came round to her side of the vehicle and waved the pistol towards the big brick building with the chimney. ‘Over there.’
She felt the barrel of the pistol pushing her forward as she picked her way among the debris in the direction he indicated, stopping in front of a pair of green doors. Ahead of her, beyond the rhyne, she saw a river curling away across country from behind the building. She had no real idea where she was, but assumed the river was likely to be the Parrett, though she couldn’t be sure.
Duval reached past her to unlock the padlock securing the doors and gripped her arm tightly to pull her back a short distance before opening one of them wide.
‘Inside,’ he ordered.
The strong smell of damp and decay issued from the gloom. He produced a torch and directed it ahead of her. She glimpsed several rows of pipes and what looked like a rusted boiler with its hatch door wide open and hanging off. She also glimpsed a pile of blankets in one corner and a dozen or so opened tins and plastic food wrappers scattered around them – all the detritus of someone sleeping rough.
‘Just like home,’ he sneered, and reached above her head.
She heard the rasp of a match and a butane lamp sprang into life on a chain suspended from a low steel girder. Shadows crowded in on her and she shivered. She saw that they were standing on the lower section of a split-level floor, with a heavy machine of some sort – no doubt the pumping engine – occupying the upper level. Even though she knew nothing about pumping engines, she could see that this one was not connected to anything and appeared to be little more than a skeleton, with much of its parts missing.
Duval prodded her forward to the foot of a row of steps accessing the upper level and lit another lamp dangling from its chain. Now Kate could see that the floor beyond the engine plunged into a deep shaft and she shivered again.
‘That’s where they pumped the water up from the rhyne before dumpin’ it in the river,’ Duval said at her elbow and, no doubt sensing her fear
, added meaningly, ‘Good place to dump anythin’ you want to get rid of …’
She turned to face him, her heels against the lower step. She could smell his rancid breath and flinched. ‘So this is where you’ve been hiding all this time then?’ she blurted, anxious to change the subject, but suffering a sudden spasm of reflux, which reduced her voice to an asthmatic wheeze.
He towered over her, the gun in his hand inches from her stomach. ‘Just give me the note,’ he rapped, ignoring her question and holding out his other hand.
She clenched her fists tightly by her sides. ‘We had a deal.’
He took a deep rasping breath. ‘Look, lady, I’m not going to play games with you. Give me the note or I’ll just rip all your clothes off until I find it – your choice.’
She glared at him, her sense of betrayal overriding her fear. ‘I tried to help you because I thought you were innocent,’ she said bitterly. ‘I don’t know why I bothered.’
He emitted a sneering laugh. ‘Help me?’ he echoed. ‘You didn’t do it for me, love, so don’t kid yourself. You did it to earn yourself some mega Brownie points for bringin’ me in – nothin’ more. Now, the note.’
She thought about knocking his arm sideways and running, but knew that that sort of thing only happened in films. He would just put a bullet in her back, search her clothing for the note, as he’d threatened to do, then dump her body down the shaft. All nice and tidy.
Feeling totally helpless, she fumbled in her pocket and produced the crumpled piece of paper. He snatched it from her before she could even straighten it out and moving away a few feet to subject it to a brief scrutiny under the butane lamp, he grunted his satisfaction. ‘You done well, girl.’
Then, slipping the note into his coat pocket with his other hand, he studied her fixedly for a moment. ‘Only problem is,’ he said, ‘what do I do with you now?’
But Kate made no reply, for, as she stared with a kind of morbid fascination at the little black pistol in his hand, she already knew what the answer to that question was going to be and it numbed every fibre of her being.
chapter 19
CRIME REPORTER, PETER Devlin, was definitely not feeling his best. The door of Duval’s Land Rover had missed his head by a fraction, but it had nevertheless bowled him over and he had struck his head on the pavement with some force. He now sported a nasty gash on his temple and a two-inch circle of rapidly worsening discolouration round the wound that resembled the skin of a bruised pear.
By rights he should have gone to hospital, but he had refused the offer from the young policewoman who had raced across the road from her station outside Kate Hamblin’s flat to help him. Now, sat on the low wall of an adjacent garden, he held a handkerchief to his head, scowling as he passed the information about the incident to his editor on his mobile phone, while his colleagues, standing around in a bristling group with notebooks or microphones in their hands, listened attentively to what he had to say.
The hatchet-faced woman in the suit pushed her way through the crowd as he returned the mobile to his pocket, and stood over him, studying him with the intensity of a vulture waiting for a potential meal to keel over.
‘DCI Callow,’ she introduced herself. ‘What was all that about?’
Devlin returned her stare. ‘Bloody maniac in the Land Rover drove straight at me,’ he retorted. ‘Snatched your DC Hamblin and drove off.’
Callow’s eyes narrowed. ‘Kate Hamblin?’
Devlin nodded. ‘Guy pointed a gun at her and told her to get in.’
‘A gun? What sort of a gun?’
Devlin shrugged. ‘Pistol of some sort, I think. Glimpsed the thing as I was trying to get up again.’
‘What did the man look like?’
‘Dunno, only noticed the gun.’
Callow was unable to conceal her disappointment. ‘You sure it was a firearm and she didn’t just get in of her own accord?’
There was contempt written into Devlin’s expression now, as he dabbed the gash in his forehead again. ‘It was either a gun or the guy had one hell of an erection,’ he retorted with heavy sarcasm. ‘And before you ask, I didn’t get the Land Rover’s number.’
Callow nodded and treated him to a grim smile. She didn’t need it. Having seen the Land Rover mount the pavement, then roar away from her vantage point in Kate Hamblin’s flat, she already knew the number and who the driver was, but she had no intention of sharing that information with Devlin.
‘Thank you for your assistance anyway,’ she said and, moving away out of earshot of the reporters, she called up Detective Superintendent Davey on his mobile. ‘Where are you, guv?’ she queried.
There was a weary sigh. ‘Well, I was heading home for a bite to eat,’ Davey replied. ‘What’s up now? I only left you ten minutes ago.’
Callow smirked her malicious satisfaction. ‘Sorry, guv,’ she said without meaning it, ‘but we have a bit of a problem.’
And that really was an understatement.
Hayden Lewis was worried, confused and – yes – angry. Where the hell had Kate got to? He had left her at the café over an hour ago and had been fully expecting her to call in at the police station for her lift when she’d finished her chat with Pauline, but she just hadn’t materialized. Without a car though, where could she have gone? It would hardly be on a shopping trip, for Highbridge was pretty much the pits in that respect.
The sour-faced waitress wasn’t much help either. ‘Just upped and went,’ she said.
‘How long ago?’
‘Dunno. Wasn’t watchin’.’
‘Well, did she leave with anyone?’
‘Ain’t got the faintest.’
Lewis muttered an oath and stomped from the café, slamming the door behind him. Once outside, he paused a moment to study the street in both directions, but there was still no sign of her.
Fumbling in his pocket, he tore his mobile free of the lining and tried to dial her mobile number, but rang off again as the answer voice started telling him to leave a message.
Damn it! Now what?
For a few minutes he hung around outside the café, walking up and down in a state of visible agitation. Then abruptly, as another thought occurred to him, he swung on his heel and headed towards the Bridgwater Road.
Pauline Cross answered the door to him almost immediately and she looked surprised when he asked if Kate was with her.
‘She’s not here,’ she told him, shaking her head. ‘I left her at the café. I did offer to call her a taxi, but she said she’d get you to run her home.’
‘Never turned up at the nick,’ he replied.
Pauline frowned. ‘Why don’t you ring her mobile?’
‘Tried that,’ he snapped irritably. ‘Not answering.’
Now Pauline looked worried. ‘I hope she’s all right,’ she said.
‘So do I,’ he agreed, then added as much to reassure himself as anything else, ‘Maybe we’ve crossed paths and she’s back at the nick now.’
But she wasn’t and Dick Stacey, the office manager, broke the news to him as he pushed through into the CID office.
‘Balloon’s gone up,’ he said. ‘Duval has Kate and he’s armed. Force chopper spotted them at an old pumping station near the Parrett and an ARV3 is en route.’
Lewis felt something crawl down his spine. Kate in the middle of a stand-off between Duval and an armed police team? The thought horrified him. ‘What pumping station?’ he demanded hoarsely.
‘Best you don’t get involved,’ Stacey advised. ‘Guv’nor won’t like it.’
‘What pumping station?’ Lewis almost shouted. ‘Come on, man, tell me.’
Stacey made a face and crossed to a map of the Levels on the wall. ‘There,’ he said, pointing a nicotine-stained finger. ‘That’s if you want your head blown off.’
But Lewis didn’t hear him. He was already crashing back through the door – for the second time since the investigation had begun bursting out of the office like a madman.
‘Bl
oody women,’ Stacey muttered.
Kate Hamblin heard the thud of rotor blades moments before Duval and she instinctively glanced upwards, even though she knew she couldn’t see anything from inside the building. She felt her heart start to race, sure in her own mind that it had to be the police chopper, and desperately hoping that if it was, the crew would spot Duval’s Land Rover parked in the open.
Duval’s face had once more developed a heavy scowl and there was a strange glint in his eyes that Kate read as a mixture of anger and panic as he also threw a swift glance towards the roof. ‘Get over here,’ he snarled, the pistol in his hand lunging towards her like a striking snake.
Faced with no other option, she did as she was told.
‘Turn around,’ he snapped and, when she did so, closing her eyes tightly for a second when the barrel of the gun pressed into her neck, he leaned close to her ear. ‘One silly move,’ he warned, ‘an’ I’ll blow your soddin’ head off. Got it?’
She nodded weakly and he pushed her forward. ‘To the door and let’s take a look,’ he said.
Keeping her in the shadow of the doorway, he peered over her shoulder to where he had left his Land Rover. The chopper was hovering directly over the vehicle, the big ‘Police’ sign clearly visible on the machine and a crew member leaning out through the open cockpit door to study the vehicle.
‘Should have put the bloody thing in the shed like I usually do,’ Duval breathed, then dug the pistol into her neck again. ‘Who would be in that thing then?’
Kate swallowed. ‘Pilot and observer,’ she said.
‘Would they be tooled up?’
‘I don’t know. Could be a couple of armed officers in the back.’ He thought about that for a second. ‘Then we wait to see,’ he said, ‘an’ if there are, you get it first.’
As he spoke, the helicopter suddenly lifted and began to circle the site, skimming the ruined buildings, then dropping between them like a giant flying bug searching for prey. Duval pulled Kate back as the machine turned its attention to the pump house, peering in through the door just above the ground and shaking the building to its foundations. Behind her, she felt Duval tense expectantly. But then the chopper had lifted again and was racing away across the fields before banking sharply and hovering at a distance above the road into the site. At the same moment she heard the sirens and, as Duval pressed her forward to the door again, glimpsed the flashing strobes through gaps in the buildings, apparently stationary at the entrance to the site.
