Firetrap

by David Hodges

  Plainly, Duval’s shooting had not fazed him in the least. In fact, he seemed positively delighted with the result and actually hummed to himself as he poured them both a cup of tea from the pot he had had sent up from the shift kitchen.

  What followed was nothing like the interrogations Kate had been subjected to throughout the inquiry and it was certainly nothing like any debriefing she had experienced in her career before. There was no aggressive questioning, no in-depth probing and certainly none of the interview trickery she had learned to expect. In fact, the whole thing was conducted in the sort of relaxed informal style employed by psychiatrists with their clients and, as the debriefing progressed, it dawned on her that it was actually more to do with shoring up any possible weaknesses in the inquiry team’s pre-judged conclusions about the case than anything else.

  Davey wanted – no, his career reputation needed – a speedy detection and he was desperate to ensure that nothing prevented that from happening. Duval’s death meant no long-winded interviews, no questions asked about some of the anomalies that had arisen during the investigation, and no protracted court proceedings. Naturally, there would be an inquest, plus the standard IPCC investigation into the actual shooting of Duval, but that was it. All nice and tidy. A result to be proud of – provided Kate Hamblin didn’t rock the boat, of course.

  No wonder Callow had been excluded from the debriefing. The last thing Davey wanted was for any loose ends to be opened up by the vicious incisive questioning of someone who had a personal axe to grind and, as for Kate herself, she was in a real cleft stick. Allowing Davey to bury the truth and the real killer to go free went against everything she believed in, but for the present she had no choice. To make a stand meant revealing her involvement with Duval, resulting in the destruction not only of her own career, but that of the faithful Hayden as well. So she had no choice but to bite her tongue and go along with the charade, nodding sagely in all the right places and trying to control her trembling fingers as she finished her cup of tea.

  ‘So, Kate,’ Davey summarized, standing up to indicate the debriefing was now over, ‘I think we can safely say we have achieved a very successful result in this inquiry.’ He smiled with the sincerity of a crocodile. ‘And much of it is down to you.’ He patted her on the arm, adding the lie: ‘I’ll make sure you get a mention in dispatches, of course.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she responded and left the room quickly before she was sick.

  The thin bearded SOCO man was waiting for her on the stairs and he thrust a large padded envelope into her hands as if he were relinquishing hold of a bomb. ‘You’re mates with Hayden Lewis, aren’t you?’ he queried.

  She hesitated, wondering if this was some sort of trick. ‘He asked me to do a rush job for him on the quiet like,’ he explained, turning back down the stairs. ‘Give that to him, will you? I can’t raise him.’

  ‘What on earth is it?’ she called after him, weighing the envelope in one hand.

  He half-turned. ‘You’d better ask him,’ he retorted. ‘I just want shot of the bloody thing.’

  Then he was gone, clattering down the stairs as if pursued by the hounds of hell. Frowning, Kate stared after him, then abruptly shrugged. She’d had enough excitement for one day and all she wanted to do now was sleep. Hayden’s damned envelope could wait.

  Ducking into the empty CID office, she picked up the telephone and dialled his home number. The telephone rang and rang, but all she got was the BT answer phone service.

  Two of her plainclothes colleagues, one her own DS, wandered into the office, threw her hostile glances and left again after checking their in-trays. ‘So much for camaraderie,’ she muttered to herself and dialled Hayden’s mobile. Once again, a metallic voice responded, telling her to leave a message. She glanced at her watch and headed for the stairs.

  Her DI, Ted Roscoe, was in the incident room and he looked up from a text-crowded computer screen. ‘And what are you doing in here?’ he demanded. ‘You’re supposed to be on leave.’

  ‘Debrief with the guv’nor, sir,’ she replied, taken aback by the hostility in his tone. ‘Just going home – no chance of a lift, I suppose?’

  Roscoe’s heavy face creased into an even deeper scowl. ‘Too busy,’ he retorted. ‘Plenty of cabs about anyway.’

  One of the officers manning the bank of VDU consoles threw her a sympathetic glance as Roscoe stalked from the room. ‘They’ll all come around in time, Kate,’ she said. ‘Look, I’m about finished here. I’ll give you a lift, if you like.’

  Kate smiled her thanks and waited while she signed off. ‘No idea where DC Lewis has got to, I suppose?’ she asked.

  The other shook her head. ‘He was in here this afternoon, but I don’t know where he went afterwards.’

  Grabbing her civilian anorak, she led the way downstairs to her ancient Peugeot 205 in the police station yard, moving a pile of shopping from the front passenger seat so Kate could sit down. ‘You and Hayden an item?’ she grinned as she pulled out of the yard.

  ‘An item?’ Kate echoed, then chuckled in spite of herself. ‘Now that is a terrifying thought.’

  And she frowned as they headed out of Highbridge in the direction of home, another thought troubling her. So, where are you, Hayden, she mused? And why the hell aren’t you answering your phone?

  But she would have been a lot less preoccupied with Lewis had she been aware of the fact that a car, which had exited the police station yard just seconds after their departure, was now tailing them at a discreet distance along the Bridgwater Road.

  Roz Callow had returned to the station in a foul mood, determined to have it out with Davey as to why she had been excluded from the debriefing, but her mood had lifted dramatically when, using her security card to enter the building by a side door, she had glimpsed the SOCO man handing Kate the padded envelope. Now hunched over the wheel of her Audi like some hungry praying mantis, she smiled grimly as she recalled the conversation she had overheard. ‘So why would you want shot of that envelope, my friend,’ she murmured to herself, ‘and what sort of a rush job were you doing for Mr Hayden Lewis anyway?’ Could it be something to do with whatever it was the ‘love birds’ had found under Hamblin’s car perhaps? A certain something that needed to be checked out forensically? It would be easy enough to find out, of course, by leaning on the SOCO man, but that would have to come later. Right now she was much more interested in what Detective Constable Hamblin did with her padded envelope and where the envelope went, DCI Callow was determined to go too.

  Hayden Lewis at first thought there had been a power cut when he opened his front door and found the lights were dead. But then he detected the smoke from Twister’s cigarette still hanging in the air and noticed the half-open French doors standing out clearly in the blaze of moonlight.

  ‘Gordon Bennett, I’ve been done,’ he breathed and strode across to the doors to take a closer look.

  He hadn’t expected that the intruder would still be on the premises lurking in the gloom behind him, but a faint sound alerted him as he bent down to examine the lock on the doors and he pivoted round just in time. The powerful hand chopped the air instead of his neck as the policeman dived to one side, out of harm’s way, throwing the assassin off-balance. But Twister had been trained to recover quickly and he was on to his target even as Lewis scrambled to his feet, both hands locking on to his throat in a deadly grip, searching for the vital pressure points.

  But Lewis was no push-over. As he slammed back against the sideboard, he managed to snatch a wine glass from the tray he had left on top. Smashing it against the wall, he slashed his assailant across the wrist with the broken stem before the other realized what was happening, forcing him to release his grip and stagger backwards with a sharp cry of pain. The wound was bleeding badly. Twister could feel the blood pouring down his wrist into his glove and almost certainly soaking into the carpet (so much for leaving a clean crime scene), but the injury only served to heighten his focus and, kicking the co
ffee table Lewis had overturned in front of him out of the way, he slammed into the policeman with annihilating force.

  Lewis hit the floor hard and was only briefly aware of Twister’s knee in his back and the blood dripping on to his neck in a steady stream before powerful fingers found the pressure points they had been seeking and he passed out completely.

  chapter 21

  KATE WAS STARTLED to find a uniformed police officer standing outside the door of her flat when she got home, and she was only vaguely aware of the double blast of her new-found friend’s horn as the young policewoman drove away again.

  The policeman checked her warrant card carefully and nodded. ‘SOCO haven’t quite finished their examination of the crime scene,’ he said. ‘Guv’nor wants it kept intact for the time being.’

  ‘And which guv’nor would that be?’

  ‘DCI Callow, miss,’ he replied.

  She gave an understanding smile. ‘And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’ she queried. ‘Sleep in a cardboard box in the street?’

  The constable looked uncomfortable. ‘You can collect any personal items you need,’ he said, ‘as long as I accompany you.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘You can have the thrill of watching me go through my knicker drawer.’

  She could have argued the point, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, she quickly changed her clothes in the bathroom, putting on a pair of warm woollen trousers and a sweater before stuffing some underwear, tops and toiletries into a holdall, while her colleague waited discreetly outside.

  ‘All done?’ the policeman asked, staring at her bulging holdall with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Not quite,’ she replied, pulling on her woollen coat. ‘Presumably I can’t use my telephone and as I seem to have lost my mobile, you can call me a taxi, OK?’

  ‘So you’ve got somewhere to go then?’ he said, reaching for his mobile.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied, frowning again as she wondered why Hayden hadn’t answered her calls. ‘I just hope someone is home.’

  Twister was exhausted and his cut wrist, now covered by some lint and a wide bandage he had found in a kitchen drawer, hurt like hell, even though the touch of first-aid he had recalled from his army days seemed to have reduced the bleeding substantially. A slightly deeper incision, he thought, and Lewis might have ruptured an artery, which wouldn’t have been at all funny. The injury had made it difficult for him to replace the light bulbs in the chandelier, but he had finally managed it, taking care to wipe them afterwards with a damp cloth to remove any minute bloodstains he might have missed. He had also cleared up the broken wine glass, burying the fragments under a bush in the garden before carefully wiping up the blood he had dripped on to the kitchen floor and work surface. There was not much he could do about the living room carpet, however, apart from covering the bloodstain with a mat from the bedroom. With a bit of luck, no one would suspect that the mat was hiding something, but he was not that confident.

  Now sitting with the curtains pulled and the lights lit in the armchair opposite the detective, after trussing him up with sticky tape and securing him to a straight-backed chair he had brought through from the dining room, he watched him through half-closed eyelids. Give the copper his due, he had put up a pretty good fight and the ex-SAS man admired him for that. But Twister had admired plenty of his targets in the past too and that hadn’t stopped him killing them – as he knew he would be killing Lewis once he had got hold of the information he needed. So he waited patiently for him to come round, irritated by the delay, but accepting there was nothing he could do about it. And even as he shook a cigarette out of the packet, he was rewarded by a loud snort as the detective opened his eyes and stared at him blankly for a moment.

  Twister lit his cigarette and smirked. ‘Nice to see you back at last,’ he said.

  Lewis spat something out of his mouth with a muttered: ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘The electronic tracker,’ Twister responded, without answering his question. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘Tracker?’ Lewis feigned bewilderment. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  His captor hissed his disapproval. ‘I have searched this entire cottage very thoroughly,’ he breathed, ‘and there is no sign of my property. But I know you and your girlfriend found it, so what have you done with it?’

  Lewis grinned, delighted to see the heavy bandage round the other’s wrist and to know that he had managed to inflict some damage on him at any rate. ‘Worry you does it, this missing tracker?’ he mocked. ‘Afraid it might be the loose end that nails you in the end?’

  Twister rose to his feet and leaned over his prisoner. ‘Play games with me and you will be sorry,’ he warned. ‘Now, I’ll ask you again, what have you done with the tracker?’

  Lewis shrugged. ‘Damned if I know, old sport. What does it look like?’

  Twister nodded slowly. ‘Decided to play hardball, have you, my friend?’ he said. ‘Well, we shall see what your girlfriend has to say about that.’

  Lewis’s bravado evaporated. ‘You leave her out of this,’ he grated, struggling against the tape which bound him to the dining room chair.

  Twister laughed. ‘Leave her out of it?’ he echoed. ‘But she is so very much a part of it, DC Lewis – a key player one might say.’ He held up a mobile phone in the light of the lamp. ‘Interesting contact list you have on your mobile and I must admit that so far I have had a lot more success interrogating that than I have you. So shall we give little Miss Katie a call – let her know we’ve had this little chat?’

  He dialled slowly, then waited, the speaker activated and his gaze fixed intently on Lewis’s sweating face with grim satisfaction. ‘In fact, I think it would be nice if we asked her to join us, don’t you?’ he mocked. ‘A sort of reunion party.’

  The mangy looking fox had had a bad night. The twin barrels of a twelve-bore had sent him packing from a nearby farmyard and the rustlings in the marshy undergrowth had produced nothing so far save a couple of agile mice. The night was still young, but Reynard needed to fill his belly and the signs were not good.

  Padding along the frozen tarmac, following the line of the rhyne, he heard the strange sound issuing from a clump of long tangled grass on the verge and stopped dead, his nose questing the cold night air and his ears pricked up suspiciously. The loud shrilling sound was nothing like he had heard before, but the possibility of a meal drove him forward to investigate further.

  At first he saw nothing but the stiff points of tufted grass, tinged with bluish fire in the splashes of moonlight, but then something else attracted his attention – something that glittered unnaturally like a live thing. He approached it cautiously on his belly, nose now parting the grass in front of him as he went, then tensed over the thing, ready to snatch it in his jaws if it tried to flee.

  But the silver-coloured box remained motionless, its little illuminated window staring back at him with a robot-like coldness. The fox sniffed it once, but concluding that it was not worth eating, abruptly lost interest. And as he padded away, disappointed, the police issue mobile Kate had thrown out the window of Duval’s Land Rover suddenly stopped ringing and the display shut down.

  Hayden Lewis was feeling violently ill in the back of the undertaker’s van. Gagged and still tightly bound with tape, he had been zipped up inside what seemed to be a none too clean body bag, with just the upper part of his face uncovered and a familiar nauseating smell wafting off the plastic. Twister had left him for just a few minutes to collect his battered vehicle and park it down the side of the cottage in front of the Jaguar – presumably so he could check the Jag for his tracker before loading his prisoner in the back of the van under cover of darkness – and though the detective had struggled furiously with the tape while he was gone, he had found it impossible to release so much as an ankle.

  Lewis was actually more than a little surprised that he was still breathing. He had convinced himself he was about to
die from the moment Kate failed to answer her mobile telephone. The killer had been left with no reason to keep him alive once it became clear that his prisoner could no longer be used to put pressure on Kate and as the policeman was also able to identify him, imminent elimination had seemed inevitable. Yet for some reason he was still in the land of the living and he clung to the old adage that while there was life there was hope – even though he knew full well that his reprieve was almost certain to be only temporary and that he was likely to be wearing the evil-smelling body bag for good very soon.

  For Twister’s part, he was in something of a dilemma. The policeman was certainly a liability and snapping his neck there and then would obviously have been the safest bet, but that would not have helped him recover the tracker. As long as Lewis was alive he felt he had a hold on Kate Hamblin. With him dead, attractive though that proposition might be, he would lose the only bargaining counter he had.

  Staying on at the cottage in the hope that Kate would eventually turn up there was not an option, however. In the first place, it was possible that, contrary to his earlier assumptions, she had actually gone home to her flat in Bridgwater with no intention of popping over to Burtle, and secondly, Lewis’s tiny pad might be convenient at present, but it could prove to be a liability if some of the detective’s colleagues were to turn up, wondering where he was, or a friendly neighbour decided to call by to borrow some milk.

  There was a sharp reminder of the risks he was running as he drove away from the cottage too. A police patrol car appeared suddenly a couple of hundred yards down the road, travelling towards Glastonbury, and it slowed noticeably as it passed his van, the driver’s white face caught briefly in his headlights, apparently turned in his direction to study him before accelerating away. He breathed a sigh of relief. He realized only too well that an old closed van like the one he was driving was bound to attract the interest of the police and a random stop-check was the last thing he needed – especially if that stop-check resulted in a police officer taking a look in the back.