‘Perfectly,’ Alex murmured, knowing this was his one concession that she could be right. ‘I’m free to go then? You’re not thinking of putting me in a cell for the night for safe keeping?’
‘Flippancy will get you nowhere, and I’d advise you to remember that.’
As she reached the door she could hear him already going through the motions of getting a team together, barking out orders to his minions to look up files, to check addresses, and to put everything else on hold. Thank God. At last someone was taking Jane Leng’s obsession seriously.
*
It was getting towards dusk when she got back to her car and she slid inside it thankfully. It was bitterly cold and she was ravenous by now, and she was distressed over what had happened to Keith Martin. He wasn’t a likeable person, but nobody deserved to be shot in the head at close range, or any other range. But as she began to drive slowly in streets that were sparkling with frost, there was also a huge feeling of relief that it was in someone else’s hands now. Whatever the outcome of it all the police would deal with it.
She felt the coldness in her neck at the same time as she heard the soft voice behind her. In a split second she had glanced in her mirror and seen the shadowy figure in the back seat of her car. In the same split second she remembered that she had gone back into the police station without locking it, and that the coldness in her neck was something very solid and very lethal — and probably the same gun that had recently blown Keith Martin’s brains out.
‘Drive, Miss Best,’ the voice said in a husky whisper.
‘I am driving,’ she croaked. ‘I’m going home —’
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’
‘Where then?’ she said, swallowing dryly. ‘Don’t you know?’
She was getting tired of this cat and mouse game, but not too tired to know that with one false move she could end up like Keith Martin. The thought of leaning on the horn, or veering her car and smashing it into the side of the road to alert passers-by didn’t appeal, either. If this guy was as ruthless as she suspected, she’d be dead meat in a moment.
‘I’m not a mind-reader!’ she snapped, trying to ignore the ferociously rapid beat of her heart.
She glanced into her mirror again as they passed through some street lights, and saw the streaked highlights in his hair. Phil Cordell’s hair. And she remembered instantly the big car that she had almost collided with in her haste to get away from Bath.
She had only noticed it peripherally, but the memory clicked in now. It had been a people mover with darkened windows. Phil Cordell’s car, on its way to Martin’s hardware shop to do the bloody murder of a simple guy. Bastard.
‘Where are we going, then?’ she stuttered. ‘If you don’t tell me, I shall just keep driving round in circles until the petrol runs out.’
And where were petrol blockades and shortages when you needed them?
‘Wilkins’ Haulage Company, bitch. I thought you might have worked that out already, since you’re so clever.’
Alex swallowed. The image flashed into her mind of the last time she had been there with Ray Smart, when they had looked down from the road to the huge, water-filled quarry pit. But with the constant jab of steel pressing into her neck, she knew better than to refuse the command.
She supposed that to any outsiders, especially in the gloom of dusk now, they would just appear to be two people in a car, with the rear seat passenger leaning forward to give her directions. There was no way anyone would suspect that her passenger was Phil Cordell, respected teacher-cum-killer.
‘Did you have to kill Keith Martin?’ she said, before she could stop herself.
The gun stabbed into her neck, making her wince.
‘Shut up and drive. You know the way.’
She saw the road sign to Backwell lit up by her headlights and she followed it in silence until she saw the turn-off she needed. Her petrol indicator was right down on empty, she noted with a sudden flare of hope. But even if the car stopped, what would she do and where would she go? Instead, she drove as slowly as she dared in the narrow lanes, praying she would hear the scream of police sirens behind her.
‘Speed up,’ Phil ordered.
‘I can’t, unless you want me to skid off the road. There’s been heavy rain, in case you hadn’t noticed, and we’re in farming country now. They drive cattle through these lanes, and I don’t fancy ending up in a pile of cowshit.’
Terror made her coarser than usual, and she bit her lip at being reduced to it by this lout. How could she ever have found him remotely attractive?
She heard him give a low chuckle.
‘I always thought there was an earthy slut beneath that classy exterior. If we had more time I’d put it to the test —’
‘Screw you,’ she said vehemently. ‘If you think I’d fancy you in a million years —’
She cried out as he jabbed her harder with the gun and her neck throbbed.
‘We could end this here and now, Alex,’ he said, more harshly, ‘but I don’t want to deny my friends the pleasure of seeing you do it for yourself.’
‘What do you mean?’ she stuttered.
‘You’re not so good at guessing after all, are you? You’re going to drive your car straight into the quarry pit. Do you know how deep it is? If not, let me inform you —’
‘You’re mad,’ Alex said, panic-stricken now. ‘You’ll never get away with this. The police know where I am —’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. You left them playing their guessing games as usual, so don’t give me that. You might as well get used to it, my dear Miss Best. You’re going to die.’
His gloating words had the strange effect of calming Alex slightly. If she was going to die, then she was damn well going to hear the truth before it happened. It mustn’t have been all a waste of time. And in her experience, pitiful though it seemed now, murderers relished explaining themselves. Otherwise, where was the glory? She shuddered, but forced herself to ask the question.
‘So what did happen to Steven Leng?’ she said in a choked voice. ‘I’m quite sure you were involved, so don’t pretend that you weren’t.’
‘Full marks! I think you’d nearly got there too. What a shame,’ he said with mock regret. ‘You’re right, of course, and those bloody kids became far too interfering. Lennie and I had a good thing going. He was a good disciple —’
‘Of the Followers, you mean?’
‘Oh, that was just a convenient blind,’ he sneered. ‘I’m talking about my own operation.’
So much for peace and harmony then. Alex gripped the steering-wheel more tightly as the car slid on the muddy road surface in these sheltered lanes.
‘Drugs, I suppose. You’ve been done before for handling, haven’t you?’
The gun jabbed her again, though it could have been simply due to the uneven surface of the lanes they were driving through at a crawl now.
‘You have been busy, haven’t you! Yes, they’d been pinching my stuff, and I wasn’t having any of that. Steven was Lennie’s little hanger-on, and I think he wanted to prove himself by going back for more after they set the fireworks off. Only then the hut went up like an erupting volcano and he disappeared.’
‘Down the well,’ Alex supplied. Ding dong bell.
‘Probably. Who knows? And who cares? It wasn’t murder, anyway. It was an accident, and nobody can prove otherwise. And that’s enough talking,’ he said aggressively, his almost dreamy manner vanishing like magic as they approached the lane overlooking the Wilkins’ Haulage Company.
Just as before, from the higher vantage point, Alex could see the impressive office building, the yard with its lorries totally still now at this time of day, and some distance beyond it, the quarry pit. It was quite dark now, but there was a thin sliver of moon in the sky, enough to light up the milky water of the fathoms-deep quarry pit.
As her car’s headlights approached, three people emerged from the office building. She saw the two bullish Wilkins brothers, and a third man
, whose blond hair was distinctive and recognizable at once. Lennie Fry.
‘How did he get here?’ Alex croaked.
‘Oh, we had already decided it was time we co-ordinated ourselves and got rid of a few troublesome meddlers. A few phone calls did the rest.’
‘And the troublesome meddlers included Keith Martin, did it? The poor sap wouldn’t have done you any harm —’
‘But he already had, you see. He’d talked to you.’
The soft, silky voice was more menacing than if he’d shouted at her. She longed for the safety of her own fireside, and doubted that she would ever see it again. She had never felt so vulnerable, and so sick with fear. If they were outside the car maybe she could have tackled him with karate, except that he was a black belt and she was well out of practice. They said it was like sex though. Once you’d done it, you never forgot how.
Her thoughts were disjointed and hysterical, and she was light-headed through the combination of a lack of food and sheer terror. They had reached the yard now, the three men were moving forward, and there was no escape ...
‘Stop the car. I’m getting out of it now,’ Phil said in a hard voice, ‘and you will continue driving to the edge of the quarry pit —’
‘I bloody well will not!’ Alex snapped, with a last attempt at bravado as she felt the hot, humiliating gush of urine inside her trousers. ‘Do you think I’m completely off my head?’
‘It makes no difference. There’s enough brawn here to do the job for you.’
Alex realized that the others had circled the car now. Cliff and David Wilkins flanked the driver and front passenger doors, and Lennie was at the rear, where presumably he and Phil would assist in pushing her car over the edge of the quarry pit into the deep, murky, freezing waters below.
Phil got out and slammed the car door, making her jump.
‘Goodbye, Miss Best,’ he shouted, and she saw the leering faces of the others as they began to manhandle her car forward. She slammed on the brake, but it made no difference. It simply went inexorably forward, and some mad instinct of saving her precious wheels from spinning and overheating made her take the brake off again. It was completely mad, in the circumstances, but she wasn’t thinking sanely any more. Preservation was uppermost in what semblance of sanity she still had, for herself, and for this bloody car that was her pride and joy.
She was sure she was screaming inside as she saw the quarry pit approaching ... except that it wasn’t the pit approaching her, of course, it was the other way around, she thought incoherently. Or maybe she was screaming out loud. Or maybe it wasn’t her at all, but the scream of something outside herself. Something that wasn’t human at all.
In the next instant she realized the four men had let go of the car and were no longer forcing it towards the edge of the quarry pit. They had turned and run, and the whole area behind her and the slope leading down to the quarry was being filled with lights as police cars thundered towards the yard with all lights blazing.
It was the cavalry coming over the hill, she thought dizzily.
Then she realized that her car was fast gathering momentum on the slope towards the quarry pit, and there was no time to think about grabbing the brake again. Somehow her brain told her that if she did so, the car would probably go into a spin and end up submerged anyway. There was only one choice left.
She grabbed the door handle, opened it, and hurled herself out, seconds before the Suzuki upended itself like a splendidly miniature Titanic and disappeared from sight. She found herself scrabbling on the ground, clutching at mud to stop herself rolling over and following it, and sobbing into the filth as if she was making some glorious supplication.
Which she was, damn it. She was.
The next moment someone was pulling her to her feet and yelling for a blanket to put around her. She could hardly see for the blindness of tears and mud clogging her eyes. All she could register was an overwhelming relief that she was alive by a hair’s breadth, and that she was being held tightly in someone’s arms. If she hadn’t been, her knees would have buckled like the rest of her.
‘Damn foolish young woman,’ she heard Frank Gregory shout in her ear. ‘But you’re all right now, my dear, and we’ll have these four bastards for attempted murder, if nothing else.’
Was that finally a touch of compassion for her in his voice? She hardly cared. What she desperately wanted was to crawl into bed and hide away like a wounded animal, since she had truly thought she was never going to have any of it again. But she couldn’t quite let it go at that, even if she’d lost her bloody tape recorder and her bag, and everything else in her car. She heard herself give a high-pitched laugh, because it was such a paltry worry, when she’d just escaped with her life.
‘You’re feeling hysterical now, and understandably so,’ Gregory said, as if he sensed the onset of typical female reaction.
‘No, you don’t understand at all,’ she said through chattering lips. ‘You have to question Philip Cordell about drugs. And Lennie Fry —’
‘Miss Best, you really can leave it all to us now,’ he said, quite gently for him.
‘And you’ll excavate the old well to see if Steven did end up in there?’ she persisted, even though her head seemed to be floating somewhere above her body now as he steered her towards a waiting police car.
Out of the corner of her eye she could see the four men being bundled none too carefully inside a larger police wagon. Thank God.
‘Everything will be taken care of, Alex. Now let’s get you home, and I’ll arrange for a WPC to spend the night with you.’
‘I don’t want anybody —’
But she did. She knew she did. She wanted Nick, but she knew she couldn’t have him, because he was miles away in London. And since she couldn’t bear to be alone, she succumbed to having the WPC stay with her.
*
She told the woman she would never sleep anyway, knowing that her nerves were as taut as violin strings. She spent half an hour in the bath, weeping like a baby because she couldn’t stop, and made no protest when the buxom WPC helped her out and dried her, pushed her unresisting arms into her nightdress and tucked her up in bed with a hot water bottle. She might have been back home on the farm with her mother’s ministrations, or Aunt Harriet’s, and that started the weeping again until she fell into an exhausted sleep.
Sometime towards dawn she awoke with a mild feeling of horror, because she was no longer alone in her bed.
Even though that person was on top of the bedclothes and she was inside them, someone was holding her tightly, and she prayed that she hadn’t been mistaken in her assessment of the WPC ...
‘I thought you were never going to wake up,’ she heard a familiar voice say close to her cheek.
‘Nick! How did you get here? Oh Nick—’ she babbled, the weak tears starting again as yesterday’s memory flooded in.
‘Hush darling, you’re quite safe now. Gregory called me as soon as they got you home. Apparently you’d been practically delirious in the police car, and were asking for me. I was flattered,’ he said, making a joke of it, but the deepening of his voice betrayed how worried he’d been. ‘I sent the WPC home, by the way. I got my leave brought forward and extended, and I’m here now.’
‘Thank God. It was so awful, Nick,’ she said with a violent shudder, the images still too vivid in her mind to dismiss.
‘I know. I heard. And you’ll be needing a new car now too.’
She managed a small grin at the incongruous remark. But she knew it was his way of dealing with things. Bringing her back to basics. To normality. Diffusing a bad situation. Caring for her.
‘I do love you, Nick.’
‘I know. And I love you too.’
And somehow she knew he recognized her words for what they were. The love of a dear friend. Maybe more. Maybe not. But not now.
Without warning she felt her stomach rumble, and they both heard it.
‘Good God, what was that? It sounded like Concorde taking
off,’ he said.
‘No, just me, reacting to the fact that I’ve eaten nothing since sometime yesterday morning.’
‘Well, since I don’t want you passing out on me, get up slowly while I cook us both a gigantic breakfast. What do you say to that?’
‘I say this is no time for dieting,’ Alex said solemnly, her mouth starting to water just at the thought of it.
*
A few days later they stood at the cordoned-off site of what had once been an old hut in the woods, now surrounded by all the paraphernalia of a police incident zone while the excavation of the dried-up well began. Alex hadn’t objected when Nick said he had no intention of leaving her side for a while yet. Even though she knew she couldn’t, and mustn’t, be wet-nursed after every case. It wasn’t the way she operated. But just this once.
The ground was appallingly heavy and sticky with continual rain and then hardening frost, but after what seemed like an endless wait the team reported that they had found some bones that could be human. They would have to go to forensics for final confirmation, but in Alex’s mind it was confirmation enough that this was all that remained of a sixteen-year-old boy called Steven Leng.
Without warning she felt physically sick, and had to bolt for the trees before she disgraced herself in public.
‘Here — use these to clean yourself up,’ Nick said a few minutes later, handing her some tissues to wipe her mouth and streaming eyes.
‘You should have stayed back there. I don’t want you to see me like this,’ she stuttered in embarrassment.
‘Why not? I’ve seen you practically every other way.’ His teasing voice changed, seeing her distress. ‘It’s time for us to go, sweetheart. There’s nothing more we can do here.’
‘But is Gregory convinced that the bones belonged to Steven?’ she went on. ‘It’s important that I know, Nick.’
‘He’s as convinced as anybody can be at this stage, but until it’s officially confirmed, he won’t make any statements.’
‘I know, but I just want a word with him,’ she pleaded, knowing there was still something only she could do. She owed it to Jane.
Deadly Suspicions (Alexandra Best Investigations Book 3) Page 26
