Sins of the Father

by David Harrison

  It was three-forty-five when she set off along the pavement, the dog now trotting happily at her side, stopping every few yards to sniff at the grass verge. She watched for unfamiliar cars or signs of anything out of place, but it seemed quiet. At the far end of the street a couple of young women were sitting on a garden wall, bags of shopping at their feet.

  There were builders working on the house opposite Diana’s, putting rubble into a skip parked on the road. She remembered how Pat had nearly collided with the skip lorry the day before. As she walked past one of the men looked her over and turned away: far too old to merit a wolfwhistle.

  A little further on there was a side street. She turned into it and stopped, letting the dog probe a fascinating collection of scents around a road sign.

  After ensuring that she couldn’t be seen by the women on the wall, she produced a mobile phone and made the call.

  Two minutes to four.

  ***

  The landline rang, and everyone seemed startled. Pearce checked the time.

  “A bit early.”

  “She can’t wait,” Nick said.

  All eyes were on Diana, who stood up and smiled bravely. Nick winked at her, and for a moment it was like they were kids again, offering encouragement before a big exam.

  Diana took a deep breath and then snatched up the phone. “Hello?”

  “I hope you’ve been sensible and followed my instructions so far.”

  Nick saw his sister’s face darken. “I have.”

  “Good. But because I don’t trust you, I won’t be staying on the line for long enough to be traced. Put Nick on.”

  Nick, who’d been instructed to keep Alex talking for as long as possible, took the phone and cleared his throat.

  “Hello, Alex.”

  “Nick. Nice to speak to you again.”

  “A pleasure to speak to you, too. Why don’t you pop in for a coffee?” He saw Pearce grinning and knew he’d produced the right tone of relaxed affability.

  “I’m afraid that’s not feasible,” Alex said, sounding slightly rattled.

  “Oh, I’m sure you could find the time,” Nick said.

  “Unfortunately, Nick, time’s just run out.” And she terminated the call before he could say anything else. Nick frowned and turned to the phone techs. They had taken a chance that Alex would use the same mobile as they day before, and they were already in contact with the service provider. There was an agonising wait while the male officer listened intently, and finally he nodded.

  “Seaford,” he said. “The eastern side of Seaford. That’s as close as we can get.”

  Nick turned to Pearce with savage jubilation. “I knew it.”

  She held his gaze for a long moment, and nodded decisively. She turned to Doug. “Let’s do it.”

  ***

  Alex slipped the phone back in her pocket and waited for the blast that would kill Nick and his sister.

  Nothing.

  She stared at her watch for a full ten seconds. Yesterday she had synchronised it with the timer linked to two pipe bombs, which she had placed in the loft. Following instructions she’d obtained on the internet, the bombs had been ridiculously simple to construct, fuelled by explosives taken from a box of fireworks. Ignited via a timer and a flash bulb, they should have destroyed the house and everyone in it.

  But it was now a minute past four, and nothing had happened. Annoyed rather than angry – and certainly not afraid – she tugged on the dog’s lead and walked back to the corner. The two women were still gossiping. The builders were still at work. Diana’s house remained stubbornly intact.

  Suddenly the front door opened and a man emerged: a policeman, carrying a gun. The instant he appeared, one of the builders ran over and they began to confer. They were quickly joined by more people from the house, some of them police but also Diana and Patrick.

  And then Nick. Looking up and down the street.

  She spun away and heard the squawk of a radio, horribly close. Tried to glance casually over her shoulder and saw one of the young women dip into her shopping bag and bring out a heavy police radio.

  Alex yanked the lead and began to walk, almost forgetting she was supposed to be an elderly woman. She forced herself to slow down.

  ***

  Nick stood with one foot on the low boundary wall, convinced that if he just looked carefully enough he would see Alex hiding somewhere in the empty street. One of the firearms team who had posed as a builder was talking to Doug, while DCI Pearce was speaking urgently on her radio.

  “Any sign of her?” This from Doug.

  “Nope.”

  “Okay. Get everyone roaming the streets. Are the cars ready to seal the junctions?”

  “Just waiting for the word.”

  “What about Karen and Jenny?” Doug asked Pearce.

  “Nothing to report.”

  Nick spun round, bunching his hands into fists. He briefly caught Diana’s eye, and felt the burden of her faith in him. “Has anyone been past?”

  The officer glanced resentfully at Doug before answering with a shrug. “Just an old dear walking her dog.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yeah.” The policeman scowled. “Sixty, seventy-odd. Had one of those ratty little dogs.”

  “When?”

  “Few minutes ago.”

  “Which way?”

  The policeman pointed, and Nick leapt over the wall, hitting the pavement at a sprint. “Get a car!” he shouted.

  ***

  It took him less than twenty seconds to reach the side street. He saw the old woman about to disappear around the next corner, and his movement must have caused her to turn towards him.

  He was too far away to see her face, but instinct told him it was Alex. For a fraction of a second she slowed, and something in her body language acknowledged that recognition.

  And then she was gone.

  He screamed her name and ran on.

  ***

  He’d worked it out. Nick had worked it out.

  The words resounded in her skull. Somehow he’d found the bombs, had them disarmed, filled the area with police and waited for her to walk into a trap.

  And she had.

  She got to the corner, sensed movement in her peripheral vision and turned for just long enough to see Nick Randall staring straight at her. The women on the wall were crossing the road to join him.

  She dropped the lead and ran. The car was less than fifty yards away and the one advantage of her sensible old-lady shoes was that they enabled her to move fast. She reached the car in a few seconds, opened the driver’s door and risked a look back just as Nick came dashing around the corner.

  She fumbled with the ignition key, then saw Nick weaving on the pavement and guessed that the dog had gone for him. It only delayed him a second, but it was long enough for her to gun the engine and take off.

  ***

  Nick saw the car door open and judged that he might just make it. Then from nowhere he heard barking and looked down to see a small dog leaping across his path. He broke his stride and moved sideways, but the dog went with him, nipping his ankle. Nick muttered, “Fuck,” and kicked the dog out of his way.

  He was less than three or four yards from the Renault when it sped away. He ran on a bit further, but knew it was useless.

  There was a sudden squeal of tyres and he spun round, saw Pearce’s Vectra taking the corner almost on two wheels. It screeched to a halt alongside him and he jumped in.

  “Starsky and Hutch or what?” she said, and hit the accelerator.

  ***

  Alex was doing fifty in third gear, heading for the junction with the main A259 when a patrol car appeared at the end of the road. Luckily for her, it turned in and then realised too late that it should have blocked the junction. She caught it with only a glancing blow and it swerved away from her, mounted the pavement and hit a postbox.

  She stamped on the brake, shifted to second gear and risked making the turn into the main road without
checking for traffic. A bus was pulling out of the stop a few yards away and she made it just in time: another second and she would have hit it side on.

  The road ahead was clear. She pressed the accelerator to the floor and watched the speedometer needle flicker upwards: fifty, sixty, seventy. Then she was out of Seaford, the magnificent panorama of the Cuckmere Valley opening up before her. Suddenly she saw everything with a startling clarity: the dark carpet of Friston Forest, cloud shadows gliding across the Downs, the glassy sheen of the meandering river. At a remove from this detached appreciation of natural beauty, the cold rational part of her brain understood that it was all over.

  She became aware of a noise, above the sound of the straining engine, above the roaring of blood in her ears. Recognised it, seconds before it swooped overhead, as a helicopter.

  Nick Randall. Nick Randall had done all this, and she hated him with a vengeance greater than anything she’d ever known.

  There was no escape now, but at least she had a chance to mete out one final devastating punishment.

  She thought of Ryan, and the slow death to which Nick would condemn him.

  ***

  DCI Pearce passed the damaged patrol car and skidded to a halt as a bus rumbled across the junction. It took them valuable seconds to break out on to the main road and overtake the bus. When they reached the long descent into the valley Alex’s Renault was about a quarter of a mile ahead. Behind them a stream of vehicles joined the pursuit.

  Suddenly the police helicopter dipped into view from the south, banking towards the river.

  “She won’t get away,” Pearce said.

  “She mustn’t. Ryan’s life depends on it.”

  “Okay. We’ll ease off. The chopper can track her.”

  She slowed a little, and Nick felt an irrational sense of disappointment. He knew they couldn’t risk an accident, in case Ryan was in the car, but at the same time he didn’t want to let Alex out of his sight. There was always a chance she had some other plan, some way of turning the tables on them.

  At the bottom of the hill the road curved to the right. The Renault took it at speed and disappeared from view behind a hedgerow.

  “Don’t lose her,” Nick said, jittery now.

  “It’s all right. She’s got to slow down for Exceat.”

  Pearce sped up, then braked for the bend. Coming round, they saw the Renault heading for the narrow Exceat bridge, which required a sharp left turn. Both of them saw instantly that she would never make it.

  ***

  Alex didn’t know the road well, vaguely recalling a bridge just round the bend that wasn’t quite wide enough for two cars. Pushing seventy there wasn’t a chance in hell she’d do it.

  But by then she didn’t care.

  By then she’d made up her mind.

  The Renault tore across the opposite lane, struck the raised concrete kerb and flipped into the air. In that moment she found herself thinking of Billy, and the perfect wretched irony that she was about to die as he had died, under the water.

  The impact killed her instantly, which is to say that she felt nothing: not the eruption of metal and plastic, not the crushing obliteration, not the swirl of icy water around her body.

  And yet in another sense, that same instant stretched almost to infinity. Rather than the fabled rush of memories there was but a single idea, an awareness that of all her tragedies, the greatest was not the loss of her father, but the fact that she had sacrificed her brother for no better reason than that she could, and in doing so she had condemned herself to a life utterly devoid of love.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Within seconds the road was in chaos: traffic at a standstill on both sides of the bridge, police cars screaming down the hill in the wrong lane, the helicopter clattering overhead. DCI Pearce turned into the car park of the Golden Galleon pub and stopped as close to the riverbank as she could. Nick was out of the car before she had engaged the handbrake.

  The noise of the helicopter assaulted his ears, and he gestured angrily for it to back off. Air pressure from the rotor blades was disturbing the surface of the river, making it harder to see anything. From the water level Nick judged it was approaching high tide, the brown water flowing swiftly upstream.

  More cars joined them. He saw Caitlin, closely followed by Diana and Patrick. His sister was distraught, quickly putting together what had happened and even quicker to comprehend what it meant. Her mouth fell open as she saw Nick, and he made a tiny movement of his head, indicating that he understood.

  Was Ryan in the car?

  Before he could be talked out of it, he slipped off his shoes and dived in, dimly aware of Pearce’s protest as he hit the water.

  It was freezing: that much he had expected. The shock was that he could see no more than a few inches in front of him. All he could do was swim blindly towards the car.

  Though his mouth was clamped shut, he was sure he could taste the oil and fuel leaking from the vehicle. Within two or three strokes his hand made contact with a smooth metal surface, which he guessed was the car’s roof. He grabbed the doorframe with one hand and felt broken glass pressing into his skin. Praying for some luck, he managed to reach down and grab the door handle. He was already disorientated by the darkness, but felt sure the car had landed on its side.

  A sudden terror gripped him, the stuff of horror movies: Alex’s cold dead embrace waiting for him in the car.

  Or could she still be alive, and ready to attack?

  He pushed the thoughts aside. Couldn’t give in to the fear. Finding Ryan was all that mattered.

  He’d been under less than twenty seconds but already he could feel his lungs protesting. He peered into the car, one hand groping to make sense of the dim shapes in front of him. He realised he was touching a mangled steering wheel, which had been compressed almost into the driver’s seat. His fingers touched something soft and yielding and he recoiled, almost losing his grip on the car.

  He was certain there’d been no one in the back seat, which left only the boot to check. He felt his way round to the rear, and again something that might once have been alive brushed his face as the current flushed out the hideous contents of the car.

  His lungs were bursting now, black spots firing on his retinas as he ran his hand up from the bumper and located the line of the hatchback frame. He knew that if it hadn’t popped open in the crash, he’d never get the boot release to work.

  His fingers slipped into a space where the frame had buckled, and he tried to wrench the hatch up, but it didn’t budge. It was stuck. If Ryan was in the boot, he would drown before Nick could fetch the tools he needed.

  And then someone grabbed his shoulder.

  His heart lurched with horror, and he almost sucked the filthy water into his lungs. Another strong hand moved across his vision and he just made out a familiar chunky signet ring.

  Pat.

  At the same time he realised his stupidity. The rear screen had shattered, and he could get to the boot space that way.

  He pulled Pat alongside him, and they each gripped a corner of the hatch frame and reached inside, frantically tugging at the parcel shelf. After a few seconds Pat punched right through it and wrenched it out of the car. Nick pushed himself into the space, not trusting his vision when Ryan’s life was at stake.

  The two of them ran their hands around the boot, Pat even pulling up the carpet and checking the compartment housing the spare wheel. Then Nick put his face against Pat’s and shook his head.

  The boot was empty.

  ***

  On the bank Caitlin, Diana and Melanie Pearce stood together, arms interlinked in a gesture of solidarity. Beside them, a couple of the firearms team were stripping off their body armour ready to join the rescue.

  It felt like whole minutes had passed since first Nick and then Pat had disappeared beneath the water, but in fact it was less than forty seconds. Suddenly Diana made a low keening sound and her legs gave way. Only the instinctive movement of the other women
prevented her from collapsing.

  Then a head burst into view, followed by a second, both men gasping and choking as they swam towards the bank. Four or five officers scrambled down to help them.

  “They’re okay. They’re okay,” Pearce was saying, but Diana didn’t seem to hear her. It was only when she raised her head and saw Nick flopping on to the grass that she seemed to regain some strength.

  Nick tried to speak, retched, then met his sister’s eye.

  “Not there,” he said.

  ***

  After Nick and Pat had been checked over by paramedics, they were taken back to the house to clean up. The firearms team were stood down and their place in the car park taken by police frogmen and a civilian vehicle recovery unit, alongside the CID, forensic and traffic officers already present.

  “Half of Sussex police here,” Nick said as Pearce drove them up the hill. “And we still have no idea what she did with him.”

  ***

  By six o’clock the media had picked up not just on the fatal accident, but on the whole complicated saga of revenge killings, complete with the one ingredient that any really juicy story needs: celebrity. News teams began to congregate at Exceat and in Seaford, while other journalists set up camp outside Nick’s home in Hove, the hospital where Howard Franks was still recovering and various police stations in London, Kent and Sussex.

  “Fucking bedlam,” said Pearce. “Excuse my French.”

  Pat had switched on the TV, caught an aerial shot of the Cuckmere Valley on News 24, and promptly turned it off again.

  The adrenalin of the chase had been replaced by a level of exhaustion and despair that no warm words or cups of sweet tea could alleviate. They sat together but mourned separately.