Edge

by Nick Oldham

  ‘Can I come?’ Flynn asked.

  Rik wavered, then shrugged. ‘I’m gone in two minutes. If you’re not in the car with me, I’m not waiting.’

  ‘Understood.’ Flynn bent to Alison. ‘That OK?’

  ‘Yes, go, but keep me informed. As soon as you hear anything, tell me. I’ll have my mobile and the house phone with me.’

  Flynn nodded. He dashed out of the bar, up to his room.

  Rik said, ‘This kind of thing happens all the time. Cops get out of range, go off doing stuff – it’s what they do. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Then why are you turning out?’ she challenged him.

  ‘Good point,’ he conceded.

  ‘Look, I know it’ll take you the best part of an hour to get to Rossendale from here, so I won’t start fretting for at least sixty minutes. But if you hear anything on the way, bloody well phone me!’

  ‘I will.’

  Flynn came back into the bar pulling on his flying jacket. He pecked Alison on the cheek and the two men were gone. On dithery legs, Alison crossed to the front window to watch Rik’s car throw up gravel as it left the car park in the torrential rain.

  ‘How serious is this?’ Flynn asked as Rik negotiated his way along the unlit, damp and slippery minor roads out of Kendleton, heading towards Lancaster and the A6. There was no straightforward route from Kendleton to Whitworth. From the village, situated far to the east of Lancaster, but also in the far north of Lancashire County, he had to motor down the tight lanes from Kendleton before even reaching a main road, in this case the A683. Once on it he had to turn left and then pick up the M6 southbound at junction 34, blast down that motorway before branching on to the M65 which would then take him across Lancashire, then on to the A56 over Moleside Moor and into Rossendale. It was a fair trek at the best of times, with no short cuts. The driving rain made it doubly unpleasant.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Rik said, then explained the phone call he’d taken from Jerry Tope, a name which jarred Flynn. Rik also added cautiously that maybe Henry just had a burst tyre in some radio/phone non-reception area and was wrestling with that.

  ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, the cops are all right,’ Rik said.

  ‘Jerry’s not usually wrong about stuff,’ Flynn said.

  ‘No – he’s a brilliant analyst, and a grumpy git.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Flynn watched the rain. When Flynn had been a cop, he and Tope had been good buddies, which was more than he could say about himself and Henry. Flynn had quit the cops after facing an unproven allegation of theft, and it had been Henry who had made his life unbearable. Their paths had crossed a few times since despite Flynn now living and working in Gran Canaria. Even though Flynn had proved his innocence to Henry, they were still uncomfortable with each other. It didn’t help Henry that he suspected Flynn of having a thing for Alison. Truth was, he did have a ‘thing’ for her, but only in the sense that they shared a non-romantic history that would forever bind them.

  About Jerry Tope, Flynn said, ‘He can put two and two together, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Talking of which,’ Rik ventured, ‘you and Alison?’

  Flynn grinned. ‘Just friends. Really.’

  Rik glanced at him. ‘I believe you.’

  ‘Besides which, for some unfathomable reason, she seems to love Henry. If she didn’t, I’d be in like a shot.’

  Henry forced FB on, stumbling and slipping through the field, FB blindly trusting Henry who tugged and directed and cajoled him, even though he could tell his boss was hurt and exhausted.

  ‘We need to keep going,’ Henry insisted, gasping for his own breath. His adrenalin had flushed out of his system and he was struggling to keep going.

  ‘I got to rest,’ FB panted. ‘I’m not that fit.’

  ‘Nor am I. Let’s stop here.’

  FB flopped into the grass.

  Henry sat next to him. His heart pounded like he had never felt it before. He settled on his bottom, not caring how wet he was, and peered back down the hill. From the height they’d reached there was a good view of the valley below in which the straggling town of Whitworth snaked. He could see the street lights on the main road and side roads, and beyond that, on the other side, the rise of moorland that was Brown Wardle Hill.

  It wasn’t as if they were miles from anywhere and if he could have flown like a crow, he would have been at the main road in less than a mile.

  He shaded his eyes with his hands to cut out some of the ambient light to see if he could spot Charlie and Luke coming after them, but saw nothing.

  He caught his breath, then did a quick check of what equipment they had left. All means of communication had been taken from them and smashed by Charlie. Their extendable batons and CS sprays had also been taken and all Henry could find was his Maglite torch in its holder on his belt. FB also had his.

  ‘How are you doing?’ he asked FB. ‘I think we might be OK.’

  ‘Not good, to be honest.’

  Henry took a chance, turned on his torch and shone it over FB’s face. He shuddered when he saw FB’s right eye, which was bleeding profusely. He leaned over and shone the torch on FB’s shoulder and saw that his jacket was saturated with blood from the wound he’d got when Charlie had blasted them at the gate.

  ‘Hell,’ Henry said.

  FB breathed raggedly. ‘I’m absolutely knackered, Henry.’

  ‘I know. We need to get down into Whitworth and get a phone. You up for that?’

  FB nodded. ‘I’ll do my best, but I’ve got a real tight feeling across my chest and up into my left arm. I feel like I’m going to burst open, like a bloody alien’s in there.’

  ‘That would be the heart I never thought you had,’ Henry quipped.

  FB found a chuckle inside him and called Henry something very rude indeed.

  Henry turned the torch off, then heard the shouted words that stuck terror inside him and made him realize what a huge mistake he had made to think that a psychopath would give up.

  ‘There they are!’

  FOURTEEN

  There was the flash and bang of the shotgun being fired again from a position much lower down the hill. The flash silhouetted the two figures behind the gun, maybe a hundred metres distant, diagonally away to Henry’s left. Fortunately the distance and the weather rendered the discharge ineffective, and it also gave away their position to Henry, just as he had stupidly given away his and FB’s position by using the torch. Henry knew that he and FB only had a very short space of time to get moving again before the brothers would be upon them.

  He grabbed FB’s good arm, flung it over his shoulder and, rising unsteadily to his feet, staggered as he took FB’s weight.

  Once moving, though, FB tried gamely to push himself along and make things easier.

  They went up the hill, linked together as if in a drunken three-legged race. At the crest they tripped over a low barbed wire fence and came to a man-made, very flat piece of land, once part of a quarry, which looked as if the actual tip of the hill had been sliced off like the top of a boiled egg. This part of the quarry had long since been abandoned and the area was now a few flat acres of scrubland with rocky outcrops.

  After a quick pause, Henry urged FB on and they hobbled out of step with each other until they reached the other side of this mini-escarpment where Henry stopped abruptly, something not right.

  ‘Why we stopping?’ FB demanded. ‘I was just getting going.’

  ‘I think we’ve come to a straight drop down,’ Henry said, scrutinizing the landscape ahead. It was all just black, nothing to help him focus. ‘I think we’re on the edge of a quarry. It’s too dark to see properly.’

  ‘Used or unused?’

  ‘No idea.’ Henry looked back over his shoulder and dimly saw the two shapes of his pursuers coming over the lip of the hill on to the flat top. He thought this must be how an antelope felt being hunted down by African dogs. They just kept going until their prey collapsed with exhaustion, then to
re it apart. ‘I think we’ve got to go down, boss. They’re right behind us.’

  ‘OK,’ FB said immediately, at which point Henry suddenly realized that FB was putting his absolute, literally blind, faith in him.

  Henry disengaged himself from FB, turned sideways and felt down the side of the quarry with his foot. ‘Not quite straight down, a bit of an angle, maybe, but I can’t tell how far the drop is – might be ten feet, might be a hundred.’

  ‘We need to find out.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Henry sank to his knees, reversed himself and then started to descend carefully, finding footholds as if he was easing himself into a swimming pool.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  FB did the same, lowering himself over the edge.

  At exactly the same moment, they lost their footing on the slippery gravel side, pivoted and began to tumble.

  Henry was suddenly in a sickening, uncontrollable world of spinning, pounding, crashing and bashing. He cracked his head. He banged his knees. He twisted his ankle. The wind was knocked out of him as he hit a rock that jutted out. He put out his hands to try and stop himself rolling, but his forearms bent and flicked and he continued to roll, and the best thing he could do was cover his head, wait to hit the floor and die.

  Then he smashed into a huge, quarried boulder which stopped him rolling, and was immediately crushed by FB who rolled into him with a thud and a groan.

  Both lay there battered and exhausted by what had turned out to be an almost fifty foot drop, only stopping when they hit a sandstone boulder on a ledge that jutted out around the inside of the quarry. Had they rolled off this ledge, they would then have plummeted another fifty feet straight down into a half-flooded disused quarry and would undoubtedly have met their deaths.

  FB moaned.

  Henry said, ‘Still alive then?’ He winced at his own pains, cautiously touching the new wounds to his head from bouncing down the slope.

  ‘No thanks to you.’

  Henry was on his back, looking up the slope, and could just make out the two figures of Charlie and Luke peering over the rim. He swore. Relentless bastards.

  A flash and a blast: Charlie firing the shotgun down at them. Henry heard the splatter of pellets against the boulder, just above where his head lay.

  ‘Got to move again, boss.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  FB rolled on to his hands and knees.

  Henry got to his feet, trying to work everything out, although the spin dryer drop and the bangs to his head and body had disorientated him slightly and given him wobbly legs. He took a pace forward, then another, then drew back quickly with a gasp.

  ‘Yep – we’ve definitely fallen into a quarry. Two steps this way and we’ll be flying through the air again.’

  Bang!

  Leaning over the edge above, Charlie had reloaded and fired again.

  Henry felt the whoosh of shot splatter into the ledge to his right.

  He flattened himself to the side of the quarry and pulled FB with him.

  Charlie switched on a torch with a powerful beam, searching for the two men. He was lucky straight away and lit them up with their backs to the stone, now easy targets for a straight shot down the quarry face, with their own faces tilted up.

  Henry heard a scream of victory.

  ‘Move, move,’ Henry yelled and pushed FB along the ledge. The torch beam followed them. Henry knew that Charlie must be reloading now and in a moment would fire again. They scrambled along, keeping tight to the quarry face, afraid the ledge would either crumble away or disappear and they would be pitched into oblivion, or shot like ducks in a fairground.

  Henry then fell forwards on to his knees, into a large hole in the quarry face, followed by FB. They had accidentally tumbled into a circular mineshaft drilled horizontally into the quarry face and hillside, maybe ten feet in diameter. Charlie fired again.

  But they had found safety of some description.

  ‘What are we gonna do?’ Luke asked Charlie, standing on the edge of the quarry. They were breathless, their chests heaving, and drenched.

  ‘Looks like they’ve gone into a mineshaft,’ Charlie said. ‘If they get ten feet in and lose sight of the entrance, they’ll get lost. We need to get back to the farm.’

  Luke wiped rain and blood from his face. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then I got an idea.’

  Henry and FB ran into the hole in the rock face. Twenty feet in there was a three-way split; left, right, straight ahead. Beyond that, although neither was to know this, the tunnel branched out in even more directions, like a spider diagram, deep into the hillside for many hundreds of metres, an unmapped maze of underground corridors.

  It was the primitive flight response that drove Henry and FB on, desperate to get out of the line of fire and the torrential rain and get some respite for just a while to regroup their thoughts.

  Henry led, turning a couple of corners. FB clung to him until Henry finally said, ‘That’ll do,’ and stopped.

  He twisted, found his torch and turned it on, noting that the beam flickered uncertainly at first, though after a whack on the palm of his hand it came on brightly. He frowned at this, but knew that sometimes the connections in these torches could be a little unpredictable.

  He flashed it around the tunnel, getting a sense of the new environment.

  He did not like what he saw.

  The shaft was basically circular and had been drilled unevenly into the rock and the floor was fairly flat. The sides and roof were rough and water dripped constantly and ran in streams down the sides. Underfoot it was wet and muddy.

  Without the torch it was complete blackness. Not even a chink of light from anywhere and already Henry was wondering about the wisdom of running in here. Fright had driven him in, but common sense should have made him stop six feet in, not keep running.

  He shone the torch at FB, who had sunk on to his haunches and leaned against the wall, injured, beyond tired, and miserable.

  Through his good eye he had followed the path of Henry’s torch beam. ‘I’m not keen on this place.’

  ‘Nor me … but I think we’ll be OK for ten minutes, then we’ll check and see if the coast is clear.’

  ‘You remember the way out?’

  ‘Yeah … yeah.’ Henry’s first word had been confident, the follow-up one less so. He peered back along the tunnel in the direction they had come from, then tried to remember if it was a left or right turn. ‘Be fine,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Fat, old and wounded.’ FB coughed and wiped his mouth. Henry’s torch beam was on FB’s face and he did not like the fact that his boss’s spittle seemed to have flecks of blood in it. ‘I am in so much pain,’ FB said.

  ‘I know. We’ll get out soon,’ Henry assured him.

  ‘What the hell did we just walk into?’ FB asked.

  ‘A psychopathic nightmare, then a mineshaft.’

  The brothers raced back down the hillside to the farm, leaping the wall via the stile and going through the gate. The police Land Rover was still there, reversed back to the stable door, the back door open, the bodies in the back.

  Charlie ran through the stable to where he had left Jake’s body. Luke followed.

  They came to a jarring halt and looked at him, another victim of Charlie Wilder’s terrible rage.

  Charlie smiled and remembered his dream from the morning again, those last moments of sleep in a prison cell. He saw the pixelated face of the person he had killed with a shotgun in the dream. Recalled it had not mattered who the victim was. Just that it was a victim.

  Jake lay sprawled grotesquely on the floor of the loose box, half his face blown away.

  Charlie continued to smile.

  His pride and recollections were interrupted by Luke.

  ‘We need to clear this up.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right. We need to clear it up and I need to get back down to Johnny’s sister’s house and get that tag put back on.’

  ‘Yeah, b
ut how?’

  ‘Call the guy up, tell him to get down there now.’

  ‘He lives over Accrington way, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Tell him to get his skates on, then.’

  ‘OK, OK, OK.’ Luke held up his hands, found his mobile phone and the number in the menu and pressed dial as he walked around the stable, waiting for it to be answered. He cursed when the signal went, and shook the phone.

  In the meantime Charlie picked up Jake’s legs and started to drag him towards the Land Rover, leaving a trail of slippery blood, brain and bone.

  Luke had circled to the back of the vehicle, concentrating on getting a signal. His eyes flickered towards the inside of the Land Rover, then back to his phone, and then he realized, understood what he had seen. The hand holding the phone slowly came away from his face just as it was answered.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ the voice at the other end of the line said, but Luke was staring into the Land Rover, horrified.

  Charlie was still struggling to get a proper grip of Jake’s legs and his back was to Luke.

  ‘Charlie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Charlie – look.’

  ‘Look at what?’

  ‘This,’ Luke said.

  Uttering a ‘tch’ of annoyance, Charlie dropped Jake’s limbs with a thud and joined Luke at the back of the vehicle.

  Rik and Flynn arrived at Rossendale Police Station forty-four minutes after leaving Kendleton, which was good going against the heavy weather. Inside they found the patrol inspector under a lot of pressure: the whole of the valley had kicked off and been at each other’s throats for the last four hours, and on top of that a thoroughbred racehorse had just escaped from a field and been mown down on the bypass, causing a dreadful accident. On top of that, the chief constable and a detective superintendent hadn’t been seen or heard of since he had waved them goodbye some while earlier.

  He looked ashen when Rik and Flynn entered his office, where, much to their surprise, stood a weary looking Jerry Tope, who had also turned out from his home near Preston.

  Jerry’s mouth sagged open when he saw Flynn, but Flynn merely acknowledged him with a wry smile and a wink.