Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3)

by Jennifer Young

  ‘Psst! Celina!’

  She turned, self-possessed enough to keep quiet. Bronte was gazing in fierce concentration at her boyfriend as he spoke into his phone, running a frustrated hand through his hair.

  In the crowd, Cas lifted a finger to his lips, beckoning her towards him. He didn’t know she’d let him down. Her heart fell to her stomach. She’d have to tell him.

  She shuffled away, while Bronte continued to stare at her boyfriend. ‘Cas. I’m sorry. I—’

  She looked in the direction he indicated. A train pulled in at the station, and the platform filled with visitors. Acting, for once, Cas grabbed her wrist and almost dragged her onto the platform, up onto the bridge over the railway. A pang of guilt took her as they barged past an elderly couple struggling with their luggage, skipped down the steps onto the opposite platform, and ran.

  On the far side of the station someone — perhaps Bronte’s boyfriend — shouted. Letting go of her, Cas pelted towards the exit. ‘Come on!’

  She scrambled after him. The new blue coat snagged on the fence and tore. ‘Cas. Listen. Don’t make things any worse.’

  ‘Down here.’ He led her across a patch of grass, through shade dappled with spring sunshine. ‘We need to get over the dam to the car. They’ll never look there — they’ll think I’ve parked in the town when they notice you’ve gone. Stay close to me. I’ll make sure you’re all right.’

  ‘But they know everything,’ she panted, short of breath through fear and the struggle to keep up with him. ‘We can’t go back up to the farm. They know what’s going on. Her boyfriend’s a policeman. He’d guessed.’

  ‘Jesus. That just confirms what I thought. Dougie’s going up to see if he can get the boys away somewhere, but I don’t know if he’ll get there in time.’

  ‘Where will he take them?’ Misery clutched at her. She should have given more thought to the others, not just to herself. If Yer Man somehow managed to get them away, she’d have Krystian and Roch on her conscience as well as Jan. Milek, too.

  ‘God knows. He never gives up, that man. He never knows when he’s beaten. They’ll catch us in the end. I don’t know why we’re even bothering to run.’ He slowed to a walk, his face gaunt.

  ‘Because he tells you to, I suppose.’ She didn’t mean to sound waspish, because she cared. But God knew, he had no-one to blame but himself.

  ‘Come on. No loitering.’ He quickened his pace as they dropped down the path towards the concrete bulk of the dam.

  ‘We have to give ourselves up.’ Celina had had enough of the futility of flight. Now that she’d seen the sympathy in Bronte’s face, she realised that there was an alternative existence to the one that Cas had promised her. And yet he’d been good to her. Heart battled head as she struggled to balance what was best for her with the infuriating, unwanted feelings she had for him. ‘It’ll be all right. I know it will. Where are we going?’

  ‘I don’t know. Haven’t thought.’ He quickened his pace.

  ‘Cas. We have to give ourselves up.’ How often did she have to say it before he would listen?

  ‘Run!’ he shouted. Glancing back over her shoulder, she saw Bronte reaching the end of the platform, pointing. And the boyfriend behind her.

  Celina hesitated, but the look Cas gave her over his shoulder spurred her on, and she took off after him. Betrayal was one thing, but abandonment was quite another. Wherever Fate took her, she’d go there with Cas. There was no-one else, now that she no longer had Jan to care for. And he had been kind to her, kinder than she deserved. Together they raced down a grassy slope towards the long, thin dam that snaked out across the loch.

  She had no head for heights. Heart in mouth, blood pounding in her ears, she fixed her eyes on Cas’s back and chased after him, dodging round the visitors walking over the dam. A quick glance to her left was yet another in her series of mistakes as the dam plunged, vertiginous, away below her. Someone shouted at her as she dodged past, dashing down the narrow steps at the far end, struggling for breath.

  ‘Here.’ Cas was gasping. ‘Get in the car!’

  She paused and looked back. Along the top of the dam there was stillness. ‘They’ve given up.’

  ‘Never mind. We need to think.’

  ‘Do we?’ She opened the door of the car and sank into her seat.

  He ignored her, digging out his phone and dialling with one hand, turning the key in the ignition with the other, and kicking the car into gear. ‘Dougie.’ And he was off, rattling on in high-pitched, unintelligible English as they drew away. She put her hands to her head while he talked, waiting for her pulse to slow, winding the window down and letting the cool wind play against her face. She leaned her head back against the headrest, and closed her eyes.

  Cas ended his call, and tossed the phone down into her lap. ‘Okay.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘We’ve to go and meet him. We’ve to help him get the boys out.’

  And so it would go on. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘We don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Yes, we do. Of course we do.’ She opened her eyes and sat upright. ‘I’m sorry, Cas. I told them everything. But it was the only thing to do.’

  He said nothing, easing the car up the lane past the riverside cottages.

  ‘I don’t like your friend. He’s wrong. He’s mad. You can’t just kill your way out of things.’

  ‘It’s more complicated than that,’ he said, but he didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘Is it? We did wrong things. But we can stop doing it. They know.’

  ‘Dougie says they’ll tell the police. We have a chance to get away with it if we can stop them.’

  ‘But he is the police! Didn’t you hear me?’

  ‘He says that’s why we have to…silence them.’ He said it with faint self-mockery, as if he was aware of the nonsensical nature of it, trapped on a route he couldn’t get off.

  ‘No.’ She laid a hand on his arm and he didn’t throw it off, even as he slowed and drove with the utmost reluctance, no keener to meet up with Yer Man than she was. ‘You’ll just make it worse. And she’s good. Bronte. She’s good. She’s kind. She’d understand. And anyway, you won’t do it.’

  He slowed the car even further, and his face took on a wry smile. ‘I got this all wrong, didn’t I? I should have given you a job in the café. Then you’d have been all right. It would have been legal.’

  He wouldn’t have given Jan a job, nor the others. She’d miss them, especially Krystian, who’d always looked out for her. ‘But what about the others? You don’t understand.’

  ‘Ah, kochanie. You’re the one who doesn’t understand. I’ll go to prison for a long, long time.’

  ‘You’ll go to prison for a whole lot longer if you kill them. Or try to kill them.’

  ‘I’m not a gambler,’ he said, licking his lips. ‘I really am not. But sometimes you have so much to lose.’

  Yes, and then you got to the point where you couldn’t possibly win. ‘I’ll stand by you, Cas. If you want me to, I will. But I won’t let you hurt them. There has to be another way.’

  ‘You’re right. Quite right.’ He looked at her with the faintest expression of surprise, as if astonished by her confession. He couldn’t have seen it coming. ‘I’ll tell Dougie,’ he said, the nearest to a decision he’d made. And he pressed the accelerator down and the car moved off. ‘For all the good it’ll do. When he gets mad, there’s no stopping him. We’ll go back to the farm. And at least we can have a drink while we wait for the police to come and pick us up.’

  Chapter 35

  ‘Bronte, stop! We aren’t going to catch them.’

  Marcus had been pelting across the dam five yards ahead of me, and we’d been making ground on Celina as she trailed behind her boyfriend. ‘No! We’re gaining on them!’

  He stuck an arm out and held me back. ‘Just let them go. There’s no point.’

  In the seconds we’d wasted, his words became self-fulfilling. The man
reached the end of the dam and swung down and round the steps to the car park, with Celina behind him, and that was it. They were out of sight and surely out of reach. ‘What are you doing? We could have caught them! We could have saved her!’

  He stood back from my path in silence. Frustration swamped me as I looked over the dam. The two of them had reached a car. ‘We aren’t even close enough to get the number!’

  ‘We don’t need to get the number. We know who he is, we know where he lives. Nick Riley can get his number in a second, if he doesn’t have it already. There’s nothing for us to gain by carrying on.’

  Astonished, I stood back and looked at him. Marcus never held back. If someone was in trouble, he was the first one there. Yes, I’d begged him not to get involved again in anyone else’s problems, but this time it was different. This time Celina was in trouble — possibly in the worst sort of trouble — and he wouldn’t help her.

  ‘What’s come over you? You’re supposed to be—’

  ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on.’ He, too, looked towards the car as it slid down the lane, past the theatre and out of sight. ‘And if we follow them, I’ve no idea what kind of trap we’ll be walking into.’

  ‘There’s no trap. You didn’t see her on the bus, when she was begging me to help. That man is basically keeping her as a sex slave, even if she does think she has a choice, and you won’t do anything about it!’

  He frowned into the distance. ‘I’ve got eyes. She was safe with us, and she chose to go with him. She wasn’t under any duress.’

  ‘Then he must have some hold over her. She told me she wanted my help,’ I said, bewildered. ‘She told me he was making them steal. And suddenly—’

  ‘For whatever reason, she changed her mind.’ He stood in perplexity for a moment, and then turned back. ‘She said there were others?’

  ‘Yes, she said there were four of them. And she showed me where they’re staying on the map.’

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s a lot of point in trying old Nick again,’ he said, half to himself. ‘He’ll be sick of me, and they’re dealing with a lot right now. I’m sure he’ll have someone on the way up there, as soon as they can get there. He isn’t that stupid.’

  His calmness usually reassured me, but today his willingness to abandon Celina and her friends infuriated me beyond measure. He was usually so capable of bending the rules until everybody’s rights became his responsibility.

  ‘I promised I’d help her. We have to go up and see what’s going on. And if you’re too scared to come with me, I’ll go myself.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing.’

  ‘And you won’t tell me what to do!’

  ‘Bronte.’ He put a hand on my arm, but I shook it off. ‘Somebody died. She said they wanted to kill you. Do I need to remind you? And we don’t know the circumstances.’

  ‘That’s all the more reason to help Celina. Do you want her death on your conscience?’

  That got to him. He took a half step back as if I’d struck him, but he still resisted. ‘Let the police do it.’

  ‘You are the police. Or are you a hypocrite as well as a coward?’

  He hesitated. I’d landed another blow. Marcus’s weak point — his only weak point — was his fear of letting himself down. ‘I’m trying to explain it to you. I’m reluctant to go charging in when I don’t know who’s there.’

  ‘But we know what’s going on. Exploitation, for a start, and for all we know, physical cruelty.’

  ‘Right. And possible danger. You think I’m going to drag you off into that, after everything that’s happened in the past? You really think I’m going to expose you to any more risk? You think I want to have to explain to your parents that something terrible has happened to you?’

  I looked across to where the car had disappeared from view. ‘And do you think I’m going to leave Celina in danger, when I promised I’d look after her? We can’t just stand back. Not when that’s going on. By the time the police get there, something dreadful might have happened.’ An image of Andy, passionate and crusading, rose in my mind. ‘We have to intervene. Even if there’s a cost to ourselves. We have to make sacrifices.’ It was a third strike, and I was sure it would be a knockout.

  He’d been standing with his hands in his pockets and a frown on his face, but he managed a laugh. ‘I expected nothing less from you. But God help me if anything happens to you.’

  ‘Nothing will,’ I said, recalling my dad’s words of earlier that day with a shiver. ‘But something might happen to Celina. I don’t want that.’

  ‘It won’t do any harm to go up there and see what’s going on,’ he said, deep in thought. ‘I don’t imagine there will be anyone there. They’ll surely have done a bunk now that they know someone knows. She’ll have told him we know, and they’ll guess we’ve put it in the hands of the authorities. If they’re doing anything, they’ll be running for the hills.’

  ‘Then what are we waiting for?’ I was already on my way back across the narrow strip of concrete, back towards the car.

  Still, he hesitated. ‘I’m thinking of you in this.’

  ‘I thought you were a better man than that.’ I wrenched open the car door.

  He gave way at last, opening the driver’s door with a shrug. ‘I’m going to regret this.’

  It wasn’t far to the house that Celina had pointed out to me — barely a few miles outside Pitlochry itself, but set back in a cleft of the hills so that you couldn’t see it. As we turned off what passed for the main road and headed up a track, the sun glinted on something up ahead on the hillside, but when I looked whatever it was had gone. My nerves had been playing tricks on me. I sighed.

  ‘If that poor kid really did escape from here, he was unlucky,’ Marcus said, as we approached the farm buildings via a long and winding road though a plantation of stunted, struggling fir trees. ‘If he’d gone the other way, he’d have made it into Pitlochry. He must have covered five miles to get to where we found him, and the terrain isn’t exactly forgiving.’

  I shuddered at the thought of the boy, cold and rigid in the wet grass of an April afternoon. ‘At least we know what happened to him now. It was too late for them to save him, and he died.’

  ‘Yes.’ Marcus slowed, his gaze raking the hillside for signs of life. ‘It makes sense. They may not have killed him, but they were left with a body to dispose of. They must have waited until my car was towed and then dumped the poor kid, not expecting us to come back. Cas Janosik is smart. He admitted to being on that road, but said he saw nothing. He’s plausible and credible. When the body was found, our story would make sort of sense. There was a car, but our claim that they took him away could be written off to hallucination of some kind.’

  That was why Nick Riley and his team hadn’t found a body. There hadn’t been anything to find. ‘It looks deserted. Celina said it was a farm, but there aren’t any animals. That’s odd.’

  ‘It suggests to me that he’s in financial trouble. If I’d had more time, I’d have followed that up.’ Marcus stopped the car in front of the farmhouse and we got out. It did, indeed, look empty. There was no car outside. The mud under our feet was thin and poor, not the rich, straw-infused sludge of a working farmyard, and the air was light and fresh, free of the sour smell of silage and manure. Silence rang off the hillside like a warning bell.

  The front door to the house, a heavy one, stood firmly closed. Marcus lifted a hand to the bell and it rang out in the echoing interior, but fresh mud on the outside doormat and a tired vase of carnations in the window showed that someone lived there, even if it was empty now.

  I followed him as he walked around the back of the building and called out, ‘Hello! Anyone there?’

  ‘They must have gone,’ I said, breathless with terror at the thought of what might have happened to them. ‘They must have taken them off somewhere. I hope we find them before it’s too late. I hope—’

  ‘Let’s keep looking.’ Apart from a thick belt of trees pla
nted to the north to shelter it from the bitter wind, there was nothing beyond the farm itself— not a house, not a shed. On the far side of the yard, a collection of farm buildings clustered up against the wall. All were derelict, except a single-storey building on the far side of the yard. ‘What about this?’

  The building had bars to its windows. ‘New,’ I noted.

  ‘Well spotted, Sherlock.’ He gave me a faint but fleeting smile, then his expression immediately became sombre again.

  ‘Fitted after Jan made his escape?’

  ‘It looks like it. They haven’t been there long.’

  ‘They’ve done a runner,’ I said. ‘They must have done. Look. They’ve left the door open.’

  ‘Wait outside. I’ll check it out.’ Marcus pushed it open. ‘Hello!’ he called again, and his voice fell into the silence.

  He stepped inside, and I hovered in the doorway, my nerves jangling in the silence. Where had they gone? Were they dead, or could we still save them?

  ‘What can you see?’

  ‘Looks like some kind of a bunkhouse,’ he reported, from the far side of the large room.

  I took a step or two inside. There was a tiny bathroom just inside the front door to my left. A selection of furniture clustered around an electric fire in the main room, with a few tattered magazines in Polish abandoned in front of it. Two doors led off to one side.

  ‘Storeroom,’ Marcus said, after a cursory exploration of the first of them. ‘Nothing in there but dust and spiders. No window, just a skylight. What’s through here?’

  I left my post at the door and followed him into the last of the rooms with a shudder. ‘It looks like the worst kind of youth hostel.’