by Jane Holland
I stare.
It’s the Volvo again.
The driver is manoeuvring out of a tight space a few doors up from our house. I drive forward, very slowly, practically a crawl, keeping my eyes on the rear window of the car.
DS Dryer told me to ignore this car. That they’d checked it out and it did not belong to anyone suspect. Yet I saw the same gold Volvo out of the window on the afternoon of the day Harry went missing. It was parked further along the street, someone clearly at the wheel. Not getting out of the car, not moving about, not doing anything. As though they were waiting.
Waiting for what though?
For a phone call?
For someone to alert them that the coast was clear?
I strain to see the driver, and catch a glimpse of grey hair as their head turns. I’m not one hundred per cent sure, but in profile it looks rather like a woman.
I stare, suddenly finding it hard to breathe.
Could it be the woman from Lemon Quay who was pushing the red buggy?
Assuming it even is a woman behind the wheel.
I continue to crawl forward, holding my breath. I am about a hundred yards away when the driver finally negotiates his or her way out of the space, and drives off, heading inexorably away from me, making for the crossroads at the far end of our road. It’s the same direction the Volvo took last time, when I chased so hopelessly after it, a mad woman, panting and barefoot in the rain . . .
All thought of going home disappears in a sudden, wild impulse to give chase. I find the accelerator and press down hard. My car leaps after the gold Volvo.
‘Gotcha.’
Chapter Thirty-Five
I keep my distance, not wanting to alert the Volvo driver to the fact that he or she is being followed. All the same, I can see that there are two people in the car this time, not one. I am more sure now that the driver is a grey-haired woman, while the one in the front passenger seat looks like a man, though it’s hard to tell without getting closer.
And if I get too close, I might spook them.
So I hang back, trying to drive casually. But all the time my brain is firing, remembering things, making connections.
How many times have I seen this car now? Too many for it to be ignored, given that the owner does not live in our street and I have not noticed it here before. Though perhaps it’s simply someone who is often visiting one of my neighbours, but has changed their car recently. I have made enough mistakes lately for that possibility to worry me. I don’t want to look like an idiot for chasing another ludicrous lead.
Yet the driver does seem undeniably similar to the older woman I saw in Truro city centre that day, pushing my son in a buggy.
If only I could have got closer, seen her face clearly, been sure that it was Harry in the buggy.
I glance at the phone beside me on the passenger seat, tempted to call Paul Dryer, ask him exactly who owns the gold Volvo. He must know, after all. He told me plainly that he had checked out the car, and it was not relevant to his inquiry. Yet all my instincts tell me that whoever is in the gold Volvo knows something, however small, however remote, about my son’s disappearance.
Should I try to make a call while driving? Not very safe, and certainly illegal. Yet if I stop, I am bound to lose them.
The gold Volvo turns right at the crossroads, exactly like last time, and takes the road that eventually leads out of Truro into the surrounding countryside.
After they have gone, I move up to the stop sign in my turn, watching covertly as the occupants pull away into the traffic. I do not like being so close behind them, but staying too far back would look equally suspicious. To my relief though, neither of them look back at me, and the driver does not appear to be checking her mirrors.
Nonetheless, I stay crouched behind the wheel at the crossroads, trying to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible, and hope they did not spot me.
It’s busy as always on the main road, people going about their daily business, moving in and out of town. I have to wait for a break in the traffic before I can pull out, tapping the wheel in frustration, afraid that I will lose them.
The main road system around Truro is a complicated one, often shifting direction, east to west, then swinging abruptly back again. But I manage to keep them in my sight for most of the time, and eventually catch up with the Volvo about a mile out of town, heading due west along the A30.
It’s a dual carriageway, and I am afraid of being noticed. So I hang far back, trying to stay out of sight behind larger, slower-moving vehicles like vans or trucks. But of course there are numerous turn-offs, and it eventually strikes me that, if I fall too far behind, they might leave the main road without me noticing. So after some judicious overtaking, I settle into a comfortable and relatively safe position three vehicles behind theirs in the inside lane.
We are doing a brisk fifty miles per hour. The sun is glaring in my eyes. I lower the sun visor, and hope it will help to obscure my face, and that whoever it is does not know my vehicle.
I am sweating, too hot in the enclosed metal box of the car. It soon gets like a sauna on a warm day like this. There’s no sunroof, so I open the driver’s-side window all the way down and lean my bare arm out in the sunshine. The refreshing wind ripples through my top. It lifts my hair, whipping it across my face.
I feel exhilarated and free for the first time in years. Free of everyone and everything. Doing my own thing, making my own choices, however crazy.
This is an adventure.
And maybe I am going to find Harry at the end of it.
Or maybe it will lead only to embarrassment and apologies and another dead end. To a muddy field and a bad taste in my mouth.
The gold Volvo eats up the miles ahead of me, and I follow it with renewed caution, keeping out of sight, not getting too close. Belatedly, I check my fuel gauge and am horrified to see how low it is. I am not sure how much fuel is available to me once the arrow hits the last mark on the gauge, which is where it is hovering. Enough to get me to wherever they are going, perhaps.
Unless they are going all the way to Land’s End.
I struggle to recall how many miles it is between Truro and Land’s End, the very westernmost tip of Britain. After Land’s End, as the name suggests, we would plunge into the sea if we kept going. There’s nothing at Land’s End itself though, except a large tourist attraction with rides and exhibitions and a small zoo. Surely they wouldn’t be going that far? But what if they are? What if I need to stop to refuel? I would lose them then, for sure.
I lean across and grope around for the mobile on the passenger seat, intending to make a call to Paul Dryer, to warn him what I’m doing. But my hand meets nothing but empty space.
I glance down. The phone’s not on the seat anymore.
‘Shit.’
At some point while I’ve been driving, presumably during one of my wilder turns, the phone has slid off the passenger seat and on to the floor.
I crane my neck, keeping the wheel as steady as possible, but can’t even see the mobile in the footwell. It must be under the passenger seat.
I grip the wheel with clammy hands, and try to stay focused.
The mobile is no big loss, I tell myself. It was running low on battery charge anyway. And if the battery is dead when I finally retrieve it from under the seat, I can always stop at any phone box or service station and call the police from there.
Assuming I haven’t run out of fuel by then.
‘Shit,’ I say again.
But at least I can still see the gold Volvo. It’s five cars ahead now, moving briskly but staying mostly in the inside lane.
We have been travelling about half an hour on the A30 when we reach the large roundabout to St Ives. The driver of the gold Volvo abruptly shifts lanes, signalling to turn off towards the coast.
The change is so sudden that it takes me by surprise.
I pull into the same lane behind the Volvo, my heart racing. I’m completely exposed, our two ca
rs maybe two hundred yards apart, nothing between us but sunshine.
I brake hard, desperate not to be too obvious.
The vehicle behind me swerves past me in the nearside lane. It’s a blue van, a local business with a large white logo painted on the side, driven by a thick-set man with a beard. He sounds his horn and makes a rude gesture at me as he passes, then accelerates erratically away.
I continue to brake, thankful that no other cars are close behind me.
We are only a few car lengths apart now. Suddenly, the grey-haired woman glances at me in her mirror as she swings off towards St Ives.
Has she seen me? Recognised the car, perhaps?
My palms sweating, I decide to drive round the roundabout a second time, swinging past the A30 to Truro and heading on towards the St Ives turn. On the second approach to the turn-off, I overdo the pace in my anxiety, and heave my car round the bend, clipping the dusty verge to my right. The car bumps up and down in a cloud of dust, then settles back on to the tarmac with a thud.
My foot slips off the accelerator, but I find it again. I grip the wheel hard and keep driving, but painfully slowly, staring straight ahead through the dust cloud.
‘Stay calm,’ I mutter to myself. ‘Stay calm, you idiot.’
At first I don’t see the Volvo. But by the time I reach the next roundabout, I see the gold flash ahead.
‘You’re not getting away from me.’
All the same, I make sure I take no more risks. No sense alerting them to the fact that they are being followed.
It was easy on a major road like the A30 to merge anonymously with the other traffic. But out here in the scrubby Cornish countryside, even with the peak of the tourist season just around the corner, cars are far less numerous.
To my surprise, when we reach the next junction, the Volvo keeps bearing left, well away from St Ives. I follow, very aware of the emptiness of the road, until the car branches off down a leafy lane signposted to an obscure hamlet.
After a moment’s hesitation, worried that I am being too obvious, I signal and turn down the same lane in pursuit.
I need not have worried about being spotted though. When I round the first bend, they are nowhere in sight. By then I am committed, and have no choice but to keep driving. The trees begin to thin out. The leafy lane becomes a narrow, winding road in full countryside, with straggling hedgerows and overgrown verges that go on for miles in every direction, and no signs that mean anything to me. It’s all Pol-this, Pen-that, and fields of sheep.
It is just as I realise that I must be heading towards the sea that my mobile begins to ring.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The phone is set to vibrate, so all I can hear is a faint buzzing sound coming from under the front passenger seat. I glance down at the passenger-side footwell, gauging the distance between the floor and my seat. I don’t have a particularly long arm, but perhaps . . .
The phone continues to buzz.
As soon as I release the wheel with one hand, and bend from the waist, stretching out towards the underside of the passenger seat, I can no longer see where I’m going. On the A30, it might be possible to do this for a few seconds without incident. But on a narrow Cornish lane, with a tight bend every few hundred yards, many of them blind, it’s tantamount to suicide.
Struggling to steer a straight course down the centre of the lane, I lunge over as far as my body allows and grope for the unseen phone.
All I feel under my fingertips is the edge of the rubber floor mat, and parts of the metal mechanism that slides the seat backwards and forwards. The vibrating buzz of the phone sounds louder now that I’m closer. More urgent and accusing.
Answer me, answer me.
In desperation, I stretch a little further.
The car lurches sideways, and the wing mirror strikes the verge, greenery whipping against the passenger window.
‘Shit.’
I straighten up, and sit in seething silence, listening to the rhythmic buzz-buzz-buzz from below the seat.
Ten seconds later, the phone stops ringing.
Another few bends without any further sign of the Volvo, and I start growing anxious. The unanswered call on my mobile distracted me. Have I missed them? Did they park up somewhere out of sight, or turn off without my noticing? I drive faster, hoping that nobody is coming in the opposite direction. It would be just my luck to meet a tractor.
Another three minutes pass.
Then I catch the tell-tale flash of gold cresting a slope in the near distance, the Volvo climbing slowly between a cluster of gnarled old trees before descending invisibly the other side.
Tractors or no tractors, I am determined to catch them.
I put my foot down.
Round the next bend, the road begins to climb. For a moment, it’s cool in the shadow of the trees on either side of the road. Then, as I reach the top of the slope, the trees abruptly vanish, and a panoramic view opens up across the Cornish landscape: a patchwork of green and gold fields, woodlands and hills, and beyond them, the wide blue expanse of the Atlantic Ocean.
I brake hard as I descend the hill. The Volvo has disappeared again. At the bottom of the slope, another tight curve forces me almost to a crawl in case of oncoming traffic.
Beyond the bend, the road widens out briefly. I catch a glimpse of grey slate roofs rising above the banked hedgerows. A minute later, I pass them on my right. Old whitewashed walls, chimneys, narrow windows beside each front porch. Three modest dwellings built low into an earth bank centuries ago, hunched against the sea winds.
A row of old fishermen’s cottages, perhaps?
The sea is bright here, dazzling on the horizon, the coast only a short distance away now. I can smell salt on the air, and the breeze has grown sharper, chilling my skin, whipping my hair about madly.
The road ends without warning thirty yards later in a small turning area perched high above a stretch of windswept beach, part rock, part sand.
There’s a small space for car parking beside the gate that leads to the coastal path. Room for maybe five cars. It’s really a glorified verge, overgrown with thick, coarse grasses and gorse bushes, and the odd determined dandelion. The road broadens here though, presumably to allow any drivers who have come this way by error to turn around and escape.
There is only one car parked beside the gate today.
It’s not a Volvo.
It’s a bright yellow Fiat with a Cornish flag bumper sticker.
I get out, leaving the engine running, and peer up and down the windswept coastal path. The cliffs look very steep and jagged along this part of the coast. Far below in the sandy cove, I can just see an old man in a grey jacket and woollen hat staggering up the path from the foreshore, his arms full of driftwood. Almost certainly the owner of the yellow Fiat.
NO OVERNIGHT PARKING, the council sign by the gate tells me cheerfully. PLEASE TAKE YOUR LITTER HOME WITH YOU.
I climb back into the car and sit there a moment, staring out at the bright, wind-flecked waves of the Atlantic Ocean. On any other day it would have been a beautiful sight. Now though, it simply looks bleak and empty.
Where the hell did the Volvo go?
I must have missed something between the cottages and here. A small turning area, perhaps, or a gate into one of the fields on either side of the road. Any place where the Volvo could have pulled in, and then turned round and driven back the way they had come after I passed by. But that would suggest they had seen me. And I am fairly confident they had no idea I was following them.
I lean over the passenger seat and finally locate my lost phone.
One missed call.
One new voicemail message.
I straighten up and thumb through the screens to my phone message centre. The missed call was from Paul Dryer. Presumably the voicemail message will be from him too. I press to dial my message service, but it refuses to connect.
No bars, no reception.
I am in the middle of nowhere, so no surprise. B
ut I had hoped for at least one bar. Enough to send a text, perhaps. But the phone is effectively useless. No chance of making a call, let alone retrieving my voicemail. And the battery is low too. Right in the red, like the fuel gauge. If I leave the phone turned on, it’ll probably be dead soon.
I take the difficult decision to turn the phone off completely. Better to leave power in the battery, and hope for better reception later, than to let it die without even being able to make a call. I shove it down into the front pocket of my jeans, where it makes an uncomfortable bulge, then slam the car in reverse and back up the lane about fifty yards.
I stop again, frowning.
There’s a rough track off to the left, so narrow and muddy that I discounted it in passing, assuming it must be a farmers’ track, a way for sheep or cattle only.
Does it lead to a house?
I jump out and stare down the farm track. The air is sharp and salty so close to the sea. I get the impression that a vehicle has driven along there recently. The deep mud ruts on the other side of the narrow, gated entrance look freshly cut, and one of the puddles near the roadside is still cloudy and disturbed, as though car tyres splashed through it only a moment ago.
I can’t see beyond the first bend in the track. But it must lead somewhere or it wouldn’t need to exist.
To an old farm, perhaps?
There’s a dirty wooden sign half-buried in brambles beside a leaning gatepost. Trying to avoid the worst of the mud, I pull the nearest brambles gingerly aside, and slowly decipher the faded, hand-painted lettering.
PRIVATE ROAD: TIDE HOUSE
I have no way of knowing for sure, but instinct tells me the Volvo went this way.
I clamber into the car, back up a short distance, then turn the wheels and ease the bonnet through the muddy gateway. The lane is narrow but more or less passable. I reach the first bend without serious incident, and spot what look like farm buildings ahead through a cluster of low, gnarled trees.
Suddenly, without warning, the car judders to a halt.
I try to restart it.
The engine remains silent.
