Jack Kemp took his team aside to explain the rudiments of their search technique. “Basically, we are going to make a long line, arms stretched fingertip to fingertip, and fan out over the countryside up and around the cauldron area behind Moses Hill.”
“Why up there?” Seth Lawson wanted to know; the middle aged sheep farmer obviously wasn't about to take anything the outsiders said as gospel.
“We've had a tip off that Lisker's still in the area, most likely hiding in one of two places. The lake or the hills. We drew the shorter of the two straws.”
“How're we getting up there? We walking?”
“Not unless you want to. We've got transit vans outside. The way I see it, we drive out along the Spine Road, circle back on ourselves and come at the hills that way. That sound okay to everybody?”
A few nods.
Andy McKenna came in then, pulled Kemp to one side, his words a vigorous whisper that didn't carry. Kemp wandered back over, looking nonplussed.
“Just going to be a minute folks. Why don't you go out to the van and I'll catch up with you out there. Kristy, can I have a word for a second, please.”
The Jonah girl, McKenna and Kemp disappeared through the double doors, talking in an animated huddle.
* * * * *
Todd Devlin was in the corridor. Like Kristy, he hadn't slept since Friday night. Unlike Kristy, it was not some form of revenge retribution kick that kept him awake and functioning. The fever was adrenaline pure and simple. High octane hype pumping into his veins.
One thing, he knew. Brent Richards could not keep it up. He had waived his right to counsel. Made his one telephone call, watched by Devlin. He remembered the doctor's words clearly, unable to read any sense into the layer of depths hidden in them.
“Give me Jenifer. . . Jenifer, the manila folder on my desk. Yes. . . Have Robert and Richie continue to clean up the paperhouse. . . No. . . No. Definitely out of the question. . . No, they have not charged me with anything. So don't go worrying yourself. I shall see you in the morning. Sleep well, Jenifer.”
What the hell was cleaning up the paperhouse supposed to mean?
Should have had the bloody line tapped so they could hear the conversation from both sides. It might have made more sense that way.
Even then, he had a strong hunch that Brent Richards would have sounded as if he were talking gobbledegook. And that bugged Devlin. Richards was trying to pull the wool over his eyes, no doubt about that. And no doubt either, that Richards considered himself a big stakes player in his own little league game, but
Todd Devlin had the weight of the entire constabulary behind him, and a suspicion forming that might just blow the hatch off this whole sordid mess.
He decided it was time to put both to the test.
Walking back into the converted classroom, Devlin closed the door and faced down the physician with one question that voiced the essence of his suspicion. Deliberately, he didn't bother to set the tape recorder playing. This one was for his ears alone.
“Tell me, doc. Why did you kill Monk Sanders?”
He saw the glimmer behind Richards’ eyes. Fear. Shock. Quickly masked. Bingo.
* * * * *
Out in the hills, Johnny watched them coming in their droves.
He wondered how they would have felt if they knew he was ready for them? Shit scared, probably. No good this lot. They made him want to puke.
He didn't feel good. He'd had it with Alex. Fucking wimp. Whinge, whinge, whinge. Its too cold. . . I'm hungry. . What're we going to do. . ? Fucking wimp.
Johnny had had to chase him out of the Judas Hole before he ended up putting his fist through his face.
Fucking wimp.
And now they were coming looking for him. Well, he'd be damned if they were going to find him, and was sure as hell they weren't going to be taking him back down with them when they went.
Not unless they were willing to die trying, that was.
“I'm hungry, Alex,” he shouted up the chimney flue. “Put some fuckin’ dinner on, will ya.”
No sense in worrying about it.
* * * * *
Kemp and Kristy French joined up with the convoy as it set up to move out.
There was an appetite to the whole scenario that Kristy found particularly ugly. Like Ben Shelton before her, she was put in mind of the village witch hunt at the end of Hammer Films interpretation of Frankenstein. The atmosphere really was unhealthily similar.
She clambered into the back of the transit, squashing up onto the wooden benchseat opposite a row of hungry faces she didn't recognise from Adam.
Kemp drove, preoccupied with Devlin's intuitive leap. Logic put Brent Richards somewhere near the centre of this endless knot, but he could not for the life of him see the threads that pulled it all together.
There had to be something he was missing.
“Won't miss a trick,” someone assured him, grinning.
They're treating this like a school bloody outing, he realised, suddenly aware of the frisson building steadily between the hunters.
How did it come to this?
- 49 -
They came to a halt beneath the ragged spire of the old chapel, a mile and a half out along the Hexham Road.
“What is this place?”
“Old chapel. The church sold it off years ago. The paper mill bought it to use as a warehouse.”
“Creepy.”
“You should see it in the dark, lad.”
Gratefully, the air of expectancy, hunger even, to the hunt seemed to be dissipating. Common sense and the cold getting to them, Ben thought wryly. “The country air sure doesn't breed Bolshevik rebels like it used to,” he joked to Daniel Tanner, keeping his voice down to keep the gag private. Not that he thought the posse would understand let alone appreciate his attempt at humour. He just didn't want to have to try and explain himself out of a needlessly messy corner.
Greg Stafford brought the second van to a halt ten feet from theirs, grinding the stick shift down through the gears noisily. Black fumes coughed out of the exhaust pipe, polluting the summer afternoon with their own peculiarly airless scent.
“So how come it was built all the way out here in the first place?” Kristy French asked, joining the conversation between Seth Lawson and Jack Kemp. “A bit remote, isn't it?”
“Aye, but it weren't always. Dates back to the old religions. Always used to be a holy place this. With them druids and their pagan magics,” Seth said, winking at Jack so neither he, nor Kristy could tell just how big a pinch of salt his history lesson needed to be taken with.
“And now it's a bog roll warehouse.”
“Bit of a climb down,” Kristy agreed, her smirk showing she was not to be outdone.
“No soul, you city folk. Can't you feel the old magic in the air?”
“Stop taking the piss out of 'em, Seth you old bugger,” Jim Becket warned, warmly enough as he slapped the sheep farmer on the back. “Nowt like giving this old sod an audience. He'll keep spouting rubbish all day if someone'll listen.”
“Hadaway with you, Jimmy lad.”
All good friends, Kristy surmised, in good company. It's all lost on them. But that wasn't strictly true, or fair. There was the guy in the wax jacket, probably five or six years her senior, she'd heard joking about Bolsheviks. He, at least, didn't look comfortable among the clan gathering of witch hunters. She decided to go and introduce herself.
Twelve fifteen. That gave her three and three quarter hours. She wasn't sure why she had come up here with the searchers. Trying to make herself feel useful to someone while she twiddled her thumbs waiting for Robin Stone. Kristy was a long way from sure what she was going to say to Robin when they met up at four.
She hoped the Animal Rights girl would have some, if not all, of the right answers. Until then, anything she could do to take her mind off Jason, seeing him on the floor, split open and empty, she would do. With gusto. Relish even.
“Hi,” she said. “Mind if I join
you two?”
Ben and Daniel exchanged a look Kristy couldn't read, but guessed passed for being the all-exclusive men's room glance of an easy pick-up. Maybe she'd judged the guy in the wax jacket wrong after all.
“Feel free. I'm Dan, and this here is Ben.”
“Hi, Ben.”
“Hi,” Ben returned. He was wearing a badly disguised “I'd-Rather-Be-Anywhere-Else-Than-Here” look she usually associated with the poorer class of politician. Maybe she hadn't been so wrong about him after all. Kristy offered a tentative smile.
“You're a reporter, right?” he said then. They were coming around the back of the old chapel house. The rest of their team already over the wooden stile and on their way up through the sparse tree line.
“So that's why.”
“Pardon?”
“Why you are looking at me like something the cat dragged in.”
“'Oh God, I'm sorry. I didn't realise it was that obvious. Occupational hazard, I guess,” Ben shrugged sheepishly.
Daniel laughed. “Just naturally suspicious is our Ben. He's been a bit of a recluse since he made the big time.”
“Really?” Kristy found herself asking, unable to resist rising to the bait.
“Straight up,” Daniel assured her. “Ben's a hotshot author.”
“You wouldn't have heard of me,” Ben put in, embarrassed by Daniel's glowing testimony. “Not many people have.”
“Oh, come on. Try me.”
This was where it usually ended up getting awkward, either one or both of them left feeling embarrassed. More often than not it went one of two ways, she'd say she loved the book, was his biggest fan and could she have his autograph followed by a minutes awkward silence while he explained that he never carried a pen, or she would end up getting all apologetic because she had never so much as heard of Ben Shelton, writer of the famous Geordie Bomber, let alone read anything by him. Either way, it was a sure fire end to a promising conversation. So, for the ritual cop-out: “Ah, sorry, but modesty prevents-”
“Bollocks to that lark, Benjamin Shelton. Modesty prevents nothing, not even blushes.”
“Thanks, Daniel. I love you too.”
“Pleasure.”
Ben offered a hand to help Kristy up and over the stile. Any minute now she was going to say: “Didn't you write. . .”
The police helicopter whumped by fifty feet overheard, the wind-spray off its rotors sheeting by as a burgeoning gale.
Being up here was deceptive. Okay, logic said the village had to be down aways and to the left, in the bowl of the amphitheatre, but with the road in and out of Westbrooke obscured by the thick green skirts of Dipton Wood, there was nothing to suggest there had to be a village anywhere near. Civilization might have been a hundred miles away from this remote slice of Northumbria instead of just over the hill. It would have been the perfect illusion, if not for the gradually coalescing clouds of steam that formed the marshmallow haloes around the three peaks equidistant to Longrigg Papermill.
Ben tried a weak smile. Kristy hadn't let on whether she recognised his name or not. Not, he supposed, judging her reticence as its own indictment.
A few minutes later she went one better, taking the new paperback she had bought the other day out of her deep pocket, much to Daniel’s delight. “This is a set up, right? You’re behind this aren’t you, Tanner?”
“Not my doing, Benny boy. Wish I’d thought of it, your face was priceless. Seems you’ve got a genuine fan.”
“Hah! I wouldn’t go that far,” Kristy said, grinning as she pocketed the book again.
Bristly ranks of mass-planted and quick growing conifers fanned out before the reassembling team.
“Merrishields Hill,” Kemp explained, not that he really needed to. “Backs onto Moses Hill and swings on around to join Swallowship Hill. We want to do the whole thing in a series of sweeps. There aren't enough of us to comb every inch, so keep your eyes open and your wits about you. See anything even vaguely out of the ordinary and holler, understood?”
Heads nodded. A few vague mutters.
“What kind of fools do you take us for, lad?” Seth Lawson grumbled. Kemp either didn't hear or chose to ignore the farmer.
“Daniel, it is Daniel, yeah?” Kemp said, vague on the names. Too many of them and too many strange faces for him to be expected to keep everyone happy by remembering. Daniel Tanner nodded. “All right, Daniel. You, Kristy and your friend swing over the top and take the village side of the first arc. Jim, Seth and you, yeah, sorry, forgot your name. You take the outside of the hills. The rest of you come with me. We're doing the peaks.”
A groan from someone.
“Not taking this altogether seriously, are they,” Ben commented for want of something to say.
Kristy snorted. “Can you blame them? A couple of kids they've known for every day of their lives go AWOL after a bit of youthful high jinks. It’s only to be expected, I mean, holy Christ, I'm surprised someone isn't playing the theme tune from The Deliverance in the background, right now.”
Ben laughed hard, and it felt good. Slapped Daniel on the back. “Small town,” he agreed. “But thankfully not that small. We aren’t quite marrying our sisters. Yet.”
“Good to know.”
“Would someone mind explaining?” Daniel shrugged, smiling ruefully. “I guess it's my turn to play the dope for a change.”
“Guess so,” Ben agreed without letting Daniel in on the back-handed reference to the dreadful inbreeding in the classic Bronson movie, but offering instead a ten second banjo-twanging solo that had the three of them in stitches.
It was the closest Kristy had come to feeling good about anything since she had walked into her flat last night and seen the rats nailed to the walls. Here, at ease in the company of these two comparative strangers, it was impossible not to black out the worst of the events that had happened since then.
The hillside was quiet, cowed as though the insects and animals were deliberately lying low, apprehensive of coming out to find their burrows trampled under heavy boots. Mud clung in patches, slaking the rough hewn grass with a sticky gloss. Part of Kristy said it was not her problem, not now. The stakes were too high. She should just go home, take a shower and curl up and hope it would all go away. Another part said Jason had been a friend, the first decent guy she had met in her new city, with dreams much the same as her own. Dreams as dead now as he was. That part of her mind was rapidly becoming obsessed with a single purpose: Vengeance.
Kristy's eyes filled up. Thick, intense, black anger welled up in thunderheads. Boiling point dreadfully close. The blackness fermenting as the one focal point. Brent Richards. She had to clamp down on it, hard. Bury it way down, deep inside. Her hands tightened into white knuckles, nerves frayed to bare wires.
“Are you okay?” Ben asked. Against the bleakness of the hillside’s gorse and heather, Kristy looked small and alone and without hope.
“I think,” she said slowly, looking down at her hands. “I'm having a nervous breakdown.”
* * * * *
Johnny watched them for twenty minutes more, getting jumpier with the passing of each and every one.
Alex, where the hell was Alex?
Gone to grass him up? Gone to squeal to the pigs? Because if he had. . . Nah, not Alex. Alex wouldn't do a thing like that. Not Alex. They were mates. Then what the hell are they doing so close?
Got to get back to the sack. Set the Primus going.
Getting cold. Be shivering soon.
Johnny was feeling rough. He looked like shit, his eyes screws countersunk into a plank of sun-bleached pine. The cramps reached a hand into his gut, wrenched at his intestines. Fuckin' cramps. Jesus. . .
He needed a fag or a fix. Not much of either left. Get back to the rucksack. Send Alex to the house on Mulberry Street. God, what are they doing so close. . ?
What was that?
Dogs?
They've brought fuckin' dogs!
Johnny gnawed at the stumped knuckles of h
is right hand.
Oh, man. . . Dog's are sure to smell us. . .
He scrabbled back towards the chute. Alex would know what to do. Alex was smart.
Please God, let Alex know what to do.
* * * * *
Alex didn't have enough faith left to waste any believing in a benign deity, not after all of the shit that had been happening with Beth, and with Johnny for that matter.
The batteries in the torch had run dry. They were all but out of tinned food. Johnny's stash was down to one last hit of happy thoughts. The situation was desperate. From now on in Alex was on his own and fighting Johnny as well as everyone from God down, while Johnny took himself on a long trip through withdrawal city on the neurosis express.
That was one journey Alex didn't want to buy a ticket for. So he had two choices. First, turn himself in, or turn Johnny in, or both. Second, make a break for it when Johnny was out for the count. Some set of choices. That they were all but out of food meant they couldn’t stay here forever like this, in the dark.
“DOGS!” Johnny shouted, coming up the chimney flue. “They've only gone and brought fuckin’ dogs, man.” He heard Johnny scuttle across the floor, his feet scraping, echoing wall to wall in the high ceilinged cavern, a scared and scary sound he hated.
“Oh, Jesus,” that was the world according to Alex Slater.
He heard Johnny rifle through his backpack, guessed what it was his feverish fingers were hunting down. Alex couldn't even make out the extra bulk of his shadow in the pitch black, but he didn’t need or desire to see the frantic scrabbling. Just sounds in the dark. Breathing. Faint. Scared.
“Light the fuckin’ stove, man,” Johnny barked. “QUICK.”
Alex did as he was told.
He turned his back on Johnny not wanting to watch while he fixed to score.
Just how the hell am I going to get out of this mess?
Oh, Jesus indeed.
* * * * *
“I wasn't lying, I wasn't,” Jeff Lisker pleaded for belief as Devlin turned on him.
Sufferer's Song Page 28
