“Come on, I’ll help you down, it’s easy and then I’ll call for help. We can sort everything out, once you’re safe. You can tell us everything, we’ll get you help, you’ll be okay.”
But it was too late, she had known it had taken too long, that they’d made too much noise. The door flung back on its hinges crashing into the wall, a shower of plaster cascading onto the carpet. Iain Braithwaite stood in the doorway armed with a nasty looking knife. The handle was fluorescent green, the blade serrated down one edge. It was long with an upturned end. Serena whimpered when she saw him and stepped behind Tanya who had thrown out an arm to push her backwards.
She held up a hand and took a pace towards him.
“Put that down, Iain. Don’t let’s be stupid. We can sort all this out, but that’s just making things worse.” She took another step and he came to meet her.
Chapter 32
Iain Laithwaite braced himself, legs apart, bent a little at the knees. He brandished the knife in front of him, waved it back and forth. He was wiry, young, and it was an evil knife.
They were bad odds, and Tanya tried again to talk to him. “Calm down. There’s no sense to this. Back up is coming, you might as well give it up.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Detective Inspector Tanya Miller seconded to the local force.” It was a lie, but it didn’t matter if it helped to intimidate him. It didn’t.
“What the hell are you doing here. You’ve broken in. You’d better have a warrant.”
He was clutching at straws and she allowed a smile to spread across her face.
“Nice try, Iain. I don’t need a warrant. Not when I believe someone is at risk and Serena here, well let’s be honest, she is definitely at risk. You need to just give it up now. You don’t want this to get any worse and attacking me is going to bring down a whole world of hurt.”
She had edged forward as she spoke, every nerve alive, her muscles tensed. He glanced at Serena who was cowering beneath the window.
“What’s she told you? She’s been lying. She wanted to come with me, wanted to party and then when it got going, she panicked,” he said.
“No, I don’t think so,” Tanya said, “but look, come and tell your side of it. Maybe there has been a misunderstanding.” There was a gasp from behind her, but she didn’t turn, didn’t react.
“No, Aunty Tan, no. It’s true, I didn’t know what he was going to do. I didn’t know what would happen.”
“Aunty Tan?” he raised an eyebrow. “Aunty. Ha! So not a copper after all.”
The useless little bag was still slung across her body and Tanya lifted it from where it dangled next to her hip. “I’ll show you my warrant card.”
She grasped the strap and pulled it over her head; another half step forward hidden by the movement. She lowered a hand towards the zip. His eyes flicked downward. She struck. With all the strength of her shoulders, she swung the bag in a wide arc towards him. He had a strong grip on the weapon, and though the bag knocked it sideways, and the handle wrapped around it, he hung on. She still had one end tight in her hand and tugged hard, unbalancing him. He stumbled a little, shook the arm holding the knife, and pulled at the bag with his other hand. He was distracted by his attempts at untangling the mess and Tanya stepped forward, bringing up her knee towards his groin. If she had hit home it would have done the job, but he turned away enough to protect his balls and she connected with his inner thigh. It made him gasp with pain but didn’t make him the roiling mess on the floor she hoped for.
He still battled with the knife, trying to loosen the straps caught in the deep serrations on the wicked blade. Tanya threw herself towards him, aiming to knock him off his feet but again luck was on his side, and though he staggered backwards, the wall broke his fall. The bag had done all it could and slid to the floor uselessly as Iain Laithwaite grinned, the knife back in his full possession.
Tanya turned at an angle and charged, leading with the elbow, connecting with his throat. She felt him go slack as he choked out a gurgle. His eyes clouded briefly, and she thought she had him. He was made of tough stuff though and the arm holding the knife sliced upwards ripping through the leather of her jacket and she felt the flood of warm liquid that told her she was cut. She would lose it now if she didn’t take him in the next seconds. Her hands darting under the blade she grabbed at his wrist, twisted it upwards and backwards, it wasn’t textbook, but as near as she could manage. What she lost in technique she made up for with brute force.
She felt the crunch of bone, and heard him scream. The blade hit the wall and fell to the floor. Hands locked together now behind his neck, she dragged him forward towards her knee which she brought up with all her energy. There was the crunch of gristle and spatter of blood and as he sagged in her arms she knew the fight was hers.
Chapter 33
Tanya threw her phone to Serena. “See if there’s a signal.”
“Yes, it’s okay,” Serena said.
“Great, now find Stan Laird on there, tell him who you are, tell him quickly what’s happened and say we need an ambulance.” While that was done Tanya spent the time rolling an unconscious Iain Laithwaite into the recovery position and watching to make sure he didn’t choke on his tongue or the blood from his broken nose. She had kicked the knife well into the corner out of harm’s way. Just in case.
By the time the troops arrived, he was conscious but groggy, lying on the carpet groaning and swearing but no longer any threat to anyone. They laid him on a backboard, his neck in a collar, an infusion plugged into his arm. The first responder had called for a second ambulance to take Tanya to A & E to have the horrible gash in her arm, currently wrapped in a sparkly red scarf, attended to. They had a struggle with Serena, she begged to be allowed to just go home. Everyone agreed that going from the current situation straight into another, which would be just as tense and emotional, was never going to be the right thing for someone in her fragile mental state. She cried and pleaded but eventually they persuaded her to go with her aunt and called for an ecstatic Fiona and Graham to meet them at the hospital.
Alone in the tiny A & E cubicle, Tanya began to go over what would be required next. A report to Stan Laird. A conversation with her sister, which was going to be ghastly, and of course official questions about her role in all that had happened. That would be protracted, there would be an inquiry, a man had been hurt and she had been injured. It was going to generate a mountain of paperwork, interviews and statements, but there would be no getting away from it. She relived the events of the last hours. She had no choice but to protect herself and Serena. He was armed, he was dangerous, and she had told him who she was. She had not had clear grounds to arrest him, but she had identified herself. She didn’t think she had done anything wrong, except perhaps not calling for backup, but these days cunning lawyers could pick and pick at something until it unravelled.
Suddenly, she found that she just didn’t care very much. She had found her niece. It had been too late to save her from harm, but the harm had already been done well before Tanya became involved. She couldn’t imagine that there would be any sort of censure regarding her fight with Iain Laithwaite, and if there was, she would deal with it. Right now, all she wanted was to be on her own at home. She lay her head back on the hospital pillow and closed her eyes.
Her phone was in the bag on the chair beside her narrow bed, and although it was on silent, she clearly heard it buzzing. She rolled over until she could reach with her good arm and hoisted the whole thing on to her belly. By the time she found the phone and dragged it out the ringing had stopped. Charlie’s number was at the top of the missed calls list. Before she had a chance to phone him back, the message icon popped up.
‘We need a Skype conference tomorrow. We need you back here. Can you give me an update? Bob Scunthorpe is getting twitchy, he wants things to move more quickly. Hope things are going okay there – Charlie.’
She responded with a short text: ‘Things here have come t
o a head. Should be back tomorrow or Monday. Serena is safe.’ It was enough, she could give him all the gory details when she saw him. She knew that tomorrow, Sunday, would be almost impossible, but she was going to try.
A nurse pushed through the curtain at the entrance to the cubicle. With a tut and a shake of her head, she grabbed the phone, pushed it into the bag and placed the whole lot out of the way on the floor. She pulled a steel trolley from the corner.
“Right, doctor’s on his way, we need to put some stitches in that arm and get you some painkillers and probably antibiotics. Are your tetanus jabs up to date?” the nurse said.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Excellent, well lay back and relax, this won’t take long and it shouldn’t be too uncomfortable.”
The nurse had lied, it hurt like the devil and they told her there was damage to the tendons and muscles. Probably not enough to need surgery but she may need physio before she regained full strength and movement.
“How’s my niece?” Tanya asked, mostly to take her mind off what the baby-faced doctor was doing to her arm because she didn’t think they’d tell her much.
“The poor thing,” the nurse said. “Her mum’s with her now and the doctor’s seen her. I can’t tell you much more than that, but it’s going to be a long hard road for her if what we have heard is true. But she’s young, God willing she’ll find a way.”
Tanya didn’t believe in a benevolent deity but right then she sort of hoped that there was some divine help for her niece because her life had changed irrevocably and she was in need of serious support.
Chapter 34
They would not let Tanya see Serena because the girl had been sedated. They had given her a morning-after pill, taken swabs and blood samples, she would be screened for STDs, HIV, and hepatitis. Fiona had sobbed and wiped constantly at her bloodshot eyes as she went through the indignities and discomforts her daughter had suffered at the hands of the medics.
They were sitting together on hard plastic chairs in the reception area, waiting for Graham to bring the car from the parking space.
“She wouldn’t see her dad. She said she was too embarrassed. It broke him in pieces,” Fiona said.
Though Tanya knew a bit more about her brother-in-law than she really wanted, she did feel for him. It was a common enough reaction with the young girls she had dealt with who had been sexually abused. It would take a long time for them all to recover. They would never be quite the same again.
“I want him in jail, the swine. I want him in jail, and the others – all of them.” There was a slight edge of hysteria to Fiona’s voice and Tanya didn’t think this was the time to explain that actually, there was very little likelihood of that happening. He might be sentenced for his attack on a police officer, that remained to be seen; and there were the drugs, but that was minor in the great play of things.
For the rest of it; it had happened in a foreign country, Serena had gone with him knowingly and had even understood that they were probably going to smuggle drugs. She had no clear knowledge of what had happened because of what she said they had given her. It was a nasty mess all round. She was not underage and couldn’t prove that Iain Laithwaite or anyone else had raped her. She had some physical signs of rough sex, but they were healing already. It did seem he had locked her up against her will but in all of it the girl was not completely innocent. A defence lawyer would tear her to pieces even if the Procurator Fiscal thought there was enough to progress with it. In the end the result would probably not be worth the trauma. It was unfair, a young girl had been taken advantage of, a family changed forever, but it was an old story and they would have to find a way through, most probably without the justice they wanted.
Tanya looked at her distraught sister and simply shook her head. She couldn’t face the arguments, the demands, the harassment, the heartbreak, if she tried to explain. She would leave it to other people, Stan Laird maybe, or the solicitors they had already contacted. It was cowardly, but she’d had enough and there was nothing that she could do to change any of it, no matter how much Fiona railed and cried.
The doctor had prescribed strong painkillers, but Tanya had pushed the little box into her pocket unopened. She wanted to tie up as many of the loose ends as she could while adrenaline still surged through her bloodstream. When the withdrawal hit she knew she would be poleaxed and the plan was to have that happen on the train on the way home. She needed to hit the ground running when she got back to Oxford. When the report for Stan Laird was written, she would go over all the emails from Charlie and finally watch the interview with their only witness. She had no intention of sleeping. Red Bull and coffee were what she needed, not painkillers.
Chapter 35
Growing up in a home with such an imbalance between the two of them, Fiona and Tanya had argued often. Recent years had been peaceful but mainly because they were rarely in contact. When Tanya walked down the stairs on Sunday morning, her bags packed, and asked if she could have a lift to the station Fiona exploded.
“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” she said.
Tanya had expected this and was determined to keep things as calm as possible. She was exhausted, she had spent most of the night filling in the forms that Stan Laird had forwarded on for her, then reviewing her own case. As soon as she judged it a reasonable hour of the morning, she had sent emails, and asked questions, disturbing Charlie, Stan Laird, and even the Fire Officer at home. Finally, she had phoned the hospital to check on Iain Laithwaite. He was due to be discharged later with his broken nose and damaged wrist; neither of which caused her a moment’s guilt. She had booked her ticket, checked her bank account – the sight of which depressed her – and now this.
“I’m going home. I’m done here.” Her eyes felt filled with sand and every part of her ached. She had her pills in her pocket and as soon as she sat down on the train she would take them and sleep away all the journey. Charlie was meeting her, and they would go directly to headquarters so that she could look at the noticeboards and add her own notes to those already there.
Fiona was standing too close, invading Tanya’s personal space, filling the air between them with fury and coffee breath.
“Don’t be so bloody ridiculous. You can’t go home,” she said.
Tanya closed her eyes and sighed. “I’ll be back in a little while. I will more than likely have to come up to address the inquiry, though Detective Inspector Laird said he’ll do his best to avoid it. Maybe we can Skype it or something. Anyway, that’s not today and I really do need to get back. I have an ongoing case, Fiona, you know this.” She put her bag on the floor and reached out to lay a hand on her sister’s arm.
Fiona stepped back, eyes blazing. “What about us? What about me and Serena, what about your family?
“There’s nothing else for me to do. You’ve arranged a lawyer, you’ve organised somewhere for Serena to go to get the care she needs. There’s nothing more that I can do. Really, Fiona, think about it.”
“You should be here, you should be supporting me. Bloody Graham’s gone off first thing this morning, I have no idea where he is, and now you’re buggering off. Does nobody care about what I’ve just gone through?”
“Of course we care. I care.” In all honesty, she had to wonder how much Graham did care, leaving his wife this morning. She had no proof that he was seeing another woman in the midst of this crisis but surely if he had gone anywhere else he would have been open about it.
“No, no, you can’t go, I won’t let you.” Shaking her head Fiona stepped backwards down the hall and leaned against the front door, her arms folded across her chest.
“Fiona, you don’t need me. Half the time you don’t even like me. You’ve got all the support you need. Someone will be coming later today from the local force to talk to you, they’ll help you with the legal stuff. You’ve got your own kids, you’ve got Serena who needs you. There is no reason for me to be here now. I found her. For God’s sake what more do you want
from me?”
The final statement was the result of pain, tiredness and frustration. She saw the hurt in her sister’s eyes, but in that moment acknowledged that she didn’t have any real depth of feeling for this woman. Serena was different, she was young and vulnerable and had to be found. But Fiona was demanding and selfish, had been since childhood, and Tanya acknowledged a truth that she had always known. It had been subdued because of guilt, upbringing and expectations, but she didn’t like her sister. Not at all.
“Well, I’m not taking you to the station. I’m just not.” Still standing guard on the door, Fiona lifted her chin and stared at Tanya with cold, hard eyes.
“Okay, suit yourself. Tell Serena I hope she’s better soon and if she ever wants to talk to me, she knows my number.” Stamping through the kitchen and down the drive, Tanya brushed away tears. She didn’t know where they came from; anger, the need for sleep, or just a strange sort of loneliness, because she had just left what little family she had and didn’t think she would ever want to see them again.
Chapter 36
Rain soaked his shoulders. He’d known a time when he’d cursed the sunshine and the heat. That was when he had a wife and a little girl waiting for him at home. Back when he didn’t jump at shadows and the sound of fireworks didn’t turn him into a snivelling wreck. Back when his life made some sort of sense, even if he was miles away sitting on a hill watching goats and scruffy kids running between concrete block houses.
There were some buildings nearby, boat houses, he could shelter there. But then the man might think he hadn’t come. Might just drive away. Wait by the bridge he’d said. There were rivercraft moored nearby – power boats and a couple of barges – all dark and quiet. Nobody here now in this rain. That was good, nobody to see him. He hated being seen, hated being pointed at, pitied, scorned, it wasn’t fair. None of it was fair.
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