Lane

by Peter Grainger

  Some pain in the left leg, of course, mid-femur where the metal plates held the bone together, but nothing that was slowing her down. Partly the adrenaline, obviously, but also she was fit, much fitter than she had been even three months ago. The air up here was cool and pure – she could taste that – and as long as the way ahead of her was clear, she could run all night under the stars. And I will, she thought, I will run all night. I’ve done enough, there is no way he can find his way back in time to do any more harm. Those lights were police vehicles, and they might even have found Emily by now.

  Lane accelerated a little more. She had heard nothing behind her since the shots were fired. That might have been Small’s last-ditch effort – no way a huge man like that could have much more running in him.

  More rocks ahead, glimmering a pale grey in the moonlight – a whole heap of rocks in her way. Lane slowed and looked for the path that must go around it, but there was no path. Just a little clearing, the remains of a fire in a circle of stones, and a couple of plastic bottles. She stopped, listened and then went forward onto the first of the rocks.

  These were great boulders left by events long before the age of man, heaped one on top of another but worn smooth by the hands and feet of the many who had scrambled over them. Lane moved quickly and nimbly, knowing that if Small was still after her, she would be a dangerously exposed target up here.

  It is called Ravens’ Tor for the obvious reason. Those great black birds seek out and dwell in the wildest places left to them – the bare mountains of the north and the rugged hills of the west. They nest on the inaccessible, vertical faces of cliffs and like nothing more than to launch themselves into the blue void and hang like children’s kites on the wind for minutes on end. If Summer Lane had wings, there is no doubt she would have done the same. Instead, earthbound, she stared down into the steep, shadowy darkness of the valley below, and understood why people made the climb up to this place – the view in the daylight must be magnificent. A bit of a shame, then, that she might never get the chance to enjoy it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Assistant Chief Constable Russell had been told that there was a phone call for him, from the DPP at after ten o’clock on a Friday night. He waved it away but then Leanne Angel, the senior office manager for the station, came back with the same thing; they were still on the line and refusing to hang up – she told him that it sounded like someone important.

  Russell had never heard of Michael McCourt, but he went back to his own office and took the call there. Mr McCourt did not mince his words. Once he had established that he was talking to the most senior officer available with regard to Operation Landing Net, he said, ‘I’ve just had a phone call about this. What’s going on this evening?’

  Russell said, ‘What exactly have you been told, Mr McCourt?’

  ‘That there has been an attempt to interfere with evidence in the case. An attempt that involves shootings, kidnapping and the possible implication of one or more of your own officers. Is this true?’

  ‘Which part, Mr McCourt?’

  ‘Any of it! Is any of this true? If so, I-’

  ‘I will tell you that we have an ongoing situation. I can confirm that one person has been shot and injured - not a police officer, but thank you for your concern.’

  There was silence then, and Russell guessed that there would be other bodies in the room with Michael McCourt – that he himself was probably on loudspeaker.

  The lawyer – for, at the end of the day, that’s what he would be – ignored the rebuke and said, ‘And can you also confirm that these events are related in some way to the operation called Landing Net?’

  ‘Yes, I can.’

  ‘You do understand the seriousness of this, Russell? If there is the slightest suspicion that evidence has been compromised, we-’

  ‘I have no reason to think that it has been. There was a crude attempt to manipulate one of our detectives, which failed because he reported it immediately to his senior officer. Two women managed to escape from the men who were threatening them. We have just found one of them safe and well, and expect to find the other one shortly. We have also made a number of arrests. In my professional judgement, the situation is under control and the case has not been compromised in any way.’

  Another pause in proceedings before McCourt said, ‘Nevertheless, Assistant Chief Constable, if word of this reaches the defence or the press, it could be grounds for a lengthy delay. Your professional judgement will count for nothing if there is any suspicion that your own officers have been involved. There would need to be an independent inquiry.’

  Russell said, ‘I will give this guarantee – that there will be no such leak from my station before the trial begins on Monday morning. Can you give me the same guarantee, Mr McCourt?’

  Apparently this was somewhat insulting; McCourt told him so and Russell was somewhat disappointed because he had meant it to be quite insulting. But McCourt gave no such guarantee, and Russell was not surprised. There had been something odd about all this from the beginning, and he suspected now that, however the day’s events were going to end, someone had already achieved their aim.

  McCourt said, ‘I request that you keep me fully informed of developments. You imagine that we here work nine to five and have the weekends off. We do not.’

  Russell said that most of his time now was going to be spent keeping people fully informed, and he mentioned the name Meredith Carr. Would it be alright just to tell either one of them?

  ‘Who? I don’t know any such person, Assistant Chief Constable.’

  On that point at least, Russell had the feeling that the DPP man might be telling the truth.

  For some reason, they had put Emily Willows back on to Jack Harley – they thought, maybe, that she would listen to him. She was down at the road now, surrounded by police vehicles and an ambulance, but she was refusing to do what she was told.

  ‘Mrs Willows, it would-’

  ‘Is that Superintendent Harley? At last, someone with some sense. Will you please tell these people to stop trying to get me into the ambulance? I’m perfectly well. And tell them to stop trying to put the shiny blanket thing around me. It’s a lovely warm evening and I am not in shock. I’m not leaving until you have Miss Lane down from the hill.’

  Harley was watching the communications desk as he listened. They were linked directly to the officers already searching on Ravens’ Tor, and he could see that something new was developing.

  ‘Mrs Willows, I do understand. But we have a set way of doing things, tried and tested, and I know you wouldn’t want to get in the way.’

  Not a chance that was going to work, of course.

  ‘Superintendent, I am not in the way but I will go and stand off to the side here. No-one needs to take the slightest notice of me.’

  The young female officer was approaching him, still looking frightened but somehow he knew that it wasn’t for the same reason as before.

  ‘Sir? Sergeant Wright needs to speak to you urgently.’

  ‘Mrs Willows, I have to go.’

  He put down the handset and went to the communications desk.

  ‘Jon, what is it? What’s happening?’

  Harley could hear that the men had been moving, perhaps still were moving as Wright spoke to him.

  ‘Thought you should know, sir. We’ve just heard three shots on the hill above us.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Jon! Be bloody careful. And Jon? Tell me you can hear a helicopter.’

  ‘Affirmative. It’s down the hill from us now, sir.’

  Harley closed his eyes and weighed this up because there was no-one else, no uniformed commander. Why the hell was there no uniformed commander? Where the hell was Russell?

  ‘Jon? In my opinion we need to carry on with the ground search – we can’t rely solely on the chopper. But if we carry on the ground search, that puts you and your men at greater risk – someone up there is armed and pulling the trigger.’

  Wright said so
mething to the men with him – Harley couldn’t make out the words – and then his voice came back clearly to the superintendent.

  ‘We all think we should go on, sir.’

  Lane climbed down from the rocks. If she was going to face him, she didn’t want it to be as a target several yards away – better to be closer and make him look her in the eye, close enough maybe for her to land a blow or two. So she stood in the little clearing that the sightseers or the teenagers had made, with the rocks at her back and the dense, impenetrable gorse bushes to her left and right. The moon was still rising slowly in the sky behind her, and that meant that, if he came, she would be able to see Small more clearly than he would be able to see her, until he shone the torch into her eyes.

  She had, of course, recognised the sound of the helicopter. It was somewhere in the valley, below the peak that she had climbed, and she thought, it’s going to be close. If he wants to find me before they do, he needs to get a move on. They’ll probably go up high and use the infra-red, no searchlight until they have something glowing in the dark. That could be me or it could be him. And the thing that frightened her most was the usual thing; she was a little frightened because she didn’t feel afraid. She was supposed to feel afraid of the scary man with his body odour, his bad breath and his big hands coming for her in the darkness – she was supposed to be petrified by something like that, wasn’t she? But she knew, in a secret part of herself, that what she was truly afraid of was that the helicopter or the police on the ground would intervene before she saw him face to face, before the final confrontation.

  It’s important to understand that Lane was not a fantasist. She was not under the childish illusion that her skills in self-defence would enable her to bring Small down to his knees with a series of short karate chops and that she would have him disarmed and pinned to the ground when the breathless plodders finally arrived. It was much more likely that he would shoot her, inaccurately enough for her to suffer a great deal of pain, or that he would strangle her – though why he was going to all this trouble over a temporarily blotchy face still eluded her. But still, in some strange way, she would rather face him than not face him; she would rather know that not know.

  And it appeared that Small felt the same way because she could hear him now – first the scrape of a foot against the stony path below and then his breathing, heavy and wheezing. His face rose up out of the gloom, round and pale and pasty in its own sick, small darkness, like a sad imitation of the bright moon above.

  He saw her immediately, stopped and raised the gun. They stood that way for several seconds, like one half of an old-fashioned duel at midnight. Small seemed to be waiting for something. His left hand was empty – no sign of the torch. Perhaps he had stumbled and dropped it.

  Lane said, ‘How’s your face now?’

  She couldn’t be sure but his left eye seemed to be closed – maybe that was simply because he was squinting along the barrel of the gun with his right. Three shots fired, of course, and another when they were on the main road, but that didn’t help much because from here in this light she couldn’t make out what it was he was holding.

  Small edged forward slowly until they were no more than ten feet apart, still with the gun pointed at her, aimed more or less dead centre – that would be really painful and messy.

  ‘Give me the gun.’

  Lane’s surprise was genuine enough.

  ‘The gun? I don’t have it.’

  ‘Effing liar. You took it. Hand it over.’

  ‘I just told you. I don’t have it.’

  He took another step closer and raised the pistol until it was pointing at her face. If the round was anything bigger than a point 22, this could cost a fortune in make-up. The note of the chopper engine had just changed a little – they were making a move. There might be feet on the ground nearby, too. OK, she thought – you’ve done the face-to-face thing. Now you need to figure a way out of this.

  She said, ‘Seriously? You think if I had the gun I wouldn’t have it pointed at you right now?’

  The logic of this seemed to get through to him, and Lane thought, right, if this is about thinking now, I might have the advantage. She decided to press it home.

  ‘So why is this gun so important? Was it a present from your dad or something?’

  ‘Shut your mouth.’

  ‘Or what? You’ll kill me? The chances are you’ll do that anyway, so I might as well say my piece. Why have you given yourself an extra ten years for the sake of this gun, Small? Kidnapping, attempting to pervert the course of justice, threatening and assaulting a police officer’s mother? The judge will go berserk!’

  It was the use of his name more than anything else that would get to him, which, of course, is why she said it.

  ‘Tell me – I just don’t get it. You could have been long gone, but here you are, looking for a gun which I don’t have because I gave it to Mrs Willows so she could guard the driver. He’s tied up somewhere back down the hill.’

  Small flinched as if he was about to turn and run back down the hill to find it.

  ‘This gun must have real sentimental value for you. Or…’

  We have all had that moment – the one in which it isn’t until you find yourself about to say the words that you truly understand. This wasn’t about his face or some sort of primitive macho rage at the way a woman had humiliated him. This wasn’t about him having some sort of weird professional pride in his work. It was all about the gun.

  It wasn’t a special gun to look at or to hold; she had done both and knew it to be a Ruger 9mm semi-automatic. It was about where that gun had been before and what it had been used for. Small had made a mistake, a fundamental one. He had re-used a weapon that could tie him to another crime, probably something more serious than the ones he was currently committing. A crime that would earn him an even longer sentence than the one he was currently setting himself up for. That’s why he had pursued her.

  And the really crazy thing was that even if he had got the gun back, this was all futile. Once forensics had the bullet that she had fired into his accomplice, the match was made anyway. Small’s best bet from the start of this had been to get back to the smoke and hide in it. These men had all been incompetent low-lives, and the most dangerous thing about them was their lack of professionalism.

  Small said, ‘Where is she? Show me where she is.’

  ‘Sorry, but even if I was willing to do that, it’s too late. You can hear the chopper, right? The police have spent the last three hours trying to catch up with us and they’ve finally managed it. If I had a job, I’d bet my last month’s salary that Mrs Willows is already safe.’

  It was sinking in slowly but there was no way Lane could tell whether this was making him less of a threat or more of one; if his past crimes were about to catch up with him in a big way, he might either give in or get desperate. She decided to give him a little nudge towards the former.

  ‘The best thing you can do now is back down. Lower the gun and give it to me. I’ll tell them that you did that. It will count for something.’

  After three or four seconds, he began nodding slowly to himself, and she thought, blimey, he’s going for it. And then without warning he stepped forward suddenly and struck her on the right side of her face with the pistol.

  Lane had been quick enough to sense it coming and she was already twisting down and left before it landed – she felt the skin breaking and the taste of blood in her mouth but no major damage. She kept going with the momentum of it, throwing herself low and past Small’s right side, but his boot came up and caught her in the middle, caught her hard and flipped her over onto her back. He was down upon her immediately, all twenty stones of him, and she thought, I must stop underestimating fat men.

  His right hand still held the gun, and his left was grabbing for her throat. Both her hands reached for his left wrist but he was enormously strong and she could delay him only for moments.

  His face now close to Lane’s, Small said,
‘You’d like that. Citizen’s arrest and all that crap. Yes, you’d love that. No, what we’re going to do is this. First I’m going to search you all over to make sure you haven’t still got that gun. Looking forward to that, aren’t you?’

  Inexorably he was forcing his huge hand down towards her neck.

  ‘And then you and me are going back down to where you reckon the other old cow is, to look for it. If she’s gone or we meet anyone on the way, I’ve got my ticket out of here, haven’t I?’

  His right hand came down now and held the gun to her left temple. That would be nice and quick, Lane. She relaxed completely then, and his fingers were tight around her throat, more than halfway around it seemed, and she knew that he was strong enough to cut off her blood supply with them. She nodded and felt him ease off just a little.

  Was the roaring in her ears the sound of her own blood squeezing through the constricted vessels, or was it the helicopter? No way of knowing. She could lie here, play along, even walk back down the hill with the gun at her head. There was no way he was getting out of this, not really, no way the police would ever let him out of the net. There are contingency plans, negotiators, snipers… She could just lie here.

  Then her two thumbs were into his eye-sockets, digging deep with the nails and she heard him shout in pain. She held on as long as possible, her fingers locked into his hair, feeling it tearing out at the roots. He must have dropped the gun because the hand that pulled her left one from his face wasn’t holding it any more.

  Almost. She almost managed to half throw him off and wriggle free but then he had her two wrists in his two hands. He was looking down at her, snorting with the effort and the shock of what she had done to him. There was blood on his right cheek, quite a lot of it, and Lane wondered whether she had blinded him properly this time.