Lane

by Peter Grainger

  Then both his hands were around her throat and she knew that she had perhaps two or three minutes to live. He meant it now – you can tell. Her struggles became involuntary, legs twitching, hands fluttering, and her final thought before she lost consciousness was that it’s all true, all the stuff about the bright, blinding lights at the end.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The side-ward of the hospital looked more like the medical wing of a prison that Saturday morning. Jack Harley had to show his ID as soon as he stepped out of the lift, even though the officer on duty was from his own station, and then he had to record his visit in the logbook. If they had asked to search him, he would not have been surprised.

  When he reached the suite of rooms, Harley could see uniformed men outside two of them, and other faces that he recognised, but no press, thank God. ACC Russell had been very definite about that but there was no way that a journalist could have got through this security; the only risk was hospital staff talking about the novelty of the situation and one of them seeing if they could make a few quid on the side. It wouldn’t be the first time, but you can’t cover every eventuality.

  The young A&E registrar that he was talking to now seemed very much on the ball, though, and not as resentful of the police presence as some he had encountered in the past. They stood outside the first room and looked in through the glass panel in the door.

  She said, ‘The bullet just caught the femur. It did some damage but it isn’t fractured. Some major vessels were torn and he lost a lot of blood – most of what’s in him now isn’t his own.’

  Harley stared at the sickly yellow face and said, ‘I have to be honest, doctor – he doesn’t look too good.’

  She took another look herself and then said, ‘The patient has other problems unrelated to his getting shot, though that hasn’t helped his prognosis.’

  Harley was an old-fashioned copper, and one who had long ago stopped pretending that he was anything else in order to get on; if that girl’s shooting this scumbag in the leg had not helped his prognosis, it was a bloody good job. Threatening two women with a razor? She would have been justified in aiming between the eyes as far as Harley was concerned.

  The registrar was waiting for him to say more – very polite, very professional and very posh. On the way up, Harley thought, won’t be here long. Consultant in another five years and earning double what I’ll retire on.

  He said, ‘And what is his prognosis? I’d hate him to miss his day in court.’

  ‘That rather depends on how quickly you can get him there. I just patch them up, superintendent, and I haven’t seen the full case history, but one would have to say that he is terminally ill with a chronic liver condition.’

  Would one? Well, we’d better get a move on then. He asked to be told about the second man, arrested on Ravens’ Tor last night and now occupying the adjacent hospital room. He too had a police guard, a big, uniformed man that Harley didn’t recognise and who had planted himself firmly in front of the door; Harley had to ask him to stand aside a little so that he could see into the room.

  The registrar said, ‘This man was brought in with concussion. He had received several heavy blows to the skull but was not, as far as I am aware, unconscious at any point.’

  Several heavy blows to the skull, eh? Well done, Wrighty. In the beam of the helicopter’s searchlight, the sergeant had found this monster with his hands around the girl’s neck, and she had stopped struggling by then. Warned at gunpoint, Small had not let go and consequently received the requisite baton treatment. If some idiot had filmed it and shown it on You Tube, it would be labelled as police brutality, no doubt.

  ‘And what is his prognosis?’

  ‘No permanent damage to the brain that we can see. Another twenty four hours and you can take him away.’

  Small had seen them through the window. One eye was staring balefully at the policeman, and the other was covered with a dressing. Automatically, Harley checked the man’s wrists and saw that he was handcuffed to the frame of the bed.

  ‘What about his eye?’

  ‘Ah. There might be some issues with that. A specialist’s job, obviously. It might require surgery when the swelling has gone down.’

  Harley thought it then, and almost said it – this pair really had picked on the wrong woman yesterday. One was likely to die even quicker than he expected and the other might be half-blinded. Ouch! Harley shivered then because he didn’t like anything to do with eyes and even his annual visit to the optician was a sort of torture.

  ‘So,’ he said then, ‘Where is she?’

  The registrar took him out of that side-ward and into another one. Although he had had one fleeting glimpse of her face on a computer screen, Harley didn’t know what else he was expecting to see, but it wasn’t the skinny, dark-haired girl wearing jeans and a red T shirt, standing at the small window and staring out at a concrete courtyard. When she turned to look at whoever had entered the room, he wondered whether he actually performed any of the double-take that he felt inside. Was this her? Had she done all that damage yesterday? Had they come to the wrong room?

  The registrar said, ‘Oh, you’re up and dressed.’

  ‘I can’t stay in bed. Someone brought me magazines. That was the last straw.’

  Harley followed her distraught gaze to the rumpled bed covers, and sure enough there were magazines about country life, fashion and celebrity gossip. He liked her already.

  ‘Who’s this? He looks like a psychiatrist. Is it time for the shrink now?’

  Harley told her who he was and noted the perceptible change in manner – she had been looking half over her shoulder but now she turned to face him. Then he spoke to the doctor again because he needed to know things and because it would annoy the young woman to be talked about in the third person.

  ‘How is she doing?’

  ‘Ms Lane has bruising to the neck and ribs. There is some discomfort in the ribs but an X ray didn’t show any fractures. As you can see, she has some stitches in her cheek but the wound is superficial and I don’t think there will be a scar.’

  The doctor looked at Lane then as if this was important but she got back nothing in return.

  ‘Ms Lane did lose consciousness briefly during the attack which is why we have kept her in, but we can see no signs of trauma other than a certain impatience with hospital protocols.’

  The superintendent was well aware that Lane’s attention was fixed entirely on him now, and she made no attempt to respond to the doctor’s comment. He looked back at her directly, and Lane said, ‘I’m also still here because I’m under arrest – or at least I’m assuming I am.’

  He said, ‘Yes, you are. It’s procedure when anyone has fired an unauthorised weapon but I don’t need to tell you that. One of the reasons I’m here is to conduct the de-arrest.’

  The registrar said to Lane, ‘He might be de-arresting you but I’m not discharging you.’

  If Harley had not been there, the conversation between the two women would have taken a different course then, but he was – Lane nodded an acceptance, and the registrar said that she would be back on the first side-ward if he needed to speak to her again.

  When they were alone, he said, ‘Consider yourself no longer under arrest. There will be a bit of police bail but you’ll be coming in to see us next week to sort out the paperwork and make statements, so that shouldn’t be an inconvenience. I can’t see there ever being any question of charges.’

  ‘OK. Thank you.’

  Attractive in an unusual sort of way, with large, dark eyes and high, fine bones in her face. Harley felt momentary anger at the thought of Small clubbing her with the gun in that face and breaking the clear skin, even though there would be no scar.

  ‘Another reason I’m here is to say thank you, particularly on behalf of my sergeant, Robert Willows, and his mother.’

  ‘Right. Well… I don’t know about that. It turns out that if I hadn’t taken the gun in the first place, he might not have
come after us. I might have made the wrong call there.’

  That was her honest view, Harley could see. No false humility, no self-deprecation; she had spent the hours since analysing the events and debriefing herself, concluding that she might in some way be to blame.

  ‘You got Mrs Willows out of harm’s way and you kept her out of it until we arrived. In my view, you made the right call. Operationally, everything you did, as far as I have been told about it, was justified.’

  There would be no smile – Harley recognised that, having known her for all of five minutes – but he guessed that his opinion as a senior officer would count with her. She accepted it with an odd, brief down-turning of the mouth, as if to do so was still in some way against her better judgement.

  Harley said, ‘How long do they plan to keep you in?’

  ‘Forty eight hours they said, due to loss of consciousness. But they’ll have had enough of me by mid-afternoon. I’ll be going home tonight.’

  ‘Home to Polcoombe? Is there anyone there to keep an eye you? Family? Friends?’

  ‘No, not necessary. This is just a scratch and I’ve got some paracetamol somewhere. I’ve had worse.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  Almost, almost a smile, followed by a sigh, but she said nothing.

  ‘We looked you up, obviously…’

  ‘Yes.’

  He thought, she doesn’t say much. I wonder what they talked about, her and Mrs Willows, up there on that hill last night. He made it clear that he was going then, saying that they were sure to meet next week at some point during the gathering of evidence and the making of statements. He thanked her again, and asked, just out of the politeness that is customary in these situations, whether there was anything he could do for her before leaving.

  She seemed to shrug, and he was at the door before he heard her say, ‘Maybe there is. There might be something.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Have you got any jobs?’

  Assistant Chief Constable Martin Russell was also having an interesting morning. He hadn’t done a Saturday for years but he had been in the building since eight o’clock. At the top of his to-do list were the names Hannaford and Cooper but by nine there was still no sign of them, and his mood had worsened. Eventually he discovered where they had supposedly stayed overnight – he had his doubts – and the officer who rang that boarding house reported back that the two men had indeed spent the night there but they had left immediately after an early breakfast.

  Russell was in the act of ringing the station commander at Exeter when an internal call told him that the officers in question were now in the building and on their way up to his room as requested. He put down the phone and stared angrily at the door. When the buzzer sounded, he barked ‘Come in’, and when they did so, he remained in his seat. There was no polite greeting this time.

  ‘So, where have you been? I’ve had officers working all night and you two roll up at half past nine.’

  Hannaford said, ‘When an internal investigation is underway, we are not subject to-’

  ‘Internal investigation my arse! Are you serious, Hannaford?’

  Hannaford had opened his mouth to respond and then seemed to have second thoughts.

  Russell said, ‘More to the point, were you ever serious? If you’re staying around, I’ve got a few questions for you. One, how did ‘internal investigations’ get onto this so quickly? I’d like the name of the senior officer to whom you’ve been reporting, and when I’ve got that, I’ll ask them the same question. Two – how do you intend to proceed here and now, this morning? Because we have a mountain of work to do, and I need officers like Robert Willows to be doing it. I don’t need anyone being distracted by the nonsense you are involved in.’

  The ACC could see then that things had changed. It wasn’t that Hannaford was afraid of him – too hard-bitten for that – but he had almost certainly been given new orders when he last reported in, which would have been this morning.

  Hannaford said, ‘We’re going back to base now. Whether this investigation goes any further will not be my decision. I’ll present the evidence we have gathered.’

  ‘Present away. Take any copies of papers that you need but you’re not having the originals. And you’re not taking Willows’ phone either. That is crucial evidence in the new investigation that we are setting up into the attempt to pervert the course of justice. An attempt which took place on my patch.’

  And if I win that one, thought Russell, then I know there is something rotten about all this. Hannaford looked at Cooper, and Cooper opened the box file he was carrying. He took out the phone in its plastic bag and placed it on the ACC’s desk. Russell’s smile was contemptuous but Cooper didn’t seem to see it. All he said was, ‘Where can I get these papers copied, sir?’

  The call from the DPP came exactly forty seven minutes later. Mr McCourt did professional outrage rather well, but then, thought Russell, I expect he’s had a lot of practice. The media had got hold of it somehow – an investigation, another one, was underway of course, and Russell should expect to have his own station staff questioned about this – but the end result was that an item would appear on the national BBC news at lunchtime. Did he, ACC Russell, realise the implications of this?

  ‘Well, Mr McCourt, it’s slowly becoming clear to me. Do you think it will affect the trial?’

  The lawyer was working to a script – either he didn’t have time to appreciate the irony, or he did but his own morning was proving to be busier than expected. Apparently it would affect the trial. If they didn’t have it already – and they do, you know they do, Michael – the defence teams would be all over this by the middle of the afternoon. And then there were the jurors, whose objectivity would be compromised the moment they saw the story on a screen or heard it on a radio. A deferral was inevitable.

  ‘How long, Mr McCourt? Weeks?’

  ‘Months would be my guess. You must understand, Assista-’

  Russell put down the phone. How the hell was he going to tell his people that?

  The phone call with the Chief Constable wasn’t ideal because it resulted in her saying that she would be at the station herself within the hour. ‘Martin,’ she had said in that unnervingly quiet and Scottish way, ‘we’re going to need our biggest fans in place because there’s an awful lot of you-know-what heading our way. My office at 11.30. And Martin, one more thing. Have you spoken to that woman you were liaising with in London? Who was she, if she wasn’t DPP?’

  He didn’t know, of course, and he should, but you don’t question people like that, do you? He would find out now, of course – and he would also find out if Meredith Carr was of the slightest use when things go pear-shaped.

  The number didn’t ring. He dialled it several times, more carefully on each occasion, but the result was the same – an ominous digital emptiness. He called Leanne Angel and asked her to check it for him. It took her a good ten minutes, and during those ten minutes a horrible suspicion was growing inside ACC Martin Russell because, once upon a time, he had been a good policeman.

  Leanne Angel said, when she called back, ‘I’m sorry, sir. It isn’t a number.’

  ‘Not a number? It’s been discontinued? Cut off?’

  ‘No, sir. According to records, it never has been issued.’

  Chapter Twenty

  As Assistant Chief Constable Russell put down the telephone and began the search for the words that would be needed to explain what he had just been told to his superiors, Emily Willows took a deep breath and walked back into her home. She had waited until she saw Robert drive away – had insisted that this was something she would do alone. She would not need support to go back into this house because of what those men had done here. She would not allow them even that shabby little victory. Instead, she walked slowly around each room with a critical eye, and when she was satisfied, she sat down on the sofa that the two of them had shared, and remembered.

  When Lane had recovered consciousness, they
brought her down from the hill and took her straight into the ambulance. Emily had heard them trying to persuade Lane to lie down on the stretcher-bed but when she, Emily Willows, was finally allowed in to see her, Lane was still sitting upright on it.

  There was much congealed blood on the right side of Lane’s face and a paramedic was examining the wound. Then his hands went to her neck. Lane flinched and then said sorry to the man. He asked her to move her head slowly from side to side and then up and down, and Emily could see the bruising and how close it must have been.

  Lane was saying, ‘It’s alright, there’s no fracture,’ and then she saw Emily climbing the steps into the ambulance. Lane smiled briefly and openly for the very first time, Emily realised, and said, ‘Hello. Are you alright? I hope you didn’t let him escape.’

  ‘No, I did not. He’s already been whisked away. What happened up there? I haven’t seen the other one yet. You didn’t…?’

  There was activity behind Emily and someone else climbed into the ambulance – a stern-faced female police sergeant in uniform and body armour.

  ‘Excuse me, please. Mrs Willows, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could I ask you to step outside? There are things we need to do here before Ms Lane is taken to the hospital.’

  Emily was not inclined to leave at that point but Lane gave her a nod that said, it’s OK. Emily climbed out again and watched from the foot of the steps. To her astonishment she saw and heard the policewoman arresting Summer Lane for the possession and discharging of a prohibited weapon. Emily took the first step back into the ambulance, and this time Lane was holding up a hand towards her and shaking her head – the person least concerned about any of this seemed to be Lane herself.

  The policewoman then conducted a search of the victim she had just arrested. There were only the pockets of the jeans, and from one of these she removed the useless iPhone and a set of keys.