by Cari Hunter
With one eye on the time, Sanne swigged the remainder of her tea and headed into the utility room, to see whether Meg had a pair of wellies that she wouldn’t mind getting covered in pig shit.
*
Derek Clegg slapped a meaty hand onto a precarious-looking dry-stone wall and bent double to catch his breath. Having managed to walk all of a hundred yards past the pigsty, toward the first of his fields, he was now giving Sanne and Nelson an unwelcome view of his arse crack, as the waistline of his sagging trousers finally lost its battle against gravity.
Averting her gaze, Sanne watched the pig rolling in a pile of manure and hoped that Derek’s theatrical wheezing meant he would renege on his promise of a guided tour. He owned approximately forty acres, much of which had been lying neglected as his health and that of his mother deteriorated. Ned Moseley’s role on the farm had largely involved tending the remaining livestock, but Derek had trusted him to take care of whatever else might need doing, and he admitted that Ned knew the land better than he did.
“There’s this field, and four more after it.” Derek pointed with the handkerchief he had just used to mop his brow. The wind caught the cotton, revealing a colourful patchwork of stains. “Not many outbuildings. Sheep barn in the second field, and something in the fourth, might’ve been a barn once, but now it’s mostly rubble and weeds.”
“Right, thanks,” Sanne said, but seeing Derek’s intent stare she took out her pad and scribbled a note.
“Think you’ll manage from here?” he asked. “Only, I best get back and see to Mum.”
“We’ll be fine.” Nelson nodded gravely. “We appreciate you taking the time to come out with us.”
Apparently satisfied that he had fulfilled his duties as host, Derek tucked away the hanky, hitched up his trousers, and headed back to the house.
Once certain that Derek was out of earshot, Nelson gave a low cheer and radioed the officers waiting in the driveway, directing four of them to help him search the outbuildings round the yard while the rest joined Sanne at the gate to the first field.
Sanne recognised most of them from the moors and the reservoir, and the automatic way they spread themselves across the width of the field spoke of their recent experience. Tagging onto the edge of the line, she nodded at the man next to her, and they slowly walked forward.
*
The weather began to turn as the search team approached the second field. They had watched the rain rolling in across the valley, a mass of grey vertical stripes suspended between the thickening cloud and the hills below. It allowed them to judge, almost to the second, the moment when they needed to pull up their hoods, zip their coats, and prepare for the onslaught. Visibility narrowed to a couple of yards as the downpour hit, and within minutes the field was a mess of puddles and slippery tractor ruts. Sanne answered her buzzing radio, knowing without looking that it would be Nelson.
“You want to call everyone back to the yard?” he said. “There’s a barn here that’s big enough to shelter in. It stinks, but at least it’s dry.”
She climbed up onto the dry-stone wall, trying and failing to catch a glimmer of brightness behind the pall of clouds. The rain appeared to have settled in for the foreseeable future.
“I think we’ll keep going,” she told him, almost shouting to make herself heard. “We’re close to the sheep barn Derek mentioned, so we can head for that.”
“No worries. Let me know if you change your mind. Nothing to report here.”
“Ditto. We’ve got nothing but muck and mud.” Rain dripped from her nose as she spoke. She checked the time. Given the weather, they probably had another three and a half hours of daylight left, at most. “Do you need a lift back to the office when we’re done?”
“That’d be great. I hitched a ride in the van, but they’re dropping off at a few different stations, so it’d be quicker coming with you.”
She jumped down from the wall, grabbing its sturdy copingstone as her boots slid on the grass. “I should warn you I’m in my Corsa, not a pool car.”
There was a lengthy pause while Nelson weighed up his travel options.
“Have the chickens been in it recently?” he asked.
She laughed. “Y’know, I leave the bloody window open once, and I never hear the end of it. No, they haven’t, and yes, the car is clean.”
“See you about seven, then.” He disconnected the call, and she clipped her radio back onto her belt. The officers had joined her at the wall and were hovering around a gate that swung on one rusted hinge. She ushered them through and, out of habit, pulled the gate closed behind her.
“Everyone okay?” she asked.
She had no doubt that they were all cold, wet, and miserable, but there were no murmurs of dissent, just nods, yeps, and the occasional “fine.”
“You’re all bloody brilliant,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get to the barn in the next hour, and then we’ll take a break.” A swirling gust of wind blew down her hood and spattered rain in her eyes. Unperturbed, she blinked until her vision cleared. Then she bowed her head and gave the signal to walk on.
*
“Right, who doesn’t need a fag?” Sanne counted five raised hands among the officers huddled beneath the overhanging eaves of the barn. “You lot come inside with me. The rest stay out here until we’ve cleared it.”
Lighters sparked up like eager fireflies, but the smell of cigarette smoke was snuffed out the instant Sanne stepped into the building. She stood just over the threshold and panned her torch around the open space. It looked as if nothing there had been disturbed for a long time. The straw and dust covering the floor showed no signs of footprints or scuffing, and there were thick cobwebs crisscrossing the doorway. Wood that had probably once formed pens had rotted and fallen away, leaving most of the barn visible from her position.
She was fairly confident that Rachel had never been brought here, but she had to make sure. She turned to her non-smokers. “You three start on the far left. We’ll head over the other side and meet you in the middle.”
The men were taking down their hoods and shaking off their coats, evidently glad to be somewhere dry, and they followed her instructions without question. It was a relief to be out of the wind, but it whistled through gaps in the decaying mortar, as if keen to remind them that it was still out there, waiting for their return. Taking careful steps across the solid stone floor, Sanne smelled damp wool and soiled hay. Rain was dripping through the cracked roof tiles, creating tiny kaleidoscopes when the droplets caught in her torch beam. Something brushed against her cheek. She scratched at it and pulled away a dirty tangle of spider web that clung to her fingers as she shook them. She flicked it to the floor and wiped her hand on her trousers, longing for a hot bath, clean sheets, and an end to this case.
“Nothing here,” an officer shouted over to her.
“Nothing here, either.” Frustrated, she kicked at a fragment of decaying wood and sent it skidding into the corner. “Get the rest in for a brew if they want one.”
*
Scrunched low in the back of her Corsa, Sanne undid her zip and peeled off her soaked trousers with numb fingers. Rain was battering against the roof, and the torch propped on the seat beside her did little to cut through the darkness. She shivered, wriggling into a dry pair of combats before swapping her sweater and tank top for a thick fleece. The material hugged her damp skin, easing the tremors, and she dragged the sleeves down until they covered her chilled hands. With her feet slowly thawing in clean socks and trainers, she sorted her essentials into the pockets of her trousers, grabbed the lunch she had forgotten to eat, and climbed forward into the driver’s seat. Nelson was still chatting to one of the uniforms at the side of the van, so she took the opportunity to stuff half a ham sandwich into her mouth and check the e-mails on her phone.
The first two mails reported the early abandonment of searches in and around the reservoirs and confirmed that nothing of interest had been found. Meanwhile, Meg had written to say t
hat she had called in on Josie for an hour before her twilight shift started, and that Sanne should dismiss any claims that she cheated at cards as scurrilous gossip.
“You bloody well do cheat,” Sanne muttered.
She closed Meg’s e-mail and clicked on the next: an updated version of Mal Atley’s client list. The partial phone numbers now comprised eight digits each, and a new pair of initials—KD and MJ—had been decrypted. Frustrated by a process that was making headway but still couldn’t tell them anything useful, Sanne stabbed her finger on her phone to move the message into her work folder. To compound her sense of another day spent chasing dead ends, a final e-mail from Carlyle took less than ten lines to summarise Ned Moseley’s most recent interview: after complaining that no one believed anything he said, Ned had taken the “no comment” route and was now back in a holding cell, pending his transfer to prison.
Sanne put away her phone as Nelson yanked open the passenger door, letting in a blast of wind and rain.
“I think I wrecked it,” he said, displaying a crumpled umbrella with spokes sticking out at random angles. He dropped it into the footwell and slammed his door.
“On the bright side, at least your trousers don’t need wringing out.” Sanne started the engine and tried to clear the mist off her windscreen. Ahead of them, the van began to move off down the farm track, its lights dipping and reappearing as its tyres hit ruts. “I’ll give her a few minutes to warm up,” she added, pointedly ignoring Nelson’s derogatory eye roll.
He pushed back his seat and stretched, in the manner of one settling down for a long wait. “You got any food?” he asked, and ducked to avoid the soggy sandwich that Sanne launched at his head.
*
The Snake Pass was a challenging road to negotiate at the best of times, and these weren’t the best of times. A fierce wind rocked the car as Sanne dropped it into third gear and then second, cursing its lack of power. Its engine whining, it crawled up the steep incline and aquaplaned around the rain-slickened hairpin bend. Once on the descent again, it started to over-rev as its speed increased.
Gripping on to his seatbelt, Nelson didn’t utter a word. Sanne suspected he had been struck mute by terror, and she sympathised entirely. The route was so familiar to her that she could describe every one of its twists, but she couldn’t allow herself to become complacent. An ever-increasing number of roadside shrines served as a sobering reminder of what happened when people dropped their guard or grew cocky. As she passed Whitelow Farm, she dipped her headlights to avoid dazzling an oncoming lorry. It thundered past in a blur of spray, its weight and speed rattling the Corsa. Nelson lunged for the dashboard, and she gave him a weak smile.
“Bet you wish you’d gone in the van, eh?”
“Not at all. I’m having the time of my life.” He peered into the mist curling around the upper reaches of the moors. “I wonder if Abeni knows where I keep the insurance policies.”
Sanne smiled and flicked the windscreen wipers up a notch, without taking her eyes off the road. As another lorry approached, she decelerated, preparing for the turbulence in its wake.
“I might have to invest in a four-by-four.” She blinked against the lorry’s headlights, fighting to keep the tyres on the tarmac and away from the stone-littered verge. “I love this car, but it feels as if it’s made out of balsa—”
A muted bang cut her off mid-sentence. The car jolted, then began to fishtail wildly. For a second, she thought she’d hit an animal, but an arc of sparks from the rear told her that a tyre had blown.
“Fuck! Grab on!” Her knuckles blanched on the wheel as she tried to stop the car from flipping over. She turned into the skid, easing off the accelerator and resisting the instinct to brake. Something gave way on the undercarriage, slowing their momentum with a screech of metal. Almost lazily, the car drifted to the verge, clipped a dry-stone wall, and shuddered to a halt with its nose in a ditch.
Sanne stared at the wall, hardly able to believe they were still in one piece. One by one, she unpeeled her fingers from the steering wheel, and then rubbed her neck where the seatbelt had almost throttled her. “Well, that’s buggered it,” she said. “You okay there?”
The whites of Nelson’s eyes seemed huge in the darkness. “I’m fine. What the hell happened?”
“Blow-out, I think.” She winced, remembering that her tyres had been on borrowed time for several weeks. “Stay here. I’ll see what the damage is and whether we can put the spare on.” Without giving him a chance to argue, she shoved open her door and went round to the boot. She had just started to pull on her high-vis jacket when he joined her, torch in hand.
“You’re not going to get a spare on that.” He circled the beam around the misshapen rim of her tyre.
“It’s all fucked.” She kicked the exhaust pipe, emphasising the extensive damage to the underside of the car. “We’ll have to get a recovery truck out here.”
“Yeah. Good job we’re not blocking the road.”
“There is that. I’ll give Red Alert a call.”
The car rocked gently as they got back in, but it made no further progress into the ditch. She flicked on the hazard lights and scrolled through her phone’s directory until she came to the number for the breakdown company. Upon connection, she was put straight into a queue.
“My queue position is twenty-fourth,” she repeated, for Nelson’s benefit. “Seems like the weather’s playing havoc with a lot of folk. Twenty-fourth? Jesus, no wonder these bastards were cheap.” The recorded message droned on, concluding with an apologetic estimate of two to three hours for rescue and recovery.
“Balls to that.” She ended the call and chose another number. “We might as well cut out the middleman. Red Alert would take the car there anyway.”
Nelson nodded, though he clearly had no idea what she was talking about. Sanne watched the fog dance around the wall as she listened to the phone ringing out. She had almost given up, when she heard Joan Cotter’s raspy greeting.
“Hi, Joan, it’s Sanne Jensen. I’m really sorry to call you so late, but I’ve just had a blow-out up on the Snake, and I wondered if Geoff or Billy were around.”
Nelson’s mouth formed an “oh” of understanding as he recognised the names. On the line, Joan coughed, a thick, wet sound that made Sanne hold the phone away from her ear.
“Geoff’s still not well, and Billy’s out at the Crown. He’s probably had a drink by now, love.”
“Damn. Okay.” The prospect of half an hour on hold, followed by three hours sitting in a draughty, ruined Corsa, made Sanne push her luck. “Can you give me his mobile, just in case? Even if he can’t come out, he might know someone else local who could give me a tow.”
There was a long pause before Joan relented and reeled off the number. Sanne scrawled it on her hand, thanking her profusely. Wracked by another coughing fit, Joan hung up without saying good-bye.
“Cotter’s Garage is only about forty minutes back thattaway,” Sanne told Nelson, surprising herself by dialling the first part of Billy’s number from memory. “We’d be able to wait there for someone to pick us up. Warm, dry, a nice cup of—oh, hey, Billy, it’s Sanne.”
“Sanne Jensen.” She heard Billy clear his throat and laugh. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“A blown tyre and a knackered exhaust. Just shy of the Snake summit. I was hoping you might be a bit quicker than Red Alert.” There was no background noise, but even so, she heard him take a few steps and shut a door as if to move somewhere quieter. “Please, Billy, I know it’s a crappy night, but I’d really appreciate it.”
“Jesus, Sanne, that’s a long way to come. Besides, we’re so backed up with work, it might be a while before we could fix it anyway.” He sounded as if he was pacing now, his tread heavy and measured.
“Oh, I don’t care how long it takes to fix.” Although she hated the pleading note in her voice, she wasn’t above using emotional blackmail. “Did I tell you how tired and hungry I am?”
“You�
��re breaking my heart.” He sighed. “I’ll be there within the hour.”
*
“Name your price.” Standing out in the rain in a display of moral support, Sanne watched Billy hitch her Corsa onto his recovery truck. “Seriously, you can charge me over the odds. I don’t care.”
He grinned at her from beneath the hood of his coat. “Always had a soft spot for you, Sanne. Go and sit with your mate and get warm. I’ll be done in about five minutes.”
She flashed him a thumbs-up and went to the front of his truck. Nelson had already taken the passenger seat, so she hauled herself into the rear compartment.
“Nearly done,” she said. “Did you speak to Abeni?”
“Yep. The girls are asleep. I told her I might end up crashing at your place, or Meg’s.”
“Or the Cotters’.” She shrugged at Nelson’s horrified expression. “Hey, worst case scenario. It’d be better than nothing.”
“I don’t know about that. ‘Nothing’ wouldn’t come with lung cancer.” He kept his voice low, as if Billy had any chance of hearing him over the torrential rain and gusts of wind, and he clamped his mouth shut when the cab door opened a moment later and Billy climbed in.
