by Penny Grubb
‘Mally, do you know where Laura is?’ Annie found herself having to raise her voice to counter the rising whistle of the wind.
‘She’s all right,’ Mally shouted back. ‘I know she’s all right.’
Scott had asked if she had anything they needed to know. She did now. Mally’s father. What was his place in all this? What did Mally know? She mustn’t let the girl disappear. Two and a bit days. Time was nearly up for Laura.
‘Mally, where is she?’ Annie took a step towards the girl but again Mally backed off.
‘I didn’t say I knew where she was.’ Mally set her bottom lip in a stubborn pout. ‘I just said she’s OK. I know she is. Will you come with me and not tell anyone?’
‘Yes, I will,’ Annie lied. ‘Get in the car. It’s going to pour down soon. You can direct me.’
‘No, you can’t get there by car. Leave it here.’
‘I can’t. It’s in the middle of the road.’
‘OK, move it to the side then, but hurry up. I’m going to make a phone call and I don’t want you listening in.’
Mally stalked to the far side of the lane and ostentatiously turned her back. Annie leapt for the car and had the earpiece in her ear before Mally thought to turn back to watch her. She wanted to ring Jennifer, but Jennifer had her phone turned off. It had to be Scott. He answered at once as she backed the car awkwardly, keeping her face turned away from Mally’s line of sight.
She spoke before he could say anything. ‘Scott listen, I think Melissa Fletcher’s father’s involved in all this. He—’
His angry tone cut across her ‘We’re on to it, Annie. His father-in-law’s told us about him. For God’s sake, leave things alone. Is he with you?’
‘No. I don’t know Mally’s father. I wouldn’t recognize him.’
‘Not him. Her grandfather. He’s gone out looking for his granddaughter. We told him to stay put … Christ, no one in this village will stand still for a second.’
‘But Mally’s with me. She—’
‘Well, thank God for that at least. Are you in Hull?’
‘No, we’re in Milesthorpe.’
‘What the hell are you doing out here? I told you … Oh, never mind. Take her to the Dearloves’ house at once.’
‘But, Scott, I think she’s—’
He shouted across her. ‘Take her to the Dearloves’, Annie. Or to the Tunbridges’. Jen’s round there. Whichever you’re nearest to. Just do it! Now!’
‘Scott, will you listen? I—’
This time she interrupted herself. Footsteps. Mally was back. Sod Scott and his heavy-handedness. She clicked the phone off. Right off. Mally knew something and it was vital Annie find it out before Laura ran out of time. As soon as she knew, she’d get Mally, or the information, or both back to the official enquiry.
Mally didn’t speak, just jerked her head in a follow-me gesture and turned to jog back up the lane.
Annie matched step with her. As they reached the top and turned down the hill towards the centre of Milesthorpe, big raindrops began to splat down around them. Mally increased her pace. Annie followed. This was the hill she’d driven down when Laura had called her to say they’d found the body. Through the encroaching dusk she made out the ramshackle gate that was the entrance to Balham’s farm. Instead of slowing to follow the turn in the road, Mally took a sprint at the gate and vaulted it. Annie clambered over. Another set of clothes wrecked.
It wasn’t easy to keep Mally in view. Dusk pooled into dense shadow between the farm buildings. The girl ahead of her clearly knew her way through here blindfold. It rained in earnest now, only the high barn walls offered any protection and that was gone as Mally scrambled over a wall and led Annie on to a grassy track out into the open.
As they ran, the storm blew harder. She heard her own laboured breathing mirroring Mally’s. ‘Where are we going?’ she panted.
The girl just said, ‘Come on.’
A stunted tree and part of a hedge marked a junction in the track. Mally threw herself into the hedge and lay back against the spiky hawthorn. ‘Hurry up. Hurry up.’ She muttered the words as though to herself.
Annie ducked into the little shelter the hedge had to offer noting out of the corner of her eye a moss- and creeper-covered shape at her feet. One of those blocks again, abandoned in the bottom of the hedge as though someone had carried it this far and could go no further.
‘Hurry up!’ Mally growled.
‘I’m here,’ said Annie.
‘Not you. Kay.’
‘Kay’s ill.’ As she spoke, Annie heard footsteps patter along the grass. Someone approached from the other track. Annie recognized Kay’s slender form and, as the girl drew close, took in the lank hair plastered to her face and head not only with the rain but with sweat. Kay’s face flushed red from whatever illness still had her in its grip.
Oh no, she’d hijacked both of them. When Scott found out …
‘I had to climb out of the window,’ Kay said to Mally.
So it was Kay whom Mally had called. It would do no good to order Kay back home. The three of them stood in the rain, braced against the force of the wind. Kay looked from one to the other of them. ‘What is it?’
Mally glanced at Annie, then back at Kay, but met neither of their stares as she said, ‘I’ve found Boxer.’
Kay gave an excited jump and clapped her hands. ‘That means you’ve found Laura. Where, Mally? Where?’
‘I’m taking her.’ Mally jerked her head towards Annie. ‘You can come too if you want.’
Boxer? If Mally had really found Boxer … but the girl held something back. She had to go along with her further than this. Mally looked resolute but scared. Annie fingered the phone in her pocket. It would do no good to call anyone now. If Mally legged it, she’d be left empty-handed and no nearer Laura.
‘Come on.’ As Mally shouted and set off again at a run, Kay followed and Annie ran behind them.
A sudden flare of lightning lit the landscape. Annie saw they were more exposed than she’d realized. She struggled on over uneven grassy hillocks as thunder rumbled around them. Her calf muscles protested the underlying upward gradient. She half-registered the angular shapes that grew at intervals from the side of the track. Whatever military use this land had once been put to, it had needed concrete blocks to trail some long-lost boundary. They were near the sea’s edge, climbing up on to the grassland above the crumbling clay cliffs. That lightning flash had shown her seething white-crested waves down below. She had time to note that the cross-country route from Milesthorpe to the sea was way shorter than going by road.
As the gradient steepened, they slowed. Then Mally slumped down in the mud breathing hard.
‘Wait a bit,’ she said, as first Kay and then Annie collapsed beside her. ‘We’d better keep quiet.’
Another diffuse sheet of lightning swept over them bathing everything in a short burst of white light. Their stares were drawn up towards the sea, invisible now they lay on the ground, but audible as the waves crashed into the cliffs below them. Probably undermining the land beneath us, thought Annie.
The lightning picked out a silvery line that hovered just above the track in front of them. Tinsel blown all the way from Tina’s and caught here in the scrub. Annie looked into Kay’s face. The girl gazed towards the sounds of the sea as though not quite on the same planet as her companions. Her face glowed an unnatural blotchy red. Her stare was so intense that Annie followed the line of it and made out some kind of barrier fencing off a dangerous part of the edge. A branch wedged across more of those omnipresent concrete blocks.
Annie heard Kay’s hands and knees squelch in the mud as the girl turned to crawl towards the sound of the sea. She dived forward and pulled her back. ‘No, Kay. Don’t go near the edge. The storm’s too strong. It’s dangerous.’
She knew too well the way the wind could whip away all stability at the edge of a precipice. The rain dripped down her back running a freezing track across her sweat-soaked skin. Ka
y shouldn’t be out in this.
‘We need to go down here.’ Mally slithered in the mud following a downward incline away from the cliff’s edge leaving the strand of tinsel glittering behind them as a shaft of moonlight escaped the storm clouds. Annie kept close to the girl. There was some relief in having the rain lash the back of her head now instead of her face, but water ran down the neck of her jacket as though from a tap. Without the glow off the sea, the landscape ahead vanished into the darkness. They almost came up against a low wall before its shape grew from the shadows. Over the rush of the waves and the roar of the wind Annie made out the unmistakable sounds of an animal snuffling about.
‘There, that’s Boxer,’ Mally whispered.
Part of Annie wanted to stop now and get on her phone to call for help, but something in Mally’s tone stopped her. She had to be sure. All ponies looked much the same, but she’d seen Boxer several times and was fairly sure she could recognize him. ‘I want to see him closer up,’ she whispered back.
Kay sat in the mud and stayed put. Mally and Annie crept closer. Annie half wished for a bigger moon, but at the same time wished for no moon at all so she could be sure they were invisible as they pressed themselves low in the sodden grass and slid forward towards the wall.
They heard the clack of hoofs on concrete as the pony moved, its outline crossing their line of sight. Annie saw it in silhouette, heard it chuckle in its throat as it put its head down. She hadn’t a hope of distinguishing it from a beach donkey but Mally gave a sudden start.
‘But it is Boxer,’ she blurted out.
Annie felt her heart begin to pound in reaction to the wave of fear she sensed from the girl beside her. Mally knew they’d find a pony here but she’d had no idea it was Boxer. What was she playing at? Why had she led them here?
‘Come on,’ Annie hissed, taking charge and backing off away from the low wall towards where they’d left Kay. Mally scrambled after her.
When they’d retreated up the slope, Annie put her arms round both girls huddling them all close together. Mally’s shivers were more than the lashing wind and rain warranted. The heat from Kay was abnormal but the high blush was gone from her cheeks as though the moonlight leached the blood out of her. As Annie spoke, she fought to keep her tone neutral.
‘Why did you bring me here, Mally?’ Suddenly she knew the question wasn’t why. ‘Who told you to bring me here?’
Even in the scrappy moonlight, Annie saw the colour drain from Mally’s face as she looked first down into the gloom towards where they’d seen Boxer and then back towards the cliff top. She saw Mally and Kay exchange glances. Kay’s face, now wan from her illness, turned paler in the silvery light.
Whatever the two girls had worked out between them, they wouldn’t share it. Annie guessed it was a dawning realization about Mally’s father.
Annie thought of Jennifer, of the police search for Laura. They’d cast a wide net. Jennifer had mentioned Burton Constable and Wassand. They were way off course, far to the north of Milesthorpe when they should be east. She replayed Scott’s scathing comments about the great detective and knew she’d been right all along. Right about Terry Martin. Right about Tremlow. She’d even been right about what Vince could have done to her in the heat of temper. Now she had to be right about Laura before it was too late.
Laura was here. Nearby. And Annie had been lured here, too. She couldn’t blame Mally. The girl’s motives had been to protect her father.
She released the two girls and pulled out her phone, tried to shield it from the driving rain so she could see the screen, and called Jennifer.
The ring tone crackled, broke up. She took the phone from her ear and pressed the buttons again.
‘You’ll not get much of a signal up here,’ Kay said. ‘We couldn’t.’
We couldn’t? She realized she knew exactly where they were. On the cliff side of the building where the murdered woman’s body had been found. She’d never seen it from this angle. That pen where Boxer ambled about was the walled enclosure she’d crossed that day after the body was taken away.
The two girls watched her in silence.
She lifted her phone again and stared at the screen. It had to work. Terry Martin was silenced for what he knew. Tremlow too. He’d been about to tell her something and it was clearly more than that he hadn’t had his glasses on that night. And Laura had found the missing page from Terry Martin’s notebook. She had to ring Scott. She’d just talk over him if he tried to silence her.
It took a second to realize what she saw in front of her. Oh no … Please, no. Battery low. She’d forgotten to charge it. It could give her no more than a few seconds. No time to waste stabbing at buttons. Return last call. She jammed it to her ear and prayed silently to whatever god grumbled its displeasure from the skies above her.
The ring tone crackled but it didn’t cut out.
You have reached the voicemail of …
Oh Jennifer! No. Where are you? ‘Jennifer, you must …’ but the phone had gone dead.
She looked down the slope into the gloom. Boxer was in that enclosure at the side of the building. She remembered the dank corridor, the raised stalls to either side and the slimy green fingers of lichen and moss that reached down the walls. At the far end was a sturdy wooden door behind which a rotting body had lain.
Boxer was outside. Laura must be inside. And she’d given away the key to Colonel Ludgrove.
When she focused again on the girls it was to see Mally’s rain-streaked face looking up at her, expression stunned.
She pulled them close again, heard Kay’s laboured breathing, felt the fire from the girl’s body. ‘Tell me about the building. Everything. How can I get in? Is Boxer shut in? Where’s the gate?’
‘Straight down from here.’ Kay pointed into the darkness, her voice slurred. ‘If you go straight you’ll get to the side of it. On your left’ll be the yard bit where they used to put the sheep. That’s where Boxer is. The first door goes off the yard bit and the locked door’s inside.’
Yes, thought Annie, I know about that. ‘Is there any other way in.’
‘No, but there’s a gap in the wall at the back.’
‘How do I get to it? Can I see inside the building? Is it big enough to get in?’
‘You can’t see in. We think there’s sacking or something covering it inside. You just feel along the back wall and you’ll come to it. You’d be able to see in a bit probably if there was any light inside. We never saw anything. We never came at night.’
Annie looked again at her useless phone. Even if she could call anyone, help would come too late. Laura’s two and a bit days were up. She was on borrowed time.
‘You want to phone the police, don’t you?’ Mally’s tone was sombre.
‘Yes, of course. We have to. And it’s what you two are going to do now while I go down there.’
‘We’ll come with you, Annie.’
‘No, Kay, you mustn’t. You must go back until Mally’s phone works properly. How far did you have to go that night you called me?’
‘We used Laura’s phone,’ said Kay. ‘Mine and Mally’s wouldn’t work at all, would they, Mally?’
Mally shivered as she reached into her pocket. ‘D’you want this?’ Annie looked at the object in Mally’s hand. The key Maz had given her. ‘I took it out of Grandad’s pocket, but Annie you mustn’t tell. You won’t, will you?’
‘I won’t.’ As Annie felt the key in her hand she felt a surge of something that felt like fear but approximated optimism. She could get through that door. Get Laura free before … before whatever was going to happen was scheduled to happen. But Laura’s time was up. It was already too late. There was no point in doing anything unless she moved fast.
‘Please,’ she begged the two girls. ‘You must go back. Call the police.’ As she begged, she knew they wouldn’t phone and speak to an anonymous voice. They’d go all the way back to Milesthorpe before they told anyone. ‘Do you remember Jennifer Flanagan? That nice
policewoman. Ask to speak to her. Or a man called Scott Kerridge. He’s Jennifer’s friend. He’ll know how to help. Now go on. Quick.’
Kay wiped her hand across her face. ‘We have to go back to the edge of the cliff,’ she said.
‘Yes, you have to go that way.’ Annie agreed, wondering what had prompted Kay to state the obvious. ‘Take care. The wind’s strong.’
Neither girl took any notice of her. Annie saw through the last vestiges of light that they stared hard at each other. Some byplay that she couldn’t understand sizzled between them.
After a moment, Mally gulped and then spoke. ‘It’s not my dad.’ It was a whisper.
‘No, I expect it isn’t,’ Kay replied, in a voice that sounded as though it deliberately humoured her friend.
‘It isn’t!’ Mally insisted.
‘But we’ve got to clear the way,’ said Kay.
Annie couldn’t stay to help them and didn’t have time to try to work out what they were talking about. They’d turned in the right direction. ‘Phone Jennifer Flanagan, Mally,’ she urged. ‘And look after Kay.’
With terrible misgivings, she pushed them into starting the scramble back up to the path at the edge of the cliff, then she turned and began the muddy slither back down towards the building.
CHAPTER 27
ANNIE MADE OUT Boxer’s outline as the pony shifted his weight and took a step forward. For a moment he stood bathed in a pale silver light as the moon pierced the storm clouds. In front of him was a net like those Annie had seen at Tina’s, but it wasn’t stuffed with fodder; it hung limply from the wall. Boxer placidly picked strands of hay from the ground. Wisps blew from his mouth and eddied around the yard. In close to the building, he had some shelter from the worst of the squall.
