Injured. Winter stood up and leaned against a tree to stop himself falling over. He was lightheaded. He allowed himself a few minutes to collect his thoughts and wait for the pinpricks of light dancing at the edge of his vision to subside.
After a while—he couldn't have said how long—he blinked and shook his head, prompting a brief return of the dancing lights. For the first time in his life, Winter understood the expression thick-headed. Skull heavy, neck weak. His thoughts refused to be collected. Every time he tried to focus on events since dinner in Elstree, his head throbbed. His mind, trained over decades with the same daily dedication as a concert pianist, let him down. A rare image from his childhood provided an apt metaphor for his scattered thoughts: apple bobbing with his father, his face wetter and wetter with every attempt to sink his teeth into the elusive pieces of fruit. He remembered his fury, pushing his father's hand away when he tried to help. How old had he been - four? Five? The fierce satisfaction when he worked out how to win, pinning an apple to the side, his teeth breaking the skin and sinking into the flesh beneath.
This tree was a silver birch. Winter celebrated a coherent thought, even one so useless. In a small hole in the trunk, something gleamed in the moonlight. A bullet.
Lewis could have killed him. Winter would have done it in his place. But Lewis fired into the tree instead, then threw the gun away, sending it sailing into the bushes. Before leaving, he leaned down to punch Winter. That explained the pinpricks of light. Well, that and the car crash.
Good. He'd pinned an apple or two to the side of the barrel. His brain wasn't anywhere near optimal, but he could make basic decisions. Take things one step at a time.
The first order of business was getting out of here. He was injured and hardly dressed for the weather. He kept an overcoat on the back seat of the Mercedes.
The car had come to rest side-on, the driver's door against a big oak. Three trees stood between him and the Mercedes. He paused at each, checking for dizziness. He stumbled once, but didn't fall. Falling, he imagined, would be bad. If he smacked his head again, he might never get up. His right eye blinked slower than his left, its lashes sticky with dried blood. When he covered his left eye with his hand, everything swam out of focus.
Near the open passenger door, Winter traced the parallel lines on the hard soil where he'd been dragged away by Lewis. He found a bottle of water in the cup holder and gulped it down. The BMW Lewis had used to ram Winter off the motorway was parked—wrong word, but he couldn't think of anything better—four feet back from his own car. His enemy was on foot. Unless he had an accomplice. Winter didn't trust his brain enough yet to make a reasonable deduction, but instinct told him Tom Lewis worked alone. Alone, on foot, and unarmed. Winter looked around. Plenty of shadows to hide in. He listened. Just the occasional passing lorry.
He knelt on the door sill, reached under the driver's seat and slid the handgun from its holster. His phone was in the footwell.
After putting on the thick overcoat, and the gloves he found in its pockets, Winter felt stronger. He thought back to the few minutes before the crash. Where was he, exactly? How long since he passed a junction?
His phone. Winter took it out. Phones had maps. He reminded himself not to make big decisions until the concussion had passed, then took off his glove and tapped the phone.
The next services were four miles north.
Winter put the phone in his left pocket, and the gun in his right.
He started walking.
At first, Winter thought the service station was closed. A single motorcyclist filled up at the pumps before paying a cashier in a Santa hat. The food court's sign was dark.
Winter walked parallel to the fence, sticking to the shadows, until the main building came into view, a bridge across the carriageways linking it with its twin on the southbound M1. Two cars outside. Inside, a man stood near the main doors while, further back, a woman talked on a phone. No sign of Lewis.
After the woman put her phone away, a door opened and a third figure joined them. If his size and bald head wasn't enough of a clue, he turned towards the door, the twenty-year-old bullet scars visible even at this distance.
Winter pulled out the gun, his forefinger clicking off the safety lever inside the trigger guard. He waited while the first man—the manager, judging by the bunch of keys—opened the doors, locking up behind them.
Lewis and the woman headed for a white Fiat 500. Winter estimated the distance from his position behind the fence at a hundred and fifty yards, give or take. He was no novice with a handgun. On a good day, at that distance, he reckoned his chances of hitting Lewis in the torso were about fifty-fifty. But this wasn't a good day.
He left the cover of the trees and knelt in front of the fence, resting his gun hand on the second rail, bracing it with his left, sighting along the barrel. He closed his left eye. The Fiat became a white smudge. He spat on his sleeve, wiped away dried blood, tried again. The end of the barrel wobbled like a kite in a storm. He held his breath. No better. If he fired, only a miracle would see him hitting Lewis, and it would take more than one shot to put him down. He risked his quarry getting away. With shots fired, a police chopper would be here in ten minutes, an armed response unit not far behind. He might as well call them himself.
"Screw it," he said, with no particular animosity. His equilibrium was returning. Not only that. His luck, too. When he put the gun down, he turned his attention to the woman with Lewis. Maybe Lewis had been working with someone on the outside all along.
When he got a clear view, he realised he knew her. Carlotto? Carlotti? Capelli. Detective Inspector Capelli. Not in uniform tonight. No back up, either. She was here alone, in the early hours of Boxing Day, meeting a man who'd walked into the services barefoot and bloody. Winter thought it unlikely she was acting in an official capacity.
The Fiat passed him as it headed for the motorway. Lewis's head was bowed, Capelli's hand on his shoulder. A very maternal gesture.
Winter pressed redial on his phone. "Jürgen. Change of plan. I need you to come and pick me up. Just you. Leave now."
His head cleared minute by minute. As he returned to something closer to his usual intellectual capacity, Winter felt a chill, imagining being mentally compromised. To stumble through life in a fog of half-grasped concepts, never understanding the way the world worked, not being able to manipulate others through the greed and fear that drove them. He would rather die.
Winter spent the next hour celebrating his sense of clarity by making big decisions. A brush with death simplified things. His house in ruins, his team killed. Strickland and Penny dead. His organisation compromised. Winter couldn't rule by fear once proved vulnerable. As soon as the news got out, it would be plain to all ambitious men and women, inside and outside his crew, that a vacuum had opened at the top. Power abhors a vacuum. And the people ready to fill that vacuum would put a bullet through his head first.
A true leader is adaptable. His plans are elastic, and he always has a contingency. Time for Winter to put his into action.
Jürgen's was the only car to ignore the slip road for the garage, instead heading for the darkened services building. Winter waited for him to park and turn off his lights before phoning.
"I'm behind the fence, in the trees. About ten yards to the left of the litter bin."
The car engine started. "No," hissed Winter. "Turn it off."
He waited for Jürgen to comply. "There are cameras. Get out of the car, look at the building, then come towards the fence. It'll look like you need a piss, but the toilets are closed. Quickly."
Jürgen did as he was told, heading his way. He wore a similar overcoat to Winter's, a wool cap pulled down over his thinning blonde hair. Winter's luck was holding. He retreated behind the trees.
"Winter? Winter? It's Jürgen."
"I know it's you, you idiot. I'm over here."
Jürgen vaulted the fence. He wasn't bright, but he was loyal and vicious, a useful combination. Winter sat w
ith his back against a tree, wrapping his arms around his side, as if his injuries were more serious. The dried blood on his face helped.
"Boss?"
Winter slid the Glock from under his coat and shot Jürgen in his left eye. He fell backwards without a sound. A dozen birds, woken by the crack of the shot, rose from their perches with an explosive riffling of wings, seeking quieter lodgings.
Winter counted to thirty. No shouts, no lights, no alarms. He retrieved Jürgen's car keys, pulled off his hat, put it on his own head and climbed the fence. Jürgen was an inch taller than Winter, and broader, but the overcoat hid most of the discrepancies. The cap was a nice convincer. When the police checked the CCTV footage, after finding two wrecked cars and a bullet in a tree four miles away, they'd watch a man get out of his car, walk out of shot to piss in the woods, returning a few minutes later. The body couldn't be seen from the carpark. It would all buy him some time.
And time was what he needed. Not much time. Enough to put the contingency plan into operation, with one small addition. Tom Lewis was persistent. Under other circumstances, Winter might have admired that. Not now. If he didn't want to spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder, Winter needed Lewis dead. And DI Capelli's involvement made things much easier.
Chapter Five
Nine days later
They stayed at Debbie's parents' house in Pakefield, a village on the Suffolk coast south of Lowestoft. The larger settlement to the north had absorbed it as it expanded in the nineteen-thirties. Too close to the struggling town to appeal to second-home buyers like nearby Southwold, property prices had stayed low for decades. When Reg and Doreen Smith retired, they moved out of Walthamstow into a detached three-bed house on a generous plot overlooking the sea. To them it was a palace. They called the house The Oaks, despite there only being one tree. Debbie hadn't wanted to be the pedant who pointed it out.
Debbie already had Christmas off and calling into the office with a fake bout of flu enabled her to add an extra week.
It was her first visit to The Oaks since clearing and tidying it after her mother died in June. Doreen, always an organised woman, left Debbie her house and savings, plus a letter identifying the town's best estate agents, and warning which to avoid. The letter ended with the secret family recipe for pound cake. Debbie had read it weeping at the kitchen table.
When she and Tom arrived before dawn on Boxing Day, they found tinned goods in the pantry and saw in the new morning with a breakfast of black tea and sardines.
The house backed onto low cliffs at the end of a road, its neighbours angled to prevent any property being overlooked. The oak tree, decades older than the house, dominated a windowless north gable. An east-facing rear looked out towards the rising sun over the North Sea.
They found a routine within days. Tom rose with the dawn, sitting in the backyard, looking across the cliff to the shingle beach beyond. Debbie got up an hour later, bringing him a hot drink. On dry days, they used the stone steps to get down to the sea. At this time of year, they only met a couple of fishermen and a handful of dog walkers.
Debbie had always loved the sea, and this was her favourite kind of beach. Working boats, faded blues and yellows, dragged by chains through the stones, waiting for the tide. No shops, no amusements, no fish and chips or ice cream sellers. Sea, sky, and the same long, gentle curve of shore the first fish to grow legs had crawled onto.
Tom liked it too, and Debbie noticed the healing effect it had on him. Over the first week, his demeanour changed. He became more relaxed, more confident. Even his posture altered. He stood taller. Debbie watched him jog back from the beach one evening and didn't recognise him. The shambling awkwardness was barely present.
Most afternoons, Tom dozed for an hour on the settee. More evidence of inner healing, Debbie hoped.
This afternoon, while Tom slept, Debbie took her phone to the ensuite off the master bedroom. Reg and Doreen boasted about their avocado tub, toilet, and sink, and Debbie had never said a word. She couldn't bring herself to sleep in their bed, staying instead in the guest room next to Tom's. She stood on the toilet, propped her phone on the shelf, and left it while it bleeped with incoming messages. It was the only place in the house with a decent signal.
No urgent work emails to worry about, and logging into the intranet confirmed that, while progress had been made identifying the Elstree bodies, Robert Winter was not among them. And Winter had gone very quiet. No confirmed sightings, nothing from the usual grasses. For now, he had disappeared. But he wouldn't stay hidden forever, and—when he emerged—Debbie wanted to be waiting with a warrant.
She just had to get Tom talking on the record. Debbie had put in a request for unpaid leave on top of the annual holiday and the sick days, but she was running out of time.
Later, after Debbie's signature prawn risotto—cooked, as always, while listening to an eighties radio station—she read to Tom while finishing the white wine she'd cooked with. Mum and Dad's complete works of Dickens shared a shelf with a block of encyclopaedias and an inch of dust.
"After tea, when the door was shut and all was made snug (the nights being cold and misty now), it seemed to me the most delicious retreat that the imagination of man could conceive. To hear the wind getting up at sea, to know that the fog was creeping over the desolate flat outside, and to look at the fire, and think that there was no house near but this one, and this one a boat, was like enchantment."
Debbie shut the book, replacing it on the coffee table.
"Do you want a cup of tea?"
Tom Lewis shook his head. "Is the, mm, b-boat real? The one, mm, David s-stays in?"
"I don't think so. But if it was, it would be about twelve miles up the coast from here. Great Yarmouth, I mean. Blundeston is even closer, where David Copperfield was born."
"Debbie?"
"Yes?"
"Mm. Can we, c-can we, mm, go there?"
"Maybe."
He smiled. Tom looked like a twelve-year-old when he smiled. He didn't do it often.
"Once your witness statement is done we'll go, okay?"
The smile disappeared, and the scarred head dropped. Debbie didn't enjoy pushing him, but the information needed to nail Winter was inside this traumatised man's head.
"Tom. You said you remembered. I know you want to stop Winter hurting anyone else. Once I get your statement, we can do that. We can take him to court, Tom. He belongs in prison. He's a very bad person."
The head rose a fraction, but he didn't look at her. "Mm. L-like, mm, like my, my, mm, mother."
Debbie had answered his questions about Irene Lewis. He didn't deserve to be lied to. Sometimes, in the afternoons, he cried in his sleep.
"Your mother did some bad things too, Tom. But no one deserves to die the way she did. And we can make those responsible pay."
"The Boy makes them pay," mumbled Tom.
"Pardon? Tom? What did you say?"
"Mm. Tired. Mm, bed."
It was six-thirty. Tom shuffled off without another word.
With no TV, Debbie made a start teaching Tom to read. He was a willing student, keen enough, but—after four or five minutes—Tom always developed a headache painful enough to stop him. Debbie suspected psychological reasons behind his inability to learn, but she had neither the time nor expertise to help. Once she had his witness statement, she would get him all the support he needed. Since they had arrived in Pakefield, despite the emotional pain regarding his parents, Tom was a changed man. He'd started to speak in complete sentences and even asked questions of his own. Every day he became more engaged, more present. And, when she read to him, Debbie often looked across to see Tom enraptured by the pictures in his mind, caught up in the story's spell.
She admonished herself for being impatient. Tom told her he remembered, but she couldn't predict the trauma it might cause him to return to that night. He would do it when ready. DCI Barber, her boss since Stevens retired, was a steady, methodical woman who liked things done by the
book. She granted Debbie's holiday request, but she'd been suspicious. Debbie hardly blamed her. Bringing down Winter had been an ambition for most of her career, and now—with her quarry attacked in his own home and missing—Debbie took a break. Barber asked if Debbie wanted to tell her anything. She didn't like lying to her boss, but it would be worth it.
A few more days. That was all she needed.
A few more days.
Chapter Six
At first, she was dreaming. A male voice sang nearby.
So drink to Tom of Bedlam, he'll fill the seas in barrels
I'll drink it all, all brewed with gall, with Mad Maudlin I will travel.
Still I sing bonnie boys, bonnie mad boys,
Bedlam boys are bonnie
For they all go bare and they live by the air,
And they want no drink nor money
In the dream, Debbie watched Tom sing and dance on television, then look straight at her, a horrible, mad intelligence in his eyes. His hand reached out, came right through the screen and strong fingers closed around her neck.
She woke up coughing. The red figures of her clock supplied enough light to find her glass and take a sip of water. 03:42. The only noise was the wind rising and falling, and the long shush of waves dragging tiny stones up and down the shore. Normally, Debbie would take comfort in those familiar sounds; tonight they reminded her of how isolated she was inside this house, only a garden and a footpath away from the cliff edge. The nearest neighbour was away for Christmas. The other house was an Airbnb, and the last occupants had departed on January first, taking their hangovers and leaving a bin full of bottles.
She and Tom were alone. Tom Lewis, who, even now, struggled to get through a sentence without two or three pauses and his habitual humming. Tom, the damaged, traumatised man she brought back from the M1 services, where he'd waited barefoot, bloody, his hands covered in bruises.
The Fall of Winter Page 3
