by James Becker
“But isn’t the main road, the A30, right in front of us?”
“It is,” Mallory agreed, “but unless this GPS has got it all wrong, there aren’t any junctions we can easily use. I think our best bet is to stay on these roads and head right back into Exeter and try to lose them in the traffic there.”
Robin powered the Ford left at the fork in the road Mallory had told her to expect. Within a hundred yards or so, there was an almost-right-angle bend in the narrow road, around the end of a wood, which had the bonus of making them invisible to the driver of the pursuing car, which Mallory guessed would be getting closer with every second, though he still couldn’t see it behind them.
“A bit of breathing space,” he murmured, again studying the GPS.
After a moment he glanced up at the road.
“There’s another fork coming up,” he said, “and go left again. The fastest way to get to Exeter is then to keep straight on, but if we do that I reckon the bad guys will catch us before we get there, so I think we need to get them ahead of us.”
“Now where do I go?” Robin asked as she took the left fork.
“There’s a turning on the right. Take that. The road goes through a small wood, and it looks like there’s a hamlet, or a few houses at least, just beyond it. In fact,” he added, “from there we can take an entirely different road into Exeter.”
“Sounds good to me.”
Robin saw the junction ahead, hit the brakes hard, but not powerfully enough to leave skid marks, pulled the gear lever from fourth down to second, and turned the car right, accelerating as soon as the Ford was around the corner.
The road was narrow and twisting, like all the others they’d been driving along since the Italian swung off the main A377 what felt like a lifetime ago, and Robin concentrated on covering the distance on the somewhat loose and broken surface as quickly as she could.
* * *
Toscanelli had become uncomfortably aware that he wasn’t catching the small Ford as quickly as he had expected, and he reluctantly added another tick in the mental list he was compiling about Robin Jessop: clearly the man was an accomplished and very fast driver, another possible indication that he was a professional of some sort. But the Porsche was so much more powerful than the Ford that even if Jessop was a trained racing driver, Toscanelli should still be able to catch him.
Seconds later, Toscanelli reached the first fork in the road and the massive brakes on the Cayman hauled the speed down dramatically. His eyes searched the road surface in front of him, scanning for tire marks or anything else that would tell him which way his quarry had turned. But he saw nothing, flipped a mental coin, and angled the Cayman over to the right, simply because that stretch of road looked straighter, and hence faster.
But moments after he’d started accelerating along it, Dante turned slightly in his seat.
“I think I just saw the car,” he said, nodding over to his left. “Way over there, by those trees.”
“Are you sure?”
“No, but it was the same color as the car we rented, and we haven’t seen any other vehicles on this road, apart from that tractor and trailer.”
Toscanelli glanced where Dante was indicating, but saw nothing.
“Right,” he said. “Use the GPS. Work out which road that car had to be on and tell me how we can catch them.”
Dante leaned over in the passenger seat, clumsily fiddling with the GPS in the center of the dashboard using his left hand, his broken right arm resting on his lap.
“They must be heading toward a village called Whitestone,” he said. “Keep going along this road until you get to a crossroads at Heath Cross, then turn left. That road will take us straight to Whitestone.”
Less than a minute later, Toscanelli hit the brakes again as the Porsche reached the crossroads, swung the steering wheel around to the left, and powered east along the narrow road toward Whitestone.
“Where can they go from there?” he demanded. “What are their options?”
Dante studied the map displayed on the screen of the GPS for a moment. “Coming from the north, there’s a T-junction. If they turn right, they’ll be heading straight toward us, so my guess is they’ll go left, toward Exeter.” Dante was silent for a few moments, looking at the options. “That road will take them back to the city, through places called Nadderwater and Redhills, but it would have been a lot quicker for them if they’d not gone through Whitestone. The road they turned off would have taken them straight there.”
He altered the scale on the GPS and then glanced at Toscanelli.
“This is only a guess,” he began, somewhat hesitantly, but Toscanelli interrupted him.
“Guesses are better than nothing at the moment. Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“If they turn left at Whitestone and then almost immediately go right, that road will take them down to the C50. That’s not a main road, but it’s a better road, and there will be traffic on it. Maybe that’s his plan, to lose himself in traffic, because if he stays on these empty roads, we’ll catch him.”
That made sense to Toscanelli.
“So where do I go?” he demanded.
“When you get to Whitestone, go past the junction on the left and take the next turning on the right. That should put us right behind them.”
* * *
The end of the narrow lane was looming up in front of them, traffic on the C50 crisscrossing the junction in both directions. The road was nothing like as busy as the main A30 trunk road that they could see right in front of them, but there were still plenty of vehicles driving in both directions.
“Which way?” Robin asked, braking the Ford to a stop at the Give Way sign and looking in both directions.
“Left,” Mallory replied without hesitation. “We haven’t got time to wait for a break in the traffic so we could turn right. And we need to go left anyway, to get back to the city.”
“You got it,” Robin said.
There wasn’t really a break in the traffic crossing the end of the lane from right to left, either, but that clearly didn’t matter. Robin waited no more than three seconds, until the next car had driven past them, then lifted her foot off the clutch and sent the Ford, tires screaming, out onto the road a matter of a few tens of feet in front of the next vehicle, an old Peugeot.
The driver hit the horn and the brakes simultaneously, causing the vehicle behind him to brake and swerve as well, but Robin’s takeoff had been so blisteringly fast that there was no danger of a collision. The driver’s reaction was more a condemnation of her impatience and bad driving manners—as the man had obviously interpreted it—than anything else.
Robin and Mallory, of course, didn’t care. They were now, they hoped, out of immediate danger. What they still had to do was make sure that the Italian couldn’t catch them, and that was going to involve more brain work than fast driving. Robin was still driving quickly but had been forced to slow down, to move at the same speed as the other traffic on the road and overtake any slower vehicles in front of them when conditions permitted.
* * *
Less than three minutes after Robin had driven out onto the main road, Toscanelli repeated her actions, braking the Porsche to a stop at the same junction. For a moment he didn’t move, just looked in both directions, trying to second-guess which way his quarry must have turned. Then he spotted the black marks left by a pair of tortured tires on the road surface, and guessed which vehicle had most likely caused them.
With a similarly cavalier disregard for the vehicles driving along the road he was joining, he swung the wheel left and drove out into the traffic stream, eliciting a cacophony of horn blasts from behind as he did so.
Now it all depended on the superior speed and performance of the Porsche.
43
Devon
“He’s still behind us,” Robin said, a few minutes later, g
lancing in her rearview mirrors as she overtook a slower car. “Maybe eight hundred yards back, but he’s there and he’s catching up.”
“Shit,” Mallory muttered, and looked back at the screen of the GPS, figuring the angles and the options. “There’s nowhere we can go until we get to the end of this road, because there aren’t any turnings. There’s a T-junction at the end, and we need to go left there, to get back to Exeter. Once we’re on that road, we’ve got options.”
“So we need to get to that junction as quickly as possible.”
The road bent around to their right, and a medium-sized white van was heading in the opposite direction. The moment it had passed, Robin switched on the headlights, punched the accelerator, and drove the Ford out onto the wrong side of the road, screaming past the traffic in front of them.
Mallory clutched at the grab handle as the driver of a small Renault signaled right, the man apparently not having checked his mirrors. Robin gave a prolonged blast on her horn, and the car immediately moved back to the left, weaving slightly. Then oncoming traffic forced her back into the left lane, diving in between two cars and eliciting angry blasts from both drivers.
“He’s still catching us,” she said, again checking her mirrors. “How far to the junction?”
“About a hundred yards, that’s all.”
“What then?”
“I’m working on it,” Mallory said. “I’ll let you know.”
“That works for me. I’ll drive. You navigate. I’m heavily into role reversal,” she added.
Mallory looked at her and smiled briefly.
“And that’s something else we need to talk about,” he said.
A few seconds later, Robin braked and swung the car left, again causing oncoming vehicles to brake and swerve. And sound their horns, inevitably.
This road was much busier than the one they’d just left, with quite heavy traffic moving in both directions, but still Robin was able to spot gaps and make use of them, accelerating hard to get past vehicles in front.
But Mallory knew that if they stayed on it, the Porsche would catch them. Their only chance was to get off it and lose themselves in the tangle of side streets on the outskirts of Exeter. He checked the GPS again, then the road ahead, and made a decision.
“Take the next left,” he instructed, “and then left again.”
“You’ve got it.”
Robin hit the brakes as they reached the junction, swung the car left, and moments later left again. Then she looked ahead as the car dived down a narrow street, houses on both sides.
“This is a cul-de-sac,” she snapped. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“So do I,” Mallory replied. “I just wanted to get out of sight.”
“Well, we’ve done that. Let’s hope that Italian bastard didn’t see us,” she added, swinging the Ford round to face the way they’d come.
* * *
Less than a quarter of a mile behind the Ford, Toscanelli eased the Cayman out toward the middle of the road, checking for a gap in the oncoming traffic. There was an articulated truck directly in front of him that was partially blocking his view ahead. He knew he needed to get past it if he was to stand the slightest chance of catching up with the fugitives.
Three cars were heading in the opposite direction, and another truck was following them, but there was a gap—a small gap but one Tosacanelli felt he could use because of the power of the Porsche’s engine—between the third car and the truck.
He dropped back twenty or thirty yards behind the vehicle he was following, to give himself room to maneuver and accelerate, and dropped the car down into second gear. The first two cars swept past, heading in the opposite direction, and then the third. The moment that vehicle drove past the Porsche, Toscanelli signaled and swung out, flooring the accelerator pedal.
The approaching truck was closer than he had expected, and the driver sounded his horn, a single loud angry blare, and flashed his lights as the Cayman accelerated toward him. There was room, just, and the moment the Porsche passed the cab of the truck he was overtaking, Toscanelli swung the wheel to the left and pulled in.
But during the maneuver the Italian had lost sight of the road ahead, and in particular could no longer see the Ford Focus that he believed Jessop was driving. He had spotted the vehicle a couple of minutes earlier, but had obviously been too far behind it to confirm its identity. Now, as he scanned the line of traffic ahead of him, he realized that the vehicle he had been following was nowhere in sight.
For about a minute he continued driving along the road, hoping to catch sight of his quarry. He wondered if the Ford had somehow managed a number of rapid overtaking maneuvers while he was stuck behind the truck and had then got far enough ahead to turn off onto a minor road. If it had done that, he had no idea which turning Jessop had taken.
“I don’t see them,” Dante said.
“Nor do I. Check the GPS. See where they could have turned off.”
As Dante leaned forward to look at the screen, Toscanelli muttered a curse and pulled the car onto the side of the road. There was no point in driving on until he could see if he had missed a turning and, if there had been, where it went. The drivers of several of the cars he’d overtaken sounded their horns angrily as they drove past the Porsche, but he ignored the noise, bending forward to look at the display on the GPS.
“There are three turnings they could have taken,” Dante said, his voice racked with pain. “You can’t go back, so the best option is to carry on and take the next left turn, then backtrack and hope we pick them up.”
Toscanelli glanced at the traffic passing him in both directions, and knew Dante was right: there was no way he could do a U-turn and backtrack to take one of the junctions he’d missed. That meant he would have to guess which option Jessop would have taken, and aim to intercept him some distance from the junction. If it had been him, running for his life from an armed man, Toscanelli knew he would have headed for the nearest town. There was always safety in numbers, and the best place to hide a car was in traffic.
He nodded, decision made, signaled, and pulled out, again using the Porsche’s impressive acceleration to get in front of a car approaching him from behind. He would have to go the long way round, but there really was no alternative.
* * *
“That’s long enough,” Mallory said, glancing again at his watch. “He must have driven past by now. Go to the end of the road and turn left.”
Robin approached the end of the cul-de-sac cautiously, in case Mallory had miscalculated and their pursuer had somehow second-guessed them, but there was no sign of the black car. Satisfied, she swung the car out onto the road and accelerated quickly through the gears.
“Take the third on the right,” Mallory instructed, “and then go right at the fork. This area is a mass of streets, and quite a lot of them are not through roads. This route’ll take us well away from the road we just left, and that should put some distance between us and the bad guy.”
The Ford shot down the residential streets at a few miles an hour above the limit, Robin watching out for pedestrians and, worse, children. Cars were parked haphazardly on both sides, and occasionally she had to weave from side to side to get through the gaps.
At a T-junction, Mallory told her to go left, then right a couple of hundred yards later, at a crossroads. The road they turned into was wider, and much busier, and led to Exeter town center. Robin settled down to just merge in with the traffic flow. The Ford Focus was a popular car, and even if the Italian did somehow get close enough to see the car, he might well not realize it was the one he was chasing unless he was close enough to see the driver and passenger.
* * *
In fact, Toscanelli was no longer chasing after them. He’d guessed where they were heading, and instead of trying to catch them, he was attempting to intercept them. Almost as soon as he’d driven off t
he C50, he realized that trying to track them down in that morass of residential streets was doomed to failure unless he was lucky enough to catch sight of them. So he’d turned round almost immediately and headed back toward the city center.
When he reached the main bridges over the river, he swung left, turning northwest up Okehampton Street, down which he guessed the Ford would probably be heading.
And as he drove under the railway bridge, Toscanelli found himself staring at the Ford heading directly toward him, the woman in the driving seat.
44
Exeter, Devon
“Jesus Christ,” Mallory muttered. “Go, Robin, go.”
She didn’t need telling twice, just dropped down a gear, waited until a bus passed them going the other way, then pulled out, surging past about half a dozen cars in front of them.
“Get over the river,” Mallory said, “and go straight on, down Frog Street.”
“Frog Street? Who the hell came up with that name?” Robin asked, whipping past another slow-moving car.
“No idea.”
Mallory swiveled round in his seat and looked behind, but for the moment the Porsche wasn’t in sight, the driver presumably still trying to turn to follow them.
There was barely a gap when they reached the bridge, but Robin powered the car forward anyway, and a man in a white van had to brake hard to let her join the traffic flow in front of him.
“A taste of his own medicine,” she murmured as he blasted his horn and gesticulated at her. “I get fed up with White Van Man always driving like a complete idiot.”
The Ford sped over the bridge and Robin angled right to go the way Mallory had wanted.
“Where now?” she asked.
“There’s an interchange coming up called Friars’ Green. Go kind of straight on and then take the first turning on the left.”
“You’ve got a plan, then?”
