'How many of them are you expecting?' asked Jock.
'Well, Zak and Stewie are almost always together so if either of them is in there they'll both be. I'm not sure about the others. Or other.'
'Other?' said Christopher.
'Possibly Giancarlo Petrelli. Possibly not. Maybe others too.'
She saw Christopher giving her an apprehensive look. She hoped he wouldn't follow her or try to do anything heroic. Previous experience suggested that he wouldn't but you never knew with men. She thought she could rely on Jock to hold him back, anyway. He seemed to have had enough of being a man of action by the end of last night.
They waited with different degrees of reluctance, Jock holding on to the pedestrian gate that opened on to the railway crossing while Christopher leaned against the nearest wall. Amaryllis went over to the fence that surrounded the perimeter of the yard, slid into the space behind it and started to work her way round. It consisted of metal railings erected on top of a low brick wall that came to about waist height. She aimed to get to the mid-point, right opposite the gateway, or as close as possible to it, and then to look for the most convenient way through, round or over the fence. There had to be a weak spot; there always was. She was lucky in that trees had grown up almost all the way round the outside of the fence: a few rowans, some birches and a lot of indeterminate wild trees she didn't recognise. The trees themselves didn't give much cover at this time of year, when they were just tentatively coming into leaf, but a mix of brambles, ferns and bracken grew around them, and she alternately crouched and ran, drawing on her security services training. The trees she didn't recognise on the way would probably have filled a book about trees.
She couldn't hear a sound from inside the yard, but that didn't surprise her. Even if there was anybody there they would be speaking in low voices, plotting and planning.
If there was nobody there she would have to re-think.
There was a spot where the railings had come away from the top of the wall, and she could have got through if necessary. But there was very little cover on the other side, in the yard itself She aimed for one of the places where scrubby weeds, or rather what was left of them after winter, covered the ground.
She dodged round behind the next birch tree, ducked quickly down into a bramble patch and carried on.
The silence could have been unnerving but Amaryllis wasn't easily unnerved. She knew that concentrating on the next thing to be done, and doing it, were important and pausing to worry could be fatal. For instance, she could have worried about another baseball bat attack, but - dammit! She swept the image from her mind, trying to keep it clear and sharp. Her brain could be her most effective weapon.
Peering from behind a large gnarled rowan tree, she saw a rapid blur of movement at the window of the old workmen’s hut she had noticed on her first visit to the yard. How many of them were in there? She wished she had reconnoitred the inside, but other things had been more pressing at the time of both visits: first Giancarlo Petrelli with his baseball bat and then Old Mrs Petrelli with the knitting needle in her heart. She shuddered. The yard suddenly didn’t seem a very healthy place to be.
Pushing these stray thoughts to one side, she considered her options, and the distances between the rowan tree and the wall, and between the wall and the hut. If this was the side with the window in it, she would definitely have to approach from a different direction. Where was the doorway? And was there a fully functional door in it, or was it empty, open to the elements? She thought she remembered a doorway on the side facing the concrete bays where Giancarlo had lurked with his baseball bat. But she couldn’t afford to make a mistake.
The sound of a train intruded into her thoughts, but she dismissed it as irrelevant. Nobody would need to cross the railway tracks for a while yet. She, Jock and Christopher were well capable of detaining a couple of kids without any outside help.
She decided to retrace her steps to the place where she had seen the gap in the railings. She advanced right up to the gap and stood staring through it. The windowless wall of the workman’s hut faced her from this angle. There was no door at this side either. She didn’t want to think about whether the hut might be so dilapidated that watchers could see right through gaps in the walls. She would cross that bridge when she came to it.
She burnt the bridges she had already crossed, smiling faintly to herself at the neat way she had telescoped two metaphors into one, by climbing on to the wall and wriggling through the gap in the fence. Then she ran towards the hut as fast as she could, in wide zigzags which she hoped would confuse anyone who might have a gun trained on her. The soft shoes made very little sound on the rough surface. As she got closer to the hut, she imagined she could hear voices inside it.
She sidled along by the wall of the hut as far as the corner, listening hard and trying not to breathe. Now she could definitely hear voices, but they spoke low and fast, and she couldn’t make out more than a few words here and there. It was more important at this point to get the gang members into custody: after that their conversations would be heard and recorded until the cows came home. One of the voices was a bit higher than the rest, so maybe one gang member had taken fright and was panicking – all to the good. It would make him easier to break.
She slid round the corner and sidestepped up towards the doorway. There was a ramshackle door of sorts. A bit annoying, because the odd slats and bars could easily get in the way.
She reached the door and wrenched it open in one movement.
That was all she managed to do.
A searing pain in her left shoulder, a bang quite close by, a kick as if from a mule, and she keeled over backwards on to the rough ground. You idiot, she thought as her eyes closed against the pain.
‘You idiot,’ came a kind of echo of her thought as she lay there. She no longer knew or cared if the echo was from inside her head or from someone else. Amaryllis twitched a little and lay still.
Chapter 23 Backup
As soon as Amaryllis had gone, Jock pulled out his mobile phone again and dialled a number.
‘We need backup,’ he explained to Christopher briefly.
‘But she said – ‘
‘Never mind that, we need backup, and the sooner the better.’
He had a quick conversation which seemed to be with Dave, since the words ‘pick-up truck’ were mentioned more than once, and then replaced the phone in his pocket. Christopher didn’t ask. Something he had learned from hanging out with Amaryllis was that he just didn’t need to know everything. It was more restful that way.
A long coal train came along behind them and stopped, blocking the place where they had crossed the tracks. Christopher felt a slight qualm at that. What if they needed to be rescued by the police, or needed an ambulance? Could the police get into the yard another way? He knew they had secret access routes that normal people couldn’t use.
‘I thought Amaryllis didn’t want Dave involved,’ he said conversationally. The silence and lack of action were getting on his nerves.
‘Hmph!’ said Jock. ‘We might need transport – I’ve asked him to bring the pick-up truck. I don’t know how she thought we would get the whole gang to the police station.’
‘We might have been better to call the police in the first place,’ Christopher grumbled.
At the other side of the tracks, beyond the stationary coal train, a car horn hooted several times.
‘That’ll be him now,’ said Jock.
The coal train started moving again.
‘He was quick,’ said Christopher.
‘They were in town anyway,’ said Jock.
‘They?’
‘Jemima Stevenson and Rosie were with him. He’s bringing them too.’
‘Amaryllis is going to kill us if anything happens to them.’
‘They can keep their heads down,’ said Jock airily.
Now that the coal train had got out of the way, they could see the pick-up truck with Mrs Stevenson sitting regally in th
e front and Rosie waving to them from the back seat. Dave got out and crossed the railway line on foot to where they stood.
He was halfway across when they heard the shot.
‘Amaryllis!’ said Christopher, and against all his instincts and inclinations, began to run towards the sound.
He was vaguely aware of Jock shouting at him to come back, but the words didn’t really make sense.
He was almost knocked flying by two people who came running at him from the yard, as fast and as focussed as if the devil was chasing them. Recovering from the near collision, he thought he recognised Zak Johnstone and Stewie the talking ham. He hoped Dave and Jock would be able to grab them as they ran. But that wasn’t important now. He dashed on, regardless.
He was in the yard. He ran on, towards a figure lying flat on the ground by the old workman’s hut. He knew who it was – had known ever since he heard the shot. Oh God, he groaned out loud, oh God. Why didn’t I stop her?
He stood there and stared down at her. Blood poured out of a wound in her left shoulder. She wasn’t moving at all.
Ambulance, said a little voice inside his head. Get an ambulance, for God’s sake.
He flung himself to the ground beside her and felt for a pulse. He wasn’t very good at this kind of thing but he thought he detected something.
Bleeding. Stop the bleeding first. He unwound the woollen scarf he had flung round his neck before leaving home, and made it into a kind of pad which he pressed firmly on to the wound, mentally apologising to Amaryllis if he was hurting her by doing this. Phone, phone, where the hell was his phone? He had a sudden, guilty memory of Amaryllis asking if he had his phone just before this whole thing kicked off. And another memory of the phone sitting on his kitchen table.
Of course! Amaryllis always had a mobile phone with her, and he was sure she had it fully charged and located somewhere on her person. He twisted his spare arm into an almost untenable position and searched her jacket pocket for it, rather tentatively because it seemed like an invasion of her well-guarded privacy. A voice from above him said suddenly,
‘An ambulance. We’d better get an ambulance.’
Giancarlo Petrelli stood over them both, holding a gun.
Christopher forced himself to ignore the boy and the weapon, because he had just located Amaryllis’s phone. He dealt with the emergency call first, then said to the boy,
‘Put that thing down. You’ve done enough damage.’
‘I’ve done – nothing,’ said Giancarlo. He looked dazed and confused: Christopher wondered if he was on drugs. He put the gun down carefully on the rough ground quite close to Christopher, and stepped back. ‘Are the police coming?’
‘Yes.’
Christopher reached out, picked up the gun very gingerly because he had never handled one before and was convinced he only had to touch it to do untold damage to himself and others, and put it in his coat pocket, again very gingerly. He wondered if he should try to move Amaryllis. But he knew keeping the pressure on the wound was the most important thing to do now.
He heard footsteps moving away, accelerating as they went. Giancarlo was making a bid for freedom. After what he had done, they would probably lock him up and throw away the key once they did catch him.
By the time he heard the distant sirens he felt as if he had been crouching there for hours. It was an age after that again when he heard running feet and looked up to see two paramedics standing there. They crouched down beside him.
'She's been shot,' he said, and had to take a deep breath to try and stop his voice shaking. One of the paramedics gently lifted his hand, which still pressed the padded scarf into Amaryllis's shoulder. Blood poured out again.
'Keep holding it like that for two more minutes, pal, and then we'll get you out of here,' said one of the paramedics. They took over from Christopher in easy stages and improved on his makeshift arrangements by bringing oxygen and other professional equipment into play. He sat back on the ground, leaving them space but reluctant to move away from Amaryllis. At last one of them helped him up. 'She's lost some blood but she's strong. She'll fight back....Are you all right?'
He was in the middle of framing a reply when the police arrived, swarming all round him in large numbers like an ant colony.
'She's been shot,' he said again to one of the officers.
The police took names and addresses from him, and the paramedics brought a stretcher for Amaryllis and a kind of folding chair for Christopher. He didn't want to sit in it, but the paramedics insisted. 'We don't want to have to put you on a stretcher too,' they told him. 'Just behave yourself.'
When at last things started to make sense again, he saw that they had managed to drive the ambulance into the railway yard, where it stood ready to whisk Amaryllis away. He wondered why they didn't get a move on. Surely every second counted? They loaded the stretcher into the ambulance, came back for him, and one of them got into the driving seat. The other was just outside talking to a couple of policemen. Jock McLean came up to the group, asked something, peered into the ambulance. Christopher strained his ears and thought he heard one of them say, ‘... grey in the face... a bit out of it… heart attack risk…’
He wasn’t sure who they were talking about. Was it him? He didn't feel like a heart attack risk, but it was as if some evil monster had sucked all the energy out of him.
Amaryllis suddenly pushed aside the oxygen mask and tried to speak, coughing and spluttering a bit. He leaned across to listen.
It was hard to understand anything, but he thought he heard the word 'Petrelli'. Then the second paramedic jumped into the back of the ambulance, replaced the mask and closed the doors behind them.
'I think she just told me who did it,' he blurted out, not wanting to hold them up but desperate to help catch the person who had shot her.
'Never mind that for now,' said the paramedic in the back with them. 'Hold tight, we're going to put on a bit of speed.'
After that it was impossible to say anything or hear anything, because the siren was going and they were dashing through the streets of Pitkirtly much faster than was safe. It was even worse than travelling in Dave's pick-up truck. Although this was what he wanted them to do if it saved Amaryllis, Christopher was afraid he would embarrass himself by being sick.
This fear intensified once he remembered he still had the gun in his pocket.
Chapter 24 The only possible explanation?
Jock and Dave had a busy half hour, but all in all Jock thought it went very well, considering. Just as Christopher disappeared from view, and while Jock was still wondering whether to follow him, Zak Johnstone and his sidekick came round the corner from the railway yard at a gallop, looking as if the hounds of hell were after them.
‘You take the glaikit one and I’ll go after the other one,’ said Dave, with the result that they both tackled Stewie the sidekick, who was only marginally more glaikit than Zak, in Jock’s opinion, and it looked as if Zak would get away except that Rosie jumped out of the pick-up truck as he was accelerating past it and swept his legs out from under him in an impressive tackle. Mrs Stevenson also got out of the truck when it became clear that Rosie had recognised Zak, was pummelling him as he lay there and showed no sign of pausing.
‘You’re hurting me,’ whined Stewie. ‘I’ll get you charged with assault.’
‘We’ll deny everything,’ said Dave, twisting his arm a fraction harder.
Jock used his mobile to call the police and then they escorted Stewie across the railway line. Mrs Stevenson and Rosie between them managed to push Zak into the back of the pick-up truck and Mrs Stevenson locked the doors. Zak complained loudly and they ignored him. Rosie wound down the window.
‘He’s the one who tried to break into my cattery,’ she said. ‘We pulled off his balaclava and saw his face, didn’t we, Jock?’
‘Definitely,’ said Jock, who in truth wasn’t at all sure. But if Rosie said so, it was good enough for him.
‘What are we going to do w
ith those scumbags?’ said Dave, as Stewie squirmed in his grasp.
‘I suppose we’d better hand them over to the police,’ said Jock. ‘Somebody'll need to work out the whole story.’
‘We never did nothing,’ complained Stewie. ‘It’s not a crime to run down the road. We were having a race.’
‘There are plenty of other things you’ve done that are crimes,’ said Jock. ‘Accessory to murder, maybe? Breaking and entering. The list’ll be a mile long once the police have looked into it all.’
‘You can’t prove anything,’ said Stewie, kicking the ground petulantly.
‘Just shut up, Stewie!’ shouted Zak from his imprisonment. ‘We don’t have to say anything to them – they’re just a bunch of interfering old people with nothing better to do.’
‘Hey, not so much of the old!’ said Rosie, glaring at him. He cowered back against the car seat.
The clashing noise of various sirens started up in the distance, and quickly came closer. An ambulance drew up alongside the truck.
‘Anyone hurt in there?’ said one of the paramedics, peering at them all.
‘No – you need to get through there,’ said Jock, pointing towards the railway line with the yard beyond.
‘We’ll open up the big gates,’ said the paramedic. ‘Thanks. The police should be here any minute.’
To Jock’s surprise the small pedestrian gate turned out to be only a section of a big set of gates that allowed the ambulance access over the tracks. The vehicle bumped its way across the lines and turned towards the entrance to the yard. As soon as it was out of sight, a police car drew up alongside the truck. This time Jock and Dave offered up the captives.
‘But you should go and have a look in there as well,’ said Jock helpfully, pointing to where the ambulance had gone.
Another police car arrived, and Zak and Stewie were decanted into it.
Once Jock knew it was safe to leave the others, he hurried off towards the yard. Nobody stopped him so he carried on to where the ambulance stood. By that time there were policemen swarming all over the place; two of them were talking to one of the paramedics.
3 A Reformed Character Page 17
