So. This was it.
Chapter 18
The hell it was!
Martha’s instinctive, feral side took over. Suddenly her thoughts were crystal clear. She wasn’t going to lie here and let this maniac attack her. She wasn’t going to end up like Daniel, Martial and Bruno. That was not going to happen. There were too many items yet to be ticked off her bucket list. And absolutely no way was she going to miss her son’s wedding. And besides, she rather wanted to find out how this ‘thing’, whatever it was exactly, between her and Philippe would develop.
She wasn’t going down. This murdering sonofabitch was.
She glanced frantically around for something to defend herself with. The only items within reach were the water bottle and pump on her bike. Neither of those exactly filled her with confidence. But, it dawned on her, she also had her bike. She was still straddling it, although her feet were out of the toe-clips on the pedals. If she could slip her feet up to either side of the down tube, the lower part of the bike frame, and grip it tightly between them, she could kick her legs out and ram the toothed chain ring into the man’s shins. The chain had conveniently slipped off when she’d been brought to the ground. Martha knew she’d never outrun this guy over a distance, but if she could get into one of the buildings and hide, or arm herself better, she’d have a fighting chance.
Her assailant suddenly spoke. “I might have known you’d be trouble. Interfering sodding do-gooder. You should’ve just driven by. But no, you had to come and help me, didn’t you.”
“Yes,” replied Martha tartly, deciding that talking to him might calm and distract him, plus give her more time to steel herself properly. She could really bring her surprise bike attack home then. “People should help each other, not go around killing their fellow humans.”
“Pah,” he spat. “What do you know?”
“The difference between right and wrong,” she spat back.
He sneered. “What’s wrong is me being disowned by my father, having a crap mother and being left penniless. What’s right is me claiming what’s mine.”
So, it was all starting to come out now.
“I’m sorry to hear you had a tough upbringing, but how does killing three innocent men give you what’s rightfully yours?” she asked, frowning. She might as well tease out a full confession.
“Three assholes, you mean. And it should have been four. I thought finding his brother dead would finish my other decrepit old git of a great-uncle off without me having to get my hands dirty.”
Cogs began to whirr at adrenaline-fuelled top speed in Martha’s brain.
“Remy’s your great-uncle? So—”
“So Bruno is… was,” he smirked, “my Grandpa. Dear old Pops.”
“But I thought—”
“He was childless?” The man interrupted her again, which even in her precarious circumstances Martha found extremely irritating. “Yeah, so did he. But naughty Grandpa had a one-night stand with my useless Gran and produced my even more useless Mum.”
So, there was an unknown-of illegitimate child in the equation.
“Useless? How come?” probed Martha. She hoped she would never give her own two children reason to think so poorly of her.
“Useless, because daft old Gran never told Bruno about the baby, and my stupid mum never mentioned any of this to me until just before she died.”
“I’m sorry to hear she’s dead,” offered Martha, “but I can’t see how her death justifies you going on a killing spree.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he hissed.
While the conversation had been going on, Martha had been slowly drawing her feet up into position. She was ready to strike, but curiosity, the fatal flaw that killed the cat, was getting the better of her. She wanted to hear the whole story now and hoped fervently her nosiness wouldn’t be her undoing.
“Mum grew up with nothing so she thought it was OK for me to grow up the same way. Gran had worked as a cleaner for bugger-all money. Well, Mum wasn’t going to do dirty work like that in order to keep us fed. She took up with some New Age types and went round fairs flogging artisan crap. Her thing was leather friendship bracelets. Plaited leather ones. I spent my entire childhood plaiting sodding leather bracelets.”
Martha wanted to cry “Bingo!” as the mystery of the plaited noose was explained, but she wisely kept quiet. She nodded encouragingly for him to go on.
“I wasn’t sorry when she died. Her and her idiot partner of the time ate the wrong sort of shrooms. Instead of a psychedelic trip they took a one-way trip to hell. Serve them right. I left him to grovel in his own vomit and shit but I looked after Mum. Cleaned her up. She was in a right state, thrashing around and spouting rubbish, but just before the end she had a lucid half hour. She told me about Gran and Bruno. Said she’d known for a long while who her father was but didn’t want to make contact. She’d gone vegan as a teenager and was all anti-farmers and stuff. But I figured he owed me. See, Mum was pretty much penniless when she died. Farmer’s got to have a bit of money, I reckoned. So I moved to this area about a year ago.”
“You did?” Martha couldn’t help herself. Surely she’d have noticed him around in this small community.
“Yeah. Here, to be precise.” He extended his arms to signify the semi-ruins around them. “I’ve been living off-grid, as they call it.”
Martha surveyed him in his expensive cycling gear and raised an eyebrow.
“Seems like off-grid is fairly lucrative,” she remarked drily.
“Oh, you mean these old rags?” he smiled unpleasantly, now running a hand down his top and shorts. “Me and some similarly independent-living mates went on a bit of a spree and broke into a bike shop in Paris, amongst other things. I grabbed a load of outfits and a really decent bike. Got those solid tyres on, you know?”
Martha did know: the shiny-looking ones with the wavy tread. All that fell into place now too.
“I’ve been working on the black around the place. Figured I should get to know about farming a bit. I worked for old Lecerf. He taught me how to drive a tractor and use all the different machinery, like the baler and the plough. Ha! He never guessed I’d use those on him one day!” He smiled gleefully.
“What… what do you mean… exactly?” faltered Martha, although fearing she’d already guessed. She knew about the baler part, but the plough? Surely not.
“Knocked him out then kept going over him with the plough until I could fit the bits into the baler,” he shrugged, matter-of-factly.
Now, did that make him a sociopath or a psychopath, or both, wondered Martha, desperately trying to keep her thoughts off poor Martial Lecerf. But she couldn’t.
“So he wasn’t dead when…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
“When I started ploughing him? Nah. But I don’t think he came round. Didn’t hear anything, anyway.”
Holy crap! Martha fought back rising nausea.
“But why kill him at all?” she managed to demand, after collecting herself for a moment.
“He was a tight-fisted old git. Plus, I couldn’t just knock off Grandpa, now could I? That would look kind of suspicious. I needed the police to think it was some kind of fanatic who hated farmers and their pesticides and GMO crops and whatever. It wasn’t hard to think like someone like that, since I’d grown up with my weird mother. I knew I’d have to take down a couple more people.”
Daniel Frobart and Martial Lecerf were therefore simply collateral damage. Red herrings. Martha shuddered.
“I was so cool,” he boasted. “I made a couple of threatening phone calls to that shop guy and wrote some hate mail to old man Lecerf. Y’know, to mislead the cops.”
Despite wanting to, Martha couldn’t take her eyes off this killer. This killer that she’d helped out of a ditch not long after he’d murdered someone she liked. He’d calmly cycled to the shop, ended the life of a good man with a handy tractor spike priced at €39.99, then cycled off again. The tabloids would have a field day with this.
No doubt they’d label him ‘The Psycho Cyclist’.
“Why did you want to kill your own grandfather?” she asked next. She was no longer trying to understand why he’d done what he had. There was no point trying to make sense of it: there was no sense to be had. But she might as well gather all the twisted facts. “Why not just introduce yourself to him? Move in with him? You’d have inherited everything from him in time, being a direct descendant.”
“That could have been years! These old country bumpkins just keep going and going. All that fresh air and exercise, I guess. I wasn’t going to wait that long. I need money now, not when I’m fifty!” He sounded genuinely aggrieved. “So I kept an eye on them from here. Even broke in a couple of times and went through their papers. Grandpa was sitting on a ton of money. And about to sell his mum’s old house for another hundred thousand.” The man chuckled. “Nearly got caught the last time I was in their house, just a week or so back. Hadn’t heard them walking in from the fields, so next thing I know, the back door’s being opened. I was in their sort of office with a bank statement in my hand. There was a bag with a load of crap in on the table so I just stuffed it in there, and nipped out through the window.”
Hence why Martha had found that unexpected bank statement in with her receipts.
She had enough information to get this lunatic put away for life. It was now time to save her own skin. While he’d been talking, she’d been glancing around, searching for somewhere she could run to and be safe from this maniac. She’d spotted the most likely place, a small stone outbuilding that was in the best condition of all the assortment of crumbling dwellings, barns and stables around her. The door was slightly ajar and she could see a solid bolt on the inside as well as the outside. If she could get in there, and shut and bolt herself in before the man in red caught up to her, she’d be safe. In theory. What would happen after that was for worrying about later. Assuming there was a later…
That was not the way to think. She could do this. Absolutely. Totally.
Help.
Her mouth had gone dry and her palms were sweating inside her cycling gloves. She wriggled slightly to ensure that once she’d kicked the bike into the man’s shins, she’d be able to leap up, free of the bike, and make the dash on which her life depended. She could really do with a back-up means of non-contact offence, like a canister of CS gas, or a Taser, or preferably a flame-thrower, to see her plan through, but she had only her wits, a pocketful of mainly food and the agility of a fifty-three-year-old to rely on.
If she’d been a religious person, she’d have prayed, or found comfort from the distinct possibility that she’d be joining her deceased husband soon, but she wasn’t and she didn’t. Instead, she conjured up the images of her children in her mind’s eye and sent strong telepathic waves of love to them, at the same time feeling immensely grateful for the interesting life she’d lived and the happy marriage she’d had.
It was now or never.
“When did your gran die?” she asked the man in red, realising the silence was starting to stretch between them. “She must have been quite young.”
“Who cares? She was a right old—”
His words gave way to howl of pain and outrage as Martha launched her attack. The teeth of the crank wheel sank into his shins. Martha kicked up with her left leg, which was below the bike, thus raking the teeth upwards. Being a lean man, he had even less than the minimal amount of fat on that part of the anatomy that most people had. Martha could only guess at how excruciatingly painful it felt, and she was very glad that it did. This murdering scumbag deserved to suffer.
He doubled over, clutching at the torn skin on his shin. Martha was on her feet in an instant, impressing even herself. She fairly flew across the stony courtyard and through the waist-high clutches of weeds towards the building she’d earmarked as her refuge. She was vaguely aware of a barrage of inventive and uncomplimentary curses coming her way. Then there was a clunk as something hard and heavy bounced off her helmet, making her stagger momentarily. Martha had moaned at the time when Mark had insisted on them buying a reputable and, in her opinion, ridiculously expensive make of helmet. She’d considered the supermarket’s own brand version to be sufficient. However, she was now eternally grateful for him being immutable over the matter. That was twice in a short space of time her helmet had protected her head from serious injury.
No more missiles followed, which most likely meant that the man in red had recovered enough to start pursuing her. Martha didn’t dare glance back to check. She reached the building and shot inside. She grabbed the edge of the door and started to drag it. It began to move then stopped with a graunching slide. Martha knew what that meant from her own stable doors: there was a stone lodged beneath it. She gave the door a quick rattle to attempt to loosen the impeding object that way. Another tug, but it still wouldn’t move. She looked up and wished she hadn’t. The man in red, with a crazed, hatred-filled expression on his face, was three quarters of the way across the yard now.
“Move, you bastard!” shrieked Martha, pulling the door towards herself, giving it another rattle and then shoving it away with all her might. There was initial resistance then, thankfully, the stone must have been knocked free because the door thunked shut, right into the face of the man in red. She both heard and felt the impact, and winced. She was about to shoot the bolt across but the door began to open. A hand appeared at the edge. Martha battled back with all her might, but she was smaller and lighter. The door creaked open a little more. At that second Martha remembered the small set of Allen keys on a ring in her pocket. Bracing herself against the door, she delved in her pocket, grabbed hold of the keys, selected one at random and stabbed it into one of the fingers gripping the door. She drove it in so hard she was horrified, but also gratified, to see it went right through. The man yelled but kept his grip. So Martha stabbed again, over and over, into the same finger until at last it proved unbearable and the hand disappeared, amidst a lot of swearing. In a flash, and with lightning reflexes she didn’t know she possessed, Martha crashed the door shut, grabbed the bolt with her right hand and slammed it over. For a second or so she couldn’t understand why she couldn’t get it go all the way across. The bolt was in its housing, but not to its full extent. Then she noticed that her little finger was crushed between the hasp and the doorframe. She hadn’t registered the pain at all, not with all the adrenaline pumping through her veins. She pulled her hand away and pushed the bolt fully home with her left hand. She surveyed her mangled finger dispassionately and then slumped against the wall, gasping for breath.
She was safe for the time being. The outbuilding only had tiny round windows, far too small for him to climb through. It had an impressively and surprising solid roof too. She’d spotted that from outside, and it had been another factor that prompted her to select this particular building. It must have housed something valuable once, she mused. But only briefly, since at that point the battering began. The man must be using a rock or a piece of wood since he couldn’t be hitting the door that hard with his bare hands, especially with one speared finger.
“Please hold,” she quietly begged the door.
She felt quietly confident though. Her own barn was around two hundred years old and the doors were still in amazing condition. Oak hardened over the years, so the doors were now more resistant than ever. This door wasn’t as well maintained as hers, bearing no evidence of recent varnishing, but it appeared healthy and robust. Even if the man in red found an axe it would take him a long time to hack through. A long, long time.
The battering began to subside, then it stopped altogether. There was silence. Martha held her breath. Had her assailant gone away or was he planning a more subtle attack? Then there were some gratings and clunkings on the other side of the door. The heavy iron latch above the bolt she’d just painfully rammed shut rattled a little. He must be jamming the other side of that shut with something. She grabbed the small handle on her side and tried to shake it but it didn�
��t budge.
“Listen, bitch,” came his voice at last. Martha rolled her eyes. There was really no need to be quite so rude. The fact he wanted to kill her conveyed his feelings towards her perfectly adequately. “So, I can’t get in, but now you can’t get out. Didn’t think about that, did you?”
Sadly not until a moment ago.
“You’re locked in, and oh dear, nobody knows you’re here except me. No phone signals in this neck of the woods. Ain’t that a shame. And I’m about to bugger off and leave you. How long is it people last? Three weeks without food and three days without water? Something like that anyway. Enjoy your last three days. Think about me inheriting my grandad’s farm and money and spending it all. I’ll go to South America, or maybe Thailand. Live on a beach somewhere. Yeah, that’ll do nicely.”
Martha decided not to point out that his sudden appearance out of nowhere after his grandpa’s death to claim the estate might arouse suspicions. Especially if he then disappeared straight away again with the money. She was sure Philippe was shrewd enough to find that fishy and do some poking around. This guy must have left some DNA somewhere, surely? And maybe Philippe would remember her mentioning the cyclist. Hopefully Lottie would recall that they’d seen tyre tracks near the Sauniers’ and Lecerf’s farm, and Jared had that Cofidis bottle as evidence.
Hang on, why was she even thinking like that? She’d live to tell Philippe herself. Wouldn’t she?
“So bye-bye you old, interfering bag, and have a horrid death.” There was a peal of manic laughter, sounds of him moving away, then nothing.
Chapter 19
Philippe watched the Vampire Judge disappear in a cloud of dust down his driveway to the background sound of an expensive engine. Then she was gone.
Hate Bale Page 22
