The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘It’s this frigging toothache,’ McAllister admitted. ‘Started yesterday and it’s got worse through the night. Frig it, I don’t want to have to go to the dentist.’

  ‘Get me a pair of pincers and I’ll yank it out for you.’

  McAllister looked at him as if he’d happily shoot him. ‘You come anywhere near me with a pair of pincers, pal, and you’ll wish you hadn’t.’

  Ben left him to his sufferings and wandered down the riverbank with a lit Gauloise and Radar trotting along at his heels. The morning mist was still clearing, drifting like smoke on the water. He was dazed. Everything he’d learned over the last couple of days seemed to have become irrelevant. The whole world had been turned upside down with Jude’s escape from jail.

  What was he thinking? And yet, how must it have felt for him, sitting locked up in a cell knowing that the real killer was still out there? Could Ben put his hand on his heart and say he wouldn’t have done the same? The crazy Hope gene, striking again.

  Ben had been sitting gazing at the misty water for a while when McAllister came bursting out of the cottage to say that there’d been a major development. Ben jumped to his feet and raced up the riverbank to meet him. He looked animated, his toothache forgotten.

  ‘Billie called,’ McAllister said.

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Not Billy,’ McAllister snapped impatiently. ‘Billie, Billie Flowers. She’s my Detective Sergeant.’

  ‘Okay, so what’s up?’

  ‘We got him.’

  Ben stared.

  ‘Well, not quite,’ McAllister corrected himself. ‘But we’re a big step closer. We’ve a pretty good idea where he went.’

  The news of the sensational jailbreak had been splashed all over television that morning. The police had just had a call from a haulage trucker called Steve Kinnear who’d picked up a hitcher in the Cotswolds late last night, while en route to Penzance in Cornwall to deliver a load of engineering parts. On arrival at his destination he’d seen Jude’s face on TV and reckoned the wanted man was the same person he’d given a lift to.

  Ben asked, ‘Reckons, or knows for sure?’

  ‘A hundred per cent sure. He gave a pretty clear description, down to the clothes he was wearing. Said he was carrying a heavy holdall, which sounds like one of the ones found with the dead Albanians. Bet your arse it’s the missing money bag.’

  ‘Where’d Kinnear drop him off?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Out in the middle of the sticks, a few miles from Bodmin. Makes sense to me that a person on the run might pick that area. Pretty wild terrain, sparsely populated, easy to disappear.’

  For Ben, it made even more sense. Because he suddenly knew exactly where Jude had gone.

  Chapter 39

  After a long and exhausting hike across the moor with the heavy holdall on his shoulder, as the early morning sun emerged from behind the hills Jude had finally found the lane that wound up towards Black Rock Farm. He followed its twisting, potholed course for half a mile further before he arrived at the familiar wooden gate, now a little more dilapidated than when he’d last seen it some years ago, but still bearing the hand-painted greeting that Robbie had put there to welcome visitors: PRIVATE PROPERTY – PISS OFF.

  Safe at last. Smiling to himself in the certainty that nobody would think of looking for him here, Jude creaked open the gate and trudged the last couple of hundred yards along the rutted track to the house.

  He and Robbie Brocklebank had been friends a long time, since they were both seven years old, though they hadn’t been in touch for a while. Robbie had always been something of a tearaway, perpetually rebelling against his hippy parents – hippies of the bourgeois bohemian, open-toed-sandalled, pot-smoking liberal moneyed variety (Robbie’s uncle, Sir Crispin Brocklebank, was a wealthy stockbroker) who’d brought their kids up to address them as Bertie and Meadow – yes, Meadow. When Robbie was eight they’d wanted to rename him River, but Robbie wasn’t having it and had been at war with them more or less ever since. Which hadn’t stopped him from making free use of the rundown Cornish farm that Bertie and Meadow had purchased as a holiday home many years ago but hardly ever visited.

  Throughout his later teens Jude had attended more than a few wild parties in the big barn that Robbie had refashioned as a private rave venue and a concert hall for his thrash metal band, the Nazi Rocket Monkeys, while the house itself had seen its fair share of drunken debauchery, indulgence in mild narcotic substances and other teenage indiscretions. It had been during one of those wild parties that Jude had first met the man he would later learn was his real father. Ben had travelled here to break the news to him that Michaela and Simeon Arundel had been killed in a car smash. The encounter had marked the beginning of Jude’s sometimes turbulent relationship with his biological dad.

  He knew that Ben would go crazy when he heard the news of the prison escape. But what would he have done, in Jude’s position? There probably wouldn’t have been a stone of HMP Bullingdon left standing, so no lectures, please.

  Reaching the house, Jude found that the front door was unlocked as usual. That didn’t mean anyone was currently staying here – neither Robbie nor his parents cared much about home security, not that there was anything much inside worth stealing. Sure enough, a check of the rambling farmhouse’s three floors, calling out ‘Hello? Anybody home?’ revealed that the place was empty. That suited Jude perfectly. He picked out a small attic bedroom with peeling Led Zeppelin posters, a mattress on the floor and a view over the hills, found a sleeping bag that wasn’t too fusty-smelling, then padded back down the creaky stairs to coax the old oil boiler into life and get some warmth into the place. There was a decent stock of tinned provisions in the kitchen, not all of it the tasteless organic vegetarian stuff Bertie and Meadow were into, and good old Robbie had left some pizzas in the freezer: triple cheese pepperoni! Best of all, Jude found a stack of lager six-packs in the fridge and more stashed under the kitchen sink.

  Ravenous after his journey and the long, weary trek across the moor, Jude made himself a giant breakfast of baked beans and sausages and guzzled it down with something approaching ecstasy, slurping on a mug of fair-trade instant coffee. What a welcome relief it was, after his diet of prison food. Afterwards, full and belching and feeling extremely contented, he hefted his new holdall onto the rustic kitchen table, unzipped it and set about counting the piles of wadded banknotes inside. By the time he’d finished, he was sitting staring open-mouthed at a mountain of cash that entirely covered the table and amounted to over forty thousand pounds in used tens and twenties. He could only guess that this must have been intended as expenses money for Luan Copja and his cronies while they were on the run, before the gang was somehow infiltrated and the tables were turned. What did it matter any more?

  Jude counted his blessings. He had supplies to last him a good two weeks, and enough cash to live on for much longer than that. Christ, he could survive for years up here in his remote bohemian hideaway if he had to. He also happened to know that Robbie’s old Triumph Bonneville lived in one of the sheds, providing him with wheels for when he needed to scoot down to the nearest village, Warleggan, for more supplies. Venturing out into the public would be the risky part – but if he coloured his blond hair red with some of the hippy henna dye that Meadow kept in the bathroom and grew himself a bit of a beard, he reckoned he could avoid getting recognised.

  He wasn’t worried about Robbie turning up. Robbie would think it was the supercoolest thing in the universe to harbour a real-life fugitive from justice, and could be utterly trusted not to breathe a word to anyone. Meanwhile if Bertie and Meadow happened to make one of their rare appearances, Jude would just decamp to one of the barns and keep out of sight. The elder Brocklebanks were usually too stoned out of their heads to pay much attention to what went on around them, anyhow.

  Boy oh boy, did this ever beat living behind bars! Jude neatly packed his money away, carried the bulging bag upsta
irs and threw himself down on his bed, laughing. In five minutes, he was drifting away into a beautiful, tranquil sleep.

  Chapter 40

  ‘You said the police know where he went,’ Ben told McAllister. ‘Maybe so, in the most general sense, but no more than that. You know what direction he went in. What county he’s in. That’s it. Whereas I’ve got him pinned down to the nearest square metre.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ McAllister asked.

  ‘Pretty sure,’ Ben said. ‘There’s no other reason why he’d have chosen to head to that region. It’s a rough old farmhouse that belongs to the family of a school friend of his. They hardly use the place, by all accounts, and nobody else ever goes there. A perfect location to hide out in.’

  McAllister looked thoughtful. ‘So where exactly is this place?’

  ‘That depends,’ Ben said.

  ‘Depends on what?’

  ‘Depends on who I’m talking to here. Am I talking to the police? Or am I talking to someone who can think outside the box and be prepared to do this my way?’

  ‘Try me,’ McAllister said cagily.

  ‘Here’s how I see it. First of all, Jude might act stupid sometimes, but he’s not stupid enough to have asked Kinnear to drop him off anywhere too close to where he was going. He’s a fit guy. Not SAS fit, but not too shabby. He could carry a heavy holdall for miles over rough country without breaking a sweat.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So, now there’s been a reported sighting, Devon and Cornwall police will have boots all over the Bodmin area hunting for him, right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But we’re talking about a big area,’ Ben said. ‘Remember your basic geometry?’

  ‘Geometry. Give me a break, Hope.’

  Ben said, ‘If Jude hiked anything up to, say, seven or eight miles from the drop-off point in any given direction, that would equal the radius of the circle you need to cover in order to find him somewhere inside. The area of a circle is pi times the radius squared, which gives you a search zone of around two hundred square miles. If he walked just a couple of miles further, say forty minutes extra at a good pace, that area widens out to over three hundred square miles.’

  ‘All right, all right. I get it.’

  ‘Meaning the police will have to check every town, village, farmhouse, outhouse and henhouse in something like a hundred and ninety thousand acres of land. Even if they roll the air operations unit out of Exeter airport, a single helicopter will still have a hell of a job covering that much ground, plus they’ve only got a two-and-a-half-hour flight window before they have to return to base to refuel. It’s needles and haystacks.’

  McAllister had to grudgingly agree.

  ‘On top of which,’ Ben added, ‘the place I think he’s gone is pretty damn remote. The one time I went there, I had a hard time finding it.’

  ‘But you’ll remember?’

  ‘Once I’ve been to a place I never forget how to find it.’

  ‘What are you, a homing pigeon?’

  ‘It buys us a lot of time. But only if we move fast.’

  McAllister frowned. ‘Us?’

  ‘You, me and that clown car of yours, because I don’t have one any longer.’

  ‘Watch what you say about my car.’

  ‘You can bring the dog along too. He might come in handy.’

  Radar licked Ben’s hand. He seemed to like the idea.

  McAllister went on frowning, still not convinced. ‘Why should I work with you on this?’

  ‘Because it’s the only way that leads to a happy outcome.’

  ‘What outcome is that?’

  ‘The one where we get Jude safely into custody, where some trigger-happy police sniper isn’t going to drill a hole in him. At the same time, we nail the real killer and put an end to this thing once and for all.’

  ‘Sounds like you have a plan,’ McAllister said.

  ‘Just half of one,’ Ben replied. ‘I’m still working on the other half. But what I have in mind, I can’t do alone. I’ll need your backup, Tom.’

  McAllister was silent, thinking.

  ‘I also need your answer now,’ Ben said. ‘The clock’s ticking. Are you in, or out?’

  McAllister said, ‘You’re forgetting one thing, pal. Forbsie might’ve pulled me off the case, but that was before the shit hit the fan at Emily Bowman’s place. Now I’m back in charge of this unholy mess, which means that twenty minutes from now I’ll be on my way to Cornwall where I’ll be liaising with the local officers on the ground to supervise the search operation. Tell me how I’m supposed to do all that and still take part in this half-baked plan of yours.’

  Ben leaned closer and peered frowning at the right side of McAllister’s face. He winced. ‘That’s a hell of a swelling you’ve got there. All puffed up and bright red. Looks like a baboon’s arse.’

  McAllister scowled and defensively put his hand to his right cheek, which wasn’t visibly swollen at all. ‘What are you talking about, baboon’s arse?’

  Ben told him, ‘You must be in agony. If I had a face like that, I’d get myself booked into the dentist’s for an emergency extraction, PDQ, because there’s no way you can supervise a major manhunt operation with a tooth that’s about to explode. And I’d have to get someone to cover for me in my absence. Like Detective Sergeant Billie Flowers, for example. Who I’m sure is an extremely capable officer. I’m certain that your superior, Forbsie, will be full of sympathy and happy to cut you some slack. That’s what having a chain of command is all about. One phone call, and you’ll be good to go.’

  ‘I can’t—’ McAllister began to bluster.

  ‘Yes, you can,’ Ben said. ‘And it’s what I’m asking you to do, because if you don’t help me and Jude gets shot by some cowboy in a SWAT vest, that’s on you.’

  ‘What do I say to them when they see I’ve still got the tooth?’

  ‘That the world’s best dentist worked a miracle and saved it. Or if it’s realism you want, get me those pliers and I’ll be happy to oblige.’

  ‘Damn you, Hope.’

  ‘Damn me all you like. Just make a decision. And get out of that suit and those nice shiny shoes. Where we’re going it might get a little rough.’

  McAllister thought about it a little longer. But not too long. Then he heaved a huge sigh, slumped his shoulders in defeat and walked back into the cottage to get straight on the phone to Billie Flowers. Five minutes later he re-emerged, wearing jeans and hiking boots and a faded denim jacket.

  ‘This had better be worth it,’ he growled at Ben. ‘Let’s go.’

  Chapter 41

  McAllister opened up the driver’s door of the massive Barracuda, left-hand drive like Ben’s Alpina had been before it became a cube of metal. He angled the seat forward to let Radar hop excitedly into the back. Ben asked, ‘You want me to drive?’

  McAllister shot him a savage look. ‘Don’t push your luck, Hope.’

  Ben walked around to the right side and settled into the high-back bucket passenger seat as McAllister wedged himself in behind the three-spoke wheel. The car was as wide as a boat, with enough leg and elbow room to spread out comfortably. They had a drive of over two hundred miles ahead of them, carving west through the Cotswolds and then plunging southwards by Bristol; down into Somerset: Bridgwater, Taunton, then into Devon, cutting through the heart of Dartmoor and onwards towards the south-western tip of England to Cornwall.

  McAllister thundered through the lanes of rural west Oxfordshire, the clattering rumble of the big Hemi V8 reverberating in the verdant, sun-dappled tree tunnels. On straights the acceleration was stunning for a car that was pushing fifty years old; on tighter bends the thing wallowed like a water buffalo in a swamp. When they hit the open road the engine note smoothed out into a mellow roar and it seemed to find its long-legged stride, like it was home again on the NASCAR racetrack.

  ‘I still think this is a bad idea,’ McAllister said as the ’Cuda hummed down the motorway with eighty-five on the c
lock. Breaking speed limits was okay if you were a cop, even one who lied to his superiors and was technically signed off duty for a medical emergency.

  ‘Then turn this bastard barge around, take me back, arrest me,’ Ben said. ‘Or try to, and see what happens.’

  ‘Is that how it works: ask me for my help and then threaten me? A right charmer you are, Hope.’

  ‘I’ve come this far,’ Ben said. ‘Nobody’s going to get in my way until Jude’s safe and the bad guys are in the bag.’

  ‘Are you planning on shooting them, too?’

  Ben looked at him. ‘What makes you think I shot anyone? You want to frisk me for a concealed firearm?’

  ‘Yeah, right. Listen, pal, doesn’t bother me. If you can take out the trash and get away with it, that’s no skin off my nose. Just try to do it a little more discreetly when you’re on my turf, okay?’

  ‘Tell me exactly how you managed to qualify as a police officer?’

  McAllister ignored the question. He asked, ‘So who are these bad guys anyway?’

  ‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ Ben replied. ‘If things go to plan.’

  ‘You have the whole plan worked out now, do you?’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  ‘A shitey auld deal this is,’ McAllister grumbled, shaking his head. ‘You drag me into a heap of trouble and you won’t even tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Are you going to bicker all the way to Cornwall?’

  A silence; then McAllister muttered glumly, ‘My tooth hurts.’

  ‘Don’t be such a wimp, McAllister. A big tough guy like you, making such a fuss for one measly little tooth out of thirty-two. I once knew a young trooper who hiked the best part of a forty-mile endurance march with half of them knocked out. He’s still alive.’