The Pandemic Plot

by Scott Mariani

  ‘One of your fellow SAS nutters, I suppose.’

  That would be the redoubtable Jaden Wolf, now living in Spain and, with any luck, doing a better job at staying away from trouble than his former commanding officer. Ben felt a pang of self-pity of his own, and wondered whether he’d ever be able to settle down to a peaceful life. Probably asking for too much, he decided.

  As the morning wore on and they got steadily closer to their destination, the sky turned to a leaden grey and the landscape grew more barren and rugged. The Plymouth drank like a Sherman tank, a four-wheeled environmental disaster, and they had to stop twice for fuel. At the second stop, McAllister let the dog out to relieve himself and reluctantly let Ben take over the wheel for the last leg of the journey.

  With the motorway behind them, the roads became increasingly empty and twisty and narrow, climbing up and down through the hilly moorland of Cornwall. A blanket of mist had descended from the grey sky, along with a thin sheeting rain that slicked the road surface and made the Barracuda’s Goodrich tyres and wallowy suspension scrabble for grip on fast bends.

  ‘Take it easy,’ McAllister said, gripping the door handle as the rear end fishtailed out of line.

  ‘Don’t worry. If I wreck it, I’ll buy you a new one.’

  It was coming on for midday as Ben blitzed past the sign for Warleggan, the nearest village to Black Rock Farm. Driving through the greystone streets he passed the pub where he’d stopped to ask directions, the one time he’d been here before. ‘It’s all hippies up there,’ the barman had said, eyeing Ben like he was a drug dealer.

  ‘Well, your boy certainly picked the arsehole of nowhere to hide out in,’ McAllister commented as they headed beyond Warleggan and climbed yet further into the remote hills. On a clear day you could see for many miles across the rolling moorland, but the mist had thickened to a yellowish fog and the visibility had dropped to less than thirty yards. Not a day for deploying Devon and Cornwall’s police helicopter for a widespread manhunt. The roads were almost completely empty. If the cops were out in force looking for Jude, they must be combing some other sector of their wide search zone. Ben could tell that McAllister was itching to get on his police radio for an update on the operation. Twice he tried calling Billie Flowers on his mobile, but what little phone signal there was out here was made even weaker by the moisture-laden fog.

  ‘Sounds like you get on well with this DS Flowers,’ Ben said.

  ‘Aye, she’s a good officer. Sings jazz, too.’

  ‘This is it,’ Ben said as he saw the entrance to the rutted track, and he swung the car into it, the tyres pattering and slithering over the rocks and banging through deep ruts. ‘It’s a classic muscle car, not a frigging Land Rover,’ McAllister complained. Further up the track, they reached the gate with the hand-painted welcome sign, and Ben knew that he’d found the place for sure.

  ‘Private property: piss off,’ McAllister muttered, reading the sign. ‘Friendly folks the kid hangs out with.’

  ‘They’re an unusual kind of family. But I doubt we’ll be meeting any of them.’

  Ben let the Barracuda roll to a halt and cut the engine. The house was still a distance away, but if Jude was here he wanted to catch him unawares. ‘We should walk from here,’ Ben said.

  They got out of the car. McAllister let Radar out of the back, and clipped him up on a short leash. ‘Quiet now, boy.’ The dog didn’t actually nod, but the look in his keen amber eyes showed that he understood.

  They walked. The place was utterly quiet. The only sounds were the soft crunch of their boots on the track and the panting of the German shepherd as he led the way, straining at his leash, ears pricked, primed and ready for duty. Ben’s neck and shoulders felt tight with tension as the inevitable last-minute doubts began to creep into his mind. If he was wrong, he’d have wasted an enormous amount of time and would have no idea where else to start looking for Jude. For the first time since he could remember, he murmured a silent prayer.

  ‘What a shithole,’ McAllister said in a low voice as the dark shapes of the house and barns loomed up out of the fog. ‘Makes Wuthering Heights look like Buck Palace, so it does.’

  ‘Shhh.’

  Ben could do nothing to stop the doubts rising as they walked closer to the house. The old farm was every bit as lugubrious and neglected as he remembered it. The house walls were streaked with green, nobody had cleaned the windows in years and a jungle of weeds sprouted everywhere. The large domed sheet-metal barn across the yard had been partially adorned with a clumsy attempt at psychedelic flower-child graphics, but the rust was showing through the paint. The first-glance impression was of a property that had lain abandoned and uninhabited for a long, long time.

  Except it wasn’t.

  Ben was already noticing details. Like the asthmatic roar of a boiler flue venting gases and water vapour from the back of the house. And an old, scabby Triumph Bonneville motorcycle parked under a lean-to adjoining the side wall, with its side panel removed and a battery charger hooked up to an extension cable that snaked across the weedy ground into the big barn. There were no other vehicles in sight. Ben pressed two fingers to the charger. It was warm to the touch as the current flowed into the motorcycle battery.

  Someone was here. Someone who’d arrived at the place on foot and was making attempts at getting some wheeled transportation up and running, while getting some warmth into the cold, damp house. And Ben would have bet his right arm that he knew who that someone was. His doubts drained away and he felt a tingle of excitement.

  He motioned to McAllister to stay put while he quickly, silently checked the outbuildings. They were empty. Whoever was here, he was pretty sure he’d find them in the house.

  The door wasn’t locked, which seemed to suggest that the house’s occupant was confident that nobody would come looking for them here. Careless. Ben eased the door open very slowly and cautiously stepped into the entrance hall. He caught the smell of damp, mixed with lingering traces of incense and the more recent aroma of cooking that wafted from the kitchen to the right of the hall. He nudged the kitchen door and saw that the room was empty. On a plain wooden table with one chair pulled up to it were the remains of a meal – pizza crusts, smears of baked bean sauce – and two empty lager cans.

  McAllister had entered the house behind him and was standing in the hall with Radar, who so far was behaving himself. Ben quickly checked the tatty living room, the tableless dining room and the water-stained downstairs bathroom: all empty too. With McAllister right behind him and the dog padding in their wake, he climbed the stairs. They creaked badly and every step was a torture – but nothing stirred above. Reaching the first floor landing Ben saw three doors: another bathroom and two bedrooms. Nobody there. He continued upwards to the second floor. The smell of damp was stronger up here, and the boards were warped underfoot. Murky light filtered through a small, mossy roof window. Two more doors, pitted and peeling: one at the head of the stairs, the other at the end of a passage under the sloping angle of the roof.

  Ben checked the first door and found an attic room someone had been using as an artist’s studio. There was an easel, an antique dresser covered in candlewax dribbles and old dried-up watercolour paints and brushes, and about a thousand canvases displaying images of pink, green and rainbow-coloured unicorns that looked like mutant Labradors with narwhal tusks sprouting from their heads. Ben closed the door. The room at the end of the passage was the last one in the house left for him to check. If that was empty too …

  Ben stepped quietly up to the door, paused outside and pressed his ear to it. What he heard inside the room made his heart jump. It was the soft, rhythmic sound of someone sleeping. He nodded at McAllister, who signalled back with a thumbs-up. Then he grasped the doorknob and oh-so-carefully eased it open.

  The attic bedroom was shadowed by drapes drawn over its single window. Ben stood motionless in the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. The only furnishings in the attic room were an ast
ronomical telescope mounted on a tripod by the window, a wooden chair and a bare double mattress laid on the floor.

  Curled up on the mattress, cocooned inside a sleeping bag, was the source of the soft, steady breathing Ben had been able to hear through the door. The sleeper was lying on their side with their back to the doorway. Ben couldn’t see their face, but in the semi-darkness he was able to make out the mop of instantly-recognisable blond hair draped over the pillow.

  And there he was, the desperate fugitive from justice with the law hot on his heels, sleeping like a princess without a care in the world.

  Chapter 42

  Ben stalked quietly into the room, not wanting to wake Jude up. Not just yet. At the foot of the bed was a bulky and bulging black holdall. He eased open the zipper, peered inside and saw the stacked wads of the Albanian gangsters’ walking-around money that told him McAllister’s guess had been right. He shook his head. You bloody idiot.

  McAllister was still lingering in the passage, holding the dog. Ben stepped away from the bag of money, picked up the wooden chair and set it down at the bedside. He sat down and looked down at the still-fast-asleep Jude. Reached down and gently nudged his shoulder and said, very softly, ‘Psst. Room service. How about a nice cup of coffee?’

  Jude stirred, rolled, stretched out sleepily and gave a contented half-smile that turned into a cavernous yawn. He murmured, ‘Hmm? Yes please, that’d be great.’

  Then he suddenly woke up fully with a jolt as though ice water had been sloshed over him. He jerked rigidly upright in the sleeping bag, eyes widening in horrified panic, looking around him wildly. Then he saw Ben sitting there next to him and his alarmed expression collapsed into total confusion. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he gasped.

  ‘I might ask you the same question,’ Ben said. ‘Decide to take a little holiday from jail, did we?’

  ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘A blind man could have found you, you silly sod,’ Ben replied. ‘Did you really think you could hide out here for ever?’

  Jude stared at him. Still too shocked to move from the crumpled sleeping bag. ‘I … who’s that?’ Catching sight of McAllister, who had walked into the attic bedroom and was closing the door behind him.

  ‘That’s the gentleman who’s come to arrest you,’ Ben said. ‘His name is Detective Inspector McAllister.’

  Jude’s face twisted in horror. ‘Arrest me? And you’re going to let him?’

  ‘Let him? I brought him here.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me! Are you crazy? I’m innocent!’

  ‘You were,’ Ben said. ‘Now, not so much. I’m sorry. You’ve got to go back to jail.’

  Jude struggled up out of the sleeping bag and jumped to his feet. Ben stood up, seized him by the arms and thrust him bodily into the chair.

  ‘Why is it, Jude, that every time I come to this house looking for you, I have to grab you by the scruff of the neck like the stupid little twit that you are? Don’t you dare move from that chair, do you hear me? Or I will tie you up in it.’

  But Jude wasn’t inclined to obey his father’s stern command. He twisted free, writhed up out of the chair and ran for the door, shoving McAllister out of the way.

  ‘Good luck with that,’ McAllister said drily as Jude burst out of the room and into the passage, slamming the door so hard behind him that it brought a rain of plaster from the ceiling. ‘Let’s see how far you get.’

  From outside the door came a low, deep growl, followed by the sound of rushing paws and scuffling footsteps in the passage, a squawk and then a soft thud. Ben and McAllister exchanged glances and rushed for the door. They hurried out of the attic bedroom to see Jude pinned against the wall by ninety-five pounds of muscle, fur and teeth. Left on sentry duty outside the door, Radar took his job seriously. He was up on his hind legs with his forepaws planted above Jude’s shoulders and his snarling jaws an inch from his face.

  ‘For Christ’s sake call this bloody werewolf off of me!’ Jude said in a strangled voice.

  ‘He’s a police dog,’ McAllister replied. ‘He knows a dangerous fugitive when he sees one.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘Here’s the deal, son,’ McAllister told him. ‘You need to decide if you’re dealing with me, or with the dog. The choice is, you either come quietly or you risk getting your bollocks ripped off.’

  ‘You can’t do this to me, you bastard!’ Jude yelled at Ben. He was about to say more, but another rumbling growl from deep inside the German shepherd’s chest silenced him.

  ‘You did it to yourself,’ Ben said. ‘While you’ve been sitting in jail, I’ve been running around gathering evidence that you were put there unjustly. I know who’s responsible for killing Duggan. I was so close to proving it. All you had to do was trust me. All you had to do was wait it out a little longer. One more day, maybe two. But you couldn’t do that, could you? Instead you had to go and screw it all up.’

  Jude’s face fell. He seemed to have forgotten all about the dog. ‘You know?’

  ‘And so will you, soon enough,’ Ben said. ‘I’m hoping you might even get to meet him. The same man who ordered the murders of Emily Bowman, Joe Brewster, a young woman called Suzie Morton and who knows how many others. Killing people seems to run in his family.’

  ‘Wait till I get my hands on him,’ Jude growled, looking as fierce as the German shepherd.

  ‘That’s not your job,’ Ben replied. ‘Your job will be to stay with my friend here while I finish what I started.’

  ‘But if you can prove who killed Duggan, why do I have to go back to jail?’ Jude pleaded miserably.

  ‘Because it’s better than getting yourself plugged by the tactical firearms squad,’ Ben told him. ‘And because you’ll still have to answer for running.’

  McAllister asked Jude, ‘So what’s it to be, son? Will you come quietly?’

  Jude’s shoulders sagged in defeat. ‘Don’t have much choice, do I? Okay. Okay. I will.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear,’ McAllister said. ‘Radar, off.’

  The dog instantly released Jude, dropped back down on all fours and sat on his haunches, tail thumping happily, suddenly as docile as a family pet.

  ‘I hate to do this, son,’ McAllister said. ‘But I have to.’ Taking out his police warrant card – the real one this time, in its proper leather holder with a silver detective’s badge – he held it up for Jude to see and said in a solemn voice, like a judge handing out a sentence, ‘Jude Arundel, you are hereby under arrest on suspicion of escaping the custody of prison and being unlawfully at large. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court …’

  ‘Such as the fact that it wasn’t my idea to escape?’ Jude said. ‘The Albanians planned the whole thing.’

  ‘Why would they bring you along for the ride?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Because I helped them. Luan Copja thought he owed me something.’

  ‘Helped him how?’

  ‘Some guy tried to shank him, okay? I happened to be there.’

  Ben stared at him. ‘In prison less than a week, and you get into a knife fight?’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly what you’d call a fight,’ Jude protested. ‘All I did was take the knife off him, like the way Jeff showed me. Copja’s guys were the ones who did all the stabbing.’

  McAllister rolled his eyes and cleared his throat loudly. ‘Aye, well, be sure to tell the judge all about it. That’ll really stand you in good stead with your defence. Now, am I allowed to finish giving this caution, or what? You’re making me lose my thread. Where was I?’

  ‘“It may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court”,’ Ben reminded him.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re helping him to do this,’ Jude muttered bitterly.

  ‘Anything you do say may be given in evidence,’ McAllister finished, in the same solemn tone. In his normal
voice he added, ‘I should cuff you now, but I didn’t bring them. Can I trust you not to run again, son?’

  ‘Stop calling me son,’ Jude muttered.

  ‘He’s not going anywhere,’ Ben said. ‘If he tries, you have my permission to sick the dog on him.’

  ‘Oh, thanks so much, Dad.’

  McAllister turned to Ben. ‘That takes care of that. Now let’s get out of here. Once we’re on the road we can rendezvous with Billie and the troops and he’ll be carted safely back into custody.’

  ‘Hold on, Tom,’ Ben said. ‘I’m not finished here yet.’ He asked Jude, ‘Does this house have a landline telephone?’

  Jude nodded glumly. ‘There’s an old dial phone downstairs. Why do you want to know?’

  Ben replied, ‘Because you can’t get a mobile signal up here in the armpit of nowhere.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. Who are you going to call?’

  ‘Have to say I’m curious about that myself,’ McAllister said.

  Ben said, ‘I’m going to call the guy who started all this. And I’m going to invite him to come over and join us. It’s time he and I had a talk.’

  Chapter 43

  The phone was a GPO antique trimphone from the seventies, hard-wired into a socket in the living room and half-hidden under stacks of magazines. Judging by the thick coating of dust it hadn’t been used for a long time, but when Ben lifted the handset he found to his relief that it was still working. He sat in the broken-down armchair next to it, pulled up the number of the Galliard HQ that he’d found the night before, and dialled. Jude and McAllister had followed him downstairs and stood watching and listening.

  A cheery recorded female voice informed him, ‘Hello, you’ve reached the main offices of the Galliard Group Pharmaceuticals Division’ and directed him to various extensions, or to hold for general enquiries. He held, and another female voice came on the line with a bright ‘Good afternoon; how may I help you?’ A friendly bunch, the Galliard Group. But the welcome mat wasn’t going to remain rolled out for very long.