Ravens Gathering (22 page)

Sex hadn’t really been on his mind.  But seeing her
like this, aware of her proximity, he felt himself stir.  He reached out and
touched her face.  His fingers glided down her cheek, the softness of her
skin exciting him.

She looked up into his eyes, and her expression only served
to arouse him further.

His intention had been to talk to her.  There were
things he needed to say.  But perhaps this was a situation where actions
would speak louder than words.

He dipped his head down and kissed her.  Her lips
didn’t part immediately, but that didn’t bother him.  He knew they would
and, sure enough, moments later he was enjoying the warmth and wetness of her
mouth.  It spurred him on.  His arms slipped around her, pulling her
against him as he thrust his hardness into her stomach.

Coming up for air momentarily, he noted the dilated pupils
and felt his own excitement rising.  Then he was pushing her against the
wall, reaching frantically down for the hem of her skirt.  Kissing her
again, his lips crushed harshly against hers.  Lust had taken over. 
She was his now, and nothing was going to stop this happening.

There had been moments over the last couple of days when he
had thought about this.  In his heart, he’d known this moment would
come.  But the time hadn’t seemed right.  And he’d had other things
to do, which meant leaving her out of the picture while he got on with his
plans.

But those plans were almost complete.  Very soon he’d
be able to leave.  There might have been another opportunity later, but
now just seemed the right time to act.

Her skirt was pulled up around her waist now, and his
fingers were pulling aside the flimsy fabric that lay between them and her sex.

She bucked against him, and he pushed her back, letting her
know that he was in control.  He knew she wasn’t used to having someone
else in charge.  That knowledge alone was stimulating.

As he pressed into her, he left a gap between them on his
left.  Enough of a space for his free hand to access her breasts. 
The contact with the outside of her shirt was brief, then he was tugging at the
buttons, virtually ripping it open.  Creamy flesh was exposed.  The
lacy underwear was no match for his fingers.  He caught a nipple between
thumb and forefinger, squeezing it.  She gasped into his mouth.

His other hand had found what it was looking for. 
Fingers pushed roughly into her.  She wasn’t ready for him yet, but it
wasn’t something he was going to dwell on.  This was animal passion, not a
physical declaration of love.

In a way, this position he’d manoeuvred them into was
uncomfortable.  To lie down with a woman was probably the most practical
way to do this.  But it was boring.  The impracticality, the
uncertainty of what they would do next and how it would work, that only added
to the stimulation.

As did the possibility that they might be seen.  Anyone
coming close enough to a window would be able to see them.  The married
woman with her breasts and legs exposed.  No doubts at all as to what she
was doing with her house guest.

Slipping his fingers from inside her, he grasped one of her
hands and placed it over his crotch, holding it there long enough for her to
get the message.  Then he felt his zip being lowered.  Her other hand
reached for his belt.  Satisfied that she would do what he wanted, he
pulled her underwear aside and ran his fingertips over her.  The jolting
reaction told him all he needed to know about the state she was in.

He felt his trousers open and her hand hesitate.

“Take it out,” he told her, his voice heavy with the
excitement.  Then he was kissing her again, thrusting his tongue on to
hers.

The soft warmth of her hand sent an intense thrill through
him.  In part it was the physical sensation, but it was more a result of
the knowledge that what they were doing was wrong.  Regardless of how good
or bad her marriage was, she had made a commitment in the eyes of God, and now
he was doing everything he could to tear that commitment apart.

Both hands moved beneath her skirt now and he tore through
lace, letting the ruined garment fall to her feet.  He cupped her buttocks
and lifted her slightly, pressing her back against the wall for support. 
A glance at her face revealed the shock in her eyes.  He grinned, fired up
by the spontaneity, the ferocity of his actions.  Then he was pushing
forward, his groin rising to meet hers.

Remarkably, and apparently to her surprise, his aim was
true, and he was immediately sliding into her and savouring the soft dampness
around him.  Holding her tightly between himself and the wall, he drove
himself in and out, taking her roughly and urgently.  She gasped and
shrieked as he did so, her responses only serving to arouse him more.

He was distracted briefly by movement to his left.  He
glanced over and smiled.  Many things could energise him.  Most of
them involved other people’s pain.  He fed off their suffering like a
vampire feeds on blood.  And to a man there is very little more
emotionally painful than watching your wife being taken by another man.

His climax was one of the most intense he had experienced in
a long time.

Fourteen hours had passed since Collins had been roused from
his bed.  His own office didn’t have windows, but he’d caught a glimpse of
daylight when he’d ventured out to the loo, so he knew it was still fairly
early.  Even though the unsocial hours went with the job, sometimes they
could be hard to accept, especially when you had a family at home.  Not
that they’d be waiting for him – from past experience, they knew better than
that.

It was tempting to knock off early and leave it until
tomorrow.  The phone calls from the Ministry of Defence seemed to have
slackened off.  At one point, he’d been getting demands for updates every
fifteen minutes.  But since he’d patiently pointed out to them that every
minute he spent talking to them was a minute less he could spend on his
investigation, they’d tailed off.  It was nearly an hour and a half since
the last call.  And bearing in mind the way the Civil Service worked, that
probably meant they’d reached the end of their working day, so they were
unlikely to call again before nine in the morning, especially as it would be
Sunday.  Besides, their main concern had been retrieving the device. 
And as far as he’d been able to tell, they weren’t missing any more of them.

He smiled at his own flippancy.  The situation this
morning had been deadly serious.  There were a lot of people at the farm
who’d been wishing they were elsewhere, and that was on the basis that it was
just an ‘ordinary’ bomb.  For those in the know, the reaction was
stronger.  The first instinct for Collins had been to gather his family
together and jump on the first long-haul flight that he could, but those
thoughts hadn’t stayed with him for long.  He was pretty sure that if the
bomb
had
gone off this morning, it would have been long before his plane
took off.  Besides, if there was fallout, how would he know where it would
end up?  Before the Chernobyl disaster, he’d assumed that if anything went
wrong in Russia, it wouldn’t affect the UK.  Even now, he refused to eat
lamb in case it came from Wales.

Self-preservation aside, at heart he was a copper, and a
bloody good one.  Not because he was a budding Sherlock Holmes – and
definitely not a
Starsky
or Hutch: those days were
long gone.  What made him good was his determination to get to the truth
and nail the bad guys.  There was plenty of injustice in the world that he
couldn’t do anything about.  So if he came across a situation that he
could do something about, he would.  It was why his wife put up with the
long and unsocial hours, the time he spent away from her and the boys.  He
knew that, and he was grateful to her.  It was also why he wasn’t ready to
leave the case alone just yet.

There was something not right about it.  Not that there
should be
anything
right about a nuclear device being stolen and then
left in the back of a van in an old barn on the edge of Sherwood Forest.

The what-ifs were endless.  What he really needed was
evidence that would point him in the right direction.  But the evidence
about the theft itself was being gathered by the Royal Military Police’s
Special Investigation Branch, and it was doubtful that anything meaningful
would be released by them.  The MOD would want this hushed up as much as
possible.  Alarming the general population was one thing, but this was
bloody embarrassing.

So all he had to go on was at this end, and that wasn’t much. 
His boys had been given limited access to the van when it was found and the
Army had taken it with them when they’d left.

Their departure from the farm had been surprisingly
discreet. 
Roadworks
had been contrived to block
civilian access to that end of the village, and they had used the track that
passed
The Barns
to leave the farm.  The military presence wouldn’t
have gone completely unnoticed by the locals, but its scale and significance
would pass them by.

What was less impressive about their departure was the
complete inability to preserve any evidence they had bothered to leave
behind.  In manoeuvring off the main track to pass through the farm yard,
lorries and Land Rovers executed three point turns that churned up any imprints
from feet or tyres.  Collins had also been given reports of deliberate
wheel-spinning by some of the
squaddies
.

Physical evidence was sadly lacking, then, for either CID or
SIB.  Which left him with witness statements.  The three he’d taken
earlier, and what appeared to be a random collection of statements from other
villagers, the latter relating to the theft of the Sherpa.  It seemed PC
Oakes had been busy the previous day.  Not particularly methodical, but
busy.

Collins had several folders on his desk, together with an A4
notepad.  Three sheets from the pad were divided into columns.  Each
of the columns had jotted headings:
Dog, Sherpa, Post Office
and
Gates
were on the first sheet.  As he’d read through the statements,
he’d tried to find patterns in them.  If there was anything referred to in
more than one statement, he’d cross-referenced them, with each heading
representing a different pattern or theme.  And for each heading there was
a separate folder containing copies of the statements that referred to
it.  He’d almost worn out a path to and from the photocopier.

O’Neill wouldn’t have had the patience for this.  He
could do the paperwork, but only as much as he had to.  This wasn’t
required paperwork, though.  This was the methodical, plodding analysis
that Collins felt was necessary to make progress.  Very often, it wasn’t
finding the clues that was the hard part.  It was eliminating the clutter
around them.

The dog, for instance.  Was that important, or a red
herring?  Its death had been brutal and violent.  As well as
statements, the file with the word “DOG” written neatly across the tab
contained a series of photographs.  Collins wasn’t an animal lover, but
that hadn’t made the images any less sickening.  Still, how did that fit
in with the theft of a nuclear device?

Another puzzle was the references he had seen to a growing
tension in the village in the past few days.  A Mrs Fuller had commented
on the number of arguments she’d witnessed, and the increasing instances of
bullying in the pub she ran.  If it had just been her report of this, he
would have dismissed it.  But there had been another statement referring
to the pub bullying, and a further two referring to the “tensions” building up
around the village in general.

This issue was also cross-referenced to another heading he’d
jotted down on the second sheet of A4:
Disabilities
.  Because the
bullying seemed to have been directed at people who were disabled, either
physically or mentally.  One of them had even been Martin
Gates’s
brother (cross-referenced to the Gates file). 
Although it wasn’t bullying, Mrs Fuller had also commented on remarks made
about Peter Salthouse.  It had taken only a couple of phone calls to
establish that Salthouse was also disabled.  Along with Ronald Dakin, that
made three disabled people in the village.  Not outstanding in itself, but
there was something else nagging at him.

It took him nearly ten minutes to find it.  A photocopy
he’d asked Brian Oakes to take of his own notes.  A single word, jotted at
the side where the margin might have been. 
Deformed
.

He picked up the phone.

Oakes did his best to be helpful, but his pissed-off tone
was predictable.  More concerned about the case, Collins ignored it.

“You’ve written the word ‘deformed’ in your notebook.”

“Yeah.”  As if it was the most natural thing in the
world to have done.

“Can you tell me why?”

“I don’t understand.  How’s this important?  I
thought you were trying to find out who’d stolen the van?”  Oakes was
still oblivious of the true nature of the case, and Collins had no intention of
enlightening him.

“I am,” Collins said patiently.  “And I’m sure this
means nothing, but it was a random word in your notebook, and I just wanted to
eliminate it.”

At the other end of the line, he heard a long breath being
let out.  He guessed it was supposed to signify either exasperation or
indignation, but he wasn’t really bothered.  Whatever Oakes was feeling
was
his
problem.

“It was nothing to do with the investigation.  Or the
statement I was taking down.”

Not that it was much of a statement, Collins thought,
glancing at the notes on the rest of the page.

“Humour me,” he said.

“Well, I was in the shop.”  Something Collins already
knew, but he maintained his patience.  “And we were talking about the van
being stolen.  When I say ‘we’, I mean the owners of the Post Office...”

“Mr and Mrs Payne,” Collins reminded him helpfully.

“Yes...  Mr and Mrs Payne.  And then there was the
other woman...”

“Mrs Fuller.”

“I’ll take your word for it.  I didn’t talk to her for
too long.”

“I’m sure.  But what about...”

“Oh, yes.  I’m coming to that.”  A brief pause,
presumably while the young PC collected his thoughts.  “Actually, if I
remember rightly, we’d moved on from talking about the van, and they were
talking about odd things happening in the village.  You know, like the
tractor accident the day before.  That Fuller woman made it sound like
it’d been more than an accident, by the way...”

“I can see that from your notes.  What about the
‘deformed’ bit?”

“Oh, God, yeah.  That was horrible.”  There was another
pause, possibly for dramatic effect.  Collins reined in his frustration
and waited.  “It was the daughter.”

Collins scanned the notes, flicking through other pages for
an indication of what Oakes was talking about.  “Daughter?  What
daughter?”

“The
Paynes
’ daughter.  It
was her hands.”  Another pause, and this time Collins was starting to feel
a rising sense of anticipation.  “They were horrible.”

“In what way?”  He could tell that, in spite of his
irritation at being disturbed while he was off-duty, Oakes was clearly
beginning to savour the story, and Collins didn’t have time for this.

“They were deformed.”

“I’d already guessed that.  How were they
deformed?”  Not that the answer to that really mattered.  There was something
more important that was occurring to him.

“Well, she only seemed to have a thumb on each hand. 
There weren’t fingers, as such.  It looked like she just had one lump
where her fingers should have been.  As if they’d been – I don’t know –
melted together.  You know how mittens look?  A bit like that, only
thinner, as if there were only two fingers there.”

“And were both hands the same?”

“As far as I could tell.”

Collins thought for a moment.  “Okay.  One last
question.  How old would you say she was?”

“About my age, I suppose.  Early twenties.”

More reading.  Scanning statements and looking at
reports.  He found some of what he wanted in the incident report about
Peter Salthouse.  His date of birth.  23
^rd
June
1965.  That made him twenty four.  The statement from Norma Fuller
referred to Ron Dakin and Colin Gates as young men.  More specifically, it
said that Colin was only in his mid-twenties.  And the Payne’s daughter
was in her early twenties.

Odd, that.  Four disabled people in a village, even the
size of Ravens Gathering, wasn’t unusual.  But four of a similar
age?  Surely that was more than just a coincidence?

He dropped his pen and sat back, rubbing his eyes.  It
was interesting.  But was it relevant?  He couldn’t see how it could
be.  Not unless there’d been some kind of nuclear fallout in Sherwood
Forest twenty-odd years ago.  That thought made him hesitate, but he
pushed it aside.  He was only thinking that because of the stolen bomb and
his thoughts about Chernobyl earlier.  In any event, it was unlikely that
a nuclear disaster would result in only a handful of victims.

No, it was time to look at the other links.

He took a break.  Coffee and a pee.  It was nearly
half past seven now.  The CID office was quiet, the minimum staff on
duty.  Budget cuts again.

Only slightly refreshed, he returned to his desk.  He
picked up the folder marked ‘Gates’.

Perhaps it was the tricks of the brain again, but he was
drawn to the brief references to Colin first.  Another copy of the
statement by Norma Fuller and a comment by another resident who Oakes had
interviewed.  By coincidence, that resident had been in the pub when Colin
had been abused, so her story was corroborated, though there was nothing in
Oakes’s notes to indicate why he had picked on this particular resident. 
The final reference to Colin was in a statement from the other brother, Matthew
Gates.  According to the accompanying notes, Oakes had spoken with him and
his father after seeing Martin.  Matthew had also made reference to the
incident in the pub, but suggested that Martin might have been behind it. 
Collins re-read the other two statements to make sure he’d understood them
correctly.  Both indicated that, far from starting the abuse, Martin had
put a stop to it.

So he studied the rest of Matthew’s statement, ignoring the
comments about Colin.  Then he reviewed the father’s statement.  Both
were filled with remarks that were damaging to Martin.  They had expressed
no surprise at Oakes’s suggestion – Collins guessed it wasn’t a particularly subtle
suggestion – that Martin may be implicated in the theft of the van.  He
didn’t need a degree in psychology to understand that Martin was the black
sheep of the family.

Unfortunately, although his family had been more than
willing to put him in the frame, his alibi from the
McLeans
was enough to keep him out of it for the time being.