Upon a Dark Night (43 page)

‘Out.’

‘I can’t move without my crutches.’

He got out and took them off the back seat and handed them to her. He produced a heavy-duty rubber torch and lit the way across the yard to the house.

Strips of yellow and black police tape were plastered across the front door. Smiling Face kicked it open and clawed the tape away.

He told her, ‘There’s no electricity. We’ll have to do this by torchlight. Where first?’

She’d spent the last twenty minutes asking herself the same question. Without any memory of this house, it required swift decisions. She had to put up a show of familiarity. ‘Could I hold the torch a moment?’

He handed it to her. She cast the beam rapidly around the kitchen. ‘There used to be a loose brick against the wall there,’ she improvised, training the torch on one section, ‘but it seems to have been cemented in.’ She hobbled out of the kitchen, hoping the floors might be of wood - for loose floorboards - but they were flagstoned.

This was the living-room. She shone the torch over a wooden armchair and a small table, a chest of drawers and a bed against the wall. One other hope was dashed: the place had no phone. On the walls and ceiling were a number of stains encircled with chalk. Her own father’s blood? She made a huge effort to put death out of her mind. Then she spotted the faint outline of a pair of footprints in chalk, and a shudder passed through her. There used to be a special flagstone with a cavity under it. I’m trying to remember which one.’

Smiling Face kicked the mat, uncovering most of it. He wasn’t saying anything, but his impatience was obvious.

‘It definitely wasn’t one of these,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if you rolled the mat right back…’

‘And you cracked me over the head with the torch? No thanks,’ he said. ‘Your time has run out.’ Even so, he moved the mat with his foot and exposed more flagstones. It was obvious from the dirt impacted in the cracks that none of them had been disturbed for years.

‘I wonder if the stone I’m thinking of was in the back room,’ she speculated, switching the torch-beam to the door at the end.

‘Full of junk,’ he told her acidly. ‘No one has been in there for years.’

Undaunted, she crossed the room and shone the torch over a forest of furniture and household objects. ‘Well, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s at the back, by the wardrobe.’

To reach the wardrobe, he would have to remove a rocking-chair, a table, a dog-basket and a hat-stand, all coated with an even layer of dust.

‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘This has been a total waste of time. You haven’t any more knowledge than I have about this place. Give me that.’ He grabbed back the torch.

She started to say, ‘I didn’t promise to—’

He swung the torch viciously and cracked it against her head. She felt her skull implode. Briefly, she saw fireworks, brilliant, multicoloured points of light. Then they went fuzzy and faded away.

The darkness was absolute, but some of her sensations returned. Shallow breathing. She was cold, freezing cold, there was a roaring in her ears and she was being buffeted.

This uniform blackness was scary. Her eyes were open. She could feel them blink, and she could see nothing, not the faintest grey shading at the edge of her vision.

Blind?

I will not panic, she thought. Try to work out a rational explanation.

She seemed to be lying on her right side in a hunched position. Her foot - the one not in plaster - was in contact with something solid that made it impossible for her to stretch.

And there was a smell that made her nose itch and her eyes water.

Petrol fumes. I am in a car. It’s an engine that I’m hearing. I’m being driven at high speed.

By degrees, she remembered the incident immediately prior to blacking out. This, she deduced, must be the red Toyota. Smiling Face is at the wheel, driving at a terrifying speed, and only he knows where.

I’m locked in the boot. He knocked me senseless with the torch and carried me to the boot and now he’s going to dispose of me somewhere. He wants me to die. He made that clear. He may even think I’m dead already.

The strange thing about it is that I’m beginning not to care. I’m freezing and uncomfortable and I want to be sick.

Some instinct for survival insisted that she do something about it. Car boots had linings. If she could wrap some of the lining around herself she would get some insulation. She reached out in the dark, probing with her fingertips for the edge of the felt she was lying on. Some of her fingernails broke. The effort was almost too much. But a strip of the material came away from the bodywork. More followed. She drew it to herself like a blanket, or a shroud.

Thirty-four

Diamond’s physique had thickened and, it has to be said, slackened since he gave up rugby, but his reactions were still quick. He grabbed Julie and dived out of the path of the advancing car. It whooshed by so close that he felt the rush of air on the back of his neck.

Scratched and winded, but basically unhurt because his colleague’s soft flesh had cushioned his fall, he hauled himself off her and out of a hedge that was mainly bramble.

‘You okay?’

She thought she was. He helped her up.

‘See if Rose is in the farmhouse.’

Leaving Julie, he started running up the lane after the Toyota, confident that a patrol car was blocking the exit to the road.

From up ahead a screech of brakes pierced the air. But the expected impact didn’t happen. There was the high note of the engine in reverse, then a change of gear.

He was in time to see the Toyota mount the verge to avoid the police car, rip through the hedge, advance into the field, rev again, switchback over the uneven turf and bear down like a tank on a wooden gate at the edge nearest to the road. Like a tank it smashed through.

‘Get after him then!’

One of the cars was already turning to give chase, its blue light pulsing. Diamond hurled himself through the open door of another and they were moving before he slammed it.

The rear lights of the Toyota were not in sight.

‘He’ll make for the motorway,’ Diamond told the driver. ‘Can you radio ahead?’

On an undulating stretch north of Tormarton, the skyline momentarily glowed in the high beam of headlights. At a rough estimate, Allardyce was a quarter of a mile ahead. There was no chance of catching him before the M4 interchange.

A message came through from headquarters. Diamond could just make out through the static that Julie had radioed in from the farmhouse to say no one was in there, but she had found Rose’s crutches.

‘I don’t like the sound of that. I didn’t see her in the car, did you?’ he asked his driver.

‘No passenger, sir. I had a clear look.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘PC Roberts, sir.’

There was a hairy moment when they raided the wing mirror in passing a stationary car. They were doing eighty along country lanes.

‘Been driving long, Roberts?’

‘Since my seventeenth birthday, sir.’

‘How old are you now?’

‘Eighteen, sir.’

The problem at the approach to the motorway was how to divine which direction Allardyce had taken. At the roundabout, Diamond watched the patrol car ahead speed up the first slipway eastwards. ‘Then we go west,’ he told PC Roberts. They swung with screaming tyres around the long turn and presently joined the Bristol-bound carriageway. At this time of night the traffic would be sparse.

Diamond was trying to hold down the nausea he always felt at high speed. It was compounded by concern over Rose. If she was not at the farmhouse and her crutches were there, what had Allardyce done with her?

‘No sign of him, sir,’ Roberts said. ‘I reckon he took the other route.’

‘Is this thing as fast as the Toyota?’

‘Should be. He should be in sight by now.’

‘Keep going.’

This stretch of motorway had no lighting whatsoever. They had the main beam probing the three lanes. In the next minute Diamond thought he could discern a dark shape ahead.

‘Isn’t that something?’

‘You’re right, sir. He’s switched off his lights, bloody idiot. He’s all over the road.’

As they got nearer, they could make out the outline of a car without lights veering erratically between the lanes.

Roberts said, ‘I think his electrics are buggered. He braked just then and the brake lights didn’t come on.’

‘Flash him. Let him know we’re here.’

‘He knows that, sir. My God, he’s going!’

They watched the car sheer towards the crash-barrier in the centre, hit it in a shower of sparks and skew left across three lanes and the hard shoulder. It thudded into the embankment, reared up like a whale, rolled over and slid upside down with a sickening metallic sound, spinning back across two lanes of the motorway.

In trying to avoid it they got into a skid themselves. Their vehicle did a three-quarter turn before coming to a halt.

Diamond hurled open the door, got out and sprinted towards the up-ended Toyota on legs that didn’t feel like his own, only to discover that the impact had pancaked the superstructure to the level of the seats. The driver and anyone inside must have been mangled.

PC Roberts joined him and warned, ‘You can’t do anything. It could easily catch fire, sir. I’ve radioed for help.’

It was good advice which he ignored, for he had noticed something Roberts had not. The force of the crash had ripped open the Toyota’s luggage compartment. The lid was hanging open under the upturned wreck and a dark form wrapped in a roll of fabric was lying in the angle. Projecting from it was a white tubular object shaped like an angled section of drainpipe, but it was patently not a drainpipe because just visible at the end were five toes.

‘It’s her,’ he said. ‘She’s wrapped in something.’

Steam was rising from the wreck, but it had not yet caught fire. On his knees, Diamond reached into the darkness and got his arm around the body. Roberts was beside him.

‘I’ve got her legs, sir.’

Diamond tried talking to Rose and got no response. The hope was that the limited size of the compartment had restricted her movement as the car somersaulted. She was wrapped in the felt lining.

They prised her out and carried her to a place of relative safety on the grass embankment.

Diamond gently removed part of the felt that was covering her face. She had a bloody nose, but she was breathing. Her eyes opened.

‘You’ll make it, love,’ he told her.

‘Allardyce? The fire service got him out eventually, sir, what there was of him,’ he told the Assistant Chief Constable next morning.

‘Looking at it from a cost-effectiveness standpoint,’ said the ACC, who usually did look at things that way, ‘I suppose it saves the community the expense of a long trial and keeping him in prison for a life term. And the woman?’

‘Do you mean Emma Treadwell? We’re still holding her. We’ll send a report to the CPS, but I can’t see them proceeding on any of the more serious charges.’

‘I meant the woman you rescued.’

‘Christine Gladstone? They kept her overnight in the RUH. She escaped with some ugly bruises. Being in the luggage compartment, where Allardyce put her, she was in the one reasonably secure part of the car.’

‘Secure? I’d say she was damned lucky.’

‘Some people are, sir. You’re right. Considering she caused the crash, she was bloody lucky.’

‘She caused it, you say?’

‘Being in the boot, she grabbed the wiring and ripped it out. His lights went, and the next thing he hit the barrier.’

The ACC cleared his throat in an embarrassed way. ‘Good thing you were close behind. I think it’s in order to congratulate you on your prompt action, Peter.’

‘No need, sir. It was a team effort.’

‘Yes, that’s a fact. You and John Wigfull between you.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Diamond half-smiled, suspecting that this was humour.

But it was not. The ACC was serious. ‘I think of you two as the Castor and Pollux of Bath CID.’

‘The what?’

‘Castor and Pollux. It’s a compliment, Peter. They were the twin sons of Jupiter, a formidable duo.’

‘I see,’ said Diamond. ‘And which is which?’

The ACC frowned. ‘I don’t think it matters.’

‘If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’ll take Castor, and Pollox to John Wigfull.’

At home the next evening, he was less buoyant. He ate one of his favourite meals of salmon
en croute
almost in silence. Stephanie didn’t need telling that he was badly shaken.

She suggested an evening walk.

‘If you like.’

They had not gone far when he said, ‘Julie’s leaving. She asked for a transfer and they’ve found her a job at Bristol. No warning. It’s fixed.’

‘I know,’ Stephanie admitted.

‘You do.’ He stopped.

‘She came to see me, Pete.’

‘To see you? When?’

‘A couple of days ago. She was pretty unhappy. She has a lot of respect for you, but she feels too much of her time is spent smoothing the way.’

‘For me, you mean?’

‘Don’t sound so surprised. You know you’re hell to work with. She’s young for an inspector, ambitious. She’s entitled to move on.’

‘We were a bloody good team.’

‘Too good for your own good.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘You told me yourself that you’re underworked most of the time, and it’s bad for your health. Julie in her quiet way has been batting for you all the time, making your life easier. I didn’t tell her about the hypertension, of course, though it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s aware of it. But we agreed that a trouble-free life isn’t necessarily what you want.’

‘It’s what I expect from my deputy.’

‘She’s too good at it. Let her go, Pete.’

He sniffed. ‘When she meets that lot at Bristol, she’ll realise I’m not such an ogre.’

‘She didn’t say you were. she said some very complimentary things.’

They walked on for some distance before he spoke again.

‘It’s going to be tough without Julie. I’ll keep an eye on what happens at Bristol.’

Stephanie said, ‘No. When the path is slippery it is safer to go two paces forward than one pace back.’

‘Who says that?’