Текст книги "The Risk of Darkness"
Автор книги: Susan Hill
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Perhaps.
He got up to go to the bar for another beer, but as he did so, heard his name called.
DC Coopey looked very different in a floating black dress with her hair piled up and long earrings. For a second, Simon stared at her without recognition. But she walked confidently towards him, smiling.
“This is sad,” she said. “Really c a lonely drink in a dump like this. We can do better for you.” She looked around. “Where are you sitting?”
Simon hesitated, then pointed to his table.
“Good. I’ll have a vodka and tonic please and then I suggest I take you to somewhere halfway decent. It’s called the Sailmaker.” She sashayed across the room and sat down.
He was furious. He felt cornered and judged. Suddenly, the charm of this quiet bar and of his own company revealed themselves. But good manners were instinctive when Simon was irritated; he bought her drink and took it over.
“Aren’t you having another?”
“No. I’ve got to make an early start tomorrow.”
Marion Coopey drank her vodka, looking at him over the glass. She had a pleasant enough face, he thought, neither plain nor pretty, though she wore too much make-up. He could not reconcile this person with the DC who had spoken such careful sense in the conference room. He had had her down as career-orientated, up for the next promotion.
“But you’ll come and eat with me—it’s not a restaurant, it’s a club, but they do very good food. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of the Sailmaker.”
“This is my first time up here.”
“I know, but the word about gay joints is out there on the grapevine.”
He felt a shock run through him at what she had said, at her confident tone and the assumption behind it. The blood rose to his face.
But Marion Coopey laughed. “Oh, come on, Simon, I’m gay, so are you. So what? That’s why I thought we could enjoy an evening together. Problem?”
“Just your complete and total mistake. And I have to go and make some calls.” He stood.
“I don’t believe this c how old-fashioned can you be? It’s really OK now, you know. LEGPO and all.”
“DC Coopey c” He saw her open her mouth to say “Marion,” but she checked herself at his tone “c I’m not going to discuss my private life with you, except to repeat that your assumption is wrong. I—”
His mobile rang in his jacket pocket. Jim Chapman’s number was on the screen.
“Jim? Good news?”
“From home. Stephanie had a girl at four o’clock. All fine.”
“That’s excellent. Congra—”
“The rest isn’t good.”
“What?”
“We’ve another.”
Simon closed his eyes. “Go on c”
“This afternoon. Girl aged six. Went to get an ice cream from a van c someone snatched her. Only this time, there’s a witness—time, place, car description—”
“Car number?”
“Part c it’s more than we’ve ever had.”
“Where did this happen?” He glanced at Marion Coopey. Her expression had changed.
“Village called Gathering Bridge, up on the North York moors.”
“Can I be any use?”
“Wouldn’t say no.”
Simon put his phone away. Marion was standing.
“Another child. I’m going over to your HQ.”
He walked across the room and she followed him quickly. At the door, she stopped him. “I’d better apologise,” she said.
He was still angry but the job had taken over now and he merely shook his head. “It’s hardly important.” He headed for his car, outstriding her.
Police HQ was buzzing. Simon made for the incident room.
“The DCS has gone off to the scene, sir. He said to fill you in.”
The wall boards were being posted with information and half a dozen CID were at computers.
Serrailler went across to where a photograph of a silver Ford Mondeo was being pinned up.
“XTD or XTO 4 c”was written beside it.
“Do we have the press on board?”
“The DCS is giving them a briefing up at the scene.”
“What do we know?”
“Gathering Bridge is a big village c old centre, new housing around c it’s grown in the last ten years. Pretty place. Child is just six c Amy Sudden c lives with her parents and younger sister in a cul-de-sac of cottages. Went to get an ice cream from the van parked just beyond there, on the corner of the main street. She was the last child at the van—the bloke was all set to go when Amy came running up. She got her ice cream and turned to walk back towards the cul-de-sac, the van started up and was just moving off when a car came down the main road and pulled up beside the girl c driver leaned or half got out and pulled the kid in. Happened like lightning apparently and he was off and shutting the door at the same time c the ice-cream van driver stopped and jumped out but the Mondeo was away c he got the beginning of the number c not the rest. Van man ran down the street shouting c someone came out of a house c we got the call.”
“Where’s the Mondeo now?”
The DC finished chalking up some names on the board. “Vanished into thin air. No sighting since.”
“Much traffic?”
“Not in the village, but a couple of miles off you get one of the main roads leading to the coast. Busy there.”
“And the number?”
“They’re running checks c”
“But you haven’t got enough?”
“No, computers’ll throw up a few thousand.”
Simon went down to the canteen, bought tea and a toasted sandwich and took them over to a corner table. He wanted to think. He pictured the silver Mondeo, driver speeding in a panic towards a motorway with the child, desperate to get away from the area, heart pounding, not able to think straight. This one had gone wrong. It had been done on impulse, like the others, and in daylight, but this time his luck had run out. He’d been spotted. For all the abductor knew his car number had been taken in full and he himself had been seen at close quarters. His description would have gone out to all police forces. The instinct would be to move, far and fast.
In the end luck did run out. Usually. Sometimes.
All the same, Simon had to think of the other possibility—that this abductor was someone different and if found would turn out to have nothing to do with the disappearance of the two young boys, almost a year apart. But he trusted his instincts and his gut reaction was: This is the one, this is him.
He felt a surge of excitement. If they could get a lead on the Mondeo they had a chance. This was not only Jim Chapman’s chase, it was his too.
He went to the counter to get a refill of tea and almost knocked into Marion Coopey wearing jeans, a jacket and no earrings. She gave him a wary look. He nodded and went back to his seat, not wanting to have to speak to her. He had not minded her arriving at his hotel in a bid to get him to spend the evening with her; it might have been a friendly enough move after all, trying to entertain a visiting colleague on his own in a strange town. He might have responded in kind. It had been her assumption that had angered him. He had been taken for gay before now and been unbothered. Tonight, though, he had felt both angry and defensive. He was a private person, wanting to keep his work life separate from the rest.
How bloody dare she?summed up his feelings.
But he was good at setting things to one side and he did it now. It was trivial. It didn’t signify. What signified was what had happened to a six-year-old girl in a Yorkshire village a few hours earlier.
He drained his tea and made for the incident room, going up the concrete stairs two at a time.
Three
“Kyra, stop bloody jumping about, will you?”
Kyra went on jumping. If she went on for long enough her mother would sling her out and she could go next door.
“I’ll sling you out, you carry on like that. Go and watch the telly. Go and do a puzzle. Go and put my make-up on—no, don’t do that. Just stop bloody jumping.”
Natalie was trying out a new recipe. She did it all the time. Cooking was the only thing she enjoyed so much she forgot where she was and that she was on her own with Kyra, jump-jump-bloody jump. In her head, she had her own restaurant, or maybe a catering business doing dinners and weddings. No, not weddings, she didn’t want to do Chicken à la King for a hundred, she wanted to do this Barbados Baked Fish with Stuffed Peppers for four. Or six. It was fiddly and the fish wasn’t the right sort, she could only get haddock, but she liked trying out things she’d never heard of to see how they came up. Then it would go down in her book, the book she was going to use for showing people what she could do. For when she started up her own business. Super Suppers.
She started coring the green peppers.
Kyra jumped until the timer fell off the shelf.
“KYRA c”
Kyra seized her moment and ran.
Next door on one side, Bob Mitchell was cleaning his car. He saw Kyra and turned the hose slowly, slowly towards her but she knew he wouldn’t really soak her. She stuck out her tongue. Mel was shutting the gate of the house opposite.
“Hello, Mel.”
“Hi, Kyra.”
“You look ever so nice.”
“Thanks, babe.”
“I got a new hair scrunchy Mel.”
“Cool. OK then, babe, see ya.”
“See ya, Mel.”
Mel was sixteen and looked like a model. Kyra’s mother had said she’d kill for Mel’s legs.
Ed’s car wasn’t in the drive. Kyra wandered up the front path, hesitated, then went round the back. Maybe c
But Ed wasn’t in. She’d known really.
She tapped on the back door and waited just in case, but there wasn’t any point. She wandered back. Bob Mitchell had gone in. There was nobody. Not even a cat.
Natalie put the foil-wrapped fish into the oven and washed her hands. Kyra slipped in through the door like grease.
“Told you,” Natalie said. She picked up the apple-shaped timer from the floor and turned it to thirty-five minutes, before going to watch the news.
Four
“You have to understand,” Cat Deerbon said.
“Lizzie isn’t going anywhere. I’m fine, I can manage.”
“Then why did you call me?”
Max Jameson stood at the far end of the long room, looking up at the floor-to-ceiling photograph of his wife. Lizzie herself was curled on the sofa under a blanket, sleeping after Cat had given her a sedative.
“I know how hard this is, Max, believe me. You feel you’ve failed.”
“No, I don’t. I haven’t failed.”
“All right, you feel that by letting her go into the hospice you willhave failed. But this is bad and it is going to get worse.”
“So you’ve told me.”
“If this were an easier place to live in c”
“It’s the place she loves. She’s happy here, she’s never been so happy.”
“Do you think she still is? Can’t you see how frightening it is for her? This huge space, those stairs, the height when she looks down from the bedroom c the slippery floors, the way the chrome shines in the kitchen, in the bathroom. Brightness is painful to her now, it actually hurts her.”
“So they’d keep her in the dark, would they? At this hospice? It would be like going into prison.”
Cat was silent. She had been with Max Jameson for forty minutes. When she had arrived, he had wept on her shoulder. Lizzie had been sick again and was sitting in the middle of the floor, where she had fallen, her leg bent under her. Amazingly, she was only shocked, not seriously hurt.
“But how long before she falls down those stairs head first? Is that the way you want her life to end?”
“Do you know c” Max turned to Cat and smiled. He was a tall man and had been handsome but now he was haggard with anxiety and fear. His face had sunken inwards and his shaved head had a blue sheen. “c I don’t actually want her life to end at all.”
“Of course you don’t.”
He walked slowly towards Cat, but then veered away again to return to the wall with the photograph.
“You think she’s gaga, don’t you?”
“I would never, ever use that expression about anyone.”
“OK, what would you say she was?” He was angry.
“The illness has reached her brain now and she is very confused, though there may be flashes of awareness. She is also very frightened for most of the time—fear is a symptom of variant CJD at this stage. I want Lizzie to be in a place of safety so that she has as little to frighten her as possible. She also needs physical care. Her bodily functions are no longer under her control. The ataxia will increase so she will fall over all the time, she has no motor c”
Max Jameson screamed, a terrible howl of pain and rage, his hands pressed to his head.
Lizzie woke and began to cry like a baby, struggling to sit up. He went on bellowing, an animal sound.
“Max, stop that,” Cat said quietly. She went to Lizzie and took her hand, encouraging her to lie down under the blanket again. The young woman’s eyes were wide with fear and also with the blankness of someone who has no sense of their surroundings, of other people or even of their own selves. All was a terrifying confusion.
The room was quiet. In the street below someone went by whistling.
“Let me make the call,” Cat said.
After a long pause, Max nodded.
It had been less than three months since Lizzie Jameson had come to the surgery. She had been walking too carefully, as if afraid she might lose her balance, and her speech had seemed slow. Cat only remembered seeing her once before, on a birth-control matter, but had been struck then by her vibrant beauty and her laugh; she had scarcely recognised the unhappy young woman coming into her room.
It was not difficult to diagnose severe depression but neither Cat nor Lizzie herself could find a cause. She was very happy, Lizzie said, no, there was nothing wrong with her marriage, nor with anything else. Work had been going well—she was a graphic designer—she loved the apartment in the Old Ribbon Factory, loved Lafferton, had had no shocks or illness.
“Every day I wake up it’s blacker. It’s like sliding down a pit.” She had stared at Cat hollow-eyed but there had been no tears.
Cat had prescribed an antidepressant and asked to see her weekly for the next six weeks to follow her progress.
Nothing had changed for over a month. The tablets had barely touched the surface of her misery. But on the fourth visit, Lizzie had presented with a badly bruised arm, and a dislocated finger where she had tried to stop herself falling. She had just lost her balance, she said.
“Has this happened before?”
“It keeps happening. I suppose it might be the tablets.”
“Hm. Possibly. They can cause mild dizziness but it usually passes within a few days.”
Cat had got her an appointment with the neurologist at Bevham General. That night she had talked to Chris.
“Brain tumour,” he had said at once. “The MRI will show more clearly.”
“Yes. Could be very deep.”
“Parkinson’s?”
“That crossed my mind.”
“Or maybe the two things are unconnected c look at the depression and the lack of balance separately.”
They had gone on to talk of something else, but the following morning Chris had crossed the corridor from his own consulting room to Cat’s.
“Lizzie Jameson c”
“Idea?”
“How was her gait?”
“Unsteady.”
“I just looked up variant CJD.”
Cat had stared at him. “It’s very rare,” she’d said finally.
“Yes. I’ve never seen it.”
“Nor have I.”
“But it checks out.”
After her last patient left Cat had put in a call to the Bevham neurologist.
Max Jameson had been widowed five years before meeting Lizzie. His first wife had died of breast cancer. There had been no children.
“I was mad,” he had said to Cat. “I was crazy. I wanted to be dead. I wasdead, I was the walking dead. It was just a question of getting through the days and wondering why I bothered.”
Friends had invited him to things but he would never turn up. “I wasn’t going to go to this dinner party, only someone was detailed to fetch me—they practically had to haul me out physically. When I walked into that room I was thinking of a way I could walk right out again, find some excuse to turn round and run. Then I saw Lizzie standing by the fireplace c actually I saw two Lizzies—she was in front of a mirror.”
“So you didn’t turn and run.”
He had smiled at her, his face blazing up with sudden recollected joy. Then he remembered what Cat was now trying to tell him. “Lizzie has mad cow disease?”
“That’s a hideous term. I won’t use it. Variant CJD.”
“Oh, don’t hide behind words. Jesus Christ.”
There was no way of discovering how long the disease had been lying dormant in her.
“And it comes from eating meat?”
“Infected beef, yes, but when, we can have no idea. Years ago probably.”
“What will happen?” Max had stood up and leaned across her desk. “Plain words. What Will Happen? How and When? I need to know this.”
“Yes,” Cat had said, “you do.” And had told him.
The illness had run its terrible course very quickly. From depression to ataxia, with other mental symptoms that were harder for Max to bear—violent mood swings, increasing aggression, paranoia and suspicion, panic attacks and then hours of sustained fear. Lizzie had fallen over, lost her sense of taste and smell, become incontinent, been repeatedly sick. Max had stayed with her, nursed and cared for her, twenty-four hours a day. Her mother had come from Somerset twice but was not able to stay in the loft flat because of a recent hip replacement. Max’s mother had flown from Canada, taken one look at the situation and flown back home. He was on his own. “It’s fine,” Max said, “I don’t need anyone. It’s fine.”
Cat went out of the apartment and down the strange, brick-lined stairwell, which still had the feel of a factory entrance, to the street, where she could get a signal on her phone and leave Max to be quiet with Lizzie.
The Lafferton hospice, Imogen House, had a bed, and Cat made the necessary arrangements. The street was empty. At the end of it, there was the curious blackness which indicated the presence of water, even though there was nothing of the canal to be seen.
The clock chimed on the cathedral tower, a short distance away.
“Oh God, You make it very difficult sometimes,”Cat said aloud. But then prayed a fierce prayer, for the man in the apartment above, and the woman being taken away from it, to die.
Five
The bleep of a mobile interrupted the orderly calm of the cathedral chapter meeting.
The Dean paused. “If that’s important, do take it outside and answer it.”
The Reverend Jane Fitzroy flushed scarlet. She had arrived in Lafferton a week earlier and this was her first full chapter meeting.
“No, it can wait. I do apologise.”
She pressed the off button and the Dean moved the agenda smoothly forwards.
It was over an hour later before she could check the caller display. The last number was her mother’s, but when she rang back the answerphone was on.
“Mum, sorry, I was in a chapter meeting. Hope you’re OK. Call me when you get this.”
She spent the next couple of hours at Imogen House, to which she was now Chaplain, as well as being the Cathedral Liaison Officer at Bevham General hospital. The work would take her out into the community but bring her back to her base at the cathedral, where she would take a full share in the worship and ministry.
At the moment, the most important part of her job was to get to know people, and let them size her up in turn, to listen and learn. It was an absorbing afternoon, at the end of which she sat with a man a few weeks off his hundredth birthday and determined, as he said, “to go for the telegram.” He was like a bird, a fledgling of skin and bone, tiny in the bed, his skin the colour of a tallow candle, but his eyes bright.
“I’ll get there, young Reverend,” Wilfred Armer said, squeezing Jane’s hand. “I’ll be blowing out all those candles, you’ll see.”
Jane doubted if he would live through the next twenty-four hours. He wanted her to stay with him, to listen as he wheezed out story after story about his boyhood, of fishing in Lafferton’s canal and swimming in the river.
As she left the building, she switched on her mobile again. It beeped a message. “Jane?” Magda Fitzroy’s voice sounded distant and strange. “Are you there? Jane?”
She pressed “call.” There was no reply and this time the answerphone did not come on. She sat under a tree, wondering what to do. There was only one of her mother’s Hampstead neighbours whose number Jane knew and he was in America for three months. The house on the other side belonged to a foreign businessman who seemed never to be there. The police? The hospitals? She hesitated because it seemed too dramatic to involve them when she was not even sure if anything was wrong.
The clinic. That number was on her phone. Other numbers might be somewhere among her things which were still in boxes in the garden cottage of the Precentor’s house.
A boy bounced past her on a bicycle doing wheelies over the cobbles. Jane smiled at him. He did not respond but when he had gone by, turned and stared over his shoulder. She was used to it. Here she was, a girl, wearing jeans, and a dog collar. People were still surprised.
“Heathside Clinic.”
“It’s Jane Fitzroy Is my mother there by any chance?”
Magda Fitzroy still saw a few patients at her former workplace, though she had officially retired the year before and was now working with a fellow child psychiatrist on an academic textbook. She missed the clinic, Jane knew, missed the people and her own role there.
“Sorry to keep you. No one’s seen Dr Fitzroy today, but she wasn’t expected. She hasn’t any appointments here at all this week.”
Jane tried her mother’s number several times during the course of the next hour. Nothing. Still no reply and still no answer machine.
Then she went across to the deanery. Geoffrey Peach was out and she left a message. By the time she was away from Lafferton heading towards the motorway it was early afternoon.
The London traffic was dense and she sat on Haverstock Hill for twenty minutes without moving. From time to time, she dialled her mother’s number. There was never a reply and she turned the corner into Heath Place wishing she had called the police after all.
As she drew up outside the Georgian cottage she saw that the front door was ajar.
For a second Jane thought the hall seemed as usual; then she realised that the lamp usually on the walnut table was lying broken on the floor. The table itself had gone.
“Mother?”
Magda spent much of her time in the study overlooking the garden. It was a room Jane loved, with its purple walls and squashy, plum-covered sofa, her mother’s papers and books flowing from desk to chairs to floor. The room had a particular smell, partly because the windows were almost always open, even in winter, so that the garden scents drifted in, and also because her mother sometimes smoked small cigars, whose smoke had melded into the fabric of the room over the years.
The study had been taken apart. The walls had been stripped of their pictures, the shelves of every piece of old china, and both the desk and a small table had had the drawers pulled out and overturned. There was an unmistakable smell of urine.
It was only as Jane stood looking round in shock, trying to take everything in, that she heard a slight sound from the kitchen.
Magda was lying on the floor beside the stove. One leg was buckled beneath her and there was dried blood on her head, matted into her hair and crusted down the side of her face. She was grey, her mouth pinched in.
Jane knelt and took her hand. It was cold and her mother’s pulse was weak, but she was conscious.
“Jane c?”
“How long have you been here? Who did this to you? Oh God, you rang me and I didn’t realise.”
“I, I think c this morning? Someone rang the doorbell and c just c I couldn’t manage to get up again to the phone c I c thought you might c”
“Darling, I’m going to call the ambulance and the police. I’ll get a blanket but I won’t move you, they’d better do that c hold on a moment.”
Every room that she glanced into as she ran upstairs had been ransacked and overturned. She felt sick.
“This will keep you warm. They’ll be here soon.”
“I am not going to hospital—”
But Jane was already calling the emergency services.
“I’ll die if I go to hospital.”
“Much more likely to die if you don’t.”
Jane sat on the floor and took her mother’s hand. She was a tall, strong woman, with grey hair usually coiled up into an idiosyncratic bun. Now, it was down and anyhow; her features, so full of character, so well defined, with the beaky nose and high cheekbones and forehead, seemed to have sunk in, so that she looked closer to eighty than the sixty-eight she was. In a few hours, old age and vulnerability had come upon her, changing her terribly.
“Are you in pain?”
“It’s c hard to tell c I feel numb c”
“What kind of man was it? How did it happen for goodness’ sake?”
“Two c youths c I heard a car c It’s difficult to remember.”
“Don’t worry. I’m just angry with myself that I didn’t come sooner.”
It was only then that the old look crossed her mother’s face, the one which Jane had come to know so well over the past few years. Magda’s eyes fell, briefly, on her collar and there it was, even now, after everything that had happened—the look of scorn and of disbelief.
Magda Fitzroy was an atheist of the old school. Atheist, socialist, psychiatrist, rationalist, formed in the classic Hampstead mould. Where her daughter’s Christianity, let alone her desire to be ordained a priest, had come from was to her both a mystery and a matter for ridicule. And then the look was gone. Her mother lay, hurt and afraid, in shock and Jane felt for her; she let the paramedics in and told them the little she knew.
One of them examined the cuts on Magda’s head. “I’m Larry,” he said, “and this is Al. What’s your name, my love?”
“I am Dr Magda Fitzroy and I am not your love.”
“Aw, pity about that, Magda.”
“Dr Fitzroy.”
He glanced up at Jane. “She always like this?”
“Oh yes. Ignore her at your peril.”
“You all right?”
Jane had sat down suddenly, hit by the realisation that her mother had been robbed and attacked in her home one quiet weekday morning while the world went about its business, and that she might well have been dead. She began to cry.
Six
The Holly Bush was like something out of a Hammer Horror film, Ed thought, driving up the steep slope to the forecourt. It stood above the fast main road, ugly, turreted and, at night, lit with neon and strings of fairy lights. At Christmas, an illuminated Santa with sleigh and reindeer leered out at the passing traffic, outlined in lights that chased each other endlessly round. Enough to give you a bloody migraine if you stared at them long enough. Only no one did. They shot past, or they were up the slope and in through the door.
It smelled the way that kind of place always smelled, and in the day it looked frowsty and peeling. At least at night the lights gave it a bit of glamour. Not that Ed had been there more than a couple of times at night. Work and pleasure, such pleasure as there was coming to drink in the Holly Bush, didn’t mix.
“Brian?”
Someone was whistling at the back. There had been one vehicle in the car park. It wasn’t a time of year for the sort of people who stopped overnight at the Holly Bush, the reps and lower-pond-life businessmen. The hotel had five bedrooms, which Ed had never seen, three bars, a restaurant and a games room. The cloakrooms, which were all Ed really knew, were jazzed up with horrendous wallpaper, fat blue roses and vivid green vines.
“BRIAN?”
Keep your nerve, that was the thing. Business as usual. Act normal.
At first, that had been scary but it had sorted everything out the year before.
“Bri c”
“All right, I’m bloody here—Oh. It’s you. Do you have to bloody shout the place down?”
“Thought you was in the cellar. OK, what’d you need?”
“How the hell should I know? Your job to go and find out.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll get to the cloakrooms. I meant what else?”
“What you got?”
All the stock had been in the boot earlier, before it had happened, but now Ed had put the boxes on the back seat, covered with an old dog rug.
“Marlboro, Silk Cut, B & H. Oh and a few Hamlets.”
“How much?”
“Same as last time.”
“How many?”
“I can let you have five hundred.”
“Ay, go on then. You get t’ cloakrooms sorted, I’ll get your money.”
The door behind Ed opened and a couple of men came in. They’d walked past the car then, they c No. They hadn’t. The car was closed and locked, everything covered up, looking like any other car.
“You do coffees?”
“Just the filter.”
“Right, two filters.”
“Owt for you, Ed?”
Yes, be best to hang about a bit, chat, not seem too bothered about rushing off.
“White, one sugar. Thanks.”
The cloakroom machines were easily sorted. Two of condoms needed, one of tampons, still plenty of tights in there, not much call for those at the Holly Bush. The profits weren’t that great, even if the goods came at knock-off prices. It was the cigarettes that fetched the money. They went into a cardboard box labelled Tomato Soup, all sealed up.
One of the men came in. Had a quick look. Ed went on filling up the tower of packets inside the machine, head bent. The man laughed.
“Helping to keep the birth rate down?”
In the bar, the coffee was on the counter, next to a flat tin. Ed glanced around but the other man was deep in the Racing Post, didn’t even look up. The coffee was all right, though, and Brian had gone into the back so there was no need to chat.
“See you,” Ed shouted. There was a grunt from somewhere.
The stuff on the seat had to be covered up again. Later, it could go back into the boot. Later.
The thought of what was in the car boot now sent the old, longed-for surge of electricity up through Ed’s body. When it came, there was nothing, nothing like it, no other excitement to touch it, nothing so utterly satisfying. Where did it come from, this urge that was like no other, this craving that, when answered, brought the deepest of pleasures? To other people, a child was a son or a daughter, a pretty little kid passing in the street, or a wailing nuisance, something to be taught the alphabet and dressed up, something smelly, snotty or cute, whatever. To Ed, a child was all of those things. But, every so often came the craving. When it did, a child was an opportunity.
The car turned out of the Holly Bush and accelerated on to the dual carriageway, just as the petrol warning light flashed amber.
“Bugger.” There was a service station at Kitby. Don’t chance it, don’t risk running out. Jesus, the thought was enough. OK, slow down, eke it out, don’t burn up the bloody fuel.
Kitby petrol station was a lifetime coming.
Seven
Simon Serrailler sat with Jim Chapman in his office. They were both silent, both thinking. Simon had not gone back to Lafferton. Because he hoped the action was going to be here, and to end here, a result for him as well as for the North Riding force. And because his mood had lifted and he was enjoying his involvement.
