KATE WAS STARTLED to find a uniformed police officer standing outside the door of her flat when she got home, and she was only vaguely aware of the double blast of her new-found friend’s horn as the young policewoman drove away again.
The policeman checked her warrant card carefully and nodded. ‘SOCO haven’t quite finished their examination of the crime scene,’ he said. ‘Guv’nor wants it kept intact for the time being.’
‘And which guv’nor would that be?’
‘DCI Callow, miss,’ he replied.
She gave an understanding smile. ‘And what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’ she queried. ‘Sleep in a cardboard box in the street?’
The constable looked uncomfortable. ‘You can collect any personal items you need,’ he said, ‘as long as I accompany you.’
‘Well, thank you,’ she said with heavy sarcasm. ‘You can have the thrill of watching me go through my knicker drawer.’
She could have argued the point, but it wasn’t worth the hassle. Instead, she quickly changed her clothes in the bathroom, putting on a pair of warm woollen trousers and a sweater before stuffing some underwear, tops and toiletries into a holdall, while her colleague waited discreetly outside.
‘All done?’ the policeman asked, staring at her bulging holdall with raised eyebrows.
‘Not quite,’ she replied, pulling on her woollen coat. ‘Presumably I can’t use my telephone and as I seem to have lost my mobile, you can call me a taxi, OK?’
‘So you’ve got somewhere to go then?’ he said, reaching for his mobile.
‘Oh yes,’ she replied, frowning again as she wondered why Hayden hadn’t answered her calls. ‘I just hope someone is home.’
Twister was exhausted and his cut wrist, now covered by some lint and a wide bandage he had found in a kitchen drawer, hurt like hell, even though the touch of first-aid he had recalled from his army days seemed to have reduced the bleeding substantially. A slightly deeper incision, he thought, and Lewis might have ruptured an artery, which wouldn’t have been at all funny. The injury had made it difficult for him to replace the light bulbs in the chandelier, but he had finally managed it, taking care to wipe them afterwards with a damp cloth to remove any minute bloodstains he might have missed. He had also cleared up the broken wine glass, burying the fragments under a bush in the garden before carefully wiping up the blood he had dripped on to the kitchen floor and work surface. There was not much he could do about the living room carpet, however, apart from covering the bloodstain with a mat from the bedroom. With a bit of luck, no one would suspect that the mat was hiding something, but he was not that confident.
Now sitting with the curtains pulled and the lights lit in the armchair opposite the detective, after trussing him up with sticky tape and securing him to a straight-backed chair he had brought through from the dining room, he watched him through half-closed eyelids. Give the copper his due, he had put up a pretty good fight and the ex-SAS man admired him for that. But Twister had admired plenty of his targets in the past too and that hadn’t stopped him killing them – as he knew he would be killing Lewis once he had got hold of the information he needed. So he waited patiently for him to come round, irritated by the delay, but accepting there was nothing he could do about it. And even as he shook a cigarette out of the packet, he was rewarded by a loud snort as the detective opened his eyes and stared at him blankly for a moment.
Twister lit his cigarette and smirked. ‘Nice to see you back at last,’ he said.
Lewis spat something out of his mouth with a muttered: ‘Who the hell are you?’
‘The electronic tracker,’ Twister responded, without answering his question. ‘Where is it?’
‘Tracker?’ Lewis feigned bewilderment. ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’
His captor hissed his disapproval. ‘I have searched this entire cottage very thoroughly,’ he breathed, ‘and there is no sign of my property. But I know you and your girlfriend found it, so what have you done with it?’
Lewis grinned, delighted to see the heavy bandage round the other’s wrist and to know that he had managed to inflict some damage on him at any rate. ‘Worry you does it, this missing tracker?’ he mocked. ‘Afraid it might be the loose end that nails you in the end?’
Twister rose to his feet and leaned over his prisoner. ‘Play games with me and you will be sorry,’ he warned. ‘Now, I’ll ask you again, what have you done with the tracker?’
Lewis shrugged. ‘Damned if I know, old sport. What does it look like?’
Twister nodded slowly. ‘Decided to play hardball, have you, my friend?’ he said. ‘Well, we shall see what your girlfriend has to say about that.’
Lewis’s bravado evaporated. ‘You leave her out of this,’ he grated, struggling against the tape which bound him to the dining room chair.
Twister laughed. ‘Leave her out of it?’ he echoed. ‘But she is so very much a part of it, DC Lewis – a key player one might say.’ He held up a mobile phone in the light of the lamp. ‘Interesting contact list you have on your mobile and I must admit that so far I have had a lot more success interrogating that than I have you. So shall we give little Miss Katie a call – let her know we’ve had this little chat?’
He dialled slowly, then waited, the speaker activated and his gaze fixed intently on Lewis’s sweating face with grim satisfaction. ‘In fact, I think it would be nice if we asked her to join us, don’t you?’ he mocked. ‘A sort of reunion party.’
The mangy looking fox had had a bad night. The twin barrels of a twelve-bore had sent him packing from a nearby farmyard and the rustlings in the marshy undergrowth had produced nothing so far save a couple of agile mice. The night was still young, but Reynard needed to fill his belly and the signs were not good.
Padding along the frozen tarmac, following the line of the rhyne, he heard the strange sound issuing from a clump of long tangled grass on the verge and stopped dead, his nose questing the cold night air and his ears pricked up suspiciously. The loud shrilling sound was nothing like he had heard before, but the possibility of a meal drove him forward to investigate further.
At first he saw nothing but the stiff points of tufted grass, tinged with bluish fire in the splashes of moonlight, but then something else attracted his attention – something that glittered unnaturally like a live thing. He approached it cautiously on his belly, nose now parting the grass in front of him as he went, then tensed over the thing, ready to snatch it in his jaws if it tried to flee.
But the silver-coloured box remained motionless, its little illuminated window staring back at him with a robot-like coldness. The fox sniffed it once, but concluding that it was not worth eating, abruptly lost interest. And as he padded away, disappointed, the police issue mobile Kate had thrown out the window of Duval’s Land Rover suddenly stopped ringing and the display shut down.
Hayden Lewis was feeling violently ill in the back of the undertaker’s van. Gagged and still tightly bound with tape, he had been zipped up inside what seemed to be a none too clean body bag, with just the upper part of his face uncovered and a familiar nauseating smell wafting off the plastic. Twister had left him for just a few minutes to collect his battered vehicle and park it down the side of the cottage in front of the Jaguar – presumably so he could check the Jag for his tracker before loading his prisoner in the back of the van under cover of darkness – and though the detective had struggled furiously with the tape while he was gone, he had found it impossible to release so much as an ankle.
Lewis was actually more than a little surprised that he was still breathing. He had convinced himself he was about to die from the moment Kate failed to answer her mobile telephone. The killer had been left with no reason to keep him alive once it became clear that his prisoner could no longer be used to put pressure on Kate and as the policeman was also able to identify him, imminent elimination had seemed inevitable. Yet for some reason he was still in the land of the living and he clung to the old adage that while there was life there was hope – even though he knew full well that his reprieve was almost certain to be only temporary and that he was likely to be wearing the evil-smelling body bag for good very soon.
For Twister’s part, he was in something of a dilemma. The policeman was certainly a liability and snapping his neck there and then would obviously have been the safest bet, but that would not have helped him recover the tracker. As long as Lewis was alive he felt he had a hold on Kate Hamblin. With him dead, attractive though that proposition might be, he would lose the only bargaining counter he had.
Staying on at the cottage in the hope that Kate would eventually turn up there was not an option, however. In the first place, it was possible that, contrary to his earlier assumptions, she had actually gone home to her flat in Bridgwater with no intention of popping over to Burtle, and secondly, Lewis’s tiny pad might be convenient at present, but it could prove to be a liability if some of the detective’s colleagues were to turn up, wondering where he was, or a friendly neighbour decided to call by to borrow some milk.
There was a sharp reminder of the risks he was running as he drove away from the cottage too. A police patrol car appeared suddenly a couple of hundred yards down the road, travelling towards Glastonbury, and it slowed noticeably as it passed his van, the driver’s white face caught briefly in his headlights, apparently turned in his direction to study him before accelerating away. He breathed a sigh of relief. He realized only too well that an old closed van like the one he was driving was bound to attract the interest of the police and a random stop-check was the last thing he needed – especially if that stop-check resulted in a police officer taking a look in the back.
He was on edge for the rest of the journey and he couldn’t have been more relieved when he finally pulled into his yard in Highbridge and jumped out to close the gates behind him. Safe at last – but then his mobile rang and it wasn’t good news as far as he was concerned.
‘You cut me off,’ his co-conspirator accused. ‘Been trying to get you ever since. Where are you?’
‘Just pulled in at home,’ he replied, returning to the van and pausing with one hand on the handle of the rear doors.
There was a heavy sigh of relief. ‘So you did as I said? Thank heavens for that anyway. Have you heard the news?’
‘Hardly.’
‘Duval’s dead.’
‘What?’ He stiffened and snatched his hand from the door as if the handle was hot. ‘How did that happen?’
‘Seems he snatched Kate Hamblin from the street. Police ARV cornered him in some disused pumping station on the Levels and put a couple of bullets in him.’
‘Bloody hell.’
A chuckle this time. ‘Don’t sound so shocked. It couldn’t be better news for us. We should now be in the clear. Duval was the murder team’s number one suspect and with him dead and nothing else to go on, they’re bound to lay all your hits at his door. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be case closed very soon.’
He felt sick. ‘I doubt it.’
A tense silence, then slowly, harshly, ‘Why, what the hell have you done now?’
‘What I said I had to do. I’ve got Hamblin’s boyfriend wrapped up in the back of my van. Just going to dump him indoors.’
The voice erupted from the mobile with an explosive hiss. ‘You stupid bastard. I told you to leave it.’
His eyes were cold and hard. ‘And I told you I do things my way.’
‘I’m coming over.’
‘Best not to.’
‘I said I’m coming over – don’t do anything.’
Twister didn’t answer, but abruptly ended the call. Then, opening the back doors of his van, he directed a small torch on to Lewis’s sweating face. ‘I thought we’d have a proper little talk now,’ he said. ‘And I know you’ll give me some answers this time.’