‘It’s too late.’
Pip ignored the swearing that came from the speaker and slowed down as she approached the intersection to Clay Target Road. In the back of her mind, she realised she was passing by the same spot where Vernon Clements was found murdered all those years ago but quickly pushed the thought away. She was almost home.
Pip tried not to let panic force her into making a stupid mistake; she needed to calm down. ‘I’ll have to get to the house,’ she told Chris. There was nowhere else to go—she couldn’t go into town, Erik would be able to cut her off.
‘Go to the neighbours’ and wait there,’ Chris ordered.
‘I am not putting them in danger.’
‘He’s not going to do anything with witnesses.’
‘He’ll probably know by now that you’ve got Zuber. He’ll be feeling desperate. I’m not taking that kind of risk with Pete and Anne’s lives.’
‘We’re not far away, but I don’t want you anywhere near him, Pip. Get inside the house and lock the doors.’
His voice betrayed the frustration and worry he was feeling, but there was nothing he could do about the situation either. Minutes were hours when everything could change in a split second.
‘I’m coming,’ he said as she came around the bend and the car slid sideways on the slippery mud track, landing with a loud, jarring thud against the trunk of a tree. She heard Chris calling out from the car speaker.
‘I’m, okay,’ she said, feeling shaken, but the flash of headlights from behind snapped her out of her momentary shock. ‘He’s pulling up. I’m going on foot.’
She launched herself across the seat and wriggled her way out of the passenger-side door, scrambling to her feet as she grabbed her phone and bag. The cold rain plastered her hair to her head within moments and took her breath away. She threw her handbag into the dense bush beside the car and ran just as a car came to a stop behind her and she heard Eric’s voice calling her name. She didn’t stop—she ran, and she kept running, glancing over her shoulder only briefly as she saw him bend down and pick up her handbag. She now knew that Chris was telling the truth—Erik was here for the hard drive.
The ploy would only give her a few seconds’ head start once he realised the drive wasn’t in there. The hard drive didn’t matter anymore. The Daily Metro had her draft story and a copy of the file. There was no way Butterworth could contain this now—although he wasn’t aware of it.
Pip could hear the heavy pant of her breathing as she ran. Branches whipped her face and she felt a scratch along her cheek that stung as the rain hit it, but she kept going. It was impossible to run with any speed in the slippery conditions, and the thick scrub was making it near impossible to see where she was headed. Somehow she had to get back to the road. She was fairly sure she wasn’t going in the right direction, but she had no way of working out her location in rapidly deteriorating light.
‘Davenport!’ Erik roared, and Pip glanced over her shoulder to see he was only a handful of metres behind her. ‘Give it up. I know you must have worked it out by now or you wouldn’t be running.’
‘And here I was thinking all that flirting meant something,’ she threw back without stopping.
‘Turns out I was obviously lacking something. You had your sights set higher—or lower, depending on how you look at it,’ he snarled.
She ignored the jab at Chris, suddenly realising she was back on the road that led to Rosevale. The flatter, open terrain made it easier to run, and she ran like she’d never done before. The rain had clearly been torrential since she’d left, and nonstop, judging by the amount of water all around—the meteorologist hadn’t been kidding. Just as she was looking around, her ankle twisted on a pothole in the track and she felt herself falling, hitting the ground with her shoulder, the breath leaving her chest forcefully.
‘Where is it?’ Erik yelled, standing over her now. His face was contorted after the exertion of running, the rain plastering his hair to his head.
‘It’s too late!’ she yelled back defiantly. There seemed little chance of getting away from him—her ankle throbbed and she doubted she’d be able to put weight on it even if she did manage to get to her feet with him standing over her.
‘Just give the bloody thing to me.’
She reached into her back pocket and pulled the drive out, throwing it at his chest, which he caught in one large hand.
‘Why would you work for a man like Butterworth? He doesn’t care about anyone but himself.’
‘You wanna know why?’ he said, seeming to think about the question momentarily. ‘Because after years of putting my life on the line for ungrateful civilians like you—protecting your rights and making sure you can sleep safe at night—I get spat on, and punched in the face and passed over for promotions. I got sick of doing it all for next to no reward. So, I took some money to look the other way occasionally. And I got busted, but you know what? The men I work for didn’t leave me hanging out to dry—they stepped in and made it all go away, and in return I only had to take this braindead job out in the sticks for a year or two. I call that a pretty fair deal. If you had your way, I’d be rotting in prison alongside Lenny Knight, wouldn’t I?’ he sneered. ‘’Cause that’s what you do—you dig around in people’s rubbish and find anything you can use to bring them down.’
‘Only if they’ve been doing something wrong to start with,’ she threw back, frowning up at him. ‘You’re a police officer—you’re supposed to follow the law.’
‘And look where that got me—screwed over at every turn. No fucking thanks.’
‘It’s too late,’ she said, shaking her head, her teeth beginning to chatter in the cold.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The drive,’ she said, looking at it in his hand. ‘It’s useless. The encryption was cracked, and I opened the file. Butterworth and all his shady deals have been exposed. Your boss,’ she emphasised the words darkly, ‘will be sitting in a cell right next door to his mate, Lenny Knight. So you better start looking for a new job.’
She saw a brief moment of uncertainty fill the sergeant’s eyes before he shook his head and snarled, ‘That encryption is unbreakable.’
‘If you say so,’ she shouted back as the rain fell harder. She knew she’d run out of time—there was no sign of Chris, and she was stranded out here alone with a pissed-off crooked cop who hated journalists with a passion that bordered on fanatical. How could she have ever thought this guy was hot? Your taste in men is truly impeccable, Davenport.
A noise Pip couldn’t immediately identify began to sound and grew louder by the second. Erik glanced up and his expression changed. For a brief moment she could only stare in confusion before the roar became the sound of a freight train bearing down and she saw a tunnel of water surging towards them.
In a second it had swept them both up, carrying them along with an unstoppable force. She briefly caught a glimpse of Erik’s head—his mouth open in alarm—before he was dragged down and she lost sight of him.
Something hit Pip’s head and then her back as she briefly went under the water, only to resurface and narrowly miss being taken out by a tree—a fully grown tree that should have been standing upright on the banks of the river. Sticks and branches tore at her legs, like fingers trying to pull her under, and she kicked ruthlessly in an attempt to dislodge them before they dragged her beneath the water and held her there.
The pull of the water was astounding. The force with which it dragged everything in its path along with it was impossible to fight, and as Pip breached the surface time and time again, the sides of the bank went past in a dizzying blur. Then, just as she took a gulp of air, she was pulled down once more and her head hit something solid, and everything was blessedly quiet.