This time she vaulted the gate, swinging over on her good arm, landing hard.
Her first thought was to run for Moon’s car to get away. They wouldn’t know where she was heading, which would give her the advantage.
Then she stopped dead. Shit.
The keys to the car were in her handbag and her handbag was in the plum orchard with her phone. She would have to get away on foot. What a mess.
She set off running again, ducking off the main track into the trees so she would be less visible, dodging branches thick with apples, skittering over fallen fruit. The ground between the trunks was uneven, the grass longer. It was harder work.
She had gone fifty metres when she stumbled and fell, yelping in pain. Reflexes had made her thrust her arms out; the pain from sudden jolt in her injured shoulder was much worse than the fall itself. Looking round she saw what had tripped her; a bloody molehill.
She lay on the grass, silent, left hand clasping her throbbing right shoulder, terrified that someone had heard her. Testing the joint with her fingers, she winced. The limb felt wrong. It wasn’t moving properly.
For a minute, after all the action, everything seemed still. Birdsong reasserted itself. Prostrate, she caught her breath. There was no point just running away. She had to know where she was running towards.
Think, for once, for pity’s sake.
Her best option would be to find a local; get them to phone the police. But at this time of early morning there would be no one around. The lanes were still empty of cars.
Simply retracing her steps would bring her to the meadow and the lane. The bridleway itself would afford her some cover if she could make it there, but to reach it she would have to cross open ground. She would be more visible in the growing light. Could she risk that route?
If there were no cars around, how far would it be to the nearest house? The marsh was so sparsely peopled; besides, not all of the old houses were even occupied. The kind of rich folk who owned them only visited at weekends.
Second option. Find somewhere to hide to give her time to think. Better. Where? The trees above her here were still young, not tall enough to climb – and with only one arm she doubted she’d be able to do it.
She listened. Far away she heard the sound of an engine. The same quad bike, or another?
She thought of the man, Salem. Had he been running away too like she was now? They had found him and killed him. There had been several people involved; she had no doubt that her pursuer would not be alone.
What was that? Noises from higher up the hill.
The sound of thumping feet heading down towards her from the top of the orchard, the place she’d been running from. She pressed herself flat in the wet long grass.
More people were chasing her already? No. Just one person. It was too late to run now. That would just give herself away. All she could do was lie as still as she could, face close to the earth.
The footfalls were heavy; she could hear breathing too. It was a man, running fast. Would he notice where she had left the main path? The grass would be flattened there.
But he ran on, down the hill. She raised her head slightly to look. It wasn’t the person she had felled; this one was stockier, older.
So her guess was right. There was definitely more than one man after her.
Think.
She was on unfamiliar ground and she was injured. She needed information. Simply running away was not enough. She couldn’t stay where she was because eventually they’d be back, retracing her route again, she guessed. But she had a minute or two in which to decide what to do and she had to use it.
Think.
What facts did she already have? The farmyard had a farmhouse next to it. There would be a phone there. It might seem stupid to head towards danger instead of running away from it, but there were advantages.
Firstly, she would be going to somewhere where she knew the lie of the land, rather than into the unknown. Secondly, they would be expecting her to run away, not come back.
Carefully she got up and moved west this time, keeping low, not running now. The western side of the apple orchard was hedged, but at high summer the hawthorn was too thick to get through, let alone see through.
If she wanted to make it to the farmyard, she would have to find a way round it.
A stick cracked. More people moving behind her through the trees. She dropped down again into, falling into nettles.
The stocky man who had run down through the orchard, chasing her, was now retracing his steps back up the hill. This time there was a third person with him.
Soon they would reach the place where she had left the main track. As she looked back she could see the path she’d taken clearly visible in the growing morning light, marked by the flattened grass. There was no way they would miss it.
They were so close now. How could she take two of them on? The younger one first, maybe, then the fat one? The odds were not in her favour. She lowered herself back onto the nettles. The stinging was a distraction from the throbbing pain in her shoulder, at least.
‘What are you doing?’ another voice, speaking in an English accent, called from the top of the field.
‘Looking,’ said the fatter man. Squinting through the grass, she recognised him now. He had been one of the people in the caravans parked on Connie Reed’s land, one of the men who had attacked Ferriter, who had got away from the far side of the ditch she’d been trapped in. He was wearing black jeans with deliberate cuts at the knees; the sort that might look all right on a slim teenager.
‘She’s not here. Go back. Get her before she gets to the road.’
And, miraculously, before she was discovered, they turned and headed back down the track away from her.
She waited another minute before she dared move, then crawled out of the nettles and stood again.
If they were sure she had gone down the hill, her best option would be to head back up to the top again and loop round to the farmhouse that way.
Cautiously, staying close to the hedge this time, she worked her way up to the corner of the field and then on to the gate she had leaped over what seemed like an age ago – though it couldn’t have been any more than ten minutes.
Leaning over it first, she peered up the fields. Work hadn’t stopped. Men and women were busy in the early light, plucking fruit off the tree, loading it into the trailers.
A third time she clambered over the locked gate. This time she crouched low, keeping to the other side of the hedge she had just walked along. After a few metres she was behind trees and harder to spot, so could move faster. She peered back to see if her bag had been abandoned where the man had dropped it, but it had gone.
The hedge ended where it joined the lane that they had driven up two days ago. It led back to the yard, she knew. Again, checking to see if there was anyone in sight first, she turned left and cautiously headed back down the track.
She was, she reckoned, about halfway down when she heard a vehicle coming up towards her. The lane was hedged on both sides, there was nowhere to hide.
Looking round frantically, she spotted a small break in the hedge on the orchard side, roughly opposite where she had been hiding earlier. A hole in the green. It didn’t go all the way through, but there was a dark gap in the shrubs where something had died back and not yet been replaced.
She threw herself into it, feeling pain erupt all over her body. Blackthorn bushes, she realised too late; she had impaled herself on thorns as long as a little finger. But she couldn’t cry out or move. There was no time. She must not be caught.
A crunching on the gravel, a revving of the throttle, and the tractor passed, hauling a trailer full of empty crates to be filled with fruit. On the trailer, legs dangling over the back, another man, with a walkie-talkie, speaking into it over the roar of the engine.
He looked backwards as he went by and his eyes went straight to the hole in the hedge.
But it must have been dark enough in there; he didn’t seem to see her. The tractor carried on up the hill, the man bouncing along behind it.
When it was quiet again, she disentangled herself painfully from the thorns, trying to pull her limbs off the branches without tearing her skin. Fresh red blood stained her suit. There was no time to think about how much she hurt now, all over. She moved again, knowing she had to find cover somewhere.
And then, rounding the bend, there was the yard.
She pressed herself into the hedge again, taking a few seconds to look at it, to get her bearings. The closest building was the equipment barn she had looked into before. The door was on the side. It was only thirty metres away, but to reach it she would expose herself to anyone who was in the yard – and from here, most of the yard was hidden.
With cautious steps she moved forward.
She was ten metres from the barn door when she saw, to her right, the man she had attacked in the plum orchard, the one who had stolen her bag. He was standing facing the big farmhouse, talking to someone she couldn’t see. His back was towards her. How long before he turned around?
She realised she must be completely exposed here, with her back against the hedge, a short run from safety.
And now she heard another tractor coming back down the same lane she was lingering in.
She had no choice. She had to move. She made a break for the dark, open door of the barn.
And made it inside just as the tractor rounded the bend into the yard.
Panting, she leaned her back against the metal wall, listening to the sound of the engine trundling slowly past, metres away.
Made it, she thought in the darkness. Bloody made it. She panted, pretty sure the men hadn’t seen her.
She was there amongst the hedge trimmers and tractors and crop-sprayers, and it was cool and still. There was a smell of engine oil and dust.
She was not out of danger, but at least here was somewhere she could hide. And, as her eyes got used to the gloom, she saw the perfect place. A stack of grey fruit crates, large enough to climb into.
Until from behind one of the tractors a man stepped out. ‘Hello?’
He had obviously been trying to start one of the quad bikes, she realised, to join the wider search. Now he looked around to see the source of a noise – he must have heard her coming in – and there she was, standing still as she could, clothes torn, wishing she were invisible.
‘Kent Police,’ she said, exhausted.
It was the same big man she had seen earlier; the one from the caravan site.
He looked for a second, as if he could not quite believe what he was seeing. Then shouted, ‘Hey!’
From outside, the roar of the tractor revving in the yard covered his voice.
‘There are more police on the way,’ she lied.
He stepped forward. There was a hopper of some kind between them. He moved one way, to come round it and catch her. She darted the other way, away from the door, almost falling. She looked down. The floor was dark, slippery with oil.
‘Hey!’ he shouted again, trying to get the attention of the men outside, but the tractor was still working.
Christ.
He held his arms wide, as if somehow that was going to catch her. And then, glancing to his left, he saw a stack of hay forks and darted in that direction to grab one.
Shit.
Swiftly he lifted it, swung it, prong forward towards her, and jabbed. Jolting backwards, she slipped again, tripping on something, fell hard, pain screaming through her back. He ran towards her, fork raised.
She had fallen on an open tin of oil, she realised, knocking it over. Thick gold liquid was pouring out of it onto the floor.
With her good hand she grabbed the can’s handle, swinging it up just in time. It still had enough weight to slam into the fork’s prongs just as they were coming towards her, knocking them sideways as they closed in on her.
Pulling the fork back again, he was now on top of her, one leg on either side, lifting it high. She reached up and grabbed the tines with her good hand before he could force it down again, this time yanking it to her right just as he threw his weight behind it to stab her. The fork hit the concrete next to her. It was his turn to be surprised by the slipperiness of the oil-covered floor. The man stumbled, losing his balance.
He fell hard on top of her. He was bigger than her, and stronger; she was one-armed.
She wriggled and kicked, to try to prevent him pinning her down, but it was one-sided.
He grabbed her right arm and tugged it above her head. The pain was severe. She screamed, knowing she must not pass out.
Now he was going for her left. She waved it up and down, trying to avoid his grasp. If he had both arms, he would be in total control.
‘Hey,’ he shouted again. ‘Come!’
Somebody must have heard them by now, surely. And there they were: voices shouting back. He looked up.
‘In here!’
In the moment he was distracted by the others, her hand touched the fork. It had fallen, handle away, spikes towards her.
Her fingers curved around metal; the base of the tines. Pivoting it in her elbow, she swung the fork, prongs forward, straight at the man’s round belly.