They took the roundabout the wrong way at sixty miles an hour.
No one in their right mind would have done that.
But there was panic in the car and fear and in the wet blackness of the night they gambled that there was no one else on the road. Just them and the car ahead.
‘Close in,’ the man in the front passenger seat said, gritting his teeth and leaning into the dashboard. ‘Faster, for Christ sake. Faster!’
‘I’m trying.’ The driver was sweating. A trickle of blood from where the woman had bitten him stained the edge of his shirt collar.
He released the pedal slightly so that the automatic transmission changed down a gear, then he slammed his foot back down. The engine roared as the big Mercedes charged forward up the hill.
‘That’s it, that’s it. Nearly got them,’ the passenger in the back grunted.
The driver felt his neck. It was very painful. She had sunk her teeth in hard. Jesus, maybe she had AIDS or something.
They were almost level. He flashed his headlights.
A little further on, the road sloped into a soft bend. He would have to pull in front and force them to stop before reaching that blind spot. It was two o’clock in the morning, they were out in the country, but what if . . .?
The lights of an oncoming car lit up the hedge.
It came round the turn towards them, into the white hot glare of two sets of headlamps on full beam, two speeding cars straddling the entire width of the narrow road. It braked with a greasy screech but in that split second the driver of the Merc found extra power in the machine and swung it in front of their quarry.
Reacting to the swift, violent movement, his wheels skidded and squealed on the wet surface, pulling the back end of the Mercedes forward in an arc. He pressed his foot down hard on the brake and waited to feel the impact of the crash but suddenly they had stopped dead, almost facing back the way they had come, and there was nothing. Just a weird silence.
The three of them looked out. There was nobody else on the road. They had missed the oncoming car. Or had it been there at all? Had they imagined it in their jangled brains?
No, ridiculous. It had been there all right, straight in front of them, coming out of the night. It must have driven on, just got the hell out of there. But where was . . .?
And then in their headlights they saw the skid marks on the muddy verge, the raw, ragged gap in the flimsy wooden fence. Beyond that there was darkness.
The driver put his hands to his face and dragged his fingers down his cheeks. ‘Oh no! Oh Christ no!’
‘Shut up!’ the man beside him snapped. ‘Pull yourself together. We’ll have to get out and look. Get this thing off the road first.’
His hands shaking, the driver turned the car again. A few hundred yards further on, almost hidden from view, there was a narrower road off to the left. They parked there and scrambled out, then stood for a second.
The rain, like cold needles on their flushed faces, did nothing to subdue their agitated state. Booze and cocaine had fuelled that and the adrenalin rush of the chase had given them an extra boost. But now a new ingredient, a sense of dread, began to make its presence felt.
It was hard to see. The night was thick with drizzle, clouds blindfolding the moon, but there was some kind of light coming from below, down in the woodland into which the car had disappeared.
‘A flashlight,’ one of them said. ‘Have you got one?’
‘What?’
‘A torch. Have you got a fucking torch? Jesus, wake up.’ The driver opened the boot of the Mercedes and rummaged around.
‘Come on. Hurry up. Move, move!’
‘I can’t find it. No, here it is.’
The torch was long and heavy and encased in rubber. He turned it on and its beam lit up the face of the man beside him for a moment.
He was dark-set and bearded, his eyes on fire. Dazzled, he turned away sharply. ‘Christ, you’re blinding me. Here – give me that.’ He snatched the torch, gabbling breathlessly. ‘Right, we’ve got to find out what’s happened to them, see if they‘re hurt. That other car’s gone but I bet not for long. It’s bound to have seen what happened, them going off the road and us skidding. But it doesn’t know we’re connected. They’ll call the police. They might come back and try to help.’
‘Maybe they’ve just driven on. Maybe they didn’t see anything – or ignored it.’
‘Not very likely. We nearly wiped them out on the road back there. Anybody see what kind of car it was?’
The others shook their heads.
‘Me neither. And I don’t think they’ll have got our number. OK, we better get down there before anybody else does.’
‘So what’s the plan, then?’ the driver wondered.
‘Plan? There is no fucking plan. Just pray. That’s your best bet.’
The bearded man led the way, hurrying back to the gap in the fence. He shone the torch into the gloom. Sloping away below them was a dank wood, its floor protected by a thick covering of fern and brambles.
They gasped when they saw what was there.
The car, a red soft top MGB about twenty years old, had crashed hard into a tall larch, the front of it crumpled like tin foil against the sturdy trunk. The light they had seen was coming from the one remaining headlamp shining into the bushes.
In its beam they could make out the shape of a figure on the ground and as they watched he pulled himself slowly and painfully to his feet.
The man with the torch began to scramble down the bank towards the wreck, the other two following suit after a second, slithering in the mud behind him. At the bottom they stood there, breathing hard, staring at the car and the man beside it. Rain pattered down on the leaves and dripped onto their heads. They could feel the heat of the engine, silent now, except for a slight hiss like escaping steam, and they could smell warm metal and the heavy odour of petrol. Christ, the thing might go up in their faces.
The man turned towards them. There was blood and dirt on his face and he stood unsteadily but he seemed miraculously uninjured. Somehow he had managed to get free of the vehicle, perhaps been thrown from it. The windscreen had disappeared and the driver’s door hung from one hinge.
‘Paul?’ the bearded one said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Where is she?’ he grunted in answer.
The woman.
The bearded man moved closer to the car and shone the torch beam in through the open driver’s door. The smell of petrol was stronger but it was not that that made him choke.
She lay against the dashboard, her face a mask of blood that left her unrecognisable. Slivers of glass and metal were embedded like shrapnel in her cheeks and head and they glinted in the torchlight.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.
Her bare arms were streaked with blood and her legs appeared to be trapped where part of the engine had been pushed in. There was no sound coming from her and she was almost certainly dead.
He passed the torch to one of the others. ‘Keep this on her,’ he said, as he began to reach into the vehicle, thinking he might try to find a pulse. But instinct stopped him suddenly. A sense of self-preservation made him realise there was a risk that he might touch something and leave fingerprints on a receptive surface. Something told him he did not want to do that. He backed away.
‘You bastards,’ Paul said. ‘You fucking bastards. You’ve killed her.’
‘I didn’t mean . . . it was an accident,’ their driver tried, his voice a whine.
Paul swung towards him, rage glaring from his bloody face. With a growl deep in his throat, he lunged forward. The two men fell in a heap, scrabbling on the ground, clawing and gouging, one out of anger, the other in wild and desperate defence.
Paul’s hands reached the man’s throat. ‘You crazy fuck . . . I’ll—’
Behind him there was a sudden movement. The torch swung in a sweeping downward arc and hit him hard on the back of the head.
He slumped forward and it hit him again. This time there was the crunch of something brittle giving way and he made a gurgling noise.
‘Jesus,’ the man on the ground said, scrambling out from under, struggling to his feet.
The torch swung again. The third blow sounded duller, moist, and the impact knocked the light out. Paul’s limbs twitched for a scary second or two and then he was still.
There were a few moments of frozen, deathly silence until the shock waves swept over them.
‘Oh Christ,’ the driver said. ‘Oh Christ, what have you done?’ He looked from one to the other; to the bearded man and then the one with the torch.
‘I had to stop him.’
‘But you’ve killed him.’
‘Shut the fuck up. If it hadn’t been for you we wouldn’t be in this mess. You don’t get out of this, you of all people. We’re all in this together.’
The torch was still working. After a shake or two, it came on again, its beam harsh in the driver’s wet face. His lip was bleeding where the man called Paul had grasped at him. He bent over the body. ‘Maybe – maybe there’s something we can do.‘ He touched the man’s head and felt something warm and sticky. ‘Oh Jesus!’ he said and stepped back in haste.
‘Hold it!’ the bearded man said. His voice was a hoarse whisper. They turned towards him. ‘Listen!’
A car was coming slowly up the road. They heard it stop a little distance away. There was the sound of doors closing and then a woman’s voice.
‘There’s some kind of light.’
A man spoke. ‘Look, we’ve dialled 999. I think we should get out of here. You don’t know what this is. It could be anything.’
The bearded man moved first. He snatched the torch back and turned it off, then he moved swiftly to the front of the wrecked car and kicked the headlamp in, thinking that he should have done that earlier. The blackness of the night enveloped them.
The sound prompted the woman’s cautious voice. She called down. ‘Hello – is anyone there?’
No light up on the road. They had no torch; that was good. There was just their voices, coming steadily nearer.
‘I’ll bring the car up a bit and get the headlights on,’ they heard the woman say.
Sensible. Damn her.
‘Look, do you not think we should just go?’ her companion said. There was something else now.
They began to hear the frantic whooping of emergency sirens in the distance. Vehicles were moving fast. Police. An ambulance. Sounds and rhythms colliding.
‘Christ, we have to get out of here quickly,’ the bearded man said, ‘get back to the road further on up where we can’t be seen. I don’t fancy walking out into the arms of a couple of do-gooder rescuers. Let’s move.’ He turned.
‘The girl.’ The voice stopped him. ‘What if she’s not dead?’
‘Oh, she’s dead all right. But what do you want – to make sure? Finish her off, too, then stay around and get caught? After that?’
They glanced towards where the body of the man called Paul lay. In the gloom they had to strain their eyes to make out its shape.
The sound of the emergency vehicles was getting louder. That would mask any noise they made as they picked their way through the undergrowth but it meant they did not have a lot of time.
‘Come on,’ the bearded man said.
‘I can’t – I can’t – I can’t – I can’t.’
The driver fell on his knees beside the body again, quivering in the grip of panic.
Their fear lent them strength. He was bigger and heavier than they were, but they grabbed him by the shoulders and almost plucked him from the ground, dragging him along with them until he was on his feet.
In the embracing darkness the brambles scratched at their faces and pulled at their clothes.
The man with the beard struggled forward, his mind reeling, scenes of unbelievable horror playing in fast forward across his brain.
How had it come to this?
Only a short time ago he had been looking forward to tomorrow. They had been talking about it, celebrating, drinking champagne, doing a few lines of coke, in privileged and comfortable privacy, contemplating a future of power and influence. Then, in an instant, everything had changed. One foolish, lunatic act had seen to that.
And now there was murder.
The woman. If only she had not come.
She had been brought along on a whim and her very presence had led to their doom. As simple as that.
He was not a superstitious man, not normally, not paranoid like some people, obsessed with fate and destiny. But right now, it was hard not to think like that, impossible not to focus on her as the cause of their destruction.
He looked back in the direction of the car and hoped she was dead too. The bitch.
That was the coke talking, agitating him. He shook his head to clear it. He had been in tough spots before. He had to think straight.
‘Go carefully,’ he said, out of breath. ‘Try not to tear anything. We can’t leave traces of clothing for them to find.’
In five minutes they made it to a solid stone wall that separated them from the road. It was not high but they had to help each other over it. There were a couple of slippery false starts but eventually they were on firm ground again.
They stood with their heads pounding from the exertion, their bodies trembling because of the awfulness of what they had done. They were soaked, their shoes were useless and their trousers were caked to their legs by soggy mud.
On the road down below them the sirens were louder. They tried to get their bearings.
‘I think I’m going to be—’ the driver began, and vomited the rest of the sentence.
And then they saw their car, a hulking shape in the dark only a few yards in front of them. Their route had taken them right to it.
It was hardly what you would call luck but it would do.
The driver held out the keys. His hand was shaking. ‘Somebody else take these,’ he said, half-falling into the back. ‘I can’t drive.’
‘All right, I will,’ the man with the beard decided. He put the torch on the floor beside him. ‘We’ll ditch this along the way.’
He started the engine. The big car was quiet, almost silent. He drove very slowly at first, with no lights, so that no one would see them or hear them. Within moments they were gone.
No one had spotted them. Those two people on the road would say something about hearing a noise and they would mention seeing a light but everyone would be preoccupied with the bodies and the operation to remove them and the car.
They had left footprints, three sets in the muddy ground, but no one would know to look for them. It would not be until the postmortem examination of the man’s body that the truth of how he died would be revealed and by that time it would be too late. The feet of the ambulance men and the police and possibly the fire service too, if the woman’s body had to be cut free, would do a thorough job of erasing all traces of their presence.
So would the rain.
The big wipers swept it from the windscreen.
‘Where are we going?’ A sickly odour came with the question. ‘What are we—’
‘Shut up,’ the driver said. ‘We’ll talk about it back at the house.’
He thought frantically as he drove. They had got away with it. For now.
But if the girl was not dead?
It did not bear thinking about.
He shivered as the truth of it gripped him.
They had committed murder. Brutal, bloody murder. Nothing could alter that fact. They could not bring him back to life; what was done was done.
He fought a wave of fear for a moment, trying to shrug off the dreadful images. What happened now was what was important; how to survive this thing was what mattered.
He pressed his foot firmly on the accelerator, hastening away in the darkness to whatever lay ahead.