EIGHTY-TWO

It would take Quinn a while yet to check her traffic cams, and Elias had no time to waste. He went over to the BMW, placed a hand upon its bonnet. Stone cold. They’d been gone a while. He shone his torch around. The woods were thick but the trampled-down nettles, ferns and grasses showed which way they’d gone. He cupped his hands around his mouth, called out Anna’s name. An owl hooted. Another bird flapped away. He gave it a few moments then called out Merchant’s name instead. Silence fell once more. He tried to think it through. They’d been on good terms earlier. They were surely here in search of the source of the silver pennies, rather than for anything more sinister. No reason, then, to fear that Anna was in imminent peril.

Yet he feared it nonetheless.

He took out his phone and called for backup, but the nearest station was miles away, and it would be at least several minutes before anyone arrived. He couldn’t bring himself to wait. The trail was easy enough to follow, the path of least resistance made even more so by the freshly broken branches and the stamped down undergrowth. He paused to call out their names every few seconds, keeping his voice as calm as he could. He kept thinking of the brutal injury done to Dunstan Warne. He’d never forgive himself if something similar happened to Anna. A tangle of brambles blocked his path, such as it was. He edged around it and saw a pair of short pine planks lying beside a hole in the ground. He knelt and shone his torch down an open shaft, its beam glittering off the ridged rungs of an aluminium ladder whose bottom two sections had been pushed high up off the floor. This baffled him for a moment until he realised a possible reason why. Merchant had pushed them up from beneath in order to trap Anna down there, which implied that not only did she now know the truth about him, but that he knew she knew it too.

He got his phone back out to call in his precise coordinates. Then he tucked his torch into his waistband and set off, pushing down the lower sections of the ladder with his foot as he reached them. Metal shrieked against metal, announcing his arrival like a faulty doorbell. He carried on anyway, stepping off the bottom rung onto a rubble mound in a pillared hallway. There were footprints on either side, one set of which were markedly smaller than the others. Those had to be Anna’s. To his right, they went away and then came back again. To his left, they only went away. That was where she was. He took a deep breath for calm and courage, then – holding his torch out ahead of him – he set off.