Benny Price was beside himself with rage. Shock too, but mostly rage. ‘You’re supposed to be dead!’
Hazel just looked at him, stupidly, too confused, too stunned to react.
‘I looked it up,’ insisted Price. ‘On the internet. I looked up how long it would take. There’s been plenty of time. He should be dead by now. You’ – he glared accusingly at Saturday – ‘should be dead.’
All Hazel could think to ask was, ‘Why?’
He stared at her as if it was a silly question. ‘For you.’
‘What?!!’
‘Miss Best – Hazel – everything I’ve done has been for you. For us. Because some things are too important to let other people stand in the way. People who do have to be … moved.’
‘Moved? You tried to kill him,’ cried Hazel. ‘For us? There is no Us.’
‘Don’t say that,’ said Benny Price, half a growl, half a whine. ‘You saved my life. How does a man begin to repay that? With presents? Well, yes, that was easy enough. Presents little enough to be left on your doorstep, too small to raise eyebrows. I know you have to be careful about accepting gifts. But wine and chocolates were never going to say everything I wanted to say to you. So I left you something better at the shopping centre.’
It took until then for Hazel to fully comprehend what he was saying, and what it meant. He was saying that he’d murdered Trucker Watts. If he’d murdered Trucker, he’d murdered Gillian Mitchell as well. He was her Brother Jam. He was also the stalker, who’d broken into Hazel’s house while she was asleep. He’d beaten Ash bloody, and now he’d done his damnedest to kill Saturday.
All of which meant that Benny Price, rambler and ornithologist, maker of rustic furniture and cornerstone of Norbold Council works department, was insane. Actually, clinically, insane.
Even before she met Ash, Hazel had dealt with people who had mental health issues. Every police officer has. At any given time, half the people in police custody ought to be under the care of a psychiatric nurse. Though they could be unpredictable, dangerous to themselves and those around them, she had become modestly adept at keeping them calm until they could be transferred to more suitable forms of care. She knew that, given appropriate treatment and support, many of them would be back in the community, living productive lives, a month later.
Benny Price was something different. She had never met anyone in whom the fires of insanity roared within so carefully defined a hearth. He seemed more than normal, boringly normal; but scratch the surface and there was … this … churning volcanically beneath. Somehow, the degree of control he was able to exercise when he had to made his outbursts of violence more, rather than less, frightening.
‘You killed Trucker Watts?’ whispered Hazel. Only to have him say it: she knew it was the truth.
‘After how he treated me on the train? In front of you? Of course I did,’ he said shortly. ‘He had no respect. He didn’t deserve to live.’
‘And Gillian Mitchell?’
‘Yes.’ He vented a little sigh. ‘I rather regret that, now. She was my sister, you know – the only family I had left. I was fond of her. But she said … she said …’
‘What did she say, Benny?’ asked Hazel softly.
‘Lies. Terrible, hurtful lies. She said it was all in my head. You and me. She said I had to stop pestering you. She said an attractive young professional woman would have friends of her own and wouldn’t be interested in me. She said, if I didn’t leave you alone, she’d warn you about me. Tell you what I was like. Tell you not to trust me, that I’d end up hurting you. She said she had all the proof she needed on her computer.’
‘The neighbours heard shouting.’
‘I lost my temper,’ admitted Price. ‘So did she. She told me to get out of her house. Like there was something special about it – like I wasn’t good enough for Park Crescent! I have a nice house too. You’ve seen it. She was my sister, but she’d no right to tell me what to do. She’d no right to come between you and me.’
Hazel ignored that. ‘So you hit her?’
‘She asked me to hang a picture for her. I brought my tools in from the Land Rover. Then we argued, and almost before I knew it, I’d hit her with the hammer.’ He reached into the backpack again. ‘Not this one. It’s a decent enough hammer, but the balance isn’t as good as my old one. But it wasn’t safe to keep it, not with the police looking for a murder weapon. So I dropped it in the canal and bought this. There was a sale on at the hardware shop.’
There was no response Hazel could usefully make. ‘And you attacked my friend Gabriel, and now’ – she looked down at Saturday, hovering on the very edge of consciousness – ‘this. I don’t understand why you’d want to hurt me like this.’
Price’s eyes were astonished. ‘I don’t want to hurt you! I told you – I love you. I want what’s best for you. These so-called friends, this one and the other one, they’re not worthy of you. The other one’s an idiot. He talks to his dog. And this one’s just street trash. He seems to have come by some money somewhere – stole it, probably – but he’s still basically just street trash. I don’t like to criticise, Miss Best, but it was poor judgement, letting him move in with you. People will talk.’
‘Benny, you tried to kill him,’ she gasped. ‘To avoid gossip?’
‘You have to have respect,’ Price retorted stiffly. ‘If you don’t have respect, you don’t have anything.’
She was desperately aware that time was passing, that Saturday might not have much of it left, that her coat might not be enough to prevent him succumbing to hypothermia, and that if Benny Price decided to use his new hammer to hurry things along she would not be able to stop him. But that was the point. While he was talking, he wasn’t hurting anyone. If he wanted to talk, she should encourage him.
But first … ‘Benny, I need your coat. Take it off.’
He started to. ‘You must be cold,’ he said solicitously.
Hazel stared at him in disbelief. ‘It’s not for me!’
Price looked at her as if she’d disappointed him somehow, and shrugged his arms back into the sleeves. ‘No.’
‘He’s going to die.’
‘He’s meant to die.’
‘But why?’
‘I told you. This friendship of yours, it’s not healthy. I thought, this way I could get him out of your life and earn your gratitude at the same time.’
‘Gratitude?’ It was a shriek of sheer incredulity.
Price nodded seriously. ‘If he went missing, you’d want him found. I could take you to him. Of course I could – I knew where I’d left him. And then, I really wanted you to see this spot. That’s why I sent you the photograph. I’ve always thought it was a bit magical, and I wanted to share it with you.’
‘You wanted to show me your special place because you’d killed my friend there?’
Price gave a faintly censorious frown. ‘You weren’t supposed to know that was me. He was missing and I found him: that was all you needed to know. You’d still have been grateful, even though we found him too late.
‘I should probably have left him a bit longer,’ he said pensively, as if contemplating a cake that hadn’t risen. ‘You took me by surprise, stopping me on the road. I wasn’t going to call you until later. Then everything would have worked out fine.
‘All the same, it should have been long enough,’ he added irritably. ‘Especially since he spent last night tied to a tree. That one.’ He pointed. ‘I put him in the waterfall first thing this morning, after I’d read up about hypothermia on the internet.’
Hazel was struggling to stay calm. She knew this man could kill her, was deranged enough to beat her head in with his nice new hammer despite his protestations of affection. Her best chance was to keep him talking until help found them. Ash knew where she was, at least roughly. When she didn’t return, he would …
Well, he would call DCI Gorman; and Gorman would find out where the area car was, and send it up the Wittering road if it wasn’t too busy; and eventually, when she still hadn’t reappeared, the crew would make a desultory search for her, at least as far into the wood as they could go without getting their socks wet.
She was so on her own.
She wasn’t on her own. If she had been, it would have been easy. Basic training had covered situations like that. The first resort, when confronted with a dangerous man, is always to run away and get help; if you can, and if you can do it without dereliction of duty. The second resort is to try talking him down. The third and last is to fight.
Well, she couldn’t run. She couldn’t carry Saturday, and she couldn’t leave him behind because she knew what that would mean. Talking was the next best option. If she could understand something of what had led them here, perhaps she could find a way for them to leave.
‘Benny,’ she said, as reasonably as she could manage through chattering teeth, ‘it isn’t too late to get this sorted. I can help – I will help – but I need your help first. I need you to lend me your coat. If I can warm him up, there’ll be time for us to talk.’
She didn’t actually know that. Saturday had gone very quiet again, very still, too cold even to shiver. She couldn’t lift him but she pulled him halfway onto her knees, to get him at least partly off the wet ground. It wasn’t enough. The icy chill of him was striking through her clothes. She thought he was going to die here in her arms, but she didn’t dare ask too much too soon for fear Price would turn on her. One blow mightn’t kill her, but if she woke up with a ringing headache she’d find Saturday dead beside her.
Price was looking at the boy. Hazel held her breath. But then he shook his head. ‘No.’
‘If he dies, there’s no going back.’
‘There’s no going back now.’
Hazel’s heart sank. She’d hoped he hadn’t realised that. But there was no alternative but to keep trying. ‘It’s different, don’t you see? Trucker Watts threatened you with a knife. And your sister – well, brothers and sisters fight all the time. People will understand that you were upset, and angry, and you struck out without meaning to.
‘But if Saturday dies, that’s premeditated murder. You planned it. You brought him here, you tied him up and you left him here overnight; and then you came back and dragged him into icy water, and left him to die. And even after that, you could have helped me save him and wouldn’t. No one will understand that, Benny. I don’t, and no one else will either.’
‘Really?’ He leaned forward, peering into her face. ‘You still don’t understand that I love you? That, beside that, nothing else is important? That, whatever it takes to be with you, I’ll do it?’
‘You think murdering my friends is going to make me love you back?!!’
Price straightened up with a snort. ‘You’re just being silly now. Girls are so silly. My sister was, Miriam was, and even you are, a bit.’
‘Maybe I am,’ she said desperately. ‘Maybe I am being dense. But I want to understand. Benny, tell me about Miriam. Was she your girlfriend? Your’ – she swallowed, got out the lie – ‘last girlfriend?’
‘She was.’ His voice softened for a moment with the memory. ‘I thought the world of Miriam. We’d been going out for a couple of months, and then I took her to the joinery shop to show her where I worked.’ All the gentleness leached out of his voice and bitterness filled the vacuum. ‘The lads there, my so-called friends … Dear God, how they laughed! The jokes, the vulgar jokes! As if there was something intrinsically absurd about me wanting what other men take for granted. Ho ho, who’d have thought old Benny had it in him? How do you get on with her guide dog, Benny? Never mind, Benny, just our bit of fun. Your lady-friend doesn’t mind, do you, dear?
‘But she did mind. They frightened her. They made her think I was some kind of a freak, and it frightened her. And she left me. She left me.’ The heartbreak of it was like a chasm in his voice.
‘That was very wrong of them,’ said Hazel quietly. She was fighting hard to keep control of herself. She couldn’t hope to control the situation if she couldn’t control her own emotions. ‘You must have been very upset.’ Keep him talking, said her inner Sergeant Mole, training supervisor. Make him think you’re on his side.
Benny Price barked a mirthless laugh. ‘You know what they say: Don’t get mad, get even. I burned the place down. They were old men, some of them, they’d never find work again. I thought, Let’s see you laugh that off!’
It was dignity every time, Hazel realised. It was when he thought people weren’t giving him the respect he was entitled to. Then he stopped being polite and helpful and became vengeful instead. The workshop, Trucker, his sister: they’d all threatened his view of himself as someone quietly important. That was what he couldn’t tolerate. And Ash, and Saturday? He’d felt slighted because she was fond of them instead of him. And he’d thought that making Saturday disappear, and then finding him for her – too late, but he couldn’t be blamed for that, could he? – would make her see him in a more heroic light.
It was madness. Of course it was madness. But she had to work with his madness if she hoped to get her friend out of here alive.
A whisper of sound made her look down. Saturday’s blue lips were moving again. She leaned closer.
‘You need to go.’
Hazel knew what he was saying. She knew he knew what he was saying. She shook her head. ‘I won’t leave you.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘It matters to me.’ She gave it one more try. ‘Benny, who knows what the future holds for you and me? I think you’re a basically decent man who’s not been very well, who maybe needs a bit of help. Somehow we need to get past this, and the other stuff that’s been happening, but after that – well, we can talk about it. See where that takes us. Stranger things have happened.’
She was trying not to tell actual lies, not to make promises she had no intention of keeping. She knew that wasn’t as important as keeping Benny Price from venting his rage on her and the boy helpless on her knees; but still, she didn’t relish trading on Price’s regard for her. ‘So what do you say? Give me your coat, and help me get him back to the cars, and let’s see where things go from there.’
He might have gone for it. There was a moment, and Hazel saw it in his eyes, when he might have been persuaded. But the moment passed. He shook his head. ‘I can’t. You must see that – I can’t. The only way I can be safe is if he stays here, and you come with me.
‘Hazel, I can make this right.’ He was pleading with her, begging her. There was something almost childlike about it, as if he really believed he could escape the consequences of his actions if he crossed his fingers and wished. ‘I can make you forget about him, forget about everything. I can make you so happy. No one will ever love you the way I love you. No one will ever be prepared to do as much for you as I’ve done – as I will do in the future, I swear to God. All you have to do is come with me. Leave him, and come with me. Please. Oh Hazel, please do what I ask. I promise you’ll never regret it.’ He stretched out his free hand, the one that wasn’t holding the hammer.
What was she going to say then? There’s no way you can be safe, you’re never going to walk away from this? When you leave here, you’re going to Broadmoor? Saying that would leave him with nothing to lose. She might as well beat Saturday’s head in herself.
Which left what? She wouldn’t run. She might be able to stay ahead of Price – she wasn’t sure, but she might – and Saturday might survive the hypothermia long enough for her to bring help. But he wouldn’t survive the kind of savage attack that had killed Trucker Watts and Gillian Mitchell. In his current state, he wouldn’t survive the kind of beating Ash had taken. She could keep Price talking, but if they talked for too long the result would be the same. And she didn’t believe she could defeat a fit, powerful man in a stand-up fight on his own ground.
In the end, all she could do was what she perceived to be her duty, as a police officer and a human being. She would look after Saturday as best she could, and what Benny Price chose to do about that was up to him.
Hazel pulled Saturday’s sodden T-shirt off and pressed her own sweater, warm from her body, against him. She rearranged her coat around his thin shoulders. She pulled the polo-neck she’d worn under the warm sweater free of her belt.
Price was watching her every move. He couldn’t figure out what she was doing.
She pulled the polo-neck over her head as well. The cold air flayed her cringing skin. With only a momentary hesitation, she unhooked her bra and dropped it on the ground.
Saturday whispered, ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to warm you up the only way I can,’ Hazel said flatly. ‘With my own body-heat.’ She pulled him higher in her arms and folded him against her, bare flesh to bare flesh, packing her clothes around his back and flanks. It was like hugging a salmon fresh from the fishmonger’s slab.
Benny Price was gibbering in mounting fury. ‘Him? Him? I’m not good enough for you, but you do this for him?’
All she could think of to say was, ‘I do what I can. And you’ll do what you must.’
She sensed rather than saw the movement as the burgeoning rage took him and his arm swung up. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and held Saturday against her, shaking with cold and terror.
Away in the woods across the stream, above the sound of the waterfall, she heard a crack like a branch breaking, and Benny Price fell back into the leaf-litter. When Hazel finally opened her eyes, he was spread-eagled on the damp ground, the hammer still clasped in one hand, a single bead of blood in the centre of his forehead.
Saturday whispered, ‘What happened?’
‘Someone shot him.’ She wouldn’t have believed it if the evidence hadn’t been there beside her. Still for long seconds she didn’t dare move, in case somehow she’d misread the situation. But then relief began bubbling in her blood like champagne when the cork comes out. Another minute and she would either laugh out loud or start crying.
‘Good.’
And it was at that point, when the danger was past and her moment for glory had passed with it, that Patience trotted out of the undergrowth, scimitar tail waving an amiable greeting. Lassie would never have missed her entrance like that.
But the sight of the white lurcher cheered Hazel immensely. If Patience was here, Ash wasn’t far away; and though he probably wasn’t up to scrambling through this wood right now, she was confident he’d have found other people who were. Including, presumably, the marksman. She called out a shaky greeting. ‘Here. We’re over here.’
Saturday’s breath of a voice asked, ‘Do you want your clothes back now?’
Hazel was tempted but shook her head. ‘You need them more than I do. I’ll risk shocking the search party.’ For a moment she eased her bear-hug and reared back far enough to catch his eye. ‘And as for you …’
The boy didn’t know where to look. Hazel thought she detected the faintest of blushes on his cold white cheek. ‘What?’
‘Think of this as your Christmas present.’