Fairwood (a suspense mystery thriller) (4 page)

She turned away, looked out towards the road, a chipped back-lane that cut a winding path through the green country. Now he
was
a murderer, he had killed a man in cold blood. He hadn’t intended to do it, had rushed to pull the trigger when he felt Pandora had been threatened, but he had done it nonetheless. She could live with it, she could accept it for the mistake it was, but she doubted he would ever be the same.

“No decent music in there?” Dexter glanced across at her, his eyes half on the road, his thoughts back on the present.

She shook her head.

“I could sing for you if you want?” he offered with a dimpled grin.

She sniggered, shook her head. “I’ll pass, thank you.”

“You’re missing out.”

“I’m not. I’ve heard you in the shower,” she sighed heavily, gave him another brief giggle as he turned a grin towards the road. “Where are we going then?”

“Like I said and like we planned: somewhere to lie low.”

“But, where?”

He shrugged, scrunched up his face. “There’s bound to be somewhere around here.”

“Another place like the bar back there? With a dozen dumb-fuck locals looking for rape, torture and reward?”

He shrugged again.

“Hm,” she glared at him.

He turned to her, saw the annoyance in her stare. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” he expressed.

“How about, ‘I’ve arranged a flight out of here,’ or ‘I have a friend who’s going to let us stay at his place until things blow over’.”

“I wouldn’t trust anyone to hole us up with such a big reward hanging over us,” he paused, contemplated. “And I don’t have any friends.”

A smile fought annoyance on her face and eventually won. “Fair enough,” she conceded. “A drive into nowhere it is then.”

***

She’d fallen asleep. She dreamed of something unreachable; a desperate urge to grasp that which couldn’t be held. She had no idea what, she thought it might have been human, might have been someone she loved -- probably Dexter -- but she couldn’t remember a thing when her eyes opened.

She felt like her first boyfriend, Steve Rowling, was there. She wasn’t sure it was him, but what little images she retained when she woke reminded her of him. His pimpled face pleaded with her, begged her, teased her and then tried it on with her. He had always been a strange one and she’d never been sure what she saw in him. She was young, sixteen bordering on seventeen, and desperate for her first dip into the dating pool. He was the first boy that came along, the first boy to truly appreciate her newfound curves and the beauty that had blossomed from a fairly average face. He was two years older than her, spent a lot of his time drinking and taking drugs, but he doted on her and she found his wild side -- the drug-taking, heavy-drinking side that often saw him arrested for reckless behaviour -- intriguing. The perfect antidote to a bland adolescence.

She woke when the car thumped heavily over a broken swatch of road. Her body jolted, her mind snapped away from the ethereal images, back into the grey reality. She mumbled something, probably something from the dream, but when it departed her lips it vanished from her memory. She caught Dexter looking at her, frowning with tilted eyebrows that looked like colliding swords.

“Strange dreams?”

“You could say that.” She stretched, touched the roof of the car with the palms of her outstretched hands. Yawned deeply. She looked out through the windscreen, the road was patched and potholed, a carnage of small craters and pockmarks, like the face of an acne ridden teenager. The road was barely big enough for two cars to squeeze alongside each other and was flanked either side by thick hedgerows, beyond which lay an abundance of fields.

“Where are we?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I checked the map a while back,” he said with a nod to the back seat where an Atlas lay strewn. “I stopped to have a look whilst you were muttering to yourself. Couldn’t really figure out where we are.”

“I said you should have brought the Sat-nav,” she said.

He glared at her. She had mentioned it, more than once, but he hated it. Twice it had taken him into the middle of nowhere, another time it insisted that he take a shortcut over what was clearly a large lake and yet another time it simply froze on him, leaving him stranded. He wasn’t a gadget man, he hated the things -- he had a mobile phone but not one capable of doing anything more than making phone calls or sending messages, and even that was a stretch. He had a laptop as well, Pandora had insisted, but he never used it.

He had grown up in abject poverty on a crumbling farm. A manual labourer from an early age. His mother was a homemaker; she was there to cook, clean and look after the children and feed what few animals they had. His father was a worker, toiling the land, caring for the livestock. His two brothers were farmhands. They went to school and stayed for the allotted time, but this was in an age where the only school computers were big, clunky machines and the only work done on them was word processing.

“There’ll be a town around here somewhere. A little village perhaps,” he said confidently. “Somewhere to keep our head down; figure things out.”

“How are we going to keep our heads low?” she asked. “This is the twenty-first century, not everyone is as backward as you, you know. They have televisions, computers, even radios. Our names, descriptions and faces will be everywhere.”

“Things are different in these places,” he insisted. “They’re farming folk. They don’t have this fancy broadband internet--”

“
Fancy broadband internet
?” she guffawed. “Oh my god, you’re like my granddad.”

“The lines aren’t installed this far out,” he continued, unperturbed.

“But they have television, phones…” she trailed off.

He shrugged again. “Then we cross our fingers and hope they don’t watch TV and don’t phone the police if they do.”

“Hmm,” she mumbled, unconvinced.

“Do you have a better idea?” he wanted to know.

“We could at least try a disguise,” she suggested.  “A wig, some make-up, some hair dye...anything. I mean we’re wearing the same clothes in the photofits they have of us, hardly master criminals are we?”

He looked at her, gave a sharp nod of his head. He knew they were lucky to have lasted as long as they did inside the bar before anyone spotted them. Their faces were already strewn across the country, anyone who read the newspapers or watched the national news would have spotted them in a heartbeat. Now that they had killed someone their infamy would explode; no one in the country would fail to recognise them.

“We’ll see what we can do.”

***

They had been driving for a couple of hours before they stopped. A bright afternoon had steadily given way to a dull evening, now the skies were grey and ready for rain.

They stopped at a petrol station, a grim and dilapidated spectre of a building that wedged itself unceremoniously against the green and glorious countryside. The wheels bounced uncomfortably over the uneven entry as they parked by the pumps, watched through a large screen window in the building ahead by an apathetic youngster in a baseball cap.

“Is it just me or does this feel very…
Deliverancey
to you?” Pandora wondered, her eyes on the man who watched her with his blank and empty eyes.

Dexter gave her a quick grin, “Wait in the car,” he told her. “But if you hear banjo music, run.”

She scowled at him. “Fuck you. I’m coming with you.”

He laughed softly and clambered out of the car with Pandora behind him. “You fill up,” he said, nodding to the pumps, “meet me inside.”

He found a wealth of crap inside the petrol station, from ready meals and flowers to books and deodorant. He also found a selection of hats and, in case that failed, a large pair of scissors. They’d never recognise Pandora without her gloriously golden locks, but it would take a skilled mortician to recognise
him
if he told her to cut them off.

They never would have had this problem if they’d shown more tact during the robberies. They tried: on the first job they wore balaclavas, but they had taken them off during the mad dash to their getaway vehicle. The CCTV cameras had followed them, tracked them from the stores, through the streets and into the car. The resulting images, of them sitting inside the car, embracing in a victory celebration -- of Pandora’s tussled hair as she peeled off the blackened veil on the run to the car, of her wide and beautiful smile inside the car -- had been enough to propel them into notoriety. After that it didn’t matter, they both enjoyed the thrill even more when they had a fan base.

There were only three aisles inside the petrol station, crammed with all of life’s un-necessities. He kept his head turned away from the clerk as he slalomed through, making sure to look the other way whenever in sight. It didn’t really matter, he would have to pay for the petrol soon enough and would be seen, he was just buying time, praying that the dim-witted clerk didn’t recognise him.

He heard the jangle of the door opening and closing, felt Pandora creep up behind him. “You can put those fucking scissors back,” she whispered hotly in his ears.

“What about the hats?” he wondered, doing a quick model for her. They were all cheap and tacky, the fedoras wouldn’t suit even the most style less of gangsters and the baseball caps were emblazoned with promotional and marketing logos, but they would do their job until they could find something better. He picked up a handful and bought some cheap ready meals. They hadn’t eaten since the morning, before setting out from the bed and breakfast that had been their home for a few days -- owned by an old couple, crazy and senile enough not to realise they were harbouring criminals. He sent Pandora back to the car whilst he strode up the till. She would be recognised, he wouldn’t.

The clerk watched him as he approached, he seemed to be weighing him up, admiring his height as his disinterested eyes traced every inch of it. Dexter smiled at him as he placed the items on the counter. The youngster held his smile, didn’t return it. He looked down at the items, then at Dexter.

Dexter felt his heart quicken. The kid knew who he was, he was moments away from outing him, from ripping out a weapon and threatening to hold him until the police came. They didn’t have these problems in the past, when they started very few people recognised them, if Pandora made a few slight tweaks to her hair that was enough for the world to pass by unnoticed and uncaring. They had a fan base, a world of people desperate for a glimpse, people who tweeted, texted and talked about them, but they could walk straight past one of them -- as he was sending one of his pleading, obsessive texts to the other pleading obsessives -- and they wouldn't batter an eyelid. Everyone recognised their photographs, everyone paid attention to the media, but few actually perceived what was going on around them.

He clenched his fists, prepared for another confrontation. He squeezed his eyes shut, saw the world turn red beyond the tightened lids and then sprung them open again, ready to launch on the defensive.

The kid was calmly running the items through the till. His eyes no longer on Dexter, his attention back on his own bland thoughts.

He released a long sigh, then decided to test his luck. “Do you know if there’s anywhere to stay around here?”

The kid paused, looked up suspiciously. Dexter immediately regretted speaking. He wanted an answer to his question but part of him also wanted to test the youngster and his own innocence, as if by starting a conversation in a petrol station he was officially declaring to the world that he wasn't a fugitive, because that’s what normal people did.

The youngster held his eyes a moment longer then looked back at the goods, continuing to run them through. “There’s a town a few miles down the road,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone who hated every moment of their job and every person that it forced them to interact with. “Fairwood. Small, can’t miss it though.”