Hot Pursuit (18 page)

Nick stroked her face. ‘Please don’t cry, and don’t worry. I’ll try and find a way to let you know that I’m all right, I promise, but in return you must promise not to come looking for me or to try and contact me. Do you understand? Is it a deal?’

Maggie stared at him. ‘But –’ she began.

He shook his head. ‘But nothing –’

Maggie stared at him, unable to say the words, although it appeared Nick took her silence as agreement. Picking up the phone he rang directory enquiries and a few minutes later tapped in the number of Minehead police station.

‘Hello? Can I speak to the Duty Sergeant, please?’ he said, sounding remarkably calm.

Maggie heard the low rumble of a reply at the far end of the line and then Nick said, ‘Yes, of course. My name is Nick Lucas; please could you tell him that it’s urgent.’

Maggie couldn’t bear to hear Nick trying to explain what was going on. Where on earth do you start to try and tell a stranger how your life has been torn apart, and how the very people meant to help appeared to be the ones who were out to get you? Said out loud it sounded mad and paranoid and beyond the realms of reason, so while Nick waited to be connected Maggie got out of the car and made her way slowly up into the village, eyes still full of tears. How the hell had she got herself into a mess like this?

The cottages of Selworthy with their deep thatched roofs, eyebrow dormers and tall chimneys were almost too picturesque. It looked as if nothing ever ruffled Selworthy. It was a place Maggie had been to time and time again over the years, exquisitely beautiful, with gardens basking in full bloom in the summer sunlight.

The peace of the place made Maggie ache with a pain she had no name for. It was still quite early in the day but even so the village had a few walkers and tourists exploring and enjoying the views.

Waiting was hard. Maggie sat on a low wall and watched the world go by for a while, her
mind clouded by random thoughts, fears and ideas, until at last she saw Nick making his way slowly up the hill towards her. He smiled and lifted a hand in greeting. As Maggie’s mind focused on him she realised with a terrible sense of certainty that she could really love this man given half a chance. Really, truly love him. How cruel was that?

‘And how did it go?’ she said, making an attempt to sound cheerful.

‘Well, it took a while to get through – but the long and short of it is that they want me to come in to the police station as soon as possible.’

‘That’s got a familiar ring to it,’ she said with a wry smile.

Nick sighed. ‘Don’t. I don’t know what else to do, Maggie. The guy was sceptical at first but then they transferred the call through to someone higher up the food chain. It took a while to make them fully understand what was going on, and then the penny seemed to drop at their end – and I don’t know –’ Nick held up his hands in surrender. ‘I don’t see that I have that many other choices.’

‘Okay,’ Maggie said as gently as she could. She could hear the uneasy, nervous edge in his voice. What was the point in torturing him over an already impossible situation? ‘In that case we had better get you back to town then. Is there anywhere you want to go or anything you’d like to do before you give yourself up?’ she asked.

Nick’s face broadened out into a grin. ‘Actually I can think of lots of things I’d like to do, but I’d prefer it if we had the chance to do them somewhere a little less public.’ Maggie blushed crimson and then he blushed, too. ‘Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have said that – it’s a bit presumptuous, and there is also the little matter of time. It just seems so unfair –’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Maggie.

‘The other thing is I’ve already told the police that I’d come in straight away.’ She looked up at him expectantly and he continued, ‘Actually it was their suggestion; they said the sooner I was under police protection, the better for everyone concerned.’

Maggie looked away. Easy for them to say.

‘So, tell me, Sherlock – did you get the number of Ms Morgan’s car?’ said Coleman in disgust when it became quite obvious that the away team had lost Nick Lucas and Maggie when they left the park.

‘I most certainly did, Sir,’ the man growled indignantly, and pulled out his notebook.

‘Good, well in that case,’ said Coleman, producing his mobile and tapping in a number. ‘Let me have it.’ And then into the phone he said, ‘I’d like to report a stolen vehicle please.’ Coleman spoke briskly into the handset. ‘Yes, about five minutes ago from the public car park outside
Blenheim Gardens, Minehead, Somerset. It’s a navy-blue Golf – registered I presume to one Ms Margaret Morgan. I want the occupants stopped and detained, my clearance codes are –’

At the far end of the line Dorothy Crow said very calmly, ‘You don’t need clearance codes with me, Danny. Not going well down there?’

Coleman snorted as he took the notebook from the boy’s hands. ‘You could say that. Hang on – he flipped through the pages past a doodle of a small cartoon dog that appeared to be winking. Bloody kids. ‘Have you got a pen there, Dorothy?’

‘I most certainly do – and I’ll have her car up and on the wire as soon as you put the phone down.’

Coleman sighed and read out the registration number.

‘Can you still see Bernie’s car?’ said Lesley, stretching up in her seat and peering myopically into the distance as they headed slowly through the centre of town.

‘I most certainly can,’ said Robbie confidently, his mood lifting considerably now that their prey was in plain sight. ‘And I plan to stick to that car like shit to a blanket until they pull over. You have got the video camera all ready, haven’t you?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Lesley, tapping the machine cradled in her lap. ‘I’ve been thinking, do you think we should phone in to the studio and let
them know where we are? Make sure they’re ready for any footage we pick up?’

Robbie shook his head. The last thing he wanted was to be pulled off the chase by that bloody harridan upstairs. ‘No, not yet. We’ll ring when we’ve got the whole thing on tape. I hope we can get enough for a half-decent segment – Bernie looks very uneasy at the moment, which could very well be to our advantage. Maybe we should corner him if the opportunity presents itself and push for an interview, after all his ex-wife did say he was very keen to talk to someone. You know what they say, confession is good for the soul, and those guys he’s with do look very dodgy – they can’t be up to any good.’

‘Who, the two men or Bernie?’

‘All of them by the looks of it,’ Robbie said confidently. ‘Although the two heavies he’s with look a cut above your average villain. I just wonder if Bernie has finally got himself in too deep – finally got in out of his depth. I’d like to be a fly on the wall in that car and hear what’s going down.’

Lesley pulled a face. She still wasn’t totally au fait with all the patois that went with the territory.

‘Going down – going on,’ he translated, ‘you know, what it is that they’re up to.’

Lesley nodded, ‘Oh right, yes, I’m with you. Me, too.’

In the silver-grey hire car Nimrod handed Bernie a Minto as they drove slowly up the main street and along the esplanade.

‘I could murder a hot dog,’ said Cain, looking out onto the busy seaside frontage. ‘Smell them onions.’

‘…a dark blue VW Golf, registration number Lema Foxtrot…’ the measured voice of the police controller on the radio scanner was busy saying, fading in and out and interspersed with regular beeps and crackles as the signal fluctuated, ‘…driven by a white female, medium height, mid-thirties, with dark hair; and male passenger, dark hair mid-thirties, approx six foot. All units are requested…’ Crackle, hiss, pop ‘…the occupants are to be stopped and detained…it is unlikely they will put up any resistance…’

‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Nimrod triumphantly, turning up the volume. ‘That’s them, we’ve got them. The control room are talking about Nick Lucas and –’ he jerked a thumb towards Bernie in the back seat, ‘– his ex-missus. They’ve come up on the police frequency – APB –’

Bernie grunted. ‘What the hell does that mean?’

‘Come on, Bernie, some kind of bad guy you turned out to be. All points bulletin. Coat man at the park must have some bloody clout to pull that off. In that case your missus and Lucas can’t have got too far away if they’re calling the local plod out to pick them up – and that heap your old
lady’s driving probably won’t go more than fifty. We just need to hang tight and wait to see who calls them in.’

The radio crackled furiously.

‘You’re going to take Lucas out with the law on the job?’ asked Cain in surprise.

Nimrod sighed. ‘Come on, who’s going to stop us? A couple of country coppers? The chances are if we can pick the call up early enough we’ll be there before them anyway – we’ll be in and out –’

‘– And home in time for tea and buns,’ concluded Cain.

Nimrod nodded. ‘Yeah, right – I couldn’t have put it better myself. We’ll play it by ear. All we have to do now is park up somewhere, wait and listen. Look over there – there’s a space.’

Robbie eased into another parking space, no more than a hundred yards away from Bernie and his companions. Within seconds Lesley had got the men in the sight of her telephoto lens and was clicking away.

‘So what are they doing?’ Robbie asked, frustrated, trying to persuade her to part with the camera by beckoning towards her.

Lesley, face screwed up in a mask of concentration, sighed. ‘It’s very difficult to tell from here but it looks to me as if they are listening to the radio.’

Robbie groaned. ‘The radio, what do you mean listening to the radio? Are you sure? What do you think they’re doing, taking part in a phone-in pop quiz?’

Lesley turned to stare at him. ‘You asked me what they were doing and I just told you.’ Her tone was icy.

Robbie sniffed. ‘There’s no need to get shirty with me, Lesley. I was only asking.’

Undeterred, Lesley held the camera back up to her eye. ‘Do you think, now that they’re parked up we should go over and confront him? I mean he’s a sitting duck over there –’

Robbie shook his head. ‘No, it would be far too easy for them to drive away; besides in my experience there is no such thing as a sitting duck. Who knows what we’ll catch them doing if we bide our time for a while longer. No, we’ll sit tight. I’d really like to see what they’re up to –’

‘But how are we going to know?’

Robbie grimaced; the woman really had no imagination at all. ‘We’re going to sit and we’re going to watch and meanwhile give me the camera and turn on the radio.’

‘What do you want to listen to?’

Robbie sighed. ‘I don’t
want
to listen to anything, I want you to go through all the stations until you find something that sounds as if those lot over there might want to listen to it.’

‘Right – only there is something on Woman’s
Hour I’d like to listen to later on if you don’t mind. I’ve been following the serial.’

Robbie glared at her and without another word Lesley pressed the buttons that would scan through the radio channels.

Maggie drove slowly away from Selworthy back towards Minehead town centre. The sea still reflected the unbroken cloudless blue above. The sun shone, the coastal strand edging the sweeping coastline looking for all the world like a golden collar, the rolling feminine lines of the Somerset landscape oddly accentuated by the white, tented skyline of the all-weather holiday resort down on the seafront. It was the most perfect summer’s day.

Below them Minehead was on holiday. Surrounded by great swathes of woodland, the seaside town basked in the morning sunlight and it was hard not to contrast Nick’s nightmarish-situation with the simple pleasures of families busy on an old-fashioned beach holiday.

Maggie slowed the car, wanting to delay the moment when it all finally ended. Alongside her Nick sat in total silence, his gaze apparently unfocused while his mind was who knows where.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. All in all it was a pretty stupid question but the best she could come up with under pressure.

Nick smiled, but it looked more like an instinctive reflex reaction rather than anything particularly positive. ‘Just thinking. You know –’, he mumbled.

Maggie knew only too well. ‘What happened with you and your wife?’ she said, as the traffic ahead of them slowed to a disgruntled crawl. ‘You said that you were married –’

Nick looked round as if trying to gather his thoughts back together. ‘Sorry?’

‘Your wife? There are so many things I don’t know about you, Nick, and I was just thinking –’

‘Do you ever do anything else?’

‘Occasionally,’ Maggie laughed.

‘So what is it you want to know?’

She smiled, trying to make light of the way she was feeling. ‘Everything I suppose.’

He lifted his shoulders in a gesture of resignation. ‘She left. Her name was, is, Anna – she’s a great person, small and blonde, very pretty in a pixie-ish, elfin way. Good family; likes to drive fast –’ He smiled as his mind flooded with images of his ex-wife.

Maggie waited. Maybe now wasn’t the right moment – but then again, if not now then when? ‘We met when we were working in the same restaurant. She was a student and I was – well, a
general dogsbody, I suppose. I’d just finished college.’ He stopped.

‘And?’

‘You are relentless, aren’t you?’ he said, wearily.

‘I prefer to think of myself as thorough. In a few minutes you are going to vanish out of my life forever. I need to put you into some sort of context. I have to try to make some kind of sense of what’s happened, what I feel –’

‘What possible sense can you make of it? It doesn’t make any sense,’ he protested. ‘I thought we’d already agreed on that?’

Maggie shrugged. ‘I know – which makes it all the more important that I try, so you fit somewhere in my head. I don’t know anything about you, Nick. I don’t know where you lived, where you grew up. Where you came from, what your restaurant was called – if you’ve got any brothers and sisters – nothing. And then,’ Maggie slowed down, aware that she was gabbling ‘– I was thinking how bad it must have been to lose everything and how it would have been easier if there were two of you, to share it.’ She paused; it wasn’t the most sensitive way to say what she meant and Maggie looked up at Nick to try and read the expression on his face, before adding very quietly, ‘I keep thinking how lonely it must be.’

‘You know what I think, Maggie? I think that you think too much –’ Moving closer, Nick gently
stroked her face with an open palm. ‘It’s a real shame that we didn’t meet years ago –’

Maggie shivered; his skin was warm and soft and almost too much to bear.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘But we have so little time – and I want to know, I want to understand.’

‘It feels as if being married to Anna was part of a totally different life now – like I watched it, not lived it. I’ve been moved from safe house to safe house over a dozen times in the last eighteen months – a couple of times in the middle of the night because there had been some sort of tip-off.’ Nick smiled reflectively. ‘Anna couldn’t have hacked it – don’t get me wrong, she is truly gorgeous and a good woman, and I loved her very much when we were married, but there was no slack with her. Things are either right or they’re wrong. On or off, up or down. No grey, no middle ground, no room for manoeuvre. When I first talked to her about the police bugging the restaurant, she thought I was totally and utterly mad. She warned me that it was a mistake – said that she didn’t want to get involved.

‘Then when things started to go wrong, she hated it – not that I blamed her for that, I hated it, too – but in the end she hated me for not listening to her and bringing our nice, bright, successful life crashing down around our ears. Maybe she was right – I don’t know, maybe if I’d just kept my head down and my mouth shut I’d
have saved myself a hell of a lot of trouble. I’m sure they would have found another way to nail the women.

‘Anna stuck it as long as she could, but in the end she left and I let her go. It felt as if I owed her that much; she was right – it was my fault that we were in the mess we were in.’ Nick’s last few words rattled out, like machine-gun bullets.

Maggie looked at him. ‘I’m so sorry. Weren’t you afraid that they’d target her?’

‘Up until the trial she was under police protection, too, but once I’d testified, or at least that is how it seemed – it was me they wanted. I don’t know, to be honest –’ Nick reddened as if she had caught him out. ‘It wasn’t that I didn’t care about what was happening to her, it was that everything was a blur. They moved me from place to place and her family shut me out, as if it had been me who was the criminal. I wasn’t able to contact her again and she didn’t try to contact me.’

‘Maybe she was frightened.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Do you miss her?’ Out loud it sounded crass but there was no way to take the words back.

Nick stared at her. ‘We’d been married for nine years – but I don’t blame her for running out on me if that’s what you mean. She was no good in a crisis. She was kind of deliciously ditzy – it was
one of the things I loved her for and one of the things that used to drive me mad about her. There is no way Anna could have coped with all this.’ Nick lifted his hands to encompass the muddle and fear of it all.

‘But you
were
happy? Before the bugging, I mean?’

‘I suppose so, we were okay. I know now that I wasn’t good at balancing things. I was building for the future, our future – but I suppose that at the same time I was excluding her from the present. I felt she ought to have understood that. So, no, it was already shaky, we’d both kind of lost sight of what we set out to do, maybe even why we were together. We were very different kinds of people. Anna liked things. How many things we had defined how successful, how happy we were. Looking back I don’t think I was supplying her with all the things she needed. But I felt that it was nothing that I couldn’t have put right – given the time.’

Nick sounded cool and distant; the wound may have scabbed over but the hurt certainly hadn’t gone. ‘So –’ he turned to Maggie, eyes bright with emotion. ‘Is that enough for the Maggie Morgan archive?’

‘I’m sorry. But part of me wants to know everything about you – and there isn’t any way to do that, is there? We’re out of time and there are so many things I’d like to know.’

He laughed, the atmosphere between them lightened by her candour. ‘Why am I not surprised? Do you actually know where this police station is?’

‘More or less – it’s not far now. Why, do you want to get away from me?’

‘What do you think?’

Maggie looked at him and shrugged. The trouble was that she couldn’t work out what Nick Lucas was thinking. She would need to know a whole lot more about him before she could say with any certainty what was going through his head, and now it looked like she wouldn’t ever get the chance.

‘…Golf saloon is currently travelling northbound on the A39, towards Minehead. It appears to be heading for the town centre –’

‘There we are. Bingo –’ said Nimrod, jabbing his finger towards the radio scanner. ‘That’s them. Which street did he say?’

Cain grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I’m already on the case.’

The car pulled quickly away from the kerb. In the back Bernie nearly choked on his Minto.

‘Here we go,’ said Nimrod, fastening his seat-belt.

‘What’s the plan?’ asked Cain, nosing his way back out into the stream of traffic.

‘Watch and wait, don’t you worry, we’ll have
our moment,’ said Nimrod. ‘I can feel it in my bones. Every dog has his day.’ He pulled the mobile out of his pocket and looked at the screen in case he had missed a text or a call from the Invisible Man.

For once Cain didn’t look so confident.

‘You feeling all right? What is it?’ asked Nimrod.

‘You want my honest opinion?’

Nimrod nodded.

‘It’s all getting too sticky for my liking. Too messy – what with him –’ Cain nodded over his shoulder, ‘– and the woman and the bloody fuzz and that bloke with the coat.’

Nimrod paused for a moment and then nodded. ‘Yeah, but I don’t really see what choice we have. We haven’t been stood down yet.’

‘Yeah, but – I dunno, it just doesn’t feel right. We’re sticking our necks out a long way with this one. Do you think it might be a trap?’

Nimrod stared at Cain in amazement; the idea hadn’t even crossed his mind. ‘No – I would have an inkling by now – no, I think it’s just bloody messy.’

Cain nodded, but the conversation had rattled Nimrod. It was the first time in their long and very profitable association that Cain had ever voiced any doubts about a hit. Nimrod sucked his teeth; it didn’t strike him as a good omen.

‘Tell you what,’ he said after a moment or two’s
consideration. ‘I could check in to see if there are any new orders.’

Cain shrugged. ‘Nah, you’re all right – they would have rung if there was a problem. All I’m saying is we need to watch our backs with this one. It don’t feel right.’

Nimrod unpeeled another sweet from its wrapper. ‘You know me well enough by now to know that I won’t see you wrong, don’t you?’

Cain nodded. ‘Yeah, I know, mate. I was just saying.’

‘We’ll find the pair of them and play it by ear.’

‘Sounds like a plan.’

‘But if there’s a clear shot…’ Nimrod began.

‘Goes without saying,’ said Cain, lifting a hand to thank the car behind him for letting him change lanes.

‘Look, Robbie. They’re moving off,’ said Lesley anxiously. ‘Quick. They’re pulling away.’

‘What?’ said Robbie, who had taken over playing with the radio when it became patently obvious that Lesley was getting nowhere fast.

‘Bernie and those two men. They’re pulling away from the kerb–’

‘Damn,’ said Robbie. The automatic selector on the radio had just slipped past something that sounded quite promising onto some foreign station playing salsa. Robbie turned the key in the ignition and the engine kicked into life.

‘Try jiggling the knob backwards and forwards around where it is at the moment,’ he said, pulling out without looking.

The driver in the car behind beeped furiously; only to be rewarded by Robbie flipping him the middle finger. Bloody country drivers; couldn’t the man see that there was plenty of time for Robbie to pull out. If they’d been in London no one would have turned a hair. The man gesticulated back. Robbie pointedly ignored him, even when he drove right up to Robbie’s car and beeped again. After all, Robbie didn’t want to give the game away and let Bernie know that they were behind him. He glowered at the man in his rear-view mirror.

‘We’ve got them, Sir,’ said a voice in Coleman’s earpiece. ‘They’re coming back down into town even as we speak. Do you want us to get the uniformed mob to pull them over?’

Coleman considered for a few moments. He’d already been contacted by his office to let him know that Nick planned to come into the police station, should be simple enough. But then again he reminded himself that Nick Lucas had also planned a walk in Blenheim Gardens. God alone knew what was going through his mind. Coleman still hadn’t quite worked out why Nick had done a runner in the park; something had to have spooked him, but what? Add to that his vanishing
act from the cottage at West Brayfield and, to say the least, Coleman’s patience was wearing a little thin.

Coleman considered for a few seconds – maybe it had been the feds who had spooked Lucas, all done up in their nice Sunday suits. Who knows, maybe Nick would feel safer if his rescuers arrived in familiar uniforms.

‘Sounds like a good idea to me. Nothing rough – just blue lights, a little assistance, and this time if he tries to scarper for God’s sake get someone to bloody-well stop him.’

‘Right you are, Sir. Do you want us to bring the woman in as well?’

Coleman considered the possibilities. His first instinct was to say no. The fewer people involved in this the better. Although he hadn’t any idea what Nick had told Ms Morgan, surely she would keep quiet to keep him safe? After all, she had risked her neck to save him more than once already. He deliberated for a few seconds and then said, ‘No, but if she kicks up a fuss, tell her…’ Tell her what? ‘Tell her to ring in to the station later on.’

It was a sop; by the time she rang in Nick Lucas would be long gone. It was thanks to Maggie Morgan that Nick had run before and although Coleman could see the wisdom in what she’d done he wasn’t too keen on civilians who thought for themselves. Every instinct told him that Maggie
was fierce and protective and when it came to doing his job, more trouble than she was worth. Coleman doubted that she would go quietly, but he could live in hope.

‘Where would you like Mr Lucas taken to, Sir?’

Coleman stretched. ‘Minehead police station will do very nicely – that’s where he expects to go, and it’s not too busy – we can arrange to have his nibs picked up from there without attracting too much attention.’

‘Right you are, Sir,’ he said, and with that signed off.

Coleman pulled his mobile out of his pocket and tapped in his office number. ‘We’ve got him,’ he said.

He could hear the amusement in Dorothy Crow’s voice. ‘Are we talking in the hand or in the bush now, Danny?’