Perfect Sins (16 page)

“He doesn't want to talk to us.”

Hazel didn't understand. “How do you know?”

“If he wanted to talk to us,” said Ash, still watching the mirror, “he'd be on your bumper, flashing his headlights, not cruising far enough back that we mightn't notice him. He doesn't want to talk to us. He wants to see where we go.”

“There's a difference?” But of course there was, and she saw it, too, just a little more slowly. “You mean, he might have something in mind other than conversation. But why? If he believed what I told Swanleigh, he thinks he's getting a horse. If he didn't believe it, or didn't care, why follow us at all?”

“Because he knows something that Swanleigh didn't. That thirty years ago he killed a child. For years and years he must have believed he'd got away with it. But he never forgot that if the police ever found Jamie and then found him, he was going down for murder. A man would be infinitely cautious in a situation like that. Anything strange or unexpected, anything that didn't quite add up, that's the first thing he'd think of. He wants to see where we're going before he commits himself.”

By now Hazel's thinking was keeping pace with Ash's. “So we'd better not head for Byrfield. That's bound to set the alarm bells ringing. And I told Swanleigh I had this horse at my place, so it needs to be a stable or a farm or something. If we head for the nearest town with a police station, he'll be gone.”

“Call Norris,” Ash advised. “Tell him what's happening—that Sperrin's following us and we need to know where to take him so the police can have a welcoming committee waiting.”

There they hit a problem. Hazel had DI Norris's number on her phone. But Hazel was driving, and Ash still hadn't mastered his own phone, which was of the simple, big-button variety designed for senile grannies. The chances of him negotiating his way through Hazel's bells-and-whistles model was slightly lower than Patience winning Crufts. But Hazel had seen the consequences too often to use the phone while she was driving.

“Okay,” she said. “You drive and I'll call Norris. It'll be interesting to see what Sperrin does when I pull over.”

It took another minute to find a suitable spot. But then the car behind did the only thing it could without confirming their suspicions: It kept traveling, overtook them while they were switching places in a gateway, and drove on steadily until its lights disappeared around the next bend.

“He won't go far,” predicted Ash. “He'll be waiting up the next farm lane, with his lights off. Give him five minutes and he'll be on our tail again.”

Ash still owned a car. It was locked in the garage behind his mother's house in Norbold. He could have counted on his fingers the number of times he'd driven it since returning to the town where he was born. But he'd been a good driver once, and even in the dark he quickly familiarized himself with Hazel's hatchback. Cars differ one from another less than phones do.

Norris had given her his mobile number, so it was answered not by a police radio-room operator but by a tired, grumpy, and slightly disorientated detective inspector who'd finally gone to bed half an hour before and had just managed to get off to sleep. “
What?
” he demanded angrily.

Hazel told him twice who she was, and gave him time to absorb the information. She heard his responses become more focused as his brain switched into work mode. Then she told him where she was and what she'd done. “I think it must be Sperrin following us. I can't think who else it would be. Can you suggest somewhere we can meet you—well, not
you,
” she added hurriedly, “but a squad car—enough bodies to sit on him if he tries to run?”

Norris didn't have what he needed in front of him—a map, a record of where the area cars were tonight. “Give me five minutes and I'll call you back. Head north when you get a chance—he won't follow you to Byrfield for a whole herd of horses. I'll call you back with a sat-nav reference.” Then he was gone, without a word of farewell, much less thanks.

“You're welcome, sir,” Hazel said pointedly to the dead phone.

“Shall I keep driving?” asked Ash.

“Yes. He's calling me back. Take your time, though. The longer he has to get ready, the better.”

Ash nodded. He found to his surprise that he was rather enjoying himself. He still found Hazel's lightning-fast, intuition-guided decision-making process a little alarming, but he was learning to trust the answers she came up with. She wasn't always right, but then the methodical, textbook approach didn't always work, either. She was right more often than she was wrong. Ash was coming to understand that this was only partly due to good luck. Even when she was thinking quickly she was thinking clearly. And she was guided by a natural goodwill that meant that, though her decisions were occasionally questionable, her motives were always sound and the outcomes often better than could reasonably be expected.

And it felt good to be doing something again. For four years he hadn't done much of anything at all. The only movement in his life had come from the winds of chance buffeting him. Now, with Hazel, he felt as if he was achieving something again. Nothing dramatic—he wasn't trying to persuade himself of that—but here and there he felt to be contributing a little know-how, a little intellectual spadework, that made him feel more alive than he had for years and might ultimately help someone.

Baby steps, Laura Fry had said. He had to measure his progress in baby steps. Well, yes. For a long time any progress had seemed impossible. Baby steps had seemed the most he might manage. Now he was beginning to feel that one day—not now, maybe not even soon, but one day—he might be capable of walking, of living, of operating like a fully-fledged adult man again. In one way, it was a scary prospect. In another, it couldn't come too soon.

He said, “You know, when this is over—”

The flash of lights killed the sentence in his mouth. Not from behind—from the side. Sperrin had waited up a farm lane for them, and now he was coming at them hard and fast. Not following at a distance, shadowing them discreetly, hoping to remain unnoticed until he knew more about them. They heard the roar of his engine as he drove straight at them, a couple of tons of steel accelerating hard from safe conveyance to lethal weapon.

Momentarily his lights blinded them, filling their car. Ash swerved desperately—he might have been out of practice, but the instinct for self-preservation is the last one that you lose—then the other car's grille hit them square in the side and kept coming, the engine note climbing, their own tires squealing a manic protest as sheer momentum forced them sideways across the road. Getting no response from the wheel, Ash just had time to reach back and grab Patience's collar—he'd bought her a seat belt, but she'd refused to wear it—and to see Hazel's mouth wide in indignant astonishment; then the nearside wheels hit the verge, plowed through a foot of soft earth, and disappeared into a deep ditch, tipping the car on its side.

 

CHAPTER 16

I
T'S EASY GETTING INTO
and out of cars. Most of us do it every day, and think so little of it that we can chat to our companions, talk on the phone, or finish our homework—or at least hone an excuse for
not
finishing our homework—at the same time. But that's because everything is designed to make it easy. The car doors hang perpendicular. The seats are at the right height. Everything is familiar.

Now try turning everything eighty degrees. The doors are no longer perpendicular, their weight carried by strong columns: One can hardly open before it runs into the ground; the other is almost too heavy to lift. The occupants are lying half suspended, possibly half strangled, in their seat belts, certainly stunned, probably concussed or injured. Even the car's instruments are now in the wrong places, the hand brake and gearshift where you're accustomed to finding the floor, the door and window buttons up around your right ear somewhere. Add to that the sudden ingress of cold, muddy water and it's little wonder that people who survive an impact can find it impossible to escape their vehicle afterward and drown in half a meter of ditch water.

Given time—to extricate himself from his seat belt, to drag his feet out from among the pedals and brace them against the dashboard, to make sure he wasn't doing this while standing on Hazel's face—Ash could probably have opened the driver's door. He wasn't, physically, the man he'd been four years ago, but he was well built, and in an emergency he could probably have found the strength necessary. But there was no time. He couldn't see much except a long view up a ditch, brilliantly lit by his own headlights, but he heard the bang of the other car's door as someone got out and the beat of urgent footsteps. People who've deliberately pushed you into a ditch don't come to see if you're all right: they come to finish you off. When a shadow crossed the side window above his head, and a bit of that shadow was long, thin, and straight, Ash wasn't a bit surprised.

He must have been afraid. He must have been. But all he was conscious of was anger. Not for himself—he hadn't that much to live for, hadn't had for a while—but for Hazel Best, who was twenty-six years old and had people who loved her and should live long enough to be a good police officer, a loving mother, and a doting grandma.

It made no difference to the weight of the door. It was too great to throw up with one hand and scramble out faster than Saul Sperrin could fire a shotgun. About all Ash could do in the time he had left was fumble for the button to open the windows. In a parade-ground roar quite unlike his normal speaking voice, he rapped, “Turn around. Now. Before either of us sees your face.”

There was a gasp beside him. “Gabriel…”

Hazel wasn't worrying about the shotgun. She hadn't time to. It was taking all her energy to keep her face out of the muddy water pouring through her open window.

Ash hadn't thought of that. He threw off his seat belt and screwed his body around, holding her head with one hand, groping under the water for the catch that would free her with the other. But maybe that was wrong; maybe he should concentrate on getting the window shut. The water was still flooding in. If he couldn't free her soon, she was going to drown in his arms.

“Help me!” he yelled, his voice running up shrill, so distraught that he failed to see the inherent improbability of the man who'd run them into this ditch, who was pointing a shotgun at them, now abandoning his murderous agenda in order to help Ash save his friend. “You have to help me. She's going to die!”

“Yes.” It was all that Sperrin said. The only word Ash heard him speak from beginning to end, shocking in its very conciseness. He paused a fraction in his desperate fumbling, as if his brain couldn't quite process what it had heard. Then, knowing with absolute certainty that he would get no help from that source, Ash turned his back on the gun, wiped it from his mind, and turned all his attention to Hazel and her plight.

She'd been stunned by the impact, confused to find herself suddenly hanging sideways, with dark water pouring in around her, but she'd never lost consciousness and she, too, was trying desperately to free herself. Her hands slapping frantically for the seat belt release obstructed Ash's attempts to thumb it. He needed her to sit still and do nothing for five seconds; that was all, but it was a lot to ask when those five seconds must have seemed to her like all the rest of her life that she could count on. He toyed briefly—very briefly—with the idea of decking her, decided that she'd probably deck him back and if she knocked him out, they'd both die. Instead he hissed, “Constable—
freeze
!”

And the authority in his voice was such that even in her current predicament she couldn't fail to understand and obey. Her whole body went rigid. Ash's right hand found the seat belt catch and his left hand pulled her out of the rising water and onto his hip. Where a more cynical soul than either of them might have noticed that she formed a pretty effective shield.

But she didn't stay there long. The driver's side window was wide open in front of her nose. With the access of energy only the urge to survive can supply, she clawed and grappled her way across him and up through the window frame. A flash of white in the corner of her right eye told her the third occupant of the car was also jumping ship.

Halfway out she met the business end of the shotgun coming in.

The situation was too far gone for panic. Even so, the steadiness of her voice amazed her. “Saul, you have no idea how bad things are going to get for you if you pull that trigger.”

Seconds, sliced into tenths and then into hundredths, crawled past. She knew her heart was racing, but the individual beats pounded a slow march in her ear like a funeral drum. And every beat was precious because any one of them could be her last.

And the gun didn't fire. And the gun didn't fire. And then the gap between the muzzle and the end of her nose began to widen as Saul Sperrin backed cautiously up the muddy bank. And still the gun didn't fire.

And then it did.

*   *   *

At first Hazel couldn't work out if she'd somehow escaped injury or been so devastatingly blasted that her ability to process pain had shut down. She opened her eyes again, but the muzzle flare had been so close and the surrounding night so dark that all she could see was the afterglow impressed on her retina.

Then she thought that in adjusting the angle of his shot to include Ash, who was still half buried beneath her, he'd contrived to miss her altogether. Or nearly—she was beginning to feel the sting of individual pellets in outlying areas. Ash was lying fearfully still beneath her. If that was what had happened, any moment now Sperrin would reload and rectify his error. He was probably doing it already. If you know how, it's a matter of seconds to reload a shotgun. There wasn't a chance in the world she could finish scrambling out of this car and make a run for it before he could shoot again.