The Button Man: A Hugo Marston Novel (15 page)

“Brian, who did this?” Hugo said. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Drinker grimaced and his eyes slid down and to the right, to the object in his hand. Hugo looked and saw an open cell phone, the buttons slick with blood. “I tried . . . couldn’t . . .”

“It’s OK,” Hugo said, his voice low and calm. “Help is on the way. I just need you to tell me what happened, can you do that?”

“He came here,” Drinker gasped. “I wasn’t going to let him in.”

“Who?” Hugo urged.

“But he said . . . he apologized.” Drinker suddenly gripped Hugo’s wrist with his bloody left hand. “He said he was sorry.”

“Harper? Are you saying Dayton Harper did this?”

Drinker groaned and looked away, then his hand fell from Hugo’s wrist. He coughed once and then looked up.

“It wasn’t meant to happen this way,” Drinker said. “That’s what he told me.” He turned to Hugo, his eyes wide and brimming with tears, his voice rasping. “I don’t understand. Why did he shoot me? I didn’t do anything.”

Drinker closed his eyes and his breath rattled in his throat. Hugo looked at the wound in the farmer’s stomach but didn’t touch it. The bleeding looked to have stopped and Hugo didn’t want to restart it by adding pressure. He looked up at Pendrith, who shook his head and spoke quietly.

“We’re in the country, an ambulance will take twenty minutes to get out here. Same for the police, probably.”

“I don’t mind waiting for an ambulance, but we don’t have time to explain this to the police,” Hugo said. “And Harper can’t be too far away.”

“You go,” Pendrith said. “I’ll wait with him. I can call some people I used to work with, make sure the police keep this wrapped up—for now, anyway.”

Hugo stood and looked over Pendrith’s shoulder to see Merlyn standing in the hallway. She was pale and her big eyes looked like those of a deer face-to-face with its hunter.

“What’s happening?” she said.

“Buggered if I know,” said Pendrith, as the two men moved into the hall. “Hugo, why would Harper shoot this man?”

“I wish I knew,” said Hugo. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“He’s gone stark-raving mad,” said Pendrith. “Off his rocker.”

Hugo nodded. “That’s about all I can come up with, too. All the more reason for me to find him.”

“Damn right,” said Pendrith. “And the sooner the better.”

They looked back into the room as Brian Drinker moaned and opened his eyes. He was trying to speak, but Pendrith stepped into the doorway ahead of Hugo. The Englishman looked back at and nodded toward Merlyn, who had a hand over her mouth. “Go,” Pendrith said to Hugo. “And you better take her with you.”

“OK,” Hugo said. “But for God’s sake call me if he says anything else. If I don’t catch Harper, I’ll come right back for you.” Hugo gave him a small smile. “Let’s hope I don’t see you for a while.” He took Merlyn by the arm and steered her down the hallway and down the stairs.

At the bottom, Merlyn stopped him.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said.

Hugo looked at her, not knowing what to say. “I wish I could tell you.”

“You mean you know and won’t?”

“No,” he smiled. “I don’t know, so I can’t. Come on, let’s go.”

She moved slowly after him. “Do you really think Dayton shot that man?”

“Don’t you?”

“But why would he?”

“No idea,” he said. “That’s why we need to go, and right now. We need to find him and figure out what’s going on before anyone else gets hurt. And if we do find him, you can be a friendly face, which he’s gonna need.”

She nodded and they moved to the front door. Just as he was about to open it, light cut through the window opposite the staircase, white flashes from the headlights of a vehicle passing the front of the house.

“The ambulance?” Merlyn said.

“No.” Hugo stopped her. Whoever it was had come from behind the house and was heading for the main road. “It’s gotta be him. Dayton Harper.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

T
hey sprinted out of the farmhouse and made straight for Hugo’s vehicle, gravel kicking up behind them as they ran. As he opened the driver’s side door, Hugo looked for the taillights of the Smart Car but saw nothing. A faint sound that might just have been the wind was the only suggestion as to which direction Harper might have taken.

The huge car’s wheels spun for a second before gripping the loose surface, and they fishtailed away from the house and down the short driveway to the main road. Hugo had already decided that Harper would likely head back to London, and he was even more sure of that when a sign at the end of the driveway pointed to the town of Stevenage, a jumping-off point onto the A1, the main road from there to the capital. Hugo was sure that Harper had taken care of any business he had in the Hertfordshire countryside, here at the farm and at Braxton Hall, which meant that the only logical destination for Harper was London, a place the actor knew and where he could be relatively safe.

But as Hugo fought the car around the tight turn onto the main road, he knew that his theory relied on Harper acting logically. And there’d not been much evidence of that lately.

He punched
London
into his GPS device and saw Merlyn looking at him.

“You OK?” he asked.

“Sure. I think. I just don’t get what’s happening.”

“Me neither, but I’m guessing he’s on his way back to London.”

“Why?”

He looked at her sharply. “Is there somewhere else he’d be going?”

“No,” she said quickly. “Not that I know of. Do you think he’s turning himself in?”

“No idea.” He gripped the wheel as the car tore along the winding country road toward Stevenage. “No idea at all.”

Hugo stared through the windshield, the road in front of him a ribbon of black that swept through villages, an empty track with no sign of his quarry. He went as fast as the car and the winding highway would let him, but it wasn’t fast enough, and soon he felt like a greyhound chasing a rabbit that had already fled into its burrow.

They sped on for five minutes, long minutes, catching cars like fireflies, but each set of rear lights was a disappointment. Hugo’s sense of desperation and pessimism increased with each.

Merlyn seemed to be thinking the same thing. “Shouldn’t we have caught up with him by now?” she asked, as they raced up behind a cattle truck.

“Yes, probably.” He’d been thinking the same thing. “This is the most direct route to London.”

At the top of a steep hill, Hugo checked for oncoming traffic, then swung the Cadillac into the oncoming lane. He flicked on his high beams and gave them a view of at least half a mile, down the hill and back up the slope opposite them. No small car. He tucked back in behind the cattle truck and waited for the entrance to a field, which he pulled into and, with a reluctance that was almost painful, turned the car around and started back to the farm. Harper had gotten away.

When they arrived, the farmhouse was awash with lights, and Hugo had to park the car on the grass that bordered the driveway into the property. He and Merlyn walked toward the gaggle of police cars, Hugo scanning the small crowd for Pendrith. He saw him talking to one of the non-uniformed officers and decided against joining the group.

It took less than a minute for a uniformed officer to spot Hugo and Merlyn lurking on the edge of things, and when he approached them Hugo had his story ready. He had to assume that Pendrith had told them he’d gone there alone, been dropped off. He was smart enough not to escalate things by involving two more participants, one an armed US Embassy officer.

“Can I help you?” the officer said.

“Sure,” said Hugo. “Constable . . . ?”

“Christie. You are?”

Hugo pulled out his credentials, and while the officer was inspecting them, Hugo motioned to Merlyn. “And she’s with me.”

Uncertainty clouded PC Christie’s face. “Yes, sir. Do you need to speak to someone in charge?”

“No,” Hugo said. “I’m just waiting for Lord Stopford-Pendrith. You might say I’m his chauffeur for today.”

“Yes, sir. He’s just giving his statement, he should be done soon. I’ll let him know you’re here.” He started to move away but turned back, pulling a small notepad and pen from his breast pocket. “Excuse me, sir, but do you have any knowledge about what happened here?”

“No, can’t say I do,” Hugo said genially. “We just arrived, I’m sure there’s nothing I can tell you that you don’t already know.”

Christie looked back and forth between them, then tucked his notepad and pen back into his jacket pocket. “Very well, sir.”

They watched him walk back to the officers surrounding Pendrith, who turned and looked over toward them without giving anything away. Within a minute, the MP himself was striding toward them.

“I say, what a bloody mess,” he said. “Poor fellow’s unconscious but hanging on. For now, anyway. Local chaps don’t get many of these, so they’re calling the brass in.”

Hugo grimaced. “What did you tell them?”

“Just that I was here on a mission of goodwill, sort of a liaison thing to sort out the mess with Harper. I told them that you dropped me off in front of the house, planning to pick me up or come by and meet with Mr. Drinker, if he agreed. I said that the door was open when I got here, and so I went in and found him. No mention of Harper being here, don’t worry.” Pendrith shrugged. “So far they’re buying it, but once the big boys start arriving, the lid’s coming off this little melting pot, I’m afraid.”

Hugo looked at the activity around him. A man was gut-shot, a man who happened to be a prominent local farmer and the father of the man recently killed by two movie stars. Hugo shook his head at the thought of the senior brass lining up to demand a quick resolution. The chief constable himself would probably be arriving any minute.

“So,” said Pendrith. “Back to London? Isn’t that where you thought Harper was headed?”

“Yes,” said Hugo. “That is what I thought.” He eyed his companions for a moment. The left side of the house and gardens was surrounded by a brick wall, which separated the property from a field. A wooden signpost twenty yards away pointed into the field, and Hugo had walked enough in the countryside to know a public footpath when he saw one. With any luck, this path would lead them around the back of the property. “Anyone fancy a walk after all this excitement?” he asked cheerily.

“A walk?” Pendrith stared at him, bug-eyed. “What the bloody hell are you talking about? We need to get a move on, get back to London.”

“He thought that Dayton was driving to London,” Merlyn interjected. “Past tense. Looks to me like he doesn’t think that anymore.”

“Then where the hell is that bloody man going?” Pendrith asked.

“No idea.” Merlyn shrugged, then jerked a thumb toward Hugo. “Ask the Yank.”

“Follow me and I’ll tell you,” Hugo said. He opened the passenger door of the Cadillac and rifled through the glove box, pulling out a flashlight. He flicked it on, testing it, then off. “Let’s go.”

Ignoring Pendrith’s mutterings, Hugo led them across the driveway toward the pasture. He pushed his way through a rusty kissing gate and waited for them to follow. When they did, he set off in the direction the sign pointed, parallel to the wall that surrounded that side of the farmhouse. They began walking.

“So what’re you thinking?” Pendrith asked, as he trailed behind Merlyn.

“It’s just an idea, nothing more,” Hugo said, “but as Merlyn pointed out in the car, if he’d been going to London we’d have caught up with him.”

“Maybe he took a wrong turn,” Pendrith suggested.

“Maybe, but he doesn’t seem to have done so yet. And a sign at the end of this drive points toward Stevenage, which is right beside the A1 that we all came in on. So even if he didn’t know that was the right direction, the sign would have told him so. And in my experience, people who are not good with directions look extra hard for signs.”

“So if he didn’t accidentally turn the wrong way, you think maybe he went somewhere else on purpose?” Merlyn said.

“That’s possible,” Hugo said, “but where? Harper ran from us and came up here on the spur of the moment; he fled here. He didn’t have time to plan an itinerary, to map out where he was going and when. And he can’t now take the risk of showing up unexpectedly at a place where people will recognize him.”

“Which is pretty much anywhere,” said Merlyn.

“Right,” Hugo agreed.

“So what?” Pendrith called from the back of the line.

“So maybe he didn’t leave the farm,” Hugo suggested. “Or even come here in the first place.”

“Then whose car did we see?” Merlyn asked.

“I don’t know. We’ve been assuming it was his, but it was dark and all I saw was a small car.” Hugo smiled tightly, then said, “at least, I think it was a small car.”

“But that chap Drinker,” Pendrith insisted, “he said Harper had been here and bloody well shot him.”

Hugo grunted, deep in thought, and the threesome trudged on as the night’s quiet settled over them like a cloak. They walked for five minutes, their eyes used to the dark now, but even so they occasionally stumbled on the uneven ground. Once, Merlyn froze in her tracks, startled by the sudden call of a nearby pheasant. She was quickly reassured by Pendrith and they moved on in silence again. The path followed the outside of the crumbling brick wall, and sometimes Hugo wondered whether the three of them could just push it over. But the downside of the wall’s fragility meant that any attempt to climb it could be dangerous.