The Overlooker (28 page)

Tom consulted his watch. ‘Sorry, Dad. We've been gone at least two hours.'

Nick reached for his mobile and tried to switch it on. The screen stayed ominously blank. He turned urgently to the detective superintendent. ‘If I could use a phone? And if you'll get us some clothes as soon as possible, we've got an awful lot of explaining to do.'

‘We'll run you back as soon as you're ready. Was that your Mazda outside the mill? If you'd give me your keys, someone will return it to the house.'

Nick felt in his trouser pocket for anxious moments. Then his fingers found the familiar bunch of metal in a corner of the wet lining. He held them out.

As they were led away to the showers, he paused on the threshold. ‘Harry Redfern. The minister. Is he going to be OK?'

The Baptist chaplain's face had not been covered when they carried him past on the stretcher, but Nick was afraid of the answer he would hear.

‘They've taken him to St Mary's hospital. From what I've heard, he was still unconscious. I can't tell you more than that, I'm afraid. He had a sharper eye for trouble than we did. Dominic Walters was sentenced to three months in prison for sending the Reverend Redfern letters threatening his children. He painted his doomsday graffiti on the Reverend's church and disrupted his services. I gather he was shouting how Armageddon's on its way and we're all heading for damnation. We wrote him off as religious nutter.'

‘I've been an idiot!' Nick exclaimed. ‘He told me he knew how I felt. That he'd been on the receiving end of menacing letters too. It never for a moment occurred to me that they might be from the same man.'

‘In spite of all that, Mr Redfern visited him in prison and tried to talk sense into him. Didn't do much good, by the look of it. They let young Dominic out after six weeks. And we missed a trick. None of us picked up on the same graffiti on that mill. But Harry Redfern obviously made the connection. How else did he know where to find him?'

‘
That's
why he was there before us. Both of them must have got in by a door at the end where the workshop was. We never saw it. And I thought
he
was the one on my tail. The one who was making those phone calls.'

‘Yes, well. He's a good man. He'll have known how you felt. Dominic Walters was spouting hellfire over his children, and they're younger than yours. So he was willing to put himself in harm's way to stop it. Should have left it to us.'

‘I suppose that's what you think I should have done.'

‘Professionally speaking, yes. But it wasn't my wife tied under that loom.'

‘If we hadn't burst in, he wouldn't have set off that bomb.'

‘Oh, yes, he would have, sir. But not until he'd got it ready and positioned to have maximum effect. He'd have set it off somewhere a lot different from an old cotton mill.'

‘The City of London.' Tom said. ‘That's what he was aiming at.'

‘
Dad
!' Millie's urgent voice came from the corridor behind him. ‘What about Thelma?'

Nick saw anger battling with thankfulness in Thelma's face. But what broke through the surface was bewilderment.

‘Whatever are you doing dressed like that?'

The four Fewings had been kitted out with identical tracksuits, blue and silver-grey.

‘Probably regulation issue for prisoners,' Tom had muttered.

‘Or the police athletics team,' Millie giggled.

DSI Mason had assured them that their clothes and the contents of their pockets would be cleaned and dried and returned to them before they left on Sunday.

‘When forensics have finished with them,' Tom had suggested.

There was so much to explain to Thelma, Nick hardly knew where to begin.

‘We fell in the canal.'

‘All four of you?' She looked blankly from one to the other. Then pent-up emotion got the better of her.

‘I've been off my head with worry! That detective sergeant went haring out of the house. Next thing I knew, the lot of you were tearing off down the road in your cars, like the Keystone Cops. And I'm left here with not a clue about what's going on. I knew you were in danger, or else why would you have the police guarding you? And . . .'

Suddenly the significance of seeing all four of them in front of her struck home.

‘Suzie! They've got you back! I know Nick told me over the phone from the police station, but . . . well, I could hardly take it all in. But here you are safe and sound, thank the good Lord!'

She threw her arms round the younger woman and hugged her.

‘And Millie! What have you done to your hand? You're hurt!'

‘I had four stitches,' Millie said proudly.

‘And I thought you couldn't stand hospitals . . . What am I doing, keeping you all on the doorstep? Come along inside, the lot of you.'

Tom's low voice came from behind Nick. ‘Dad, you can still see it.'

Nick turned. In the valley below, one small area of the town was unnaturally brightly lit. Within it, fire still glowed like a red flower.

‘I wonder what happened to Dominic,' came Millie's voice.

‘Shouldn't think he stood much of a chance, with the force of that explosion,' Tom said.

‘But the police will be looking,' Nick told him. ‘Come on. We've kept Thelma waiting long enough.'

‘Y
ou'll want to go back and see Dad this afternoon,' Thelma said at breakfast. ‘All of you.' She cast a penetrating look at Millie.

Millie blushed. ‘Of course I will. It was just . . .'

‘Well, you've come a bit nearer to death than you expected. I dare say you can spare a thought for someone who's a lot closer to it than you are.'

‘He's not going to die, is he?' Millie exclaimed.

‘Of course he is.' Then Thelma softened. ‘We all are, pet. Sooner or later. But Dad's ninety-three and he's had a nasty stroke. He's closer than most. You want to make the most of it, while we've got him.'

Nick ran his hands through his hair. ‘There's so much I still want to ask him. I'm kicking myself that I didn't come back here sooner. I know that sounds kind of selfish. As if I only to want to talk to him to get some more family history out of him. But when we saw him yesterday – gosh, was that only a day ago? – he seemed like he'd been storing up everything for all these years and he couldn't wait to tell us.'

‘You're right there. He was tickled pink when he heard you were coming, and that you wanted to find out about the old days and all the people he used to know. He was tired of talking to me about it, I suppose. As far as I was concerned, it was just the same old stories I'd heard for years. I didn't pay proper attention. Not like you, with your family trees and your computer files. I think it's marvellous the way you've got it all down, like a book.'

‘There's a whole lot more I need to find out,' Nick said. ‘He was born just after the First World War. But he'd have heard the older ones talking about it. And what about the Depression in the twenties and thirties? Did he have a job then? Was he ever on the dole?'

‘Far as I know, he went into the mill at thirteen, and stayed there. Same as everyone round here did in those days.'

‘He must have been called up in World War Two.'

‘In the Lancashire Fusiliers. There's an old cap badge somewhere. But he never would talk much about it.'

Nick played with the crumbs on the table. ‘It was the same with most of them. They saw too much. Didn't want to inflict it on their families. I feel a bit guilty now. I was so keen to find out about our family in the nineteenth century. I didn't think enough about the twentieth. I couldn't believe that he actually knew people who were on the censuses in the 1800s.'

‘Like Millicent Bootle?' Millie supplied.

‘Yes. So I didn't spend enough time asking him about his own life. Well, I had other things on my mind at the time. Never mind. We'll do that today.'

‘What will you do with yourselves this morning?' Thelma asked.

Nick grinned across at Tom. ‘I've always wanted to take the kids up Skygill Hill. It's sort of family mythology. My dad always used to talk about family expeditions up Skygill.'

‘You're on,' Tom said. ‘How high is it?'

‘Five hundred and fifty metres. That's eighteen hundred feet in old money.'

‘There's just one problem. It's all right for the rest of you. You brought spare clothes. All I had for the weekend was what I stood up in. And the police took them off us.' He looked down ruefully at the regulation issue tracksuit. ‘But I guess I can make it up there in police trainers. I just hope they get our stuff back to us before I have to go back to uni.'

‘You've a grand day for it,' Thelma said. ‘How about you, Suzie? Are you up to it, after all you've been through?'

Suzie smiled at Thelma. ‘I've just about got the use of my legs back. I'd be glad of a breath of fresh air to blow the memories away.'

The morning's brightness darkened for Nick. All her life, Suzie would carry the memory of those hours imprisoned underneath the loom. The captive of a madman obsessed with his apocalyptic vision of hastening the end of a sinful world. Armageddon.

He had his own nightmare fears to contend with, but those dark hours he could not share with her.

‘Come on, then,' he said, with enforced cheerfulness. ‘We have to make the top of Skygill in time to be down at the hospital for Uncle Martin.'

‘What about Harry Redfern?' Suzie asked. ‘He was unconscious when they took him in. Do we know if he survived the night?'

Nick was silent for the moment, aware of the others' eyes on him. ‘I'll ring the hospital. If he's come round, maybe we can see him too.'

He flinched from the pain in his bruised shoulder. In his imagination he saw the gouts of flame, the debris raining down on the crimsoned water. How easily any one of them might not have been taken out of the canal alive.

The morning on Skygill Hill was everything Nick had hoped it would be. A soft blue October sky, with low sunshine that lit the flames in the autumn woods. The higher they climbed, the wider the towns and countryside of the north-west spread below them.

The path Nick had chosen was steeper than he remembered. Or else, in his forties, he was not the agile boy he had been when his father brought him up here. His damaged shoulder ached.

Millie, her bandaged hand in a sling, was lagging behind. Nick stopped and turned to enjoy the view, giving her time to catch her breath.

‘Having a cut hand shouldn't make it harder to walk, but it does,' she explained.

‘I guess the sling is throwing you off balance. You can't swing your arms to help, the way you usually would.'

Tom, predictably, was almost galloping up the hill ahead of them. To Nick's joy, Suzie was purposefully following behind him. There seemed to be no lasting physical effects from her ordeal of yesterday.

The wounds lay deeper. He had come so near to losing his wife and children. His own death was of little importance. The thing that mattered was that they were all here, where he had meant to bring them. He felt an enormous thankfulness as he drank in the keen air.

‘It's a pity Thelma wouldn't come with us. I did try to persuade her. But she said she had the weekend shopping to do. I told her we were definitely treating her to a meal out tonight, but she's still set her heart on providing a slap-up Sunday lunch tomorrow, when Uncle Martin comes home.

A celebration of their safe return. And Great-uncle Martin's. The Fewings family reunited.

Nick surveyed the town far below them, misted in the soft autumn light. The haze was no longer the pall of smoke that would once have lain over it, when a hundred boiler houses spewed their breath from tall chimneys.

‘I've been thinking about James Bootle, brewing his herbal remedies when nobody wanted the fine cloth from his hand loom. Do you wonder if he ever wished he could concoct a bomb to blow all those mills that were stealing his living to kingdom come? But he didn't. Instead of that, he reinvented himself. Making stuff to heal people.'

‘You're thinking about that Dominic nut.' Millie glanced at him sideways.

‘Yes.'

‘I'm with Harry Redfern. I think Dominic's read the wrong bits of the Bible. The gospels are all about loving your neighbour, not blowing them up. Do you think he's going to be OK? Mr Redfern, I mean?'

‘When I rang the hospital, they wouldn't tell me much, because I'm not a relative. But they did say he's on Arkwright Ward.'

‘So he's still alive? Thank goodness for that.'

‘We'll look in on him this afternoon, shall we?' He cast an anxious glance at Millie, but there was none of the rebellion of yesterday. ‘Look, we don't have to climb all the way to the top. It's a grand enough view from here.'

‘Try and stop me.'

She set off up the path in pursuit of Tom. Nick followed. They caught up with Suzie and Tom on the summit. Nick threw Suzie an admiring grin.

‘You fairly steamed up here. We couldn't keep up with you.'

She gave him a half smile, though her eyes were clouded.

‘Yes, well. I needed to work it out of my system. I was angry. This is the day he didn't want us to see. Look at it! All this is what he was going to take away from us.'

‘He's dead now, love,' Nick told her quietly.

‘I'm angry that I let myself be frightened of him. When he came up behind me in the shopping precinct he said he'd hurt Millie if I didn't come with him quietly, and I believed him. I didn't understand how he knew so much about us. It didn't occur to me about you dropping your business cards. It made it seem there was something . . .
supernatural
. . . about him. I went as quietly as a rabbit. I should have screamed and shouted for help.'