a black dome surfaced. The helmet of a motorcyclist. A crouching, leather-clad rider. A large machine, accelerating and bearing down on him.
How the bike had materialised from the floor of a quiet wood he had no time to discover. It was about to strike him. At this speed there was no escape.
6
Diamond could do nothing to save himself. There wasn’t the split second needed to leap clear of the oncoming motorcycle. An Olympic athlete wouldn’t have managed it, let alone a portly middle-aged detective. Yet there was time enough to know his number was up. The body may be slow to react, but the brain is super-fast in life-threatening moments.
A massive impact.
For a moment he was airborne and then he hit the ground like a tenpin, spinning with the force of the contact. No way out of this, the brain insisted. Fatal, such force, such weight. He resigned to being run over by bike and rider.
Lying helpless on his back, eardrums at bursting point, he glimpsed the black network of branches swaying high overhead against the grey of the sky. The last image he would ever see.
Not so.
The killer crunch from the bike didn’t happen. The roar of the engine continued some seconds and then reduced. The note changed from a blare to a wail to a buzz. He heard it recede down the valley.
The branches overhead continued to stir in the wind.
Spared, then?
He didn’t know how.
Every part of his frame felt numb. Impossible to tell the extent of his injuries. Unwise to investigate yet. He lay motionless until the engine sound was a hiss that merged with the distant swish of water from Avoncliff weir. Only then did he truly believe he might be safe.
The motorcyclist must have made a last-second decision to swerve, catching him on the shoulder instead of mowing him down. Flesh and bone had impacted with flesh and bone, destructive enough, but not lethal. Dead leaves had cushioned his fall. He was conscious of the not unpleasant smell of moulding vegetation. Scrabbling with his fingers he felt the damp layer below the dry ones on the surface.
Tentatively, he moved his right hand down his side, checking that he still had a ribcage, hip and thigh. All present. All in place.
That settled, his brain struggled to account for what had happened. He’d been upright, fit and striding through the wood to return to his place in the dragnet. It was a mystery where the bike had come from. How could it have sprung from the solid earth in front of him?
People came running. The first to reach him was one of the Wiltshire firearms officers.
‘You OK?’
He released a shaky breath. ‘Don’t know till I get up.’
‘Stay still. Don’t try and move. What happened?’
‘Must have been the sniper. He came from nowhere.’
Others in their body armour surrounded him. ‘Call an ambulance,’ someone said.
‘No need for that,’ Diamond told them. ‘I can feel my legs.’ He tried to move them and gasped as pain shot up his left thigh.
Jack Gull forced himself to the front and leaned over. No sympathy given or expected. ‘What the fuck were you doing?’
‘Walking through the wood, that’s what. I was on my way back to the search party when this motorbike appeared from nowhere, coming straight for me.’
‘What do you mean, “from nowhere”?’
‘Out of the ground. Straight ahead.’ He tried to point and felt a stab of pain in his shoulder.
Disbelief personified, Jack Gull stepped over to check. He thrashed around in the bracken.
‘Well, fuck me.’
‘What? What is it?’
‘Where he came from. You wouldn’t know it was here. Watch me.’ Gull took a step forward and dropped out of sight. ‘Impressive?’ His head and shoulders reappeared. ‘It’s a bloody great hole in the ground.’
‘I saw nothing.’
‘It’s overgrown, isn’t it?’ Now that he’d made this discovery, Gull wanted all the credit he could extract. ‘Looks to me like part of the quarry workings, squared off neatly inside.’
Some of the others moved closer to take a look. The injured Diamond was only a sideshow now.
Gull said from inside the hole, ‘A bloody great chunk of limestone has been taken out of the ground. He’d get a motorcycle in here, no problem, and it’s got a natural ramp with some purchase where they cut into the open face. He’d found his own hidden parking spot. The scumbag was in here waiting for the right moment to get the hell out.’
‘Neat,’ someone said.
‘No question. He planned it for an emergency getaway.’
‘Will he get stopped?’ Diamond said.
‘He’d better.’ From his sunken position Gull swept some bracken aside and addressed the man in charge. ‘You sealed the area, right?’
‘The roads, yes, but — ’
‘But what?’
‘On a bike he can use the footpaths and this whole area is riddled with them.’
‘Give me strength. He’ll be clean away. Did you radio all units?’
‘We’re not total idiots.’ There was some cross-border rivalry here. Wiltshire wasn’t part of Gull’s empire.
Gull climbed out of the dugout and went over to Diamond. ‘What did this dickhead look like?’
‘Helmet and visor. Leathers. That’s as much as I saw.’
‘Come on. You saw the bike.’
‘Black, with a windshield. I’m not into motorbikes.’
‘Fat lot of use that is. This is the fucking sniper. He comes so close he knocks you down and that’s all you remember.’
The chief inspector said, ‘I think we should lay off. The man’s obviously in pain.’
‘He’s in pain?’ Gull said. ‘I’m in bloody torment. The tosser was under our fucking noses and he escaped.’
The ambulance arrived and got as close as it could. Diamond insisted on trying to walk and had to admit he needed the stretcher. They removed the protective jacket and he was made sharply aware of how much his ribs hurt. He was hauled inside and driven to the Royal United Hospital.
In Accident and Emergency, he was checked by a doctor, put in a wheelchair and taken away for X-rays to his left leg, shoulder and ribcage.
‘What happens now?’ he asked the staff nurse in the radiography department.
‘You wait your turn.’
‘I don’t have time to wait. I’m a police officer on a manhunt.’
The nurse gave a smile that said she’d heard every story going and this was a nice try. ‘You won’t be hunting anyone today. We take patients strictly in order. It shouldn’t take long.’
‘Nothing is broken. It’s bruising or a sprain. Find me a pair of crutches and I’ll save you the trouble.’
‘This is radiography, Mr. Diamond. We don’t supply crutches.’
‘There’s a man over there with them.’
‘He’ll have a good reason.’
‘And you think I don’t? I tried standing up and it’s obvious what’s wrong. My ankle can’t take my weight. If that doesn’t justify crutches, I don’t know what does.’ He knew as he spoke the words that he’d just undermined
