Straight on down past the red car, T-junction, turn left, quarter mile on right, small quarry.’
When the flow turns into a tsunami, you’ve no choice but to go with it.
‘Wieldy, you get that?’ said Pascoe.
‘Think they likely got it in Shetland,’ said Wield.
The car was moving already as Pascoe scrambled in.
‘Andy, where are we going?’ he gasped.
‘The sort of nice quiet spot a pair of psychos might take a woman to ask her some personal questions,’ said Dalziel, leaning his considerable weight on the accelerator. In a less solid car, his foot might well have gone through the floor and hit the road.
‘We can’t know for sure the Delays have got her, and even if they have, they’re certainly not going to hang around here,’ protested Pascoe.
‘Wrong,’ said Dalziel. ‘They’ll be in a hurry, no time for subtlety. It’ll be water-boarding from the start, or if they’re short of water, they’ll slap her around a bit to show they’re serious, then stick a gun up her jaxy and start counting down from ten.’
Pascoe still looked dubious.
‘You don’t even know what direction they went in,’ he said.
‘They didn’t drive back, else we’d have seen them. No, this is where they’ll be, mark my words.’
He spoke with all the oracular authority of his prime, that long period during which his judgments, though often cloudily mysterious, almost inevitably turned out to be correct, a period that some posited had come to an end when he walked with godlike certainty straight into the blast of a terrorist explosion.
Pascoe felt the man’s old power, but he also recalled the moment not long before when his legs had given way on hearing the news of Novello’s recovery. That burden of responsibility had clearly weighed heavy. Was he now feeling the same sense of having let the Wolfe woman down? And was it himself he was trying to reassure by this assertion of confidence in what at best had to be a fairly wild guess?
The next few minutes would tell.
And which would be worse? Dalziel proved wrong and the quarry empty?
Or Dalziel proved right and the two unarmed policemen confronted by a killer with a shotgun?
Though perhaps, thought Pascoe with a kind of hysterical merriment as they approached the T-junction with no perceptible diminution of speed, perhaps the fat bastard’s driving will kill us both first!
18.45-18.52
I’m not thinking straight, thought Fleur Delay. Too much pressure, too many pills.
The laptop had shown the Nissan standing still on an unclassified road.
A rendezvous, she’d decided. If they got there in time, they’d find the Wolfes sitting together in the car, talking. Or maybe in his car. When they separated, follow him and grab him. She didn’t want any truck with the woman. Disappearing a guy who has already disappeared was no problem. Disappearing the blonde was going to raise complications.
Then they’d driven past the Lost Traveller over the brow of the hill, and a couple of hundred yards ahead of them there she was, just reaching her car.
Fleur had worked things out instantly.
She’d met Wolfe at the pub. They’d talked and separated. She’d walked back to her car, he’d driven off in his. They’d probably crossed with him as they drove towards the pub. She tried to remember the cars they’d passed after they left the arterial. There’d been two, maybe three. A year ago she’d have remembered details, but not today.
Anyway, it was too late and she had to decide what to do next.
Following the blonde was an option, but not an attractive one. If she’d just been talking to Wolfe, she was hardly likely to lead them back to him now.
As she braked alongside the Nissan she said to Vince, ‘We take her.’
There had seemed no choice.
But now, looking at the terrified woman as she lay on the ground before them, Fleur knew she’d somehow reached a very wrong place.
Soon as Vince had shot the young journalist and laid out the policewoman, she should have followed her instinct and got out, to hell with The Man!
Her whole strategy, not just on this assignment but ever since the day she got the fatal diagnosis, had been based on a false premise.
Head for Spain, get Vince settled there before she died, and he’d be safe from The Man.
Maybe.
But there was nowhere in the world she could put Vince where he’d be safe from himself.
She looked at him now, standing astride the blonde, his sawn-off held in one hand, waiting for his sister’s instructions.
She’d driven a couple of miles from where they’d snatched Gina Wolfe, looking for somewhere quiet and secluded to stop. At the T-junction she’d turned left. Right would take them south. Back towards suburban spillage from the city. North would be lonelier, emptier.
She was right. Half a mile on, she’d spotted a small quarry, not much more than a slice dug out of a hillside by some farmer looking for hard-core, its upper edge visible from the road but with enough of a scattering of scrubby trees at the lower level to hide a car from passing eyes. In the dusky light, it was a desolate spot, fit for foul deeds.
Fleur stooped over the blonde and looked into the woman’s fear-dilated pupils.
‘All we want to know is where we’ll find him,’ she said. ‘Tell us that and…’
She paused… and we’ll take you back to your car and let you go… No, this was a bright woman, she wasn’t going to believe that.
‘…and no harm will come to you, I promise.’
Pretty feeble, but it might provide enough straw for a terrified woman to grasp at.
The dark blue eyes moved from hers to the shotgun barrel and back again.
‘I don’t know where he is,’ gasped Gina. ‘Yes, he rang me, or someone saying it was him, and he told me where to go, but when I got here, nothing happened. So after a while I walked up to the pub just on the off-chance he might be there, but he wasn’t, so I went back to the car…’
‘Vince,’ said Fleur.
Her brother raised his right foot and stamped down hard on the blonde’s left hand.
She screamed in pain.
‘Look,’ said Fleur, ‘the more you make us hurt you, the harder it’s going to be to let you go. I mean, once you can’t move around by yourself and drive your car, what the hell are we going to do with you? All I want is to talk with Wolfe, find out what his plans are. If he’s going to keep his head down and you’re going to keep your mouth shut, then we’re sorted.’
There were tears in the blue eyes now, and Gina Wolfe’s voice trembled, but her words showed a mind still holding itself together.
‘That’s just what he wants…no fuss…me too…I just want things to carry on…no waves…I’ll go back to London and that’ll be an end to it…’
Fleur almost believed her, but she knew she’d never sell that to Goldie. He wanted closure, and closure did not mean leaving Wolfe alive to tell the tale.
Or this woman either.
There. She’d reached a decision that had been inevitable the moment they’d grabbed her.
She said, ‘Vince.’
‘What this time?’ said her brother, grinning. ‘Do her kneecap? Or mebbe…’
He reached down and flicked her skirt up around her waist with the gun barrel, revealing skimpy panties with a lace edging.
