The torch-beam swung round to frame her as she finished straightening her Burberry.
“Right. Don’t try anything. I’ve still got the knife. Put your arms behind your back.”
She could do nothing but what she was told. She felt the rope tightening around first one wrist and then the other as he strapped them together. He wasn’t gratuitously sadistic. He tied the rope over the cushion of her jumper and raincoat, and not so tight as to wrench her shoulder blades.
But tight enough. There was no way she could free herself.
He stopped when her wrists were secure.
“Aren’t you going to do my feet too?” asked Carole, managing to find a note of insolence from somewhere.
“Not yet,” he replied ominously. “Come on, walk ahead of me. I’ll show you where to go.”
The beam of the torch marked out the route. They seemed to be heading through a tangle of snagging undergrowth straight towards the cliff face.
Carole stopped. “I can’t go any further.”
“Yes, you can. Down on your knees. Push that lot aside.”
Once again, the torch-beam showed her the way. Pushing through the natural barbed wire of roots and creepers, she saw a narrow horizontal crevice in the chalk. Its lips were stained green with the slime of old vegetation.
“Inside.”
A cold recollection came to Carole. She was sitting in the Forbeses’ dining room and Harry Grant was talking to her. “There are some nasty places out on the Downs…Marshy bits…Chalk pits…Caves…We used to scare ourselves witless, some of the games we played. Tying each other up, that kind of stuff. Not very nice to each other, kids…Certainly we lot weren’t.”
She started to object. “But I – ”
“Inside!”
Once again, obedience was Carole’s only option. She kneeled, crouched and slid, awkwardly crabwise, into the gap.
Inside she found herself slipping down, and would have rolled, but for the tension of the rope securing her wrists.
She didn’t slide far. The cave was bigger than it appeared from outside, but not very big. She felt a sepulchral chill. There was a smell of death, of trapped air, stagnant water, rotted vegetation.
The space filled with flickering light as he came in after her.
“Now we do your feet.”
Again, he wasn’t vindictive as he trussed her ankles together. But he was efficient. There was no way she’d be able to free herself unaided from those knots.
But Carole’s panicked mind was still circling on thoughts of escape. Though the floor of the chalk cave was lower than its entrance, she still reckoned, if she were left alone, even tied up as she was, she’d be able to work her way back up and out.
He put paid to the thought even before it had taken proper shape. The low curved ceiling of the natural vault was broken here and there by gnarled rafters of tree roots. And round one of these thick loops of wood he tied the loose end of the orange rope.
He left enough slack so that Carole’s legs weren’t actually lifted off the ground, but not enough for her to be able to stand up. She was stuck where she lay until someone decided to untie her.
“Why’re you doing this?” she demanded. “What do you hope to get out of it? This is only going to make things worse for you.”
He didn’t answer, just let out a little dry laugh.
Then he flashed the torch over his handiwork to check the knots were solid and rolled back out of the cave. Leaving total darkness. And the smell of death.
Carole felt her body trembling uncontrollably.
It trembled more when she heard the engine spark into life. The noise of the motor receded until it was lost in the silence of the dark.
? Death on the Downs ?
Forty-Two
Jude thought it odd that she hadn’t heard from Carole after she got back from Sandalls Manor on the Wednesday evening. There was so much she wanted to discuss. But she knew her neighbour was sometimes spikily unpredictable and assumed that an early night had seemed a more attractive option than staying up late over a bottle of wine spinning theories of murder.
Jude had been mildly surprised, but unfazed. It was not in her nature to be judgemental about other people’s behaviour. If Carole didn’t want to talk that evening, her decision should be respected.
Still, perhaps she should make an official report about what she’d heard. Carole had given her Detective Sergeant Baylis’s number. Jude tried it. He didn’t answer. She was invited to leave a message. She asked him to ring her. Nothing else she could do at that point.
So, although Jude’s mind was seething with the implications of what she had heard from Tamsin Lutteridge, she put those thoughts away and spent the late evening dealing with a much more difficult problem. She’d had a letter that morning from the man she’d met in London the weekend before. He claimed to have seen the error of his ways and claimed to want her back. Though she knew the idea was insane, Jude could not pretend that she wasn’t tempted.
Couching her reply to his letter in words that were neither dishonest nor misleading took a long time and a lot of concentration.
She woke the next morning, tired and a little wistful. But she was still convinced that she’d made the right decision. Her long-term sanity demanded that the relationship should be over for good.
She knew she must post the letter before any hairline cracks appeared in her resolve.
It was on her slightly melancholy way back from the postbox that Jude decided she would shift her mood by talking to Carole.
No reply when she rang the doorbell of High Tor. Probably out taking Gulliver for a walk on Fethering Beach.
Jude had turned back down the path to return to Woodside Cottage when she heard the whimpering. It was the sad sound of a dog who not only hadn’t been fed, but had also, deprived of his morning walk, done what he knew he shouldn’t on the kitchen floor.
Jude went straight across the front garden to open Carole’s garage. There was no sign of the Renault.
She wasn’t prone to panic, but she knew this was serious. Before even sorting out Gulliver’s needs, Jude rang led Crisp.
¦
They stood by the Renault in the car park behind the Hare and Hounds.
“Doesn’t look good.” Ted Crisp bent down to pick something up off the ground. He held it out. Jude recognized the bunch of keys immediately.
“She’d never just have dropped them. Carole’s far too organized for that. Someone must’ve surprised her by the car and…”
“And what?”
“I don’t know. Taken her off somewhere.”
“Did she tell you she was going to come up here yesterday evening?”
“No. I guessed. I knew she’d been doing a lot of thinking about what’s been happening in Weldisham. It seemed a reasonable assumption that she’d come up here to continue her investigations…You know, to meet someone.”
“Who? Her boyfriend?”
The hurt in led Crisp’s voice was so overt that Jude looked at him curiously. “Boyfriend? Carole hasn’t got a boyfriend.”
