But I doubt he’d even care.
The thought was sobering, and Colin had the strange, unsettling feeling that his life hadn’t amounted to much in the end. Just a sad man who’d pledged to serve people living in this house—and for what? To end up a corpse on an office floor?
He smiled. And his mouth must have decided to work because he laughed.
“What’s so bloody funny?” Randall snapped. “I don’t see what’s so amusing, Colin. I thought you were on my side. The last time someone came here you lost an eye protecting me. What changed?”
Colin laughed harder.
The bald man, that Jackson, cleared his throat. “Listen, I’ve killed people, you know that, and after tonight I’d decided I wasn’t going to do it anymore—I was going to fuck off somewhere, start again. But him?” He pointed at Colin. “He knows things, could get you in the shit.” He paused. “You need to make some decisions. You need to get rid of him.”
“I do?” Randall said.
It seemed Randall cared for him to some degree. He’d sounded alarmed at what Jackson had suggested.
Jackson bent over Colin, obliterating the sight of the ceiling. His strong-boned face held an expression of menace, something that churned Colin’s stomach with immeasurable amounts of fear. Colin stopped laughing. The glint in the man’s eyes—he didn’t like it.
“I’ll take him outside,” Jackson said. “He won’t be going anywhere fast, what with the state of him. Then I’ll come back. Then you’ll press that button. Kill him. After that, it’s time for us to leave.”
Randall sighed. Nodded.
Colin smiled. Typical. Randall would probably go and live the life Colin had planned. Beaches. Bars. Warm seas. Sun loungers. Cocktails with cherries and paper umbrellas. No worries. Every day full of nothing but wonderment.
Still, what did it matter now? The pain below his heart was increasing, and shortly he’d be dead. All that would be left after they’d disposed of him was any blood staining the floor. He closed his eye, wanted to poke his nail into the skin of his missing one. Didn’t have the energy. He was picked up in strong arms, and he thought of Nellie. Thought of the picture on the pub sign and how he was going to end up like that rabbit outside earlier.
The image of that sign told him that fate had twinned him and Nellie right from the start. Maybe they were meant to be together. It was just a shame he had to wait a while in Hell before he’d see her again. But come to think of it, she’d go to Heaven, his Nellie, he was sure of that, so they wouldn’t get to see one another after all.
A shame, that.
Chapter Sixteen
Since coming to Marsh Vines, Langham hadn’t had the chance to forget work at all, and now fatigue overcame him, except he didn’t want to sleep here. He just wanted to get the hell away. “Want to go home?”
“Yep.”
“Come on. I just need my own fucking bed now.”
Langham led the way down to the foyer. He had a hunch that if they stayed and came into contact with officers tomorrow, he’d end up staying put and helping them out. After signing out of the register, he made for the car, pleased once he was putting their bags in the boot. He should never have ignored his instincts when they’d first arrived. And their arrival seemed like days ago, yet it had just been hours. If he’d kept on driving, gone through the village instead of stopping… If he hadn’t seen Sid Mondon and Jackson Hiscock, the first indication that their holiday wasn’t going to turn out as a holiday after all…
Once in the car, he started the engine then whacked up the heat. Drove away from a village he never wanted to go to again. And what was it with villages lately? Supposedly quiet places where nothing ever happened. In his experience, that was turning out to be a load of crap.
“That place,” he said, glancing across at Oliver, “was weird.”
“It was, but there’s a weirder place up ahead.” Oliver balanced his elbow on the door then propped his face in his hand. Stared into the darkness, narrowing his eyes.
Oh fuck. “What do you mean?”
The last thing Langham wanted was more weirdness, more offences encroaching on his time. He fought the urge to shout, to go on a rant about just needing a bit of bloody peace, for fuck’s sake. It wouldn’t change anything, nor would it make the future any different.
“Oh, someone’s been killed,” Oliver said, as if he were merely mentioning the weather. “In a field, from what I can gather.”
Langham told himself to accept the fact that neither of them were going to be able to get away from their calling in life. Oliver hearing that kind of thing then relating it to Langham was par for the course. Best to just accept it, get on with it as their lot. He digested the information. Had the fleeting but disturbing image of a woman sprawled out, much like one Oliver had found in the Sugar Strands case. Deaths in a field usually meant bodies being dumped, perhaps the result of supposedly missing persons who hadn’t been missing at all but taken.
“Do we need to call anything in right this minute?” he asked, meaning that if the crimes had been committed ages ago, like those in the strawberry patch out the back of The Running Hare, there wasn’t any urgency in the matter.
“Yep. It’s recent. Less than an hour ago. And it isn’t just someone—there’s two of them.”
“Jesus Christ. Let me know if we need to stop, if you get told where we need to go to find them.”
