He needed to run faster.
‘POLICE! STOP!’
Lucas spun around and groaned as two uniforms came running at him from a side alley. Shit! Not again! He didn’t have time for this.
‘I know where the killer is heading!’ he yelled, in the vain hope that they might believe him and just run along with him.
‘STAND STILL! PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR!’ yelled one.
The other one produced a whine. A high-pitched whine that he remembered far too well. If he wasn’t mistaken, he was just about to get his third encounter with a police issue Taser. He would be unable to move or speak for at least five minutes.
Fuck that! Lucas did a U-turn and ran back the way he’d come.
The first thing you learned as a circus performer was how to fall over. Do it wrong and you were apt to break bones or knock yourself out. Barney had been falling as expertly as Charlie Chaplin since he was six.
So when he collided, out of the blue, with some guy whom he just had time to vaguely recognise in their split-second crash, he was able to roll and get back on his feet before the unicycle had even hit the ground. He grabbed the toppling saddle and was up on it and away again before the other guy had even stood up. He made a calculated U-turn, realising that his best bet now was to get back to the top of the site and along the edge of the car park, and out through the perimeter before he could be caught. He could tell them later that he’d simply gone off on a jaunt along the coast road, keeping out of the way while the Buntin’s staff handled whatever emergency they were dealing with. It had nothing to do with him. Yes, he had abandoned his props in the children’s theatre. It was no big deal. He had another gig in the ballroom that evening, and it was much easier to carry his kit straight over there than lug it all the way down the site to his caravan and then lug it back again. And the silver stage outfit? Well, he was an eccentric. He didn’t always notice what he was wearing.
Of course, he knew he was a suspect for Julie’s murder… but they didn’t know that he knew that. He sped on through the narrow alleys and up to the top end of the site, dodging around a corner twice in succession when he spotted uniformed officers moving quickly along, heads sweeping left and right, two-way radios in hand. He could give himself up, of course, abandon his plans. It was inevitable they’d get him in the end. But he just couldn’t bear to. Not yet. Not when he was this close. He had to show her. He had to.
He cycled quickly along the top of the car park where the staff were asked to park, their cars inconveniently far from the pavilion, and found the gap in the hedging he’d noticed before. He shot through it and out onto the road, turning a sharp left and pedalling on at speed. He would do a wide arc and get to the coast further down.
It was working well. He felt in control in a way which would be baffling to the average person watching him speed past, balancing on a single wheel, post and saddle, arms slightly raised for balance.
Then he was hit from the side by a mustard yellow Ford Capri.
27
Kate tore along the empty beach, sending pebbles skittering left and right as her flat-soled sandals pounded into the shingle. She felt her phone vibrate and grabbed it from her pocket to see the number she recognised as DS Stuart’s. She didn’t answer. She would call back the second she found Craig and Nikki, but until then she needed to focus; she couldn’t be worrying about a battalion of suspicious East Anglian bobbies on her heels.
And where was Lucas? He was the backup she really needed. Had he heard her message? Had he already dowsed his way ahead of her and found her friends… safe and well… or dead? The beach had never, ever seemed so long. She could now see the first bunker, tipping slightly into the sand and pebbles, the endless eroding pummelling of the sea slowly taking away its foundations. Above it hung the low-level cliff and above that, folds of brooding grey cloud. She yelled her friends’ names as she pelted towards the bunker but heard nothing back but the sea, the gulls and her own heavy breathing and shingle scattering.
At last she reached the slanting structure and threw herself inside it, to be hit in the face by the sharp stink of stale urine. The chamber was barely big enough to accommodate six people, standing, and it was dark, very dark. Just a shallow slit of light fanned in through the letterbox opening where the World War Two weaponry would once have been positioned, many decades past. She flipped her phone torch on and threw light around the walls, her belly clenching at the prospect of finding a corpse propped up in the corner. There was no corpse, but something glinted on the floor. Something that looked like
