Hilary gasped and loomed in the open doorway as it spilled cold December air into the house.
‘Where is Jane?’ I demanded. ‘What have you done with her? Is she here in this house?’ I was looking along the corridor, wondering if this type of house had a basement. I didn’t think so but there could be a shed in the garden, or maybe she wasn’t here at all and he had her stashed somewhere else.
‘Can’t breathe,’ Harry rasped, my knee on his lower back keeping him pinned to the carpet.
Yanking out my phone, I snarled, ‘That’s the least of your problems.’ I let a little pressure off though. It would do me no good to be accused of excessive force.
My phone connected to the emergency line and I wasted no time attempting to explain myself. The second I got through the police dispatcher, I started talking.
‘This is Tempest Michaels. I have a suspected serial killer in my custody.’ I gave her the address and told her to send everything.
Only once my call was finished did I turn my attention back to the Sandman. He was trying to tell me something and had been since I threw him to the floor.
‘I heard Jane say it,’ he squeaked.
I narrowed my eyes. ‘What?’
‘The Sandman,’ he attempted to clarify. ‘I heard Jane say it.’
I let a little more pressure off him now, letting him fill his lungs properly.
He heaved a deep breath, and then another, before saying, ‘After she tackled me to the ground and pinned me there – I must say you and your employees are very good at it – she asked Karen if she was sure I wasn’t the Sandman. I guessed that was who she was employed to deal with.’
I did not like it one bit, but I was beginning to worry that I had just slammed an innocent man into his own carpet.
‘You overheard Jane say the name and you just happened to guess what we are calling … of Karen’s attacker?’ It was not so much that I didn’t believe him, but that I didn’t want to.
‘Yes,’ he squeaked again, craning his neck to look around and up at me. ‘Is Karen all right? After the fire, she just vanished. I thought I might read about it in the paper or see her coming back to get some things, but I genuinely don’t think she has returned since that night. I’m not the one you are after,’ he assured me in a quiet and hopeful voice.
I closed my eyes and swore inside my head.
Big Ben. Retaliation. Friday, December 23rd 1735hrs
Jane’s gran knew exactly where she had placed the note with Karen Gilbert’s number on. Unfortunately, when she went to retrieve it from the small drawer in the kitchen where she kept all her odds and ends, it wasn’t there.
This led to the drawer being emptied on the kitchen table and when it still didn’t present itself, a thorough ransacking of the whole room ensued.
Karen Gilbert is the only person on the planet who can describe or identify the Sandman and that made her of vital importance so far as Tempest was concerned. She was in hiding and though Jane might know where she is, my impression was that no one else did and no one had a contact number for her.
We had no way to get in touch with her unless we could find the piece of paper.
Then a thought struck me: Jane’s phone.
I hadn’t checked her handbag to see if it was there, but I should have. If it wasn’t, and she still had it with her or near her, maybe it could be used to track her location. If it was in her handbag, maybe there would be a number for Karen Gilbert in it. Jane wrote it down for her gran, so surely she had it in her contacts log.
With that in mind, I started for the door. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ I called out. ‘I need to check something.’
From Basic, I got a grunt of acknowledgement and I was out of the door.
Aylesford is built on the side of a small hill. The whole area: Maidstone, Rochester, and all the surrounding towns and villages rest atop a geographical feature known as the North Downs. They are a series of rolling hills no doubt created when one bit of land bumped into another a billion or so years ago.
Jane’s gran’s house was right next to the pub which is about halfway up the steepest bit of the street running through the middle of the little village. The carpark is at the bottom next to the river but there is only about a hundred and twenty yards between the two.
I set off at a jog, excited to see if I could achieve something with this field trip. Maybe if I could produce the phone number everyone wanted and get us to Karen Gilbert, I would be seen as more than just the pretty one with all the muscles.
The carpark was quiet, the sound of the river gurgling over rocks to create eddies and the sound of a couple having a row in one of the nearby houses, the only sounds to hear.
Given how quiet it was outside, it came as quite a surprise when I got ambushed.
Something inside the back of my head picked up the sound of an object travelling through the air and told me to duck. Instinct could have advised me to turn around to face the threat, but had I done that I would have got a house brick to my face.
It sailed over my head as I shot downward, smashing into my car where
