walked through the sticking snow to his hire car, spun it around and drove back to the village, stopping outside the pub called the Tawny Owl. A free house, it proclaimed on the sign.
They edged carefully along a tight shale track that clung to the edge of the steep hillside, stumbling occasionally and travelling, according to Henry’s compass, slightly north-north-west. Being on the exposed eastern side of the hill, they were completely at the mercy of the weather. The wind had increased forcefully, driving hard sleet-ice remorselessly into their sides as though they were being pelted by gravel.
As much as he was cursing himself for getting them into this mess, Henry was pretty sure they were on the right track. They were just starting the descent down Mallowdale Fell into the valley cut by the River Raeburn. When they got down to that level, Henry knew they should be able to find a good track that would lead them to the civilization that was Kendleton, their stop for the night and now, of course, the end of their journey. He knew that Donaldson could not possibly go on, that his friend was in embarrassing and continual agony. He might even need medical help, although Henry knew that doctors only dealt with extreme cases of food poisoning these days. You literally had to excrete it all out of your system, all by yourself. Probably all that Donaldson needed was TLC, immediate access to a toilet and a bed to crash on.
Henry stopped. Donaldson had lagged behind. As he waited for him to catch up, he turned his back to the wind and took out his mobile phone. Still no signal, but even so he typed out a text message with a frozen thumb and pressed send, hoping it would wing its way into the ether anyway. The screen said ‘Unable to send message’, so he tried again, pressed the send button, gave a flick of his wrist as though this would help, and hoped it would somehow land on Kate’s phone.
Donaldson stood miserably behind him. His eyes had sunk into his face. He looked drawn and exhausted.
‘We start going down now.’ Henry had to shout above the howling wind. ‘Then there’ll be more cover and it should be easier, OK?’ His friend nodded. ‘Push on?’ Henry asked. Another nod. Henry turned and started to walk, imagined he heard something — a thud? — but wasn’t certain. Something that wasn’t part of the weather noise. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to have Donaldson right behind him.
He wasn’t there.
Flynn climbed out of the Peugeot and walked to the front door of the pub. The snow was now horrendously heavy, falling in a way he hadn’t seen since he’d been a teenager, when winters were much more severe in this part of the world. It was thick and was definitely now sticking — almost as soon as he walked through it, leaving footprints, his tracks were instantly filled in as though he hadn’t been there. He knew at that point that if he was going to get out of Kendleton that day, now was the time to do it. The weather looked set and bleak and it wouldn’t take long to cut off a village like this one, set deep in a valley, one road in, one road out.
He decided to do what he needed to do first, then make a decision about leaving. If he got snowed in, he would just have to throw himself on the mercy of the innkeeper. If necessary he would sleep in the bar, something he’d done on many occasions in the past. The good old days.
He glanced up at the name plate over the door as he went in and saw the licensee’s name was displayed as Alison Marsh. He found himself in a very pleasant country pub, low beamed, dark wood, nicely decorated and with a huge fire roaring in a grate. He approached the bar, noticing only a couple of other people in the snug. One was a youngish woman who seemed slightly out of place, sitting alone in an alcove, the other was a grizzled old-timer on a corner seat at the bar who looked as though he’d been rooted there, growing old, for many years. He had a pint of Guinness in front of him, and a whisky chaser. The young woman watched him but the man didn’t even raise his eyes from the newspaper he was scanning. Behind the bar was a nice-looking lady, maybe early forties, who smiled at Flynn.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘Er… do you do coffee?’
‘You name it.’
‘Latte with an extra shot?’
‘No problem. Small, medium or large?’
‘Medium.’
She nodded and turned to the complex-looking coffee-making contraption at the back of the bar. Flynn eased one cheek of his arse over a bar stool and surveyed the room again. He gave the lone woman a quick smile — she looked away — and the man continued to ignore him.
‘Weather not good,’ he said to the back of the woman behind the bar.
‘No.’ The coffee maker gurgled, hissed and steamed. ‘It’s caught us by surprise and it looks like it could be a bad one.’ She turned to him with his foamy drink and placed it carefully on the bar. ‘Passing through?’
‘Just visiting — but they weren’t at home.’
‘Ah.’ She leaned on the bar and he couldn’t help but notice her figure, which was very nice. She caught his look and smiled. ‘Two twenty-five, please.’
He paid her, counting out the exact change. When she turned to the till, he pulled a crumpled piece of paper from his pocket and ironed it out on the bar top. Headed ‘Lancashire Constabulary — Message Log’, it was a pro- forma document that ensured nothing could be missed when taking a message of any sort from anyone. The top message that Flynn had seen on the pad in Cathy James’s office, he had managed to snaffle it in the instant before Tom had appeared at the office door and thrown him out. It was the most recent message she had taken.
Flynn read it, then got out his phone, waited for a few moments for a signal to be indicated on the screen. One didn’t. He tutted. He raised his head to the woman behind the bar, who had turned to watch him.
‘We struggle out here at the best of times,’ she told him. ‘They’re always on about putting boosters in, or whatever, but they never seem to get round to it. Probably not worth it. This weather will make certain there’s no signal at all, I reckon.’
‘I take it the landline works?’
‘There’s a public phone in the toilet corridor.’
Flynn had noticed a phone behind the bar. ‘Any chance of using that one?’ he asked sweetly. ‘Don’t want my coffee to go cold.’
She weighed him up, then said, ‘OK,’ and gave him the cordless handset.
‘Thanks. I’m Steve Flynn, by the way.’
‘Alison Marsh.’
‘Ah, the landlady. Pleased to meet you,’ Flynn smiled. He got Cathy James’s mobile number from the contacts menu on his own phone and thumbed it into the handset, put it to his ear and waited. A connection was made — then went straight through to voice mail. He tutted and hung up, realizing he was doing a lot of tutting recently.
‘No joy?’
‘Nah.’ He handed the phone back to Alison.
Reading from his stolen message pad, Flynn asked, ‘You wouldn’t know where Mallowdale House is, would you?’
Flynn saw the woman’s instant reaction. ‘Why?’ she said sharply, and it took him back slightly.
‘Is it local?’ he asked, carrying on as though nothing had happened.
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s… where?’
‘Two miles up the road, past the police house.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘Big house, behind a big fence, big grounds.’
‘When you say big grounds, what do you mean?’
‘Well, the house itself is in big, fenced-in grounds, but the land surrounding that all belongs to Mallowdale.’
‘What, like moorland or forest, kind of thing?’
‘Yeah — why?’
‘Er, nothing,’ he said. He picked up his coffee and took a sip. It was a good brew and the extra shot had an instant effect. He was puzzled by Alison’s strange reaction as he re-read the message again, written down and recorded by Cathy James, who still remained uncontactable.
In the ‘From’ section, she had written, ‘Anon.’
In the body of the message she’d written, ‘Poachers on Mallowdale House land again.’
