He pulled Danny around and marched her back past the white cottage and turned her onto the public footpath which sliced across the golf course. Within seconds the lights from Fleetwood docks were left behind. They seemed to walk into a shroud of blackness where it was impossible to see your feet.
A wave of panic coursed through Danny. This was the ideal place to finish the job. Drag her onto a fairway, into a bunker, then attack her. A hundred yards dead ahead of her, Danny saw the lights from a row of houses which backed onto the golf course, and to which the footpath led.
Trent shoved her, driving his open hand into the middle of her back, making her head snap backwards.
She stumbled.
And saw her chance.
She exaggerated the movement and turned it into a sprint.
She shot off like a whippet. Before Trent realised his error, Danny was five yards away. ‘Bitch!’ he shouted angrily. He lunged at her. The knife cut through the air with a swish.
Danny accelerated away. Having only recently tested her running skills when pursuing Claire Lilton, she knew her capabilities were limited, especially now with a sore ankle. But she had to put as much distance between herself and Trent as possible. She motored.
‘ No way! No fucking way!’ Trent screamed behind her.
Danny’s arms pumped wildly, her legs pumped, dismissing the pain in her ankle, her heart pumped to bursting. She knew she would get no help from adrenaline which had already overdosed her system. She had to rely on pure determination and the instinct to survive.
She willed herself to get to the houses ahead of Trent.
His footsteps crashed down in her wake, echoing in her ears.
He was only feet away, maybe only inches.
Danny surged on, motivated by the thought of his hands reaching out for her. She got to the point where the narrow footpath did a 90-degree turn to run directly behind the houses.
‘ Ahhh!’ Trent cried. He had lost his footing at the turn and pitched headlong into bushes.
Danny forced herself to go even faster, racing to the point where the path ended and an avenue of bungalows began and street-lights blazed, house-lights burned… back to an environment of normality.
Before she could get to the nearest door and possibly safety, Trent was on her, having recovered quickly from his fall. He rugby-tackled her, driving her over a low garden wall, through a tangle of bushes, rolling onto a well- manicured lawn.
Trent landed on top, reared up with the knife rising in his right hand, glinting in the sodium lighting. It began a downward descend into her face.
With a superhuman effort, Danny writhed herself away from the weapon’s arc of travel and Trent stuck the knife into the grass where, a split second before, Danny’s eye had been.
Danny’s right hand fell onto a large, hand-sized pebble on the rockery. She grabbed it immediately and with no thought process, just pure basic instinct, smashed it into the side of Trent’s head. He sprawled across the grass, leaving the knife embedded in the lawn.
Danny crawled away from him, completely exhausted, trying to get to her feet, but her whole body had given up responding to anything. Trent had already stood up. He staggered like a drunk around the garden, holding his head and searching for the knife.
‘ What the bloody ‘ell’s goin’ on ‘ere?’ boomed a voice from the back door of the house. The dark figures of two burly, handy-looking men appeared and made towards Danny and Trent.
‘ Call the police,’ Danny groaned. She slumped down. ‘Please, call the police.’
Trent cursed. He stumbled on the hilt of the knife, extracted it from the grass, stared wildly at the two of them, then, inexplicably but wonderfully to the exhausted Danny, he turned and ran.
Chapter Fourteen
Monday morning, three days later, two battered and bruised figures hobbled into work.
Firstly there was Henry Christie.
He had a collection of swellings on his scalp of various sizes and configurations. Because he had been knocked into oblivion, he had spent Thursday night in hospital, under observation, even after X-rays on his thick skull had shown no fractures. He had then spent a long weekend at home, recuperating.
His brain constantly hummed and his left ear emitted a shriek every so often which, he was assured by the medical profession, would pass in time. He had to walk fairly slowly, though, because if he moved his head too quickly, lights exploded at the back of his eyeballs, making him feel like his brain was linked to a Van Der Graaf generator.
Other than that, he was feeling pretty steady.
Behind him came Danielle Louise Furness on the first day of her official promotion to Detective Sergeant. She dragged herself into the police station a few feet behind Henry because he had picked her up on the way in.
The first of Danny’s days of sickness had been spent in the same hospital as Henry, where she had been checked over — again — by that same dishy doctor who had treated her before. He appeared to work more hours than she did. They became quite chatty under the circumstances and Danny filed him away for future possibilities.
Her next two days had been at her sister’s house near Preston where she had been fussed over and treated like royalty. Most of Danny’s physical injuries were relatively minor. The weekend gave them some quality time to heal.
Now, as she limped in behind Henry, she was just stiff and sore. So pretty much, Danny’s outer layer had been repaired.
It was her inner self, the psychological layers which concerned her. The chassis which held the bodywork together.
The night demons had been bad, sleep a problem. Each time she closed her eyes, whirling, frightening images came to her, where the faces of Jack Sands and Louis Trent overlayed each other to form a single terrifying monster with only one aim: to destroy Danny Furness.
But she had been determined to fight. She returned home on Sunday evening, resolved to sleep alone in her own house, get back to normal and get back into work to take up her new post.
And though she was suffering mentally, she knew she was tough enough to pull through it.
She and Henry rode up in the lift together.
It was 9 a.m.. Louis Vernon Trent had not yet been captured.
Following the gruesome discovery of a skull in woodland near to Darwen in East Lancashire by two illicit lovers, one very decomposed body was dug carefully out of a shallow grave and transported to the mortuary. It turned out to be the skeletal remains of a young person and the pathologist called in for the job identified them as those of a young girl aged maybe ten or eleven years old; she had been buried there for about five years. The only way to make positive ID would be through dental records, as the jaws and teeth were well-preserved.
He could not specify a cause of death, nor whether the girl had been sexually molested. Even so, the police decided to set up an incident room, allocate half a dozen detectives to it and see where the enquiry led.
The first port of call for the detectives on the case was Lancashire Constabulary’s Missing from Home files. These threw up three possibilities. One was quickly eliminated — she had actually returned home, but no one had cancelled the circulation. That left two girls, both having gone missing several years earlier and never returned.
The second port of call was to dental surgeries. This eliminated one of these girls.
The final port of call was to Blackpool police station.
Robert Fanshaw-Bayley, Assistant Chief Constable (Operations) was waiting impatiently in Henry Christie’s office, sitting behind his desk, leafing through his things. Henry closed his eyes momentarily when he clapped eyes on FB.
