A Dirty Death (32 page)

Lilah’s next thought was for Roddy. A searing terror flashed through her that the killer had found her brother and killed him. Where was he, otherwise? And Tim? Why hadn’t they been there, to save Den and Miranda? She gazed at Amos, who stood looking after the car, as if unsure whether it had really existed. His helplessness only fuelled her sense of panic. Den’s gurgling moan brought her back to reality and she cautiously approached him; one eye was open and focused on her, but the other side of his face was a mess she could hardly bear to look at. The crowbar had caught him at an angle, smashing his cheekbone and jaw.

‘Don’t scream,’ he mumbled, the words thick, but audible. ‘It gives me a headache.’ 

‘Just don’t move,’ she ordered him. ‘You’ll damage your brain if you do.’ A snort from Amos triggered a rising hysteria.

‘Same crowbar he used on me,’ he said. ‘Didn’t damage my brain so much.’

She wanted to say something about Isaac and the permanent, terminal damage done to him, but restrained herself. Then she realised that she should go and call for help. The prospect of dialling 999 yet again from the Redstone phone was too much for her. It was like living in a time warp. Kneeling next to Den, she stroked ineffectively at his hair.

‘Ought to fetch someone,’ Amos observed.

‘Go and see to it, then,’ Lilah snapped. ‘I’m not leaving him.’

Then everything happened at once. Jonathan’s Land Rover came charging down the Redstone lane like cavalry in a western. Before it could properly slither to a stop, Tim came tumbling out of the passenger seat, looking oddly different. Immediately taking charge, he knelt beside Den and began to examine the wound. Lilah looked to Jonathan, bewildered, and saw Roddy, white-faced on the back seat, making no attempt to leave the vehicle.

‘Where’s your mother?’ asked Tim.

‘She’s gone. With that man – Terry, I suppose. It was him who attacked Den.’

‘Are you sure? Did you see him?’ 

‘
Yes
, I saw everything. I saw them driving away. He was
kidnapping
her. Go after her, Jonathan. Please. He’ll murder her next.’ Her voice had risen to another scream, all control lost in the face of total nightmare. Den started to gurgle again, but Tim waved a hand to hush him. Then he addressed himself to Lilah.

‘It’s all right,’ he soothed. ‘There’s a whole lot of police officers waiting at the top of your drive, with two squad cars. They’ll catch him.’

‘How on earth did they miss him just now, then?’ she demanded. ‘He’s only been gone a couple of minutes.’

‘Longer’n that,’ said Amos reproachfully.

‘Pity they didn’t stop him on his way in,’ Lilah snarled. ‘What makes you think they’ll manage it now?’

Tim frowned. ‘They’re bound to realise …’ Interrupting himself, he extracted a phone from his pocket and made a hurried call. ‘He’s in the car that left just now,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose him.’

Lilah stared at him for a long moment, and then gave up. ‘Where have
you
been, anyway?’ she demanded of her brother.

Roddy leant his head out of the Land Rover. ‘The police phoned, trying to get hold of Den. We told them he’d gone up to see you, and left his phone in the car.’ For the first time, Lilah noticed the police car parked unobtrusively beside the 
barn. Roddy went on: ‘They said they wanted him to phone back. Tim and I were going to go up the field and get him, but then Jonathan phoned and told us what had happened with Phoebe and Elvira. He said we should keep Amos here, and he’d come round and drive him into town, because he had things to tell the police.’

‘God, Roddy, get
on
with it,’ Lilah shouted in frustration. ‘I don’t care about all this stuff.’

‘Well, basically, we haven’t been anywhere,’ he retorted loudly. ‘We were running after that red car with Mum in it, when Jonathan came down the lane, and we came back here with him.’ Roddy glared at her, still pale, his lips shaking. ‘Satisfied?’

The explanation fitted almost nothing that Lilah thought she had witnessed. The time frame seemed entirely wrong. ‘Well, what do we do now?’ she cried, looking round at the three standing men, and back to the prostrate Den. ‘We’ve got to help Mum.’

‘There’ll be an ambulance here in a minute,’ said Tim, holding his mobile telephone in one hand.

Lilah turned her attention back to Den, in an agony of indecision. ‘I can’t leave him. But I have to be sure that Mum’s okay. She might be dead as well by this time. We have to follow the red car.’

Jonathan looked to Tim for an answer. ‘Come 
on
,’ she screamed. There was a moment of hush, as the men seemed to commune silently.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Tim, at last. ‘It might be dangerous.’

‘
Might?
’ she demanded, increasingly hysterical. ‘After all this?’ She swept an expressive arm to embrace the entire farm, and finished by looking down at Den, lying on the ground, wounded and in pain.

In the car, Miranda faced the man who was abducting her. ‘You killed Isaac,’ she accused, her glance darting to the crowbar, wedged between the front seats. She could hardly speak for terror. ‘Why? You didn’t even know him.’

‘Shut up,’ he snapped, his voice unexpectedly Irish. ‘Why should I tell you anything?’

‘And Guy. You were involved in killing Guy, weren’t you? Even if you didn’t do it yourself.’

‘I said
shut up
,’ he repeated.

The bulging eyes and chewed lips warned Miranda that he was on the edge. Anything could happen. Her mind was blank, apart from a desperate need to understand. The car was going much too fast, swinging her painfully against the door, and then forcing her to brace herself to avoid falling onto him. She had undone her seatbelt, in a futile attempt to be ready to jump out of the car if it stopped or even slowed sufficiently. 

Something forced her to keep up the questions. If he was going to kill her anyway, surely he owed her an explanation first? Wasn’t that always what happened – the murderer revealed everything, on the assumption that his hearer would never live to share the secrets?

‘Did you want Guy dead? Your own father?’

It didn’t work. He merely turned to her for a second, and sneered. ‘I won’t tell you again. If you say one more word, I’ll bash
your
head in as well.’

The high hedges, flashing pink and white with the summer flowers, skimmed past as he kept the accelerator hard down. There was a junction less than half a mile ahead, with a sharp bend just before it. They would be lucky to avoid disaster if he didn’t slow down.

She wished she could see him better, and confirm the impression she’d had that he was uncannily like Guy to look at. But the reckless pace kept her gaze fixed mainly on the road ahead, willing it to remain clear. At least he was in no position to carry out his threat to bash her, so she risked further speech.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

He made no reply. She asked again, and he shook his head rapidly, side to side, as if shaking water from his hair; it was the craziest gesture he had made so far. 

‘You don’t know,’ she interpreted, dully. ‘You haven’t got any idea. Not to see your mother, I assume?’

‘She’s got nothing to do with this.’

‘They’ll catch you. You’ve killed someone.’

‘Let them try.’ He took the next bend faster than she could have imagined, and she reproached herself desperately, while clinging tightly to the door handle, shouting at him to slow down.

Jonathan and Tim were saved from more of Lilah’s wrath by the strangely exciting throb of a helicopter engine coming rapidly closer. Everyone looked up. The panic died in Lilah and she sqautted beside Den, passive and wooden, waiting for the next impossibility to happen.

Somehow, the injured policeman was taken up into the deafening machine. When it lifted slowly, magically, up into the sky, she held her flying hair away from her face and watched.

She looked around yet again at her home, then up into neighbouring fields where the heifers galloped frantically to escape the terrifying noise in the sky.
They’ll slip their calves
, she thought, and the idea seemed unbearably sad. In a rush, great hot tears began to run from her eyes at this final piece of destruction. For a few minutes, she couldn’t see anything, but when she looked again, Tim and Jonathan were joining Roddy in 
the vehicle, and she followed automatically. They paused to speak to Amos.

‘Go home, old chap,’ said Tim, kindly. ‘When this is over, someone’ll come to see you’re all right.’

Amos nodded submissively. Lilah wondered whether he had any idea what was going on. She couldn’t remember where he fitted into the story, had no idea why he’d come to speak to Miranda. She felt no curiosity as to what might happen next. Her powers of reasoning seemed to have died. Huddled on the back seat of the inexplicably fast-moving Land Rover with Roddy, she let the tears flow. Everything was over now, the whole matter was at an end. If the helicopter fell out of the sky onto the Land Rover, it would be no more than fitting.

But gradually she became aware of how very rapidly they were travelling.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked, in the little-girl voice she’d sometimes used with her father.

‘It’s not over yet,’ Tim threw over his shoulder. ‘This guy is really something. Do you know him? Terry, you said his name was?’

‘He’s my half-brother. Mine and Roddy’s.’

‘Good God.’ Jonathan whistled, then went quiet. After some thought he said, ‘This is all very strange. There’s something going on that I can’t 
fathom out. Did this bloke kill Guy and Sam? Or what? And where does Elvira fit in?’

‘He killed Isaac, I suppose,’ said Lilah. ‘But Elvira’s been arrested for killing Daddy and Sam. Den just told me that.’ In spite of herself, Lilah was reviving. ‘Roddy looks as if he’s going to be sick.’

As they left the village, heading towards town, she saw two police cars on the steep road some distance ahead of them, driving much too fast, one behind the other. She heard Jonathan say, ‘They must have lost him.’

The view was patchy, but the road snaked for some distance between the hedges, destined to meet a much larger and busier road just over the brow of the hill. Everywhere felt oddly deserted to Lilah. Just two incongruous police cars, chasing madly after an invisible quarry, and themselves in the jolting Land Rover gaining on them all the time.

‘Where the hell is he?’ snapped Tim.

The inexorable climax built as she waited with a cold, numb horror. On the main road, they could see the police cars ahead, lights flashing. There was no traffic, making her feel again as if they were in a time warp, or some different reality altogether. ‘They’ve stopped the traffic,’ Tim said. ‘I’m impressed.’

They came upon the final scene with devastating 
abruptness. The road dipped gracefully down into a shallow valley and up the other side, visible for a good distance, giving the occupants of the Land Rover a panoramic view of events. Halfway up the opposite side, a tractor was toiling along, evidently oblivious to the drama unfolding behind it. A red car was closing rapidly on it, and began to pull out to overtake it, just as the tractor itself began to make a right turn.

It was obvious that the car was travelling too fast to stop. For two or three seconds, Lilah was transported into her mother’s body, seeing the whole encounter through Miranda’s eyes, feeling the breathless, tingling fear that went with speed and that terrible sense of knowing that an impact was inevitable.

Afterwards, they concluded there must have been a moment of telepathy, which caused Miranda to duck her head and protect it with her arms, pressing herself against the firm side of the car and closing her eyes tightly. When the car swerved and then pitched and rolled, grinding through a thick hedge and plunging into a bramble-filled ditch, she gave herself up to it and simply waited for the sickening motions to stop.

The next part was lost to Lilah, the car obscured by a large beech tree, which it had mercifully avoided hitting. She saw the tractor
driver climb down and walk unsteadily to the hole in the hedge, staring uncomprehendingly as first two police cars and then a Land Rover pulled up in the road. Overwhelmed, he stood passively, an insignificant bystander.

Lilah wanted to curl up tight and close her eyes, avoiding any further misery or responsibility. Would she have to watch her mother being lifted unconscious or dead from the car?

‘Everybody out,’ ordered Tim, urgently. ‘You might be able to help.’ Lilah and Roddy fumbled in unison with door handles, clumsy and slow, neither in any hurry to witness their mother’s fate.

Tim held out a hand to each of them. Lilah took one, blinking at the strangeness of it. Surely Tim had desk-bound, white hands, with slim fingers and narrow wrists? This was the arm of a very different individual. She looked hesitantly into his face, almost afraid that he would peel off a latex mask to reveal someone wholly other underneath.

In a way, that’s what he did. His eyes, formerly so casually friendly and eager to please, were now full of a mature intelligence, combined with a kind of apologetic understanding. His whole bearing had changed in one smooth transition from an unfit yuppie to a lean military professional. Lilah felt simultaneously betrayed and relieved. Meekly, she waited for him to assist her to her mother.

The door of the crashed car on the passenger 
side was now open, the angle it made transforming the car into some monstrous alien machine, a metal contraption with no purpose other than to crush its occupants. The door was being propped open by one of the policemen, and Miranda’s legs in tight blue jeans began to emerge, apparently of their own volition.

Concerned male hands and arms caught her as she unfolded from the capsized seat and pushed herself up and out, like a strange birth from an experimental new species. With a curiously awkward wriggle, she stood upright, breathing deep and squaring her shoulders. Lilah watched, tense with apprehension, as her mother lifted first one foot, then the other, walking on the spot as if to test her legs. Three men hovered round her, hands fluttering, ready to catch her if she fell.