Folly (29 page)

‘For God's sake, Dad. Are you serious?'

‘Never more serious. I always wondered if Will had anything to do with Edward being sent away. A sort of payoff because Cornelius had his two sons and had even taken away the one Will thought was his. I heard Will try to say Edward pushed the little boy but he wasn't like that. It would never have happened – and he was almost catatonic by the time I got to the river. And nowhere near where Graham had fallen.'

‘Shit,' O'Reilly muttered. ‘That's what this was all about. Will being cuckolded and turning it to his own advantage. Perpetual payoff. What kind of a man does that? If he'd killed Cornelius I might have got it, but all this?'

‘Listen,' Tony's dad said. ‘Will wasn't to know what could happen if he left a young wife alone in a cottage up on the Derwinter estate. Cornelius had a reputation. After his wife died … well, with or without Cathy's willing participation, she became pregnant but nothing was said. That's how I pieced it all together. Cathy as good as admitted it to me at one point. It was obvious Will never knew until the accident, and given that there was never any sign of another pregnancy with him and Cathy, it could be he's sterile. That drives some men mad. It wasn't until the lad hit his head and drowned that it came out, and then it was only by chance I overheard what I did. When I got there Cornelius Derwinter had the boy's body in his arms and he was crying over him. I heard him say, ‘My son, my son.' Will heard it, too. I'm sure he didn't know before that. But it was obvious he got it then. He looked at me and I saw it in his eyes. It was never mentioned again. Next we knew, Will and Cathy were in the Black Dog – it belonged to Cornelius, like most things around here.'

Signs for the villages of Upper and Lower Slaughter came up on the left.

‘Llama farm!' Tony yelled. ‘I've seen it. Back there. We've gone past the bloody thing.'

‘Oh, fuck!' O'Reilly checked his rear-and side-view mirrors. ‘Hold on. Use the light, Bill. Can't risk the siren.'

Lamb lowered his window and slapped a light up top. O'Reilly leaned on the horn. Oncoming traffic in the other lane reacted slowly, a van driver hitting his brakes, then speeding up again. Two cars after him did the same thing.

A motorcycle tried to get off the road and hit an orange and yellow barricade, sending splintered wood and metal flying and workers leaping for a ditch.

‘Pay attention, you stupid gits!' Lamb yelled. ‘Something's changing in Alex's car, boss. He's yelling at her so loud I can't hear a word. He's threatening her, I can tell that much.'

‘F
ucking bitch,' Will bellowed at Alex. ‘Give that to me.' He reached across her for the phone.

She punched at him. ‘Stop it. I'll go off the road.'

‘We're going off the road anyway. Give that to me.'

Punching him again, crying out, Alex veered to the left, hit a broken branch loaded with snow. The load cascaded in front of her and she drove blind, the wipers pressing a film of instantly frozen snow against the windscreen.

Will slugged her across the jaw, snapped her head around and grabbed at the phone again.

He slammed a hand over hers on the wheel and tried to ram a foot down on her boot to press the brake. His jacket slid up and a piece of steel handle gleamed in his back pocket. A knife.

She was dead. She knew she was dead.

With her left hand, she managed to close her fingers around her coffee mug. The drink wasn't scalding but it was hot enough when it splattered into his eyes.

Will screamed and went for his knife. The blade, curved, evilly pointed and double-edged, ridged on one side, shot out.

A bloody gash opened across Alex's knuckles.

She didn't pause.

Her seatbelt responded to a single jab with a thumb and she was out of the Land Rover in one motion, snatching the phone on the way.

She had no time. No time to save herself. Fighting, batting at laden branches, sliding down a bank, tripping over hidden tangles of undergrowth, Alex threw herself away from the vehicle.

Losing him was the only escape she could think of. If she ran along the road she would be clearly in his sight. They hadn't passed another car on this rutted way that was barely more than a lane. On the open she'd be an easy target.

With every stumbling step, every painful, wracking breath she took, a space on her back, between her shoulder blades, prickled and burned. The hunting knife, switch blade, whatever the horrible thing was, could hit there and sink in, go through her entire body like a hot wire through butter.

A spatter of scarlet drops sprayed the snow.

Her hand. He would see the blood and follow, like a trail of murderous breadcrumbs.

With a couple of tugs, the scarf around her neck came loose and she wrapped it around her fist, held the injured hand up while she stumbled on. One foot after another sank into the soft drifts.

It was like climbing through crusted meringue. Slow, slow, slow, and her thighs already ached from the rush of adrenaline and the cold she met with each move.

The incline threw her forward, struggling to keep her balance, wading. More trees awaited her at the bottom of the steep bank and she pushed through the first cross-hatched twigs and limbs, flinching at the barrage of wet sticks that struck her face.

Her heart beat harder but easier. She might have lost him. Not a sound came from behind her. The coffee could have done more harm than she hoped. Closer and closer together, the trees rose from uneven ground she couldn't see. Rocks caught at her feet and thorns tore through her jeans to scratch her legs.

She heard sounds now, but they came from her breath and her rasping throat.

If she was calm, she could move silently through all this.

Alex swung around, searched behind her. His feet wouldn't make more noise in the snow than hers did and the snapping, cracking cacophony around her head was no different from what was happening to him.

He was back there, Will, getting closer because he was stronger.

He would hear if she vomited. Alex forced herself to stand still in a small copse of skinny ash trunks and sucked air deeply through her mouth until the sickness passed enough for her to think. And she listened.

Nothing.

Tears sprang, stinging her eyes. Please let her have lost him. She had no idea where she was. She could walk into anything as long as she moved blind like this.

But she had to go on.

A shattering crack sounded. Not close, but back there. It could just be the weight of snow breaking a branch,

The next barrage of breaking limbs took only seconds to reach her. She had the lead on him but she hadn't lost Will.

Here and there, where the woods had shielded the ground, she saw dark patches and ran from one to another, dashed on until she burst, abruptly, into an open space – on the edge of another snow-camouflaged ravine.

Alex changed direction and ran left, along the rim of the gully. She ran until more trees scattered the slope, and launched forward, using branches to hold on to and control her downhill charge.

She fell, cannoned head-first and rolled, arms flailing.

Winded, she found her feet and staggered on, hugging her aching middle.

The next fall landed her in a throbbing heap inside a hollowed ditch overhung with the edge of a bank where runoff had caused the earth to break away.

Alex pressed a hand over her mouth. Black flecks burst before her eyes. Passing out wasn't an option. Driving in her heels, she pushed backward into the hollow until she was completely under a ledge.

Not a ledge but earth and debris caved into the mouth of an old culvert with an icy coat over the opening where dripping water had frozen. Dimly, Alex saw a shiver of light through the blue-white veil and spread a hand on a knobby, hard surface.

The light would come from the other end of the culvert.

If she could get inside – it was as big in diameter as she was tall – there was a chance Will would never find her. If he did, there were two entrances, which also meant two exits, and she was more agile than he was.

Alex listened intently. Her hand throbbed, deep and hard, but it was too cold for the blood to drip from the scarf.

Ice spiked her eyelashes and coated much of her face. Every move felt like a decision but when she looked at that shimmer on the ice curtain, a rush of hope gave her strength.

She chose what looked more like a piece of broken concrete than a rock and smacked it against the ice.

The noise was dulled but still she drew her neck down into the collar of her coat and waited.

Should she accept Will, his knife, and no hope out here? Or risk the noise to get into a culvert where she might have a chance?

Alex battered at the ice and swallowed a sob when it cracked and a hole opened the size of a fist. The beating of her heart in her throat shortened her breath, but she hacked faster and the hole grew bigger.

A jagged slice of ice broke away. The smaller, the less obvious the opening she made, the better. She didn't hesitate to shove a booted foot through the space and squeeze inside. The freeze deadened an odor of rot but she still gagged, held her nose and breathed through her mouth. And she prayed the smell of death came from nothing more horrifying than rodents.

N
ot one of them could have expected an a-hole driving a combination mega lorry and construction-sized cement mixer to opt for committing mass murder – even though he would die pulling it off.

O'Reilly had managed a hair-raising but successful one-eighty through oncoming traffic and they'd ended up heading in the right direction … before the mammoth mixer turned suicidal.

From the back seat, craned forward to see between O'Reilly and Lamb, Tony felt his mouth open but the only noise he heard was the wild, grinding howl of the mud-covered monster lurching across the path of the Volvo no more than a hundred and fifty yards ahead.

‘Back up,' Lamb yelled. ‘Back up!'

He was, Tony realized, shouting to the lorry driver, not O'Reilly. The colors of other vehicles spun around them, running together before his eyes. A steady blare of horns drummed amid the shrieking of tires that weren't grabbing anything but ice.

O'Reilly cranked the steering wheel left, as hard left as it would go, and the Volvo shuddered, slid, found some traction and leaped inches from the road to slam into a bank. They roared upward, O'Reilly pumping the brakes and fighting for control.

They stopped.

Tony fell backward against the seat. His father didn't make a sound. In the front seat, Lamb filled any lull with colorful language mostly unintelligible to Tony.

He started to open his door.

‘Stay where you are,' O'Reilly snapped. ‘We need to move. Now.'

Miraculously, the Volvo made a smooth descent to the roadway – only to be confronted by the maniac equipment driver who waved his arms in front of them until they stopped.

‘Not now,' O'Reilly hissed. He told Lamb to, ‘Give the fool a card and warn him off.'

They were already moving again when Lamb rolled down the window and a scrawny man covered with cement dust from the top of his Mohawk to the steel caps of his Doc Martens grabbed the open rim and stuck his head inside the car.

‘Shite,' said O'Reilly the Irishman, braking again. ‘Take our number and call it in, son. We'll deal with you later. And get out of our way.'

The man pointed back to his cab and yelled, ‘The police are for emergencies, right? My missus is dying in there.'

C
radling her left hand, Alex molded her body tighter to the curve of the culvert. When her lungs burned, she remembered to breathe. Listening so hard her ears popped, even the sound of air shifting in and out of her body was too loud.

There was nowhere else to go. Not any more. Here she would stay until help arrived – how could it? – or Will came. If help came, it would be Tony or the police and they would come, shouting and running and sliding. If Will came, it would be like a snake, looking for a silent way to wherever she was, the knife in his hand.

And if it got dark, if the icy veils at either end of the culvert turned from hazy blue-white to black, would she have the strength, the courage to crawl out and try to find her way, or would the cold and the weakness she felt seeping into her have left her to slip away in this huge, stinking pipe?

Whispering reached her.

Alex held her breath again and listened, tried to make out voices, or a voice.

The light changed. At the end furthest from where she'd climbed in here, the end where the ice was unbroken and looked thicker, a black rim showed like the thinnest crescent moon painted in silhouette.

She sighed, slumped a little … until the whispering came again, and the black crescent became a half moon, slipped to obscure the lower half of the opening, then covered it completely in a final shushing crescendo of the whisper.

Sweat broke out on her face, cold sweat, and between her shoulder blades. When she blinked it didn't stop the burning in her eyes. If Will came in the same way she had, her plan was to escape the other way. But she knew what had happened. Snow and ice and probably rocks had fallen like an avalanche to block the second opening.

The waves of tremors started in her knees. If she didn't hold on, she'd slide into the muck that rose around her ankles. Panic didn't respect her needs. Now she needed to cling to some shreds of reason, not pass out from a lack of air.

With her mouth pressed beneath the cuff of her right sleeve, Alex blew. She blew and blew and sucked in, and blew, trying to imagine inflating her parka. Somewhere there was a character that blew up, or looked puffy, something made of rubber … or pastry. A doughy, pastry creature, white like the world and blowing up with each push of air. A laugh came out as a hiccup and she pressed a forearm over her mouth.