One Dead Witness (34 page)

‘
Now you know. I was betrayed by everyone, particularly those
little angels who I cared for. They’re the ones who must suffer -
as well as people like you. People in the system who don’t
understand men like me.’

‘
But what about Meg Tomlinson?’ she asked. That was the name of
the murdered girl whose parents Danny had just spent several hours
counselling. Danny needed to know if Trent had killed her. ‘You
didn’t even know her, did you?’ She asked the questions gently, so
as not to antagonise him.

‘
Knowing is not the point.’ Trent relaxed, removed the knife.
He sat back and Danny breathed out. The cold line where the blade
had been pressed throbbed. ‘It’s the principle of the matter. She
was like them, one of them, really. I’m simply making a
statement.’

‘
Why kill her, though?’ She still needed a definite answer.
‘I’m assuming you did kill her.’

‘
You assume right.’

Danny cast a quick glance at him. He stared ahead, eyes
unblinking. She could hear his teeth grinding, a noise which made
her cringe.

‘
I treated her with kindness and compassion, actually. But she
didn’t like it. She would have betrayed me like all the others - if
she’d lived. She was going to die anyway, but she chose to do it
without dignity. She could have been a willing martyr for me, but
no. Instead of a dignified death, she struggled after we had
finished making love ... she was foolish, very foolish.’

He had said all this as if in a trance.

Danny shook as his words poured out. She had to blank her mind
to how Meg Tomlinson must have suffered at Trent’s hands. Making
love! Jesus, Danny thought. Making love was not what the post
mortem revealed, but a brutal, perverted assault.

It dawned on Danny, if it hadn’t done before, that she had
been kidnapped by a seriously deranged man who, for his own good
and the safety of the general public, needed to be
killed.

Danny knew she probably would not be the one to do the deed,
though.

She fully expected to be his next victim.

Henry stood at the urinal. His water seemed to be passing for
ever. He willed his bladder to empty quicker.

The toilet door opened behind him and someone came
in.

Ahhh . . . finished. Henry looked down and shook off the drops
and the image of his limp penis was the last thing he saw as his
head exploded in a firework display Guy Fawkes would have been
proud of. His legs buckled and he crashed down, catching his chin
against the bowl of the urinal before he hit the floor. A further
broadside pummelled him into blackness.

The assault stopped abruptly.

Henry veered through that sickening twilight zone somewhere
between conscious and not, fading in and out, whilst his mind
blared like a siren, loud, then quiet, then louder.

Finally everything went quiet.

Henry lay there very still as the urinals flushed.

Trent made Danny loop round again, cut inland through
Blackpool and eventually hit the M55, heading east towards Preston.
His directions were as contorted as his thoughts. It became clear
to Danny that he had no idea where to take her to finish her off.
Obviously the prospect of dealing with Danny was unsettling
him.

Before they had gone very far on the motorway, he instructed
her to take the next turning off. She found herself being directed
along country roads, towards Fleetwood. She knew exactly where she
was, though, which made her feel comforted. She was pretty sure
he’d be unable to take her anywhere within the county she did not
know.

He made her turn right off the A586 and go across Shard
Bridge, over the River Wyre. Now they were on narrower, winding
roads, with Trent saying little, deeply engrossed in his own
thoughts.

Soon they reached the coast again, well to the north of
Blackpool, at a small seaside village called Knott End, and were
driving down the short promenade towards the slipway near the river
estuary. Fleetwood was directly opposite, across the
water.

He told her to stop at the top of the slipway.

Fleetwood was lit up and looked prettier than it actually was.
The tide was in, quite high, and the water lapped not many feet
from the front wheels of the Mercedes. On this side of the water it
was dark. No one around. In more ways than one, Danny had reached
the point of no return.

‘
Switch off.’

She killed the engine. Silence surrounded them like a
shroud.

‘
Keys,’ he barked, holding out his hand. Danny took them out of
the ignition and dropped them into his open palm. He slid them into
his pocket.

Trent was now in a dilemma.

The very fact that Danny had to get out of the car gave her a
slight opportunity to escape. He knew it, so did she.

As soon as he told her to get out, she was going to run.
Trent’s mind, already in turmoil, revolved furiously. Then he hit
on a course of action.

He opened his door and placed his left leg out. With his right
hand he grabbed Danny’s hair, started to climb out and dragged her
behind him over the handbrake and gearstick.

‘
This way. You come out this way and if you try anything I’ll
stab you.’ The point of the knife wavered dangerously close as she
succumbed to the situation. He pulled her across and dropped her
onto the ground on her hands and knees. He stepped away from her,
waving the blade threateningly.

‘
Come on, come on, get up, get up!’

She clambered unsteadily up, using the arm-rest on the inside
of the door as leverage. Trent yanked her away from the door,
back-heeled the door shut and propelled her towards the footpath
which ran alongside the river, underneath the observation windows
of the unmanned coastguard station and the golf club to their left.
On their right was the River Wyre. The water lapped gently up the
man-made riverbank.

Danny stumbled several times when Trent pushed her, but he was
remorseless.

Two hundred yards down the path they approached a pretty white
cottage at the water’s edge, lit up, looking inviting and homely.
Danny willed one of the occupants to come to a window. That did not
happen as Trent frogmarched her quickly past. Ahead of them was a
small sailing club with many dinghies drawn up on a slipway. Beyond
were more cottages which Trent obviously did not know
about.

‘
Shit,’ he said on seeing them.

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.