The Boat House (33 page)

The four guns, and the schoolteacher's scrapbook. There was the situation, in one simple picture. Aldridge was asking each of them about their firearms experience.

"Don't look at me," Pete said. "Most I ever handled was a bent air rifle in a fairground."

Tony Marinello said more or less the same. Ivie had hit a few birds in his time. Diane had hit very little in hers, but she was still included as one of the experienced shots.

"Now," Aldridge said. "This is the situation. We know she's taken the limo. Pete's car's still blocking the way out, so she could only have gone into the estate. How many tracks are there?"

Ivie and Marinello looked blank. Diane rubbed her forehead as she thought for a moment.

"Three main ones," she said. "Lakeside, woodland, and across the top. There are little dirt roads as well, but that car's too wide."

"So that's three possibilities, but we've only got two cars - Diane's pickup, and Pete's wreck."

"Thanks," Pete said drily, but Aldridge didn't seem to hear; and besides, Bob Ivie was chipping in with a suggestion.

"Three," he said. "There's the Land Rover in the stables."

"Okay. Three possibilities, three cars. We want a gun and a radio in each. Those with no weapons experience handle the driving. If you find her, raise the alarm and don't let her get near. Use the gun if you have to. I mean, a warning shot first if it'll do any good, but then I'm saying
use
it. I've seen her in action and I'm telling you, don't even hesitate. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Tony Marinello said. "What the fuck's going on?"

"Later," Aldridge told him. "Just hope you don't find out the hard way."

Pete was watching Aldridge as he handed out the weapons and counted shells.

Forget it, buster,
he was thinking.
Let's just forget the whole thing.

FORTY-THREE

Ivie had been having bad feelings about the situation ever since Dizzy had called him up to the doorway of his suite to explain that he'd been joined by 'a lady friend' during the night, and that her presence at the Hall was going to have to be the best kept secret since Winston Churchill's sex change. It hadn't taken much for Ivie to guess that the lady friend in question would be the little waitress from the village that Dizzy had been pining over for so long.

It had felt like trouble to Ivie even then, and when he'd seen them going out together in the limo and then returning after half an hour with an obviously underaged kid that they'd taken up to the suite with them, the mental alarm bells had really started to ring. He'd watched them unseen from a doorway as they'd ascended, and he'd felt his skin creep into gooseflesh as he'd heard the waitress whispering to the child in a way that was somehow empty of words but filled with promises. When the door had closed behind them and the lock had clicked shut, Ivie had begun to feel sick. It was then that he'd gone to the key board in the housekeeper's closet and helped himself to her passkey; but, until the loud music and the scream, he hadn't been able to raise the nerve to use it.

Now he and Marinello were in the estate's Land Rover, the one with the wire-protected windows that was like a mobile jail, bumping along the middle track through the centre of the estate. McCarthy and Diane had taken the lower road along the very edge of the lake while Ross Aldridge, alone and in Diane's pickup truck, was way up on the high ground where the woodland ended and the shooting moor began.

Ivie was at the wheel. Marinello rode shotgun. In spite of Aldridge's insistence that there was a possibility of real danger, he might have felt happier if it could have been the other way around.

"What do you think?" Marinello asked suddenly, as if his thoughts had been slowly heating up and now had to boil over.

"I don't know," Ivie said, scanning the woodland out of the meshed window as they rolled forward at no more than ten miles an hour. "Doesn't make any sense to me. You'd think the copper would know what he was talking about."

"Unless there's more to it, and nobody's saying."

"What do you mean?"

"I was in the village, first thing. The news is all over. They're saying the copper's wife walked out on him last night. What if this ties in?"

Ivie thought it over.

It made a certain kind of sense, even though he couldn't see all of the connections; and Tony's information in such matters was usually good, thanks to the network of local contacts that he'd kept up since his all comers dance marathon on the night of the party. If the girl was supposed to be so dangerous - and there was nothing about the way that she looked to suggest that she was - then, why was Aldridge throwing together a rag-tag vigilante force instead of calling on his own people? Perhaps his own people were on their way, but Ivie had seen nothing to suggest it.

He was about to say as much, when the small police radio crackled into life and gave them both a start. It was Aldridge, calling on both of his parties to check in.

Ivie reached for the radio, which he'd hung by its carrying strap from the Rover's rearview mirror. Pressing the transmission button, he said, "Bob Ivie. Nothing so far."

"
Where are you?
"

"About a mile out, still moving."

A couple of seconds later, they heard Diane reporting on the same channel. She said that she and McCarthy hadn't seen anything yet, either.

Marinello said, "I don't like it. I don't know what's going on, but I haven't seen anything to warrant any of this." The whole car dropped with a jolt as they hit a bad pothole, and the engine complained as Ivie changed down a gear to get them out of it. The Rover was an ex army model, unbelievably old and not fit for much more than carrying small parties up to the shooting butts. Marinello added, as Ivie was changing back up again, "I think we're being set up, here."

"For what?"

"I don't know. But say they've got a situation, the four of them, and now everything's gone wrong and nobody's thinking straight. Can't you just see it?"

"I suppose it's possible."

"What do they think we are? Stupid?"

Ivie couldn't say that he was as fully convinced as Marinello seemed to be, but he didn't have any evidence that he could offer for his doubts.

But he'd heard that whispering, on the stairs. And he'd seen the way that the waitress had been looking at the child.

Aldridge said that he'd seen her in action, and perhaps this was the same kind of thing. If you hadn't been there, it was impossible to explain.

Ivie suddenly hit the brakes, and then started to reverse.

"I saw something," he said.

What he'd seen proved to be the glint of a hubcap, lying in the grass beyond a gatepost a few yards back. The post itself was leaning, the wood splintered and showing fresh… as if somebody inexperienced in a big, unfamiliar car had taken the entrance too fast.

"I'll call," Ivie said, reaching for the radio.

"No," Marinello said abruptly. "Let's be sure we get to her before anyone else does."

And so instead of calling, he hauled on the wheel to turn the heavy vehicle into the driveway.

Ivie recognised the track. It led out to the old trap shooting range where Diane had sometimes come to practice. It was all overgrown now, but another car had been here ahead of them and it had passed by fairly recently.

They came to the limousine about a hundred yards further on, around the bend and out of sight of the main track. Ahead of it was the clearing for the range with its group of small, weathered silver wooden huts. The limo's side had been damaged and its rear bumper had been torn halfway loose; the driver's door was wide open and at a strange angle.

There was nobody inside it, or anywhere around.

They stopped the Rover, and got out. The woodland was strangely quiet - no birdsong, even. Marinello didn't seem worried, but he took the shotgun anyway. He'd told Ivie that he was keeping the safety on, almost as if in concession to their shared doubts.

"What's her name?" Marinello said. "Can you remember?"

"Anna, I think."

"Not Anna," Marinello said. "More unusual. Anya. No… Alina." And then he turned and cupped his hands and called through them to the entire forest. "Hey, Alina," he called, "You can come out, we're not going to hurt you. We know you haven't done anything." He waited for a while, and then carried on, "It's either us, or the others. You know what it means if they find you?"

More silence.

"She could be well away by now," Ivie suggested, half hoping.

"Last chance!" Marinello called, almost shouting himself hoarse this time.

And just as it was starting to seem that Ivie was right, she stepped out of cover.

She'd been around behind one of the huts, not so far away; she was shoeless, looking lost and scared, and she was shivering in her lightweight cotton dress even though it wasn't particularly cold. Tony Marinello started toward her immediately. Glancing back over his shoulder, he said, "God, look at the state of her. Get that car rug out of the back, Bob."

He was already striding out toward her. She looked every bit as bleak and as lost as that child back there in the Hall; Ivie was now thinking that his fears and his suspicions were showing themselves to be formless, finding no reflection in this reality at all.

Marinello had reached Alina and put his arm around her shoulders. The shotgun was over his other forearm. He'd broken it open for extra safety, and the empty barrel was pointing at the ground. They were walking back toward the Rover.

Ivie gave himself a shake. What could he have been thinking of? He turned away and reached into the back of the Rover for the checkered wool travelling blanket that lay folded on one of the vinyl benches. It would be musty, but it would do for now. As he was bringing it out, he glanced at the radio that was hanging from the mirror bracket.

"
No, I don't think so,
" Ivie muttered, and turned back to meet the others.

Marinello was in trouble.

He'd fallen to his knees after covering only half of the return distance, and now it was Alina who was showing concern for him. The shotgun lay on the ground where he'd dropped it, a few strides back. Ivie started to run forward. As he did Marinello looked up, purpling, eyes literally starting to bulge in a manner so unnatural that it was almost fascinating; he started to raise his hand in a gesture of appeal, asking for Ivie's help in something that he simply couldn't understand.

Alina looked up, too.

Ivie saw the green fire in her eyes, and a new and frightening intensity in her attitude; he knew then that everything had been a sham, that his first instincts had been the only correct ones, and that Aldridge had been telling the truth even though he hadn't been telling it all. Ivie realised all of this in the time that it took for Alina to cover the distance between them.

She struck at him, her hand as hard and flat as a blade, but the rug that he was holding took the main force of the blow. He threw it at her and ran for the Rover, flat out and feeling his age. He'd wondered for maybe a half second about reaching the gun, but knew that he had no chance. Why couldn't he have bagged it way back at the very beginning? Fortunately the door was still open, and he dived straight for the radio and snatched it down with a force that snapped the bracket and brought the mirror along as well.

He fumbled for the transmission switch. He tried to say
She's here, we've got her…

But instead it came out as, "She's got us!"

A hand suddenly grabbed his collar, and in a show of immense strength he was hauled out of the Rover backwards. His head clipped the top of the door arch, hard.

This was all that he knew.

FORTY-FOUR

Pete's heart started to sink when he heard the garbled call. He'd deliberately done his best to bag the lakeside part of the search, citing the Zodiac's condition as his reason but really believing that it would give him his best chance of finding Alina before Aldridge could. Now he realised that he was not only wrong, but he was also trapped; he had the lake on one side and a new wire fence on the other, and there wasn't enough road for him to make a turn.

"Keep going," Diane suggested. "According to the estate plan, there's supposed to be a track somewhere ahead. It'll take us up to meet the forest road."

"I just hope it isn't too rough," Pete said. "She weighs half a ton and she steers like a tank, but there the resemblance ends." And he put on as much speed as he was able, which wasn't much with the edge of the banking only inches away.

After half a minute, Diane said, "Coming up. See it?"

"Gotcha," Pete said, and made the turn.

The track hadn't been used in years. It soon narrowed and became overgrown, with long grass in a mohican strip up the centre where tyres had never worn it down. It whipped at the underside of the car as Pete changed all the way down into first gear and still had trouble making the slope.

After a while, he didn't have to worry about it. Because the track dead ended at a gate which had been secured with a rusty lock and chain, and the ground beyond it was fit for nothing less rugged than a farm vehicle.

"It looked great on the map," Diane said hollowly. And Pete thought of Aldridge, tasting blood and driving hard to get there first.

"Watch the back while I reverse," he said to Diane, "and cross your fingers."

She had to climb around on her seat to see well enough to direct him as they went. Pete let off the brake and they started to freewheel backward, gathering speed and jolting hard.

Too hard. He returned some pressure to the brake, but it was too late. They were sliding too fast and out of control, and as the wheels locked Pete found that the grass underneath gave his tyres almost no traction at all. They hit one bump, and then another which almost threw Diane up against the roof; and it was at this point that Pete felt a queasy slackness in the wheel which told him immediately that the Zodiac's steering rack had gone. The brakes weren't holding, the wheel was a useless ornament.