The Boat House (34 page)

They left the track, and ploughed into the undergrowth at its side. Diane took a dive over the seat and disappeared completely; for one awful moment Pete thought that she'd gone through the rear screen, but he turned and saw that she was safe in the back.

The Zodiac plunged on backward, well out of control.

There wasn't much that he could do until a fifteen yard depth of bushes slowed and stopped them, and the engine stalled. There was silence. Pete levered himself upright. Greenery pressed up against the windows on three sides of the car. Diane was trying to sort herself out in the rear seat.

"You okay?" he said.

"No," she said. "I caught my leg between the seats as I went over. I think it's my ankle."

He opened one of the doors and forced the brush far enough back for them to squeeze through, and then he helped her out. She tried to stand on her own. She couldn't.

"Damn," she said, wincing. "How's the car?"

"Shot. We're on foot from here. I'll check with Ross."

She kept her balance with one hand against the car as he reached in and passed the gun out to her, and then reached for their radio. Diane upended the stock, and leaned on the shotgun for support.

She said, "Will we be safe if we're not in the car?"

"I don't know," Pete said. "If she's up there and we're down here, we ought to be okay for a while. I'll see if I can get Ross to pick us up."

Awkwardly, Diane tested her ankle as Pete tried to raise Aldridge. It didn't seem promising. The slightest weight, and Pete could see how her face screwed up in pain. As for Pete himself, he was getting a response on the radio but it was made indistinct by a lot of howling and noise. Holding the receiver close and speaking as clearly as he could, he explained the situation and hoped that Aldridge would be able to hear.

There was something from Aldridge that might have been Okay.

Pete said, "Come down for us before you do anything else, all right? Don't try to go it alone."

Another reply, this one completely unintelligible.

Diane said, "You think he got that?"

"Yeah," Pete said, knowing that he didn't sound entirely convinced, and then he looked all around. "Come on, he'll have no chance of finding us up here. I'll have to get you back down to the road."

And with one last affectionate slap on the Zodiac's roof - scrap value only after a bang like this - he put his arm around Diane to support her, and they started to make slow progress downhill toward the lakeside track.

FORTY-FIVE

Pete was wrong in at least one detail.

Aldridge wasn't heading down to collect them, nor was he tearing through the woodland to get to Alina. Instead he'd stopped the Toyota up on the edge of the olive green moor, and he was holding his radio out of the open window to get a fix on the signal that was messing up the frequency. Ivie's radio was still transmitting. That Ivie himself was dead, or at least close to it, was a matter on which Aldridge had little doubt.

It was a rough method, but at least it gave him a direction. When he turned the volume all the way up as far as it would go, he thought that he could hear somebody breathing. It was impossible to be sure.

He raised his window before he set off again. He'd been out of her reach in the generator cage and now he was out of her reach in the cab, and as far as Aldridge was concerned this was the best way to be. In an ideal world he'd be able to take her alive, but if he couldn't then he was fully prepared to run her down. He had four-wheel-drive, he had no witnesses. She might be full of surprises, but she surely couldn't argue with an oncoming truck.

He followed the signal.

Ten minutes later, he was at the scene.

He came in slowly, watching all around. He could see the battered limousine, and the silent Rover with its far door open. He drove the Toyota all the way around almost in a complete circle, but there were no signs of life at all.

He stopped level with the Rover. He could see inside from here. No bodies, just a tartan blanket half in the cab and half on the ground. It was a weird, deserted scene, looking like some aftermath of germ warfare - property abandoned, actions uncompleted - and the appeal of opening his door and stepping out would rank about the same in both cases.

Something thumped on the Toyota behind him.

He glimpsed a movement in his mirror, then it was gone. But then he turned in his seat, and he could see her; she was throwing back the snap cover and climbing into the pickup's load area, and it was too late for him to do anything about it. She was hauling herself up already, and she had what looked like a firm grip on one of the four diagonal bars protecting the cab's rear windshield.

She gave him an evil-looking, sharp toothed grin.

"I said I'd come back for you," she said through the glass.

"You won't get me this time, either," Aldridge said, wondering how he could best throw her off and run her down with minimal risk. "I'm all locked in."

"You're forgetting the obvious," she said, and Aldridge found himself looking out into the dark
O
of Bob Ivie's shotgun. That would have been the thump that he'd heard, the sound of the gun being slung in ahead of her; and he could only sit and gape at his own lack of foresight as he contemplated the more prominent one on the Winchester.

Alina squeezed the trigger.

Nothing happened.

The safety was on; Aldridge realised it with a heartsurge of glee. Alina was turning the gun in puzzlement, unsure of what to do next.

He had a chance.

He hit the accelerator and let out the clutch, and as the Toyota spurted forward he turned the wheel hard in an attempt to catch her off balance and pitch her out. But then he glanced in the mirror and saw her hand, again grabbing the strut as the pickup spun around. He gunned the engine again, wrenched the wheel over the other way…

And, watching his mirror more than the ground ahead, slammed sideways into the Land Rover. The Rover shook, but it barely moved.

Aldridge was thrown sideways across the passenger seat. His head bounced on the door padding. The pickup was out of gear with its engine still running, and Aldridge was almost on the floor; he scrambled up again, and looked into the back. He couldn't see her… and he thought, Have I done it? Was that enough, the woman dead and not even a shot fired?

A hand came up, and its fingers curled around one of the bars. She hauled herself up after, inches away on the other side of the laminated glass. She was still grinning.

Aldridge slammed the pickup into gear again.

The engine raced, but the pickup didn't move.

He'd killed the rear transmission. He was going nowhere.

He wondered if there wasn't some way; there was
always
a way, wasn't there? Could he perhaps switch the drive to the two front wheels and drag himself out of there like an injured dog? But even as he glanced again in the mirror he knew that his time had run out, saw that the shotgun was being levelled again, understood that nothing he could do was going to alter anything now.

He saw the windshield craze before he heard the blast.

Rachel,
he thought miserably.

But then he never got to hear the blast at all.

FORTY-SIX

"He should have reached us by now," Diane said. "The bastard, he isn't coming."

"I've got to get up there," Pete said.

The implication of this was obvious. With Diane more or less hopping along and Pete having to support her, they'd been making only minimal progress. They were barely a quarter of a mile from where they'd started, and they were getting slower and slower. They'd nearly reached the boat house, which marked no more than a fraction of the distance they'd have to cover. Pete had tried the radio again a couple of times, but neither Aldridge nor anybody else had replied.

"On your own?" Diane said. "Come on, she'll be getting desperate now."

"I know her better than anybody."

"You thought you knew her yesterday, Pete, but then look what you learned. You don't know her at all."

"She owes me, and she knows it. She said she'd never hurt me."

"She killed her lover and burned him in his own car. The lady isn't noted for her scruples."

There was silence for a while as they limped on, a three-legged twosome getting wearier by the minute. It was a stubborn silence, and there was only one way that it could come to an end.

"Go on, then," Diane said with a sudden flareup of anger, getting free and pushing him away, and she almost lost her balance in the process. "Go to her. Go running to her, if she's the one you really want. See if she treats you any better than the others."

Pete stopped, and looked at her. Diane's cheeks were bright and streaked with tears, and she made an ineffectual attempt to rub them away with the sleeve of her jacket. Her eyes were blazing and steady.

"I've never touched her," Pete said.

"No, but she's the one you dream about. Isn't she?"

There was an opening, a hint of uncertainty in her look now, and he went for it.

"No, I never have," he said.

She watched him, and perhaps they both knew that there was some part of the truth, some part of a lie in what he was saying, and that whatever was to happen between them from now on would depend on what she chose to believe.

She said, "Then, why do this?"

"Because I brought her here. She hurt the people closest to me and I'm responsible. I can feel sorry for her. But I know she's got to be stopped."

Diane looked down.

"At least take the gun," she said.

He put his arm out to support her again, and she let him slide it around her.

"I wouldn't know how to handle it," he said. "Do you still have the key to the boat house?"

He passed close behind the Hall on his way upslope, climbing over gates and wire fences to take the most direct line that he could. Aldridge wasn't going to meet him, halfway or any other way, so there was no point in watching for his car. By going across country he could pick up the middle track a lot faster, and follow it along until he found some trace of the others. At one point he tried the radio again, once more turning the volume up all of the way and once more getting the strange effect that he hadn't wanted Diane to hear.

It was the sound of breathing. Or something very like it.

He was climbing through coniferous woodland now, so dense that there was permanent twilight underneath with bare ground where nothing was growing. Daylight and the rest of the world could be dimly glimpsed as a distant filigree pattern of branches, leaves and silver sky in the middle distance. He had to duck frequently because many of the lower branches were at head height; some trunks were streaked with birdlime, and one or two that he saw had been rubbed bare of bark by animals. Deer, at a guess, although he couldn't be sure.

He pressed on. Smaller trees had stunted and died and then fallen. Even the healthy ones looked as if they'd been painted with light green moss on the windward side, moss the colour of Nile water. All around him was slow growth, and slow decay.

While ahead of him lay… what?

Within minutes he was emerging, breathless and somewhat scratched, onto the roadway not too far from the broken gate where the limo's hubcap still lay like a marker. He followed the tyremarks to the small auto graveyard that stood in the clearing, and there he made a careful circuit of all the vehicles so that he could look without actually touching any of them.

Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound, apart from the wind in the leaves.

He saw the two aligned holes in the front and rear screens of the Toyota, and he saw the widening spray of blood and glass fragments across the bonnet; but he saw no bodies, and he saw no signs of where they might have been taken.

He did find his heavy breather, though. In one of the trees over on the edge of the clearing he spotted a radio - Ivie's, presumably - hanging by its carrying strap from one of the lower branches. The breeze was moving it gently, and probably making a fair imitation of a human sound. He walked over to it and took it down, noting the way that the transmission button had been taped with a piece of yellow insulation plastic that was probably out of the Rover's toolkit.

What he couldn't see, was its purpose in being there.

But of course! he realised after a moment. Bait… and as the word came up into his mind, something very hard and moving very fast made a good, solid contact with the back of his head.

Definitely bait, he acknowledged as he folded like a sack.

FORTY-SEVEN

Diane hated this. She hated being left, she hated the thought of Pete going off alone, she hated her own body for letting her down. Surely they'd reached the point where the only way ahead was to go back to the hall, pick up the phone, and call in the cavalry? The fact of it was that Pete McCarthy had been the first of them to encounter Alina Petrovna, and he was the last to understand,
really
understand, that of which she was capable. He hadn't seen the graphic aftermath of her work that Ross Aldridge said he'd witnessed, and he hadn't been through Diane's experience of a sincere if rambling first-hand account from a man named Pavel, followed by the sight of his charcoaled body only a few hours later. No, he had to go running up there like a man with his hand out to a mad dog, convinced of his safety because he'd never yet encountered a dog that hadn't liked him.

Unfortunately, Diane couldn't help noticing how Alina seemed to deal out the same kind of treatment to her friends as to her enemies.

The best that she could hope for was that Alina would already be gone when he got there, using whatever time she might have bought for herself to get up and away from the scene. If she could get off the estate, maybe follow one of the walkers' routes over one of the mountain passes, then she could make it into another part of the region and perhaps even get away altogether. Find some other ride on some other road, find a new place to settle, start the process all over again while the police hunt ran itself dry with nothing to go on. Otherwise, what would Pete be facing? A radical revision of his illusions, at best.