The Overlooker (24 page)

‘You're kidding?' Tom exclaimed in spite of himself. His knife and fork clattered on a plate empty of all but fish bones.

‘No, I'm not. You'll see. Dad's still kept the envelopes in that suitcase, with the Russian stamps. And those two boys wrote back to tell the family all about how it was like. How they helped them set up the machinery. It all had to be sent out from England in those days. They hadn't got the factories to manufacture their own looms and spinning mules then. So then they had to show the Russians how to use them.'

Even Millie looked up from her half-empty plate. ‘So they taught these Russian girls to weave cotton, like Dad's granny used to?'

‘That's the size of it,' Thelma sighed. ‘And now you look at this town, and all the little places down the dales. And there's hardly a chimney left standing. What mills there are have mostly been turned into museums.'

The word brought Nick's thoughts up short. They were back to that. The only other possibility to explain where Suzie was. What the Fewings might, inadvertently, have stumbled upon. The Thorncliffe Mill Museum.

But he had no idea what they could have seen there that they should not have. His mind raked frantically through his partial memories of their visit. Nothing would come.

The kitchen was too hot. It smelt of fried fish. He had to get out or he would be sick.

‘I'm going outside,' he said, making for the door. ‘I've got to clear my head.'

‘I need a walk.' Nick heard the belligerence in his voice as he informed the detective sergeant. He was challenging her to forbid him.

He saw the alarm in her grey eyes, the need to make a quick decision.

‘I'd rather you didn't go out of sight of the house, sir. I can't keep my eyes on both you and your children otherwise.'

‘Can't I even take a turn round the garden?' he exploded.

‘No problem there, sir. Riley will have you in his sights.'

It heightened the sense of unreality that he could not even step outside Thelma's front door without a detective watching his back.

He saw the tall Constable William Riley straighten instantly from his casual pose against his car. DS Bray came out of the house and exchanged a few words with him. Nick sensed the policeman relax a little. But he was still alert, watchful, as Nick crunched across the gravel path.

He turned his back on the constable and began to walk down the grassy paths of Thelma's garden, between the vegetable beds.

He felt a prickle down his back. He could be watched, not just from Thelma's house, but from Geoffrey Banks'. He turned his head. There were no lights in the next-door windows. He did not know whether that was good news or bad.

He walked on.

Despite the unreality of the situation, everything about the scene that met him struck home with heart-aching clarity. The sun had dropped below the steep fells, but the air still held a pearly clarity before twilight. The solid permanence of Skygill Hill made him long to be climbing it with his family, as he had promised himself. Would that ever happen now?

Neat rows of vegetables patterned Thelma's sloping garden. Leeks, carrots, the ragged heads of Brussels sprouts, their buds barely starting to fatten for Christmas. Street lamps were starting to come on, beading the streets of the town below him. He could pick out the cupola of the town hall. The solitary chimney of Thorncliffe Mill.

The museum. The thought made him draw his breath short, like a fist to his chest. Was it really possible that Suzie was there? He needed to have hope that there was an answer somewhere.

He could hardly restrain himself from jumping into his car and rushing there to see.

Had Superintendent Mason taken the information seriously? That Hugh Street was a red herring and the real threat lay in the museum?

Why
? He found he was stamping the dew-damp grass between the gooseberry bushes. Why was her abductor taunting him? Surely, if there was something criminal going on, the perpetrator would want above everything else to keep it secret? What was the sense in goading Nick to follow Suzie to wherever he was hiding her?

He? Them? He did not know whether he was dealing with a solitary lunatic or an organized gang. There was something deeply wrong about the whole scenario. It made no sense.

At the bottom of the steep garden, Nick stopped. It was hard to tear his eyes away from Thorncliffe Mill. Every moment, he hoped to see flashing police lights. To know that they were going in to end this.

After a fruitless wait, he made himself turn back.

He saw the front door open. Tom and Millie came out. Both had their jackets on. He watched them look around before they spotted him below them. They crossed the drive and started down the slope towards him. Nick walked up the grassy path to meet them.

They stood in an awkward silence.

‘Do you think they've found her?' Millie burst out. ‘Are they going to look in the museum?'

‘You two really think she's there?' Tom asked. The boyish enthusiasm for adventure had gone out of him. He looked older. His blue eyes went across Millie to his father's. This was no longer a challenging mystery to be solved. His mother might not be coming back.

‘I don't
know
,' Nick said, exasperated. ‘Nothing in all this makes sense. Why draw attention to himself? Why take Suzie in the first place, still less taunt me to come and get her? But if the reason isn't in Hugh Street, it's got to be the textile museum. We didn't go anywhere else. We spent the morning at Thorncliffe Mill, had lunch in their restaurant, then we set out along the canal path and ended up in Hugh Street. There only
are
those two places where we could have seen something wrong we might have told the police. And we didn't find anything out of the ordinary in the museum. At least, it was all pretty amazing, but certainly above board. There wasn't a single thing I can think of that looked suspicious. If she's there, then they've kidnapped her for nothing.'

‘You're wrong, Dad.' Millie said suddenly. ‘There
was
something else. Don't you remember? We were walking along the towpath and there were all those empty old mills. I found the grating over the window of one of them was loose, and we broke into it. They had machines, like the ones we'd seen in the museum, only dustier.' Her words were coming rapidly now. ‘You wanted me to crawl under one, so I could imagine I was Millie Bootle, but I wouldn't. So you did!'

Nick stared at her, speechless. He was appalled. How
could
he have forgotten? His mind had been a mill race of churning memories, struggling for the cause. But not of this. The scene came back to him in vivid clarity.

‘Someone had been there,' he said huskily. ‘There were footprints in the dust. They led to a locked door at the end of the weaving shed.'

‘There was something else, Dad. On the outside of the mill. All those graffiti. Remember? Out of the Book of Revelation, Mum said.
Their torture was like the torture of a scorpion.
Stuff like that.'

Nick stared at her, wide-eyed with shock.

Tom looked from one to the other. ‘Why the hell didn't you say so?'

Millie rounded on him. ‘Because we thought it was all to do with Hugh Street, you daft pig. Who wouldn't? There
was
a crime going on there. It was only that last phone call that told Dad we'd got it wrong . . . Dad!' She whirled round to him. Her pointed face blazed with realization. ‘That explains it! You know you said you couldn't think how that man at Hugh Street had got your mobile number, when you only told him your name? Well, in the mill you took off your jacket to crawl under the loom and show me. Idiot! Why didn't I remember? When I passed it back to you, some stuff fell out of your pocket. Your mobile. Business cards and stuff. We were scrabbling all over the floor picking them up.'

Nick's hand went slowly to his inside pocket. His phone. And yes, a little sheaf of cards. He drew them out and looked at them. His name and architectural qualifications. Just the information with which that first call had mocked him. His office address. Phone numbers, both landline and mobile. Email address of the firm. Some of them were still smudged with dirt from the abandoned mill floor.

He thumbed through them. There was a piece of paper wedged between them. It seemed to be torn from a small notebook and folded in four. He could not remember what it was.

He unfolded it. There was a list scrawled on it. Words he did not recognize. The writing was not his.

‘What's the matter, Dad? Tom asked.

‘I don't know this piece of paper. Do you remember picking this up, Millie?'

‘Sort of. I suppose it was on the floor with everything else. Some of them had slid under the loom. I fished out everything I could see.'

‘It's not mine. I don't even know what half these words mean. I didn't write this.'

Tom took it from him. ‘Let's have a look.'

His waving black hair fell across his face as he bent his head to read the words in the paling evening light.

Suddenly he straightened up. There was shock in his face.

‘Dad! We have to get there! Straight away!'

‘Why? What does it mean?'

‘Caesium-137? TNT? At least he doesn't mention uranium. Run!'

T
om's long legs sent him hurtling up the slope, outstripping the others. Nick's mind was reeling. The letters TNT hammered in his brain. A bomb factory? In the derelict mill? Who? Why? The thought of Suzie imprisoned there suddenly galvanized him into action. In a few moments he had caught up Millie's running figure.

They broke out on to the level drive behind Tom. He was making for their car.

‘Have you got the keys?' he flung over his shoulder at Nick.

‘Yes!'

Constable Riley leaped from the seat of his own car, where he had been keeping surveillance. He started to run towards them, shouting into his radio as he did so. Nick ran round to the driver's seat of the Fewings' car.

Riley had reached them and was grappling with Tom.

‘What's the hurry? Wait! You can't go anywhere without telling us.'

‘How about a bomb factory?' Tom shouted at him. ‘They've got my mother.' He thrust the piece of paper at the constable. ‘It's all there. TNT. Caesium-137. Detonators. You know what that means.'

Sergeant Bray was running from the house.

Nick shouted at Millie as she folded her legs into the car. ‘No! Stay here.'

‘Not likely. Look what happened the last time we split up.'

She leaned out of the window and called to Constable Riley. ‘It's a derelict mill beside the canal. About halfway between the weaving museum and Canal Street. You can't miss it. It's painted all over with slogans about the end of the world.'

As Nick put the car into gear, those last words broke over him with renewed meaning.

The end of the world. They had thought the graffiti on the mill was the work of some nutter who had merely used those walls as a convenient backdrop. It had not occurred to him that it might have anything to do with what was going on inside. Had it? Was this some volatile mix between the manufacture of explosive devices and the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world? What madmen were they dealing with?

Sergeant Bray hammered on the window, but the car sprang away, leaving the two police officers helpless in its wake. In the mirror, Nick saw them race for their car. It was the detective sergeant who was now talking rapidly into her radio as she leaped into the car beside Riley.

Then he swung on to the downhill road and lost them. A few moments later, he thought he saw them emerge from the drive, already a long way back up the hill behind him.

Would they see him as he turned the car into the residential streets through which the Fewings had threaded their way back from Hugh Street yesterday?

He tried to damp down the feeling that he was running away from the police, evading capture. They had got away from High Bank before their escort could stop them. But now they would surely need the backup of the police.

All he could think about was the need to find Suzie and be with her. What happened next he could not imagine.

He blessed the accuracy of his memory as the car shot out of a street of terraced houses on to the huge, desolate area where the houses had been demolished. For a moment, he was disorientated. Then his sense of direction reasserted itself and the car roared forward on to Canal Street. Horns blared as he sped across the oncoming traffic into the far lane and turned downhill for the canal bridge.

‘Dad!' Millie exclaimed. ‘It's not going to help Mum if you get us killed.'

She was right. He steadied his hands on the wheel.

‘What's caesium-137?' he asked Tom.

‘Radioactive isotope. They use it in university labs and hospitals. Easiest place for radioactive material to go AWOL. Combine it with explosives and you've got yourself a dirty bomb.'

‘What's that?' Millie asked. ‘Aren't all bombs dirty?'

‘Not like this. The aim is not to blow people up, unless they're really close, but to spread contamination over a wide area. Streets, houses, drinking water. You can't see it, so you don't know what's safe and what's not. Result – panic.'

‘And you think . . . Inside that mill . . . Where Mum is . . .?

‘We don't know for certain she's there,' Tom said grimly. ‘But, from what you say, I've a pretty clear idea now what's going on there. It sounds like the perfect place for a clandestine bomb factory.'

They were level with the steps that led down from the bridge to the canal. Nick hesitated. Should he ditch the car and run along the towpath? But it was some distance away that they had found and entered the mill. On a hunch, he turned the car right, being a little more careful this time to find a gap in the traffic. He drove into a narrow side street that seemed to run parallel to the canal.