Strangers. Paul Finch

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СКАЧАТЬ too sparkled with moisture. Beyond them lay a dense mesh of sepia-brown undergrowth. Nothing moved.

      ‘Okay,’ she said, proceeding to the tree. ‘This’ll do. Make it quick.’

      Haygarth grunted with gratitude as he assumed the position. Lucy stood alongside him, but turned her shoulder so that, even by accident, she couldn’t glance down and catch sight of anything. It fleetingly occurred to her that, given, Haygarth’s alleged form, this voluntary blindsiding of herself might not be the wisest policy, but it was done now, and he had the air of a broken man in any case – plus Alan Denning was only a shout away.

      She heard Haygarth sigh as liquid splashed gently down the bole of the tree.

      ‘That’s much better,’ he mumbled. ‘God, I’ve been waiting for this.’

       ‘DC Clayburn, what the hell’s going on?’

      Lucy turned, surprised. Behind the blob of torchlight approaching from beyond the bollards there was an indistinct figure, but she knew who it was. The clumsy, slightly stooped gait was the main giveaway, but the harsh, humourless voice was added proof.

      ‘Ma’am, the prisoner …’ Lucy’s words tailed off as everything suddenly seemed to go wrong at once.

      First, she sensed movement alongside her. When she glanced around, Haygarth, who was six foot four – and with one arm extended upward could reach to nearly nine feet – was rooting inside the tree-trunk cavity.

      ‘What’re you …?’ she said, fleetingly baffled.

      Next, DI Doyle ran forward. At the same time, with a metallic thud, a driving-cab door swung open in response. Then there was a plasticky crackle, and Haygarth laughed, or rather giggled – it was a hyena-like sound rather than human.

      Lucy tried to grab his arm, but he barged into her with his left shoulder, knocking her off balance. And now the object he’d been groping for inside the tree came into view. It was only small, but it had been swathed in a supermarket wrapper to protect it, so its make and model were concealed. And it was anyone’s guess what calibre it was.

      As Lucy fell to the ground, he swung the object around. Its first booming report took out Doyle’s torch. She was only about ten yards away, but her light vanished with a PLOK. By the way she grunted and gasped and doubled over, the bullet had punched clean through it, tearing into her midriff.

      Lucy, prone on her back, was too numb to react. Hideous, unimaginable seconds seemed to pass before her training kicked in and she tried to roll away – only for her right arm to pull taut where it was handcuffed to Haygarth’s left. As she struggled to escape, he turned a slow circle, still laughing, a black skeletal figure in the reduced light, a man of sticks, a living scarecrow. And yet so much stronger than he looked. With embarrassing ease, he yanked her backwards, throwing her hard onto her spine, and pointed his bag down at her, smoke still venting from the hole blown at the end.

      She kicked out, slamming the flat of her foot against his right knee. There was a crack of sinew, and Haygarth’s leg buckled. He gave a piercing squeal as he collapsed on top of her, at the same time trying to hit her with his weapon. She blocked the blow with her left arm, and fleetingly their faces were an inch apart, his no longer the melancholic image she’d seen earlier, but a portrait of dementia, foam surging through his clenched buck-teeth, cheeks bunched, brow furrowed.

      He headbutted her. Right on the bridge of her nose.

      The pain that smashed through the middle of Lucy’s head was so intense that she almost blacked out, and as such didn’t see the weapon as he swept it down at her again, twice in fact, both times catching her clean on the left temple. A double explosion roared in her skull. As awareness faded and hot, sticky fluid pooled over her left eye, she saw him kneel upright, sweating, drool stringing from his mouth as he bit at the plastic wrapping, exposing the gleaming steel pistol underneath, and then pointed it down at her face – only to go rigid as a massive blow clattered the back of his own head.

      Consciousness ebbing away, the last thing Lucy saw was Haygarth’s thin, limp form as it was hauled roughly off her by the brute force that was Alan Denning.

       Chapter 1

       Now …

      He said that his name was Ronnie Ford and that he was from Warrington. By the looks of his heavy build, weathered face and chalk-grey hair, he was somewhere in his late forties. Apparently, he ran his own business – an auto-repair shop, which explained his ragged sweater and oil-stained canvas trousers – but he added that he was now on his way home for tea. Weirdly, the longer the woman rode alongside him, the more she came to suspect that he’d picked her up for honest, even gentlemanly reasons.

      For the first fifteen minutes of their shared journey, he’d kept his eyes firmly on the road, chatting amiably, covering every subject under the sun, from the unseasonably mild autumn weather, to the poor state of the Malaga hotel where he and his wife had spent two weeks last August, to the latest and, in his opinion, even-more-hopeless-than-usual contestants on the new series of X Factor. It was all very affable and light-hearted.

      So … a bit of a father figure, Ronnie Ford.

      Or at least, an avuncular uncle type.

      But ultimately he was a man too. And seemingly as red-blooded as so many others.

      When he parked the car in the quiet lay-by and she climbed out, he climbed out as well. When she ran giggling to the stile, he followed her, expressing open if feigned admiration as she climbed it with lithe efficiency, despite her tight, knee-length skirt and four-inch heels. It helped, of course, that she did it sexily, wiggling up the rickety ladder and stepping prettily over its topmost rung before descending into the field on the other side.

      At this point, he shouted. ‘Hold up, love! Whoa … wait a minute!’

      He’d lost sight of her, thanks mainly to the autumn twilight. It was early October and not yet seven in the evening, so it wasn’t what you’d actually call dusk. It wasn’t even what you’d call cold. They’d had an Indian summer, which even now was only dissipating slowly, but light was leaching from the cloudy sky and dim traces of mist rising in the undergrowth.

      In the field, hacked stubble was all that remained of a recently harvested crop. It was roughly the size of a football pitch, but as the woman already knew, there was a clear pathway running straight as a ribbon to a belt of reddish-leafed trees on its far side. She hared off along this, still giggling. She had no idea why men found that ‘cheeky giggle’ thing fetching; she supposed it harked back to those daft naughty schoolgirl fantasies that generation after generation of saucy movies and top-shelf lads’ mags had impressed on British male society.

      From behind, she heard the clump of Ronnie Ford’s feet on the wooden rungs, and his loud grunts for breath. A non-too-fit avuncular uncle then, but evidently a man who now felt he was on a mission.

      They usually were in the end. It was always so pathetically easy.

      She’d only needed to remove her black knitted beret and shake out her blonde locks, ease down the zip on her anorak just sufficiently to reveal the skimpy blouse underneath, and then cross and uncross her legs a few times while he’d attempted to drive.

      The СКАЧАТЬ