Nobody wants to run someone down in the road, but for a long time afterwards Karl Seabury wondered if things might have worked out better if his van had slammed the woman into bloody oblivion.
He was piloting 3,500 lbs of Ford engineering along a road as wet as a solid river when something came at him. He didn’t even see a shape, let alone a woman, just a hint of colour that extracted itself from the black wall of trees on his right. Instinct pistoned his foot hard onto the brake. There was a screech of rubber that sent birds panicking from the treetops like gravity-defying leaves. His seatbelt cut hard across his chest as he was thrown forward. Before he had time to wonder what the hell had happened, it was all over. The van sat stalled and silent, headlights illuminating the curving road ahead and a woman in a sodden summer dress.
He reached for the handle to open his door, missed it, cast his eyes away from the road to locate it, found it, started to open the door, ready to unload foul language, and let out a yelp as the door was wrenched from his grasp as if by a fierce gale.
She was right there in the doorway, a face that had been gaunt and terrified in the headlights now gaunt and terrified in the van’s interior light.
‘What the Jesus are—’ Karl began, but froze when she grabbed his shirt in two tight fists.
‘You gotta help me!’ she moaned.
Autopilot kicked in. On a bright summer’s day, he might have told her to calm down, might have stepped out of the van and led her to the side of the road to seek an explanation. But it was dark and eerie out there and that fired an alarm in his mind. He grabbed the woman under the arms, yanked her up and literally threw her across him into the passenger seat. Her head smacked the window but she didn’t seem to care, and neither did he. He just needed to get out of there. He twisted the ignition key and stamped and pulled at all the appropriate pedals and levers until the road started to vanish beneath the vehicle. By the time he hit second gear, the woman had already slipped out of the seat and crammed herself into the footwell. She clearly didn’t want to be seen in the van by whoever she was running from.
And then it happened again.
This time the shape was black, just like the night, and he didn’t see a thing until it stepped into the funnels of his headlights. He recognised a human form, but the mental alarm was in full flow and this time his foot stayed away from the brake. He did not want to stop out here again, ever.
Instead, he tugged hard on the steering wheel, and the silhouette in his headlights vanished off to the side. It flashed by his door window then was gone. Only once he had passed did he realise it was a man in dark clothing and wearing a balaclava. A shiver ran down his spine at the image.
He looked in the driver’s wing mirror at the shape in the road, saw twin dots of white high up in the blackness that must have been eyes, staring after him. Then the masked face turned to look the other way along the road, as if searching for something.
Karl gripped the steering wheel hard and faced forward again. Nothing ahead but the road and the trees and the headlights. He glanced at the woman.
‘What the fuck’s going on?’
‘Is he gone?’ she croaked.
The road grew bright ahead. Another vehicle. Karl hit his door lock, then cursed his paranoia – what did he expect, this new vehicle to screech to a halt and block his path? It would just be some car, just some guy heading some place. The headlights grew brighter, and then the car emerged from around the curve. The van’s interior was lit up like a surgery.
In that moment he noted that her dress was patterned red and yellow, the material thin. She had manicured nails, smooth skin, and a bob haircut that was an ash blonde you couldn’t get from a chemist. An indoor look, or a summer-lunch-on-the-patio look. Certainly not a cold-March-walk-in-the-woods look.
Then the car flashed by and all was dark again.
‘He bloody who? Was he chasing you?’ Karl realised his error even as he asked the question. Of course the guy was chasing her – he all in black, and her face coated in fear. ‘What did he want? You know him? Where did you come from? What are you doing out here?’ He took a breath, aware that his rapid speaking broadcast his own panicking heart. The man in black was gone, and the woman was safe, but not yet calm, and he felt some kind of male pride telling himself he needed to appear strong, as a knight in shining armour would. ‘You want to tell me what’s going on? The guy’s gone, so you can sit up.’
She didn’t sit up. She lay her head on the seat as if it were a pillow and closed her eyes.
‘Do you live nearby? Did you get chased out of your house? You weren’t out geocaching dressed like that, that’s for sure.’
No answer. He touched her shoulder, using a fist because that felt less intrusive. She jerked but her eyes stayed closed.
‘They came for us,’ she said, voice low, as if talking in her sleep.
They? More than one? ‘What did they want?’
‘We have a house on land beyond the woods,’ she murmured, a delayed answer to his previous question. ‘We were going to have dinner. Our friends. I hope they’re okay.’
‘And what, these men came? And everyone ran away? Why are you on your own?’
‘They wanted to hurt us, I think. And rob us. My husband… he…’
This was making his head spin.
‘Where are you taking me?’ she blurted, eyes open, a new fear imprinted on her face as if she suspected the nightmare might yet have another chapter.
‘I’m sure all the others are okay,’ he told her. He tried to picture a party on a rain-drenched patio. Men in tuxedos and women in flowery dresses. Expensive wines and political chat. And masked men in black rushing at them out of the trees, making them scatter. Might there be other drivers out here with scared people in their passenger seats, listening to such a tale?
‘You’re not going to throw me out, are you?’ Her eyes were pleading.
‘I’m not taking you anywhere,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’ll take you to a police station. I’m not going to throw you out.’
She didn’t speak again for a minute, and he was grateful for the silence. It gave him time to let this whole palaver sink in. He held his breath until he caught sight of the mist of orange lights oozing from around the next bend. A few seconds after streetlights appeared. Ahead were terraced houses in two neat lines. Karl felt himself relax. The proximity of the human world woke some confidence in the woman, too, because she struggled up out of the footwell and sat in the seat like someone… normal. She gazed out of the window as if enjoying the view, but then he realised his error: she was concentrating on the wing mirror. Checking behind them for pursuers.
‘Burglars don’t come chasing people who got away,’ he said, unable to think of anything else. ‘I’m sure they got spooked by everyone seeing them and just ran off.’
She looked at him. Hard. As if he had said something naive. Or just plain wrong.
‘Maybe you shouldn’t have stopped for me. Now you’re caught up in this and in danger, and it’s my fault.’
‘What? Why?’
She was examining a cut on her elbow, probably from crashing through trees to escape her pursuer.
‘Hey. What do you mean? Why would I be in danger?’
‘It’s probably fine,’ she said. But she didn’t sound sincere. In that moment, he wished he’d never slammed on the brakes.
Brad knew something was up the moment he spotted his partners.
Set in a clearing dotted with tree stumps, the house was a stone barn conversion with an open-air porch containing all-weather sofas arranged around a large firepit. And there sat Mick, puffing away at a cigarette and seemingly oblivious to the light rain. Like a guy on holiday, no worries in the world. Dave paced nearby, agitated.
He saw them clearly in the light from the flames despite their black clothing, but they did not see his approach until he was almost upon them. Like an apparition, he appeared from out of nowhere on the porch, right next to Dave who jerked with a grunt when Brad said: ‘Why are you two outside?’
‘Where the hell is she?’ Dave snapped. He was thirty-five, short and black and sinewy, like a track guy.
Mick jumped to his feet. He was in his late forties, tall and white and heavily built, like a gym guy. He had an iron-grey buzzcut. ‘Where is she, Brad?’
Brad ignored the question, his eyes on the kitchen door, fearful of what lay beyond. He didn’t like that his partners were both outside. And not wearing their balaclavas.
Dave seemed to sense Brad’s concern and said: ‘It went bad. Ain’t a summer scene in there.’
Brad started for the door. He got the handle in his fist and was about to twist it when Mick called out: ‘We can’t leave her body out in the trees, Brad. Come on, let’s go get her.’
Brad hesitated but didn’t turn around.
Mick said: ‘I mean, a body she is, right? Dead and no threat to us, for sure. Because you wouldn’t stroll back all casually like this if she had escaped.’
‘She escaped.’
Dave started cursing.
Mick’s voice was low and calm as he said: ‘Brad, how did she get past you and outside from all the way upstairs? A five-foot woman in high heels.’
He ignored that question and explained that she’d hit the road and jumped into a passing vehicle. This news increased the tempo of Dave’s complaints. He’d expected rage from Mick, but there was none. The man simply shook his head like a parent disappointed in a child.
Brad said: ‘She’s running for her life. Scared. That’s what you wanted. What’s the problem?’
‘Shut the screeching, Dave. Why don’t I show you the problem, Brad? Open the door.’
Brad entered the house, his worry rising. The kitchen hummed with modern technology but retained a graceful air with bespoke cabinets, a slate floor and exposed timbers. There was a wine rack. It had been attached to the wall beside a tall freezer, but was now broken on the floor, bottles scattered or shattered everywhere, and in among them was a man in a white suit, sitting against the wall. The red soaking his torso wasn’t a vintage Bordeaux.
Grafton. Dead.
Mick spoke from right behind him, like a devil on his shoulder. ‘I wish you could have seen his face. He knew the end was coming.’
Brad could hear Dave further back, still moaning.
‘I’m thinking the plan to put him in a wheelchair looks like a no-go now, right?’ Brad asked, shocked. But was he really that surprised? He knew what Mick was capable of.
‘Well, I fucking apologise, Brad. I went a bit far.’
Brad turned to him. ‘You didn’t go too far, Mick. You made the exact journey you planned. You were going to kill this guy all along.’
‘For what he did to me, you really think it was going to be just a scare? Really?’
The silence of the house. Dave’s constant moaning. The fact Dave and Mick had been waiting outside, no balaclavas. Something was horribly wrong about that picture. Brad moved through the kitchen and stopped in a hallway with a vaulted ceiling and paintings lining both walls. It was there he learned exactly what was wrong.
Another body. Another man. This guy wore jeans and a corduroy jacket. He was down on his face, and there was a chunk missing from where his shoulder and neck met, as if a giant bite had been taken out of him. The shotgun blast had taken him in the back. As he ran away.
‘He had the audacity to turn his back on me, this one,’ Mick said.
Brad ignored him. The vast living room was next. Three-quarters of the floor was carpeted, the rest wood and set aside for an office. Here again was a vaulted ceiling in white and exposed timbers painted black. Colour had been added with yellow and green spotlights arranged artfully around all the walls. The lounge section of the room had a corner sofa and upon it, sitting back as if relaxing in front of the TV, was a woman in a dress. A spotlight above the sofa bathed her in green, making Brad think of some bizarre art exhibit. Her death had been cleaner because she had just a single bullet hole in her forehead. No blood, strangely. His head spun.
‘Jesus Christ, Mick, what the hell is this? We came here to put Grafton in a wheelchair, but he’s dead. That was overkill. But this. I don’t know what the hell to call this.’
Dave followed them into the room looking like he’d just lost a winning lottery ticket. ‘This is a fucking escalation into a new universe, that’s what this is. What do we do? And the woman’s running around out there. So now we’re fucked.’
‘Not if we get her before she goes to the cops,’ Mick said.
‘She’s probably in a police station right now,’ Dave screamed.
Mick grabbed Dave’s shoulders. He was a clear head taller than him. ‘Calm down. She won’t be running to the cops tonight. She’ll expect this to have been a robbery, or some guys wanting to give her sweet hubby a hiding. Like you said, he always told her: if any shit kicks off, crawl under a rock and wait it out. So, she’ll just hide away somewhere till morning, and then try to call him, or go to some place they pre-arranged. He’d fucking kill her if she brought the cops around. So she won’t be going to any fucking police station tonight. Hell, he’s Mr Invincible, remember. Maybe she thinks he killed us all. So, we have time to find her.’
‘And then what?’ Brad said. ‘Kill her right out in the open?’
Dave was shaking his head. ‘We need to sterilise this place and get rid of the bodies. Make out somehow that Grafton fled. No one was ever here. Let’s think about this. No one knows about this place. Everyone thinks he’s in Spain. That gives us time to get rid of the bodies. We could torch the place afterwards. It won’t matter if his wife goes to the cops after that.’
Mick let him go. ‘That wasn’t the plan—’
‘This slaughterhouse wasn’t the damn plan!’ Dave yelled.
Mick pulled something from his pocket, holding it out to Dave and Brad. ‘This was the plan. And we’re sticking to it. It will work. Understand, you two?’
Dave glared at the item in Mick’s palm. ‘Provided he didn’t go to a party five minutes after I stopped watching him. He could be surrounded by witnesses.’ That would muck up their plan entirely.
‘It buys time. It gives him a damn headache. That’s enough for me. So that’s the plan. Right, Dave?’
‘Whatever!’ Dave said, throwing up his arms like a petulant child.
‘Right, Brad?’ Mick asked.
Brad didn’t speak, and he didn’t look. He was staring at the woman on the sofa. The only one who hadn’t fled. When they had burst into the house, the three dead people had been in here, very much alive and sitting on the sofa and chatting. Grafton’s wife had been upstairs, using the toilet. When Brad had gone up to get her, he’d left Dave and Mick holding their guns – a shotgun for Dave and a pistol for Mick – on the three captives. Brad could see now how it had gone down. At some point after Brad had climbed through the bathroom window in pursuit of Grafton’s wife, Mick had shot sofa woman, and the two men had fled. No way would Dave have pulled the trigger, so Mick must have taken the shotgun from him and pursued the two men. He had probably blasted the other guy first just because he was a loose end – an obstacle between Mick and his target. Grafton must have thanked his lucky stars when he heard the explosion in the tiny hallway and the guy next to him had dropped. But there were no lucky stars a few seconds later. Grafton hadn’t been shot in the back, so, trapped in the kitchen, he probably turned to face his executioner. Mick probably said something to the man before pulling the trigger. Probably smiled right at him, knowing the last laugh was his.
Two men escaping. Perhaps reason enough, in a panic, to blast away. But the woman?
‘You shot this woman out of the blue,’ Brad said. ‘She didn’t try to escape. She didn’t move. She didn’t do anything. There was no reason to kill her.’
‘You were chasing Miss High Heels through the woods, so how would you know? Maybe she pulled a weapon.’
Last he’d seen, the dead woman had been shivering with fear, a million miles from launching a counter-attack against two masked gunmen. ‘You planned to kill them all. Not just Grafton. Not just a scare. Kill them all. Everyone here tonight. Planned all the way.’
Mick stepped in front of him, blocking his view.
‘This doesn’t work if the woman who got away from you in high heels saw a face that wasn’t dark-skinned, does it? So, can you be sure she didn’t see your shiny white skin?’
‘I didn’t let her escape on purpose,’ Brad said, shifting the focus from the question. Because she might have seen white skin through the large eyeholes in his ski mask. And that would well and truly fuck up the plan. ‘Since we’re in this shit together, at least admit you came here planning to kill everyone.’
‘What did you think, we’d blast Grafton away and make the others do pinky promises that they wouldn’t tell? Besides, any friend of his doesn’t deserve to live.’
A scary thought. Brad wondered what would have happened if this party had been for thirty or forty people. He wondered if he had really believed Mick’s assertions that the plot had been to steal Grafton’s money and smash his legs and spine to confine him to a wheelchair. But it was what it was, and they had to deal with it. They didn’t have a choice.
‘So what’s next?’
Mick walked to the sofa and sat down, just feet from the dead woman. The cushions moved under his weight, and the woman’s head lolled to one side. Mick laid his head on hers, like lovers watching a romcom, and laughed at Brad’s expression.
‘We need to find the wife. Tonight; because when she finds out her hubby’s dead, she’ll have no reason not to go to the cops. Let’s not panic, though. We’ve got all night.’
‘We don’t have to do that,’ Dave said, shocked. ‘She didn’t see our faces. She can’t tell anyone. The so-called plan still works. It could still work if we torched this joint.’
Mick stared at Brad.
Brad stared back.
And then Brad said: ‘I don’t know if she saw I was white.’
Dave started to complain again. Mick halted him with a raised hand.
‘Don’t worry, Dave, because Brad got the registration of the car she jumped in. Right, Brad?’
Brad nodded. ‘I got both. Two cars out there.’
‘There we go. Good news all round. Dave, you go and make sure we haven’t left anything that can make Her Majesty our landlady for the next fifty years, like some of that cheap tacky jewellery dripping off you with your name all over it. Brad, you go to the shed. Then we find whoever picked up the wife and make him wish he hadn’t. I’ll call Król for that shit. Right up his alley. Then we go home and celebrate. That’s a plan and a half. Grafton’s going to spare me a bottle of Scotch. I reckon he won’t mind. I’ll ask him and take silence as a yes.’
‘And what’s in the shed that you could possibly want?’ Brad said. He had a notion in mind, but dearly hoped he was being silly.
Mick’s grin said he wasn’t in luck. ‘This is my one and only date with Grafton, and I’m not leaving the dance early.’
He had been on his way to a house in Wilmington, to see a client, but that plan was out the window. Once he was through the housing estate, he cut north on Leyton Cross Road because a sign pointed that way for the A2 which he could use to get back to London. As if sensing that he had changed his route, the woman in the summer dress asked him where he was going.
‘To a police station,’ he said, surprised. Where did she think – Alton Towers?
Since reaching lights and civilisation, she seemed to have calmed down. But suddenly she appeared agitated.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, his own fear rising. He checked the mirrors, just in case she’d spotted a tail. He imagined a man on a bike emerging out of the darkness like a ghost ship, but the world behind was black and blank.
‘We need to go somewhere safe,’ she said.
He was full of conflicting emotions. The urge to do the right thing was wrestling a cowardly craving to stop and kick her out. He didn’t like hassle, and this was a big one. At the same time he was annoyed at her for dumping a shitstorm in his lap, and embarrassed that he felt that way.
‘What do you mean? Police stations are safe places. You’re making no sense. You want this guy caught, right?’ Plural, he remembered. More than one guy.
Her hand went onto his arm, which made him jerk and almost tug the van into the oncoming lane and an insurance claim by a people carrier.
‘Jesus.’
‘Just take me somewhere safe. Then you can go back to your quiet life and forget about me.’
He laughed. Disbelief, not amusement. ‘How about the 71st Signal Regiment?’ They’d passed a sign for the barracks a minute earlier.
And then she started to cry. He thought about putting an arm on her shoulder, just for comfort, then thought better of it. If he tried to console every lost soul in London, he’d have to give up work and drink a lot more caffeine. He wasn’t Florence Nightingale. He’d rescued her on a dark road, so it wasn’t as if he was being unkind.
He pulled out his mobile phone and started to type, but she snatched it from him and tossed it down by her feet. Without a word. And that was when he knew: she had a problem with going to the police. And he thought he knew why.
‘You know these people. That’s why no police, isn’t it? I see your wedding ring. Is it your husband? Is he a wife beater? Were you running from him? Him and his pals? Did they get too drunk or something? Started trouble?’
She didn’t answer. He took a sharp left, and they drove west with the A2 running parallel on the right. She stared out of the side window, forehead on the cold glass. No answer from her, which was answer enough.
‘Did he hurt you? What happened?’ No response. ‘Hey, just because this guy’s your husband, it doesn’t mean he’s allowed to smack you around.’
No answer. He’d read about beaten wives before. About their desire to believe their violent partners were good men. He pressed his foot harder on the accelerator. He would take her to the police station and that would be his part over. If she chose to pretend to the boys in blue that nothing had happened, that she had walked into a door or fallen down the stairs, well, that was her choice. His good deed for today would be done.
But her continued silenced gnawed at him. He imagined a big man making this little woman cower in a corner. Hitting her. Begging for forgiveness afterwards, and getting it. Again and again. And that made him angry.
‘You’ve got to tell the cops about him, before he bloody kills you next ti—’
‘I don’t know who they were,’ she cut in. ‘It’s not my husband. It was my husband they came for. They came to hurt him. He…’
She fell silent. He looked at her for so long that the van drifted, and he had to jerk the wheel to retain the road. She had been about to admit something, he figured. Something she suddenly decided she didn’t want him to know. Something that would explain why her husband had the sort of enemies who’d crash a party to get at him, who’d hurt his wife to hurt him. But that just made it stranger that she wouldn’t go to the cops. She wasn’t think— ‘—ing straight,’ he said out loud. ‘We should go to the police right now. Your husband might be hurt. He might need help.’
‘I just need somewhere safe. I will go back to the cottage tomorrow.’
He laughed. Disbelief. ‘This is stupid. You can’t just hide away. Is there someone you know? We could call the cottage. Maybe he’ll answer, and all will be fine.’
‘Not tonight. Not until we know what’s happened.’
‘Is it a pissed-off ex-boyfriend or something?’ Her attitude was so puzzling that it was becoming scary. ‘You need to tell me why you can’t go to the police.’
They passed a streetlight. Her face flashed; he saw pleading eyes, like a hungry dog’s. You were supposed to go all soft, seeing eyes like that. He just got annoyed.
‘Tell me why you can’t tell the cops?’ he snapped. ‘That guy back there was trying to hurt you. He might go hurt someone else. Why wouldn’t anyone with a brain tell the police? Why are you protecting him?’
She was silent again. Head on the glass.
He shook her shoulder. ‘Hey, listen to—’
‘I’ll go tomorrow, I promise,’ she snapped, and slapped his hand away. ‘But not now. I just need somewhere to stay. Until tomorrow. Do you live alone?’
He really didn’t like this.
In a job devoid of humour, you had to get your laughs somewhere. One piece of comedy enjoyed by Bexley’s Murder Investigation Team was to ring the HAT phone at end of shift. This was the Homicide Assessment Team’s phone, and it only rang when there was a dead body. That meant a trip out to a scene, where the team would search for signs of foul play. No fun for the team getting ready to go home; much fun for the detective making the bogus call.
Detective Sergeant Manzoor Gondal, a British-born Pakistani copper, expected a colleague to laugh down the line when he stomped to the phone and slapped it against his ear. But it didn’t happen. He gave his two other HAT pals the sign that the call was real. They groaned. At least with a bogus call you didn’t have to go out in the dark and peruse some lunatic’s handiwork. Half an hour later and the next shift would have got this one. Killers could be so inconsiderate.
‘Three dead,’ he said. ‘Cottage on Tile Kiln Lane. Thank the Lord for catch-up TV. Someone call Mac. Tuesday’s his gym day, isn’t it? He’ll have a barbell above his head, so be careful not to say, “drop everything.”’ Gondal was the only one who laughed at his joke.
Tile Kiln Lane was only a mile and a half south of them. They were there fifteen minutes later. The scene was already a party.
Outside the postcard-material house were three patrol cars, two crime scene vans, and two ambulances. The crime guys were suiting up in plastic outfits to prevent contaminating evidence. The paramedics stood around their vehicles like guys on strike because there was nobody to save, and the bodies couldn’t go anywhere until the pathologist said so, and he wasn’t here yet. The uniformed cops stood around because the remote location meant no horde of gawkers and reporters to hold back, chatting as if welcoming a break from slinking around dark streets in the hope that some hoodie would smash a window right in front of them.
A uniformed officer stepped up and introduced himself by his full name, making a big show of adding the title First Officer Attending. The HAT guys got sent out in advance to see if the dead body was a homicide, but uniforms were always dispatched prior to that to make sure there was actually a body to assess. Couldn’t have important detectives mobilised . . .
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