Catch Your Death (21 page)

‘
I don’t want you to call the police.’

‘
Why the hell not? We’re being chased by a guy who just murdered someone. If I call the police they might be able to get someone out here. Someone to stop Sampson.’

He took the next bend at high speed. They swayed in their seats. ‘No. I’m sorry – I’ll explain later.’

‘
No.’ She tried to grab the phone and he snatched it away , throwing it out of the window.

She gawped at him. ‘What the hell did you do that for?’

‘
I’ll tell you later.’

She shrank away from him. ‘Who are you?’

‘
What? You know who I am.’

Kate pressed herself against the door. ‘I don’t understand why you just…’

Bang.

Kate jumped in her seat. ‘What was that? Did we hit something?’

‘
Fuck’s sake. He’s shooting at us.’

Another bang.

‘
And you wouldn’t let me call the police?’ Kate started to cry. ‘He’s going to kill us. Oh, Jack…I’ll never see Jack again.’

Paul grasped her hand. She tried to pull it away but he held firm, steering the car with one hand. ‘Kate, listen. You have to stay calm. I’m going to get us out of this. And then I’ll explain about the police. I promise. Just trust me. Okay?’

She blinked. ‘Okay.’

‘
Good. Now, see that house in the distance? The big white one? That’s where we’re going.’

It looked like the kind of house the lord of the manor would live in. Huge, picturesque and surrounded by rolling fields. A hill rose up behind it, with a few other small stone buildings dotted around. The narrow lane they were driving down widened out as they reached the hamlet of Little Marrow, and another thin road led towards the large house. Paul turned into it and carried on at top speed. A pair of horses watched them over a fence. A second later, the Audi turned onto the road behind them. This was what it felt like to be hunted.

‘
Keep your head down,’ Paul instructed.

They swerved left onto a road marked ‘Private – Keep Out’ and found themselves at the end of a long driveway, the start of which was marked by a gate that stood open. They drove up it, and the house loomed into view.

Gravel crunched beneath their tyres as they approached the house – more of a mansion – and saw a group of five men and a woman, dressed in Barbour jackets and wellies.

All the men were carrying shotguns. It was a shooting party, heading into the countryside to shoot pheasants or rabbits. A couple of English pointers ran around their heels. All of them, people and dogs, stared at the Peugeot as it came to a halt, and Kate and Paul jumped out of the car.

The dogs came barrelling towards them. Paul held his breath, but the dogs just sniffed him, then Kate. The woman in the Barbour squinted at them.

‘
Can I help you?’ Her voice was so upper crust it was almost royal. Then, to the dogs: ‘Plum, Pudding, get back here.’

One of the shotgun-wielding men stepped forward. Kate had lived in America, supposedly a country populated by NRA-approved trigger-happy killers, if you believed the English media, and had never seen a gun, not once. Now, in England, she had seen enough in one day to last a lifetime.

‘
What’s going on?’ the man asked in a voice that matched the woman’s.

Paul said, ‘I’m really sorry to intrude on you but we need your help. We’ve…run out of petrol.’

The man looked over Paul’s shoulder. ‘And what about him? Has he run out too?’

They looked back. Sampson’s black Audi idled menacingly at the end of the drive.

CHAPTER 27

The man who had spoken to Paul, clearly the lord of this manor, took a few steps towards Sampson’s car.

Sampson weighed up his odds. Five men with shotguns, and they looked like they knew how to use them. They’d probably been killing things since they were at boarding school. He put his foot on the accelerator and drove on. Kate and Wilson had got away, for now. It was time to put some more distance between him and the scene of the widow’s death, anyway. Stupid old bitch. Still, she’d be with her husband soon. Not in heaven or hell – Sampson didn’t believe in all that shit – just mouldering in the grave.

He headed back towards the forest. There was something he needed to pick up before he left the scene completely.

As the sound of the Audi’s engine faded into the distance, Kate and Paul exchanged a look of relief, and Kate put her hand on her chest. It felt as if her heart was about to burst out. She turned, as the woman in the Barbour said, ‘Who was that?’

Kate didn’t reply immediately.

‘
A friend of yours?’ pressed the woman, licking her lips as if the taste of intrigue was a rare treat.

The first man turned to his four friends. ‘Why don’t you chaps get on and I’ll catch you up in a little while?’

The men nodded and strolled off with their shotguns, one of the dogs scampering behind them. As she and Paul followed the woman and her husband into the house, Kate silently hoped that they would have a fruitless day’s hunting. Then she thought again about Jean Bainbridge lying in the road, gunned down. . She took a deep breath, fighting the urge to throw up. ‘You look like you could do with a cup of tea. I’ll put the kettle on,’ said the husband.

The kindness of strangers, thought Kate. They were led into a vast sitting room, where they sat down on plump sofas with a view of the garden. The remaining dog sat down by the French windows, looking longingly towards the hunters walking away towards the woods. Kate could hardly speak; not until the tea had been placed in front of her. She could have expected a bone china cup in a saucer, but it came in a mug with a chip in the rim.

‘
Thank you.’ Kate sipped the tea. Sometimes, in Boston, she felt like she was turning into an American, but the reinvigorating effect of the tea persuaded her that she was still English through and through. ‘Mrs…’

‘
Mrs Braxton. But call me Penny. This is Andrew.’ She nodded towards her husband, who smiled at Kate. He had a pleasantly craggy face and exuded an air of old money. But he was passive, cast into shadow by the fierce brightness of his wife’s personality. Penny clearly wore the jodhpurs in this relationship. Kate suspected that Andrew probably ranked somewhere below the dog in the domestic pecking order.

‘
I’m Kate, and this is Paul.’

Introductions over, Penny put her tea on a coaster on a small occasional table. ‘So why was that chap in the black car chasing you?’

Paul said, ‘We don’t know. Just some random nut.’

Kate stared at him but he ignored her and continued, ‘We made the mistake of overtaking him up on the main road – next thing, he was right on our tail, horn blaring, trying to barge into our car. We couldn’t shake him off. If I’d been on my own I might have pulled over, had it out man to man, but I had to think about Kate here.’

‘
I see,’ said Penny, looking over at Kate, who was trying to rearrange her face from a look of incredulity. What the hell was Paul playing at? Why was he lying? She still couldn’t believe that he hadn’t let her call the police. And that he’d thrown her mobile out of the window.

‘
There are a lot of lunatics about on the roads these days,’ Andrew said. ‘Only the other day…’

‘
Yes darling,’ Penny dismissed him and turned back to Paul. ‘Do you want to call the police?’

‘
Yes,’ said Kate pointedly to Paul. ‘Do we?’

‘
What’s the point? It was just road rage. He’ll be long gone by now. And he didn’t actually do anything they could prosecute him for. It’s not as if we’ve got any evidence either.’ He avoided Kate’s gaze. ‘We don’t even know who he was.’

‘
Didn’t you get his licence plate number?’

‘
No… Look, I really don’t think there’s any point calling the police.’

Penny looked at him long and hard. She obviously knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth. But he returned her stare without flinching.

‘
Well, it’s your decision,’ she said after a while.

‘
That’s right.’

Kate could feel her heart jumping beneath her blouse. The pointer padded over to where she sat and stuck his wet nose into the palm of her hand. Suddenly, a wave of tiredness washed over her. In times of extreme stress, the human brain sometimes takes the option of shutting itself down to avoid trauma. Mrs Bainbridge; seeing Sampson again; the pursuit, the confusion over Paul’s strange behaviour. She wanted to sit here and stroke the ridiculously-named dog and not have to think about any of it.

But that wasn’t an option. Oh, how she missed the cool atmosphere of the lab, where all made sense; where everything could be measured and weighed and analysed. Where, if things didn’t go as they should, there was always an explanation.

‘
We ought to get going,’ Paul said.

‘
But what if this road-rager is still out there?’ Penny asked.

Andrew said, ‘I could take the Land Rover out and check if the coast is clear.’

He moved to the door.

‘
Be careful, darling,’ Penny said, with a tremor of genuine concern in her voice.

Andrew returned fifteen minutes later – fifteen minutes during which Penny paced the sitting room with the dog at her heels, her nervousness a reproach to Kate, to not make snap judgements about other people’s relationships. Or her own relationships, for that matter, she thought. She was desperate to get Paul on his own to find out why the hell he’d been acting so weirdly.

‘
No sign of the bugger, so I think it should be safe for you to leave,’ said Andrew, throwing his Barbour down on an armchair.

Paul stood up immediately. ‘Excellent. Let’s go, Kate.’

As Kate rose to her feet, Andrew added, ‘Big story on the local radio news. Some elderly woman has been found shot outside her house.’

‘
Shot?’ Penny exclaimed.

‘
Yes, in Hednesford.’

‘
Good heavens, that’s where I play boules! How could something like that happen in a sweet little village like Hednesford?’

Kate tried to remain calm, but she couldn’t shake the image of Mrs Bainbridge crumpling in front of her hollyhocks and lavender. She had taken a bullet meant for Paul, and Paul was now standing here, staring intently into the garden, grim-faced.

‘
You didn’t come through Hednesford, did you?’ Penny asked.

‘
No. No, we didn’t,’ said Paul.

‘
We should go,’ Kate said, her voice trembling. ‘Can I just use your toilet first?’

‘
Of course.’

When Kate emerged from the loo, Penny and Andrew were deep in conversation, holding hands. She was sure she heard Penny call Andrew ‘poppet’.

Penny said, ‘Your friend has gone out to his car already.’

‘
Oh. Okay. Well, thank you both so much.’

‘
Think nothing of it.’

After the young couple had driven away, Andrew turned to Penny. ‘What did you make of that?’

‘
I didn’t believe a word they said.’

‘
No. I certainly didn’t believe all this stuff about road rage. I didn’t believe that Paul chap when he said they hadn’t been through Hednesford either.’

Penny felt a rush of excitement. ‘You don’t think they might have had something to do with the old woman’s death?’

Andrew strode towards the phone. ‘I made a note of their registration number when I went out. I’m going to call the police.’

After dialling the Stafford police and explaining about the strange couple that had visited them, Andrew went outside, keen to join the rest of his hunting party. He looked around for his shotgun.

‘
Penny, darling,’ he called. ‘Have you seen my gun?’

She emerged from the house. ‘No – where did you put it?’

‘
I left it right here, propped against the wall. I…oh, blast.’

They both looked towards the road.

‘
I’d better call the police again,’ Andrew said.

Kate and Paul passed through Slitting Mill and out onto the main road again. At Kate’s insistence they had backtracked a little way to try to find Kate’s phone but there was no sign of it. Paul used his own phone to call Kate’s number, but nothing rang, even though they walked back and forth along the road close to the spot where Kate was sure Paul had thrown it, nervously half-expecting Sampson to jump out at them from behind a tree. While they were searching, Paul asked Kate about Sampson, and she explained about the creepy odd-job man at the CRU who never seemed comfortable in the role.

After ten minutes’ fruitless searching, Kate was forced, reluctantly and with bad grace, to accept the fact that her phone was gone. She felt annoyed with Paul, both about the phone, and about his odd behaviour. They drove in silence to the outskirts of Stafford, glancing behind them in the car’s mirrors all the way, and as they passed a row of shops and a pub, Kate said, ‘Pull over. We need to talk.’

Paul pulled up outside the pub, The Red Lion.

Kate took a deep breath. ‘Why did you lie to them, Paul?’

He reached for her hand, and she flinched away.

‘
Kate…’