Closer Still (19 page)

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Authors: Jo Bannister

BOOK: Closer Still
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She nodded, fumbling for her phone. Only with her finger on speed-dial she hesitated, intimidated by the implications. ‘What if we're wrong?'
‘What if we're right?'
She nodded and dialled. The network was down. ‘I'll try the landline.'
She still couldn't get Deacon's mobile. She tried the
other number she knew by heart, that of the front desk at Battle Alley. This time she got the engaged signal. She tried again. Still engaged.
‘Stupid bloody people,' she hissed, dialling again, with the same result. ‘It's not enough that they clog the roads for miles in every direction, they have to overload the phone system as well!' She tried again. Still engaged.
Daniel stood up. ‘Brodie, this could really matter. If no one else has had time to think it through, we could be the only ones who've stumbled on what's actually happening. What's going to happen. One way or another, we have to get a message through. You keep trying the phones. I'll run down to Battle Alley.'
‘
Run
down?' She hadn't intended that note of incredulity. But Daniel wasn't much of an athlete.
‘I can walk it in twenty minutes – I should be able to run it in ten.'
‘Or give yourself a heart attack in five!'
‘Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe I'll find a policeman with a working radio. We can't just wait for the bang!'
And of course he was right. It might be bizarre that in the communication age circumstances could ensure that vital intelligence could only travel a little over a mile the same way it would have got there two thousand years ago, in the hands of a running man. But that was the situation they faced. And however unfit Daniel was, Brodie was even less likely to finish in the medals.
‘OK,' she said briskly. ‘Do it. I'll get on the computer, see if I can raise them by email. And Daniel' – he turned back in the doorway – ‘don't take no for an answer. We
might be wrong about this, but it really doesn't matter. That can be sorted out later. If we're right and we can't get anyone to listen, there may not be a later.'
 
He'd been right about the car. At the end of Chiffney Road he met a scene like something from a post-apocalyptic movie. A sea of abandoned cars filled the road from side to side, as far as he could see in either direction. They'd been trying to get out of town up the Guildford Road, but as gridlock began to bite panic had set in and fuelled an inventive reinterpretation of the Highway Code. Cars had tried overtaking on the left, and also on the far right. They'd tried driving up the footpaths, oblivious of the trees growing through the pavement every thirty metres or so. The thing about a big tree is, it barely notices if someone drives into it. Crumpled cars squatted round the trunks like dogs looking for squirrels. It would be a crane job to move some of them – when you could get a crane within reach.
There were still people in some of the cars, but most of those who'd got this far had waited a couple of hours and then given up, returning on foot the way they'd come. It was like a weird mechanical still life, or a metal ocean breaking on a suburban shore.
Daniel turned down the hill towards town and picked up an unpractised jog. People still in their cars watched him pass with a kind of uninterested misery; except for one woman who peered in the direction he'd come from and demanded querulously, ‘
Now
what?'
It could have been worse, he thought – he could have
been running up this hill. Even so, by the time he'd gone a few hundred metres he was sweating and his glasses were misting up.
A mile and a bit, mostly downhill. Anyone could run a mile and a bit. Anyone with lives on his shoulders could run it
fast
. With urgent fingers he smeared portholes in his foggy glasses and picked up the pace.
 
Brodie fired off an email with no idea whether it would be read or not. Then she sent another to Division. But they had no reason to take her seriously, while Deacon had. She kept trying to get him, always with the same result. Every failed attempt confirmed Daniel's wisdom in leaving when he did. She kept checking her watch. He'd be a quarter of the way there by now, she told herself. He'd be halfway there. If nothing happened to stop him. If the overstressed officers at Battle Alley, all of them struggling to deal with a situation they were never trained for, all of them worried for friends and family, half of them drafted in for the emergency, would take time out from the crisis and give a fair hearing to a man who thought, just thought, they were doing it wrong.
And there was nothing she could do to help. She was besieged in Chiffney Road by the rock-solid traffic jam, unable to leave or to contact anyone closer to the action. Brodie hated being out of the loop. She hated feeling that events could go on happening without her assent.
Thinking about that, she realised there was something she could do. She could call Faith Stretton. If there was now a police presence at the Stretton house, they could use
their radio network to forward a message to Deacon. Even if the police weren't there yet, out in the wilds of Chain Down Faith wasn't subject to the same strictures as Brodie. She was also a lot closer to the Crichton Construction site. If she made her way there and introduced herself as the mother of the terror suspect – in the circumstances suspect hardly seemed the right word – she could be quite sure of speaking to Detective Superintendent Deacon.
The phone rang twice before someone snatched it up. ‘Dev?' It was Faith. Which meant the police had yet to arrive. If they had, they'd be answering the phone.
‘No, it's Brodie Farrell.' Despite the urgency she was trying to keep her voice calm. ‘Faith – do you know what's going on at the construction site?'
If they'd been face to face she'd have seen Faith's expression close like a box, tight, impenetrable. Instead she heard it in the quality of her silence. ‘You do, don't you?' And as the silence continued, turning to granite, she added softly: ‘In fact, you know more about it than I do.'
Faith got the words out like squeezing the last bit of toothpaste from the tube. ‘Brodie – stay out of it. This is none of your business.'
This was never a good line to take with Brodie. ‘Your son's going to take Dimmock into the space race! That's
everybody's
business!'
‘He isn't.' Faith's voice was low. ‘Nothing's going to happen. Believe me.'
And, oddly enough, Brodie did believe her. But the truth isn't always reassuring. ‘This isn't about Dev and what happens up on the Downs, is it? It's about what happens
somewhere else while the police are fully occupied and the population are running round like headless chickens.'
Again the silence. She might as well have said Yes.
‘Faith, no one's going to make a distinction! No one's going to say, “But Dev's bomb didn't go off – it was his mates' bomb that killed all those people.” They're going to say, “This was a conspiracy to commit mass murder and Dev Stretton's actions were central to it. If he hadn't done what he did, none of the rest would have been possible.” They're going to say, “He was one of us. He was born and raised here, he got a good education and had a good career. And that makes what he did worse. He wasn't stupid, he wasn't ignorant, he wasn't desperate. He made a choice. He killed a lot of people, to make a point.”'
‘Brodie.' Faith's tone had changed again. She sounded genuinely surprised, and genuinely afraid. ‘You've got it all wrong. No one's in any danger. Dev doesn't want to hurt anyone. He hasn't got any mates who want to hurt anyone either.'
‘Then what the hell's he doing?' yelled Brodie, frustrated beyond endurance.
‘What he has to,' said Faith, with a kind of flat despair. ‘What he chose to. He's a good man, my son. He puts himself at risk for other people. I know what this is going to cost him.
He
knows what it's going to cost him. He thinks it's worth it. I just hope he's right. I know I'm more proud of him than I can begin to tell you.
‘And now I have to go.' And with that she put the phone down, and though Brodie hit redial immediately no one picked up.
‘We've sent someone to the cottage,' said Deacon conversationally. ‘Your mother will be here soon. Assuming the Area Car can get through the traffic. You've caused a right old snarl-up out there, you know.'
‘I don't want to talk to my
mother
!' exclaimed Dev Stretton through the crack of the door. ‘Leave her out of this.'
‘Bit late for that,' shrugged Deacon. ‘Like it or not, we're all involved. The time to think whether you wanted to embarrass your mother was
before
you broke into an explosives bunker.'
‘I mean it,' said Stretton, his voice rising unpredictably. ‘I don't want you going anywhere near her.'
‘Tough,' grunted Deacon, unimpressed. He wasn't a trained negotiator. Deacon's idea of negotiation was giving people a choice between doing what he said and doing what he said with a bloody nose. But he was the one who was here, leaning his back against two tonnes of blasting explosives, so cards on the table was the only game in town. Criminals – and whatever else he was, Dev Stretton was certainly that – didn't get pandered to on his watch.
‘Do you
know
how big a bang this'll make if I detonate it?'
‘Don't know,' sniffed Deacon, ‘don't much care. It'll kill you and me, so whatever it does after that will be somebody else's problem. You don't get to say how we do this, Dev. All you get to say is when you've had enough. Say you're coming out and I'll walk you to the car. Say you're staying in and I'll keep you company. That's all the choices you get.'
A trained negotiator would have handled it differently. But perhaps Stretton would have known how to deal with someone doing it by the book. It wasn't going the way he'd expected. Everything he'd read, every film he'd seen, suggested that people did what they were told to by an armed man. He'd supposed that, if a revolver and a handful of shells would achieve that, two tonnes of high explosive would achieve a great deal more.
At first it had seemed to be working. Then Detective Superintendent Deacon arrived and the script went out the window. Stretton hadn't gone into this lightly. He'd known what he was going to have to pay for it: years of his life or, if he got clumsy, the rest of it. He was ready for even that. He thought what he was doing was that important.
What he hadn't expected was to be taken less than seriously. His sensibilities were offended. He didn't too much mind being thought of as a mad bomber. He did mind being treated like a bolshy teenager who's going to be in deep shit as soon as he puts the class hamster back in its cage. Deacon had sent for his mother, for God's sake!
He had to keep telling himself,
That's not the bit that matters. The bit that matters is happening elsewhere — but it wouldn't be happening except for what I'm doing here.
He thought
, When Deacon realises what it was all about he'll see me in a different light …
In a Damascus moment, suddenly he recognised what Deacon was doing. That off-hand manner was anything but arbitrary. He was goading Stretton. It took a leap of the imagination to suppose that a sane police officer would deliberately annoy a man armed with explosives, but that's what he was doing. He wanted Stretton to feel misunderstood. He wanted him to vent his frustration in the few hot words that would explain what was really going on here.
A chill wave swept up Dev Stretton's spine. He knew that, however much Deacon tried him, he couldn't afford even those few words that would make him feel better. Detective Superintendent Deacon was a cleverer man than he appeared. If he guessed what this was really about, it was all over.
He said deliberately, ‘Then make yourself comfortable, because we're staying where we are.'
Disappointment wrinkled Deacon's lip. But if Stretton had figured out his game plan, Deacon had learnt something too. He'd learnt that Stretton had an agenda beyond simply martyring himself. Even without choices, Stretton still considered he had options. That was encouraging. He wasn't going to pull the pin, or whatever you had to do to set this lot off, because he'd backed himself into a corner and couldn't think what else to do.
Deacon shifted his back against the rough hardness of the breeze-blocks and complained, ‘My bum's getting cold.'
 
Brodie raced upstairs. Marta and the children had lost interest in the chaos outside and were playing Scrabble, though not in a form the manufacturers would have recognised. As played by a seven-year-old, a blind baby and a Polish music teacher it sometimes involved stacking the tiles and sometimes having them leapfrog one another, like draughts.
‘Marta, I have to go out. Can you keep the kids?'
‘Sure.' Unable to leave herself and with students unable to reach her, it wasn't such an imposition. ‘But how? You can't take the car. You going to run too?' It was in her tone how improbable she thought this was.
‘No. That was my second question. Have you got the number of the world's least talented pianist? You know – the guy who was here yesterday.'
‘Graham? Sure. But..
.why
?'
‘Because he was here yesterday and now he isn't. He can get through this stuff, Marta. He's got a motorcycle!'
Men called Graham who are good at motorcycle maintenance but fancy themselves as Liberace don't often have women like Brodie Farrell riding pillion behind them. His mouth was open to tell her he couldn't help, that he was at work …and then he heard himself and stopped abruptly. ‘Be there in ten minutes.'
He stuffed his limbs back into his leathers, all the while trying to think up a plausible excuse for his boss. Then
it dawned on him that no excuse would serve as well as the truth. He just might lose his job, but what he'd gain in respect would be worth it. He swaggered out of the garage where he worked to a round of applause from his colleagues.
Brodie was waiting outside her house. His heart skipped a beat. They weren't proper motorcycle leathers, but when a woman looked that good in black leather jacket and trousers and high-heel boots, who cared? He passed her his spare helmet with a hand that actually trembled.
It was more than ten years since Brodie had been on a motorcycle. Somehow she expected that the instinct would still be there, but in fact she felt wobbly and vulnerable. She clung to Graham in a manner which, had he been there to see, would have made Deacon immediately go out and buy a Kawasaki.
It was no clearway even for a motorbike. But Graham weaved judiciously, and once rode across someone's front lawn, and within minutes the jumble of metal blocking the road began to thin.
The obvious way to Chain Down was up the Guildford Road. But the only traffic on the Guildford Road now was returning to Dimmock: barriers and diversion signs met anyone trying to head north.
Brodie tapped Graham on the shoulder and pointed. ‘Try Cheyne Lane.' It wandered round the southern side of Chain Down, serving the various farms and hamlets. The narrowness and the snakelike bends would have kept a car in second gear, but Graham rode with a skill he would never display on the piano and ten minutes later
they crested a swell of the Down and saw the cluster of houses grouped about the crossroads that was Cheyne Warren. Faith Stretton's cottage was halfway up the hill on the other side.
Faith Stretton's car was pulling out of the driveway.
Brodie's first thought was that the police had contacted her and she was on her way to the Crichton Construction site. But she was going the wrong way. Brodie tapped Graham's shoulder again. ‘Follow that car.'
All his life Graham had waited for this moment.
Tom Cruise?
he thought.
Too short. Tom Hanks? Too old. Daniel Craig!
When they made the film, he wanted to be played by Daniel Craig. He set off in pursuit, and somehow resisted the urge to throw a wheelie.
Hugging Graham's waist, Brodie felt her mind spinning as fast as the wheels – and like the wheels, spitting grit on the corners. It made no sense.
None
of it made any sense. If she was right about Dev, why was his mother now heading for Guildford? Or – no, not Guildford – further west. Basingstoke? Swindon? Her son was trying to blow up the Three Downs because he'd just found out he wasn't a Moslem fundamentalist after all, and she was hightailing it to Swindon?
‘What are you
on
?' gritted Brodie inside her helmet; and Graham, chastened, turned his head enough to say, ‘Nothing. I always drive like this.'
‘Sorry,' said Brodie, ‘talking to myself. You're doing great. Just — watch the road. Keep watching the road.'
So Faith wasn't heading for Swindon. With everything that was going on at Crichton
Construction there was still something important enough to take her in the opposite direction, north across Menner Down where there was next to nothing. Sheep farms. Wind farms. Little wooded copses, and villages that didn't yet have proper sewerage. And that was all, until the swell of the Downs dipped and levelled out and …
And became flat enough to build an airfield.
 
Daniel was halfway down the long hill into Dimmock before things really started going wrong. Until then all he'd had to contend with was the sweat in his eyes, the knives in his lungs, the leaden ache of his running legs and the fact that his heart was playing ‘Chopsticks' inside his ribs.
But halfway down the hill people started taking an interest in him.
Perhaps it was only natural. Everyone else on the road that day was trying to get out of Dimmock. By mid-afternoon, of course, many of them had given up and, abandoning their cars, were trudging back the way they'd come. Still the sight of someone in a hurry to get back to town was enough to attract attention and then concern. People don't behave like that. They don't run towards a known danger. Suspicions were aroused that he was Up To No Good.
Somebody shouted after him, ‘Where's the fire then?'
And Daniel, who should simply have ignored him and kept running, tried to reply without wasting either time or breath that he could ill afford. ‘There's no fire,' he gasped.
But if he thought that would reassure anyone he was wrong. The Chinese Whispers travelled down the hill faster than he did. ‘What did he say? Don't fire? Why would anybody be shooting at him?' ‘Jesus – you don't think it's him, do you? The bomber?' ‘That little runt? But he's not …' ‘That's the bomber? The one on the news?' ‘That's him. That man there says so.'
At first it was only that the people he passed drifted together into watchful groups. They followed the running figure with their eyes, with pointed fingers and with nervous challenges Daniel was too preoccupied to hear. He thought lives depended on his ability to keep running. It never occurred to him that one of them might be his own.
Soon after that the little clumps of people gravitated – like star-stuff – into bigger, heavier agglomerations that acquired a momentum of their own. They began to follow in his wake. At first, because he was running, he left them behind. Then some of them started to run after him. And those further down the hill saw a man running towards them with a small crowd chasing him. Primed for disaster and ready to believe the worst, they moved to intercept him.
Daniel didn't realise what they were doing, thought it was just his usual luck that put people in his way on the one occasion when speed mattered to him. He waved his arms frantically at them. ‘Please …I need to get through …'
He found his way blocked, unaccountably, by a brick privy. Except that it spoke with a Yorkshire accent. ‘What's your hurry?'
Most satisfactory explanations are either very short or very long, a sentence or an essay. A middle-distance explanation can cause more confusion than it resolves. Because time mattered, and he was fighting for breath, Daniel went for the abridged version. ‘I have to get to the police station. Or people are going to get hurt.'
For once, brevity wasn't a happy choice. People heard the word
hurt
. They heard the word police. They raced, whippet-like and in fact accurately, to the conclusion that Daniel knew more about what was going on than they did, and inaccurately to the supposition that this was because he was involved. The Chinese Whisperers took up megaphones.
‘The police are after him!' ‘He says he's going to hurt people!' ‘Ask him about the bomb. Where's the bomb?' ‘He says you planted a bomb!' ‘What do you want to bomb
us
for?'
‘I don't want to bomb anyone!' yelled Daniel. ‘Do I
look
like Osama bin Laden?'
‘He says he's Osama bin Laden!' ‘He doesn't look much like him. He's got yellow hair.' ‘Who's Osama bin Laden?'
‘Sonny,' said the Yorkshire privy severely, ‘this is not a good day for teasing people. They're ready to beat the crap out of someone, and if they can't find the real Osama bin Laden they may decide you'll do.'

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