See How They Run (34 page)

H
arry had swiftly adjusted
to driving the Range Rover, though the higher centre of gravity had nearly caught him out a couple of times. They’d also had a horrible near miss – pulling out to overtake just as a car came out of a junction towards them. Alice had to remind him that dying en route wouldn’t help Evie at all.

Forty-five minutes after leaving Cranstone, they were skirting around the village of Coleford, approaching Symonds Yat from the south. Michael’s map had indicated that this was a quicker route than the A40 through Ross-on-Wye. Harry hoped that wasn’t a lie.

In any case, they still weren’t going to get there until about thirty minutes after Ruth. By which point anything might have happened.

He hadn’t said as much to Alice – in fact they’d hardly spoken at all – but he knew she was thinking the same thing. Their silence had an intimacy to it; the sense of an almost psychic connection that made him feel closer to her than he had in ages. Of course, this was virtually the first time since the birth that they had been together without Evie. Even when their daughter wasn’t in the same room, they would be listening out for her on the baby monitor; fretting over the timing of her next feed, her next change; worrying that the snuffling they could hear meant she was coming down with something … always a thousand tiny anxieties to occupy their minds, and now all those mundane concerns seemed laughably trivial.

Was Evie alive? Would they ever see her again? Those questions, those fears, were so all-consuming that they could not be voiced. The closest either of them came to it was when Alice said, ‘I keep trying to picture her, and I can’t, somehow. I can’t see her face in my mind.’

‘That’s normal when you’re under stress,’ he said, though in fact he had no idea what was normal in a situation like this.

Alice put her hands to her cheeks, pressing almost savagely against the skin.

‘Those nightmares we talked about on Thursday, they’re going to come true. Every bad thing all at once.’

‘No, they’re not. You can’t think like that.’

‘Why not? Aren’t you thinking that way?’

He sighed. ‘Yes, I am. But you have to stop me from being negative, and I have to stop you. That’s how we’ll get through this. It’s our only chance.’

He didn’t have to add:
It’s Evie’s only chance.

I
t turned
out that the woman in the dining room, Nerys, was still alive. Ruth heard ragged breathing, then a feeble cry.

She entered the room, carrying Evie at her shoulder to spare her the sight of what had been done in here. Nerys saw her, though, eyes focusing weakly then widening with … what? Hope?

This was someone who had offered sanctuary to Renshaw and then betrayed him. A woman who had snatched a baby from its mother and brought it here to sell or bargain with.

Nerys tried to speak, coughing up pinkish bubbles as she managed a few words, none of them clear enough to decipher. Ruth was no expert but she could see that Nerys was in a very bad way. Even with urgent medical treatment she might not make it.

But Ruth couldn’t ring 999 now, any more than she could walk out of here and return Evie to her parents.

Did that make her, in her own way, just as bad as Nerys? Ruth deliberated for a second and decided that she didn’t care what the answer was.

Nerys tried again, her hand beckoning Ruth closer, but Ruth didn’t move.

‘My son,’ Nerys said. ‘Son.’

Ruth guessed it was a plea for help – having extracted some information from her, perhaps Foster and Bridge had been despatched to find the man who had helped his mother.

She regarded Nerys for a few seconds, then shook her head.

‘You need to keep very quiet. When this is done I’ll bring help if I can. But not now.’

R
uth ignored
another weak plea as she left the room. She climbed the stairs, confident that there was no one up here but needing to be absolutely sure.

Her intuition was right. Three bedrooms and a bathroom, all empty, the beds stripped for winter. In the room above the kitchen she walked over to the window and carefully peered out. The summer house lay about thirty feet away, facing across the valley. A light from the front was spilling on to the grass.

She descended the stairs slowly, the baby an encumbrance she could do without. She was outwardly calm, as she knew she had to be, but inside there was a degree of turmoil – quite understandably, she thought. The question was: to what extent could it impair her judgement?

Maybe it already has
, she reflected as she stepped out of the back door and walked across the garden, helpless with Evie in her arms.
Maybe it already has.

T
he summer house
was a long low building, clad in timber but not dissimilar in size and shape to the shipping container in which Ruth had spent the previous night. The front section was almost entirely made of glass, with a set of double doors in the middle. It was lit by a single lamp.

The interior was large enough for a sofa and a set of aluminium furniture: four tubular framed chairs and a small round table. Nathan Laird was sitting on one of the chairs, a bottle of Evian on the table in front of him, along with a phone and an iPad.

He was wearing a dark grey suit and a white shirt; no tie. His hair was shorter than he used to wear it; close-cropped and greying at the temples, with a pronounced widow’s peak. A few lines and wrinkles that hadn’t been there before, made more obvious by a deep tan. But the grey hair offset the tan nicely, so although he was looking his age, he was, if anything, even more handsome than before.

He reacted to her approach as if he had fully expected it. As if he had known that his precautions would fail. He studied Ruth in much the same way that she was studying him. He seemed about to rise to greet her, but settled for lifting the Evian in a kind of toast. His other hand went for the phone, tapping a couple of times as he lifted it to his ear.

Someone answered straight away and he told them: ‘Get back here. Now.’

R
uth waited in the doorway
. ‘One to one no good for you, then?’

He absorbed the taunt with a lazy smile, and pointedly didn’t ask what had happened to Mark or Sian Vickery.

‘Come in. Sit down.’

She accepted only the first invitation, moving to the opposite side of the table and standing behind the chair.

‘Where are the others? Warley, is it? And the Scottish one.’

‘Keeping watch, north and south. I can call them back as well, but Foster and Bridge are the specialists.’ He grinned. ‘They won’t be long. Five or ten minutes.’

‘I know. I saw them leave.’

‘Well, you were lucky.’ His eyes narrowed as he regarded Evie. ‘If it’s her you came for, why are you still here?’

‘You know why.’

He looked genuinely baffled. ‘You’d put your head in the noose for something that happened over a decade ago?’ Then another unexpected question: ‘Where’s your friend?’

‘What?’ For a mad second she thought of Greg, and felt a rush of grief and guilt. But Laird gestured at the baby.

‘This one’s dad. The family Renshaw used as a cut-out.’

‘Harry? I convinced him that he stood more chance of getting his daughter back if he left me to do it.’

‘And where is he now, this trusting father?’

Ruth shrugged. ‘Waiting for my call.’

L
aird looked sceptical
. He leaned towards the seat next to him and picked up the gun he’d been keeping out of sight.

This challenged a lot of Ruth’s assumptions. She knew Laird as a man who took the utmost care to avoid incriminating himself. To see him armed, at the scene of a violent crime, was completely out of character.

‘Oh, really?’ Ruth thought this a fair effort to sound cool, given the circumstances.

‘Unavoidable,’ he said. ‘These are dangerous times, Ruth.’

The gun was a Glock, semi-automatic and lethal at close range. With the garden furniture between her and the doors, she stood no chance of running.

Laird said, ‘Why don’t you sit down?’

‘I’m okay here.’

‘Well, you don’t look very comfortable with that baby. Why not hand her over?’

‘And then you shoot me?’

The question seemed to induce a sudden cry from Evie. Whatever the reason, it caused Ruth to step back, the baby wriggling and kicking with surprising strength.

Laird tutted. ‘Give her to me.’

Ruth wanted to call his bluff, counting on the fact that he wouldn’t risk shooting when the baby would almost certainly die in the process. But she had underestimated Nathan’s capacity for cruelty on more than one occasion, and she was not about to do it again.

‘It’s a simple choice, Ruth. Both of you in the firing line, or just you. What’s it to be?’

Evie yelped again: Ruth had no idea why. Was she hungry, or wet? Or was she scared? Could they sense the threat of violence at this age? Ruth didn’t know: she’d been a hopeless mother.

And Laird could read her mind. He watched her clumsy attempts to placate the child and offered a patronising smile.

‘What is there to decide?’ he asked, his tone vaguely pitying. ‘After all, you’re not here for her, are you?’

T
he sly look
in his eyes was one she remembered well. She felt humiliated by her own need for answers. That she would submit herself to this – and with much worse to come. All he had to do was keep her dangling until Foster and Bridge returned.

Was she really prepared to give up her life, just to know the truth about her son?

She gazed at Evie, whose cries of displeasure had now been reduced to a low-level grizzling. Ruth’s arms were aching from the effort of jiggling her up and down.

‘What do you want her for?’

Laird looked amused. ‘What do you think I want her for?’

‘I heard something in Downview.’

‘Prison gossip. A lot of stupid people cooped up together, spinning fantasies to pass the time.’

‘Maybe. But what I heard was that your girls occasionally got pregnant. Instead of terminations, you “encouraged” them to go to term.’

He laughed at the euphemism. ‘They didn’t all need “encouraging”. Not when there was a very significant bonus to be had.’

‘So it’s true? And the babies were sold?’

‘Adopted, is a better word. Only without all that bothersome paperwork. The girls were consulted.’

‘Always?’

‘Almost always,’ he conceded, with a glint in his eye.

R
uth felt dizzy
, the blood roaring in her ears. She shifted her weight, made sure Evie was secure in one hand and grabbed a chair for support.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘If you spot a gap in the market, it’s crazy not to fill it. A lot of wealthy people out there who want to adopt without all the usual rigmarole, the state interference.’

‘Or people who’d been turned down as unsuitable?’

‘Maybe. They seemed like genuine loving parents, mostly. Desperate for a child they could call their own.’ He sniffed. ‘Can’t say I understand it myself, all this “son and heir” stuff. I couldn’t give a toss what happens to a world without me in it. Could you?’

He laughed, boorishly, obscuring any answer she might have given. It startled Evie, who turned towards the source of this noise.

It had startled Ruth, too. Perhaps there was an element of bravado in there, but if that statement held even a kernel of truth, then Laird would have few qualms about disposing of his own son.

Ruth said, ‘But people with lots of money and no scruples can get babies anywhere, can’t they? The world is awash with unwanted children.’

‘Yes, but this clientele tend to want healthy, white, European babies – and western European at that. No one wants Slavs, or gypsy cast-offs. And they can’t pass a brown one off as their own child, can they?’ He winked at her. ‘It’s not a politically correct business, you see.’

‘Loving parents,
mostly
,’ she quoted back at him. ‘So not in all cases?’

His shrug wasn’t quite as insouciant this time. ‘I make it a rule not to enquire too closely about the purposes of the adoption. I mean, they could always lie, if they were planning something unpleasant …’

‘And Renshaw was the doctor who helped with this operation?’

‘Until he retired. Then he got greedy, and he ended up with something he shouldn’t have.’ He regarded her thoughtfully. ‘And now I’m wondering how much you could tell me about that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Well. Foster and Bridge are going to make sure.’

‘I don’t know anything. If I did, I’d use it as leverage.’

‘True.’ He sat back in the chair, raising the gun and taking aim at her mid-section. ‘Put the baby on the table here, and then we can talk about Benjamin.’

I
t was
a shock just to hear his name spoken aloud.
Spoken by his father
, Ruth had to remind herself, as sickening as that was to acknowledge.

She obeyed quickly, before the guilt could prompt a rethink. The metal surface must have been cold. Evie wailed as she was set down, and Ruth shuddered with self-loathing. For betraying Harry and his wife like this, she ought to be shot on the spot.

‘Move back.’ Laird jabbed the gun and she retreated, aware that she had just surrendered her one and only bargaining chip.

She reminded herself that it would have been obscene to use Evie in that way. The likely outcome would have seen Laird kill them both. This, surely, was the least bad option.

All Ruth could do now was hope for a miracle.

T
hey were only
a few minutes away when Alice noticed how tense Harry had become. At first she put it down to nerves; then she saw the way he was checking the mirror. She glanced at the wing mirror and saw a sleek black saloon, possibly a Mercedes.

‘Are we being followed?’

‘Maybe. He pulled out of a turning just now.’ Harry slowed from fifty to forty. The Mercedes gained on them a little, but not as much as it should have done.

‘Can you see who’s inside?’

Harry squinted hard at the mirror, then sighed. ‘I think it’s Warley.’

‘The fake detective?’ Alice felt her heart thumping: the onset of panic. ‘Do you think he was lying in wait for us?’

‘For Ruth, I expect. Hopefully that means she got past him.’

Alice felt there were quite a few optimistic assumptions in that statement, but she chose not to say so.

‘What are we going to do?’

Harry was examining the road ahead. It was a single carriageway on level ground, with trees and dense vegetation on both sides. Very little traffic.

‘This is risky,’ he muttered, ‘but worth a try.’

W
ith a warning to
hold on tight, Harry floored the accelerator. The Range Rover lurched forward and Alice cried out, grabbing the edge of her seat.

He was pushing the car up to seventy and beyond as they reached a shallow bend. Turning into it, he spotted a slight break in the tree line on the left-hand side, just before the end of the next straight section.

‘I’m going to pull in. When I do, dive out and hide in the trees.’

As they got closer he saw it wasn’t a proper lay-by, as he’d been hoping, but a narrow strip of earth and gravel, bordered by a steep wooded slope. Not much margin for error.

Despite that, he didn’t brake till the last possible second. The Mercedes was momentarily lost from view behind him when Harry slewed off the road, still travelling at thirty or more as they bumped and skidded over the rutted surface. He jammed on the brakes, and the rapid deceleration threw him against the steering wheel. Beside him, Alice was clinging to the seatbelt with both hands, her knuckles white.

The instant they were stationary Harry turned off the engine and removed the keys, undid his seatbelt and slipped out of the car in one easy motion. Alice was quicker: with the trees on her side she needed only a couple of steps to be hidden from the road.

Harry ran round the front of the car and glimpsed the Mercedes coming towards him as he darted out of sight. His impression was that Warley was peering over the wheel, confused by the sudden manoeuvre.

He leapt off the edge of the flat ground and slithered down the slope until he saw Alice, crouching fearfully behind a tree.

‘What are we doing, Harry?’

He put a finger to his lips, listening for the Mercedes even as he began scanning the ground.

‘Help me find something.’

H
e was like a man possessed
. Alice still had no idea what he planned to do – though perhaps, she thought, it was better not to know.

The Mercedes was braking hard, tyres squealing as it overshot the lay-by, screeched to a halt and rapidly reversed on to the rough ground behind their Range Rover. Any moment now the driver would be coming after them, and Harry was still kicking frantically through the leaves, explaining nothing.

‘Find what?’

‘A heavy stick, or— ah!’ He scrabbled in the dirt and lifted a jagged lump of rock, the size of a cricket ball.

He started to climb back up. The driver was out of the Mercedes now; they heard the clunk of his door closing.

‘Harry, no …’ she whispered, but he shook his head.

‘We don’t have a choice.’

H
arry moved slowly
, careful not to make any noise. He was helped by the slow, rumbling approach of a lorry. He felt the vibration of its wheels through the ground, and by the time it had passed his head was almost level with the lay-by.

The Mercedes had parked just behind the Range Rover. Warley was making a slow circuit of the vehicle. He paused at the driver’s door, then moved round to the passenger side. Now he was less than two feet away.

As Warley peered into the car, Harry stepped up from the slope and brought the rock down on the back of his head. It was only as the man crumpled to the ground that Harry realised how easily he’d acted – without the slightest sense of remorse.

He called to Alice, then checked Warley for a pulse. The man was still alive, bleeding from a gash on his scalp. Alice joined him, briefly resting her hand on Harry’s shoulder.

‘I can’t believe you did that.’

‘Neither can I, actually.’

With her help, he dragged Warley along to the Mercedes, stopping once to crouch out of sight as a couple of cars drove past. Then Harry retrieved the keys from the ignition and opened the boot. Lifting the unconscious body proved to be a struggle; made worse when Warley began to stir. In desperation, they shoved him in and slammed the boot shut.

Harry locked the car and threw the keys into the undergrowth. He held Alice close for a second.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You know I couldn’t do this without you?’

‘I think you could,’ Alice said, and her voice held an uneasy mix of admiration and concern.

Back in the Range Rover, they checked the map and realised they must have gone past the property. Harry did a swift U-turn and drove back, Alice craning forward to see the turning that would now be on the right-hand side of the road.

Before they noticed the driveway, they saw the car screaming towards them. Another Mercedes.

Harry slowed, tensing as he waited for the car to rush past them. But the Mercedes was also braking; without indicating it veered on to the wrong side of the road, then took a sharp left into an opening obscured by trees and a bank of grass. Harry spotted two men inside the car.

Alice gasped. ‘That driver was at Renshaw’s. I think he’s the one from the other night, with the knife.’

‘I guess this is the place, then,’ Harry said, and he turned across the road, following the other car on to the driveway.