The Lost Guide to Life and Love (29 page)

I tried to remember how far it was to the farm. No more than a mile, I reckoned. If I was on the right track. Twenty minutes. Yes, twenty minutes on a nice flat path with trainers and in daylight. Not in strappy shoes in fog with only a dim orange glow. Ow! My foot turned over. Pain shot through my ankle. Maybe I should try walking without my shoes. But it was so cold, the stones so sharp and wet. I limped carefully on, glad of Clayton’s jacket. But the skirt of the T-shirt dress was now damp with the fog and clung to my legs and their thin tights, now ripped to shreds. I couldn’t stop shivering.

But I just had to keep going. There was nothing else to do. Every few steps got me closer. If I was going in the right direction.

A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Arghh. My heel caught in something and I crashed to the ground. Pain jarred through my wrist and up through my shoulder. I sat there for a moment, feeling utterly defeated. A sheep bleated and made my heart race. Its eyes glinted yellow. I was surrounded by these glints of evil yellow light. I gasped and struggled to my feet again, abandoned my shoes, clutched the pumpkin and carried on.

By now I couldn’t feel my feet. They were like bricks on the ends of my legs. Solid, heavy, frozen and very difficult to move. Pain shot through my ankles and into my legs. I felt curiously light-headed, remote from it all. I almost hypnotised myself by counting. A mile was around 1,500 metres, wasn’t it? And I was taking about three steps to a metre, so that was 4,500 steps. I counted backwards. It was harder; it took concentration. I found I was stuck on 2,378 and couldn’t think what came next. But while I worked it out, there were a few more steps made.

I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I seemed to have spent my whole life slipping and tripping through the fog on this apology for a path, but now there seemed to be something up ahead. I stopped trying to work out what came after 2,378. 2,278? 2,780? Too difficult. A cluster of shapes loomed out, darker than the fog around them. Buildings? Then a small light spread a dim glow on the surface of the fog. Then there was a questioning bark from a dog, followed by another. Suddenly there were dogs going mad. It was a house. Definitely a house. Lights went on somewhere in the fog. A window inched open. My heart lifted, I could have sung with happiness.

‘Anyone there?’ I heard. Even muffled in the fog, I recognised it. It was Guy’s voice.

‘Help!’ I yelled as I stumbled towards the door. ‘Please help!’

The door opened and, still clutching the last witch’s hat and the plastic pumpkin, I collapsed into the Aldersons’ back kitchen. For one hysterical moment I wanted to shout ‘Trick or treat!’ but then managed, ‘Home, I’m home.’

Kate and Guy scooped me up and, amazingly, made sense of my burblings. Within seconds, Tom and Guy were out with the quad bike and the Land Rover and torches. Kate loaded them up with blankets and rang 999. I could hear her voice, calm and precise, giving directions, telling them what had happened. How had she managed to translate my rambling gibberish into something so sharp and clear?

She was wrapping me in blankets and lifting me onto a sofa. She coaxed the fire back into life and brought me something hot to drink. I was still shivering. Even though I was warm, I couldn’t stop. Now my feet had thawed, the pain was excruciating. Kate held the cup to my lips. Suddenly I hadn’t the strength to hold it. Ruth and Zak came down and were given instructions to keep the fire blazing and to make sure I was comfortable, while Kate got dressed and waited for the paramedics and the fire crews to arrive. And she went with them along the dale to find Sandro and Becca.

I’d done it. I’d made it. Help was coming. It was all other people’s responsibility now. As I gazed at the very real flames now licking up from the hearth, and as I began to feel the first inkling of their warmth in my shivering body, I gave up and slipped gratefully into a state between semiconsciousness and sleep.

Later, in the ambulance, as we headed down the dale to the hospital, I heard a lot of cars whizz past in the opposite direction.

‘Police,’ murmured one of the paramedics to his companion, ‘and lots of them too. Wonder where they’re going at this time of night? Something’s up.’

Suddenly, we heard a strange noise, a huge bang, an
explosion, followed by another. Groggily, as I lay on the stretcher, I looked through the ambulance windows and I could see in the far distance a bright glow exploding through the blanket of fog and colouring the whole night sky a vivid, burning red, as though the world was on fire; as though the world was ending.

Simeon Maynard was dead. He had died as dramatically as he had lived, in an explosion that had lit up the night sky for miles around. The police racing up the dale were on their way to Ravensike to arrest him on a long list of charges including tax evasion, fraud and money laundering. But he and one of his henchmen had grabbed as much cash and as many of their papers as they could and tried to flee in the helicopter. Witnesses said that as soon as it took off it was swallowed up in the fog. Within seconds there’d been a huge bang. The helicopter had hit power lines and then crashed into the fellside, the resulting flames visible for miles even through the fog. That was the red glow I had seen from the ambulance. They reckoned Maynard had nearly half a million pounds in cash in the helicopter with him. For weeks afterwards, walkers would find scorched fragments of twenty-pound notes fluttering on thorn bushes.

Jake had been right all along about him and his dodgy empire and now his research paid off. His background stories filled the newspapers and it made his name. Flick presented a TV documentary, hastily brought forward to a prime-time spot. That was based on Jake’s research too. She did well. They did well.

They’d also managed to speak to people who’d been at
that party. But here they had to be more circumspect. The police might have been after Maynard and had the effects of a helicopter crash to deal with, but they still found time to arrest a couple of footballers and their girlfriends on drug charges. There was also an allegation of rape. I wondered uneasily about the giggling girl being led up the stairs by two men.

Becca and I had plenty of time to read about it as we shared a hospital room for the next week. Becca had a broken arm, a broken shoulder and various other sprains, bruises, wrecked muscles and, to top it off, pneumonia. To my surprise I found that I had escaped with a badly sprained wrist, two sprained ankles, a lot of torn ligaments, numerous cuts, bruises and gashes. And pneumonia.

‘Next time you take a midnight hike, please don’t do it in bare feet,’ said the nurse as she did the dressings. ‘You were very brave, but also very stupid and extremely lucky.’ I winced and nodded and dutifully swallowed the tablets she was now passing to me. I felt as if an elephant was standing on my chest as a pony kicked me between the shoulders. Every breath was a massive effort.

‘I’ve put your clothes in the cupboard. Well, what’s left of them. The dress looks pretty well ruined, but the silk jacket might be all right. Just as well you had that leather jacket or you might not be here at all now.’

I wheezed gratefully.

Then she bent her head down close to mine. ‘And I’ve wrapped that necklace in a paper towel and put it in the pocket of the leather jacket. Make sure you get someone to take it home for you as soon as you can, or it will vanish.’

‘Yes, I will, thank you,’ I wheezed again, and tried to find a position in which I could breathe.

Sandro had a broken arm, severe concussion, but no pneumonia, and had been wheeled into our room for a few
moments before the club had flown him down to London. It had all been very emotional and incoherent as the three of us were in no state for anything at that stage. He was now in a swish private hospital, was doing all right, but wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry.

As for Clayton…there was no word. In all the reports of the goings-on at Ravensike Lodge, the only mention said that leading goal-scorers Jojo François and Clayton Silver had been at the party but had left early and long before the police had arrived.

I felt curiously detached from it all. Whether that was the disappointment of finding out that Clayton wasn’t the man I had thought that he was, or whether it was because of the pneumonia or the drugs, I don’t know. All I knew was that I just wanted to be able to get back to some sort of normality.

Kate was brilliant. She had come down to the hospital with me in the ambulance and had the presence of mind to bring some clothes and toiletries with her. She had stayed with me until all the tests had been done, and then gone back up the dale, no doubt done a day’s work, cooked a meal for the family, so I could hardly expect her to drive the forty miles back down to the hospital again in the evening.

Becca’s mum and dad were here now. They thanked me profusely, tearfully, for my efforts in saving Becca. They had brought me some flowers, some apple juice, some chocolates. I lay back on the bed and thanked them in return. And then they, understandably, concentrated on Becca, hugging her, helping her, making a fuss of her.

It was quite irrational, I know, but I felt out of it. Alone. And I couldn’t even leave the room and leave them to it as I just didn’t have the energy and my feet were like puffballs.

So I thought I was dreaming when I heard my mum’s voice. But suddenly there she was, leaning on a walking stick and Bill, abandoning them both to swoop down and hug me hard.

‘My darling girl!’ she said. ‘My lovely bold brave girl!’

Kate had called them and they had come straight up. Their only delay had been in hiring a car roomy enough for Mum and her plastered leg.

‘We just wanted to get to you as soon as possible, to make sure you were all right,’ said my mother in between hugs.

We? We?
My mother never thought in
we
terms. A little bit of my mind noticed this with some satisfaction as I proceeded—with what breath I had—to tell them all that had happened. As my mother leant forward, anxiously, holding my hand—the one that wasn’t sprained—and peering at me intently, Bill looked down at her, indulgently. Something had changed; something had shifted between them.

Mum was talking to me fiercely. ‘That was an amazing thing you did,’ she was saying, ‘brave and determined. I am so proud of you. So very proud of you. And I’m just so glad you’re safe.’ She was crying and smiling at the same time. I’d never seen her so emotional. Everything was all so unreal.

They were introduced to Becca and her parents. There was much discussion of their daughters and the bad luck of the accident and the good luck of the rescue and my presence of mind etc, etc, etc. And then, just as it seemed as if everyone was going to start crying all over again, Becca’s mum said to my mum, ‘You’re wearing one of our Becca’s scarves!’

‘Oh yes!’ said Mum to Becca, ‘are you the girl who made it? I love it, love it. In fact, I wear it nearly all the time. I’ve never had a scarf like it.’

Becca’s parents beamed proudly and my mum smiled happily in return. Then a nurse came in and said, tactfully but firmly, that it was long past visiting time.

‘Kate invited us to stay with her, but it’s such a long drive, we’re booked into a hotel around here,’ Mum was saying. ‘But we hope to see her before we go back.’

That
we
again. And when the time came for them to go, Mum actually allowed Bill to help her as she manoeuvred up out of the chair.

‘We’ll be back in the morning,’ said Mum, leaning forward on Bill’s arm to kiss me goodbye. Bill winked. And I drifted off to sleep, feeling that the world was becoming very strange.

The police came to see us the next day. Two lots. The first, in uniform, wanted to know about the car crash. We explained about the fog and about how Sandro hadn’t known the road. The younger policeman nodded. He knew that road well. Easy to get it wrong, especially in the fog, especially when you didn’t know the road.

‘But Sandro hadn’t been drinking!’ said Becca anxiously.

‘No, miss, we know. The blood tests showed that. Don’t worry. It was clearly an accident.’ He looked at me.

‘You did well, miss. Lucky too. Not a very sensible thing to do when you don’t know the area. Even the best of us could get lost in the fog up there.’

‘I had to do something.’

‘Well, you must have had someone looking after you, that’s all I can say. You must have had someone looking after you.’

The second lot of police officers were much harder. A man and a woman in plain clothes. They asked so many questions: Why were we at the party? Who had we gone with? How long had we known them? Did we recognise people there? Did we see Simeon Maynard? Was there anything strange going on?

‘There was a row involving Clayton Silver, wasn’t there? The man you’d gone with.’

‘Yes, but that was nothing much. Just a woman who was very drunk. Clayton didn’t react to it at all and then someone took the woman away. There was nothing to it.’ (Only, I thought, my utter disillusionment and the total collapse of the idea of Clayton Silver that I had foolishly built up in my head.) ‘I’d gone with Clayton, but after the first hour or so, I hadn’t spent much time with him. It just seemed easier to leave when I had the chance of a lift.’

‘Did you see anything of Simeon Maynard at all?’

I told them of that quick glance I’d had of him scrabbling desperately through papers on his desk.

Then we moved on to the matter of the drugs and I could truthfully say I’d seen no footballers doing anything with drugs. As for the rape…I explained I’d seen a girl I didn’t know going up the stairs with two men. Was she unwilling? No. But she was drunk.

And so it went on. Had I known Clayton Silver long? Had I seen him with Maynard? Did I know any of the other people at Shadwell? Did I know Bob Brandon, the manager, Terry Hopkins, the assistant? No, no, no again.

I lay back on the pillows, exhausted. I really had tried to help.

‘Look, I met Clayton Silver and Alessandro when they walked into The Miners’ Arms a few weeks ago. I went to lunch with him, went to a dinner with him in Newcastle and then to the party. It was no big thing. It was just because I happened to be around, that’s all. He’s not my normal sort of boyfriend and I’m quite sure I’m not the type of woman he normally goes out with. It was just a matter of accident and geography.’ Was I trying to convince them or myself ?