Deception (40 page)

Steven chose his moment and clicked Ferguson’s heels with his right foot, tripping him and sending him tumbling to the ground. He quickly stood over him, pretending to be helping him to his feet when in actual fact he had his thumb in a pressure point behind his ear, restricting blood supply to his brain and keeping him on the ground.

‘
It’s his ankle,’ yelled Steven, without looking up. ‘On you go! We’ll catch up.’

Steven kept Ferguson on the ground, hiding his own face while the mob passed by on either side. When it seemed that it was all clear, he risked looking up. The two men from the Castle who had been flanking Ferguson were still standing there waiting for him. One of them recognised Steven immediately as they approached and said, ‘It’s that poncey civil servant bastard! He’s no wi’ us!’

Steven hit him once. It was a blow from his right fist that travelled barely eighteen inches but it caught the man just to the left of the point of his chin and jerked his head sharply up, causing him to lose consciousness and go down like a bag of cement. The other man, he hit twice; once in the solar plexus and once on the back of the neck as he doubled up. Steven left both of them lying in a heap and helped Ferguson to his feet to start frog marching him back to the village.

Ferguson started to protest loudly and Steven halted to spin him round and bring his face up close. ‘Now get this,’ he snarled. ‘I have had just about as much of Bonnie bloody Blackbridge as I can take. Ronald Lane had nothing to do with the death of your son and neither did the crop in his fields. The man who did is now dead so there is nothing you can do about it. Your daughter cares about you enough not to want you ending up spending the rest of your life in prison for killing an innocent man and I like your daughter so I’m helping her. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. You can walk home with me in civilised fashion or I can stick your rabbit gun up your backside and carry you in across my shoulders but going back, you most certainly are! Now, don’t waste my time. You choose!’

Ferguson started walking quietly beside Steven until they reached his home without further incident or comment. Steven was dismayed to find that Eve wasn’t there. He warned Ferguson to stay indoors and ran to his car to set off for Crawhill. He almost ran into Brewer’s car as he turned into Main Street and both men screeched to a halt. Steven got out and ran round to talk to Brewer through his open window. ‘The mob will be at Peat Ridge by now,’ he said. ‘There must be about a hundred of them and rent-a-mob were carrying hold-alls.

‘
Two of my officers are down,’ said Brewer.

‘
I saw it. There was nothing I could do. How many more have you got coming?’

‘
Five pandas.’

‘
Ten unarmed men?’ exclaimed Steven. ‘I suggest you call for several ambulances and the Fire Brigade . . . and maybe the Brigade of Ghurkhas while you’re at it.’

‘
I’ll try talking to them,’ said Brewer.

Steven screwed up his face and said, ‘I won’t tell your insurance company you said that; they’d probably invoke the suicide clause in your policy.’

‘
That bad, huh?’

‘
The only way I’d talk to that crowd would be with an AK47 in my hands.’

‘
I’ll have a look anyway,’ said Brewer. ‘After all, it’s my patch they’re crapping on.’

‘
Be careful as you drive up the hill,’ said Steven. ‘I left a couple of them in the road. If they’re still lying there you could charge them with obstructing the police in the execution of their duty.’

Brewer roared off and Steven got back into his car. As he did so, a police panda car entered Blackbridge with blue light flashing. He waited until it had passed on its way to Peat Ridge before moving off. ‘
Bon chance
,’ he murmured.

Steven found the yard at Crawhill deserted when he drove in through the open gates. He checked the gun in his holster and decided on a head-on approach. He went up to the door of the farmhouse and knocked hard on it. There was no response. The only sound he could hear was coming from the mob over at Peat Ridge. As he listened at the door he heard a gun shot in the distance and the sound of a small explosion. The real trouble had started,

‘
Eve! Trish!’ he called up at the windows of the house. ‘Are you in there?’

The house seemed deserted. He tried the door and found it locked. Where the hell were they? If they weren’t at Eve’s house and they weren’t here, where else could they possibly be? The possibility that they were being held prisoner by Childs and Leadbetter presented itself. Steven went round to the back of the house and broke a pane of glass in order to release the catch on the back door. He entered and moved cautiously through the ground floor rooms with his gun held at the ready. He then moved upstairs and carried out a similar search while the sounds of explosions from Peat Ridge emphasised the silence here at Crawhill. The house was empty.

Steven clattered back downstairs and left by the front door to run quickly round the sheds, searching for signs of life. He found nothing and that just left the barn itself. Could Eve and Trish be in it? A shiver ran up his spine as he acknowledged that Trish knew too much for Childs and Leadbetter to feel comfortable about her and so – whether they knew it or not – did Eve. It might be convenient for them to have the two women die in a tragic fire. He moved cautiously towards the tall doors, keeping an eye on the ground for any signs of trip wires or infra red devices, and found them – not unexpectedly – locked. He didn’t want to use his gun and have the sound of the shot ring out across the farm, so he ran back to one of the sheds and returned with a hammer. Two blows and the lock parted company with the door.

As he swung back one half of the door, it was suddenly framed by a huge sheet of orange flame coming from Peat Ridge and the air was filled with the smell of petrol. The oilseed rape was on fire. Steven pushed the door to again for a moment in order to look at the sky. He was in time to see through the trees the roof of Peat Ridge farmhouse erupting in sheets of flame. ‘Sweet Jesus,’ he murmured as billows of black smoke from the fields started to drift in the breeze towards Crawhill.

TWENTY THREE

The barn was full of unlabelled plastic sacks, stacked in rows and piled up to the roof. He opened one with his pocket-knife and took out a handful of the granular material inside to examine it in his palm. Modern industrial technology could make the most horrific of substances appear innocuous. This was slaughtered cow, reduced to dried pellets by a rendering plant. He was about to leave again when he thought he heard something and turned round. ‘Eve?’ he called out. ‘Trish? Are you there?’

He thought he heard a muffled cry coming from - he knew not where. There did not seem to be any room for anyone to hide among the tightly packet rows. He called out and got a faint response again. Puzzled, he started moving the sacks nearest him, shifting them behind him so that he could make inroads into the mountain. The muffled cries got louder so he worked harder. He could now see that a narrow tunnel had been created through the bottom rows of the sacks. He got down on the floor of the barn and started to wriggle up through it.

He found Trish and Eve tied up and gagged and lying huddled together in fright in a tiny confined island of space among the sacks. The lack of air and the heavy smell made Steven himself feel nauseous as he pulled off the tape stuck across their mouths and struggled to undo their bonds. Both women tried to take deep breaths and immediately started to cough as the dust got to their lungs.

‘
Childs and Leadbetter?’ Steven asked.

‘
Eve gasped a brief confirmation as she continued to fight for breath. She turned and tried to help Trish back out along the tunnel with Steven reversing out first. There wasn’t much light coming in through the open door but Steven could see that Eve’s hair was wet with sweat and she was covered in the dust from the sacks. When they finally reached the door of the barn they immediately became aware of the heat coming from the fire at Peat Ridge. The air was already thick with smoke.

‘
Is Dad over there?’ Eve asked.

‘
He’s at home,’ said Steven.

Eve put her hand on Steven’s shoulder and squeezed it. She was saying thank you when a bullet embedded itself in the barn door.

‘
Get down!’ yelled Steven.

Two more bullets came near in quick succession and Steven and the women, were forced to retreat into the barn again. Steven remained near the door, lying flat on the ground with his gun held in both hands, ready for any target that should present itself. He rolled quickly over to his right to try to get a better view and another bullet slammed into the wood, less than a foot from his head. He was well and truly pinned down.

He could now see that the shots were coming from two directions. This meant that he and the women couldn’t even think about making a run for it. They would be cut down in the crossfire before they had covered ten metres. The best he could force from the situation was a stalemate. As long as he had his gun, Childs and Leadbetter couldn’t afford to rush him. He pulled out his mobile phone and punched in Brewer’s number. There was no response. There was no signal in the barn. They were on their own.

Three minutes passed without a shot being fired so Steven decided it was time to check on the opposition’s presence. He rolled over three times in quick succession to the other side of the door opening and a bullet thudded into the door frame, sending splinters up into the air and telling him what he wanted to know. His new vantage point however, gave him sight of a small explosion which resulted in several trees catching fire about a hundred metres away. This was significant because the trees were on Crawhill Farm. The ‘spread’ of the fire had started.

Steven moved back a little: the last bullet had come dangerously close. It had missed him but he had felt it pass close to his head. He became aware of a diesel engine starting up and being revved hard. It sounded very near and his pulse rate rose as he realised that this could be a trump card for the opposition. His gun would be of little use against the bulldozer, he’d noticed in the yard. It was now coming towards them. He moved back a little and signalled that the women move as far back as they could. They backed into the tunnel in the sacks because there was nowhere else to go.

The yellow monster lumbered into view, its tracks churning up the earth as Steven looked desperately for an angle to get off a shot at its driver. It was impossible. The shovel of the vehicle was being held at a height that obscured the driver from view. Steven was expecting the vehicle to come straight into the barn and for Childs and Leadbetter to alight with guns blazing but it didn’t happen that way. Instead it halted outside the front doors and a few moments later he saw the barn doors start to close. He loosed off a shot at them but it was no more than a gesture. The wood was too thick to allow a bullet from a hand gun to penetrate.

The barn doors closed completely and the bulldozer outside revved up before moving in to nudge up against them. The engine died and Steven faced the fact that he and the women were now trapped inside. Childs and Leadbetter were back to pursuing their original plan. The barn was going to go up in flames, but now with three people inside instead of just Trish Rafferty. It would all be just a tragic accident, resulting from the riot at Peat Ridge.

There was no chance of getting out through the front door so Steven searched desperately for other options. He turned to Trish and asked, ‘You said that Tom didn’t repair this barn as he’d agreed to do, what’s wrong with it? Where are the weak spots?’

Trish looked as if she was living a nightmare, as indeed she was. ‘It was rotten along the bottom of the back wall,’ she said. ‘But … they fixed it when they found out that Tom hadn’t.’

Steven’s hopes were dashed.

‘
After I told them what had been going on, the authorities inspected it and then sent men to stop the rats getting in,’ said Trish. ‘We’re going to die, aren’t we?’

Steven was reluctant to voice the affirmative that he felt. ‘No we’re not,’ he said, not entirely convincing himself, let alone Trish. ‘Did they completely renovate the barn?’ he asked.

‘
No, they just plugged the gaps in the back wall.’

‘
So maybe there’s a weakness higher up,’ said Steven, thinking out loud. He started to fight his way up through the mountain of sacks by throwing them one at a time behind him where he asked Trish and Eve to move them out of the way. By the time he had reached the narrow gap between the top of the sacks and the apex of the barn roof, he was finding the heat almost unbearable and the air foul but he was now committed to this course of action. There wasn’t going to be time to think of another one.

He turned and shouted back to the women that he was going to try to reach the back wall by crawling along the narrow tunnel formed by the ridge of the roof.

‘
Be careful!’ yelled Eve before he started his wriggle along the top of the sack pile. The space was so narrow that he had to keep his arms stretched out in front of him all the time: there was no room to withdraw them.

There came a point when the space between the sacks and the roof became so narrow that he had to force himself through it, grazing his stomach on the sack stitching and raking his back along the roof ridge beam. But the pain was secondary to the knowledge that it would now be impossible to turn back. There was just no room to turn round and he couldn’t force himself backwards with the same strength as he could forwards. He was now committed to getting out . . . or dying in the attempt. There would be no in-between.