First Horseman, The (12 page)

She looked at the door again. She had to go through it.

Renton looked up from his screen. Funny, he thought. I left the door open. He got up and went to it. He clasped the handle and turned it slowly, listening.

Kate stood by the wall where the door would swing open, covering her. It moved slowly. Whoever was on the other side, undoubtedly Renton, was opening it carefully because they expected someone to be there. She clasped the scalpel behind her back and pressed herself against the wall, trembling, her hands clammy with sweat.

A head appeared. Renton’s.

If she had been in any doubt as to the purpose of that room, her glimpse of Renton’s face and the wild excitement in his eye dispelled it.

The door slammed.

If only she had opened it herself and run past him, she would have had a chance.

Kate heard the key rattle in the lock. She was trapped.

Renton ran back to his desk. Well, well, he thought. The bird had flown straight into his trap. No need to hold the chloroform to her face and drag her into the room. She was waiting for him. He pulled a doctor’s bag out from under his desk and took out the cloth and bottle. Chloroform was such a wonderful weapon: it allowed for a struggle but not enough of one to cause much trouble. People always underestimated his strength, one of his many little secrets.

He soaked the cloth with chloroform. In a few minutes she would be his, and his alone, for ever.

She stood in the middle of the room dialling 999.

No signal. No signal.

She heard the key in the lock. She dropped her handbag to the floor and stuffed her phone into it. She held the scalpel behind her back. This is your last chance to be strong, she thought, your very last chance. This is it. This is the only moment that counts. This is the one time in your life where you need to be big and bad and tough and nasty, like all those horrible people who get whatever they want by being vile and wicked. She was hopping from one foot to the other. You have to win. You can’t let him get you. The door was opening.

Renton flung it wide. ‘You’re early,’ he said, ‘but that’s OK.’ He stepped in.

She saw the folded cloth in his hand and caught a whiff of something chemical, like ether.

Renton really was there to do something terrible to her. He was going to do what she had been scared even to imagine.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’ He closed the door behind him. ‘Don’t be frightened, take my hand.’ He extended it as if to shake hers.

Why should I? So you can pull me towards you and cover my face with that cloth? Do you think I’m stupid?

‘Come on, let me lead you out of here.’

You’re left-handed, she thought, just like me.

He looked so very friendly now, almost kindly. He inched his right hand forward. ‘Don’t be afraid. I know you know that you aren’t meant to be in here. Let’s go outside.’

A shadow flickered over his face as he moved, his friendly face suddenly demonic. His eyes flashed.

She stood a little taller and turned a little from the door. He mirrored her.

‘Come on now. Take my hand and let’s get going.’ He threw a glance at her hidden left hand.

She saw him cast his eye to the table, but she blocked his view. ‘OK,’ she said hesitantly, holding out her right hand.

He grabbed it – and she lunged at him, the scalpel disappearing into his belly. He cried out and let go of her hand. His knees buckled and he fell.

She bent down, grabbed her bag and leapt for the door. She swung it open and slammed it behind her. Then she whirled around: there was a key in the door. She turned it in the lock and took it out of the key hole as Renton groaned. There was blood on her left hand. She let out a little cry.

‘You’re in trouble now,’ she heard Renton roar. ‘Better come back in and finish me off because I’m going straight to the police. You’re an animal-rights terrorist, and you’ve tried to kill a simple researcher for your twisted politics.’ He gave a crazy giggle.

Then she heard him pick himself up and walk heavily to the table. ‘Amazing what a one-inch blade can’t do. There’s not even much blood.’ Something fell to the floor with a clatter. She started. It had sounded like a bundle of keys. He might have a key to the door. She turned and ran.

Renton peeled off his lab coat, opened his shirt and stuck a plaster on the cut. Then he took the keys from his lab coat and went to the door, unlocked it and walked out stiffly. He sat down carefully on his chair and opened his screens. There she was, running up the stairs and out of the building. She was heading to the car park. He got up and threw on his jacket.

He took out his phone and called her, watching her running away till she stopped, pulled out her phone and looked at it. She might guess it was him.

‘You,’ she said, before he had spoken.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘me. You have twenty minutes before every policeman in Cambridgeshire is looking for you. Better run, rabbit, run.’

‘I’m going straight to the police.’

‘And what will you tell them? There’s nothing to see here but lab equipment, silly girl. Nothing but my stab wound against your crazy story.’

He watched her shoulders sag in the CCTV shot. ‘Run, rabbit, run,’ he shouted, into the microphone. She would flee and he would follow and, if circumstances allowed, he would strike.

She was holding something. A worm of anxiety slithered through him and he glanced back to his workspace. She had the specimens. He disconnected the call and let out a howl of rage.

She looked at the phone. He’d ended the call. He might be coming after her right now. She sprinted for her car.

Renton sat uncomfortably in the driving seat of Cardini’s silver Mercedes. He was hot and in pain. He had forced himself, with great discomfort, to get upstairs and be in place to follow the girl. Pain was a fitting punishment for letting her get away. The place just below his ribs where the tiny blade had penetrated was burning. It was little more than a flesh wound, he calculated. She hadn’t twisted the blade, just stabbed with it. It was hardly a wound at all.

He would treat it himself later, but first he had to discover where she would run to. He watched her on his android phone as she drove out of the car park, taking a route that, while out of site of the campus cameras, would bring her past the entrance to the lab. It was the fastest route to the rest of the world that she could take. Going left would have been smarter – it would have been harder for him to find and catch the little blue Ford Focus. Instead she was going to drive straight past him and he would follow her wherever she went.

The blue Focus flicked by, followed by a white van. Renton pulled out behind it and fell back a little so he could see the faintest glimpse of the girl’s car.

Kate was shaking as she drove, her arms numb, her grip feeble as if her hands might fall off the steering-wheel. She was sobbing to herself in frustration.

‘Call the police, call the police,’ she kept saying to herself. She had stabbed Renton, that much was obvious. What would he do? Go to the police? Surely a sicko like him wouldn’t do that. She started to rummage in her bag for her phone. Her fingers caught a sharp piece of card. Jim’s. Her eye glimpsed something in the wing-mirror. There it was again – a flash of silver behind the white van that was following her.

Was it Renton?

She went back to rummaging in her bag. ‘Phone, please,’ she begged, ‘please.’ She shook the bag sharply and suddenly her phone was in her hand.

Call the police, said the voice in her head, for the umpteenth time.

What if he wasn’t following her? Then the police would think they were dealing with a mad woman saying she was being followed by a man she had stabbed, with his stolen property in her footwell.

‘Why did you take that?’ she muttered. Because I thought it would have stuff in it that would prove Renton was planning to do horrible things to me. It was an evil-looking box and whatever was inside it was evil too. It was black, functional and secure: it looked like it was meant to hold something nasty. But it was light: perhaps he’d meant to put something in it, something of hers. She shuddered.

She picked Jim’s card up and read the address. Jim was a rich guy: he would have lawyers, he would know people: he would help her, she knew he would – she prayed he would. ‘Oh, God,’ she moaned. Now she was praying for help from a stranger who wasn’t even in the country.

She punched Jim’s address into her beaten-up old GPS. It said she could be there in thirty-seven minutes. What harm could another thirty-seven minutes do?

Stafford was standing in front of the main door at the top of the steps as the Ford Focus came to a halt. There was a young woman in the driving seat, a local, perhaps, who had come to enquire about a fundraiser or the use of a field for some event or other.

She got out and looked up at him. He cut an imposing figure, he knew, in his grey striped trousers and black jacket. She smiled and walked up the steps to meet him. ‘Good day,’ he said. She looked extremely nervous. His right eyebrow rose. She’s not nervous, he thought. She’s terrified. ‘How may I help you?’ he said, smiling kindly.

‘Jim,’ she said. ‘Jim said I could come and stay whenever I liked, so here I am.’

‘I’m afraid—’ began Stafford.

‘That Jim’s gone away to America.’ She nodded vigorously. ‘I know, but he asked me to come anyway.’ She looked quickly over her shoulder.

Stafford followed her gaze up the drive, then turned back to her. There was a desperate determination in the girl’s eyes. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Let me fetch your bags.’ He made to go down.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I didn’t bring any.’

Stafford stood back to attention. ‘Very good. Will they be following?’

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘I have to speak to Jim, to work out what I’m doing.’

Stafford watched her face twitch involuntarily. She was in shock. ‘Please come in,’ he said. ‘Allow me.’ He tried to take the small black box in her left hand.

She smiled. ‘I’m fine,’ she said, and appeared to sag in relief.

He held the door open and she walked into the mansion’s hall. The floor creaked as she crossed it and their footsteps echoed.

She climbed the ancient wooden staircase behind Stafford to the gallery, then followed him along a corridor. The carpet was ragged and worn and ran irregularly down the passage, whose polished boards groaned with every step. The pictures on the walls were portraits of well-painted but ugly noblemen and women set against beautifully painted but contrived country scenes. The smell of polish filled her senses. The house was as perfect as a museum.

Stafford opened two large doors and ushered her into a giant bedroom filled with ancient furniture, a huge bed set against the far wall. Four windows looked out on to the parkland beyond.

‘Please feel free to wander about,’ said Stafford, ‘but be careful not to disturb anything in the master’s study, especially near his computers.’ He held out a small wooden block with a button set in the middle of its length. ‘If you need anything, press this and I will be on hand.’

She took it. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

Stafford stood at the edge of the ha-ha, the light gently fading. In another hour it would be dark. He watched Lady Arabella riding around the cornfield towards him. Two wood pigeons swooped from above the tree to his left – he could have snapped his shotgun breech closed and despatched them. However, as he imagined they knew, he preferred not to shoot. He watched them fly off. He was a little disappointed, but meeting Lady A as she passed on her daily patrol would more than make up for it.

‘Good evening, my lady,’ he greeted her. Her long chestnut hair was flared out behind her; no riding helmet today.

‘Good evening, Stafford,’ she said, smiling down at him. She rubbed the horse’s neck. ‘You seem to have someone parked at the bottom of your drive looking rather shifty,’ she added, her voice high and clear. ‘Mercedes, about thirty metres to the right of the gatehouse. Unsavoury, if you ask me.’

‘Thank you, m’ lady,’ said Stafford. ‘I’ll attend to it right away.’

She smiled at him, as she had when their paths had first crossed where Jim’s grounds met her family’s estate. Somehow he would make a point of being in the same places at the same times and she appeared to do likewise. Their meetings had become a pleasant unofficial appointment in the day.

There was something fascinating about the butler, something unusual, she thought. Of course, there was no such thing as a butler any more. It was a fiction, a reconstruction of a relic, an invention worthy of a Disney movie. A butler, if you ever met one, was a costumed manager, as much a servant as any vice president of marketing she might meet socially. Stafford was clearly a gentleman, and the retainer of allegedly the richest young bachelor in Europe. She fancied getting a look at his boss: Stafford was clearly gatekeeper to him and a very charming one at that.

She was happy to flirt a bit with the old man. If she looked at him through narrowed eyes, she could see him as he had been in his prime, beneath the older, heavier form. Beneath his servile exterior, she sensed the strength and character of her late father; a man guided by principles as archaic as the estate she rode around.

‘I hope to see you tomorrow,’ said Stafford, raising his green checked cap.

She smiled in acknowledgement as the horse walked on.

Stafford’s shadow passed across the driver’s window of the Mercedes and he rapped on the glass. The man inside sat up with a jolt and lowered the window. His eyes were fixed on the broken shotgun under the butler’s arm.

‘What are you doing there?’ asked Stafford, imperiously. The car was parked so that its occupant could observe the house’s gates. The terrified young girl and this vehicle were linked, he felt sure. Something was afoot, but he had no idea what it was. Without doubt Jim would be mixed up with it.

‘Resting,’ said the bearded man, in a friendly but unctuous way that made Stafford bristle.

‘You had better move along,’ he said.

The man started his engine.

Stafford took this as conclusive evidence that he was up to no good. An innocent person would have shown shock or enquired as to why he had to move off a public highway.