Gone to Ground (23 page)

Helen Walker, while not exactly sitting up, had recovered sufficiently to be lying on the bed with her head raised, propped up by pillows; the IV line was still attached to the vein at the side of her neck, and she was somewhat hazy from the painkillers she had taken.

Her sister had left at the end of the previous afternoon, promising to return; her parents had stayed until late into the evening and returned at first light. When Will arrived later that morning, they hesitantly took the opportunity to go down to the cafeteria for some breakfast.

"Flowers, Will?" Helen said, her face breaking into a weak grin.

Will glanced down at the mixed bouquet in his hand. "Lorraine's idea. She sends her love."

"You'd never have thought of it otherwise."

"Unlikely."

"Too unmanly."

"By half." He set the flowers down and pulled a chair closer to the bed. Her hand struck him as surprisingly cold.

"How you feeling?"

"Other than like shit?"

"Other than that."

She tried for a smile. "Let's say I'm a way off spring training."

"No 10K this year, then?"

"I doubt I could manage ten metres on my hands and knees." With an effort, she pushed herself almost into a sitting position, then collapsed back down. "I can't even sit up in bed."

"Take it easy," Will said. "Don't force things."

"All right for you to say."

"Push it too hard and you'll end up being here all the longer."

"Yes, Doctor."

Will grinned.

"I just feel so bloody useless," Helen said.

"You probably saved someone's life. Maybe two. Your picture's in all the papers, you know. And on TV.
Look East
, anyway. Regular heroine. Sorry, hero."

"That's all bollocks and you know it."

"Course it is. Be some kind of commendation, though, I'd not be surprised. Chance to shake the Chief Constable's hand. Won't hurt those chances of promotion."

"Fuck off, Will."

He looked at his watch. "Any minute."

"Don't you start," Helen said.

"What do you mean?"

"My dad, he sits there pretending not to be bored, sneaking glances at his watch when he thinks I'm not looking. Mum witters on endlessly, like she thinks if I haven't got her to listen to I'll keel over and die."

"Family, eh?" Will lightly squeezed her hand. "These blokes who attacked you, if you'd remembered anything useful, you'd have said?"

Helen moved her head slowly from side to side. "Like I told Rastrick, it all happened so fast. And it was dark, besides. The two who came at me, they were both white. Youngish. The one with the knife, he could have still been in his teens."

"And the other?"

"Older than that, but not by much. Late twenties maybe?"

"Size?"

"The older one? Your kind of height. Sort of skinny. One of those wool caps on his head."

Will nodded and checked his watch a second time. "Look, I really do have to go." He gave her hand another squeeze. "I'll pop in and see you this evening, okay?"

Helen smiled weakly. "Okay."

"The student from Hong Kong," Will said at the door, "he thinks a couple of the gang might have been taking pictures with their mobile phones."

Helen felt sick inside. "I didn't notice. That doesn't mean it didn't happen."

"I know."

"Thank Lorraine for the flowers."

"Sure." When he switched his own mobile back on outside the hospital, there was a message from the station: Malcolm Rastrick wanted to see him ASAP.

Rastrick was looking inordinately cheerful—for Rastrick. A suggestion of brightness in his gray eyes, pale cheeks still sunken in.

"Ford Escort, wrapped round a lamp post on the Newmarket Road. Not so far from the retail park. Three youths seen running from the scene."

"Descriptions?"

A curt shake of the head. "Still working on it."

"How about the vehicle?"

"Stolen earlier the same day. Park and ride out past the cemetery."

"Anything to tie it in with the attack?"

"Only the time so far. Near as we can pin it down, fifteen, twenty minutes after they scarpered."

"And if they took off on foot after crashing the car...?"

"Gould live local, Barnwell, out by the airport. Alternatively, they could've been heading out somewhere on the Newmarket Road. Newmarket itself."

"Or making for the A14 east."

"Or that."

"No other vehicles reported stolen? Around that time?"

"Not as yet. We're checking."

Will's face set in a frown. "How about the van?"

"One more sighting. A1 North. Just below Grantham. We're pulling in everything else we can get our hands on now."

"Could have been heading practically bloody anywhere." Will said. "Leeds to Scotch bloody Corner. Sheffield. Nottingham."

"No point guessing." Rastrick said. "Let's wait and see."

Back in his office, Will started sifting through paperwork, reading e-mails, prioritizing as best he could. The Stephen Bryan murder was not the only investigation he was nominally responsible for, and now there was the attack on Helen and the two students, which he could have left entirely to Rastrick, though both men knew he never would.

In Helen's absence, Paul Irving, the family liaison officer, had stepped up, and with Nick Moyles pitching in, was doing his best to keep the Bryan enquiry on track. So far, however, they'd had no joy in tracing the man who'd been seen hanging around Bryan's house, nor identifying whoever had left a message on his answer phone. A backtrack into Russell Johnson's past had yielded nothing that led them to believe either that he had been lying in his account of his one-night stand, or involved in any way with Bryan's murder. And still no murder weapon had been found.

Will was still working at his desk when Rastrick appeared in the open doorway, sometime after seven.

"No home to go to?" Rastrick said.

Will looked up wearily. "Not if I don't get back to it soon."

"Women, wives, whatever, you can warn them beforehand what it'll be like, and they'll nod their heads and say they understand, but they don't, not really." He coughed drily into the back of his hand. "None of mine ever did."

"Lorraine's okay," Will said.

"You been married how long? Five years?"

"Somewhere round there."

Rastrick chuckled, a dry rattle in the back of his throat. "Give it time."

"Thanks," Will said. "Thanks a lot."

"Okay," Rastrick said, standing. "I'm off to the pub for a pint or two, likely pick up a curry on the way home, watch the box till I can't keep my eyes open any longer, and then fall into bed. I don't recommend it till you've run out of alternatives."

THE BURNT-OUT VAN WAS FOUND EARLY THE FOLLOWING morning, close to the dismantled railway between Eastwood and Brinsley, ten miles or so from Nottingham city centre. A teacher, out on her morning run, had seen the van from the track leading toward Coneygray Farm, and remembering the appeal on the previous night's news, phoned the local police on her mobile. Within the hour, Rastrick was driving cross-country from Cambridge to supervise operations. That close to the Nottinghamshire-Derbyshire border, early liaison between both forces would be essential.

Officers in protective clothing would conduct a fingertip search of the immediate area, hoping that whoever set light to the van had left some physical evidence behind—a thread of trouser material caught on a tuft of rough grass, a button that had become detached. The recent wet weather made the recovery of any shoe prints relatively easy to photograph, without having recourse to the gelatine or electrostatic lifters used on drier surfaces. Tire tracks would be treated in the same way. Samples of soil and dirt would also be taken, as this could potentially place suspects at the scene.

Only when this process was over would heavy lifting equipment be brought in and the van taken away for thorough forensic examination. Whoever had been responsible for torching it had done the job well—the interior was little more than a charred shell—and it was doubtful if any prints or marks would have survived.

But they were due a break: they could hope.

Nick Moyles caught Will in his office that afternoon, Will doing his best to pull together details of half a dozen other cases he was still nominally supervising.

"You've heard about the van?" Moyles said.

Will nodded.

"Where it was found," Moyles said. "Gould be something in that."

"How so?"

"Year or so back, there was a spate of homophobic attacks in the same area. Eastwood, Kimberley, Heanor. All inside a twelve month. All serious. One bloke especially, got himself badly beaten in a gents' toilet. This lad set him up, sounds like, pretending to be gay. Trousers round the guy's ankles when six or seven of them came barging in. Knives and baseball bats. Near killed him."

"And this was when, you say?"

"Good year back, maybe more. Notts and Derbyshire set up a joint task force, managed to infiltrate the group responsible for a while. Pretty successful, by all accounts. Half a dozen arrests, two or three convictions. Since then, no more attacks as we've heard of."

"Till now, maybe."

"Maybe."

"This task force," Will asked, "it's still operational?"

"I'm not sure. I can talk to Chris Parsons, Notts Hate Grimes, he'd likely know."

"Okay, see if you can't set up a meeting. And be sure to keep Rastrick in the loop, okay?"

"Right," Moyles said. "Understood."

Checking through his messages, Will saw that Lesley Scarman had rung twice since noon. He called her work number and she picked up the phone on the second ring, the buzz of voices audible around her, the sound of a radio presenter deeper into the background.

"Thanks for getting back to me," Lesley said.

"No problem."

"I was ringing about Helen," Lesley said. "Helen Walker. I was wondering how she was?"

"As well as can be expected."

"The last bulletin I heard, she was still in intensive care."

"Not anymore, thank heavens. Out of the woods, by all accounts."

"It sounds as if she was lucky."

"I suppose so," Will said. "In a way." He wondered how being stabbed within an inch or two of your life counted as lucky. But then, if you were comparing it to what had happened to Lesley's brother, lucky is what she was.

"While you're on the phone," Will said, "Howard Prince, we met him. Asked him about the solicitor's letter he had sent to your brother."

"What did he say?"

"Said it was a matter of privacy. Family privacy. His wife, apparently, she's—how did he put it?—fragile. Mentally unstable, I suppose that means. Seems it was her he was trying to protect more than anyone."

"More than himself," Lesley said with a certain scorn.

"What d'you mean?"

A pause. "I don't know."

Will made no response.

"But what he said, you believed him?"

"Yes. Yes, I think we did. No reason not to."

Lesley started to say something, then changed her mind. "Your colleague," she said. "Helen. Give her my best wishes."

"Of course."

Lesley broke the connection before Will could do so himself and, almost immediately, the phone rang again. It was Rastrick.

"Moyles has just been on to me—this meeting out at Notts—all yours and welcome. What with following up that business on the Newmarket Road, never mind witness reports to wade through and the forensics on the van, I've got more than enough to handle. Just keep me informed."

Will assured him that he would.

Earlier that day, even as a flurry of rain had blown fiercely against the police station windows, the sun had come out from behind dark clouds and a rainbow had appeared above the city. Now, as Will stepped out into the early evening, the sun had long gone and the rain had slackened to a drizzle. The hospital was so close that taking the car was a nonsense: besides which, there was never anywhere to park.

He called Lorraine on his mobile as he walked. "Hi. Everything okay?"

"Fine."

"I thought I'd just nip in and see Helen before coming home."

"You should. How was she this morning?"

"Not too bad," Will said. "Is Jake there?"

"Yes. Why?"

"I thought he might be in bed by the time I get back."

"You want to talk to him?"

"Yes, please."

He could hear a brief exchange of voices and then, "Here he is now."

"Hey, Jake," Will said.

"Daddy," his son said, cheerfully.

"What you been up to?"

Walking, collar up, Will listened to a wandering tale of marble paintings and playtime and friends, both real and imaginary.

"Listen, Jake, I'm going to have to go now. Okay?"

Silence.

"You'll probably be in bed by the time I'm home."

Nothing.

"If you're asleep, I'll come in and give you a kiss."

"Give Puppy a kiss."

"All right, I'll give Puppy a kiss as well."

"And Brian." Brian, for some reason, was the name Jake had given to his toy lion.

"Okay, and Brian," Will said. "If Mummy's still there, can you give her back the phone?"

After a few more words with Lorraine, Will slipped his mobile back into his pocket and quickened his stride. The rain was slackening off and the wind was dropping. Driving home later might not be as unpleasant as he'd feared.

Neither of Helen's parents were at her bedside. In their place was a man Will had never seen before. Mid- to late thirties, brown leather jacket, jeans, a full head of fairish hair that rose to a V at the front and fell away a little to one side. His hand was close to Helen's on top of the sheet, not touching. Helen's eyes were closed, and it was impossible to tell if she were sleeping or not.

Will stood, watching through the glass screen, until the man at the bedside turned his head toward him.

No, Will thought, he didn't recognize the face at all.

For some seconds they stared at one another, before the man half rose from the chair and, leaning toward Helen, kissed her softly on the cheek.