The Judas Sheep
Authors: Stuart Pawson
S
TUART
P
AWSON
The tyres of the Rolls-Royce hissed on the wet road as it pulled into the kerb, splashing dirty water against the legs of the old woman on the pavement. She turned and glared at the driver, unimpressed by the noble origins of the cold spray.
‘You sploshed me,’ she remonstrated in a low accent, as he walked round to open the rear passenger door.
Mrs Marina Norris swung her cover-girl legs onto the pavement and stood up. ‘Wait for me, Harold – this won’t take long,’ she told her chauffeur, with no attempt to hide her distaste.
‘He sploshed me,’ said the old lady as Mrs Norris swept by.
Harold watched the wife of his employer trot up the wide stairs and vanish through the revolving door of the
Town & County department store, and wondered if she were wearing tights or stockings today. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said after her retreating figure. ‘Don’t worry about me, ma’am. Presumably your old feller owns the double yellow lines as well as the bleedin’ store.’
‘Young man, you sploshed me,’ the old lady repeated.
Harold glanced at her ham-shaped legs, mottled red down one side through sitting too close to the fire, and flecked with brown down the other, like a thrush’s breast.
‘Sorry, love,’ he told her, as he slid back into the driving seat. In a lifetime starved of apologies it was more than she had expected.
Harold lowered his window and lit a cigarette, holding it outside the car and half-heartedly trying to blow most of the smoke that way. One good thing about this job – there were always plenty of cigs available. Two or three times a week the boss would leave him a carton in the glove box, or a couple of packets with just one cigarette taken. He gazed across at the shop doorway and wondered about Marina Norris.
Every Friday morning he would drive her to Town & County and she would do her rounds, blowing through the store like a February gale through an orchard, picking fault and criticising at every counter. She would purchase, although that wasn’t the right word because no money ever changed hands, several items of clothing that she would never wear, and, her week’s work done,
allow Harold to drive her back to Lymm for a well earned g and t.
And then there were her Wednesday afternoons … Harold dropped the half-smoked cigarette on to the road and lit another. They were the type designed for office workers who snatched a quick drag outside their smoke-free zones. Heavily loaded with nicotine at the front end, they gave an instant rush to calm the frayed nerves of chairman and typist alike, before fading into blandness.
Every Wednesday afternoon for the last six months, Mrs Norris had been in the habit of going off in her own car – a sporty little Honda coupe. Apart from that she rarely drove; Harold would have to reverse the car out of the garage for her and leave it pointing in approximately the right direction. Where she went he did not know. Until this week.
Two days ago, Mrs Norris had driven the Honda over the fleur-de-lys shaped wrought-iron edging around the flower beds in the grounds of the Royal Cheshire Hotel, puncturing the front nearside tyre. She rang Harold and asked him to collect her in the Rolls.
Surprisingly, she said she would ride in the front with him. As she swung her legs in he dropped his gaze deferentially, as all randy chauffeurs do, and was rewarded with a glimpse of stocking tops that nearly gave him a cardiac arrest. He confused R with D on the automatic gearbox and almost reversed the Rolls into the Royal Cheshire’s ornamental pool. When she asked him
to light her cigarette he could smell the alcohol on her breath, over the perfume and smoke, and her eyes were big and black and sparkled like he’d never seen before.
So, he thought, Mrs Norris spends her Wednesday afternoons at a posh hotel, gets popped up, and wears stockings for the occasion. There was no cabaret at the Royal, and they were much too genteel to employ Bunny Girls, so there must be another reason. Knowledge is power, he said to himself, and this knowledge could be very good for my job security, very good indeed. He’d taken her home, then gone back with the gardener to collect the Honda.
‘’Ello, Harold. How are you?’ said the voice.
Harold jerked out of his daydreams, dropping the cigarette, and turned to the face that had appeared at the window of the Rolls. ‘Hey! Who the hell do you think you are?’ he protested, for the man was now leaning on the windowsill, his head almost inside the car. He was holding a rolled-up plastic carrier bag in his hands.
‘A friend, Harold. I’m a friend.’
Harold’s hand moved towards the ignition key, so he could raise the electric window, but the stranger slid the plastic bag back to reveal a large automatic pistol. His voice now had iron in it. ‘Don’t do that, or I’ll ventilate your friggin’ spine. Now put your hands on your knees, where I can see them.’
Harold wasn’t a brave man. The colour drained from his face and the palpitations in his chest brought
the taste of bile up from his stomach. He had to look down before he could place his hands on his trembling knees. ‘What … what do you want?’ he ventured. If the man had told him: ‘The car,’ he would gladly have vacated it.
‘First of all, a little talk,’ the man replied. ‘Just so as we know where we stand, if you’ll be following my meaning.’ He was wearing ex-Army camouflage clothing and had a concave face, as if he’d been born without a nasal bone. Or modelled from plasticine and then given a good thump.
Harold swallowed and nodded. He felt certain he was about to die, possibly from a heart attack.
‘You have a little daughter, I believe,’ the man said.
Harold spun to face him, eyes wide and mouth hanging open. ‘You … you …’ He tried to speak, but nothing came out.
‘Charlotte, I’m told. A bonny wee thing. Now would you be knowing if she arrived at school this morning?’
Harold raised his hands towards the man, but the gun slid from under the bag, pointing towards him. ‘If you so much as touch her …’ Harold began.
‘You’ll what? Tell the police? We’re not interested in you or your daughter. We may have her, or we may not. Can you afford to take the risk? That’s what you have to ask yourself, Harold my boy. Now here’s what you do.’ The man stooped low alongside the expensive car and gave his instructions to the chauffeur.
* * *
Marina Norris emerged from Town & County accompanied by the manager carrying her purchases. She’d castigated a girl behind one of the perfume counters for looking bored and bought six blouses, three skirts and four pairs of shoes. Harold didn’t notice her until the manager knocked on the car window.
‘Sorry, ma’am,’ he muttered as he opened the door for her.
Mrs Norris was annoyed. She didn’t like being seen outside Town & County with a bunch of their bags. ‘We’ll put these in the boot,’ she told him.
The manager stood on the pavement and waved as they pulled away. ‘Arrogant cow,’ he mouthed through his smile.
‘We’ll go to Claire Louise’s now, Harold. I haven’t an appointment, but she’ll fit me in.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
Three hundred yards down the road was a large junction controlled by traffic lights. Harold’s instructions from the man with the flat face were to stop at the lights in the left-hand lane. He cruised towards them at a snail’s pace, as if part of a motorcade transporting some dignitary to an important function. Mrs Norris enjoyed travelling through town very slowly in the Rolls-Royce.
‘You’re in the wrong lane, Harold. It’s straight on to Claire Louise’s.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ He’d seen the man making his way towards the lights. He walked with a limp.
‘Harold! The lights are at green. Why are you stopping?’
‘Don’t know, ma’am.’
She, too, had noticed the man on the pavement, waiting to cross the road, and wondered with distaste what sort of hooligan he was. She judged everyone on first impressions, but for once she was on the conservative side. The car stopped alongside him and he yanked the rear door open.
‘Move over,’ he hissed, and bundled her across the seat.
Mrs Norris screamed and kicked, but the man poked the automatic into her side and pulled the door shut with a clunk that had cost a fortune to perfect.
‘Keep quiet!’ he told her. ‘Dead or alive doesn’t make any difference to me.’
Harold took the left turn as he had been instructed.
‘Follow the signs towards the M6,’ the man told him.
Mrs Norris huddled in the corner, as far from him as possible, her arms wrapped round herself for protection in a manner that was older than mankind. Thoughts of murder, rape and kidnapping tumbled through her mind. What she had previously only heard of briefly in TV newscasts was now happening to her. She clutched the lapels of her unborn-calf jacket and felt her breasts trembling against her forearms. She wanted to shout, to protest, to reason, but terror had rendered her mute.
Harold tried to see her in the rearview mirror, but
she’d sunk low into the leather seat. ‘He made me do it, ma’am,’ he whimpered. ‘They’ve got Charlotte. He made me do it.’
The man pressed the muzzle of the gun into the junction between Harold’s left ear and his skull. ‘Just drive!’ he ordered.
Fifty minutes later, the Rolls-Royce turned off a B road into a narrow cart-track. Winter branches dragged along each side of the immaculate coachwork and the vehicle tipped and rolled as the wheels sank into
mud-filled
ruts and climbed out again. In half a mile they came to a clearing, surrounded by stark brown silver birches. A red Ford Sierra was already parked there, its boot-lid ominously open.
‘Terminus,’ said the man. ‘Everybody out.’
There was a greeting party of two more men, but they could hardly be called welcoming. Their coat hoods were drawn up, concealing the lower parts of their faces. ‘All OK?’ asked the bigger one.
‘Like a dream,’ said the first, as he dragged Mrs Norris from the car. ‘You too,’ he told Harold.
Marina Norris, now on her feet, pulled her arm from his grasp. ‘You bastard!’ she hissed at him. ‘You—’
His fist hit her on the side of the head, hurling her to the ground. Harold shrank at the ferocity of it. It wasn’t a slap or a punch; it was a blow. He didn’t think a human being could take brutality like that.
She lay on the wet grass, propped on one elbow, with a look of hurt bewilderment on her face and a trickle of
blood coming from her nostril. The man unzipped his camouflage jacket and concealed the pistol somewhere within it. He walked over to the Sierra and lifted a Kalashnikov assault rifle from inside the boot. ‘Put her in there,’ he ordered.
The other two grabbed Mrs Norris and manhandled her into the boot. They pinioned her arms and legs with plastic ties and stuck a length of duct tape over her mouth. She blew the blood out of her nose so that she could breathe, and realised that she was wetting herself. The boot-lid clunked shut, switching her off from the outside world as abruptly as turning off a television, leaving her in total darkness.
The first man, he of the concave face, caught sight of his own reflection in the Rolls’s paintwork. His legs were truncated, but the curve of the bodywork gave him a barrel chest. He posed for a few seconds, holding the gun at exactly the same angle as Lee Harvey Oswald held his rifle in the photograph he used to have on the back of his locker door.
He wrenched himself away from the image. ‘You, over there,’ he said, swinging the Kalashnikov towards Harold and then in the direction of the trees.
Harold was speechless and paralysed.
‘Don’t worry. We’re just going to delay your progress. So we’ll have a head start, if you’ll be following my meaning.’
He jabbed Harold with the gun, propelling him towards the undergrowth.
Five yards into them he said: ‘Kneel down.’
Harold’s knees gave way and he sank to the ground.
The man placed the barrel of the gun against the back of Harold’s head and pulled the trigger. The Kalashnikov was only set for single fire, but it was enough to blow his brains through his face.
‘Good morning, Mrs Wilberforce,’ I said brightly as Annabelle opened her door to my knock.
‘Good morning, Inspector Priest. You look
wet-nosed
and bushy-tailed for this time in the morning.’ She held the door wide for me to enter and I followed her through into her kitchen. ‘Have you had some breakfast, Charles?’ she asked.
‘Yes, thank you.’ I didn’t have much to say, relying on a beaming smile to convey my feelings.
‘I’ve made us plenty of sandwiches, and that’s a flask of soup,’ she said.
‘Terrific.’ I tested the weight of the parcels. They were heavy. ‘Do these go in your rucksack or mine?’ I wondered.
‘Yours. You’re of the stronger sex.’
‘Since when did you start believing that?’
‘Since I felt the weight of them. It’s my fault, I made the bread with strong flour.’
I looked doubtful. ‘Are you having me on?’
‘Having you on? Moi?’ she chuckled.
Annabelle was wearing a big Aran sweater with jeans
and a pair of trainers. She looked as if she’d just stepped off the ‘Outdoors’ pages of Grattan’s catalogue, except I knew she could deliver the goods. She’d climbed Mount Kenya a couple of times and her rucksack and hiking boots near the door were the pukka-gen items.
‘I left my sack outside,’ I told her. ‘I’ll just pop these in yours for the time being. How did the conference go?’
I hadn’t seen Annabelle for a week. Once upon a time she lived in Africa with her late husband who eventually became a bishop. He died of cancer. Now she did a lot of work for a variety of overseas charities, and had just attended a conference in London, aimed at trying to direct their various contributions more effectively.
‘Oh, so-so,’ she replied. ‘I need to have a word with you about it, when we have a chance.’
‘I expected you to come home bubbling over with enthusiasm,’ I told her.
She looked concerned. ‘I ought to be, but – I’ll tell you later. What about you? Have you made any decisions yet?’
‘Probably. As you say, we’ll talk later. C’mon, let’s wait for the bus at the end of the street.’
I’d parked my car on her drive. We gathered up the stuff we needed for a day’s walking in the hills and padded silently to the end of the cul-de-sac, our anoraks flapping open, rucksacks hooked over one shoulder and hiking boots held in our hands. It was eight o’clock on a bright January morning.