The Judas Sheep (28 page)

Where do they all come from? I negotiated the junction at Ribblehead and the roadsides were lined with parked cars. The train had obviously not gone through yet. I turned left towards Chapel le Dale, now driving slowly, assessing the situation. A police Escort was parked on the verge, and I pulled up behind it.

The local bobby had a boozer’s face and a paunch to match. I wondered if the more liberal opening times
had taken some of the attraction from his job, now that there was no need to steal a crafty pint or four in the landlord’s kitchen with the door locked.

‘DI Charlie Priest,’ I said, waving my ID at him. ‘What’s happening?’

‘Oh, er, dunno, surr. I’ve been told to get misself ’ere and look out fer anything suspicious. Can’t be more specific than that.’

‘When’s the Mallard due?’

‘’Bout fifteen minutes, surr.’

‘Are there always this many trainspotters for a steam train?’

‘Don’t rightly know, surr. One of them told me it’s a special. Apparently it’ll stop on the bridge for photographs, then go back and come over again, making a lot of smoke. Should be a proper spectacle, if you ask me.’

I scanned the valley between us and Whernside, spanned by the viaduct. The railway line ran above the road, near our position, so we couldn’t see the tracks. The sun was at this side, and the flat area beside the railway was dotted with little groups of enthusiasts, cameras on tripods, waiting for Mallard to make an entrance. They wore bobble hats and anoraks to protect them against the ravages of a warm summer’s day.

‘OK,’ I said to the bobby. ‘I want you to radio in and get everybody available up here. Any ARVs within striking distance are to join us. Then tell the nearest helicopter to stand by. On second thoughts, get him airborne.’

His jaw fell on to his paunch. This was a bit different from his normal fodder of pig movements and sheep scab precautions. ‘Yes, surr. Right away, surr.’ He fumbled with his personal radio.

‘It might be better if you used the car radio,’ I suggested, ‘just in case they’re using a scanner.’ It’s too easy to monitor the personal radios.

‘Yes, surr.’

‘And stop calling me sir. Charlie will do.’

‘Yes, surr. Charlie.’

I listened to him trying to raise help, saying: ‘This Inspector Priest says …’ to every query.

‘They want to know what it’s about,’ he told me, looking up from the radio.

Tell them we think someone is going to blow the bridge up, with the train on it.’

He gulped and turned pale, before repeating what I’d said.

I was standing alongside his car, talking to him through the window while I let my gaze wander across the scene, inspecting the viaduct from one end to the other. Suddenly a figure appeared in the middle, jogging towards us.

It’s a single track over the bridge, the total width being about ten feet. A small wall, about eighteen inches high, gives a degree of protection to anyone walking across. I think the figure must have been kneeling down, concealed by the parapet. Now that he was nearer I recognised him as Darren.

As he reached our end of the viaduct he slowed to a walk, not in a hurry now that he was unlikely to be suddenly confronted by a train. He stepped off the track and descended the embankment at the other side, out of my sight.

‘Lend me your handcuffs,’ I told Dangerfield of the Dales.

‘Handcuffs?’

‘Yes, handcuffs.’

I vaulted the British Railways standard seven-strand wire fence and galloped down the bank at this side, towards the first span of the viaduct. Darren was in for a surprise.

He was leaning with his back against the stonework, under the massive cathedral arch, lighting a cigarette, when I breezed round the corner.

‘Hello, Darren,’ I said, still puffing from the sudden exertion.

‘Ch-Ch-Charlie!’ he exclaimed, aghast.

‘Shawn sent me. Said to make sure you had a gun.’

‘Shawn? Yeah …’

His hand moved towards the zip of his combat jacket, but my fist hit him in the face before he got anywhere near it. It was a beauty, starting right down in my foot and moving up through my leg and shoulder, just like we were taught. Darren flew backwards and fell in a heap, blood spurting from his nose and a bewildered expression on his face, like a pet dog that’s just been whipped for the first time.

I had a cuff round one wrist before he realised what was happening. He jerked the other arm behind his back and took a kick at me. I grabbed his foot and slapped the other bracelet round his ankle: Unorthodox, but effective.

I took the gun, a standard-looking automatic, maybe a thirty-eight, from inside his jacket and ejected the clip. I put the bullets in one pocket and the pistol in another.

‘Detective Inspector Priest,’ I told him. ‘Police. Sorry, Darren, but you’re nicked. Don’t go away.’

I climbed the embankment, pulling myself upwards with big handfuls of willowherb and ragwort. I knelt down for a rest at the top, waiting for my respiratory rate to catch up with the adrenalin rush. What had Darren been doing in the middle of the viaduct? They couldn’t be attempting to blow the thing up – it would take an atom bomb to do that. The answer was somewhere in the middle, two hundred and twenty yards away.

Ten feet wide seemed suddenly narrow, like walking a plank. I jogged between the lines, leaning sideways into the stiff breeze that was blowing up there, hoping it wouldn’t suddenly cease and send me staggering towards the edge. Every ten yards I looked back over my shoulder – I’d have felt silly if a train coming the other way had flattened me.

It wasn’t what I’d expected. Two climbing ropes were neatly coiled at the side of the track. One end of each was looped under the rail and tied around the
anchorage. So that was it. Two people were going to get off the train and abseil down off the viaduct. Presumably after killing Andrew Fallon. And then what?

The answer came immediately. Over the roar of the wind in my ears came the chom-chom-chom of a helicopter. I looked up and saw it over Whernside, and it wasn’t one of ours. It swooped round in a big arc and hovered over the trainspotters. They gathered their gear and fled from the downdraught, holding their hats on while composing strong letters to various public servants.

And then I heard another noise; a sound guaranteed to wipe away the years from the most disenchanted, embittered, disillusioned grown-up in the land and reduce him to a starry-eyed, rubber-kneed schoolboy. It was the long mournful wail of the A4 Pacific steam engine.

Most American locomotives make that noise, but in Britain it is only the streamlined A4. The words of the old song flashed through my mind: You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles …

But it wasn’t a hundred miles away, it was less than one. And I couldn’t get this bloody knot undone.

A cop in a film would have severed the rope with a single shot from his gun. If I’d tried it I’d have probably caught a ricochet in the balls. I grabbed a large pebble from the ballast between the rails and started to bash the crap out of the first rope. I was about halfway through, striking blindly into a mess of frayed ends, when the
whistle blew again. I looked up and saw Mallard coming round the bend in the track, black smoke pouring from the stack and white superheated steam billowing around its wheels. It was a shot the trainspotters would have killed for, but for me it had lost all romance. I attacked the rope with renewed fervour.

I did it. When I was through I gathered the coils in my arms and cast the lot into space. ‘A hundred feet high,’ Darren had said. It looked more like a thousand to me. I knelt down while the dizziness subsided and took hold of the second rope. Mallard was nearly at the end of the viaduct, creeping forward with the characteristic CHUFF-chuff-chuff-chuff, CHUFF-
chuff-chuff
-chuff of that type of engine. I threw the pebble down – there had to be a better way than this.

She was about fifteen yards away when I stood up and started running. I won the hundred yards in the school sports in eleven point two seconds. Afterwards I worked it out at nineteen miles per hour. Mallard can do a hundred and twenty-six, but she has lousy acceleration.

I was fleeing down the middle of the track, jacket flapping behind, glancing over my shoulder every two seconds at the clanking, roaring behemoth bearing down on me. Steel screeched against steel, and a sudden change in the breeze enveloped me in a cloud of steam and smoke and the smell of hot oil.

She’d stopped. I slowed to a jog and in a few seconds was at the end of the viaduct. I jumped off the track
and rolled and slid to the bottom of the embankment.

Darren hadn’t moved very far. I collapsed on the grass beside him, recovering my breath.

‘It’s too tight. I’ve got cramp in my foot,’ he moaned.

‘Just be grateful it wouldn’t go round your neck,’ I wheezed.

The gun had vanished from my pocket. I thought I’d felt it go when I was running. It was cold in the shade of the bridge, and a shiver shook my body. I grabbed Darren’s collar and dragged him out into the sunlight. He said ‘Ooh! Aah! Ooh! Aah!’ as the end of his spine bumped over the outcrops of carboniferous limestone that recorded the origins of the region. I gave him a final spin and left him facing down the length of the viaduct.

I walked away from it, to obtain a better view. The chopper was about two hundred yards away, on the ground, its rotors idling. The spotters had regrouped and were clicking away like a convention of flamenco dancers.

Two figures appeared on the viaduct, running away from the train and peeling off their jackets to reveal the climbing harnesses they were already wearing. They paused for a few moments, clipping their figure-of-eight abseiling devices on to the two ropes they found, then stepped over the parapet.

I watched them as they leant out at forty-five degrees, as if supported by only the breeze. The one on the right
lowered himself a few feet and produced something from a pocket. His right hand moved up and down several times and then horizontally. He was holding an aerosol of white paint, and the letter T appeared on the stonework of the bridge, followed by S and C. When he’d finished he tossed the can over his shoulder, nodded to his companion and kicked away from the wall.

They were above one of the arches, so soon had no wall in front of them. They dropped alternately, about ten feet at a time, leapfrogging past each other.

Until they reached the loop in the rope. It was Shawn Parrott who reached it first, but I didn’t know that at the time. A second later Frank Bell – the Skipper – landed on top of him, his crotch pressed hard into Parrott’s face.

‘What the fuck’s happening?’ one of them shouted.

‘The fucking ropes are tangled!’

‘Well, pull an end up!’

‘I can’t find it.’

Bell leant sideways and looked down at the ground, fifty feet below. ‘We’re on the same fucking rope!’ he screamed.

I’m not sure if Darren heard the rest of it, but it wasn’t complimentary and contained a good number of threats. His credibility in the gang was lower than a penguin’s bottom.

I wandered back to him. ‘I take it that’s Bell and Parrott.’

Darren nodded. He’d wiped the blood away from around his mouth, but missed quite a bit and it had dried on his chin and cheeks. He looked miserable; ill, almost. He was having a bad day.

‘Let’s have a talk,’ I said, but before we could start the helicopter engine sped up and it took off. I dialled Heckley control and told them its registration letters and the direction it was headed.

‘Who’s in the chopper?’ I asked Darren.

‘Dunno.’

‘C’mon, Darren. You’ll have to do better than that.’

‘No, it’s true, Charlie. It’s a pal of the Skip’s.’

‘Bell’s?’

‘Yeah. Army pal. I’ve never met ‘im. My foot’s killing me.’

‘Sorry, I haven’t the key. I’ll get it in a minute. Is it hijacked?’

‘Well, half-an’-half. Hired proper to start with – that’s what we needed the cash for – then hijacked. The pilot thought he was going to Ascot.’

‘I see. OK, Darren, listen to this. Parrott is going away for a long time. He’ll be eating his meals off a tin plate for the next thirty years; maybe even the rest of his natural. Bell will probably get something similar. Now we have a simple rule in the police. We believe whoever tells us a story first. So you can tell us yours, or we can wait until someone else tells us. Understand?’

‘I was just the driver, Charlie. Honest.’

‘I believe you, Darren. But will a jury? ’Specially
if the other two say you were an equal partner.’ He looked scared. ‘Then there’s Norris. We’ll be picking him up later today, and I can’t imagine him taking the rap for any of you lot, can you?’

‘It was his idea. Norris’s.’

‘I’m sure it was.’

The local bobby suddenly appeared beside me and I noticed that a ring of spectators had gathered around us, video cameras recording the action and a few of them telephoning their agents to get the best deal. ‘I thought you might need some assistance,’ he panted.

‘Yes, I do, thanks.’ I asked him his name and we shook hands for the cameras. This young man wants to make a statement. I put the cuffs on a bit tight, so do you think you could take the one off his ankle and place it round his other wrist, then take him in? He’s an old friend of mine, so treat him properly.’

‘Yes, surr. Charlie. Will do.’ He fished a bunch of keys from his tunic pocket and bent over Darren. ‘Let’s ’ave a look at you, then.’

As we were walking up to the road I glanced back at Bell and Parrott, swinging gently from side to side. The breeze would be cutting, up there. I wondered if I ought to shout something clever at them, like: ‘Hang around,’ or: ‘Sorry to leave you dangling,’ but I couldn’t think of anything worthy enough.

Traffic cars could be heard coming up the lane. Before the local bobby drove away with Darren he asked me what Darren was charged with.

‘Oh, trespassing on railway property,’ I replied.

Large policemen with serious faces were approaching me. Later, when I saw myself in a mirror, I was surprised I hadn’t been charged with vagrancy. They melted a little when I showed them my ID, but didn’t smile. We’ll, if they did it was hidden beneath their moustaches. A uniformed Inspector arrived just after the helicopter carrying the Yorkshire Television film crew, but well before the BBC. I suppose the BBC did have further to come.