The Strange Death of Fiona Griffiths (46 page)

Only one shot comes back out of the night. I see it more than hear it, but feel a sudden burning in my right foot and calf. The sensation is so hot, so fiery, that it takes me a moment to realize I’ve been hit. I try to kick free of whatever is holding me back and this time, my movement is unimpeded, as though the shot unhooked me from whatever held me back.

Shove more cartridges into my gun.

Two buggies left the farmhouse and I’ve only disabled one.

I try standing. I feel slightly vertiginous with shock, but more OK than not. My ankle is stiff and a strange state – simultaneously hot and numb – but when I take a trial step or two, I don’t fall over.

Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you
, I say to myself. Out loud or in my head, I’m not sure.

I start limp-jogging back up the valley in the direction that the first buggy came from. In the direction where I assume the second buggy still lurks. I don’t have a plan, don’t have a strategy. Just can’t bear the thought that these bastards might be getting away.

Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you
.

I limp-jog for four minutes, maybe five.

My injured ankle feels hot to begin with, then feels nothing at all. I’ve lost all sensation in my feet, but when I look down I see them still there. Ghostly white, mud-spattered, still attached to my legs.

Good enough.

Behind me, police vehicles, Land Rovers at a guess, approach the spot where the shooting took place. They’ll have found the injured buggy. Be searching for runaways.

I don’t know if any of my shots found their target, but at least I directed our resources to the right spot and deprived the first batch of fugitives of their getaway vehicle.

The second batch I’ll handle alone.

And ahead of me, not far away, I can still hear the puttering beat of that other buggy. It’s not moving fast, not on this terrain, not in this light. I try to figure out what they’re trying to do. We’re moving up the valley, into the mountains. These are glacial valleys, scooped out by the last Ice Age. The sides of the valleys are steep – too steep for any farm buggy – and the headwall itself is only fifteen or twenty degrees off being perfectly vertical.

At some point, surely not far off, the buggy will find itself in a dead end. A cul-de-sac of the mountains.

I’m just starting to doubt myself. Question the whole pursuit, when I realize – with stupid slowness – that I can no longer hear the buggy ahead of me. Taken aback, I move forwards with extreme caution. My limp, I notice, has become more exaggerated, and even my good foot seems clumsily reluctant to obey my brain.

Shoes, schmoes, and feet will heal.

Shotgun levelled, and Glock easily accessible in the front waistband of my jeans, I creep on. Watching, listening – hearing nothing.

Then I hear something. The tick of an engine cooling. A fan. A drip of water.

See the gleam of light, curved over metal.

The buggy, empty, no humans present.

I do what I can to search the landscape round me for possible threats. It’s not yet dawn, not yet close. But the clouds have thinned. There’s more moonlight than there was, and over towards England there’s a hint of brightening, a vinegary silver, a first glimpse of the coming day.

The track that we’ve been following leads on to the head of the valley. A track for farmers and ramblers and nobody else.

A track without exit.

Above me, there’s a spur of rising ground leading up to the main ridge high above my head. The incline is as much as forty-five degrees and the slope is tussocky and uneven.

A car won’t cope with that, not even a four-by-four, but human legs will cope just fine. The fugitives will even now be climbing up to the ridge, and from there, they’ll be able to scatter wherever they want. Brattenbury won’t be able to throw a cordon round these mountains. There aren’t enough police officers in the country to do it.

I can’t follow. Not sensibly, not realistically. Not with my poor fitness, my injured ankle, my bare and increasingly tattered feet. Plus I don’t fancy the thought of creeping up the slope above me into Tinker’s waiting guns.

We’ve lost
, I think again,
we’ve lost
.

Reason says: fire your guns. Set fire to the buggy. Summon help. Do what can be done. At least play out a losing hand. Stay in the game to the last hopeless shake of the dice.

Reason, my old buddy. Reason, the only friend I never quite lose.

But even friends need a good kick from time to time, and this is one of those moments.

For some reason, I can’t quite bear the thought of encountering my colleagues just now. Not under these circumstances. Just can’t bear to watch the police machine clanking energetically into action on this losing cause. Like watching some industrial automaton, mighty but blind. A King Kong of the Cambrian mountains. Raging, brave, defeated.

For no real reason except tiredness, wanting to sit down, I ease myself into the buggy’s driver’s seat.

Ease myself in, and catch a glimpse of something moving. Keys swinging from the ignition. A little cluster of metal and hope.

A stupid oversight that, to leave the buggy still drivable – except that the buggy can’t make any ground on the slope above and the runaways can’t have known I was only a few hundred yards behind. Can’t have known, come to that, that they were even being pursued. A regular police pursuit involves light, machinery, and noise. My pursuit involved next to nothing. A girl with bare feet and skinny jeans. One blonde Jessica, two vengeful Fionas.

They don’t know that they’re being pursued
, I think.

Swinging keys, sighing wind. Those things, and empty air. A smell of peat.

We’ve lost
, I think,
except just possibly not
.

The fugitives will work slowly upwards to meet the ridge at the top. Then logic will tell them to put as many miles between themselves and the farmhouse as they can. The high ridges of these mountains all bear footpaths, good ones, well maintained and even paved in places. The getaways might scatter left or right once they hit the top, but either option would be better than working their way down the difficult opposite slope in bad light.

I put my hand to the ignition and start the buggy.

A poor chance is still a chance.

54.

I ride the buggy up to the head of the valley. My feet, no longer forced to carry my weight, are sending a long, slow swell of pain up to my brain, which listens gravely to their complaints. Then tells them to fuck off.

Has my language got worse since all this started? I think it has. I like riding the buggy though. It has a tough but easy power, like the best sort of men.

Like Buzz, actually. I wish he were here. Or would wish it, except that he would definitely want to stop me doing what I’m about to do and I would definitely want to do it anyway.

I drive on. A bouncy, jouncy, tussocky ride. A puttering growl trotting alongside, like a dog.

The mountains gather me in and encircle me, a huge bowl of silence.

A glassy silver starts to lift the rim of night.

I don’t know these mountains well. My father has never been the outdoorsy type, and when we did leave the city, we usually headed for my Aunt Gwyn’s farm in the Black Mountains. All the same, we did make excursions now and again. Often led by Gwyn herself, my mother in slightly frightened but acquiescent support. We visited the ruined monastery at Llanthony. Paddled rubber dinghies on the Monmouthshire and Brecon canal. Explored the disused tunnel at Torpantau, once the highest train tunnel in Britain. And we went for walks in the Brecon Beacons. For all I know, we used to walk and picnic in this very valley.

So though I don’t know these mountains well, I perhaps know them well enough. The valley headwalls look vertical from some angles, but they’re not quite. They’re twenty degrees off, even more in places. And there are lines of weakness. Gullies that break these clean lines, the dirty drainage pipes of geology.

Once, in a valley like this, my father dared me to climb one of these gullies. The sort of dare my father couldn’t help but invent, then couldn’t help but try to meet. So we did. Him and me. Panting our way up the weakness in the headwall. Strips of rock and near-vertical grass to right and left. The gully itself a torrent of clay, peat, rock and streaming water. We emerged from the top of that damn thing slathered in mud. Head to toe. Creatures of earth and bogwater. Aching, frightened, incredulous, elated.

That day, we climbed in broad daylight, properly shod, without a wounded ankle, and without a fistful of guns. But phooey to that. I’m here to catch bad guys. I drive the buggy up to the headwall, till it looms above me like the fall of a dam. Drive it, till the wheels spin on the rising slope and the sodden moorgrass.

Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you
.

I kill the engine and the silence swells around me.

There are two main gullies piercing the cliffs above. One spiking up and to the right, the other up and to the left.

Eeny-meeny-miny-mo.

I choose the left-hand one. No particular reason, except that it will drop me out onto the ridge closer to where I think the fugitives themselves are headed.

My route to that point is shorter than theirs. More direct, no wasted miles. Also, up till now, I’ve been doing a steady six or seven miles an hour on the buggy. A speed that I doubt they’ll be able to match themselves.

I start to climb.

Quite quickly, I find that my ankle is not happy with my decision making. It’s arguing in favor of doctors, hospitals, painkillers and clean linen. My feet are sending memos that make mention of clean water, soap, medical care, bandages.

The numbness that has gripped my lower half is beginning to pale into some low throb of pain. A beat I’m now struggling to ignore. I find myself falling, when I now, more than ever, need to move.

At one point I see a rock which is well-positioned for where my right foot needs to be. I put my foot onto it – watch it into position – then shift my weight over. And simply fall. Sideways and painfully. I think,
How can I even climb what lies ahead when I can’t even stand on a stupid rock
?

I actually hit my thighs in frustration. Stupid, useless things.

Not good.

Not good at all, and I’m aware of a kind of anger at this situation. In a way, my whole life has been an exercise in cutting off from my feelings. I’m a world-class dissociator. Numbness is my forte. I’m the empress of numb. Most of the time, somehow, I still manage to get on with my life.

So why not now?

For a moment, I struggle to get a grip of myself, to wrestle the pain into oblivion. To force it away with simple mind power. That doesn’t work, but when I withdraw my attention, with a silent
pop
, the pain vanishes. Not just the pain, but almost all physical sensation. I can hear the wind, feel the rain gentle on my face, but that’s more or less it. I can’t feel the barrel of the Glock jabbing against the top of my leg. Can’t feel the shotgun, cold in my hand. Can’t feel tiredness or pain or even fear. It’s like I’m walking alone in the universe, the only person here.

A strange state of mind, but useful.

Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you
.

Somehow, I manage to keep climbing.

The slope increases. To start with, I was using my hands and arms only occasionally for balance. Now, I’m using them all the time. Hands, elbows. The stock of my gun. Whatever works.

I still can’t see much, but I can see enough. And strangely, there’s some sort of upside in having no boots. My toes clutch at stones. Stab themselves into mud. Twist into whatever wiry grass that survives at these heights.

I inch higher.

Or more than inch. The valley starts to level beneath me. Tracking sideways with my gaze, I estimate I’m a quarter of the way above the valley floor. Then halfway. Then even more.

Left foot, right foot, hand, hand.

Left foot, right foot, hand, hand.

I sing, chant and swear myself upwards as the wind chatters at my clothes and hair. It’s not wet, not really, but there’s still enough rain that I’m properly soaked. Jessica’s pretty floral shirt – £9.99 at H&M, a bargain we were both happy with at the time – is a thing of rags. Her loose jumper – some acrylic thing in red, bought at a price and from a store I no longer recall – is near useless. Freely letting in the wind and rain and yet managing somehow to impede my movements.

Up and up.

The slope to either side of me is some good fraction off vertical. Perhaps twenty degrees at its steepest. The wall itself is made of bands of rock, mingled with sodden moorgrass and slopes of tumbling scree. It’s steep enough – high and exposed – that you find arctic alpine flora here. I don’t know enough to name the species, but these mountains were sculpted by the Ice Age and you feel its blast in these lines, these screes.

My gully, lying at an angle, is a little shallower than the wall itself, but best of all, it’s like a notch carved into the slope. I can use the left hand wall to brace myself as I move up on the right, and vice versa. One muddy hand steadying me, as the opposite muddy foot claws to find support.

Everything hurts, but in some other land. The empress of numb waves a vague hello to that land of sensation. She’ll make contact when she’s ready.

The wind snickers, waiting for a fall.

Once, out to my left, I see a couple of sheep placidly munching, an extraordinary sight in this luminous pre-dawn. White smudges grazing the edge of the impossible.

I test everything before trusting my weight to it. A few times, too often to count, I feel myself slipping. But I never slip more than a few inches. The holds that don’t give way make up for those that do. One time, the worst time, three-quarters of the way up the wall, both handholds give simultaneously with a wet ripping of grass and root, and my right foot flails to find a hold that will keep me in balance. I manage to save myself by biting down on the knot of vegetation in front of me. I survive the moment, but realize that if I slip more than a foot or two, nothing would stop me. And if I tumbled out of my gully onto the headwall proper, the momentum of a fall would be irreversible. I’m sheeted with mud and water. A human toboggan.