No Smoke Without Fire (A DCI Warren Jones Novel - Book 2) (33 page)

He carefully unscrewed the lid of the jam jar that held the chloroform-soaked rag. The smell immediately wafted out, suffusing the air around him with a sickly sweet odour. Fortunately, the young woman was upwind of him and so couldn’t smell the anaesthetic solvent. The first time he’d tried this, he’d put the rag into a carrier bag and then watched in surprise as the volatile solvent dissolved the plastic bag. He’d learnt his lesson from that episode and now kept the piece of cloth in a glass container.

Emerging from the shadows, he saw that his timing had been perfect. The young woman was just a few paces from the rear of his transport. Her head bobbed in time to the music; she was oblivious to any danger. Walking briskly, he closed the distance between them.

It was probably his shadow cast by the street lamp behind them that alerted Gemma. The one thing he hadn’t thought to check. Glancing over her shoulder, she opened her mouth in a silent scream of terror. With the element of surprise now gone, he pounced at her, bringing the rag into position, wrapping his powerful arms around her.

To his surprise, instead of screaming and putting up a fight, she immediately went limp. Had she fainted? There was no way the chloroform had acted that fast. Even as he struggled to cope with the sudden dead-weight in his arms, she suddenly snapped her head backwards, catching him full in the face.

As he staggered back, the young woman twisted, a feral snarl on her lips. A sharp pain erupted in his ankle as she stamped hard on his instep. Stumbling in surprise, he dropped the jam jar with a clatter “Bitch!” he gasped as he struggled to regain his composure. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to be.

With one last wriggle, the young woman squirmed out of his grip. A blast of cold air on his face told him that the scarf and his mask had been pulled away, revealing his features in the street light. They locked eyes, before she took off.

It was the loss of his disguise that spurred him on. Ordinarily, the pain in his ankle and across his nose would have been enough to make him call off the attack. To slink away into the night, leaving the young woman shaken but wiser. Plenty more fish in the sea, as they said. But now that was no longer an option — she’d seen his face. Only a glimpse, to be sure, but what if she recognised him? Her description might not be detailed but it could be enough. Would she describe him well enough for that police officer to recognise him? The one who’d sat staring at him in the police station? He couldn’t take that chance. Gritting his teeth against the pain in his ankle, he took off after her.

She was fast. Her coat tails flapping in the wind as she raced down the street. The end of the road was barely a hundred metres away. The thoroughfare that it intersected wasn’t especially busy, but there was a pub a few doors down from the junction. The smoking ban meant that, even on a wet and dismal evening in the middle of December, there was a good chance that there might be a nicotine addict standing in the doorway, enjoying their fix.

The gap was opening up between them. Even as he pushed himself on, lungs and heart straining, he could see that she was going to reach the main road before him.

What should I do? he asked himself. What was the safest course of action? If he somehow caught up with her on the main road, he ran the risk of being seen by other, more reliable witnesses. There might even be CCTV cameras on the front of the pub. On the other hand, what had she seen when she pulled away the scarf? The street light had been behind him, casting his face into shadow. He had no distinguishing marks. He doubted she could even guess his age.

Reluctantly, he started to slow down. You’re a lucky girl, Gemma, he thought silently. He felt a twinge of regret as he remembered the way her uniform had risen up her back as she bent over some boxes, revealing a small tattoo above the base of her spine. He’d fantasised about that tattoo for a fortnight.

It had been that which had first marked her out as his next target, as he’d entered the shop to buy a newspaper. A spotty youth in his late teens had served him, but it had taken all of his will power not to turn around and drink in the young woman with his eyes as she wrestled with a plastic box-cutter. As he’d left the shop he’d realised with a start that the lad behind the till could have given him a pound’s worth of change for a fifty-pound note and he would never have noticed.

Up ahead, images of the two murdered local women filled Gemma’s vision. The story had dominated the local newspapers for the past few weeks, their photographs staring at her from the news stand across from the till. In quiet moments at work, she’d read the stories, discussing them with her co-workers and regular customers. They’d shaken their heads in sadness, commenting on what the world was coming to when even a town like Middlesbury could witness such crimes. Of course, it had never occurred to her that she could be the killer’s next victim.

The end of the road seemed to be a thousand miles away. Behind her she imagined that she could hear the pounding of her pursuer’s feet. She turned around, desperate to see how close he was. Could she make it to the main road before he did? And if she did, what then? Her chest was heaving; did she have enough breath to scream for help? What if the road was deserted? She thought that there might be a pub on the main road, but which way? Left or right? Could she make it to the pub before he caught up with her? What if she chose the wrong direction?

He was slowing, she realised, and limping. She must have caught him better than she thought. The skills learnt in self-defence classes from her schooldays had come back when they were needed most. He was giving up. A tide of relief rushed through her. All she had to do was get to the junction and cross the road. He wouldn’t come into the light, she realised. He couldn’t catch her before the end of the street, so he was breaking off his attack. Suddenly, it was as if a weight had been lifted. Was it her imagination, or did her speed actually increase?

Behind her, the man in the mask wheezed and gasped, trying to catch his breath as he planned his escape route. Should he return to his vehicle, or should he ignore it as if it had nothing to do with him? Safer to ignore it, he decided. He might be able to retrieve it later; failing that, he could cover his tracks if he needed to.

Ahead of him, approaching the junction, the young woman turned. A look of relief crossed her features as she saw that he had broken off his pursuit.

And then she tripped. Just like that. Whether it was a broken paving slab, or a thoughtlessly neglected dog turd, he had no idea. But one moment she was upright, arms and legs pumping, the next she was crashing down, face first onto the pavement, her momentum propelling her into an ungainly and painful heap, too surprised to even cry out.

All thoughts of quitting vanished; ignoring his heaving chest and throbbing ankle, he redoubled his speed. And suddenly, he was upon her. Ten metres from safety for her — still in the secluded darkness that spelt safety for him — he pounced. He’d dropped the chloroform-soaked cloth a hundred metres back when he’d started the mad dash, but it didn’t matter. He was in no mood for finesse. He grabbed a handful of her long blonde hair and pulled her head back. Her face was bloody, her nose probably broken, teeth missing. A soft moan escaped her lacerated lips. Her eyes were rolling in their sockets as she fought to remain conscious.

With a loud crack he slammed her head on the pavement, putting her out of her misery.

Monday 19th December

Chapter 40

Six a.m. Gordon Hathaway awoke, as he had done almost every day for the past sixty-eight years, without the aid of an alarm clock. Flicking on the dimmed bedside lamp, he turned to his wife, Allie, sleeping beside him. Her long hair, now more grey than brown, was tightly secured in the pink rollers she’d worn to bed every night for the forty-seven years they’d been married. She shifted slightly in her sleep, her breathing quiet and steady. Careful not to wake her, he leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. Once upon a time she’d have got up with him, but these days she needed an extra couple of hours in bed. Hell, she’d earned it — they both had.

As he stood he stifled a quiet groan. The constant ache in his joints was at its worst first thing in the morning; he knew from experience that after a couple of hours of hard, physical work it would recede to a background nag.

Padding softly to the bathroom, he closed the door before switching on the light. As he shaved and brushed his teeth he stared at his face in the mirror. Craggy. That was the word that best described him these days, he decided, although Allie still insisted he was as handsome as the day she’d first seen him at the Young Farmers’ Club Christmas party.

Although summer was long gone, he still retained the remnants of a faint tan — on his face and his arms. Nothing below the neck, of course; his wiry body was as pale as a glass of milk. His tan was that of a man who worked outdoors for a living; it had been over twenty years since he’d last lain on a beach with his top off. A week in Majorca, a present from their sons for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. He smiled at the memory. Good lads, both of them, they’d made sure the farm ran smoothly in their parents’ absence. That meant Eddie their youngest, had booked several days off work himself to help his older brother, Rory, who’d followed his old man into the farming business and still worked alongside him to this day.

After getting dressed, he went downstairs. First order of the day was to let their elderly collie, Shep, outside. With relief, he saw that the old girl hadn’t made a mess in the night. It wasn’t so much the cleaning up — Lord knew, he was a farmer, he was used to that and worse — it was more what it portended. At seventeen years old, the black and white former sheepdog had enjoyed a damn good innings, but that was over a hundred in dog years and time was catching up with her. As a farmer he wasn’t supposed to be sentimental about his animals — but he knew he’d have a tear in his eye when he had to dig that hole.

Flicking on the stove, he poured skimmed milk into a saucepan, opened a packet of Quaker Oats porridge and popped two slices of wholemeal bread in the toaster, flicking the on switch for the kettle as he did so.

The reappearance of Shep coincided perfectly with the milk boiling, the toast popping up and the kettle boiling. Like clockwork; he smiled.

Waiting for his porridge to cool, he spread some Benecol margarine onto his toast. As he did so he gazed wistfully at the frying pan hanging, spotlessly clean, on the wall. For forty-six of his forty-seven years of marriage, Allie had woken with him and the couple had started a hard day’s work with a good, healthy fry-up. Well, perhaps not so healthy as it turned out.

The heart attack had been small — a warning shot, the cardiologist had termed it. Nevertheless he would never forget the terror he’d felt when he’d returned home for lunch to find his beloved Allie slumped over, clutching her arm, her face a grey, sweating mask of pain. Ignoring her protestations — she never did like to make a fuss — he’d bundled her into the Land Rover and driven at breakneck speed to Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, the nearest hospital with a casualty department.

Two clogged arteries and a third narrowed more than was healthy and so a triple by-pass had been scheduled and carried out the very same day. After the initial shock had worn off, and Allie was pronounced stable, with a good chance of a complete recovery, her cardiologist had turned to him. A thorough check-up — the only extended amount of time he’d spent in the care of the medical profession since a boyhood broken leg — revealed a healthy heart, the product of a lifetime of hard physical labour, but a dangerously high cholesterol level and blood pressure bordering on hypertensive.

Twelve-months on and a combination of statins, healthy eating, margarines containing plant sterols and blood-pressure pills had reduced his cholesterol to a more acceptable four point eight and his blood pressure to one hundred and thirty over ninety. Allie had shown a similar improvement, but her days of getting up at six a.m. were behind her.

They were getting old, damn it. They shouldn’t still be working at this age — that hadn’t been the plan. They should have retired at sixty, sixty-five at the latest, and Rory should have inherited the farm that he had worked so hard on since leaving school. As it was, with the economy in its current mess and the downward pressure on prices from his buyers, they wouldn’t be able to sit back until their mid-seventies. Rory had looked into getting a loan to buy out his father — he’d get the money back in the estate one day anyway — but the banks just weren’t lending.

The crunch of gravel on the drive signalled the arrival of his eldest. Seven a.m. on the dot as usual. By the time Rory had let himself in, the dishes were in the sink soaking and Gordon was pulling on his work boots. Taking a final mouthful of his full-strength, full-flavour coffee — any coffee he consumed for the rest of the day would be decaff — he stood to greet his son.

“Right, the forecast is cold but clear, so what say we go down to that back field and have a look at that fence that came down last week? See what needs doing.”

“Sounds like a plan, Dad.” Rory looked out of the window at the darkness outside. “Let’s see what we find.”

* * *

Ninety miles away, DCI Warren Jones was also up early. He’d lain awake all night, his mind a turmoil. Even the three fingers of Scotch he’d drunk with Granddad Jack hadn’t been enough to lull him to sleep. Eventually, as the faint chimes of the antique clock in the living room had struck six, he’d given up and slipped quietly downstairs.

The reception of Nana Betty’s body into church the night before had been a quiet, sombre affair. The hearse had glided silently up to the doors of the church, the driver effortlessly navigating the narrow entrance to the car park. Immediately all of the awkward conversation from the assembled mourners quietened. Unlike the funeral, which was due to be held the following morning, the reception into church was a short and simple affair. Many of those who would be travelling over to attend the funeral in the morning were unable to attend the reception, so it was a small congregation that watched as Warren and Jack and Dennis — assisted by three carefully height-matched pall-bearers — had shouldered her simple casket and marched it slowly into church, where it would rest overnight before the funeral service in the morning.