And heard someone come into the room after her.
Louise expected the normal ‘click-click-click’ of heels progressing to one of the other cubicles or to the mirror over the washbasins. But for the briefest time there was no sound at all. Then she heard it – the slow
stump
of flat shoes filled by heavy feet.
They advanced a couple of yards and then halted. Louise found herself listening curiously. Why did she suddenly have the feeling that whoever it was had stopped just on the other side of her door? She glanced down. From this angle it was impossible to see beneath the door, but she was suddenly convinced there was someone there, listening.
She glanced at the lock. It was fully engaged.
The silence continued for several seconds, before the feet moved away.
Louise struggled not to exhale with relief. She was being absurd, she realised. There was nothing to worry about. She was only seven or eight feet below the brawling bedlam that was Mad Jack’s on a Friday evening.
Once more the feet halted.
Louise listened again. Had they entered one of the other cubicles? Almost certainly they had, but there was no sound of a door being closed or a lock being thrown. And now that she was listening particularly hard, she fancied she could hear breathing – steady, regular, but also deep and husky. Like a man’s breathing.
Maybe it was a member of staff, a caretaker or repairman? She was about to clear her throat, to let him know that there was a woman in here, when it suddenly struck her as a bad idea. Suppose it
wasn’t
a member of staff?
The breathing continued, and the feet moved again across the room; more dull heavy thuds on the tiled floor, getting louder. Whoever it was, they were backtracking along the front of the row of cubicles.
Unconsciously, Louise raised a knuckle to her mouth. Was he going to stop outside her door again?
But he didn’t.
He
stumped
heavily past, veering away across the room. A second later, she heard the lavatories’ main door open and close. And then there was silence.
Louise waited. Still there was silence.
Eventually she stood, pulled her tights back up, pushed her skirt down, cautiously disengaged the lock, and peeked out. She couldn’t see everything, but she appeared to be alone. She took a breath, then rushed across to the door, opened it and went out into the passage – and stopped in her tracks. Halfway up it on the right, one of the other doors was ajar. It was one of those marked ‘Staff Only’ and a thin slice of blackness was visible on the other side. Louise stared at it hard. Was that faint movement she could see through there? Was someone partly concealed but staring back at her?
The door crashed open with a violent bang.
But the man who came through it was young and wearing the pressed black trousers and olive-green t-shirt of the bar-staff. He was carrying a plastic tray filled with gleaming wet crockery. When he saw her and realised that he’d made her jump, he grinned apologetically. ‘Sorry love.’
He sauntered away up the stairs, towards the bar area.
With one hand on her heart, Louise ventured forward and glanced through the door as it swung slowly closed. Beyond it, a darkened corridor with boxes down one side connected with a series of lit rooms, and at its far end, with a door opening out into one of the service alleys behind the building. Several other members of staff were moving around down there.
Feeling foolish, she hurried on upstairs and rejoined the others.
Louise finally left the premises, briefcase in hand, just before eight. It was a five-minute walk down to Bank, where she took the Central Line to Oxford Circus. There, she changed to the Bakerloo.
She rode down the escalator to the northbound line, and when she got to the bottom found that she was alone. This might have been odd at any other time of day, but it was now Friday evening and most travellers would have been headed into town rather than away from it. The arched passageways were equally deserted, yet Louise had only walked a few yards when she thought she heard footsteps somewhere behind her. She stopped and listened, but now heard nothing.
She strolled through onto the platform. Again, no one else was present. A gust of warm wind blew a few scraps of waste paper along the gleaming tracks. And then she heard the footsteps again – apparently drawing closer. Discomforted, she gazed back along the passage, seeing nothing but expecting someone to come into view.
No one did. And now the footsteps stopped. It was almost as though whoever it was had sensed that she was waiting for him.
A train groaned into the station behind her.
Relieved, she climbed aboard.
At Marylebone, back among commuters, she bought an evening paper and had a coffee before boarding an overland train to High Wycombe. It was now close to eight-thirty. There was no real rush – Alan, who owned his own insurance company, spent his Friday afternoons on the golf course and would be in the clubhouse bar until well after eleven, but it was always good to feel you were almost home. She glanced through the window as she sped along. In the smoky dusk, the drear West London suburbs gradually blended with the woods and fields of the Home Counties. Darkness was encroaching fast; twenty-five minutes later, when she left the train at Gerrards Cross, it had fallen completely.
She was alone again, and it was very quiet. But she wasn’t worried – this was entirely normal. Gerrards Cross was a typical South Bucks country town, so small that it was actually more of a village. Being the most expensive postcode outside London, it was way too upmarket to have a lively night-life, even on Fridays. Its main street, which ran through it from one end to the other, boasted a few bars and restaurants, but these were quality establishments; pub-crawlers and binge-drinkers never darkened their doors.
Louise left the station, which was unmanned at this hour, and followed a hedged side-path down towards the parking area. Gerrards Cross railway station was built in a deep cutting, on a much lower level than the town itself, so its car park was a dark, secluded spot at the best of times. Now, as she descended the steeply sloping path from the station, she noted that several of its electric floodlights were not working. What was more, as the car park came into view she thought that her car was missing.
She stopped, surprised, but then spotted it. It was the only vehicle left and it was down at the farthest end, under the low, leafy boughs of a very ancient chestnut tree. Thanks to the damaged lights, that particular corner was deep in gloom. She set off walking.
And heard footsteps again.
She halted and glanced over her shoulder.
The path curved away behind, so she could only see twenty yards along it. There was no one in sight, and the footsteps abruptly stopped.
Louise continued to peer behind her. The slope of the station roof was visible over the hedge. Beyond that, higher up, there were lights along the balustrade of the bridge – it was possible she’d heard someone crossing it on foot. But again, there was no sign of anyone.
She started out across the car park, which was perhaps two hundred yards long by fifty wide and was bordered on its right-hand side by thick undergrowth. Louise now imagined she could hear movement in this undergrowth: a persistent crackling of foliage, as if something heavy was pushing its way through. An animal, she told herself. This part of the county was alive with badgers and foxes, especially at night.
Then she saw the figure sitting against the trunk of the chestnut tree.
She stopped short, a cold chill down her spine.
Was it a tramp, a hobo of some sort? You rarely, if ever, saw anyone like that in this exclusive district. He was slumped and ragged, and wearing what looked like a dirty old coat, tatters of which were moving in the breeze.
But then she realised what she was actually seeing.
The ragged, bundled object ‘seated’ against the tree-trunk was nothing more than a bin-bag stuffed with rubbish and waste paper.
Again feeling ridiculous, Louise hurried on.
The car was still half-hidden in murk. Its near-side, where the driver’s door was, was up against the undergrowth, and the narrow gap this afforded was completely hidden in shadow. But now Louise just wanted to get home. She was spooking herself with all these daft, pointless worries. So she went deliberately and boldly around to the driver’s side, acutely aware of the deep undergrowth at her back as she fiddled with the key-fob. But she could no longer hear movement in it, and even if she could, so what? It was summer. Birds would be roosting in there. She was only a few hundred yards from the Packhorse Common, where wild deer had been sighted. In any case, there was no sound now.
She unlocked the car, threw her briefcase into the back and climbed in behind the wheel. A moment later, she’d gunned the engine, and was on her way out.
She left Gerrards Cross via the B416, heading south towards Slough. At Stoke Poges she turned right and continued west along narrow, unnamed lanes. It was a breezy but warm night, so she had her window partially wound down. Moths and other bugs fluttered in her headlights. The eyes of a cat sparkled as it slid across the road in front of her. At Farnham Common she swung south towards Burnham. Belts of trees growing on either side of the road hemmed her in a tunnel, their branches interlacing overhead like fingers.
Louise had relaxed again. She was only three miles from the snug comforts of home.
But with a thunderous
bang
, she lost control of the vehicle. It lurched violently downward and slewed across the road, the steering wheel spinning in her hands. She jammed her brakes on, skidding to a halt with a fearsome screech.
When finally at rest against the verge, she sat there, stunned. The only sound was the engine ticking as it cooled. She jumped out.
What she saw left her astounded: her front two tyres hung in shreds around their wheel-trims. It was the same with her rear tyres. They’d literally been ripped to pieces; spokes of broken ply-cord poked out from them. She walked around the vehicle in a circle, scarcely able to comprehend the misfortune of it. One blow-out would have been bad enough; she’d never changed a wheel before and thought she could probably do it, but here – in the middle of the woods, at this time of night? Not that it mattered now, because she didn’t have spares for all four of them.
She fumbled in her jacket pocket for her mobile phone. She’d have to call Alan. Okay, he was at the golf club and would probably have had too many drinks to drive, but there might be someone who could come and pick her up. If not, he’d know what to do.
Then Louise spotted something else.
The phone was now in her hand, but her finger froze on the keypad.
About forty yards behind the car, something glinted with moonlight as it lay across the road. She walked slowly towards it, but stopped when she was only halfway.
It was a ‘stinger’ – at least, that’s what she thought they were called. One of those retractable beds of nails that police use to stop getaway cars after bank robberies. Someone had deliberately left it across the road.
Louise realised that she was shaking. She backtracked towards the car. Had some hooligans done this, some idiotic bunch of kids who had no better way to waste their time? Or was it something more sinister? Not allowing herself to think about the latter option, and certainly not glancing into the unlit reaches of woodland on all sides, she scrambled back to the car and yanked open the driver’s door.
She paused briefly to consider: she couldn’t drive on her hubcaps of course. But she
could
lock herself in. Yes, that was what she’d do. She’d lock herself in and call for help. She climbed behind the wheel, closed the door and made to apply the locks when she sensed the presence, just to the left of her.
Slowly, she twisted around to look.
He was in the front passenger seat, having clearly climbed in while she’d been distracted by the stinger. He was of heavy build and wore dark clothing: a bulky leather jacket and underneath that a ‘hoodie’ top with the hood actually pulled back. His hair was thinning and he had a pair of huge, jug-handle ears. But he had no nose – just a gristle-filled cavity
–
and no eyelids, while the rest of his face was a patchwork of puffy, raddled scar tissue.
Louise tried to scream, but a thick hand in a leather glove slapped onto her mouth. A second hand, also gloved, fastened around her throat.
And began to squeeze.
It was typical Bermondsey – scrap yards, wasteland, litter, graffiti running over everything.
Heck drove through it with a jaundiced eye, thinking only that his battered old Fiat Brava matched this decayed environment perfectly. To his left somewhere lay the river, delineated by the occasional crane or wharf-tower. He passed a row of boarded-up buildings on his right. A bag-lady sat on the kerb, her knees spread indecently wide as she drank from a bottle of cheap wine. Directly ahead, derelict tower blocks – bleak edifices of stained concrete and broken glass – were framed on the slate-grey sky.
He drove on, too weary to be oppressed by such a scene.
The appointed meeting-place turned out to be a crossroads close to a low railway arch. Corrugated steel fences hemmed
it in from all sides and there was a single streetlight, its bulb
long smashed. On the left, a mound of flattened brick rubble provided sufficient room for parking. However, Heck cruised on past, surveying the place carefully. There was nobody there, which, checking his watch – it was now ten minutes to six – was not surprising. He was early for the rendezvous, but at this hour on a Sunday morning there was unlikely to be anyone about in this desolate neck of the woods. He passed under the arch and drove another three hundred yards until a broken fence and a patch of scorched ground afforded him a turning-space. After that, driving slowly this time, he made his way back.
At the crossroads, another vehicle was now present. A maroon Bentley had parked, and a tall, lean man was standing against it, reading the
Sunday Sport
. He wore a black suit and had short hair bleached a shocking blonde. When Heck saw the car and the man, he groaned with disbelief. In truth, he hadn’t expected a great deal from this meeting. The voice on his office answering-machine had been abrupt and to the point, stating simply that it had information he might find useful. It had then given a time and place, and had rung off. When Heck had traced it, the call had been made from a payphone somewhere in South London. He’d received dozens of similar things over the last few months, but on this occasion, perhaps because he was so dog-tired, he’d started thinking irrationally; he’d wondered if maybe he’d get a break simply because he was due one.