Two hundred yards ahead, he braked again, tagging onto the end of another queue of vehicles, this time waiting to exit the motorway at the roundabout ahead. Once more, he crept slowly forward with the traffic, his front bumper inches from the vehicle ahead.
Rising panic tugged at his gut and threatened to engulf him. The dread of having his worst terrors realised. He found himself imagining what life would be like without her; how would he cope, how long would it take to get over her, get himself back out into the world? Somewhere deep down the educated man in him rationalised his thoughts as preparation for the worst, but even though he had an understanding of the process, he could do nothing about it.
The vehicle ahead pulled away across the roundabout. There was a gap. Croft hit the gas. A car coming from the right accelerated. Croft braked and cursed. The driver waved an angry fist at him.
Traffic from the Rochdale side of the junction, which would have held up that from Scarbeck, was going straight on, avoiding the motorway snarl up, and with nothing to prevent access to the roundabout, a steady stream of vehicles from the Scarbeck poured past, holding him up once again.
If she was not there when he got home, if she had been abducted by The Handshaker, he would need the support of a professional police officer, and on the other side of Scarbeck, Millie would be fighting a similar battle with the homeward bound traffic… he hoped. She would not feel the same anxiety. To her it was nothing more than a routine call on a matter that may or may not be urgent. It couldn’t possibly have the same significance for her as it did for him.
Another gap appeared. Croft went for it this time causing the next vehicle coming from Scarbeck to brake. He ignored the blast of a horn, hurtled round the roundabout, and along the road to Scarbeck.
It was freer here, but not for long. Passing under the motorway, speeding along, he soon caught up with the vehicles ahead, and he was once more reduced to a crawl through the village of Roxton where a moorland road branched off to the left. One of the loneliest routes in the area, it shadowed the motorway across the border into West Yorkshire and the northern outskirts of Huddersfield. Most of the eastbound vehicles avoiding the motorway followed that road, but it had never been built with such traffic volumes in mind, and as a consequence, cars were backed up onto the Scarbeck road. Croft could imagine the infinite line of cars and lorries stretching all the way to the outskirts of Huddersfield/Halifax where they would rejoin the motorway.
He recalled the early days with Trish; days when they were still learning about each other, when every minor disagreement was made up with a kiss and passionate sex, days before the establishment of their different roles in the partnership. And later, when they were settled, when each had got used to the other’s quirks, sex was no longer vital, merely preferable. Those were the times when they were content just to be there, together, a couple.
The car in front angled to the left in order to follow the line of crawling vehicles into the moorland road. Croft took a chance, pulled out slightly and overtook, forcing an oncoming van to hug the opposite kerb and give him room.
Free of the jam, he floored the accelerator, the automatic transmission racing through its shift. He hit the brakes hard for a left hand bend and wheeled into it, his tyres screeching a protest on the wet tarmac.
The road wound out of Roxton, climbing a short hill, twisted its way through a series of tight bends, then over a railway bridge. As he crossed it, a large lorry coming the other way, in need of the entire carriageway to get onto the bridge, was forced to wait and the driver flashed irritable headlamps at him.
On the other side of the railway, he hit the gas again then remembered a permanent speed camera a hundred yards further on. He brought his speed back down to 30, plodded sedately across the photo stripes in the road, and once past it, hammered the accelerator.
Was it all over? Was this it? Five, six years of contentment, happiness and inestimable pleasure, come to an end thanks to some lunatic? He could not believe it. He kicked the pedal again.
For half a mile he followed the railway line on his right, wooded hills to his left, and then came to the outskirts of Scarbeck, where buildings began to appear. A couple of farm cottages, a short terrace here, a clutch of modern semis there. An urban road cut to his left, and oncoming traffic waited to turn into it. A car chanced the gap between Croft and the car ahead of him. Croft hit his brakes and followed, throwing the car hard left off the main road. The driver who had cut across him – a young woman, it looked like – worried by his dangerous tailgating, accelerated. Croft paced her, praying that she would turn off into one of the housing estates lining either side of the road, and give him the space he needed to get on.
How could it be over? Trish was not yet forty,
he
was not yet forty. How could it all come to an end so early? He forced himself to think of her still alive, safe and well in their mansion home, as if the mere idea could bring about the reality.
Climbing the hill, away from the suburbs again, drifting towards the surrounding moors, he recalled another mercy dash like this; a journey of over 200 miles to be at his mother’s bedside when a congenital heart problem threatened her life. All the way down the M6 and M1, throughout a frenetic four-hour drive to North London, he kept an image of her alive and well in his mind, and when he arrived, she was still with them, but only for another half hour before she finally passed into the peace of eternity.
He remembered the shock, the disbelief, the mind-numbing unreality of the knowledge that this woman, who had borne him, fed and nurtured him, brought him up, wiped his nose, dried his tears, encouraged him when he needed it, berated him when he deserved it, was gone forever, and he recalled the tears he shed at her passing.
He remembered blaming his father for her death. If the old man had not been so ambitious, if he had given more time to his wife, he would have insisted she have life-saving surgery years previously and she would not have died so young. More than anything, his mother’s death had cemented the antipathy he felt for his father.
The plodding car ahead of him turned off into a housing estate and he accelerated again. He passed beyond the street lighting, and darkness encompassed the car. Traffic was sparse. The moors crowded in upon him, he peered through the sheen of rain on the windscreen, following the white line and cats’ eyes, travelling sometimes dangerously fast, cutting the bends as a racing driver would, sitting out on the left-handers and drifting in, hugging the nearside on the right-handers and drifting out.
He watched the speedometer hover around the sixty mark. Up ahead, the lights of the Gibbet Inn cut through the gloom. Croft’s Mercedes roared past the pub, and he remembered the times he and Trish had dined there, usually on filthy nights like this, when the place was all but empty, and they could enjoy each other’s presence under the low, oak beams, and decorative horse brasses. Trish had loved the place. Croft could take it or leave it, but enjoyed it for her.
Approaching a staggered crossroads where he would cross Pennine Road and follow Allington Road, he mentally brought himself up sharply, and told himself to stop thinking of her in the past tense. She was not dead yet. She was not even missing.
At the junction, he went for a gap in the cross-flow of traffic, risking the annoyance of other drivers, and then he was on the downhill stretch, weaving his way into a deep valley. Three miles on he would turn left into Huddersfield Road, and half a mile up the climb out, he would drift off to the right, onto Allington Lane, and be home.
And she would be there. She would definitely be there. He would pull in through the drive, hurry into the house and find her in the lounge, watching early evening TV, or working on a closing submission with some hitherto undreamed of explanation for her day of silence. Probably illness. Yes, that was the most likely. She had set off for chambers, taken ill on the way, and in her suffering she had completely forgotten to ring and tell anyone. Or maybe she had rung them and they forgot to pass the message on.
Croft knew enough about Trish Sinclair to know that it would not happen. No matter how ill she was, even if she did not bother him, she would
never
commit the sin of failing to inform chambers.
The junction was clear. He hammered the pedal again, turning east along Huddersfield Road and up the hill, and two hundred yards on he swerved off into Allington Lane, the car weaving erratically across the narrow road. A further hundred yards on, the lane bent sharply to the right, but dead ahead were the blackened, sandstone pillars of Oaklands’ entrance.
With a contempt born of familiarity, Croft hurtled through them and brought the car to a halt, his wheels slurring on the gravel drive.
Her car was not there and the house was in darkness. He snatched his keys from the ignition, rushed to the door, fumbled the lock, snapped it open and rushed in, flicking on the light. The burglar alarm bleeped for attention. Impatiently, Croft punched in the four-digit code and silenced it.
He dashed into the lounge. Not there! He rushed to the kitchen. Not there! He even tried his study, the one room in the house that she detested, and she was not there. He flew up the stairs, checking bedrooms, bathrooms, attics, his private gym.
Soon he returned, his movements slower, shoulders slumped. He should have known. The alarm was set. Mrs Hitchins would have done that before leaving. It could mean only one thing. Trish had left this morning and never arrived at chambers.
He sat on the top step and felt the tears welling in his eyes. He was too late. The Handshaker had signalled his intention and while Croft was busy going to the police station with a cryptic message, the very note that warned him was already there. The monster had struck and taken away the only thing that was of any true value in Croft’s life.
15
Millie approached the entrance to Oaklands with much more caution than Croft, slowing to a crawl as she passed through the narrow gap between the pillars. The house stood thirty yards back from the gates, a magnificent, awe-inspiring edifice.
Her research into Croft the previous day told her that the mansion house had been built a couple of hundred years back, the residence of the local squire and cotton magnate. It stood half a mile from the village of Allington, six miles from the centre of Scarbeck and had an acre of land at the rear, protected by high walls, looking out onto Allington Woods to the south and the Pennine Moors to the East.
A listed building, bequeathed to Scarbeck Borough Council when its previous owner died in the late 60s, it had been left to decay, a thorn in the side of the cash strapped council, who could not demolish it and lacked the funds to renovate it. They sold it to Croft for a peppercorn fee of one pound, but if he picked up the house and an acre of attached land for something just above nothing, the contract came with some meaty clauses, the main one being that he had to bring it up to habitable standard, and after standing empty for the better part of three decades, it was an expensive and frustrating task.
His website contained pictures of the interior before and after the renovation work, which had included cleaning up the stonework, replacing the shattered windows, having the gardens landscaped, and totally gutting the interior to have it rebuilt from scratch, until the Georgian building stood in something approaching its former glory. At the rear, flowerbeds were a riot of colour in the summer, interspersed with finely mown lawns, while behind the high retaining walls, the oak, larch, beech and elm of Allington Woods afforded the occupants some privacy.
The interior contained every conceivable luxury, from the waterbed in the master bedroom, to a range of modern appliances in the kitchen, designed to cater for lavish dinner parties. He retained one of the downstairs rooms as an office-cum-study where, in order to generate the atmosphere of peace he preferred, he had lined the walls of this room with books, many of them rare and valuable.
The attics were unused, but one of the eight bedrooms had been converted into a private gym where Croft, a man of meticulous habits according to his web bio, worked out every morning.
Bringing the car to a halt, Millie had twenty feet of gravel to cross to the door. Rain lashed the windscreen, running down the glass in an almost continuous stream, reinforced by the odd, strong gust of wind driving in more water. It was like being inside a car wash. She looked across to Oaklands’ double door. Nothing so fancy as a porch on this mansion. Killing the engine, she took out her mobile phone, recalled Croft’s number and punched in the connection.
“Millie?”
She was glad to hear his voice, although his car parked by the door confirmed he was home. “I’m sat right outside and I don’t have an umbrella. If you open the door, I can make a run for it.”
The connection died, there was a brief delay and the door opened, Croft silhouetted in the backlight.
Removing her keys from the ignition, she leapt from the car, barely checking to see if the door closed behind her, and scurried across the gravel, hurling herself into the house.
Croft closed the door. “Here. Let me take your coat.”
She removed her raincoat, shook it, and allowed him to hang it above a radiator, where it would dry off.