The Vacant Casualty Page 12

  The taxi wound through the dark lanes, lulling Bradley towards sleep.

  ‘Hey, Detective, don’t nod off! I need instructions from you,’ said Sam, but he gave up, deciding he’d wake Bradley when the lights of the town came into sight. He let his thoughts drift for a while, trying to think of other detective movie clichés he could use to confuse Bradley even further, before he realized they were driving uphill. Surely Fraxbridge was downhill, he thought, in the other direction . . .

  As his suspicions began to grow he looked at the back of the taxi driver’s head. They had not exchanged two words since they’d got in, Bradley eventually having stated their destination before slumping onto Sam’s shoulder. Shaking off his own slight drunkenness, Sam saw that it was not the middle-aged man he would have expected, but in profile the driver was both female and definitely not young. He smelt the cigar smoke and saw the glowing tip as she puffed on her cheroot. He had just alarmingly concluded that they were being driven by a denizen of the granny mafia and was beginning to wonder where they might be going when they pulled into a car park near the top of the Hill.

  Situated all round the edge of the car park, chillingly, were all the Austin Allegros, Citroën 2CVs and other granny cars that he had seen in the pub car park, except they were now many more in number. All their lights were ablaze, giving the surrounding night a deeper blackness and the tarmac surface the appearance of a floodlit sports pitch.

  He urgently shook Bradley awake, who came to consciousness, slurring, ‘Stick it on account, would you, taxpayer can pick this up . . .’ and frowned bad-temperedly at Sam’s efforts to keep him quiet.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked.

  ‘Your destination, gentlemen,’ said their elderly driver, releasing the doors, which Sam hadn’t realized had been auto-locked. He got out and pulled Bradley after him.

  ‘No charge,’ said their driver, puffing on her cigar and pulling away just fast enough so that the door shut itself, before reversing into the only space on the other side of the car park and completing a wall of motors facing them down.

  ‘There’s my car,’ said Bradley, starting forward. ‘Nice one!’ But Sam grabbed his hand and held him back.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘Haven’t you seen them?’ He pointed at the bright lights, and slowly Bradley noticed the sound of revving motors. They were clearly standing at what had been designated a natural beauty spot, in a car park laid out so that tourists could look down over the valley from this high point. Bradley’s car had been left by the fence right at the edge, above a sharp drop. He tried to shake off Sam’s grip, but Sam held him even tighter, and now one of the cars came forward, turned until it was directly behind Bradley’s vehicle and revved its engine harder than ever.

  It burst forward with startling speed, raced up to the detective’s Prius and smashed into the back of it, pushing it forward a yard or so, up against the fence.

  ‘What the FUCK?! What are you doing, you old bitches?’

  A second car now rammed the back of the Prius, making it press against the bulging fence until its bumper was over the precipice. Bradley had some thoughts of reaching it and driving it to safety, but before he could get to within twenty feet, a third struck it and then a fourth. The fence partially splintered and snapped, and as it came forward the nose of the car dipped down and slid underneath the twanging wires still dangling on the edge.

  ‘Bitches!’ yelled Bradley. ‘My golf clubs were in there. I’ll kick your hairy old arses!’

  ‘Do you think maybe we should run away?’ asked Sam, as a fifth car smashed into the back of the Prius. Its rear was now crumpled beyond recognition, and only remained visible for another second or so before the car wobbled violently and then slipped out of sight.

  Bradley ran towards the fence, with Sam close behind. They couldn’t see anything beneath the beams of the harsh lights behind them, but heard a heavy regular bouncing, crunching noise from the field below, mixed in with smashing glass as the car flipped over and over.

  ‘They think they’re going to get away with this?’ asked Bradley, turning back to face the granny-motors. Several thoughts then occurred to both of them at once.

  First, perhaps these old ladies weren’t intending to leave any witnesses.

  Second, if Sam and Bradley were found crushed near the remains of the car with a lot of alcohol in their bloodstreams, perhaps no more explanation would be sought than the obvious one.

  And third, even if foul play was suspected, no one would think to ask the harmless-seeming little old ladies of the village to show their garaged cars and prove their innocence.

  These thoughts came in a lightning flash to both, encouraged by the sight that met them as they turned round: their former taxi driver was coming straight towards them, cigar clenched between her teeth that were showing through a wide grin, and at the end of her arm that was hanging out of the car window, a baseball bat going round in a sequence of threatening practice swings.

  ‘This is it,’ said Bradley. ‘No more bullshit from the gimmers. It’s action time!’

  It was a nice sentiment, and Sam had about a second and a half to notice that it fitted perfectly with the grimly determined persona he had been trying to encourage Bradley to take on. However, it didn’t make any difference to the fact that the old woman in question was doing forty miles an hour only a few dozen yards away when she pulled the handbrake, spun the wheel and, leaning out of the window, smacked the baseball bat across Sam’s back with a two- handed swing that hit him so hard it picked him bodily up and neatly posted him over the fence into the darkness below.

  ‘Sam!’ shrieked Bradley, rushing to the edge. He could see nothing down there, and had no idea how far the drop was. What would he do without this new partner to tell him how to act? Just when he was starting to get into the role of a detective. He thought he heard a shout of some sort, but couldn’t be sure.

  Behind him the taxi driver laughed throatily as she gunned the motor and then drove away, leaving the space clear for whoever was next in line. Bradley saw another driver coming towards him, this time a meat cleaver in hand, and realized he had no choice. The engine behind him roared faster as it neared, and so without time to think he shut his eyes and leapt into the dark.

  Heavy, life-long seconds seemed to pass in slow motion as he hung in the air and the freezing wind whistled past him. Then the ground smashed up into him, he tumbled, and when he came to a halt, he found himself to be on wet grass.

  ‘Sam?’ he shouted, looking around, waiting for the noise and the brightness to subside and let him get his bearings.

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ came a voice from nearby. ‘You decided to join me. I thought I was going to be stuck down here on my own. You haven’t seen my left eyeball anywhere, by any chance?’

  ‘Thank God, you’re okay,’ said the detective.

  ‘I’m alive, but certainly not okay,’ protested Sam. ‘I’ve definitely broken at least five things. I don’t know what exactly, but there are at least five of them.’

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ wondered Bradley aloud as he looked back up to the car park, where the headlights were still shining out into the night above them. He put a hand to his head and stumbled in the direction of the voice. ‘My wife’s going to kill me,’ he said.

  ‘That would make a refreshing change, I must say. You know what, those drugs have finally worn off.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bradley, ‘I’m sure we can pick up some aspirin in town.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about aspirin. I’ve got some aspirin on me, somewhere. Why is my first reaction at moments like this that I’d like to go to the pub?’

  ‘Because you’re an alcoholic.’

  ‘Is that your foot, or am I being assaulted by a cow?’

  ‘No, it’s me. Here, get up. If we go downhill we should find the wreck of the car and then we can get my golf clubs to use in self-defence, if need be.’

  It didn’t take them long to locate the crumple
d metal frame, which made quite a visible dark shape in the middle of the field, once their eyes had adjusted. The boot had popped open but had already been crushed in such a way that the clubs were trapped inside, mangled into strange and nasty-looking shapes.

  ‘Driver,’ said Bradley, handing it over.

  ‘I don’t want a driver, you have the driver. I’ll go for a sand wedge – I reckon you could do some proper gouging with that.’ Sam took the proffered club and lit the roll-up he had been making before sniffing suspiciously.

  ‘Whatever you like,’ said Bradley. ‘What’s that smell?’

  ‘I was just wondering. Is it some sort of weed killer or crop spray or something?’

  ‘It’s petrol. Put that out!’

  ‘Oh shit—’ Sam threw the cigarette away from himself and both began to run as fast as they could, which was very slowly indeed, as running hurt them a great deal, and they hobbled and tripped on the little hummocks of the field. There was first a yellow light behind them, then a big whoosh and they felt the heat on their backs. They tried to put a few last yards behind them, then it came – a rippling boom that knocked Sam off his feet. Bradley turned round to face the blast of heat and saw the incongruously beautiful black-yellow-orange flames soaring up, and turning in on themselves, forming for one brief second a miniature mushroom cloud, then dissipating in the night air.

  ‘That should satisfy them that the job’s done, at least,’ said Bradley, but the wry wisdom of the remark was some- what undercut by the sunroof landing flat on his head and knocking him over.

  ‘You’re right,’ said Sam. ‘Look, the lights are going.’

  A line of little old-lady shadows had been standing along the edge of the precipice looking down, silhouetted by the car lights, but one by one they started to melt away, and the lights to turn and drift down the side of the valley.

  ‘How are we going to find our way back?’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ said Sam. ‘Don’t you have iPhones out here in the country?’ He pulled the phone from his pocket, relieved to see it had survived the fall unscathed. Then they looked at each other, and Sam guiltily handed it over.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of that before. She must have knocked the sense out of me.’

  Bradley dialled, hung up and dialled again, but could not get through. He handed it back.

  ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to walk further until we get some coverage.’

  ‘Map’s not working either,’ admitted Sam. ‘But I don’t think the town can be more than a mile down the hill. We just have to get to the other side of these woods and we should be able to see some sort of lights.’

  They began to walk downhill, Bradley keeping ahead on the lookout for the treeline which they should soon enter, and they held their golf clubs up and ready in as menacing a pose as they could.

  They soon came across what looked like some farm buildings and attracted the barking attention of a dog, making them skirt the property as widely as possible, going back uphill for a few hundred yards before turning south again. Soon they were at a fence and climbing into the woods.

  ‘So, do you think that the old ladies killed Terry Fair-breath, then?’ asked Sam.

  ‘I’m not sure. I’d say whatever he was interested in, they are trying to keep secret. But whether that means they killed him, I don’t know.’

  ‘They’ve certainly got the intent to carry it out.’

  ‘Well, yes, that is true. But maybe they scared him and he simply ran away.’

  They had now been creeping silently through the woods for some minutes, and were thoroughly disorientated by the absolute darkness all around them. A large bruise was forming on top of Bradley’s head, along with a decided headache compounded by the knock he’d received, the hangover that was setting in and thoughts of how he would explain all this to both his wife and his Superintendent. For his part, Sam didn’t think he had broken any ribs, but he was pretty sure he had perforated a kidney, if that was the sort of thing that you could do by falling thirty feet or so into a field. Almost all of his back muscles were bruised. His calves ached, one knee had a nasty shooting pain in it and he still had absolutely no idea where he might go to sleep later on. If, that was, they survived the night.

  Suddenly the trees seemed to clear and a small fraction of light peeped through from the night sky. A dark shape loomed above them, one that seemed large and out-of-place enough to make them both stop.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Sam. ‘It’s too tall to be a shed . . .’

  ‘Or a hut,’ said Bradley, blinking to get a better view. ‘It’s too dense to be a tree. It’s sort of man-shaped.’

  Bradley swung his golf club and thwacked it in the middle. ‘It’s soft,’ he reported. ‘Sort of like a huge rock made out of flesh.’

  The object they were standing in front of then cleared the matter up by suddenly doubling in height, turning around on two giant legs, opening a mouth about as wide as a sofa and roaring.

  ‘It’s a bloody PERSON!’ shouted Bradley, sprinting past it. Sam remained rooted to the spot, staring up at the furious face some thirty feet above and feeling that he was suddenly in the middle of one of Roald Dahl’s nightmares.

  ‘Run!’ he shouted. Then he noticed that Bradley was nowhere to be seen, and that the creature had raised a fist angrily over its head. ‘Shit!’ he said, darting between its legs, and bolted down the hill.

  That both had suddenly disappeared, slightly bewildered the creature for a moment, and they sprinted downhill to make as much headway as possible, hearing heavy footsteps and further roaring behind them. Feeling the need for silence was now at an end, and that being chased by an ogre was no time to maintain decorum, both screamed wildly as they sprinted and flung themselves over a solid wooden fence that appeared in front of them. They landed and rolled, and skidded down a bank, then staggered to their feet and looked upwards.

  There was a beat of silence, then the ogre burst through the fence as though it was made out of nothing sturdier than a collection of breadsticks. They yelped again and ran on at full speed.

  Finding themselves in the front yard of someone’s country house, they flew in through the side door of an enormous, barn-sized garage. Locking it behind them, they then tiptoed to the back, crouched at the far end of the room and waited, hoping by some chance that the ogre might have been tricked or confused by their disappearance.

  ‘What is that?’ whispered Bradley.

  ‘An ogre, I think.’

  ‘An ogre?’

  ‘Well, I think so. Or a really, really expensive children’s toy gone wrong.’

  Another extremely loud roar told them that their hiding place was not safe, and they saw the enormous creature tear through the garage’s aluminium door as though it was no stronger than kitchen foil.

  The two men mewed in fear, fell back and tumbled out of the back door that flew open as they fell against it. Finding the hillside still stretching out beneath them, they leapt and ran until they came to an ancient stone wall constructed of paving slabs. They clambered up, jumped down on the other side and found themselves standing on the verge of a road, then ran across and looked back tensely. This time, they felt, they might have been quick enough to evade the monster’s notice.

  It was with a mixture of abject fear and grinding inevitability that they saw the giant figure smash through the stone wall as though it had been made from nothing stronger than – well, you get the picture. It was flippin’ strong.

  They clutched each other. Between them here or there they might have let out a little squeak of terror, or an imprecation for their mummy to be near, or a regret at some life ambition that remained unfulfilled. But largely, as the gargantuan creature took one mighty step towards the road, they watched it in terrified and quaking silence.

  Then, with a giant whumf, it disappeared.

  Bradley and Sam continued holding each other and whimpering for a few more moments, inclined to bel
ieve that in the extremity of their terror it was their eyes or brains failing them, rather than the huge animal in human form (which might or might not be classified as an ogre) that had vanished.

  Chapter Fourteen

  GRADUALLY, as a minute or so passed and the animal failed to reappear, their breathing slowed, and Detective Inspector Bradley and Sam unlocked from each other’s arms.

  Cautiously they stepped forward until they were looking at where they had last seen the ogre standing.

  ‘Odd,’ said Bradley.

  This was possibly something of an understatement, and Sam, who was a fan of understatement, but rarely managed it himself, cast the detective an admiring glance. They had crossed this short stretch of earth themselves only ten seconds before the ogre, and yet where firm earth had supported their footsteps, now there was quite clearly nothing but a large hole in the ground. It went down so far that there was no bottom, that they could see.

  ‘Very odd,’ agreed Sam. They listened out for the ogre for a minute or so, persuading themselves that they heard distant noises, but could not be sure. Then suddenly there came a deep rumbling below the ground that shook them off their feet again, and, crawling backwards at first, then getting up and running, they got as far away from the hole as possible.

  ‘That noise was no ogre,’ said the detective.

  ‘It felt like an earthquake. What the hell is going on? There are no earthquakes in this part of the countryside.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Bradley. ‘Let’s stop this guy. Quickly!’

  There was a station wagon coming along the road and they both frantically waved it down. The driver was a grey-haired middle-aged man, and he wound down his window.

  ‘Thank God you stopped,’ Bradley told the man. ‘We desperately need a lift to Fraxbridge.’

  ‘That’s fine, I’m going that way,’ said the man. ‘Hop in.’

  They got in and slumped back on the seats, hardly able to believe their luck.

  ‘Thank God you came,’ repeated Sam. ‘We just narrowly avoided an assassination attempt by a gang of old grannies!’