Urgently repeat urgently need D’Aubigny’s connection w E Anglia, if any, Liz typed in return. Job? Holiday? Boyfriend? Schoolfriend? (Was D’Aubigny @ boarding school or UK university?) Tell parents they’re risking daughter’s life by not talking.
She had encrypted and sent the reply, and hoped for the best. After a shower and a silent breakfast with Mackay in the Trafalgar dining room, she had been back in the village hall by 7:30. Mackay, as planned, had driven off to Mildenhall USAF base, armed with a sheaf of printout portraits of Faraj Mansoor and Jean D’Aubigny.
In the village hall, which she couldn’t quite bring herself to call “the incident room,” she had discovered Don Whitten, alone. The brimming ashtray at his elbow suggested that he hadn’t gone home since she had taken her leave at 5 a.m. They had sat and stared together at a big A3 printout of Jean D’Aubigny. Taken four years earlier, it was an interior shot, and showed a surly-looking young woman in a black sweater standing in front of an out-of-focus Christmas tree. Short, unfashionably cut brown hair framed a pale oval face with intense, wide-set eyes.
“I’ve got one that age,” said Whitten.
“What’s she do?” asked Liz.
“Lives at home and gives us a shed-load of grief. Nothing like this, though. Jesus.”
Liz nodded. “It’d be good to get her alive.”
“You think we won’t?”
She met Jean D’Aubigny’s twenty-year-old gaze. “I don’t think she’ll come out with her hands up, put it like that. I think she’ll want to be a martyr.”
Whitten pursed his lips. The steel-grey of his moustache, Liz noticed, was yellowed with nicotine. He looked exhausted.
Now, three hours later, she watched as, with measured grimness, he stuck an arc of pins into a 1:10,000 Ordnance Survey map. Each pin, and there were twelve of them, marked a roadblock. Whitten had calculated that their targets couldn’t have driven more than a dozen miles from Dersthorpe since abandoning their old car and-presumably-commandeering a new one. He had set his traps accordingly.
“I’ve also requested helicopters and a Tactical Firearms Unit,” he told her. “We’re getting them, I’m happy to say-the TFU are going to be on standby within the hour-but we’re getting Deputy Chief Constable Jim Dunstan too. I’ve been bumped to second-in-command.”
“What’s he like?” asked Liz sympathetically.
“Good enough bloke, I suppose,” said Whitten. “Not over-keen on your lot, though, from what I’ve heard.”
“OK, thanks for the warning.” Earlier she had looked at Jean D’Aubigny’s portrait with a certain detached sympathy, sensing the maladjustment in that over-intense gaze. Now she just viewed their quarry as the enemy-two people who were prepared to murder a harmless creature like Elsie Hogan just because, for whatever reason, she had found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
They had to be stopped. Stopped before they destroyed more lives, and caused more desperate and needless grief.
44
Jean had been driving for twenty minutes when they saw the roadblock. They were travelling at a careful twenty-five miles an hour along a rutted single-lane track, enclosed by high hedges of bramble and elder. According to the map the lane would soon connect with another, which after various bifurcations would lead them southwards between the villages of Denton and Birdhoe. The route had been planned on the basis that they were still driving the Astra, and as the one on which they were least likely to encounter a police car. Given their changed circumstances, there had been an argument in favour of heading for the fastest road out of the area, and attempting to outrun any roadblock, but on balance, thought Jean, they had probably made the right decision by sticking to the original route. Farm roads were slow, but they were discreet.
Beside her, the young man whose car she was driving had subsided into a silent, sulking torpor. His immediate fear of their weapons had subsided, to be replaced by a dull fury at his helplessness and at the liberties taken with his precious Toyota.
Jean saw the blue light at the same moment that he did. They were passing a gap in the hedge, a gap through which the junction with the Birdhoe road, half a mile ahead, was momentarily visible. The blue light had flickered just once-a mistake, Jean guessed. Praise be to God, she thought, for the flatness of this countryside, and then the fear kicked in, hard and painful.
“Police,” the greasy-haired young man murmured fearfully. It was the first word that he had spoken.
“Shut up!” Jean ordered him tersely. Her heart was pounding. Had they been seen? There was a good chance that they hadn’t, given the distance and the height of the hedges.
“Reverse,” ordered Faraj.
Jean hesitated. To drive back past the gap would give the waiting police a second chance to see them.
“Reverse,” repeated Faraj angrily.
She came to a decision. A short way in front of them, to their right, was a narrow track leading to a motley collection of barns and farm outbuildings. No actual dwelling was visible.
Pulling the wheel over, ignoring Faraj’s protests, she swung quietly up the track. As far as the roadblock was concerned, they were invisible. They just had to hope that there were no farm workers about. Thirty yards up the track the ground opened out into a walled yard in which stood a rusted tractor and harrow and a silage heap covered by a plastic sheet and old tyres.
Driving round the far side of the silage heap so that the car was hidden by the road, she came to a sharp stop. She turned to Faraj and he nodded, seeing belatedly that the idea was a good one.
“Out,” Jean said to the youth, into whose fearful eyes a faint spark of hope had crept. “Get into the boot.”
He nodded, and did so, tucking himself deep and fearful into the carpeted space. The rain lanced down, cold against Jean’s face after the warmth of the car. For a moment his eyes met hers, frankly imploring, and then she felt Faraj press the butt of the PSS into her hand and knew that the moment had come. Around her, ghostly and transparent, crowded her fellow trainees from Takht-i-Suleiman, silently yelling and waving their weapons. “To kill an enemy of Islam is to be reborn,” whispered the instructor. “You will know the moment when it comes.”
She blinked and they vanished. Behind her back the PSS was heavy in her hand. She smiled at the young man. His knees were drawn up to his face, covering his chest. A head shot, then. The moment was unreal. “Could you just shut your eyes a moment?” she asked him.
The discharge was soundless and the recoil negligible. The youth twitched once, and was dead. It was the simplest thing in the world. The boot closed with a faint hydraulic whisper, and when she turned to Faraj to return the weapon, she knew that nothing now stood between them.
Wading through the thick brown midden they grabbed a corner each of the plastic sheet and dragged it off the silage heap and over the car. A half-dozen tyres came rolling with it, and they heaved three of these on top of the sheet. The rain poured down on the midden and the silage heap and the rusted tractor. It was the sort of scene you drove straight past.