Dry One was only just standing up after getting out of the car. His gun swung upwards. He fired.
The flash and the sound in the rain was dull, making Donaldson think that the bullets in the gun were sub-standard. He returned fire, his finger squeezing the trigger back twice in quick succession — the double tap. But only the first shell left the muzzle, the second stayed where it was. A misfire. He pulled again. Another misfire. Defective or wet ammo — or empty. . whatever.
Dry One fired again — and his gun worked.
That was enough for Donaldson. He spun and ran low toward the dark edge of the road, plunging head first into what lay beyond the light.
The Land Rover emerged on to the main road, Donaldson sighing happily at the smooth flatness of the tarmac after the pot-holed terrain of the country track. A sign indicated Torrevieja and Alicante to the left.
‘Where should I drop you?’
‘Airport?’ he dared to suggest.
‘OK,’ Maria said brightly. ‘It’s about half an hour from here.’ She pulled the Land Rover on to the road. ‘You never really told us why you came to be where you were,’ she said. ‘You’ve been really vague with us.’
‘It’s best you don’t know,’ he said, tight-lipped. ‘I told your father quite a lot, but kept the details sketchy. It’s better that way.’
A headlong plunge into the darkness, no idea at all of what was waiting there for him. Which was the more stupid? That or facing a man with a gun? Twenty metres into the forest he wished he had chosen the latter, something he’d had more experience with, as suddenly he lost his footing and the ground underneath him just disappeared, becoming a perpendicular drop of shale, rock and protruding branches. It was as though he had stepped off the edge of a cliff, which, in essence, is exactly what he had done.
He could not recall much of the fall, just covering his head, rolling into a ball and hoping for the best, as he bounced down the incline, his breath being driven out of him each time he smacked down. Then, just as suddenly as he had started the fall, it was over and he stopped rolling.
Breathless he lay there, panting, feeling the pain. The rain beat down on him, torrential and as hard as little stones.
‘I’m alive,’ he said to himself. He took a moment to work out whether anything had been broken. His feet moved, his knees could bend; he flexed his fingers, his hands and arms and rolled his neck. Everything seemed to be in order, though he felt like he had just been hammered in a street fight, beaten, maybe, but still in one piece. ‘Now if I can just get up.’ He groaned and moved at the same time, turning over on to all fours, his head lolling wearily between his arms. ‘Jesus, Jesus!’ he gasped, then slowly rose to his feet. ‘Made it,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I can stand. . that’s good. . I’m on my feet. .’
Still the rain battered down. He looked round into the pitch black, unable to work out anything at all. He had no conception of where he could be. He had fallen down a steep, rugged hill and miraculously hit the bottom relatively unscathed. Didn’t think anything was broken. Slowly his breath came back.
Then something made him cock his head to one side. A noise. A rumble. Something not part of the rain. He tensed up, fearing something, but not having any idea of what it was. The rumble grew louder. It had a sort of liquid sense to it.
That was his moment of realization.
He was standing in a river bed. A dry river bed. It had been raining in the mountains. . he recalled somebody saying that. Heavy rain, persistent.
As a wall of water hit him at knee level and scythed away his legs, the words ‘Flash flood!’ formed on his lips.
John Elliot found him next morning as he patrolled the periphery of his land, inspecting the damage caused by the storms and the flood. It was the first time Elliot had known the river bed to flood since he had lived at the farm, even though there had been bad storms in the past. In some respects the sight of a washed-up body on the banks of the river did not totally surprise him, nor did it panic him. Thirty-three years as a cop had made him immune to death.
Finding him alive was a bonus, but not a straightforward one. After conveying the bedraggled, exhausted man to his home, he would have preferred to call the emergency services, but all phone lines were down and he did not possess a mobile phone and the access lane was impassable at that moment, far too muddy even for the Land Rover. He and Maria were effectively cut off from the rest of the world for a time.
He knew of a retired doctor who lived in the next valley, but it was a four-hour hike, so he decided to tend the man from the river himself. There was no way he could accurately tell whether the man was badly injured internally, but he trusted to luck.
Elliot was reminded of the old cowboy movies where the patient fought a fever and either died or recovered. Donaldson was feverish for a day, then slept a deep, exhausted sleep for a further day before awakening to that wonderful morning sunshine and the delicious sight of Maria Elliot in her thin clothes.
Donaldson thanked Maria for the lift back to the airport. She said little to him as he alighted from the Land Rover, but her eyes said a lot.
Donaldson waved her off reluctantly. She drove back to her world as he walked into the terminal building and re-entered his.
Nineteen
Forty-eight hours after almost going headlong on the ward floor, Henry was discharged from hospital and found himself at home. He was still scouring his brain for the memory of why he had been driving down the motorway with the chief constable, another man, a gun and some bullets. But being cooped up in the house drove him barmy very quickly. He paced like a caged rat and to escape this he decided to go for a walk, both to get out of the house and to get his mind turning again.
On the second morning at home, still booked off sick from work, he was striding down the promenade at Blackpool, heading north towards Bispham. . when he suddenly stopped because he had no recollection whatsoever of how he had actually got there.
He knew where he was and that he must have walked there from home, but for the life of him he could not recall putting his feet out of the front door and setting off. To get where he was, he estimated, would have taken him a good hour and a half, but that ninety minutes was just a void.
A sensation of panic rippled through him.
‘This,’ he said worriedly to himself, ‘is very bad.’ He was convinced that his mind had now completely gone kaput. The madness of Henry Christie. He quickly found a seat in a shelter and plonked himself down next to two old ladies who were openly displaying their underwear. He smiled at them, but it must have been more a frightening grimace and they cowered away from the sex-crazed murderous fiend who was obviously about to rape and kill them.
He sat with his head in his hands for a few minutes, breathing deeply and trying to regain some iota of control. ‘Get a grip,’ he instructed himself with a growl.
Gradually he became aware that someone was standing near to him. He raised his eyes to see a man, out of breath, maybe as old as he was, a few feet away, looking at him. The man’s right arm was in a sling. He looked dreadful, unshaved, eyes sunken, skin grey and sagging.
‘Can I help?’ Henry asked, wondering if this was the start of a new life for him, one in which he played a major part in the care-in-the-community scene. The man looked slightly demented, hunted even.
‘Thank God you stopped,’ he said, panting. ‘I thought you’d go on forever. I’ve been following you for ages.’