Just Desserts Page 17

  It was not until he had nosed the machine out of the alley and on to the narrow street behind the pub that he saw the police car. He should have known the two men arresting the dealer would not be alone.

  The engine started and the dazzling lights flashed in his face as he was accelerating gently down the street. The window eased down and a voice shouted to him to stop. The car was facing him. It moved to block his path as he rode towards it, turning sideways across the dimly lit street. The gap left for him seemed to narrow in slow motion as he moved towards it. There was a thin film of drizzle now. His brain said inconsequentially, even in the midst of this crisis, that he had thought it too cold for rain.

  It was a good thing he knew just what the Ducati could do; a good thing he controlled its power so expertly. He gave the engine a little more juice, felt the bike leap like a live thing beneath him, twisted the handlebars just enough to the left, and was through the gap and away.

  He had to mount the pavement briefly to do it, and he felt the beginning of a skid on his rear wheel as it hit a steel grating in the gutter. But he corrected that instantly, almost contemptuously, and he was away. Away towards Gloucester, oblivion and safety.

  He heard the police car switch on its siren, caught the flash of its blue warning light on the damp tarmac in front of him as he leant low over the handlebars, flattening himself against the machine until he became almost part of it. He wasn’t worried about the police car. He could leave it behind quite easily, if he kept his head. And he would do that: he knew everything the Ducati could do, and it wouldn’t let him down. Bikes could always outdistance cars, when there was traffic about. This was a situation where Barry Hooper was in control. Goodnight, pigs!

  He threaded his way expertly through the outer streets of Cheltenham, overtaking a couple of tardy cars and a van, and back on to the A40 to Gloucester. The wailing of the police siren was already fainter when he reached the dual carriageway beneath the neon lights. He opened the throttle, moved swiftly and smoothly up to seventy, eighty, ninety. He checked his mirror to make sure the road was empty behind him and opened up to the ton, exulting in the surge of power, giving a V-sign to the white-faced, startled woman behind the wheel of a Nissan, which he passed as if it were standing still.

  He’d lost the cops now. They must be a good mile and more behind him. He’d do the ton along here until he came to the first roundabout outside Gloucester, give himself even more of a start on them. Then he’d move at a sedate pace through the Gloucester streets he knew so well to his own pad, leaving them baffled behind him. He could just see their faces, just visualize their dismay as they had to report their failure.

  He had reckoned without police radios.

  He passed the first roundabout all right, leaning low to the ground to take it at speed as he saw that he could pass in front of the car coming from the right. There was another two miles of dual carriageway on the Gloucester by-pass then, where he opened up and put another half-mile between himself and any pursuit.

  It was at the third roundabout, the one where he planned to turn into the area near the Gloucester docks and thence home, that he met problems. He had already indicated a left turn and was slowing to make it when he saw another police car, poised by the roundabout, with its emergency lights flashing to warn other motorists of its presence.

  Barry reacted quickly, ignoring the signal he had given, crouching until his knee almost touched the ground to take the bend of the roundabout, denying his left-hand signal and moving on towards Ross-on-Wye. He caught the blare of a car’s horn behind him, the driver outraged at his refusing to turn left as he had indicated. Then, as that sound died, he heard the louder and more insistent note of the police Rover’s siren.

  There was traffic on this road, two lines of it. He could not at first make much headway, for motorists were switching lanes, according to whether they wanted to continue along the A40 to Ross or swing right on to the B road for Newent and Hereford. Barry realized he had to make a decision himself about which route to take; the police siren remained a constant distance behind him, insistent in his ears now that this slower speed was forced upon him.

  The lights for the right turn on to the Newent road changed from red through amber to green when he was two hundred yards short of them, shining bright through he darkness and the thin mist of drizzle as he approached. That decided him. He chose the familiar road, and swung right on to the B4221.

  His brain was working well in this pressure situation. He was pleased about that: when he was safely home and had the time, he would even be proud of himself. This road was the one he took every day to Camellia Park: he knew it like the back of his hand and was confident he could outwit the fuzz in their Rover 75. It was a fast car, but no match for a Ducati on this twisty road. Goodnight, pigs!

  The B4221 skirted the village of Highnam, a notorious trap for speeding motorists, where Barry meticulously observed the thirty limit every morning on his way to the golf course. Now he roared over the mini-roundabout and flashed past the gates of the course, where he normally turned carefully left. The speed camera flashed white and brilliant in his face, blinding him for a second, taking him dangerously towards the hedge at the speed he was travelling. He righted the bike just in time, with practised, unhurried skill, which gave him extra confidence.

  He opened up to sixty, feeling the closeness of the road to his body as he leant low, perilously low, first one way and then the other, on the Z-bend, as he moved beneath overarching trees and out between open fields. He was driving near the limit, on damp surfaces; he had better be careful. But that was why he had chosen this route: he could outwit any car on this road.

  He heard the police siren switch on behind him as the big Rover left the village of Highnam.

  It was nearer than he had expected: they were good, these blokes. But not good enough. There was a small white car ahead of him. Its rear lights seemed to leap towards him as he caught up with it quickly, reminding him how fast he was going. But he did not shut the throttle. He swept past the car at the end of a straight stretch of road, ignoring the glow against the hedge ahead which told him that some invisible vehicle was approaching from the opposite direction. He was conscious of the double white lines, unnaturally white, unnaturally near to him beneath his wheels.

  Then everything disappeared in the blinding headlights of the lorry which hurtled towards him. He twisted the throttle more open still, roared straight at the high, blinding lights, heard the head-splitting blare which he realized only later was the lorry’s urgent horn. Then he twisted his handlebars, missing the wing of the pantechnicon by a margin so small that the wind from its front wing almost had him over. He saw the huge letters of the firm on its side as he turned into the skid which was trying to take him out of control and roared on. The Rover 75 wouldn’t get past the car as he had done: it would have to wait for the right stretch of road. So goodnight, pigs!

  He was proud that he had opened the throttle even wider back there, when his instinct and everyone else’s would have been to brake, dazzled like a helpless rabbit in the lights of the lorry. If he had done, he’d have been hit, and that would have been the end of it. Only his speed had got him through that narrowing, fleetingly visible gap. They were a good team, Barry Hooper and the Ducati. He had always known that, and they were proving it tonight.

  And he knew now what he was going to do. This road led to the M50. That is why it carried the heavy goods vehicles which would not normally use a B road: the canny, experienced drivers knew it was a short cut to the motorway. He would turn on to the motorway when he reached it. If he could put enough distance between him and the Rover by then, they wouldn’t know whether he had turned north or south.

  But Barry knew where he was going. He would turn north towards Birmingham, opening up the Ducati to the ton, to a hundred and twenty or thirty if necessary. He had never ridden as fast as that before, but the machine would do it, when he called upon it. When he was sure he had shaken them off, he�
��d turn off, probably at the Tewkesbury exit. Then he would make his way home at leisure on the minor roads, enjoying his triumph, letting the coolness of the night air bring him slowly down from his high.

  Thank God for the Ducati. He had forgotten now why he was being pursued, why the chase had begun. He was conscious only of the chase itself, of the exultation, of the absolute necessity of escaping the hunters. He heard the siren again behind him. They’d got past the van, then. There hadn’t been much going the other way, after the monster which had nearly hit him.

  Barry Hooper felt the coldness of fear for the first time about his heart.

  He was approaching Newent now, the place where they had gone to the restaurant last Wednesday night, the place where it had all started to go wrong. It seemed unbelievable that it was only six nights ago. But this road by-passed the old market town and there would be a long stretch of straight road after he had zoomed past the turning for Newent. A car threatened to pull out in front of him, then realized just in time how fast the single headlamp was approaching, and pulled up with a jerk. Thank God for that.

  He was on the straight stretch now. He opened up the bike to the ton, glorying in the smoothness of the rising whine of the engine, loving the swiftness of the acceleration between his thighs, even in this moment of crisis. Then he remembered. Just round the bend, where the old road at the other end of Newent ran at right angles across this road, there were traffic lights.

  He would go through them, even if they were at red. He made the decision as he ran beneath trees and slowed for the bend. He had no alternative. If he respected the red of the lights and halted, the big Rover would be up beside him, the coppers tumbling out to grab him. He could hear the siren again. He could not understand how they had managed to stay so close. They were good, those guys.

  The lights were green. They came at him as if they had life and movement of their own, reminding him again how fast he was going. He was through them like the wind, raising his right fist for a second in brief, unwitnessed triumph, willing the lights to turn to red before the police car reached them. The pigs had an advantage, with their sirens and their flashing lights: other traffic would give way to them. It wasn’t fair really. But he still had the Ducati to balance that.

  As he left Newent behind and moved on to a winding stretch of road where the double central lines forbade overtaking, he heard the siren behind him again. They were through the lights.

  He was three miles now from the motorway, on a road which had a maximum speed of fifty for the first mile and forty after that. They would know which way he had turned at the motorway, unless he could put more ground between him and them.

  The road was blessedly free of traffic, and he took the willing machine up to eighty, then ninety, roaring on the wrong side on the bends, trusting that if he saw no oncoming glow of light, there would be no oncoming vehicle. At the bottom of a short, steep hill, a road turned away at forty-five degrees towards the Forest of Dean, and a vehicle of some kind was beginning to ease out across his path, to turn whence he had come.

  He willed it to stop, then blasted his own horn in a long, insistent warning to get back. It was an old car, and it kept moving. He had to cancel his plans to go in front of it at the last minute, as it kept moving at a snail’s pace across the road. He twisted the handlebars left, shot through the narrow space which miraculously opened on his own side of the road, behind the car, and fought to retain control of a bike which was moving too fast to turn at this speed.

  There was nothing coming the other way, and he used every foot of the road as he fought the skid, first one way, then the other, using all of his strength as well as all of his skill to regain control of the Ducati. ‘Pushed you too far there, babe! Won’t do it again, so don’t you worry!’ Barry patted the machine’s flank as if it were a mettlesome horse, then realized that the peal of laughter which rent the darkness above was coming from him.

  Relief, that was. He’d been lucky there, might as well admit it. But if he hadn’t been skilful as well as lucky, he wouldn’t have made it, would he? He roared jubilantly over the hill with the old stone church hall on his left and down the steep, short slope beyond it. Almost there now! Goodnight, pigs!

  A sign on his left said forty miles an hour. That was a laugh, when he was doing over eighty! But it was less than a mile to the motorway now, and he must surely be far enough ahead for him to confuse his pursuers about the route he would take. He’d keep a low profile for weeks of riding after this, just in case they circulated a description of the Ducati. Better safe than sorry!

  As he flew past the dark shape of the post office in Gorsley on his right, he heard the siren again behind him. They could surely not be as close as that awful wailing through the damp night air said they were?

  He was tempted to change his plans and speed south down the motorway, past Ross-on-Wye and into Wales. It was an easy, natural turn to the left, and he would scarcely need to slacken his speed. But they might have alerted other police in Ross. That would be the way they were expecting him to turn.

  He sped on over the motorway bridge, holding his speed for as long as he dared. It was a tight turn on to the northern carriageway of the M50: this entry had only been built as a temporary one, twenty years and more ago, but it remained unaltered, because the planned permanent access had never been built. That was all right, because Barry Hooper knew it well, knew that he must turn through almost 180 degrees in forty yards.

  He would probably have managed it all right, if the siren hadn’t sounded again as he began to slow. It was cruelly close, probably beside the little primary school, scarcely two hundred yards behind him.

  If a huge van hadn’t been turning off the motorway to take the short cut along the B road, he might still have got away with it.

  As it was, Barry slowed just too late, thrust at the brakes in belated panic, felt the tyres of his faithful machine sliding beyond control beneath him, felt the wet tarmac tearing through his immaculate leathers to the flesh beneath, saw the side of the massive van coming at him like a concrete wall.

  The bike went on, sliding sixty yards down the hard shoulder of the motorway with a rending of tortured metal. The rider hit the base of the van with a sickening sound, then disappeared beneath it.

  The police Rover 75 parked carefully: there was no longer any need for haste.

  The driver left his roof light flashing; its intermittent, garish blue light gave a hellish illumination to the scene around the stationary pantechnicon. Its driver, climbing stiffly from his warm cab, clad bizarrely in a string vest, said in an odd voice, ‘I didn’t have a chance.’

  The police traffic control men nodded, radioed for an ambulance, moved cautiously to the side of the huge vehicle. A boot, ripped off in the impact, lay pathetically beneath the rear wheel of the van. Whatever else was left of Barry Hooper lay invisible beneath it.

  Goodnight, pigs.

  Seventeen

  The police Mondeo which Barry Hooper had waited so anxiously to see on the previous day drove into Camellia Park on the morning of Wednesday, the twentieth of December. But it did not drive up to the groundsmen’s office, where Hooper had watched so anxiously for its arrival. It turned instead into the car park beside the clubhouse. The tall figure of John Lambert levered itself stiffly from the passenger seat and followed Bert Hook round the back of the low modern building, glancing for a moment at the wintry sky as he moved.

  Joanne Moss had laid out the pies, the bacon and the various forms of bread her clients preferred. She was as meticulous and neat and well prepared as ever. ‘It’s mostly fast food, I know,’ she said apologetically, ‘but it’s what they want and enjoy. There won’t be many of them, in weather like this, but they like something hot, and they don’t want to wait too long for it!’ Her nervous little laugh said that she knew they were not here to discuss the culinary merits of her offerings.

  Joanne knew they must know a lot more now than when they had talked to her on Friday night. T
hey’d talked to all the others now, some of them more than once. They must have found out a lot more about Patrick. Things she hadn’t wanted them to find out, probably. She steeled herself for that, telling herself that this was no more than she had expected, all along.

  The next half hour could well be the most important of her life. She told herself not to be melodramatic, but she could not rid herself of that idea. Well, she was up to it, anyway. She hadn’t killed Pat, had she? Cling on to that idea, Joanne, and go for it.

  The Chief Superintendent seemed in no hurry to start. He studied her without embarrassment, even when they were all sitting down, as if estimating her state of mind, her preparedness for this interview. Perhaps that was part of his technique. Joanne determined to play it cool, to stay as calm as this man heavy with experience seemed to be, as he looked so hard into her face.

  ‘Tell us again about your discovery of the body.’

  It was like a blow to her face, the way Lambert went straight in without the slightest attempt at preliminaries. Joanne swallowed hard, forced herself to take her time over this. The question couldn’t harm her: she held on to that thought as she said slowly, ‘There was a lot of noise going on in the restaurant as I went down to the basement. I met Michelle Nayland coming back up the stairs, but no one else came down to the Ladies during the three or four minutes whilst I was in there. I don’t know whether anyone was in the Gents at that time, murdering Patrick.’

  She looked up at that point, into impassive, attentive faces. ‘I noticed the door of the gents’ cloakroom was slightly open as I emerged from the Ladies and saw Patrick’s foot through the gap. The door was probably already open when I came down the stairs, but if it was I didn’t notice it. I found the body, saw the big pool of blood around it. The next thing I remember is Chris Pearson slapping me to stop me screaming.’

  It was delivered as if she had memorized it, as if she was anxious to get through it without making a mistake, without contradicting any detail she had given them before. It sounded a little odd, like a careful childish recitation in this nightmarish framework, but there was nothing unnatural in that. Anyone who had discovered a corpse in this gory context would have been over the scene many times, running the events through like a loop on a videotape.