At Risk

40

What people saw in the Strand bungalows, mused Elsie Hogan, was more than she could fathom. They were poky, they were cold, you had to drive all the way to Dersthorpe if you wanted so much as a box of tea bags, and there wasn’t a telly or a phone in any of them! Still, Diane Munday had to know what she was doing. She wouldn’t hang on to them if they weren’t turning her a profit.

Elsie “did” for the Mundays on the days that she wasn’t “doing” for the Lakebys. She wasn’t particularly fond of Diane Munday, who was rather liable to run an accusing finger along a dusty skirting board, and to argue the point when it came to totting up the hours. But cash was cash, and she couldn’t survive on what the Lakebys paid her alone. If Cherisse fell pregnant… Well, it didn’t bear thinking about.

Sunday was Elsie’s morning for the bungalows. She didn’t sweep them all out every weekend, especially if they were unoccupied, but she kept an eye on them, and as she lurched slowly up the uneven track in her ten-year-old Ford Fiesta, windscreen-wipers thonking back and forth against the steady rain, she could just see the front of the black car belonging to the woman staying in Number One. Student, Mrs. M had said. Well, she was welcome to her studies, especially on a morning like this.

From the front seat of the Astra, Jean D’Aubigny watched the Fiesta’s slow approach through her binoculars. She had driven up to within a couple of feet of the track to give herself a clear field of vision in either direction, and for the last hour’s watch had been listening to the local BBC station on the car radio, hoping for news of the Gunter murder. Nothing had come through, though, and she had been left peering through the sweeping curtains of rain and attempting to subdue her mounting agitation. The last time-check, a couple of minutes ago, had been 10:20 a.m.

When were they going to go against the target? she wondered for the hundredth time. What was the delay? The C4 was volatile, as Faraj knew, and couldn’t be stored for long. But he was imperturbable. “We go when it is time,” he had said, and she knew better than to ask again.

She blinked, and returned her eyes to the binoculars propped on the Astra’s half-open window. Slowly, like a mirage, the other car crept towards her. It was old, Jean could now see, and almost certainly too clapped-out to be carrying plain clothes policemen or any other servants of the state. On the other hand, they might deliberately be using a cheap old car to get close to her. To be on the safe side she drew the Malyah, and laid it in her lap.

The Fiesta was almost on her now, and Jean could see the driver-a solid-looking middle-aged woman. Switching on the engine and putting the car into gear, she accelerated and let out the Astra’s clutch, intending to reverse towards the house, well out of the other car’s way. But the car was not in reverse. Somehow she had put it into first or second, and as the gears engaged the car leapt hard forwards and hammered into the wing of the oncoming Fiesta. There was a crunch, a lurching cough as the Astra stalled, and a cascade of headlight glass. Swinging counter-clockwise across the wet surface, the Fiesta came to an unsteady halt.

Shit, thought Jean. Shit! Shoving the Malyah into the waistband of her jeans, she jumped from the car, heart thumping. The Astra’s bumper was dented and it had lost a headlight. The Fiesta’s entire passenger-side wing, however, was a write-off and the car’s driver was sitting motionless, staring in front of her.

“Are you all right?” shouted Jean through the Fiesta’s closed window. Rain sluiced down, drumming at the car roof and drenching her hair.

The window opened a couple of inches, but the middle-aged driver continued to face ahead of her. She had switched the engine off and held the keys in her hand, which was shaking badly. “I’ve hurt my neck,” she whimpered plaintively. “Whiplash.”

Like hell you have, thought Jean savagely, crouching beside the window with the rain running icily down her back. “Look, we really didn’t hit each other very hard,” she pleaded. “Why don’t…”

“I didn’t hit anyone,” said the woman, her voice a little stronger now. “You hit me.”

“OK, fine. I hit you. I’m sorry. Why don’t I just give you a hundred and fifty pounds right now-cash, right-and we can…”

But to her horror, Jean saw that a phone had appeared in the woman’s hand, and that the two-inch gap in the window was closing. She grabbed at the Fiesta’s door but the rust-streaked handle locked solid as she reached it, and through the rain-blurred glass she saw the woman pulling away from her, her fingers stabbing with tremulous suspicion at her phone.

No time to think. Wrenching the Malyah from her waistband and thumbing down the safety catch, Jean screamed, “No! Drop the phone!”

The two plinks at the windscreen were barely louder than the beating of the rain, and the woman seemed to sink in her seat belt and fold forwards. For a moment Jean thought that she had somehow fired the Malyah without knowing, and then Faraj ran forwards with the PSS, shouldered her out of the way, and put two more aimed rounds through the driver’s-side window. The woman’s body jerked a little with each new impact, and sagged further forwards.

Reaching down to the ground for a large stone, Faraj heaved it through the bullet-crazed side window, reached inside, unlocked and opened the door, and rummaged beneath the woman’s body. His arm came out bloodied to the elbow, and wiping the phone on the woman’s blouse he glanced at the display and cut the connection.

“Load the car,” he said quietly, rainwater streaming from the pale planes of his face. “Go.”

Hurrying to the water’s edge, he hurled Elsie Hogan’s phone and the four brass-bright 7.62 shell cases out to sea. Inside the bungalow, desperately trying to ignore the shrieking panic that was expanding within her, Jean made up two bin-liners of clothes and bundled them into her rucksack with the Malyah ammunition, the map book, the compass, the clasp knife, the Nokia phone, the two washbags, and the velcro-sealing wallet containing the money. Keep doing things, she told herself unsteadily. Don’t stop. Don’t think. Faraj, meanwhile, carefully took the C4 device from the fridge, placed it in an open-topped biscuit tin that he had packed with a hand towel, and took it out to the car.

Everything else that might assist a forensic investigation-their used clothes, the sheets and blankets, the spare food-was bundled into the centre of the sitting room and sprinkled with petrol from the five-litre container Jean had filled at the Hawfield garage. Further fuel-soaked combustibles were packed around Elsie Hogan’s body in the Ford Fiesta.

“Ready?” asked Faraj, surveying the bungalow’s disordered front room. The air stank of petrol. The time was 10:26. It was just five minutes since the killing. They were wearing jeans, hiking boots and dark green waterproof mountain jackets.

“Ready,” said Jean, flicking a plastic briquet lighter at the fuel-soaked sleeve of one of the shirts she had bought Faraj in King’s Lynn. They left the house at a run, heads down into the rain. As she leaned through the Fiesta window with the lighter, he swung the rucksacks into the back seat of the Astra.

Then she drove. They had planned for a fast exit, thanks be to God. She knew exactly where she was going.