The Boat House

FORTY-THREE

Ivie had been having bad feelings about the situation ever since Dizzy had called him up to the doorway of his suite to explain that he'd been joined by 'a lady friend' during the night, and that her presence at the Hall was going to have to be the best kept secret since Winston Churchill's sex change. It hadn't taken much for Ivie to guess that the lady friend in question would be the little waitress from the village that Dizzy had been pining over for so long.

It had felt like trouble to Ivie even then, and when he'd seen them going out together in the limo and then returning after half an hour with an obviously underaged kid that they'd taken up to the suite with them, the mental alarm bells had really started to ring. He'd watched them unseen from a doorway as they'd ascended, and he'd felt his skin creep into gooseflesh as he'd heard the waitress whispering to the child in a way that was somehow empty of words but filled with promises. When the door had closed behind them and the lock had clicked shut, Ivie had begun to feel sick. It was then that he'd gone to the key board in the housekeeper's closet and helped himself to her passkey; but, until the loud music and the scream, he hadn't been able to raise the nerve to use it.

Now he and Marinello were in the estate's Land Rover, the one with the wire-protected windows that was like a mobile jail, bumping along the middle track through the centre of the estate. McCarthy and Diane had taken the lower road along the very edge of the lake while Ross Aldridge, alone and in Diane's pickup truck, was way up on the high ground where the woodland ended and the shooting moor began.

Ivie was at the wheel. Marinello rode shotgun. In spite of Aldridge's insistence that there was a possibility of real danger, he might have felt happier if it could have been the other way around.

"What do you think?" Marinello asked suddenly, as if his thoughts had been slowly heating up and now had to boil over.

"I don't know," Ivie said, scanning the woodland out of the meshed window as they rolled forward at no more than ten miles an hour. "Doesn't make any sense to me. You'd think the copper would know what he was talking about."

"Unless there's more to it, and nobody's saying."

"What do you mean?"

"I was in the village, first thing. The news is all over. They're saying the copper's wife walked out on him last night. What if this ties in?"

Ivie thought it over.

It made a certain kind of sense, even though he couldn't see all of the connections; and Tony's information in such matters was usually good, thanks to the network of local contacts that he'd kept up since his all comers dance marathon on the night of the party. If the girl was supposed to be so dangerous — and there was nothing about the way that she looked to suggest that she was — then, why was Aldridge throwing together a rag-tag vigilante force instead of calling on his own people? Perhaps his own people were on their way, but Ivie had seen nothing to suggest it.

He was about to say as much, when the small police radio crackled into life and gave them both a start. It was Aldridge, calling on both of his parties to check in.

Ivie reached for the radio, which he'd hung by its carrying strap from the Rover's rearview mirror. Pressing the transmission button, he said, "Bob Ivie. Nothing so far."

"Where are you?"

"About a mile out, still moving."

A couple of seconds later, they heard Diane reporting on the same channel. She said that she and McCarthy hadn't seen anything yet, either.

Marinello said, "I don't like it. I don't know what's going on, but I haven't seen anything to warrant any of this." The whole car dropped with a jolt as they hit a bad pothole, and the engine complained as Ivie changed down a gear to get them out of it. The Rover was an ex army model, unbelievably old and not fit for much more than carrying small parties up to the shooting butts. Marinello added, as Ivie was changing back up again, "I think we're being set up, here."

"For what?"

"I don't know. But say they've got a situation, the four of them, and now everything's gone wrong and nobody's thinking straight. Can't you just see it?"

"I suppose it's possible."

"What do they think we are? Stupid?"

Ivie couldn't say that he was as fully convinced as Marinello seemed to be, but he didn't have any evidence that he could offer for his doubts.

But he'd heard that whispering, on the stairs. And he'd seen the way that the waitress had been looking at the child.

Aldridge said that he'd seen her in action, and perhaps this was the same kind of thing. If you hadn't been there, it was impossible to explain.

Ivie suddenly hit the brakes, and then started to reverse.

"I saw something," he said.

What he'd seen proved to be the glint of a hubcap, lying in the grass beyond a gatepost a few yards back. The post itself was leaning, the wood splintered and showing fresh… as if somebody inexperienced in a big, unfamiliar car had taken the entrance too fast.

"I'll call," Ivie said, reaching for the radio.

"No," Marinello said abruptly. "Let's be sure we get to her before anyone else does."

And so instead of calling, he hauled on the wheel to turn the heavy vehicle into the driveway.

Ivie recognised the track. It led out to the old trap shooting range where Diane had sometimes come to practice. It was all overgrown now, but another car had been here ahead of them and it had passed by fairly recently.

They came to the limousine about a hundred yards further on, around the bend and out of sight of the main track. Ahead of it was the clearing for the range with its group of small, weathered silver wooden huts. The limo's side had been damaged and its rear bumper had been torn halfway loose; the driver's door was wide open and at a strange angle.

There was nobody inside it, or anywhere around.

They stopped the Rover, and got out. The woodland was strangely quiet — no birdsong, even. Marinello didn't seem worried, but he took the shotgun anyway. He'd told Ivie that he was keeping the safety on, almost as if in concession to their shared doubts.

"What's her name?" Marinello said. "Can you remember?"

"Anna, I think."

"Not Anna," Marinello said. "More unusual. Anya. No… Alina." And then he turned and cupped his hands and called through them to the entire forest. "Hey, Alina," he called, "You can come out, we're not going to hurt you. We know you haven't done anything." He waited for a while, and then carried on, "It's either us, or the others. You know what it means if they find you?"

More silence.

"She could be well away by now," Ivie suggested, half hoping.

"Last chance!" Marinello called, almost shouting himself hoarse this time.

And just as it was starting to seem that Ivie was right, she stepped out of cover.

She'd been around behind one of the huts, not so far away; she was shoeless, looking lost and scared, and she was shivering in her lightweight cotton dress even though it wasn't particularly cold. Tony Marinello started toward her immediately. Glancing back over his shoulder, he said, "God, look at the state of her. Get that car rug out of the back, Bob."

He was already striding out toward her. She looked every bit as bleak and as lost as that child back there in the Hall; Ivie was now thinking that his fears and his suspicions were showing themselves to be formless, finding no reflection in this reality at all.

Marinello had reached Alina and put his arm around her shoulders. The shotgun was over his other forearm. He'd broken it open for extra safety, and the empty barrel was pointing at the ground. They were walking back toward the Rover.

Ivie gave himself a shake. What could he have been thinking of? He turned away and reached into the back of the Rover for the checkered wool travelling blanket that lay folded on one of the vinyl benches. It would be musty, but it would do for now. As he was bringing it out, he glanced at the radio that was hanging from the mirror bracket.

"No, I don't think so," Ivie muttered, and turned back to meet the others.

Marinello was in trouble.

He'd fallen to his knees after covering only half of the return distance, and now it was Alina who was showing concern for him. The shotgun lay on the ground where he'd dropped it, a few strides back. Ivie started to run forward. As he did Marinello looked up, purpling, eyes literally starting to bulge in a manner so unnatural that it was almost fascinating; he started to raise his hand in a gesture of appeal, asking for Ivie's help in something that he simply couldn't understand.

Alina looked up, too.

Ivie saw the green fire in her eyes, and a new and frightening intensity in her attitude; he knew then that everything had been a sham, that his first instincts had been the only correct ones, and that Aldridge had been telling the truth even though he hadn't been telling it all. Ivie realised all of this in the time that it took for Alina to cover the distance between them.

She struck at him, her hand as hard and flat as a blade, but the rug that he was holding took the main force of the blow. He threw it at her and ran for the Rover, flat out and feeling his age. He'd wondered for maybe a half second about reaching the gun, but knew that he had no chance. Why couldn't he have bagged it way back at the very beginning? Fortunately the door was still open, and he dived straight for the radio and snatched it down with a force that snapped the bracket and brought the mirror along as well.

He fumbled for the transmission switch. He tried to say She's here, we've got her…

But instead it came out as, "She's got us!"

A hand suddenly grabbed his collar, and in a show of immense strength he was hauled out of the Rover backwards. His head clipped the top of the door arch, hard.

This was all that he knew.