Cold Revenge (Willis/Carter #6)(35)
‘Was there anything interesting after she’d been moved?’
‘We’ve found more money in the drawers.’
‘Anything else personal?’
‘Passport, issued two years ago, to Melanie Drummond. None of Nicola Stone’s fingerprints remain on file as she was given a new identity but we have a new set to go on now.’
‘Anything else, Dermot? Anything missing?’
‘The phone is missing.’ Dermot handed over a monthly phone bill in a plastic sheath.
‘Okay, thanks. I expect it’s long gone. We tried it earlier.’
They watched the ambulance drive away, lights flashing, no siren. Willis took out her phone and put out a location search for Nicola’s.
Carter looked across at her as she was watching her screen.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Her phone is emitting a signal.’
After an hour and a half’s drive, Willis and Carter turned into the lane near Dunstable Downs signposted towards Lambs Farm.
‘Who owns this farm, Eb? No animals, no crops, looks deserted.’ There were fenced fields on either side of the lane and up ahead of them they could see the austere grey farmhouse, dominated by large cattle sheds to its right. At four o’clock the sky’s grey clouds had become so thick they brought on a premature darkness.
‘It’s been empty a year, it’s a probate sale,’ Willis answered. ‘It comes with over two hundred acres.’
They parked up in the yard. The emptiness of the farm was eerie; from somewhere a loose piece of corrugated roofing rattled and vibrated in the gusts of cold wind. The stable doors left open in the yard swung and banged on their hinges. The evening was fast descending.
‘Have we still got it?’ asked Carter. Under the gloom of a leaden sky they took out their boots from his SUV and replaced their shoes.
As they finished up and closed the boot, Willis paused, computer tablet in hand, and made sure of the direction. The signal from Nicola Stone’s phone was still strong.
Carter looked at her screen and the blinking GPS.
‘That’s less than five hundred metres.’ Carter was not a lover of the countryside. It was too big a space for him to control, too unpredictable. No streetlights to see what was out there.
Willis looked up to get her bearings. ‘Down that lane.’ She nodded in the direction of a lane leading off from the back of the yard. It was hard to make out anything but shadows in the empty stalls and stables. From the concrete of the yard they walked past an empty cowshed, and past fields on either side until Willis stopped at an open gateway.
She nodded, staring at the screen in her hand and pointed to her left. ‘It’s this way.’
Carter hesitated, gazing around him as if deciding it was a mistake, but looked at Willis who was walking ahead and joined her. They stayed close to the hedge; the field was grass and weed and bare brown mud.
‘We’re near now,’ said Willis as she stopped and looked at her screen before walking on a few more feet. They looked up to see the sun’s low rays on a corner of the field and the glint of something shining there. The wind got up and the first blast of icy air hit their faces as it drove across the field in a curtain of cold, picking up the topsoil and throwing it into the air. Carter turned his face to shelter it.
‘I can see a light, it’s the phone,’ Willis said as they pushed up the field against the wall of icy sleet, the phone blinking at them. The sound of the wind buffeting them drowned out everything else except the beep from Willis’s tablet. They walked on the next fifteen feet and the ground became uneven. The darkness descended as the clouds took all light from the field, which had nothing else to feed it but the sun and the moon. Carter switched on his torch and shielded his eyes from the sleet as it whipped around them, turning to hail. They got within feet of the phone when Willis stopped. Carter shone his torch over the ground in front of them.
‘The soil has been dug here,’ Carter said. ‘This is recent.’
Willis reached forwards to pick up the phone and her fingers touched others, bony and pushing up from the ground.
Chapter 21
‘Surgery open,’ Kowalski said to the queue of prisoners waiting outside Douglas’s cell door after breakfast.
‘Each person gets fifteen minutes,’ said the guard. ‘If you’re not prepared to wait your turn with good manners then fuck off now and don’t waste Mr Douglas’s time.’
‘Like we have something else to do?’ someone muttered, and the queue broke out in a ripple of laughter.
For two hours Douglas worked his way through the line. He found the nearer he got to his release date the more restless he became. It was impossible to forget it. He tried all the mindfulness techniques he knew but none of them gave him the satisfaction of projecting himself forward in time to the day in June when he would walk out of the prison and start his life again.
He’d enjoyed his time in prison. It had given him time to think and it had given him time to grow. Now he was fully formed and he realised in all those years before, the one thing he didn’t have was connections. He had been an ignorant good-looking lad from Ireland. He’d used those attributes to the max and they’d taken him to many pleasurable places but now he wanted more, so much more. Gone were his good looks, but very much arrived was his intelligence. He felt he was in his prime because, after all, it may have been the size of his muscles that mattered when he was young, but it would be the size of his wallet as he grew old. He was now capable of anything. Now his disciples had become the people he had always thought they would. Cathy might still bear him a child, thought Douglas. She might be in love with Stephen, but even after all these years she still needed the reassurance of the man with the connections. He found that disappointing. Her potential had never been fully realised because of her stupid pretentions. When Douglas got out he’d make so much money for them both that no amount of prejudice could stand in their way. It was what she’d always wanted. Stephen wouldn’t stop them. No one would. Douglas looked across at the man opposite and he asked him, ‘What else would you like to say to your wife?’