Nowhere to Run. Jack Slater

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she had expected. She got up, pulled another one away, then another. Behind them, the ancient wood had rotted away and a sheet of corrugated iron had been fixed over it, on the outside.

      And metal could bend.

      ‘Yes!’ Lauren was breathing hard, but the excitement of possible escape kept her going. The rattle of hailstones on the roof continued as she sat down, put her feet against the metal and pushed.

      *

      By five o’clock, the squad room was back to full capacity and as noisy as Pete remembered it with the incoming officers chatting and joking about the arrests they had made that morning. They had begun to drift in from mid-afternoon. Teams brought in the men and women they had arrested during the morning raids, processed them into custody and interviewed them, then came upstairs to type up their notes and reports. Even with an extra man on the custody desk it was a slow process. Officers were frustrated and short-tempered by the time they got to the squad room, but when they came in and saw Pete at his desk, they each came over and welcomed him back, asked how he was doing, expressed their sympathy or asked after his wife and daughter.

      Leaning back in his chair, his day almost over, Pete heard a phone ring among the hubbub and looked up to see whose it was. DS Mark Bridgman picked up his phone and held a hand up to the two men who were chatting next to his desk. Pete watched as he spoke briefly into the phone, then put it down and stood up, heading for the door to the DI’s office at the far end of the squad room.

      He knocked and went in. Emerged a minute later and returned to his desk.

      ‘So, what do you reckon, boss?’ Dave Miles asked.

      Pete spun his chair back around.

      Dave was looking at him with a half-smile. ‘Looks like gardening season’s over, so are you back for good, or what? Do you reckon you’ll be able to stand the pace?’

      ‘Well, if today’s anything to go by, I reckon I’ll cope.’ We’ll see how Louise dealt with it when I get home, he thought.

      The door at the far end of the room opened and both DI Colin Underhill and DCI Adam Silverstone entered the room.

      Hello. Something’s up.

      He hoped they were not going to make a meal out of welcoming him back. He’d had plenty of that through the afternoon. He didn’t need the official version, especially from Silverstone. He sat up straighter in his chair as Underhill raised his hands for quiet.

      Silverstone stepped up beside the older man. In his immaculate uniform, he looked exactly what he was – a career desk-jockey who’d barely know one end of a baton from the other and had certainly never felt the greasy collar of a drug-pusher or a burglar. The contrast between the two men was almost laughable. Colin was the bigger man in every sense apart from rank. An inch taller, a good four stones heavier, fifteen years older and hugely more experienced, he was a man-manager, not a pen-pusher. He’d walked the beat, come up through the ranks and he looked every inch of it in his slightly rumpled tweed jacket and cord trousers.

      ‘Right,’ said Silverstone. ‘What’s everyone doing at the moment? I need to know what cases each DS has on their desk, as of now, excluding this morning’s haul. Mark?’

      Bridgman looked up and set his pen down. ‘We’ve got the city centre muggings and the break-ins down on the Marsh Barton industrial estate, sir. We’re at a crucial stage with the muggings.’

      The DCI nodded. ‘Simon?’

      Phillips glanced at Pete. ‘Tommy and the Jane Doe, sir. And the airport job.’

      ‘Jim?’

      ‘We’re leading on the drugs, sir. All this morning’s stuff, plus trying to track down where it’s coming from.’

      ‘Right. OK. I think, Simon, you ought to have this new one. A missing girl. Thirteen years old. Rosie Whitlock. Dropped off at school this morning and never went in. Parents are Alistair and Jessica. Live in the St Leonard’s area of the city. Mark’s got the details.’

      Pete spun around to face his team. ‘What are we? Invisible?’ He pushed himself up out of his chair as Dave shrugged.

      ‘Maybe he thinks it’s too soon for you, boss,’ Jane suggested.

      ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’

      *

      Lauren peered with a sinking heart through the gap she’d created at the blackened forest of stinging nettle stems beyond. But, she only had two choices – stay or go. And if she stayed . . . She didn’t even want to think about what would happen to her. She grabbed a couple of big handfuls of loose straw, pushed it out through the gap in front of her, then started to wriggle through, arms in front of her face, hoping that the sleeves of her cardigan might offer some protection from the burning stings.

      Metal scraped the back of her head and she ducked lower. She felt the dull edge dig into her shoulders. There was no going backward now, even if she wanted to. It was forward or nothing. As long as she didn’t get stuck . . .

      ‘Oh, God.’ A vision filled her mind of her stuck half in and half out of the barn, wedged under this bloody door when the man came back and found her. Caught hold of her legs and . . . Throat clogged with terror, she scrambled forward. The old stems crackled like fire as they snapped and broke, adding to the noise of the hail. Then, between her panting breaths, she thought she heard something else.

      She stopped moving. Held her breath, straining to hear.

      ‘No, no, no.’

       An engine.

      He was coming.

      She pulled herself forward. The corrugated iron pressed down on her backside. Her thighs. Then she was rolling out and free, curling into a ball to protect herself from the nettles, barely registering the miracle that she had yet to be stung. Her bare legs felt suddenly chilled. Goosebumps rose on her skin. She got up, pressing herself against the stone wall and looking around for the first time.

      The hail was still coming down hard, thick enough that she could not see clearly through it. The nettles were bending and swaying beneath it – nettles that stretched away, dense black and brown, in front and to the right, all the way to a dense thorn hedge, beyond which lay open fields. To her left, there was a gap at the side of the barn, a barbed-wire fence and woodland, dark and inviting.

      The van sounded terrifyingly close. She began to edge along the side of the old stone wall, reaching out with her left foot to press down the nettles, breaking the stems before moving over them. The engine stopped.

      Oh, God. Her breathing got shallow and fast as terror gripped her.

      He was here. She moved faster. At least the noise of the storm would mean he couldn’t hear her.

      The side door of the van slid open and she stepped forward, pushing through the wet stems rather than pressing them down. She would just have to suffer the consequences for the next couple of days.

      But she was amazed to find that she wasn’t stung.

      She heard the door roll shut.

      Nearly there. Just another metre to the

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