Stephen Gallagher - The Boat House

Aldridge took a look, half interested. "Keep it somewhere safe," he said.

"For evidence?" Diane said.

"Something like that," Aldridge said, moving off toward the french windows as if the legal niceties couldn't be further from his mind right now.

They went out to take a look at the terrace. There was no way down other than to drop from the parapet, but the ground beneath was soft. There might have been some mark of where she'd landed, but it was impossible to be certain from here.

Aldridge said nothing for a moment. But he seemed to be running through his options, rather than hesitating.

"Right," he said when he'd reached a decision. "We have to move." He turned to the girl, who was standing in the window behind them. "Are you all right?"

"I just want to go," the girl said in a small voice.

"You know you're a witness."

"I didn't even want to come here. My dad'll kill me if he ever finds out. Can't I just leave?"

Aldridge glanced out across the overgrown gardens. Pete could see no movement out there.

"I'll tell you what to do," Aldridge said to the girl. "Get your stuff and walk out of the gates and don't look back. Don't tell anybody what you saw here today, and no one'll come looking for you. That's the deal."

"You're on," she said, and hurried to get her pack.

They went down to check the ground under the terrace, leaving Ivie and Marinello in a hurried whispered conference. The empty sun lounger stood out on the lawn, a faint breeze riffling the pages of Ivie's abandoned magazine. On the ground by the wall there was no convincing sign, but after a minute Ivie appeared at the parapet above them and called down, "The limo's gone."

"Gone where?" Aldridge said.

"How should I know? It was there ten minutes ago, it ain't there now."

The five of them met up again in Diane's office, where Diane unlocked her grey metal gun cupboard. Laid out on the desk, the four shotguns — Aldridge's own included — made a formidable looking arsenal. Ivie and Marinello were both contemplating it with the same dazed look; but Pete's dismay was mainly felt when he looked at Ross Aldridge.

He was beginning to feel railroaded, hustled along the young policeman's path before he'd had time to consider the game that he was entering. This entire affair was beginning to take on an ugly aspect, almost like the organisation of a lynch mob. Aldridge wasn't pursuing his professional duty; this seemed to be turning more into some kind of a vendetta, with Aldridge merely using his profession to legitimise it.

The four guns, and the schoolteacher's scrapbook. There was the situation, in one simple picture. Aldridge was asking each of them about their firearms experience.

"Don't look at me," Pete said. "Most I ever handled was a bent air rifle in a fairground."

Tony Marinello said more or less the same. Ivie had hit a few birds in his time. Diane had hit very little in hers, but she was still included as one of the experienced shots.

"Now," Aldridge said. "This is the situation. We know she's taken the limo. Pete's car's still blocking the way out, so she could only have gone into the estate. How many tracks are there?"

Ivie and Marinello looked blank. Diane rubbed her forehead as she thought for a moment.

"Three main ones," she said. "Lakeside, woodland, and across the top. There are little dirt roads as well, but that car's too wide."

"So that's three possibilities, but we've only got two cars — Diane's pickup, and Pete's wreck."

"Thanks," Pete said drily, but Aldridge didn't seem to hear; and besides, Bob Ivie was chipping in with a suggestion.

"Three," he said. "There's the Land Rover in the stables."

"Okay. Three possibilities, three cars. We want a gun and a radio in each. Those with no weapons experience handle the driving. If you find her, raise the alarm and don't let her get near. Use the gun if you have to. I mean, a warning shot first if it'll do any good, but then I'm saying use it. I've seen her in action and I'm telling you, don't even hesitate. Any questions?"

"Yeah," Tony Marinello said. "What the fuck's going on?"

"Later," Aldridge told him. "Just hope you don't find out the hard way."

Pete was watching Aldridge as he handed out the weapons and counted shells.

Forget it, buster, he was thinking. Let's just forget the whole thing.

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? "