M.R. Hall - The Disappeared

She pulled up on a double yellow and ran into the bus station. Save for a handful of weary-looking stragglers waiting at a cab rank, the concourse was deserted. The only buses in evidence were parked up for the night. A metal grille was drawn down over the ticket-office window. Jenny hurried between the rows of silent vehicles: there was no sign of a young woman lugging a rucksack.

Fighting off a rising fear that Anna Rose had slipped through her fingers, Jenny headed back towards the timetables. She spotted a man in liveried overalls climbing down from an empty coach with a vacuum cleaner. She hurried towards him, fishing her damp and crumpled card from her coat pocket.

'Excuse me — ' Breathless, she handed it to him. 'I'm a coroner. I'm looking for a young woman who would have come through here about half an hour ago. Short black hair. Rucksack.'

The cleaner, a mild West Indian with heavy-lidded eyes and the weary expression of a man resigned to a lifetime of joyless, badly paid work, peered suspiciously at the card.

'Have you seen her?'

Cagy, the cleaner said, 'Don't think so.'

'Have any buses gone out in the last half hour?'

'The London bus would have left at a quarter to.'

Jenny glanced at her watch: nine minutes to eleven.

'Was that the only one?'

'Far as I know.'

'Does it go straight through?'

The cleaner shrugged. 'I never been on it.'

Jenny ran back to her car, her dainty work shoes slipping on the light covering of snow. The feet of her tights were wet, her toes aching with cold. Sliding into the driver's seat she turned the heater on full blast and took off, the back end of the car fish-tailing as she swung away from the kerb. Fifty yards behind her, the stationary Lexus flicked on its headlights and followed.

The main road out of town widened swiftly into the M3 2 motorway. Jenny pushed up the empty outside lane at eighty miles an hour, cutting virgin tracks through the slush. What would she do even if she did catch the bus? she asked herself. She could follow it all one hundred and twenty miles to London, but what then? Even if Anna Rose was on it, there was no reason why she'd cooperate, and God knows what she was carrying in her backpack. The rational thing would have been to call the police and assert her right to take a statement once Anna Rose was safely in custody. If they were obstructive she could come armed with a High Court order and insist. Cold, wet and painfully tired, it was an attractive proposition. Her phone was right there in her handbag. She could be speaking to Pironi in seconds.

Another more persuasive voice told her not to be seduced, that she'd never get to speak to Anna Rose if the police got to her first. She'd be pushed out, gagged, and issued with threats of dismissal if she threatened to make trouble. The full might of the terrorist-fighting state would be wheeled out against her.

She thrust her foot down harder. The needle climbed towards ninety.

On the margins of the city she took the east-bound lane and swept in a semi-circle to join the M4. The motorway descended into unlit darkness. Her eyes smarted with the strain of squinting through the smeared arcs of dirt on the windscreen: every oncoming set of lights blinded her to the road in front.

Rigid with tension, she had covered more than fifteen miles when the double-stacked tail lights of an express coach appeared out of the gloom. It was cruising at a steady seventy in the inside lane, filthy fountains spewing from its massive tyres. Keeping the middle lane between them, Jenny drew alongside, trying to distinguish the passengers' faces, but all she could make out through the bus's steamy windows was the flickering of seat-back screens.

The car lit up with strobing light. Startled, Jenny glanced in the mirror. A large, aggressive vehicle inches away from her rear bumper flashed its headlights a second time. Dazzled, she swerved left into the centre lane and caught the full spray from the bus as a Range Rover powered past. Instinctively, she touched the brakes and swung back away from the bus. A horn sounded behind her; another set of lights flashed, forcing her to jerk sharply to the left. She barely saw the Lexus accelerate away as the back end of the Golf flicked out to the right. For a brief moment she was sliding sideways along the carriageway. She wrenched at the wheel, clipped the rear corner of the bus, travelled through a long, slow, graceful one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and came to rest on the hard shoulder, pointing into the traffic. A huge lorry thundered past honking long and loud as it swerved to avoid her front end.

Exhilarated at simply being alive, she snatched at the ignition, brought the engine to life and slammed the stick into first. The front wheels spun in two inches of snow, then caught and lurched erratically forwards. Several tightly bunched cars sped past on the inside lane sounding their horns. Aiming for . the gap before the next wall of approaching headlights, Jenny stamped on the accelerator, threw the car sharply left and crunched through the gears past sixty, to seventy to eighty . . .

She sped precariously over the skin of snow for over a mile and caught up with the lorry that had nearly struck her. She edged past and emerged ahead of it to see the distinctive tail lights of the bus up ahead. It was indicating left and exiting onto the slip road of a service station. Jenny swerved across two lanes and made the exit with only feet to spare.

At the crest of a slope she followed signs to the bus and lorry park. The coach had come to a halt in the far right- hand corner of the football-pitch-sized lot. She nursed the Golf across the lying snow, passing rows of trucks parked up for the night, and contemplated the prospect of coming face to face with Anna Rose. What if she refused to talk? Or ran off into the night? Hot needles spread outwards from her chest and down her arms.

She made for the coach's left-hand side. She was no more than thirty yards away when the front passenger door swung back. At the same moment, two figures ran swiftly out of the shadows: wiry, athletic men in black paramilitary overalls and caps. They reached into their jackets as they gained the bus door and burst inside. She stamped on the brakes and slid to a halt, watching the blurred, frenetic movement of bodies behind the misted-up windows. She heard muffled snatches of shrieks and raised voices. A slight, indistinct figure was bundled along the aisle.

It was a glint of reflected light on metal which caught her eye. She looked sharply left and saw his tall, slender silhouette appear from between two goods trailers. He was dressed in jeans and a puffy anorak, a baseball cap pulled down over his forehead, obscuring his face. He stopped at the corner and glanced briefly towards her.

It was him. The American. The man who'd come to the mortuary claiming to be looking for his lost stepdaughter. His attention snapped back to the bus. He raised both hands and took aim as the two men manhandled their prisoner down the steps.

Some reflex made Jenny stamp on the throttle and accelerate towards him. A burst of orange light issued from the barrel of his gun, then another; several more flashes issued from the direction of the bus. The American staggered and reached out a hand to the side of the trailer. Jenny spun past him and slewed to a stop.

Ten yards to her left the two men threw a small, dark- haired female into the back seat of a Range Rover, leaped inside and took off over the kerb, crashing through the thin hedge separating the bus park from the exit road beyond.

The fleet of police cars and unmarked vehicles arrived less than two minutes later. A helicopter followed soon after, illuminating the scene from above with an array of searchlights. The bus park was sealed off. Jenny was rounded up together with the hysterical passengers from the bus and a handful of bewildered truckers. All were frisked and relieved of their mobile phones, cameras and other electrical equipment, before being herded towards the service-station building. Jenny refused to move and was protesting to a uniformed officer that she was one of Her Majesty's coroners on official duty when she saw DI Pironi, with Alison in tow, striding angrily towards her.