Henry had drunk the last of his coffee and taken some from Donaldson’s flask, swapping the hot drink for a bottle of water, basing the transaction on the belief that it was important for Donaldson to keep his pure liquid intake up to compensate for the stuff leaving his body. Coffee wouldn’t be much good for him, even though they were entering a phase that Henry thought would be a balancing act. Donaldson needed to keep up his fluids, yes, and water was the best, yes, but he also needed to keep warm as the temperature dropped, and a few mouthfuls of coffee could help that. Maybe. Coffee, though, didn’t always have a beneficial effect on the bowels.
Henry finished his high-energy cereal bar that tasted of card, then stood up. The harsh wind blew into his face, so he dropped back down again, unfolded his Ordnance Survey map and tried to plot their current position using that and the woefully inadequate compass.
‘Where are we?’
Henry blew out his cheeks and placed a gloved finger on the map. ‘Here,’ he said confidently.
Donaldson did not even glance. ‘Let’s push on.’ He got up unsteadily, swung his rucksack on to his back, then doubled over in agony.
The office was pretty sparse. Desk, two chairs and a sturdy, old-fashioned filing cabinet. There was a cordless phone on a base on the desk, next to a charger for police radios. Pretty dull, even as offices go. Flynn glanced one more time up the stairs before putting his finger to his mouth, saying ‘Shush’ to the dog, and stepping through the door.
Items of female uniform, including a hat, were hung on a series of hooks on the wall. There was a message log on the desk, a ring binder in which every call-out was recorded by hand, whether it came from a member of the public ringing in directly, calling into the office in person, or a telephone or radio message received from the divisional comms room at Lancaster, the main station covering. Flynn knew it was procedure to log everything. He opened the binder with his fingertip, noticing there were two batteries in the charger, both with the green ‘fully charged’ lights glowing, and an actual radio next to this. Personal radios were issued to each individual officer now and Flynn assumed this was Cathy’s own radio, although it could have been Tom’s.
‘Mm,’ he said at the back of his throat. So wherever she was, he thought, she wasn’t in uniform and didn’t have her PR with her… maybe. Flynn wondered if she and Tom had argued and she had stormed out and was now holed up with a relative or in a hotel somewhere, licking her wounds. It was only speculation, nothing more, Flynn admitted to himself. He could be wrong on all counts. Perhaps Tom simply didn’t want to discuss a deeply personal situation. Flynn could empathize with that.
A blank block of message pads was crocodile-clipped to the left side of the message log binder, with several days’ worth of messages inserted on to the steel rings on the right-hand side. Flynn started to peek at the top message, which was handwritten — he assumed, by Cathy.
‘I thought you were leaving.’
Flynn jerked around to see Tom standing at the office door. He had been able to come silently down the stairs, his approach masked by the sound of the shower. He was still in his dressing gown. ‘And you’ve no right to be in here.’
‘Have you two had a fight?’ Flynn asked, unperturbed.
‘None of your business,’ Tom stated.
‘Fair do’s.’ Flynn raised his hands in defeat. ‘But I take it you do know where Cathy is?’
Tom pointed towards the front door of the house, saying nothing.
Flynn took the hint and sidled past Tom, who was almost as big as he was. He patted the dog on the way out and as he stepped out into the cold afternoon, the door was slammed behind him. Without a backward glance he walked through the sticking snow to his hire car, spun it around and drove back to the village, stopping outside the pub called the Tawny Owl. A free house, it proclaimed on the sign.
They edged carefully along a tight shale track that clung to the edge of the steep hillside, stumbling occasionally and travelling, according to Henry’s compass, slightly north-north-west. Being on the exposed eastern side of the hill, they were completely at the mercy of the weather. The wind had increased forcefully, driving hard sleet-ice remorselessly into their sides as though they were being pelted by gravel.
As much as he was cursing himself for getting them into this mess, Henry was pretty sure they were on the right track. They were just starting the descent down Mallowdale Fell into the valley cut by the River Raeburn. When they got down to that level, Henry knew they should be able to find a good track that would lead them to the civilization that was Kendleton, their stop for the night and now, of course, the end of their journey. He knew that Donaldson could not possibly go on, that his friend was in embarrassing and continual agony. He might even need medical help, although Henry knew that doctors only dealt with extreme cases of food poisoning these days. You literally had to excrete it all out of your system, all by yourself. Probably all that Donaldson needed was TLC, immediate access to a toilet and a bed to crash on.
Henry stopped. Donaldson had lagged behind. As he waited for him to catch up, he turned his back to the wind and took out his mobile phone. Still no signal, but even so he typed out a text message with a frozen thumb and pressed send, hoping it would wing its way into the ether anyway. The screen said ‘Unable to send message’, so he tried again, pressed the send button, gave a flick of his wrist as though this would help, and hoped it would somehow land on Kate’s phone.
Donaldson stood miserably behind him. His eyes had sunk into his face. He looked drawn and exhausted.
‘We start going down now.’ Henry had to shout above the howling wind. ‘Then there’ll be more cover and it should be easier, OK?’ His friend nodded. ‘Push on?’ Henry asked. Another nod. Henry turned and started to walk, imagined he heard something — a thud? — but wasn’t certain. Something that wasn’t part of the weather noise. He glanced over his shoulder, expecting to have Donaldson right behind him.
He wasn’t there.
Flynn climbed out of the Peugeot and walked to the front door of the pub. The snow was now horrendously heavy, falling in a way he hadn’t seen since he’d been a teenager, when winters were much more severe in this part of the world. It was thick and was definitely now sticking — almost as soon as he walked through it, leaving footprints, his tracks were instantly filled in as though he hadn’t been there. He knew at that point that if he was going to get out of Kendleton that day, now was the time to do it. The weather looked set and bleak and it wouldn’t take long to cut off a village like this one, set deep in a valley, one road in, one road out.
He decided to do what he needed to do first, then make a decision about leaving. If he got snowed in, he would just have to throw himself on the mercy of the innkeeper. If necessary he would sleep in the bar, something he’d done on many occasions in the past. The good old days.
He glanced up at the name plate over the door as he went in and saw the licensee’s name was displayed as Alison Marsh. He found himself in a very pleasant country pub, low beamed, dark wood, nicely decorated and with a huge fire roaring in a grate. He approached the bar, noticing only a couple of other people in the snug. One was a youngish woman who seemed slightly out of place, sitting alone in an alcove, the other was a grizzled old-timer on a corner seat at the bar who looked as though he’d been rooted there, growing old, for many years. He had a pint of Guinness in front of him, and a whisky chaser. The young woman watched him but the man didn’t even raise his eyes from the newspaper he was scanning. Behind the bar was a nice-looking lady, maybe early forties, who smiled at Flynn.
‘Hi,’ he said, ‘Er… do you do coffee?’