“You’ll have to turn on the lights again.”
“Leave that to me. You check the GPS. Where’s the next side road that isn’t a dead end? We need to get out of the way. I can see the police behind us.”
Isabel glanced back over her shoulder. It was true enough. The lights were there now, flashing blue in the dark. Maybe only four or five hundred meters behind at the motorway exit.
“There!” she shouted. “Up ahead.”
Rachel nodded. The headlights of the car in front had picked out a road sign. Vedbysønder, it read.
She stepped on the brake and veered away, lights out, into the darkness.
“OK,” she said, slipping into neutral and rolling past a barn and some farm buildings. “We’ll pull in behind the farm here. They won’t see us. You call Joshua again, OK?”
Isabel looked back over the landscape as the blue lights loomed out of the dark, an ominous aura.
Then she pressed Joshua’s number again, this time full of trepidation.
It rang a couple of times, and then he answered.
“Yes?” was all he said.
Isabel nodded to Rachel to say Joshua had taken the call.
“Have you delivered the bag?” she asked.
“No, not yet,” came his reply. His voice sounded labored.
“Is something the matter, Joshua? Are there people around you?”
“There’s one other man in the compartment besides me, but he’s working at his computer and wearing earphones. So that’s all right. But I’m not feeling good. I keep thinking about the children. It’s so awful.” He sounded short of breath and exhausted. Hardly surprising.
“Just calm down, Joshua.” She knew it was easier said than done. “It’ll all be over in a few minutes. Where’s the train now? Give me the coordinates.”
He read them out. “We’re moving out of the town now,” he said.
She was with him. It couldn’t be that far behind now.
“Get your head down,” Rachel commanded as police cars ripped along the main road and past the turning they had taken. As if anyone could see them here from that distance.
But in a moment, the elderly couple who had been in front of them would be waved in. They would tell the police about the lunatics they had encountered on the road, tailgating them with their headlights switched off, and how suddenly they had shot off down a side road. And then the police would turn back.
“Hey, I can see the train,” Isabel suddenly exclaimed.
Rachel was alert. “Where?”
Isabel pointed south, away from the main road. It was perfect. “Down there! Come on, let’s get going!”
Rachel switched on the lights, ran through the gears in five seconds, negotiating the two bends through the village in one maneuver, and within moments the chain of lights that was the train crossed the beam of the Mondeo’s headlamps in the darkness ahead.
“Oh, God, I can see the strobe!” Joshua cried into the mobile. “Oh, dear Lord and Father, please protect us and have mercy on our souls!”
“Has he seen it?” Rachel said. She had heard the sound of his cry over the phone.
Isabel nodded, and Rachel bowed her head slightly. “Mother of God. Let Thy holy light shine down and show us the way to Thy splendor. Take us unto Thee as Thy children, and warm us at Thy heart.” She exhaled sharply, then breathed in air to the bottom of her lungs as she pressed her foot down harder on the accelerator.
“I can see the strobe right ahead of me. I’m opening the window now,” said Joshua over the mobile. “I’ll need to put the phone down on the seat. Oh, God. Oh, God.”
Joshua groaned in the background. He sounded like an old man with only a few steps remaining on the path of life. Too many things left to do, too many thoughts of which to keep track.
Isabel’s eyes darted around in the darkness. She couldn’t see the light flashing. So it had to be on the other side of the train.
“The road crosses the railway twice farther along here, Rachel. I’m sure he’s on the same road as us,” she shouted, as Joshua exerted himself audibly at the other end of the phone, trying to get the bag out of the window.
“I’m letting go of it now,” said his voice in the background.
“Where is he? Can you see him, Joshua?” Isabel yelled urgently.
Now he had picked up the phone again. His voice came through loud and clear. “I can see his car. It’s pulled in by some trees where the road cuts in toward the tracks.”
“Look out of the window on the other side, Joshua. Rachel’s flashing her headlights now.”
She gave a sign to Rachel, who was hunched over the wheel, peering out of the windscreen in an effort to catch sight of something, anything at all, beyond the train in front of them.
“Can you see us, Joshua?”
“YES!” he cried back. “I can see you by the bridge. You’re coming toward us. You’ll be there any sec…”
Isabel heard him utter a groan. Then came a sound like the phone clattering to the floor.
“I can see it, the strobe!” Rachel exclaimed.
She drove on over the bridge and along the narrow road. A couple of hundred meters and they would be there.
“What’s the man doing now, Joshua?” Isabel demanded, but there was no answer. Perhaps the phone had snapped shut when it fell.
“Holy Mother of God, forgive me for whatever evil I have done,” Rachel chanted in the seat next to her as they swept past a couple of cottages and a farm at a bend, then another house on its own close to the tracks. And then the headlights picked out his car.
It was parked on a bend a couple of hundred meters ahead, perhaps fifty from the railway. And behind it there he stood, the bastard himself, peering into the bag. In a windbreaker and light-colored trousers. If they hadn’t known better, they might have taken him for a tourist who had got lost.
As the full beam of their headlights illuminated him, he lifted his head. It was impossible to see his expression from their distance, but a thousand thoughts must have been racing through his mind. What were his clothes doing in the bag? Perhaps he had already seen that there was a note on top. Certainly he must have realized that there was no money inside. And now these headlights were coming toward him at breakneck speed.
“I’ll run him down!” Rachel screamed at the same moment as the man threw the bag and himself into the car.
They were only meters away from him as his wheels found traction and pulled him out onto the road, his engine whining.
It was a dark Mercedes like the one Isabel had seen near the cottage at Ferslev. So it was him she had seen while Rachel was being sick.
The road ahead was lined by dense woodland, and the sound of their engine and the car ahead roared through the trees. The Mercedes was more powerful than the Ford. It wouldn’t be easy to keep up, and what good would it do them anyway?
She looked at Rachel, deep in concentration behind the wheel. What on earth had she in mind?
“Keep your distance, Rachel,” she yelled. “In a minute, we’ll have the police behind us with reinforcements. They’ll help us. We’ll catch him, you’ll see. They can set up a roadblock somewhere up ahead.”
“Hello?” came the sound of a voice from the mobile in her hand. A stranger’s voice. A man’s.
“Yes?” Isabel’s eyes were fixed on the rear lights of the car in front as they tore along the narrow road, but everything inside her focused now on this voice. Years of disappointment and defeat had taught her always to be on her guard, even in the most innocuous of situations. Where was Joshua?
“Who are you?” she demanded harshly. “Are you in on this, with that bastard? Are you?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean. Were you the person talking just now to the man who owns this phone?”
Isabel felt her brow turn to ice. “Yes, that was me.”
She sensed Rachel shift uneasily in the driver’s seat. Her entire being was a question mark as she tried to keep a straight course on the winding ribbon of asphalt, the distance between them and the car in front increasing all the time.