While she was waiting she phoned Black Law and told Joe Ashworth she’d be late. They weren’t to worry. And if Edie phoned they should explain what had happened.
“I was just about to go home,” he said. “There’s still someone here to keep a look out for Mrs. Preece. And the inspector’s about somewhere.
But if you like I’ll hang on so I can come down the lane with you.” She was tempted to agree. Then she thought of his wife, waiting for him. She’d have prepared a meal for him. Perhaps she’d even kept the baby up so Joe could give him a bath. And she remembered her first meeting with Joe Ashworth on the night Bella died. He’d been amazed by the work she did, astonished that a woman could survive on her own in the hills. She could hardly ask for an escort back after putting him right about that.
“Nah,” she said. “Of course not. Besides, I don’t know how long I’ll be.”
It was midsummer in Northumberland and still light at ten o’clock as she sat outside the garage drinking cans of coke and waiting. By the time the car was fixed and she’d driven through the new tubular steel gate onto the hill it was midnight and black. When she got out of the car to open the gate she left the engine running and even then she fumbled with the catch in her haste to pull the gate open, because she was so worried that the car would stall.
The battery must have been low because the headlamps didn’t seem to give out much light. At first she tried to go as quickly as she could but she had to slow down because she was hitting the bank and catching her exhaust on the biggest of the ruts.
A sheep ambled into the track in front of her and she braked sharply and sat, petrified for a moment, staring into its bemused amiable face before realizing what she was looking at.
This is crazy, she thought. Don’t panic. Relax. Think of something else.
So she tried to concentrate on what she and Edie had been doing that day. It wasn’t too late for her to have riding lessons, was it? Just because it wasn’t the sort of thing a right-on mother encouraged her child to do. And she thought of Charles Noble, who’d loved animals too when he was a boy, so much that he’d wanted to become a vet. Yet he’d been forced instead to watch the live cattle and sheep herded from the trucks after market and be turned into meat. His father’s death had saved him from that. It had given him a chance to buy the stables.
Charles Noble had much more of a motive for killing his father than Bella had.
She was so excited by this new idea, so thrilled as she pictured dazzling Edie with it, that when she first saw the headlights coming out of apparently open countryside directly towards the passenger door of her car, she wasn’t frightened. She just thought, “I wonder who else can be out at this time of night?”
This only lasted for a second. Then she got her brain into gear and began to work out what was happening. The car was coming towards her down the forest track, the track she had taken by mistake on her first drive to Black Law that season. She knew that the track dwindled into a footpath so the car must have been parked there. It surely couldn’t be a walker who’d left a vehicle there while he spent a day in the hills. Not at this time of night. Had someone been waiting, sitting in the car, watching for her headlights through the trees? Or had they expected to have the place to themselves and been more surprised by her approach than she was by theirs?
She reached the junction before the other vehicle, then looked in her mirror to see which way it would turn. If it was being driven by country kids on an illicit joyriding trip in their parents four-wheel drive or lovers wanting romance under the moonlight, it would turn back now towards the main road and the town. But it turned the other way and began to follow her.
All right then, she told herself. There’s still no need to panic. It must be one of the police officers. Out on surveillance perhaps. Or Joe Ashworth’s sent someone to keep an eye out for me. Deliberately she tried to slow down. She was nearly at Black Law. She was approaching the ford. If she drove at this speed into the water she’d flood the engine, the car would stop and she’d look a fool. But if anything the car behind came faster. The driver had turned up the headlamps to full beam and when she looked into the mirror she was blinded. She couldn’t see the passenger or any details of the car.
She was almost at the ford when it hit her. Her neck jerked backwards and for a moment she lost control of her steering. Instinctively she stuck her foot on the accelerator to pull away from it. The car jumped forward down the bank, hitting the water at an acute angle, bonnet down like a dive. Water sprayed the windscreen so she could see nothing.
The engine hissed and steamed and then it stalled. She turned the key but nothing happened. She heard the burn eddying around her and in the distance the purr of the other car at idle.
She craned her head to look behind, expecting all the time to feel the crash of another impact. She could see nothing but the hard white light of the headlamps. She turned the ignition again but the engine was quite dead.
Into her mind ridiculously, came the image of the steward on a flight she’d once taken to the States. He had stood at the front of the plane, demonstrating, with elaborate pantomime, the brace position. She put her feet firmly on the floor of the car, where water was already seeping, and bent forward with her arms protecting her head. Behind her suddenly she heard the roar of the other car’s engine. As powerful as a jet.
Nothing happened.
The engine noise increased but instead of releasing its energy to shoot down at her the car screeched backwards. At this point the track was wide. There was a place where vehicles could turn if the ford was too deep to cross. The car backed into that and screamed away. Rachael listened to it disappearing into the distance. Then everything was quiet except for the sound of water lapping around the wheel arches.
Still sitting with her arms around her head she began to tremble.
She sat for twenty minutes before she accepted that she would have to walk back to the cottage. She turned the key over an dover again but the car wouldn’t go. By then her feet were soaking and she was cold.
There were three options. She could wait until morning when Joe Ashworth or one of his cronies would come along. She could hope that Vera Stanhope would still be awake and would send out a search party.
Or she could take the risk of walking. She knew it would be a risk.
The car had driven away down the lane but it could have parked again in the forest track and the driver could have returned on foot.
What prompted her to action in the end was an urgent desire for a pee.
No way was she going to sit there all night and wet her knickers. She unlocked the driver’s door and got out, having to push against the flow of water. There was a thin sickle moon which gave a little light. She looked once back up the track but she could see no shadow and she heard no footsteps. She didn’t want the inspector to see her in such a state. But she couldn’t make the last few yards to the cottage. She couldn’t face going past the open barn where she’d found Bella. She banged on the farmhouse kitchen door and when it wasn’t immediately opened she pushed it and almost fell inside.
Vera Stanhope was sitting in the rocking chair where Bella had often sat. There was a beer can on the table beside her. She was reading a pile of papers. She wore spectacles, which Rachael had never seen before, attached to a chain round her neck. Besides the pen which she held in her fingers like a cigarette, a pencil had been tucked behind one ear.
Why doesn’t she ever go home, Rachael thought. Isn’t she happy there?
Then she began to cry. Vera got to her feet, took a fleecy jacket which had been folded over the back of the kitchen chair, and put it carefully around Rachael’s shoulders.
Chapter Thirty-Eight.
When Rachael got up the next morning Vera had already turned up at Baikie’s. She stood in the kitchen with a piece of toast in one hand and a mug of Anne’s filter coffee in the other. Even coming down the stairs Rachael could hear her eating.