Progress was agonizingly slow. The man inched forward, and finally got right up to the rear bumper of the Range Rover. For about half a minute he did nothing, listening, no doubt, for a voice or a movement inside the vehicle. Then he raised himself into a crouching position and slowly stood high enough to look through the rear window. Abruptly he turned towards the others and gestured with both hands for them to approach.
“Go, go, go!”
The response was immediate. Everyone got out and started running towards the Range Rover, with Diamond and Hen well in the rear. Even the helicopter dipped its nose and zoomed lower.
The officer was shouting, “They’re on the floor. We’ve got to get in.” He smashed the side window with the butt of his gun- which activated an alarm loud enough to shatter eardrums. He put his arm through, swung back the door and dipped inside.
In a moment he emerged with a body trussed with plasticuffs and leather belt. Others helped lift the man out and onto the grass, where they unbuckled the belt that pinioned his legs. He was breathing. He opened his eyes.
A second man was removed from the space behind the back seat. He, also, had been tied up and handcuffed, and he, also, was alive. Like his companion, he looked dazed and ill. The heat inside, with all windows closed, must have been appalling.
Neither of the rescued men was Matthew Porter.
Jimmy Barneston wasn’t too concerned by the state of them. Quite rightly, he wanted information. Someone thoughtfully produced a bottle of water. Barneston snatched it, unscrewed the top and splashed most of the contents across the face of the nearest man.
“Somebody kill that fucking alarm!” Barneston yelled.
It took a few minutes to get under the Range Rover’s bonnet and locate the mechanism. A uniformed inspector disabled it.
The men’s groans could now be heard by everyone. The more animated of the two was still handcuffed and lying on his side. But at least he was conscious.
“Where’s Porter?” Barneston asked. “What happened to him?”
One question was a lot to cope with. Two was overdoing it. The man shook his head.
Barneston asked again, “What happened? Come on, man, I need to know.”
The mouth was moving soundlessly, like a beached fish.
“I can’t hear him,” Barneston said. “Someone tell that chopper to get the hell out of here.”
Hen said, “He’s dehydrated. Give him a drink, for pity’s sake.” She snatched up the plastic bottle and held it to the man’s mouth.
He gulped at it.
They fetched another bottle for the second man. “Can’t we get them out of these cuffs?” Hen asked. “The poor guys are in pain.”
One of the police gunmen unhitched cutters from his belt and snipped through the plasticuffs.
The man who seemed in slightly better shape sat up, and immediately vomited, throwing up all of the water he’d swallowed and more.
It definitely wasn’t Jimmy Barneston’s day. He’d taken some of it on his shoes.
The man seemed to be about to retch again. In fact, he was trying to speak a word that he eventually spluttered out.
“Gas?” Barneston said. “Did you say gas? He used gas on you?”
A nod.
“What-CS?”
He shook his head, and the movement seemed to hurt him, because he winced and shut his eyes.
“Did he put it to your face, or what?”
Now he managed a few connected words. “Took me from behind. I was coughing. Couldn’t breathe. Don’t remember any more.”
“So the gas knocked you out. This was inside the house?”
“Living room.”
“Did you see him?”
He shook his head and placed his hand, palm inwards, against his face, covering his mouth and nose.
Barneston was quick on the uptake. “He was wearing a gas mask?”
“Yes.”
“Didn’t you get any warning? Alarms?”
“Going to throw up again.”
This time, just in time, Barneston stepped aside.
When the man’s head came up, Barneston said, “What about Matt Porter? Was he in the room with you?”
“Another room.”
“So he would have been gassed as well. What happened then?”
“Don’t know.”
“You don’t have any memory of being driven here? You didn’t see what happened?”
The man looked around him and asked, “Where are we anyway?”
The question remained unanswered because Barneston had turned to the second guard and was trying to question him. But the gas had affected this one more seriously. He was talking gibberish.
This was a medical emergency. Up to now, Peter Diamond had thought of himself as an observer, but someone had to take some initiative here because there was no telling how seriously these men were affected. They’d been unconscious for some time. Heatstroke and even brain damage was a possibility. Barneston was entirely taken up with extracting any information he could, so Diamond told the nearest man with a mobile to call an ambulance.
When Barneston stood up, muttering in frustration at getting so little out of the guards, Diamond drew him aside and told him what he’d arranged. It was a courtesy. You don’t muscle in on someone else’s incident. But the message didn’t seem to register. JB was extremely keyed up. He turned his back on Diamond and returned to the more coherent of the two men.
“This isn’t getting anywhere,” Diamond confided to Hen. “It’s up to Barneston to do something.”
“He’s in shock,” she said. “I’ve never seen him like this. If there’s stuff he should be doing, you’d better tell him. You’ve got experience.”
In fact, this wasn’t really about experience. Every incident brings its own unique problems, and the challenge is to stay cool and deal with them as well as resources allow. Considering Barneston was one of the generation who made ‘cool’ into a cardinal virtue, he wasn’t shaping up at all.
So Diamond tapped him on the shoulder and discreetly suggested he ordered everyone off the grass and onto the lane.
“What’s the problem?” Barneston asked. “What’s up now?”
At least there was communication this time.
“Crime scene procedure. You’ve dealt with the incident. Now it’s a matter of preserving what you can of the scene.” For a man who had never been a slave to the rulebook this was rather rich, but Diamond was putting it in language the new generation of CID should understand. “Particularly the treadmarks.”
“Oh, yeah?” Barneston said vaguely.
“Not the Range Rover’s marks.”
“No?”
“The Mariner’s. The Mariner had his car waiting here.”
“You think so?” Those blue eyes showed little understanding.
“You’ve got the picture, haven’t you, Jimmy?” But it was obvious Barneston’s brain hadn’t made the jump, so Diamond laid out the facts as he saw them. “Back at the house he gassed these blokes and Porter and trussed them up and put them in the Range Rover and drove here. He must have had a vehicle waiting, right? So he transferred Porter into his own motor and drove off, God knows where. The least we can do is find the treadmarks his tyres made.”
The last twenty minutes had been too frantic and traumatic for Barneston to give a thought to anything so basic as treadmarks, but he nodded his head sagely as if it had always been in his plans and ordered everyone off the turf and onto the hard surface of the lane. The ground was already marked with many footprints as well as the contents of the guard’s stomach. Crime scene tape was fetched and used to seal off the area.
Hen said, “That’s better. Feel as if we’re getting a grip, even if we aren’t.”
“He’s away,” Barneston said bleakly. “He’s hung us out to dry.”
“Snap out of it, Jimmy,” Diamond told him. “Have you sent for the SOCOs yet? I’d get one of those sergeants onto it if I were you.”
“Good point.” He went over to arrange it.