“Don’t try to take everything,” she told Ryan, “just some water and snacks. We’ll be on our way soon.” The boy had reached the blanket and was already loading packets into his coat. “Come on, Ryan.” She pulled at his sleeve. “Leave it.”
“But it’ll just go to waste. There’s crisps and stuff.” He was crouching now, checking labels and looking for something other than plain water. She jerked him to his feet and turned to go, then saw Johann bending inside the van. He had waited for them to leave so he could search it for the envelope. Where the hell had he been hiding? She froze, slipping a protective arm around the boy, tightly muzzling him with her hand when he went to speak.
She started to back up along the line of abandoned cars, carefully placing one boot behind the other, dragging Ryan with her, but the crunch of hard snow in the blue stillness was enough to alert him, and he stared up at her through the windscreen.
Their sight of each other was like a static shock. Like it or not, she had a connection with him, and in that moment they both recognised the subterfuge. This was no longer about the envelope, which was still tucked inside the wheel arch of the Toyota, but about something unfinished between them.
Sweeping Ryan into her arms, she abandoned caution and ran.
“A clear sky, perfect landing conditions for air rescue,” sniffed Bryant, squinting into the iceberg-blue of the morning. “Why don’t they come?”
“I don’t know,” May admitted. He and Bryant had headed back to the truck, to take another look at the driver’s corpse. “Perhaps they only just reached base and have to refuel before returning. We can’t wait any longer to tell someone about the body, Arthur.”
“By the time they send out locals to investigate, our man will have gone.”
“Where? Where can he go?” May waved a hand at the silted landscape. “There are no tracks in any direction other than up and down this road, and the only fresh footprints are ours. He can’t run across the moor without risking his life. He has to be in one of the cars.”
“Then we conduct a proper search, from one end to the other.”
“And do what, exactly? Does it occur to you that he might be stronger than either of us? We don’t know what we’re up against. We have no power here. We can’t involve innocent drivers without placing them at risk, and although I hate to bring up the subject, you’re too old to tackle murderers.”
“We can still outthink them, even if we can’t outrun them,” Bryant muttered. “I know you dread the idea of acting your age, tinting out your grey and sucking in your stomach whenever you talk to attractive women, or even hideous ones; I’ve seen you.” Bryant looked about the cabin. “I know one thing. He’s a young French hitchhiker, possibly from a mountain region.”
“What makes you say that?”
“He was sitting here in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard. Nobody over twenty-five ever sits like that. He boarded the truck in wet snow and his boot prints dried out, see? He’s wearing Merveilles, a brand of French ski resort trainer you can only buy in Alpine regions; he’s probably at home in the snow. There’s a customs clearance form in the glove box. The driver’s details are printed on the customs form. My guess is he picked up our man as a hitchhiker.”
“That is pure supposition, Arthur. We don’t have any real information. And I don’t think we should spend any more time in this cabin wrecking the crime scene. You look frozen.”
“We have to keep searching the cars,” said Bryant. “For all we know, he’s moving from car to car, preying on the innocent without fear of capture.”
May did not wish to stress his partner’s lack of suitability for a search conducted in inhospitable conditions. He knew how Bryant would react to the subject of his own mortality. “Then stay in the car and let me conduct the search,” he said. “There’s no need for both of us to freeze. We should have stayed in those potholers’ outfits.”
“I could barely walk. The crotch was around my knees. And what if something happens to you? You could die out there all alone. Don’t be ridiculous.” Bryant snapped his scarf around his neck and pushed out of the cabin, dropping up to his knees in a snowdrift. He fought to maintain his balance for a few seconds, then tipped over onto his face.
“That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about,” said May, helping him up and dusting him off. Linking arms, the pair of them set off like children in the dark, wading past the column of vehicles.
Half an hour later, Bryant was puffing like a kettle and showing signs of distress. A gleaming crust had formed across the snow, levelling the drifts over potholes and ditches, making walking perilous and exhausting. May knew that they had come too far to turn back now, but he needed to find shelter. The wind was rising once more. Fresh flurries blew across the sparkling ridges of ice like sand skittering over dunes. Several times Bryant nearly fell, but was hauled back on his feet. He weighed nothing. Against the blinding snow, he appeared like a character from a Dickens Christmas, a dark bundle of oversized clothes topped by a tonsured head and a bulbous blue nose.
“We’re too old for this sort of thing,” May puffed.
“What you mean is I’m too old.” Bryant beat snow from his coat for the twentieth time. “I know right now I look like something that belongs on the wall of a second-rate cathedral, but I’m stronger than I appear. Our family is a hardy breed. My mother was an usherette for twenty-two years, and then cleaned the same cinema until she was eighty. We’re used to standing about in the cold.”
“Why tempt fate?” asked May. “Divine providence isn’t going to intervene and lend a hand. There’s no-one within a hundred-mile radius who can help us.”
“Don’t be so sure,” said Bryant, raising his hand. “Look.”
“Oh, no-tell me I’m dreaming.” May gave his forehead a theatrical smack of the hand. “What on earth is she doing here?” He stared back at the painted army truck and read the unfurled purple and yellow pendant on the side: Coven of St James the Elder (North London Division) Prop. M Armitage (Grand Order Grade IV White Witch).
Just then, a hatch in the rear door opened and a dyed crimson head poked out. “I thought that was you, Arthur,” called Maggie Armitage, dubious doyenne of the London witch world and occasional helpmate of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. “I didn’t expect to see you until the convention. We took to the B roads because Maureen is our designated driver and she suffers from tunnel vision, so she tends to rely on the advice of her spirit guide, Captain Younghusband, and he’s not at all trustworthy when it comes to overtaking. He died long before the motorcar was invented, you see, so he’s a bit surprised whenever she goes over twelve miles an hour, and she drives quite fast because the situation with her waterworks is such that she requires a comfort stop every twenty minutes.”
“I thought I told you, John,” Bryant explained with a pleased grin. “Maggie is booked to perform the Opening of the Ways ceremony on the first night. It grants spiritualists un-parallelled access to the Netherworld for the duration of the convention.” He made it sound like she was selling tickets for a fairground ride.
“I brought some of the coven members with me in the truck,” said Maggie, her smiling eyes closing to mascara’d crescent moons as she beckoned them. “The convention centre called Wendy, our organist, to ask if she would protect the entrances of their car park from Cornish spirit-suckers by casting runes in salt and chalk-apparently the little buggers like to nip over the border and torment believers. Wendy can speak Piskie, and made us stop on the moor to commune with them, but they stole her jump leads, stranding us here. Come on in.”