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‘Come on, Arthur.’ Bridget stepped closer again, arm extended.
He took her hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘Thank you very much.’
She was a small woman and her hand was small too, but her fingers were talons, designed for seizing prey and tearing it apart. She gripped and pulled. He braced himself, stretching forward his other arm and grabbing at the sleeve of her jacket. He threw his weight backwards. She squealed. He saw her gun slip from her gloved hand and fall noiselessly into a tuft of long grass. A male voice yelled, the music man whose name he would never know. He felt Bridget’s free hand scrabbling at his face, her nails cutting into his papery skin. But the pain only spurred him on. He was a heavy man and his two hands clamped round hers were plier-tight. There was a searing pain in his ear. Had she bitten him? He didn’t care. Nothing mattered any more. It was just a question of hanging on.
‘Dad!’ That was Maggie shouting from high above. He could recognise her voice anywhere. He strained as hard as he could. He felt a sudden shift in the equilibrium. He began to fall backwards, out into the void, and where he went the woman inevitably followed. There was a sudden rush of air and a wild screaming in his ear which told him he had done it. It was over.
* * *
One moment her father was standing down below, in full view, tussling with the woman, and then they had both disappeared over the edge and out of sight.
It had all happened so quickly that Maggie found it impossible to believe what she had seen. She felt faint, as if she too might tumble over. Her throat was paralysed, as if it, like her brain, had gone into shock. ‘Dad!’ she wanted to cry out, but the word never got beyond her lips. She felt a surge of nausea, and bent down low, hands on knees. She vomited and for several seconds she remained doubled over, waiting for it to subside.
‘Mother?’ Beth tugged at her hand.
She stared blankly at the girl. A few moments before — while they were putting their rucksacks on — she had told Beth what to do if things ‘went wrong,’ and immediately they had gone disastrously wrong. ‘Remember what I said?’ she whispered, as if her voice might carry to the man down below them.
The girl nodded.
‘Don’t look back and don’t stop running.’
Down below them the man was standing on the edge of the cliff. He stood still, looking into the quarry, and for a mad moment Maggie imagined that he was going to jump off the cliff too. Then he turned and looked up at her. He pulled out a gun. No silencer on this one.
‘Maggie!’ he shouted. ‘Come down here! Don’t do anything stupid.’
Maggie put her hand on Beth’s shoulder. ‘Remember what I said.’ She bent down and kissed the girl on the forehead. At the same time she slipped the memory stick into her hand. ‘Don’t lose it,’ she said. ‘Now, run!’
* * *
It was several moments before Elgar reacted. That went against all his training and all his experience. But as he peered over the edge of the cliff and saw the two bodies lying spread-eagled on a huge boulder next to the lake, the thought flashed across his brain that this must be a dream. The two bodies were still locked together, the old man’s two hands entwined with Bridget’s.
He shook his head, trying to clear his confusion. He turned and looked up. Maggie was bending over the child. He shouted something. He wasn’t sure what, but he saw them both look at him for an instant and then they both started to run, in opposite directions. Maggie was running westwards. Elgar had no idea what the terrain was like, but as he watched he quickly came to the conclusion that he would be able to catch her. She was overweight. He knew that from all the observation they had carried out back in Oxford. She ran as if running was the most unnatural activity in the world. She was wearing brown boots, not walking boots but fancy fashion boots with a heel. They would, he thought, be the death of her.
He began to jog after her. There was no need to run fast. He could see her in full profile, running down the slope and he was confident that he would soon close the gap. He wondered where she was trying to get to. Just escape, or maybe loop back round to her car. By the time he had got to the end of the quarry, she was only twenty metres or so in front of him. They were on the same level now, both heading down a shallow valley.
It was clear that she was beginning to struggle. Her arms were flailing either side of her like the sails of a demented windmill. It could be only a matter of seconds before she crashed to the ground. She would scrabble desperately back onto her feet, panic rising, and then before she had gone more than a few slithering paces she would slip and fall again to squeal and yell and eventually plead for her life. It would be easy.
But Maggie didn’t fall. She slipped once. Her left hand had dipped down to touch the ground, but somehow she was up again and still ploughing on. Elgar began to accelerate. She was moving faster than he thought possible. She reminded him of a rhinoceros. Those big, apparently cumbersome animals could generate quite a speed. Not exactly nought to sixty in ten seconds, but once they reached their top speed, they sure as hell took some stopping.
Elgar didn’t panic, nor did he try and run faster. There was no need because he was gaining on her. His feet were moving deftly over the terrain, his trainers stepping expertly from tussock to tussock. The gap between them was closing and her movements were becoming more laboured and jerky. He was not an imaginative man, but he thought he could smell her fear. The ground dropped away in front of her, not sharply, but enough, running from right to left. This was where the water from the higher ground funnelled, turning the ground into a slippery, boggy trap. Elgar could feel the sponginess of the ground beneath his own feet. Sooner or later she would fall down or get stuck in the boggy ground, and then it would only be a matter of seconds before he closed the gap completely. But she was still moving forward. Her progress was increasingly erratic, however, as her stupid heels subsided with every step into the increasingly sodden ground. She was having to pull hard to extricate them and to force herself forwards into further squelching, energy–sapping strides. But she wasn’t givi
ng up. Elgar was impressed.
There were bushes scattered across the grassy incline, and it was almost into the middle of one of these that the rhino now blundered. He saw her trip and fall down, briefly out of his sight. He heard her scream of despair. Only now did he quicken his pace.
* * *
What would you do? Maggie’s father had loved to play that game, when she and her brother Paul were sufficiently young and biddable. Until Paul, two years younger but wanting to be older, announced one holiday that it was a stupid game and he wasn’t playing it any more. And so her father had stopped.
It had been a game they played exclusively when they went on holiday. It had started the time they stayed in a converted windmill, and Paul and she were sleeping in the bedroom at the top. ‘How would you escape if the kitchen caught fire in the middle of the night?’ her father had asked them over supper, totally straight-faced. The answer they had come up with had been to jump from their one window onto the sail and wait for their weight to turn the sail and bring them close to the earth, and then try and drop into the beech hedge to break their fall. Father had been delighted. Next time it had been, ‘What would you do if your mother and I were taken with a sickness that made us both delirious?’ which had been a rather unsettling question given that they were staying in a Scottish bothie with a telephone which only received incoming calls. But never in all his ‘What would you do?’ games had her father asked, ‘What would you do if a homicidal psychopath with a gun is pursuing you across unfamiliar terrain far from any visible habitation?’
She knew she couldn’t keep running for much longer and she knew the man pursuing her was closing in on her. It was only a matter of time before he caught up with her and killed her. But her father’s game — she had never worked out how serious he had been — was like learning to ride a bicycle. Even though she hadn’t played it since stroppy little Paul had brought it to an abrupt end, the ‘what would you do?’ part of her brain kicked into action.
A low bush loomed in front of her. She had been concentrating so hard on staying upright and then looking back to check where the man was that she blundered right into it. Something caught her left foot and she somersaulted through the air, landing on her back. She lay there, looking up into cloudless blue sky. What would you do? What now?
She sensed and then heard him, a staccato laugh. She groaned, half-opening her eyes. ‘Help me!’ she said pathetically. Another rat-a-tat of laughter. He wasn’t a big man, but he was looming over her now, the gun hanging casually in his fingers. ‘Daddy,’ she moaned. The man bent closer, grinning from one cauliflower ear to the other.
‘Daddy?’ she said again. She could smell him now. He was close, very close, his breath a mixture of pickled onions and peppermint. She lifted her hand as if to beg for help, until it touched and then gripped the collar of his coat. She swung her other arm harder than she had ever in her life before. The stone she was holding in her cupped palm smacked against his temple. He screamed and pulled away but her fingers, attached to his coat, pulled him back. She struck wildly at him twice more.
