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Something dropped onto her thigh. His gun! She grabbed it, rolled sideways onto her front and forced herself up onto her knees. She had never fired a gun before, but there was a first time for everything. She pointed it at him and waited for him to lunge at her, but he lay there on his side in the mud, with blood down the side of his head, showing no obvious intention of getting up. He was alive. She could see his chest heaving. A low moan emitted from his mouth. Now was the time to pull the trigger. If she didn’t kill him, he would kill her. It was as simple as that. Except that it wasn’t. She wasn’t a cold-blooded killer. He was the cold-blooded killer. And he was on the ground, whimpering. She rose warily to her feet. She was in charge now. But her thoughts were elsewhere. She needed to get to Beth and then get the two of them out of there pronto. She stared at him. Suppose he was pretending? Maybe he was waiting for an opportunity to hurl himself at her as soon as her guard was down.
She stretched out her arm, tensing it. She wondered how much of a kick the gun would give. The man moaned again, a desperate attempt to enlist her sympathy. She wasn’t going to be taken in by that. She pulled the trigger and the gun cracked. She was surprised by how quiet the noise was and how little her hand jumped. The bullet exploded a small stone next to his ear, closer than she had intended. He yelped.
‘Take your shoes off,’ she ordered.
He looked at her as if she was speaking a language unknown to him. ‘Shoes and socks,’ she said more loudly, as if turning up the volume would make her more intelligible. She waggled the gun at the central mass of his body.
‘Mobile!’ she demanded when his feet were bare.
He scrabbled in his pocket and produced one.
Then she told him to shut his eyes, and she pulled the trigger again. This time her aim was better. This time he screamed in agony. She turned southwards and started heading up the slope. She had bought herself time. Beth would be waiting for her at the cottage. That was what they had agreed. Maggie was heaving and puffing. She couldn’t run any more, but that didn’t matter. She had bought herself plenty of time. There was no way that the man was going to come sprinting after her, not with the big toe missing from his left foot. She turned round to check. The man had made it to his knees, but he was showing no sign of standing up.
She carried on up towards the top of the incline. The gun was still hanging from her right hand. She lifted it up to study it. Guns were not her style. Carry a gun and sooner or later you pull the trigger and kill someone. She paused. Just to the left there was a cleft in the rock. She had no idea how deep it was, but she dropped the weapon into it anyway. Then she continued marching, determined to catch up with Beth.
* * *
Sam was being very odd. He always was, but this time it was different.
Beth had been so pleased to see him when she got to the cottage. He had bent down and given her a big hug and she had told him how Maggie had told her to run back to the cottage and hide upstairs until she came. But now that Sam was there, everything was alright, wasn’t it?
‘Of course it is,’ he had said.
But there was another man in the cottage. He was sitting in the armchair when she arrived. He was a bit like an owl. He had a round face and round thick glasses. He was wearing a dark grey suit and he was pretty fat.
‘This gentleman and I need to talk, sweetie,’ Sam said, ‘so perhaps you can play in your bedroom until we’ve finished.’
Then he had taken her upstairs.
‘You know that I love you more than any other little girl in the whole wide world, don’t you?’
She had nodded. It wasn’t the first time he had said this. When he did, it usually meant he was going to go away for a while. That was the problem with Sam. He never stayed for long. He was always going away.
* * *
It was only after she had crested the rise and the village had come into view that Maggie’s anxieties began to build again. It was a tiny village — God only knew how it managed to support a pub — and there wasn’t a single person in sight. There was no sign of Beth, which meant that she must be inside the cottage. Maggie had told her to go upstairs and hide in the wardrobe in the big bedroom. So that is where she would surely be, safe and sound. Maggie dared not think about any alternative.
It was easier going downhill, but she was still panting like an overheated dog. There was a pain in her left calf, perhaps she had pulled a muscle. She walked on as fast as she was able, conscious that if she tripped over and twisted her ankle or anything stupid like that, she would be in even more trouble. She scanned the area as she approached the cottage. She could see her car where she had parked it. There were a couple of other cars parked just beyond the cottage. They must have brought her father in one of them, she guessed.
She told herself not to worry. She had to think. What are you going to do now, Maggie? Beth has the evidence. So find her, get her in the car and get the he
ll out of the place. Get to somewhere safe (was anywhere safe for her?) and then decide what to do with the memory stick.
* * *
Beth unzipped the small compartment on the back of her rucksack, ferreted around inside it and pulled out a pack of tissues. ‘Bless you,’ the label said. Her mum had given them to her and she hadn’t used a single tissue since. She slipped a finger and thumb inside it and pulled out the memory stick.
It wasn’t the treasure she had expected to find, but she wasn’t so young or daft that she didn’t know what it was. She had her own tablet. Sam had given it to her for Christmas. Her mother hadn’t been too keen. ‘Where did you get the money for that?’ she had snapped. Which was a good question, because whenever Sam turned up he never seemed to have any money to spare.
‘It’s not brand new,’ Sam had replied with a laugh. ‘I got it off eBay.’ Sam always had an answer.
‘Well, I suppose beggars can’t be choosers,’ her mum had replied and she had pecked him on the cheek.
Beth got her tablet out from under her pillow and opened it up. She plugged the memory stick in and waited. It behaved like an old tablet bought on eBay too, really slow. Her friend Amelia had been given one by her mum’s boyfriend. That had come from Argos and it was new and super-fast, but Beth didn’t mind too much.
There were lots of different files on the memory stick. Some were much bigger than others. She thought that was because they were different types of files. She had learned about different file types at an after-school club, but she couldn’t remember what they all meant. The names weren’t very helpful. Mixtures of letters and numbers. Probably the letters stood for something, but she didn’t know what.
She paused and listened. She could hear Sam and the man talking downstairs. She was safe. She double-clicked on one of the files and it opened.
