‘They’ll think of something. Maybe they’ll crucify us on rubber trees. Maybe they’ll just carry our heads around on poles. I don’t know exactly – and I don’t want to find out.’

  ‘So what can we do?’ the sergeant whimpered.

  ‘Attack them while they’re asleep. At the very worst, we’ll get our hands on their water. At best, we might manage to keep one of them alive and force him to lead us out of this hell.’

  ‘We’re outnumbered,’ the sergeant said. ‘There’s a good two dozen of them.’

  ‘But we have the element of surprise on our side.’

  ‘How can we surprise them?’ the sergeant asked hysterically. ‘They’ll have sentries posted.’

  ‘Yes, they will,’ Jacko agreed. He turned to LH and Socks. ‘You’re going to have to take the sentries out first.’

  Crawling on his belly, LH reached the edge of the clearing. The campfire had died down, but there was just enough light left for him to see that there were only two sentries on guard. One for him, one for Socks. Once they were out of the way, the three privates would spray the sleeping bodies of the enemy with machine-gun fire.

  It could work. It had to work!

  He edged forward, just as he hoped that Socks was doing on the other side of the clearing. The plan was for him to make the first move, then Socks, who should be watching, would take out his man almost immediately afterwards.

  LH’s target had his back to him, and from his stance it was clear that he kept dozing off where he stood. Good. That would make things easier. LH assessed his task, calculating just when he would get up off the ground and exactly where he would grab the guard.

  This guard wasn’t very tall, even for a Chinese. Not very broad, either. More like a boy than a man. That didn’t matter. This was war – and in war being weak was no excuse. LH slowly reached towards his belt, and pulled his knife from its protective sheath.

  A knocking on his door!

  ‘LH? LH? Are you all right?’

  The stink of the jungle receded. Now all he could smell was furniture wax and his own sweat.

  ‘LH?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘I heard you crying out.’

  ‘So what? Didn’t the nut doctor tell you to expect that kind of thing?’

  ‘You shouldn’t call Dr Freedman that. He’s a trauma therapist.’

  ‘He’s a shrink. If you have to go and see him, it’s because you’re crazy. That’s why I go – because I’ve got a screw loose.’

  The doorknob rattled. ‘Let me in, LH.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Please! I want to help.’

  ‘You can’t help. You – and what you’ve done – are a big part of the problem.’

  ‘If we could just talk . . .’

  ‘If you don’t go away this minute, I’ll take my knife out,’ LH threatened. ‘And once it is out, I’ll have to use it – because that’s what I’ve been taught to do.’

  ‘Please don’t threaten me!’

  ‘Who says I’m threatening you? Maybe I’m only threatening myself.’ LH took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to count to five, then I’m getting the knife.’

  ‘You mustn’t . . . you . . .’

  ‘One. . . two. . . three . . .’

  It was on ‘four’ that he heard the footsteps reluctantly signalling a retreat. He closed his eyes again and let the stinking green hell of the jungle seep back into his nostrils.

  The guard still had no idea that he was there . . . still didn’t know just how close death was . . .

  November the Second

  Though rivers of blood

  May spill through the crack

  The dam has been breached

  And there’s no turning back.

  Eight

  Under the cloak of darkness, Mad Jack’s Field had seemed a sinister place to Bob Rutter. Now, in the dull light of an overcast November day, any chill he might experience had more to do with the temperature of the air than with any atmosphere which might emanate from the field itself. This was no potential location for a horror film. It was simply a patch of wasteland which no one had yet thought worth developing – just another urban blemish in a declining town which had more than its fair share of such sites.

  Rutter shifted his gaze from the charred remains of the bonfire to the edges of the field. A dozen uniformed constables were slowly and meticulously scouring the ground for clues, but it was unlikely they’d have any luck. The earth had been rock-hard the night before, so there was little chance of being able to lift any footprints. Besides – and to use one of the newly fashionable policing phrases which Charlie Woodend affected to despise – the crime scene had been ‘contaminated’ by two small boys, a passing couple, a number of police units, several spectators who had managed to slip through the cordon (including the one Monika chased) and two bloody big red fire engines which, as well as putting out the fire, had drenched the ground around it.

  He turned his thoughts from the crime scene to the dead woman’s clothes. They’d been bothering him – on and off – since he’d first examined them the night before.

  Her shoes had at once struck a jarring note. They were bright scarlet, with very high heels. They seemed totally at odds not only with the woman’s age but also with the frumpy cloth overcoat and heavy woollen cardigan she’d been wearing. Then he’d examined the rest of her clothes, and quickly understood that it was the overcoat and cardigan – not the shoes – which failed to match the rest of the ensemble.

  The skirt was black, knee-length and tightly fitting. The blouse was low-cut, frilly and electric blue. Underneath these outer garments, the woman had been wearing a black lace bra and panty set, stockings and a suspender belt.

  That kind of underwear would have suited his wife – or Monika Paniatowski – Rutter thought, but it hardly seemed appropriate clothing for a woman who was fifteen years their senior.

  Or was it inappropriate? he wondered, pulling himself up short.

  On more than one occasion, Charlie Woodend had accused him of seeing the world through arrogant young eyes – of assuming that any woman over thirty-five had either lost the urge for sex or, at the very least, the power to attract a partner.

  Slightly guiltily, Rutter accepted both the criticism and the extent of his own ignorance which that criticism implied. Perhaps all middle-aged women wore the same kind of underwear as the victim. He’d never undressed one of them, so he simply didn’t know.

  Rutter checked his watch. It was nearly ten twenty-seven and, under normal circumstances, the team should have been able to put a name to the dead woman by now.

  Yet that hadn’t happened. There’d been no phone calls from anxious husbands who wanted to report that their wives hadn’t come home; no children turning up at the police station to say they’d lost their mum; no concerned employers wondering if the reason one of their workers had failed to turn up that morning was because she’d been murdered.

  He looked at his watch again.

  Ten twenty-nine!

  Christ, was it really only a couple of minutes since the last time he’d checked?

  ‘Calm down!’ he told himself.

  Calm down? There wasn’t much chance of that. His personal life had got his nerves in such a state that he made a spider tap-dancing on a hotplate look tranquil.

  When Woodend had briefed the press in the old days, he had done it from wherever he happened to be at the time. Sometimes the briefings were conducted out on the street, sometimes in Woodend’s office and sometimes – very often, in fact – in a pub. He’d liked doing things that way. He could get to know the journalists, and they could get to know him. When it had been necessary to draw a line over which they should not cross, he’d been able to do it informally, without raising too many hackles. When he’d wanted their help, he could ask for it without having to fill in the mountain of paperwork which was now necessary if he wanted to cover his own back. It had been a good system – one which had actually helped him to get the result he was after.

  The Chief Constable did not approve of such effective anarchy. On his return from one of the countless conferences he attended – conferences which, coincidentally, were all within reasonable distance of a good golf course – he’d announced that what the Mid Lancs Police needed, more than anything else in the world, was a good press room. And so one of the larger rooms on the ground floor had been set aside for the purpose, and the criminal records department – which had hitherto been making full use of the room – had been dispatched to a dusty basement.

  Thus it was that Woodend found himself standing at the podium in the ‘press centre’ that morning, addressing three local reporters.

  The Chief Inspector made a brief statement, and then asked if there were any questions.

  ‘What was the motive for the murder, Chief Inspector?’ asked a pipe-smoking reporter for the Burnley Telegraph.

  ‘Come on, Horace, you know it’s far too early for me to start speculating about that,’ Woodend said.

  ‘Is it true that you think the killer is an escaped lunatic?’ asked the man from the Preston Evening News, who, like Woodend, smoked Capstan Full Strength.

  ‘If he is a nutter, then it’s certainly news to me,’ Woodend replied.

  ‘When do you hope to be able to identify the victim?’ asked the Accrington Post man, who was addicted to short black cigars.

  ‘I can’t say when we’ll know who she is for sure, but since we’re plasterin’ Whitebridge with her photograph even as I speak, I’d be surprised if we didn’t know by this evenin’ at the latest.’

  ‘Are you looking for a serial killer?’ the pipe smoker asked.

  Woodend frowned. ‘We’re lookin’ for the man who slit that poor bloody woman’s throat an’ stuffed her into the bonfire. I’ve no idea whether he’s killed before – an’ neither have you.’ He glared meaningfully at the pipe smoker. ‘So if I was in your shoes, Horace, I’d think very carefully before I even hinted at anythin’ like that in my rag.’

  The cigar smoker raised his hand. ‘Chief Inspector, would it be possible to comment on––?’

  ‘I’ve told you all I can for the moment,’ Woodend interrupted. ‘Keep in touch with the duty desk, and they’ll let you know when I’ll be available again.’

  He stepped off the podium and walked quickly to the door. Behind him, he heard one of the men fire off another question, but he ignored it.

  He didn’t blame the reporters for trying to squeeze as much information out of him as they possibly could. He would have done the same in their position. They saw this murder as a big chance to make a name for themselves, and were only too well aware of the fact that once the hot shots from Fleet Street arrived, they would be elbowed aside. If, on the other hand, they could come up with a significant angle on the story before then, they had a fair chance of seeing their by-lines in the national press. And who knew what that might lead to?

  He really would have helped them if he could have done, Woodend thought as he approached his office, if only because he got a lot of pleasure from seeing the underdog come out on top occasionally. But the simple truth was that, apart from a black and white photograph of the dead woman, he had very little to give them.

  Nine

  Rutter sat in his car at the edge of Mad Jack’s Field, staring at his car radio. When he’d had it installed only a few days earlier, he’d been like a kid with a new toy, but now even this latest miracle of the 1960s was failing to thrill him.

  The problem wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do to get himself out of the mess he’d fallen into, he thought. He did know – he simply didn’t want to act on that knowledge.

  He reached forward lethargically, and switched the radio on. He was just in time for a news bulletin.

  ‘Beatlemania’ continued to follow the group on their tour of the country, the announcer said. At their last concert, even a cordon of two hundred policemen had not been enough to stop the screaming fans from mobbing their van.

  ‘Waste of police resources,’ Rutter mumbled.

  The news continued. Kim Philby, the former British intelligence officer who had gone missing in the Lebanon a few months earlier, had finally emerged in Russia. At his press conference, he had condemned the decadent West and praised the communist system. Ever since the defection of two diplomats, Burgess and Maclean, some twelve years earlier, the newsreader said, the security services had suspected that there had been a third member of their spy ring. Now it was clear that Philby, who had attended university with the other two, was that third man.

  ‘That’s what I call brilliant detective work!’ Rutter said sarcastically. ‘MI5 are now sure he’s guilty – but only because he’s told them he is!’

  President Kennedy, seeking a re-nomination no one doubted was his for the asking, was planning to campaign in Texas towards the end of the month, the newsreader concluded. Among the cities he would visit were San Antonio, Houston and Dallas.

  Jack Kennedy was just like all the others, Rutter thought sourly. He might talk about building a new Camelot, but when it came down to it, all he really cared about was getting re-elected. A couple more years, and he would be indistinguishable from every other politician who wanted to be president.

  The bulletin ended and the theme music to a popular quiz programme filled the space it had vacated. It was a jaunty tune aimed at lightening the spirit and promising much fun to come. Rutter twisted the off-knob on the radio with such force that it came off in his hand.

  For a moment, he just sat there, staring at the knob. Then his mind began to review his reactions to what he had heard on the radio. He had disapproved of the Beatles, for God’s sake! He had criticized the security services without any knowledge of the problems and constraints they were working under. And he had slammed Jack Kennedy, whom he had previously regarded as the great shining hope of the free world.

  He groaned inwardly. What was happening to him?

  ‘The case!’ he told himself. ‘Concentrate on the case!’

  Why had the killer placed his victim in the bonfire? Because he was playing a game, of course! Because he was trying to draw attention to himself. But weren’t there other – perhaps even more dramatic – ways that he could have achieved the same effect?

  Why not make an even more public display of his victim?

  Why not, for example, hang her from a lamp standard? Or dump her body on the doorstep of the Mid Lancs Courier?

  And what was so special about bonfires? What hidden significance did they hold for the killer?

  Rutter got out of his car, strode rapidly towards the phone box which he had noticed about hundred yards down the road, and dialled home.

  ‘Hello?’ said Maria, his wife, her slight Spanish accent now supplemented with a thin overlay of Lancashire.

  ‘It’s me,’ Rutter said. ‘I don’t want you leaving the house today.’

  ‘What are you talkin’ about?’

  ‘I want you to stay at home.’

  ‘But there is food which needs to be bought. Besides, the baby needs some fresh air.’

  ‘I’ll do the shopping,’ Rutter promised. ‘And I’ll take the baby out, too, as soon as I get home. You stay inside. And make sure the doors are locked.’

  ‘Is somethin’ the matter?’ Maria asked, sounding alarmed.

  Damn, he’d frightened her! He’d never intended to do that. The world was a scary enough place for a woman who could not see it, without him doing anything to add to the sense of menace.

  ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about,’ he said soothingly. ‘You’re in no danger. It’s just that I’m a bit nervous, and I’d be happier in myself if I knew you were safe.’

  ‘What’s happenin’ with the case, Bob?’ Maria asked.

  ‘Nothing. It’s just that I––’

  ‘Robert!’

  Rutter sighed. He could rarely fool his wife for long, especially once her suspicions were aroused. Perhaps because she lived in the dark, she was adamant that she should not be kept in the dark about his affairs.

  His affairs! He wondered how long he could keep that particular secret hidden.

  ‘Tell me, Robert! I need to know!’ Maria insisted.

  ‘It’s going badly wrong,’ he admitted, not sure if he was talking about his life or the case.

  ‘You’ll sort it out,’ Maria said, deliberately injecting confidence and reassurance into her voice. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Rutter replied.

  But he didn’t mean it, because something deep in his gut told him that this murder was only the beginning – that before the investigation was over, things both professional and personal would have turned a bloody sight worse.

  When Woodend reached his office, the phone on his desk was already ringing. He picked it up, and found himself connected to Dexter Bryant.

  ‘Isn’t it odd that during all those years you were working for Scotland Yard, and I was working for the Daily Standard, our paths never crossed?’ Bryant said, after he’d introduced himself.

  ‘Aye, very odd,’ Woodend replied noncommittally.

  ‘Is that what you really think – or are you just being polite?’ Bryant asked, and Woodend could tell by the tone of his voice that he was smiling.

  ‘It’s true I was hardly ever in London,’ Woodend admitted.

  ‘And I was hardly ever out of it,’ Bryant said. ‘As far as my editors were concerned, a murder which didn’t happen in the London area could scarcely be called a murder at all.’

  ‘Aye, they did tend to think like that,’ Woodend agreed.

  ‘And it was scarcely by chance that you spent most of your time in the provinces,’ Bryant continued. ‘If there was one thing that the top brass in Scotland Yard disliked more than your way of conducting an investigation – and they really did dislike that, you know – it was the fact that your unorthodox methods usually seemed to produce a result. I don’t think they ever slept comfortably in their beds unless they knew that you were at least a hundred miles away from them.’

  Woodend found that he was smiling, too. ‘If I remember rightly, I wasn’t the only one who got up the noses of the brass at the Yard,’ he said. ‘There were a fair number of them who wouldn’t have exactly shed a tear if you’d been transferred from crime reportin’ to the Daily Standard’s knittin’ and sewin’ page.’