The Trail Killer

Twenty-eight

She didn't know what she'd been expecting, coming out there again. Had just felt duty-bound to give it one last go, she supposed. Duty-bound to Kirsty, to Joanne, to Prisha. Most especially, duty-bound to herself. A desperate final scrabbling around for some sort of key which would unlock the door, force everything to come rattling and tumbling out. A key which in all probability didn't even exist. Thanks to Gooch's sheer stubborn-headedness, Pitman had gotten away with it. She could only pray he wouldn't be foolish enough to strike again, and in so doing blow a self-triggered hole right through the whole Gupta scenario. Those deepest, darkest impulses of his, however - she feared they were strong enough to usurp even plain common sense, the desire for self-preservation.

Heaven forbid, but if there were to be another victim then on Gooch's conscience the warm blood would splash. She'd done everything she possibly could, had sacrificed the career she'd held so dear, the relative financial stability it had bestowed upon her and her two sons. Though it pained her to admit it, she was done now. The following day she would turn over the page to some dull new chapter of her life. No longer Diane Shields the ballsy CID officer, but Diane Shields the check-out girl. Just wouldn't have the time and energy for it any more.

She gazed up through the tangled canopy of branches above, the cloud-veiled heavens beyond.

"Sorry," she whispered. "I'm so, so sorry."

*

Trudging out of the pen shed, Pitman rested the manure bucket onto the ground beside him, took a moment to catch his breath.

The clouds above were full-bellied and swift moving, their shadows tumbling down the hillside before him.

It was as he followed their progress that he spotted it - that distant speck of red beyond the dry stone wall.

*

After grunting and gasping her way over the passenger side and back behind the wheel, Shields set off once more along the road. Approaching the junction a little further down, she turned a final backward glance up at the farmhouse - its silhouette against the clouds like some medieval fortress peering down the slope in search of invading enemies. Menacing. Impenetrable.

In the hope it would lead her back to the village, she swung the steering wheel into the lefthand road. As she did so, a glance in the rear view brought into vision a red van at that moment emerging around a curve a little behind. She continued to observe its progress as it swung the other way towards the main entrance of the farm. A Royal Mail van, the driver a ginger-haired type with his elbow propped out of the lowered driver's window.

And in that same instant the second of the two unanswered questions echoed once more in her head: if Billy's witness testimony had been completely fabricated to protect his father, how had he at the time known that they had an Indian man already on their radar?

The postman? Could it possibly have been him? The most regular visitor to the farmhouse, without question.

It seemed a long shot, the original question in effect just sliding across to another person: if it had been the postman to have informed the Pitmans that the initial suspect was Indian, then how on Earth had he known?

What the hell though, she reasoned - it wouldn't hurt to wheeze out one final investigative breath before admitting defeat. Rather than turning right at the roundabout onto the main A-road leading back to Branstead, she thus continued straight towards the village.

*

"Southwold frank," remarked Doug as he passed the envelope through the opened driver's window.