Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [265]
“Walking back from the railway station. Where are you?”
“The business centre.” She told him the route, surprising herself with her own memory.
He repeated it back to her and she said, “Hurry. Please do hurry. Freddie, the police won’t come. When I rang them, they said they need a search warrant, they need to take that computer to Barrow, they need to… God, I don’t know what. And he’s in there and they’re going to film him. I just know it, but I couldn’t make her see.”
“Darling, I’m on my way,” he said.
“I’ll try to get inside the shop,” she told him. “I’ll bang on the door. They’ll stop what they’re doing, won’t they? Surely?”
“Manette, do nothing. Do you understand me? These are dangerous people. I’m on my way. Wait.”
Manette didn’t know how she could. But she rang off after promising him that until he arrived … There was no way she could do that, although she tried. Three minutes of waiting did her in.
She ran to the front door. It was locked, as she knew it would be, but that was of no account. She banged upon it. She rattled it. It was mostly glass, but the glass was thick and the door was unmoving, even in its jamb. And as for the noise possibly disturbing the action inside Shots!— whatever that action was— she could see how unlikely the case was that she was achieving that. For a door behind the shop counter was also closed, and if they were filming within the building, noise would also be associated with that.
She bit her nails. She looked around. She thought of the possibilities and came up with the back of the business centre. For the shops in the centre would have more than one door, surely? In case of fire, only one means of egress from a place of business had to be illegal, didn’t it?
She dashed round the back, only to encounter a line of doors and all of them unmarked. She hadn’t thought to count up the shops in front in order to do the same in the rear, so she went back round the front at a run to do so, just as Freddie came tearing into the car park.
She flung herself towards him. He was breathing like a mountaineer without oxygen. He gulped out, “Treadmill. Starting tomorrow,” and then, “Which one? Where?” as she clung to his arm.
She told him that the door was locked, that there was an inner door, that there were also doors round the back. She said that she could bang on the back door and Freddie could wait at the front door for all of them to come pounding out of the place to make a run for it. When they did that—
“Absolutely not,” he said. “We’re not about to set these people off. They’ve a lot vested in not getting caught. We need the police.”
“But they won’t come!” she wailed. “I told you that. They won’t come unless they get a bloody warrant.”
Freddie looked round the car park. He spied the heavy wheelie bin. He said to Manette, “Oh, I think we can give them a reason to come.”
He trotted over to the wheelie bin and put his shoulder to it. She saw what he intended and joined him in the effort. They began to roll the bin towards the shops, picking up speed on a slope of the car park. As they approached the front of Shots!, Freddie murmured, “Give it your best now, darling. And hope he set the burglar alarm.”
He had done. So they discovered when the wheelie bin crashed through the front door of the photo shop and the alarm began to howl.
Freddie winked at Manette and rested his hands on his thighs to catch his breath. “Voilà,” he said.
“Bob’s your uncle,” she replied.
MORECAMBE BAY
CUMBRIA
Alatea was motionless, a statue more than two miles from where she’d leapt off the seawall and into the empty channel of the River Kent. When she’d set off from Arnside, she’d seen the fog but at that point she could still make out in the distance the peninsula that was Holme Island, and she knew that round the tip of it lay Grange-over-Sands and escape.
She’d thought to put on her hiking boots, deciding she had just time for that and an anorak as Nicky and the red-haired woman had their conversation out