She picked a direction at random and pushed on, deeper into the woods. Past more fallen trees. He must’ve left a trail, right? Broken twigs and footprints and all that malarkey. Shame she never paid any attention to that kind of crap in the Brownies.
A lump of rusted twisty machinery loomed out of the forest, like the skeleton of a long-dead beast.
‘SERGEANT MOORE!’
On. Deeper.
A noise up ahead.
Roberta hurried forward, struggling through a thicket of branches and brambles, out into a tiny clearing – no more than twenty foot across, knee-deep in sodden bracken. A stone circle festered in the middle of it. Not a big swanky photogenic one, like onOutlander, but a small mean one, with lichen-furred stones. The kind of place you could sacrifice children to the Elder Gods without waking the neighbours.
She stepped out from beneath the forest canopy into the proper rain. It drummed a tattoo on her high-vis shoulders.
Mountains reared up behind the woods, their top two-thirds lost in the grey misty clouds. Whole place couldn’t be more remote and primeval if it tried.
‘SERGEANT MOORE!’
Didn’t matter how much she strained her ears, only the rain replied.
Maybe her voice wasn’t carrying through the woods? What she needed was something to make bigger noises with...
Roberta picked up a fallen branch and whacked it against a thin beech tree at the edge of the clearing with a loudclack. ‘SERGEANT—’
A whole heap of water cascaded from the tree’s shaking leaves, most of which crashed down on top of her.
‘Gah!’
She danced backwards, away from the deluge, but something grabbed the back of her heel andcrash, she was flat on her back in the long wet bracken. Which promptly dumped another torrent of water all over her. Leaving Roberta lying there, looking up at the horrible grey clouds as four million litres of soggy soaked into her.
She’d got Sergeant Moore killed, hadn’t she? She’d dragged him out here, into this bastarding forest, chasing a psycho, MP-murdering bastard, and got himkilled. The whole thing was a piss-buggering disaster.
‘AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!’ Roberta scrambled to her feet, grabbed her branch and battered the living crap out of the traitorous beech tree with it. Whacking and thumping and howling with rage, because everything was comprehensively—
‘Are you OK?’
She turned – branch still raised, ready for another wallop – and there was Sergeant Moore, limping out from behind a clump of brambles, one hand pressed against the small of his back, breathing hard.
Roberta waved her stick at him. ‘Where the goat-wankinghell have you been?’
He pointed over his shoulder. ‘I fell down a—’
‘Had me worried sick! Sodding off on your own when there’s a killer on the loose!’
Moore looked from her to the branch in her hand, then tothe beech she’d been beating to within an inch of its woody life. ‘Did you think thetreedid it?’
Roberta lowered her whacking stick. ‘Don’t be a—’
‘Hope you read Mr Beech his rights before you embarked on the police brutality. Don’t want Professional Standards coming after you.’
She treated him to a scowl. ‘I liked it better when I thought you were dead.’
‘Yeah, my ex-wife feels much the same way.’
The branch came up, indicating the general direction he’d emerged from. ‘Anything?’
‘Nah. Whoever it was, they’re long gone.’
Of course they were.
