Interested, he took a step back, aware that he could be visible should someone choose to look up. He angled his head, the pulse in the base of his throat throbbing. Anticipation, excitement. Dicing with possibilities.
Blue lights flashed on their approach. Fire. Ambulance. Police.
He retreated. Curious, interested in the process. Aware of the possibilities of being noticed. He took one more step back. Hunkered down, his back against a tree to watch the light show.
6
Sunday 19 April 0035 hours
Once they’d parked their cars at Malinsgate Police Station, Jenna took the keys Mason had grabbed from the duty desk and slid into the driver’s seat of the police-issue vehicle. One of the older cars in the fleet, the interior held the vague reminiscence of sweat and pee, as though the vehicle had transported one too many drug addicts and drunks.
‘Did it have to be this one?’ She tried not to breathe in through her nose.
Mason shrugged and she suspected he hadn’t even noticed the stench, or perhaps wasn’t bothered by it.
Jenna slotted her travel mug into the plastic holder in the centre console as Mason made the car bounce when he flopped into the passenger seat. ‘That’s mine!’ She stabbed her finger at the mug. ‘Don’t touch it, or you’re dead meat.’ With a deliberate hard glance at Mason to make sure he got the message, she turned again for a closer look at him. ‘What the hell are you grinning at?’
He shrugged and reached for his seat belt, the long creases bracketing his mouth cut deep as he continued to grin.
Jenna pushed the button to fire the engine up but took it out of gear as she turned in her seat to stare at him. ‘What?’
‘I think you’ve gone soft on him, all for a dopey smile and a hot mug of coffee.’
Speechless for a moment, she narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I’ve not gone soft, and you were the one who got the coffee.’
‘Only because I took it from you. If we’d been at work, you’d have knocked my block off for that.’
‘It was precisely because we weren’t at work that I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t want to frighten him off with a display of unprecedented violence.’
‘It wouldn’t have been unprecedented. It would have been justified. So would your burial in the shallow grave in my back garden. You stole my coffee.’
‘That’s a stiff accusation.’
‘It’s an accurate observation. And you were in my house. I was being congenial towards you. It was nothing to do with Adrian.’ And yet it was everything. He was integrating into her world, being accepted by Mason.
‘Interesting.’ He fell silent and stared straight ahead as he waited for her to respond.
With emotions a little too tender and new for her to examine, Jenna turned and pulled her seat belt around her, put the car in gear and pulled away from the parking space to head for the exit.
She put her foot a little too hard on the accelerator and the car leapt to life, shooting into the mainstream of traffic as she took the ring road around Telford Town Centre. That in-between time of couples heading home after a date night of restaurant and cinema, but too early yet for the turning out of the clubs, the mid-flow of traffic hadn’t reached its peak.
She sailed through green traffic lights at Hollinswood Interchange and took the fifth exit onto the A442 Queensway towards Ironbridge.
Jenna guided her vehicle between the other cars, negotiating the pimple roundabouts which were a recent addition to the area. The whole of Telford had been affected, slowed down, clogged up. At one time she remembered, she could get from her house to the retail park in under ten minutes. Now, with all the additional traffic lights and roundabouts and narrowing of lanes, and feeder lanes, she was lucky if she made it in twenty.
Progress. This is what they called progress.
Gone were the days, and not so long ago, when Telford was renowned for its roundabouts, traffic flowed freely, and one-way systems worked. It hadn’t taken so very long from the advent of the first set of traffic lights on those roundabouts to manage to snarl up the traffic.
Unable to stop the yawn, Jenna reached out to turn the heating down and keep some fresh air flowing, then she pushed back in her seat. She glanced right and swooped the car around the roundabout at the top of Jiggers Bank, the steep, undulating road that dived down into Ironbridge. The narrow road, opened in 1818, had serviced the Industrial Revolution but had crumbled into the deep valley below until the last few years when they’d shored it all up with gabion baskets filled with stone.
She opted to take the more direct route along the bypass, lifting her foot off the accelerator as the car swooped down the steep embankment. Instead of following the steady curve in the road that would take her onwards to Shrewsbury, Jenna touched her foot to the brake, changed down gear, indicated left and opted for the narrower road over the Buildwas bridge and headed towards Much Wenlock.
‘Oh, dear God.’
Brilliant amber and gold scythed across the glass-clear night sky, dulling out the bright stars. Like a sunset, multicoloured hues dashed across the horizon, but unlike a sunset, the colours wavered like great flags, never still, interlacing with huge plumes of smoke, which could have been mistaken for clouds but for the vicious spiralling upwards into the ether.
‘That’s one hell of a fire,’ Mason observed.
Jenna blew out a breath. ‘We’re still miles away. It must be enormous.’
‘It’ll take some putting out. Let’s hope the fire service have enough resources on hand to deal with this. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it.’
Sparks licked into the night sky, pushing the illumination higher, and Jenna pressed her right foot a little heavier to the accelerator.
‘They’ll have to pull in everything they’ve got.’ Not her problem, Jenna nevertheless considered the logistics of adequate cover from a county whose fire stations mainly had one tender in each location.
She followed the smooth flow of the road, hugging the bends as it took her past the sparse smattering of houses, meandering down past the old renovated pub on her left and then climbing back up again on its approach to Much Wenlock.
Hands soft on the steering wheel, Jenna peered up into the sky at the encroaching vast swathe of red, purpling at the edges as it dispersed into the night.
Distracted by the sight, her heart leapt in her chest as a dark shadow burst from the treeline in the hills above her to spring onto the road. Survival instinct had Jenna slamming her brakes on. Lit up in the swathe of white headlights from the police car, the fallow deer continued its dash in front of their bonnet almost skimming the paintwork and then dodged at the last minute. Its white spots glowed against the pale golden tan of its hide.
As Mason was almost thrown through the front windscreen, but for the immediate action of his seat belt, the inertia flung Jenna back in her own seat. Her head slammed against the headrest as her breath jammed in her chest. ‘Shit.’
‘Shit.’ Mason rubbed his chest as he let out a deep grunt.
Oblivious of her near-death experience, the deer danced with grace and finesse into the embankment on the right-hand side and disappeared into the undergrowth.
Before Jenna had time to suck in the breath she desperately needed, a small fawn high-stepped across the road in front of the car, a new-born with legs still gangly and thin, unlike the beast who’d come before it.