‘Police cars? What’s happened, Alec?’

Alec’s mobile phone rang. It was Patrick.

Naomi told Danny what had been going on.

‘Chased him from the shop?’ she could hear the awe in his voice. ‘Shit! Sorry.’

‘No, I think the bad language is quite appropriate,’ Marcus said with dignity. ‘That is precisely the way I feel.’

‘Patrick says Fine’s arrived and is coming up with them. The scene’s been secured and SOCO called. There’s nothing more he can do until it’s released to him so he’s going to come and talk to us.’

‘What does all that mean?’ Danny asked.

‘It means they’ve found the car that hit Marcus?’ Naomi asked.

‘On its side in the ditch. No sign of the driver.’

‘The uniformed officer will have to make sure the scene is secured, that means no one can go into it. They’ll lay a single path that everyone has to follow, then the crime scene officers will come in and do their stuff. Then DS Fine will be allowed back and he’ll be told what’s been found so far.’ Naomi explained. ‘Alec, any idea what condition the driver might be in?’

‘Patrick says there was blood, but he’s nowhere close so … hard to tell. Danny, you say Kinnear came to the farm. Do you remember when?’

The boy shook his head. ‘Couple of weeks back.’

‘Before or after Rupert died. Do you remember?’

He thought about it. ‘Must have been before,’ he said finally. ‘The other man gave my mum a lift home and she said he was a friend she had met at this meeting with Mr Friedman.’

‘She hadn’t driven herself.’

‘Can’t have done if he gave her a lift home,’ Danny said reasonably. ‘I don’t know why. Anyway, they were standing talking and this other man came up. He just drove into the yard like and the dark-haired man took one look and said he’d better go. Mam didn’t say anything, but I could tell she didn’t like him much. Then a few days after he came to see my dad. I was in the barn and I stayed up there. They were arguing. I could see that, but I don’t know what about, except me dad and mam were in a fight later about her having her … friends come to the farm.’

‘Friends?’

Danny shrugged uncomfortably. ‘Dad called him her fancy man. But mam would never do anything with someone like him. Never.’

‘Danny, this is a difficult question, but the other man, the one your mum said was a friend. Did you get the impression that he was more than that? Or that she’d known him long?’

Danny stared hard at him, his body stiff and unease showing in the set of his shoulders. Finally, he shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘I dunno what she was doing. What’s the use in asking me?’

Fine announced that he would walk back up to Fallowfields and left his car parked on the verge at the end of their driveway. He raised an eyebrow as Patrick retrieved his poker from the hedge.

‘I thought we should be prepared,’ Patrick said. ‘But I’d better not leave it there now, someone might think it’s part of the crime scene.’

Fine laughed. ‘It might muddy the waters,’ he agreed. ‘I’m relieved you didn’t have cause to use it. I might have been arresting you too.’

Patrick shrugged. ‘You think he’d have gone far? You know who he is?’

‘Well, the descriptions point to it being Derek Reid,’ he said. ‘He was always top of our list. Funny though, he has no real history of violence. This seems out of character, at least from what I’ve seen of his sheet.’

‘Fear can make people behave in some very odd ways,’ Harry commented.

‘True. Is Marcus up to being questioned?’

‘Provided Naomi didn’t give him any more brandy. By the time we left he was calming down somewhat. I imagine Alec and Naomi will have got his story from him anyway.’

Derek Reid was lost. His one thought had been to get away from the scene. His neck hurt and his head throbbed where he’d cracked it on the steering wheel. The seat belt had dug deep into his ribs when he had been thrown forward and he’d managed to crack his head a second time on something when the car rolled. He’d hit the back end of Marcus’s car at an angle, his speed and the angle causing the passenger side to lift and he had flipped, then rolled, ended up on his side confused and shaken and hurting like hell.

He did not recall getting out of the car but did know that he had not had the strength to climb over the gate. Unable to open it, he had slithered beneath on his belly and then stumbled across the cow churned field as fast as his shaking legs could take him, his one thought that he should get away.

Now, two fields or three fields over and disorientated, he wondered what to do. The day was warm and there were no cows here to snuffle in that curious way they had. Instead he lay at the edge of a field of wheat or barley, he didn’t know which but had the vague memory that he had once known the difference. He lay down on the swathe of uncut grass at the field edge and listened to his body complain.

‘God, Derek, your dad was right,’ he told himself. ‘Can’t get a bloody thing right. Not ever.’

Except Sharon, he thought. Sharon was right. He’d known that from the start.

Thinking about her gave him the strength to get up and he felt in his trouser pockets for his phone only to realize that it was in his jacket and his jacket was still in the car.

Groaning in despair and disbelief he remembered that it had been cool first thing and he’d slipped his jacket on when he’d gone shopping for Kinnear. A further search of his trouser pockets informed him that all he had in the world was a handful of change and a crumpled five-pound note.

His dad had been right, he thought again. Never could do a damn thing right. It did not seem in the least bit strange that here he was, a man in his early thirties still stung by the words of someone who had disappeared from his life when Derek had still been in his teens.

‘Can’t do a bloody thing right. Bloody waste of skin.’

Derek sighed and considered the irony that he was in this situation precisely because for once in his life he had tried to do the right thing. Driving away from Kinnear that morning, Sam’s words still burning in his ears, he’d finally realized that he was in a no win situation. Kinnear would use him and then scrape him off like shit on the bottom of his shoe. Kinnear had no intention of giving Derek a share of what he saw as his. Sam Kinnear had waited too long and fomented so much greed in that waiting time that he wasn’t about to share any of his spoils now.

He remembered Kinnear talking to him in prison. One long night when Sam had been in a conversational mood and when Sam wanted to talk you had no choice but to listen. He had talked about this man, this driver, this Sam Spade, and how he knew he had the proceeds from those first two jobs. Derek had laughed. Laughed at Kinnear.

Spitting blood through the split lip Kinnear had awarded him as prize for his humour, Derek had explained that Sam Spade was a fiction. A made-up name. No one would call their kid Sam Spade.

So Derek had decided when he had left Kinnear that morning that he would, for once, try to do the sensible thing. He would talk to Marcus and together they could concoct some story. Blackmail would probably fit the bill, he thought. Go to the police and tell them Kinnear was blackmailing them. It was close enough to the truth to be almost real and if forced Derek was now even willing to come clean. Tell the whole truth and nothing but. Do time if he had to. He’d managed before and though his heart sank at the thought of it, he could hack it again if he was forced.

But it seemed that his father’s damnation of him had to thwart even his best intentions. Marcus had seen him and taken off like a scared rabbit and Derek knew that his chance was gone.

He wasn’t sure why he’d tried to run Marcus off the road but he’d sort of figured it might be the only way to get to talk to him, convince him to go along with his scheme. Failing that he would have dragged Marcus’s sorry ass back to Kinnear and looked for another way out, but it was all too late for that now.