Web of Lies by Sally Rigby (classic novels for teens txt) 📗

age and experience get in the way. Going to the station was the right thing to do. Should she pull rank? He was no longer a DI so her being a DC put her in charge.

‘You said you recognised him. How much surer do you have to be?’

‘I think it’s him and that he’s been following us, but I want to play it out and see if they follow us all the way back to town and then to my place.’

‘I’m still not sure that’s the right thing to do, but okay. I suppose it’s not taking us out of our way.’

They continued along the Gallow Field Road, turning right onto the Harborough Road, towards the town centre. She kept her eyes constantly on the car behind. There was now a vehicle between them. Perhaps Seb was mistaken. But would he be, with his memory?

‘What if they try to run us off the road?’

‘There aren’t a lot of places around here that they can do that,’ he said, cracking a smile.

‘I suppose not. It’s not like in parts of America. Surely they must know you’ve clocked them.’

‘They’ve been keeping well back, so they might not. I’m sure they won’t try anything at the moment because my car is much more powerful than theirs, and I could lose them easily enough if necessary.’

They reached the outskirts of the town centre and turned into Bowden Lane but the car behind them went a different way.

‘They’ve gone,’ she said, glancing in the wing mirror. ‘Maybe it wasn’t them after all and you were mistaken. They could have just been coming back from Foxton after being in the pub or looking around the locks.’

‘The driver did look like Dunkley, but as it was from a distance you could be right. And I didn’t recognise the man with him.’

‘Then again, what if it was them and they’ve gone to your house to wait for you? They know the area you’re staying in because they followed you, even if they don’t know the actual house, although I expect they do if they’ve been keeping an eye on you for a while.’

‘They’re not heading in the right direction. I was most likely wrong.’

‘And if they do turn up at your place?’ Birdie pushed, still uncertain.

‘I’ll call the police. If they’re after me, wherever I go they’ll find me. You’re worrying unnecessarily.’

‘Am I? What if they don’t give you the opportunity to call the police? They could beat you up again. They could murder you. I mean, they’ve already done it to Donald, haven’t they? Or they could kidnap you. It’s going—’

‘Birdie, calm down,’ Seb interrupted. ‘It’s not going to happen. I need some time to get everything together so I can hand it all over. I’ll do that this evening. You can let your sergeant know where we are with the investigation and tell him that tomorrow morning I’ll bring everything in and we can go through it with him. My concern is that we don’t have concrete proof Donald was murdered. The coroner’s report, the police report and the fact the case hasn’t been reopened all goes against us.’

‘But we now know about Donald blackmailing Edgar and Tony, and it looks likely that Andrea was being blackmailed, too.’

‘That’s all very well, but whether any of these people will admit to it in a police investigation, is a different matter. I suspect they won’t, and then what do we have? Our word for it?’

For the remainder of the journey, she was silent. He might be confident that he wasn’t in any danger, but she wasn’t so sure.

When they arrived back at his place, she scanned the street and couldn’t see the car which had been following them. Seb pulled in outside the front of his house and she drove off in her Mini towards the station. As she got to the end of the street, parked in a side road was the silver Golf.

Crap.

She stopped in a nearby street and called Twiggy.

Chapter 39

20 May

Twiggy had put his jacket on to leave the station, already late for dinner, when his phone rang. Surely it wasn’t Evie again, he’d already told her he wouldn’t be much longer. He’d been behind on his paperwork and he’d been informed by Sarge that he wasn’t to leave the station until it was all up-to-date.

He glanced at the screen. It was Birdie. What did she want? She hadn’t been seen or heard from for much of the day and it hadn’t gone down well in certain quarters.

‘Now you choose to let us know where you are,’ he said, without even saying hello. ‘Sarge has been breathing down my neck wanting to know what you’re doing. I tried to cover for you, but I didn’t have a clue what you were up to. What shall I tell him?’

‘Nothing. Actually … Yes … He needs to know. There’s a situation. I need you urgently and bring backup. I think the men who attacked Clifford are at the house he’s renting in Heygate Street, waiting to confront him.’

‘Are you close by? Can you see them?’

‘I was on my way back to the station when I saw their car parked up. They’d been following us most of the day, but then they disappeared.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Positive. They must have taken a shortcut.’

She caught him up with everything that had happened, and mentioned that these men might have murdered Witherspoon.

‘What the fuck, Birdie? Why didn’t you let us know you were in danger? And why did you let him go back to his place on his own? That’s police work 101.’

‘Okay, stop having a go. They stopped following us so Clifford thought it would be okay and that he might have been mistaken about it being his attackers. I didn’t really agree, but I was overruled. Meet me on the corner of Heygate and Doddridge and we’ll go in together. These men could be armed.’

Twiggy gripped hold of the desk, so tightly his knuckles went white. He couldn’t