‘Bryant, I’m not joking so—’
‘She’s not fucking with me,’ he shouted, and Leanne’s blood ran cold.
Leanne got herself out of the ambulance and looked around. There were squad cars and officers milling around but no Inspector Stone.
‘She’s gone. She’s legged it,’ she said, holding her shoulder in place until the pain medication kicked in.
‘Leanne, you had better be joking?’
‘She waited, Bryant,’ Leanne shouted down the phone. ‘She waited until I passed out,’ she said, running down to the road. She knew it was pointless. If Symes was anywhere close by, he’d now had a ten-minute head start.
‘I’m coming back,’ Bryant said.
‘No, stay at the hospital,’ Leanne said, thinking ahead. ‘I’ll come to you. It’ll be quicker.’
She ended the call, ran back to the ambulance and grabbed her jacket.
‘You a driver?’ she asked one of the police officers.
He nodded.
‘Grab a buddy and get me to Russells Hall right now, and use every siren and light you’ve got.’
SEVENTY-FIVE
The sensation of her phone vibrating silently against her stomach brought Kim out of the darkness of her own consciousness.
It took only seconds for her to remember what she’d done. She knew her body was moving but not by itself. She was in the back of a car and every bump sent a wave of pain to the lump that had already formed on the back of her head.
She could feel the roughness of some kind of blanket covering her and resting against her cheek. She was lying on her right side with her arms and legs hog-tied behind her, preventing her from any kind of movement. She had no idea how long she’d been unconscious or how long she’d been in the car, but the plan of escape had formed in her mind the second she heard that recording of Symes terrorising the girls.
She needed to know if the first part of her plan had worked. She couldn’t feel the bulk of the borrowed phone in her back pocket, so she was hopeful he’d taken the bait.
She prayed that he was taking her to the girls, that she had called it right and they were still alive. Her plan was no more in depth than that. Get to the girls and save them.
Whatever happened after that was in the lap of the gods.
SEVENTY-SIX
‘So what the hell do we do now?’ Bryant asked, getting into the back of the squad car beside Leanne. His own car would remain parked at Russells Hall.
‘Head towards Himley,’ Leanne said to the driver as she checked her phone. ‘Sirens off.’
‘Leanne…’ he said as the car pulled away at speed.
‘Have you called your boss?’
‘Not yet. I’ve instructed Penn to get to the hospital for Gavin, and Stacey to await further instructions.’
‘Call him and let him know what’s going on. Tell him we want another two squad cars to join us but not on the blues.’
Bryant took out his phone ‘But what are we…?’
‘We’re tracking her. She knows I put a tracker in her phone. While it’s still switched on we have a rough idea where she is.’
‘So don’t we want every resource available screaming its way towards her?’ he asked, confused. Surely they should deploy the army, navy, air force and every squad car in a twenty-mile radius. She was with a psychopath who wanted nothing more than to kill her.
‘Not until she stops moving. The last thing we want is a high-speed chase and to show Symes our cards. Someone might get killed and then we’ll never find the girls. Once they stop moving we need to be ready.’