Page 74 of The Trouble With Love

The arms released me and the weight of my captor moved suddenly as he climbed to his feet. ‘Nah. I was pointing at his feet, not his fucking head.’

A sudden punch, which I heard rather than saw, which sent a body landing next to me on its backside. ‘You fucker. What do we do now?’

The three men started swiping at one another, helmets cracked together and jackets creaked and tore, sounding like mating time in a leather furniture showroom, as fists and arms flailed and connected. I struggled to my feet and stared across at the body lying underneath the tree, then I started to run with my feet skidding, three steps forward and one step back until I reached Kai’s fallen shape hunched and huddled across the roots of the leafless oak.

‘Kai! Oh God, don’t be dead, please don’t be dead!’ I reached out and took his hand, but it flopped inertly onto the earth. I grabbed his shoulders and shook. ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen!’ My tears fell onto his pale, chilled skin and ran down into his hair. ‘Don’t do this to me, Kai Rhys, you bastard, don’t die on me!’ My voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Please. Don’t let me lose someone else that I love.’

‘You should always start this kind of conversation by looking for the exit wound.’ Kai’s voice was so level and its tone so coolly amused that I found I was looking around for the ghostly shade that spoke. ‘That was your first mistake.’ His eyes slipped open. ‘And the second was telling me you love me.’

I suppressed the startled noise that rose. ‘But . . .’ was all I could manage. Then I slapped him on his shoulder. ‘You’re alive.’

He closed his eyes again. ‘Well, yes. But it makes a much better ending for my piece if someone shot me, don’t you think? Besides’ — a cool hand rummaged inside his jacket and brought out the tiny, but very powerful camera — ‘I’ve got it all. In all its megapixelled glory.’ He shook the camera gently. ‘It does sound too, y’know. Borrowed it off my photographer.’

I opened my mouth a couple of times but words refused to come out. They were forming a disorderly queue in my brain though. ‘You . . . are such a . . . journalist,’ I managed.

‘When I saw him point the gun I decided to take a dive. Better all round if he thought I was out of things. Besides,’ a lazy drift of his fingers pointed to the gang fight that had erupted on the brow of the hill, where the rest of the girls had long since been left to their own devices, ‘they’ll do all the hard work for me.’

‘But . . . I thought . . . where are the police? I thought you had the police watching through your telescope?’

‘They’re on their way.’ He tapped his ear. ‘I’m Bluetoothed up the wazoo. They’ve been watching all right. All we need now is to find where the drugs are before one of them gets them all shipped out and the case is dropped for lack of evidence.’ He pointed again at where two of the men had a third down on the ground and were explaining to him where he’d gone wrong, with the teaching aids of both boot and fist. ‘Of course, that has yet to dawn on these morons.’

Eve was doubled over, sitting on a muddy outcrop and rocking. ‘She thinks you’re dead too,’ I said, gazing at her over the trio of scrapping helmets.

‘Yeah, resurrection will have to wait until the police get here. It’s only them thinking they’ve killed me that’s keeping their minds off you lot. If I were you I’d get those ladies off the hill and somewhere safe.’

‘But . . .’

His lips rose to mine and the words I’d been about to say vanished in hot breath and heartbeats. ‘Kiss of life. If anyone asks,’ Kai whispered, letting his head drop back onto the mossy ground again. ‘Now go.’ He tapped his earpiece again. ‘Police are on their way. You and the girls vanish off to Vivienne’s place, I’ll catch up with you there.’

‘Won’t there be questions?’

A manic grin. ‘Probably. And I should warn you that I am going to lie outrageously.’

‘Well, you are a journalist.’

I headed back. Vivienne was leading everyone down the path towards her cottage, carefully not turning around to watch the increasingly bloody fight, which I managed to circumvent by tracking around the hilltop. As I dropped below the skyline, I heard the crackle of radios and the heavy-booted running of several men in police-issue footwear, then the gunning sound of a motorbike engine.

‘Shit!’

‘What?’ Megan panted alongside me for a second, chest bobbing like two buoys on a choppy sea.

‘One of them is trying to get to the drugs.’

‘There are drugs? As in, little plastic baggies being sold in nightclubs? I thought you said they were poachers!’ she puffed.

‘I may have been a little economical with the truth.’ I stopped running, Meg’s words kicking an idea into the front of my brain. ‘And I think I know where they’ve put the stuff.’

‘But Holly . . .’

‘I wished for excitement, remember?’ I wheeled away from her and headed down over the lip of the hilltop into the wood, splashing through runny mud, keeping one ear on the rattle of the motorbike engine which sounded as though it was heading along the dry ground on the ridge.

Heading out through the woods to the gully where I’d hidden after my escape from the shed. To where, it had just dawned on me, there had been an awful lot of plastic sheeting and loose earth, just the kind of thing you might expect to find if someone had, for example, wrapped and buried a load of drugs, in the middle of nowhere, where no one ever went.

I tripped over my own feet as I ran. The bike engine was just ahead of me, so I kept going, following the sound, although my memory for places — honed by years of having to keep a mental image of locations in case of sudden need — told me that the gully was in the bottom of the valley and the bike was still running along the ridge. Suddenly the note of the engine changed, I saw the mossy outline of the innocent-looking shed where I’d been trapped just in front of me and realised that the bike was being ridden directly down the slope. I took a deep breath and sprinted amateurishly through the leaf mulch, slipping and sliding on the debris with the sound of the dirt bike whining in my ears.

Kept going, on through the trees. There was still a covering of snow on the floor of the forest, but all footprints were long gone. I had to run navigating by instinct, fear, and the vague memories that had formed as I’d hurtled through the trees afraid for my life. I found the gully the same way I had last time, by sliding down into it, rolling and jolting with my legs out in front of me and my shoulders catching on roots and branches, and I just had time to duck behind one of the low-growing ivy-covered bushes that littered the slope before I heard a bike drop with a dying drone. The engine cut out and there was a sudden green silence, broken eventually by a crashing slide as one of the men — I didn’t know which of them I’d been chasing — came plunging down the slope, broke his fall by grasping at a stump of elder and swung around to start digging with both hands in the side of the hollow, tearing plastic and swearing loudly and emphatically.

I didn’t think. I leaped out from behind my cover and confronted my nemesis, Big Ginge himself, who was pulling small white blocks from the earth, dusting them off and slipping them inside his leather jacket. ‘The police are on their way,’ I said, making him jump and drop one of the packets. ‘They’re just arresting your mates.’

---