THE RUGBY CLUB was deserted—not surprisingly for a wet December lunch-time. The ground looked sodden and inhospitable, and this bleakness spread to the houses that backed on to the field of play. I drove around the ground and explored the streets that fed off the main road and finally came across a row of six garages behind an open field. The field was wild and strewn with rubbish and bits of masonry and metal. The garages were single story concrete blocks with up-and-over doors, each painted battleship grey and marked with graffiti and the scars of assaults sustained over the years.
I had a set of keys but no idea which door they fitted, so I worked down the row patiently until I came to one that was guarded by two heavy padlocks. One of the keys worked one of the padlocks, which I undid and pulled out. None of the other keys would go into the second lock. Eddie must have kept the key with him.
I looked back at the Corsa. In my Cavalier I had a kit in the boot that helped a resourceful private detective in all manner of ways. But I hadn’t transferred it to the courtesy car, so I had no way of prising off the second padlock.
Angry with myself and beginning to worry that by now people in the houses beyond would be watching, and possibly calling the local police, I started looking around the garages and in the field behind them. After a few minutes trudging through the long grass, I came across a pile of weather-beaten housebricks. I picked one up and hefted it for weight. It felt about right. I took it back to the garage and using both hands began noisily hammering at the second padlock. In a short time the fitting it was attached to peeled away far enough for me to lever it off completely. I turned the handle of the door and slid it upwards. It rose with a horrible graunching noise like the opening of the gates of Hell.
Inside, Eddie Hampshire’s pale blue 1973 Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow gleamed in the dull half-light.
The car had been reversed into the garage, its proud bonnet facing outwards, the Spirit of Ecstasy flying upwards towards nothing but a steel door. One of the keys on the key-ring I’d taken from Eddie Hampshire’s office had a Rolls-Royce fob attached to it. With it I opened the driver’s door and climbed inside. I sank into the driver’s seat and looked at the wood inlaid dashboard and its precision-tooled instruments. The smell of old leather and high-grade machine-engineering was potent, despite the number of years the car must have spent in the damp and forlorn garage. But there was another smell that lay over the expensive aroma of wealth and class generated by the car’s component parts—a smell I didn’t anticipate and didn’t like.
I climbed out and shut the door, then walked to the rear of the car, into the gloom at the back of the garage. I felt a growing tightness in my chest as I inserted the key and lifted the boot-lid—and saw the body of Tara Brand curled up inside, her eyes closed, her fists balled, her lips slightly open as if exhaling a final, unheard, plea.