Impression (DI Gardener 4)

Whilst on the phone, Gardener pulled Summerby further back. “Stand back, will you?”

He finished his call and knelt down to help his partner. “It’s okay, Mr Rydell, the ambulance is on its way.”

He’d stopped vomiting blood and was now sitting with his arms around his knees, rocking backwards and forwards, shaking, repeating one word: “Samantha.”

A gunshot suddenly reverberated around the small room. Gardener ducked and threw himself to one side. Reilly shielded Rydell.

Gardener glanced around to where the gun had been. Sally Summerby held it close to her chest, her finger still around the trigger.

“An eye for an eye, isn’t that what the good book says? Live by the sword, die by the sword. Choose any one you like, that bastard had it coming.”

She was staring at her dead husband.

Chapter Sixty-three

Gardener lurched forward and carefully removed the gun from Sally Summerby’s grip. He checked to see if it was still loaded, emptied the remaining shell, and threw it on to the floor.

“You just shot your husband,” said Gardener. “What the hell were you thinking?”

“He deserved it,” said Sally.

Gardener knew from the expression in her eyes that she meant it.

“He killed an innocent five-year-old girl. He put my daughter’s life at risk. He deserved to be punished.”

“Maybe,” replied Gardener. “But his punishment would have been up to the courts to decide.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “He’d go to prison for three years and be out in one for good behaviour. He’d probably study law while he was in there and come out a fully qualified solicitor. Some sentence that would be. Three square meals a day, gym, sauna, pool table…”

Reilly had left Rydell and was now checking Summerby. He stood up and shook his head: too late.

Summerby had a huge hole in his chest, and the wall he was sitting against had a trail of blood and intestines running down it.

Gardener couldn’t believe what had happened. He thought, at worst, he would be walking into a hostage situation, and someone might have been injured.

He turned to Sally Summerby. “Whatever you think about the system, you have no right to take the law into your own hands. You could go to prison for this.”

?

??What does it matter? My daughter’s dead.”

“We don’t know that. It hasn’t been established. All we know at the moment is she’s missing.”

She suddenly went and sat by Rydell, her left arm around his shoulder. “I’m so sorry for what happened to you and your family, but please, you have to tell me where you have my daughter.” She had tears in her eyes.

Rydell was still rocking, in shock. He glanced up at Sally Summerby.

Through his tears he said, “I never gave up, you know. I never stopped looking for her.”

Her expression softened. “I know what you’re going through, but you don’t want the same to happen to me and Chloe, do you?”

“She meant the world to me,” he said. “All these years, I’ve never given up hope.”

Rydell glanced at Summerby’s lifeless body. “And all this time, he knew.”

The sound of sirens diverted their attention.

Gardener opened the front door as the ambulance drew level. The medics jumped out. A second ambulance pulled up behind, parking on the area in front of the village hall, close to Rydell’s contraption.