The Girl Who Stole the Apple

* * *

‘They’re moving, sir.’

It was 7.30 a.m. Reid had had five fitful hours of sleep in his desk chair and he felt crap. He was pretty sure that Ashcroft hadn’t even knocked and now he was standing in the open doorway with a Cheshire-cat grin smeared across his face.

‘Late last night they used the card outside a supermarket in Penrith,’ Ashcroft was saying. ‘Took three hundred cash from an ATM. They must be heading for Scotland.’

‘Why Scotland?’ Reid was thinking aloud, but Ashcroft answered.

‘Foulkes is half Scottish, sir.’

Reid looked at Ashcroft, giving him the full benefit of his dislike. ‘And the other half is English.’

Ashcroft’s grin stiffened. ‘He heads north and stops at Penrith. Supermarket and garage are both open all night. They stock up on cash for fuel and food. You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to work out that they are headed for Scotland. Where the heck else would they be going?’

Reid sniffed. He rubbed his chin. Ashcroft was probably right. It was the obvious conclusion. They were running short of cash, so they had withdrawn the maximum amount possible in a single transaction and by now they could be anywhere in Scotland. But Reid certainly had no intention of congratulating his sergeant. And something bothered him about it. It was the fact that Ashcroft’s conclusion was the obvious one.

‘Have we spotted their car? Got them on ANPR?’

Ashcroft’s faint grin faded. It was the weak point of his case.

‘No, sir. But . . .’ Ashcroft dribbled to a halt, primarily because Reid had got up from his chair, turned away and walked over to the single window in his box of an office. He stretched his arms, trying to ease his various aches. He was getting too old for this. He stared out across the busy thoroughfare at the hideous 1970s concrete construction that was his view.

He turned round and snarled at Ashcroft. ‘They aren’t stupid, Sergeant. I’m sure I have already made that clear. They are perfectly capable of changing registration plates, changing vehicles, changing identities even. They know how to cover their tracks. So what you need to do is get hold of the CCTV footage from that garage and supermarket in Penrith and see if we can identify them and their vehicle. Only then will we have some chance of tracking them reliably.’

‘But we keep monitoring the card?’

‘Of course you do. But we don’t put all our eggs in one basket, do we, Sergeant?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Not unless you want them scrambled all over your face, Sergeant.’

Ashcroft nodded and left, closing the door carefully behind him.

Reid leaned with his back against the window and sighed. He had overdone the eggs a bit, he thought.

* * *

It was all very well to drug Sam and get the hell away from him before he woke up. But Maggie knew you can’t just run away. You have to run to somewhere — or someone. She had struggled with that conundrum half the previous evening. Where on earth were she and Beth going to escape to? Leaving the UK was no option — the kid had no passport. Sam had tried to send their pursuers on a wild goose chase to Scotland. Or that was what she assumed. But was that a smokescreen, a device to get her running in the opposite direction? Was Sam on their side or hers?

Then, halfway through her glass of Merlot, the answer had suddenly jumped fully-formed into her head. Going through her shoulder bag, she had come across Ellie’s latest letter. She had picked it up and looked at it again. She had examined the back of the envelope with its printed, ‘I love Trident’ slogan and the cryptic pencilled message: ‘Maybe I should retire soon?’

Only suddenly it wasn’t cryptic at all.

It had been a hot June day. A Saturday. They had been sitting on a rock admiring the view. It was one heck of a view, though Ellie’s attention hadn’t been fixed entirely on the cold dark water below or the peaks rising in the distance. Rather her eyes had been following a group of maybe a dozen rugged young men scrambling up the escarpment away to their left. She had even borrowed Maggie’s binoculars to get a better look.

‘You never told me about this!’ Ellie had giggled. ‘I think I shall retire here.’

Maggie had laughed. ‘Behave yourself, Ellie. It’s a bit late for all that.’ And she had leaned over and patted her friend’s stomach. Beth, four months after her conception.

‘No, I mean it, Maggs,’ she had said, suddenly serious. ‘This would be the perfect place to retire. To get away from the world.’

Now that this memory had risen from Maggie’s unconscious, it refused to budge. Whichever way she looked at it, she came to the same conclusion. Ellie’s envelope was telling her where she was, or might be going. Quite why and exactly where, was a different matter. On that occasion they had stayed in a cottage above the village, one familiar to her from several childhood holidays. It had been owned by a friend of her father, though when she and Ellie had gone there the friend had been long dead and the cottage had become a commercial let.

So maybe that was where she needed to go now. If so, she had to work out how to get to North Yorkshire without being followed. If Sam was on their side, then they would know what car she was driving. It would only be a matter of time before the cameras picked her up on the road.

Beth was fast asleep, which was a blessing. So Maggie made her way back onto the M5 and then headed south at a steady sixty-five miles an hour, fine-tuning the plan in her head. Then, just as Beth was waking, she pulled off into a motorway service area complete with CCTV cameras and Automatic Number Plate Recognition system. The two of them made their way to the loo and grabbed a takeaway breakfast before putting fuel in the car and continuing their journey southwards.