A Body in the Lakes by Graham Smith (great books of all time .TXT) 📕

seven people: two council workers, an elderly couple and three people standing by themselves. One of the three was a woman: that left the two men.

Both men were of a similar build to the file description of Stanton and, as both had their backs turned, they didn’t know which one to approach first.

O’Dowd pointed at herself and then Beth as she assigned them each one of the men.

As she walked along the gravel path, Beth was watching O’Dowd’s approach as well as keeping her eye on her own quarry. The closer she got, the more she was preparing herself for action. Should Stanton take flight, as had been proven with the pursuit of Gracie, she’d have to be the one to catch him.

O’Dowd’s roar broke the serenity of the graveyard. ‘Hoy! Come back here you bugger.’

Beth’s body snapped into action by the time her head had twisted to look O’Dowd’s way. Within two seconds, she’d wheeled round and was haring back towards the cemetery’s gate. She knew she ought to take a direct route rather than follow the dog-leg of the gravel path, but she knew that any time she saved going straight at her quarry, would be lost by dodging the heavy headstones and avoiding standing on graves.

O’Dowd chased after Stanton, exhortations for him to stop spilling from her lips as she lumbered along.

When Beth got to the path’s 90-degree corner she made the mistake of not slowing her pace. The gravel crunched beneath her pumping feet, but while it provided plenty of vertical support, it offered up no lateral strength to give her traction.

Her right leg was on the inside of the turn she was making and it was this foot which lost traction first.

She went down hard, rolled over twice and sprang back to her feet ignoring the rip to the knee of her trousers or the gravel rash her hands had picked up as she’d tried to break her fall.

The gate was only twenty yards away and she saw Stanton dash through it a clear ten yards ahead of O’Dowd.

Beth pumped her arms and legs as hard as she’d ever done and got to the gateway at the same time as she heard a car door slam.

Rather than waste time trying to prevent Stanton driving off, she dashed towards her own car.

Eighty

Beth slammed the car down two gears and stood on the brake with all her weight. Beside her O’Dowd was using one hand to hold her phone to her ear and the other to brace herself as Beth threw the car into the corner.

Stanton’s BMW was far more powerful than Beth’s little VW, but on these narrow country roads, its rear-wheel drive was proving a liability on the corners as its tyres struggled for traction under Stanton’s liberal use of its immense power.

It was all Beth could do to keep up with the car ahead, but that was all she had to do. O’Dowd was directing reinforcements to their location, and Stanton would soon find himself hemmed in.

Beth rounded the corner and exited onto a long straight. Ahead of her she could see Stanton’s car bouncing along the uneven road. The corner was strewn with tiny stones where rainwater had crossed from a natural gully at one side to one on the other.

She controlled the understeer and buried her foot to the floor at the earliest moment.

Stanton’s car disappeared round a blind corner.

Beth’s entire focus was on driving. Her thoughts were staccato instructions of what she was doing and what she needed to do.

Change up a gear. Bury her right foot again.

Dodge the pothole.

Scan the hedgerows looking for emerging animals or farm machinery.

Up another gear. Stand on the throttle.

Blind corner approaching. O’Dowd barking requests into her phone for support.

Down two gears.

Brake pedal kicking back. Thank God for ABS. Swing the wheel right, crest the corner as fast as the car can maintain traction.

Disaster. A huge pothole on the inside of the corner. Deep. A wheel wrecker.

No time to stop. Go round or smash a wheel.

Tease the steering wheel left a little. Put two wheels on the grass and aim to miss the edge of the pothole by as little as possible.

Don’t look at where the outside of the corner falls away down to the bottom of a wooded glade.

Success. Eyes ahead again. Feed in the power again.

Assess everything .

See the inevitable crash before it happens.

Stand on the brakes and aim for the gap that’s too small.

Stanton’s BMW was straddling the road. Its front end all smashed in from its collision with a stone wall. As she tried to steer round the back of the stationary car, Beth realised there wasn’t enough room. That her little car would tumble down the glade until stopped by a tree.

She did the only thing she could do and aimed for the back of Stanton’s car. It was the lightest part of the car and therefore would be the softest part to hit.

Even as she braced herself for the impact, she noticed the BMW’s front wheel was smashed. Most likely from a hard impact with the cavernous pothole.

The two cars collided with a thudding crump.

It wasn’t a straight head-on collision for the VW. More a glancing blow. The BMW slowed them but the VW was rebounded away in the direction of the slope.

The roadside grass offered no traction to her brakes.

Beth tried to steer a path back onto the road.

Failed.

The car was almost stopped when its front wheel crossed the edge of the slope.

‘Shiiiit.’ O’Dowd’s screamed curse was one Beth agreed with.

For a moment it balanced on two diagonal wheels until the weight of the engine pulled the car off balance.

As the little VW went into its first roll, Beth realised that instead of trying to fight the inevitable, she should have turned the car so it was facing down the slope after colliding with Stanton’s BMW.

Eighty-One

When Beth came to, she found the inside of the car was filled with the talcum powder used to pack airbags. She