And that hesitation was her mistake. Pain shot through her leg as a blow landed on her right knee. Her leg gave way and she slid to the ground, still hanging on to the man’s coat. Then she saw something swinging towards her again from the side, a shape like a baseball bat. She put her hand out to ward it off as she threw herself to one side, gasping from the agony in her leg.

Fry rolled over in the mud, glimpsing feet around her and covering her head in anticipation of boots coming in. She fetched up hard against a rock and pushed herself into a crouch ready to jump up, but realized that her leg was not going to support her. Only one dark figure still stood in front of her, watching her for a moment, before it turned and ran off to join the others around the van.

Now the noises came to her through the night. She could hear the van being trashed. She could hear other sounds, too. Shouts and curses, and thumps.

Taylor had switched on the siren in his stranded patrol car. But the noise didn’t help at all when the scream came. It was so high-pitched that it ought to have been female. But Fry knew that it wasn’t.

27

‘There has to be something in the damn computer, Stewart,’ said Chief Superintendent Jepson. ‘That’s what it’s there for, to come up with the right answers. You’ve got a multi-million pound guaranteed Mastermind winner. All you need is Bamber Gascoigne to ask it the right questions.’

Normally, Jepson loved to be kept up to date on the progress of a major enquiry. It made him feel involved, instead of just a man sitting in an office with a lot of brass on his uniform. And sometimes Tailby found that talking a case through with him could put it in a different light. But not this morning. This Sunday morning there was no light to be found of any kind, not even from a phallus-shaped candle. The reports of the incident in the quarry the night before made painful and depressing reading. Three people had been injured, one of them a police officer. And the perpetrators had come and gone like a flurry of dead leaves in the wind, vanishing back on to the moor before PC Taylor could dig himself out of the mud.

‘Bamber Gascoigne was never on Mastermind,’ said Tailby wearily. ‘In fact, Mastermind hasn’t been on TV for years.’

‘So? Pick some other quiz. It doesn’t matter.’

‘These days contestants get to phone a friend or ask the audience.’

‘Well, we can’t ask our audience,’ said Jepson. ‘If we admit that we know sod all, they’d be down on us like vultures.’

‘And we haven’t got any friends either, have we?’

Jepson sighed deeply. ‘That’s true.’