“Don’t know, sir. He just sort of appeared.”
Logan muttered something, then fired up the engine. Across the car park, the polis 4x4 roared into life, its sirens breaking into a piercing scream.
“Are you going to throw up on this road?” Logan asked, turning to the DC sitting beside him.
“Hopefully not, boss,” Tyler replied.
Logan glowered. “Let’s try that again, son. Are you going to throw up on this road?”
“Eh… no, boss. I’m not.”
“That’s more like it,” Logan said, then he gave a blast of his horn to encourage the other vehicle to move.
As soon as it had, he floored the accelerator, and the BMW went tearing out of the car park in a cloud of fumes and gravel.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
It was fifty minutes later, and Tyler had been true to his word. But only just. Every hump in the road, every sudden twist and bend, had elicited a noise, or a flinch, or a gasped, “Fuck!”
They had gone tearing up the road far faster than Logan and Sinead had done it a couple of days before, the sirens of their escort forcing any oncoming traffic to divert into laybys in order to let them past.
The speed, while helping them get there sooner, was doing Tyler’s stomach no favours, at all. Or, for that matter, anyone else’s.
“Why did they do this?!” Tyler wailed, after a particularly twisted chicane that had forced him to swallow down something that had been pretty damn adamant about coming up. “Why would anyone build a road like this on purp—?”
The rest of the sentence was cut off by a hwurk, a, “Jesus Christ!” and a clamped hand across his mouth.
The other detectives had offered words of support for the first twenty minutes of the journey, albeit in their own very different styles. Now, though, they were both so focused on not throwing up themselves that they frankly didn’t have time for Tyler’s shit, so nobody offered a response.
“How far now?” Logan asked, stealing a glance in his rearview mirror at a decidedly green-looking Sinead in the back.
Her side window was open, and Taggart sat in her lap, letting the fast-moving air ruffle his ears and flap his tongue around. He, unlike every other bugger in the car, was having a thoroughly lovely time.
“Not sure,” Sinead said. It was safer to speak in short, staccato sentences, she and the DCI had both found. It limited the opportunity for anything to… escape. “Can’t be far,” she offered, although she knew this was probably just wishful thinking.
The polis car flung itself around a bend up ahead, and was lost out of sight behind a stack of hay bales bound and rolled in purple plastic. Tyler hissed and braced himself for the turn, then let out a cry of fright when they took the corner to find the 4x4 stopped in the road just ahead of them.
“Brakes, brakes, brakes!” he howled, despite the fact that the BMW’s tyres were already screeching, leaving four slug trails of melted rubber on the road behind them.
There was a thump from the back, and quite an annoyed sounding yelp from Taggart.
“He’s fine!” Sinead announced, as the car jerked to a halt just inches from the vehicle in front.
It was only then, once the initial panic of the emergency stop was over, that they realised the reason they had been forced to stop.
Sheep. Scores of them. Hundreds, maybe. They flocked across the road and onto the embankments on either side, penned in by the fences of the fields.
Logan blasted his horn and leaned out of the window. “Get them shifted!”
Constable Tanaka leaned out of the driver’s side window of the 4x4 and called back. “Not sure I can, sir. There’s loads of them.”
“I can see there’s fu—” Logan began, then he decided that actions spoke louder than words. Throwing himself out of the car, he charged the sheep, clapping his hands to scare them away.
It worked. To an extent. The sheep moved away, though not as quickly as he would’ve liked, and not in any of the directions he’d have chosen.
The problem was the fences of the fields on either side. They were too high for the animals to jump over, and they formed a narrow passageway which allowed them only two directions of travel—towards the cars, or away from them. Given the sheer mass of the flock, and its relatively lumbering pace, it could take hours to clear the buggers. Hours that they or Jameelah Oboko may not have.
“What do we do, boss?” asked Tyler, stumbling up behind him. He was a deathly shade of white, but looked relieved to be back on solid ground.
Logan looked down and around at the impassable mass of sheep. He looked over to where Constables Tanaka and Miller were vaguely trying to shepherd them out of the way, well aware that they were fighting a losing battle.
And then, he looked ahead, along the road, to where the top of a white marquee tent was just visible over the crest of a hill.
“Taggart, no!”
Sinead made a grab for the dog, but he was too fast. He launched himself towards the sheep, barking and yipping his hairy wee head off. Tyler tried to catch him, but the dog dodged the grasping hands and vanished between the legs of the closest sheep.
The world erupted into a chaos of bleated cries and stamping hooves. The sheep, which had been forming one big knot on the road, now started shooting off in all directions like sparks from a Catherine Wheel. This did not make it easier to drive past them. Quite the opposite, in fact. Penned in by the fences, they rebounded back and forth across the road, making what was already an impassable obstacle markedly more so.
“Sinead, you two, catch that wee bastard,” Logan instructed. “Tyler, you’re with me.”
“What are we going to do, boss?” the DC asked again.
“Run, Tyler,” Logan said. “We’re going to run.”
Logan shrugged off his coat and tossed it onto the bonnet of the BMW. With a grunt, he vaulted the fence on the left. Then, without bothering to check if Tyler was following, he set his sights on the top of the tent, and he ran.
Constable Dave Davidson was facing down a bowl of something that looked like semi-digested twigs, with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for people who’ve just been diagnosed with a terminal illness.
André Douville sat cross-legged on the floor beside him, egging him on, and assuring him that the plate full of misery was, “Really good stuff,” as well as being meat, gluten, and dairy-free.
“And there’s definitely no bacon rolls, or chips, or anything?” Dave asked, prodding something that he was convinced was a stick insect with the prong of a fork. To his relief, it didn’t get up and walk away. Although, if it had, it would’ve been one less thing in the bowl to worry about.
“It’s nutritious,” André continued. He gestured around at his small army of acolytes, who were half-heartedly getting stuck into their portions. “And look, the others enjoy it.”