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Authors: Joe Mcnally, Richard Pitman
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appetite for women as Harle did. None of them had heard of the
place.
I sighed and did some physical and
mental head-scratching. Supposing Harle had been abducted. I had to assume it
was by the two men who’d smashed up Bergmark and blinded Rask and maybe killed
Danny Gordon. Harle had last been seen at Cheltenham races. If these guys
wanted to get him, they’d have known they could intercept him on the way back
from the racecourse.
Harle lived in Lambourn but would
probably have been staying over in Cheltenham for the three-day race-meeting. I
knew he hadn’t because the receptionist had told me he’d checked out of his
hotel on the Wednesday morning, the second day of the meeting. Whatever had
spooked him, must have happened at the party on the Tuesday night, or after it.
Assuming he was running for home after
leaving the hotel, he’d have travelled south west toward Lambourn. The area
around Cheltenham had its share of quiet country roads and most jockeys knew
the short-cuts. I needed a road map to try and figure out the route Harle
might have taken. I headed for Cheltenham to buy one.
Driving into town along the A46 I saw
the Library sign and quickly turned left. They’d have maps, and parking
spaces. The smiling young man at the desk said they didn’t have ‘your standard
road map’, but the reference section did have ordnance survey maps for the
whole of the UK.
Juggling a plastic cup of very hot
coffee from the machine I sat down with OS Map 163, Cheltenham and Cirencester.
I smoothed out the area to the south west: one of the benefits of the OS map
was that it included every road, right down to a pig track. From the centre of
town, I searched the possible routes Harle would have taken if he’d planned to
go home. Three cups of coffee later I was bleary-eyed and no wiser and I began
chiding myself on the basis that I hadn’t a bloody clue what I was doing.
They could have got him anywhere.
Stepping into the car at The Duke’s Hotel, arriving home at his remote place in
Lambourn and any point in between. I got up and began folding the map to hand
it back when something caught my eye; an area to the east of Cheltenham
coloured green on the map, shaped like a pair of thin legs wearing different
size boots - Puckham Woods. Slowly, I sat back down keeping my eyes fixed
on the spot in case I lost it. Opening the map again, I traced with my finger a
narrow dead-end road on the north west side of Puckham Woods. Where the road finished
sat some small closely-grouped buildings with the name Puckham Farm.
From the throat of a desperate man to
the ear of an angry woman how easily misheard? I noted the road numbers and
directions and hurried to the car.
It was only half an hour’s drive. The closer
I got to it the narrower grew the roads and the sparser the houses. Just after
one o’clock I passed through the last village on the map and out into open
country. The road climbed and the surface worsened. Bushes on the overgrown
verges scratched at the Rover as we sped along. In that twenty minutes a blue
van passed me going in the opposite direction; that was the only vehicle I saw.
It began to rain.
I turned at the no-through-road sign, knowing
the farm should be at the end of it. The track dipped steeply like a ramp in
the first fifty yards. It ran between trees and broken rusted barbed wire
fencing and I could hear the tyres sloshing through the rain-softened surface.
The fields on either side were empty.
The trees grew denser the further I went till I seemed to be driving in a
tunnel. I broke out of it into daylight and a farmyard, so suddenly that I ran
past and had to reverse to a point where I faced what looked like the main
house.
I sat in the car
watching for some sign of life. The yard, rutted and puddled, was about the
size of two tennis courts and seemed to envelop the house in a grasping
semi-circle of black muck.
The dark grey stone walls were pitted and
dirty. The front door was not in
place.
I sighed and did some physical and
mental head-scratching. Supposing Harle had been abducted. I had to assume it
was by the two men who’d smashed up Bergmark and blinded Rask and maybe killed
Danny Gordon. Harle had last been seen at Cheltenham races. If these guys
wanted to get him, they’d have known they could intercept him on the way back
from the racecourse.
Harle lived in Lambourn but would
probably have been staying over in Cheltenham for the three-day race-meeting. I
knew he hadn’t because the receptionist had told me he’d checked out of his
hotel on the Wednesday morning, the second day of the meeting. Whatever had
spooked him, must have happened at the party on the Tuesday night, or after it.
Assuming he was running for home after
leaving the hotel, he’d have travelled south west toward Lambourn. The area
around Cheltenham had its share of quiet country roads and most jockeys knew
the short-cuts. I needed a road map to try and figure out the route Harle
might have taken. I headed for Cheltenham to buy one.
Driving into town along the A46 I saw
the Library sign and quickly turned left. They’d have maps, and parking
spaces. The smiling young man at the desk said they didn’t have ‘your standard
road map’, but the reference section did have ordnance survey maps for the
whole of the UK.
Juggling a plastic cup of very hot
coffee from the machine I sat down with OS Map 163, Cheltenham and Cirencester.
I smoothed out the area to the south west: one of the benefits of the OS map
was that it included every road, right down to a pig track. From the centre of
town, I searched the possible routes Harle would have taken if he’d planned to
go home. Three cups of coffee later I was bleary-eyed and no wiser and I began
chiding myself on the basis that I hadn’t a bloody clue what I was doing.
They could have got him anywhere.
Stepping into the car at The Duke’s Hotel, arriving home at his remote place in
Lambourn and any point in between. I got up and began folding the map to hand
it back when something caught my eye; an area to the east of Cheltenham
coloured green on the map, shaped like a pair of thin legs wearing different
size boots - Puckham Woods. Slowly, I sat back down keeping my eyes fixed
on the spot in case I lost it. Opening the map again, I traced with my finger a
narrow dead-end road on the north west side of Puckham Woods. Where the road finished
sat some small closely-grouped buildings with the name Puckham Farm.
From the throat of a desperate man to
the ear of an angry woman how easily misheard? I noted the road numbers and
directions and hurried to the car.
It was only half an hour’s drive. The closer
I got to it the narrower grew the roads and the sparser the houses. Just after
one o’clock I passed through the last village on the map and out into open
country. The road climbed and the surface worsened. Bushes on the overgrown
verges scratched at the Rover as we sped along. In that twenty minutes a blue
van passed me going in the opposite direction; that was the only vehicle I saw.
It began to rain.
I turned at the no-through-road sign, knowing
the farm should be at the end of it. The track dipped steeply like a ramp in
the first fifty yards. It ran between trees and broken rusted barbed wire
fencing and I could hear the tyres sloshing through the rain-softened surface.
The fields on either side were empty.
The trees grew denser the further I went till I seemed to be driving in a
tunnel. I broke out of it into daylight and a farmyard, so suddenly that I ran
past and had to reverse to a point where I faced what looked like the main
house.
I sat in the car
watching for some sign of life. The yard, rutted and puddled, was about the
size of two tennis courts and seemed to envelop the house in a grasping
semi-circle of black muck.
The dark grey stone walls were pitted and
dirty. The front door was not in
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