18. TREAT

Afterwards, both of the young Police Constables were prepared to admit to each other, if not to anyone else, that they did wonder whether this woman, who was still rather good looking considering her age, was trying to tempt them into the woods to give them a bit of a treat in order to avoid getting a fine or a ban.  Whilst both of them would say that they only went along because they thought it was the other one who wanted to go through with it, neither of them really knew why they actually took the young nurse so seriously.

Maybe it really was just her pretty face.

Whatever the reasons were, ten minutes later they had radioed in and then were passing through an opening in a dry-stone wall where a large wooden gate had, until quite recently, once stood. It had been recently been demolished by a speeding white van exiting the woods at high speed earlier on that very same night.

These young policemen weren’t idiots, and the scattered debris from the gate and the tyre tracks from a largish vehicle pretty much convinced them that something had been going on in the woods that night, they just hadn’t quite worked out what it had to do with a drunken nurse heading out here in an inappropriate vehicle in the middle of the night. At the very least, they reasoned, she knew more about what was going on and who was involved than she’d been letting on to them.

They did their level best to remain open-minded as the Police 4x4 toiled its way up the hill, driving up one of the fire lanes in Sixteen Acre Wood. They had worked together for a fair number of months now and were both pretty much aware of what the other was thinking. They kept exchanging enigmatic glances that confirmed their suspicions and to prove to each other that they’d both come to the same conclusion. However, given the weather conditions, the young lad who was not driving did rather wish that his companion would concentrate more on his driving.

Eventually the tyre tracks they were following came to an end, and they pulled the 4x4 up roughly where Stu’s van had been parked only a couple of hours earlier. The two young Constables clambered out of their car and noticed straight away that there were a number of footprints heading off towards the woods.

“She might be telling the truth, you know” said one to the other, indicating the car where Carol was furiously trying to indicate to them that she was locked in and wanted to get out.

“What do you reckon?” said the other, “Should we bring her along?”

“Well, she is a nurse…” the first replied “Might not be the worst thing.”

His colleague strolled over to the car and released Carol, and then had to grab her as she tried to make a dash in the direction of the trail of footprints. “Hang on there, Miss…”

“But he’s out there! We’ve got to…”

“All in good time. Now, you don’t want me to have to cuff you, do I?”

Carol shook her head, miserably.

“And you’re not going to try running off now, are you Miss?”

Again, another shake of her head.

“But, can we go now, please?”

The Constables looked at each other, shrugged and thought “Why not?”, and grabbing their jackets and torches from the car, all three set off along another trail of Stu’s footprints stretching back into the woodland.

Within a very short time, they came across a large amount of disturbed snow, and it was immediately obvious that someone had come a cropper here quite recently, but there was no sign of anyone. There were, however, trails of footprints heading off in four directions.

One of the Constables fancied himself as a potential C.I.D. man and quickly summed things up for them. Three sets had come in the way they had and just one set went back the way they had come. Another single set headed off through the trees towards the road. A third set of three seemed to be heading both into and out from another area of the forest.

And then there was a fourth set, someone arriving alone and then leaving, half dragging, half carrying another person along with them.

His colleague thought that his associate really needed to stop stating the obvious if he ever wanted to make Detective and looked around at the scene in front of him, trying to work out what had happened.

Meanwhile, Carol was bereft that she hadn’t yet found Chris and started pleading with the two young Constables that they should continue on their way. The potential C.I.D. man agreed with her, hoping to get out of the cold as soon as he decently could. He looked around at his colleague, wondering what he was doing standing looking at that branch.

“Come on then!” he shouted over, “I reckon we should go this way!” He indicated the fourth trail, reasonably supposing that that was the way the injured man had been taken.

“Hold on a sec!” His colleague replied. “I think there’s something in this tree…”