Where There's A Will

Chapter Sixty-Three

Ryan's flight ended with shocking suddenness. For a little more than three quarters of an hour, following the appearance of the first patrol car in his rear-view mirror, he had sought to evade the pursuing police - that was over now.

As he struggled against the airbag – this time it had deployed – which threatened to smother him, he couldn't help thinking that life wasn't fair; he had kept ahead of the police, and countered every attempt by them to force him to stop, for forty-five minutes, only to be stopped by a fox, a stupid, verminous, scavenging fox!

What made it worse was the knowledge that it had been instinct, nothing more than that, that had made him crash. Seeing something dart across the road in front of the car, his hands had twitched on the wheel, the result of which was that the front passenger wheel left the road and mounted a low grassy bank that ran alongside the tarmac.

By the time he realised the movement had been a fox, a creature he would have felt no compunction about running down - not that he would have felt much compunction about running down pretty much any animal that stood between him and his escape - if he had the time to think about what he was going to do, it was too late; his efforts to get the Jaguar under control resulted in it racing across the narrow country road, climbing the low bank at its side and then dropping down, nose first, into the muddy ditch beyond it. He was thrown forward, and then pushed back against his seat as the airbag exploded from the wheel, expanding in less than a second to fill the gap between him and the wheel.

The collision left Ryan stunned, and it was more than a minute before he moved again. With the airbag deflated, and able to move again, he threw open the driver's door and climbed out, falling into the ditch in which his mother's car was now stuck. It wasn't a long fall, just a few feet, but he landed heavily, twisting his ankle and falling forwards; he managed to get his hands out just in time to stop him smashing his face into the muddy ground at the top of the ditch.

Slipping and sliding, he climbed from the ditch, while frequent profanities, caused by the pain in his twisted ankle, escaped his lips to drown, momentarily, the quiet engine noises of the Jaguar. Once he made it back to the road, and was standing on firm ground, he straightened up and brushed himself off. Fastidiously, he removed what mud and dirt he could before wiping his hands clean, not that they were all that clean when he was finished; despite his efforts, and his dislike of being dirty, there was nothing he could do just then about his dirty shoes or his sodden socks.

"Ryan Keating."

The loud voice diverted his attention away from his dishevelled appearance and onto the police cars stopped a short distance away, and the uniformed officers closing in on him.

"You're under arrest; keep your hands where we can see them."

Ryan's immediate reaction was to look around for a means of escape; the road leading further out into the country was clear, but he quickly dismissed any thought of making a run for it. Even if he hadn't twisted his ankle - a constant throbbing made him all too aware of the futility of trying to run on it - he didn't think his chances of getting away, when there were so many officers waiting to give chase, were good enough for him to try, and he didn't fancy the humiliation of being caught by a group he didn't respect and which he considered useless.

All he could do was surrender with as much grace as possible, and hope that his father's solicitor could put up a good defence on his behalf. He felt reasonably confident on that score, Harvey Langstrom was, after all, one of the best and most expensive solicitors in the county, if not the country.