Authors: Ian Rankin
She looked startled. ‘You’re not going back there?’
‘No, don’t worry.’
‘I thought you’d ruled out Rick and his gang.’
Now I nodded. ‘Maybe it goes higher, Bel.’ I didn’t bother explaining what I meant.
We’d no hire car to return, so I decided to hang on to the Maestro. I could drop Bel off in Yorkshire then dump the car somewhere. We kept moving, stopping only to fill up with petrol, buy sandwiches and drinks from the filling-station shops, and try getting through to Max.
‘Maybe he’s had to go somewhere?’ I suggested.
‘Maybe. He’d have said, wouldn’t he?’
‘Short notice. I know I’ve been in a tight spot once or twice and dragged him away with no notice at all.’
She nodded, but stared at the windscreen. To take her mind off Max, I got her round to talking about the men from that morning, what they could have wanted from us, how they’d known where we were.
‘What would you have done,’ she asked, ‘if one of them had drawn a gun?’
‘Taken the drawing from him and torn it up.’
‘But seriously.’
‘Seriously?’ I considered. ‘I’d probably have gone along peacefully.’
‘Really?’
‘It’s hard to know, but I think so.’
I assumed it was the answer she wanted to hear.
We reached the farm before dark.
I got a bad feeling about the place straight away, and was glad I had the MP5 with me. As soon as I stopped the car, Bel was out and running. She’d felt something too. I called out for her to wait, but she was already opening the kitchen door.
I left the car idling and followed her, holding the sub-machine gun one-handed. With its stock fully retracted, the thing was just like an oversized pistol. I pushed the safety catch past single-shot and on to three-round burst.
Then I went in.
Bel’s scream froze my blood. I wanted to run to her, but knew better than that. There could be many reasons for her screams. I peered into the hall but saw no one. Holding the gun in front of me, I walked forward, brushing the wall all the way. I passed the open door of the dining room and noticed that one of the chairs was missing from around the table. Then I saw the living room, things scattered over the floor, and Bel kneeling in the middle of it all, her hands over her face. Finally I saw Max.
‘Christ Almighty.’
His headless torso sat on the missing dining-chair, like some ventriloquist’s dummy gone badly wrong. Flies had found the body, and were wandering around the gaping hole which had once been a neck. A false glimmer struck me: maybe it wasn’t him. But the build was right, and the clothes seemed right, though everything had been stained dark red. The blood on the skin had dried to a pale crust, so he’d been here a little while. There was a sour smell in the room, which I traced to a pool of vomit on the carpet. A tea-towel from the kitchen was lying next to this pool, covering something the size of a football.
I didn’t need to look.
I squeezed Bel’s shoulder. ‘We can’t do any good here. Let’s go to the kitchen.’
Somehow I managed to pull her to her feet. I was still holding on to the gun. I didn’t want to let go of it, but I pushed the safety back on.
‘No, no, no, no,’ Bel was saying. ‘No, no, no.’ Then she started wailing, her face purple and streaked with tears. I sat her on a chair in the kitchen and went outside.
I’m no tracker. There were tyre marks on the ground, but they could have belonged to Max’s car. I took a look around, finding nothing. In the long barn, I flicked the lights on and stood staring at one of the distant human-shaped targets on the range. I switched the MP5 to full auto and started blasting away. It took about fifteen seconds to empty the magazine. Only the legs of the target remained.
Bel was standing at the kitchen door, yelling my name.
‘It’s okay,’ I said, coming out of the barn. ‘It’s okay.’ She put her arms around me and wept again. I held her, kissed her, whispered things to her. And then found myself crying too. Max had been... I can’t say he’d been like a father; I’ve only ever had the one father, and he was quite enough. But he’d been a friend, maybe the closest I’d ever had. After the tears I didn’t feel anger any more. I felt something worse, a cold creeping knowledge of what had to be done.
Bel blew her nose and said she wanted to walk about a bit, so I went back into the house. They hadn’t left many clues. The vomit and the dishtowel were curious, but that was about it. Why cover the head? I couldn’t understand it. I went upstairs and looked around. The bedrooms hadn’t been touched. They hadn’t been burglars.
Of course they hadn’t. I knew who they’d been. The Americans. And either Max had talked, or they’d worked it out for themselves anyway, or someone from the Oban Disciples of Love had contacted them. I considered the first of these the least probable: Max wouldn’t have talked, not when talking would mean putting Bel in danger. As for working it out for themselves, well, if Hoffer could do it so could they.
Bel still hadn’t come back by the time I went downstairs. I walked out into the yard but couldn’t hear her.
‘Bel?’
There was a noise from the long barn, something being moved around.
‘Bel?’
I had to go to the car for a fresh cartridge-box. When I pushed it home, I had thirty-two rounds ready for action. I moved quietly towards the barn.
When I looked in, someone had cleared an area of straw from the concrete floor, revealing a large double trap-door, which now sat open. The trap-door led to a bunker. There were wooden steps down into it, and a bare lightbulb inside. Bel was coming back up the steps. She had a rifle slung over each shoulder, a couple of pistols stuck into the waistband of her denims, and she was carrying an MP5 just like my own.
‘Going to do some practice?’ I asked her.
‘Yes, on live targets.’ She had a mad look in her puffy eyes. Her nose was running, and she had to keep wiping it with the back of her hand.
‘Fury is the enemy, Bel.’
‘Who taught you that?’ she sneered. ‘Some Zen monk?’
‘No,’ I said quietly, ‘my father... and yours.’
She stood facing me, then I saw her shoulders sag.
‘Don’t worry,’ I went on, ‘you’ll get your revenge. But let’s plan it first, okay?’ I waited till she’d nodded. ‘Besides,’ I added, ‘you’ve forgotten something.’
‘What?’
‘Bullets.’
She saw that this was true, and managed a weak smile. I nodded to let her know she was doing okay.
‘You don’t need guns just now,’ I went on. ‘You need your brain. Your brain ... and your passport.’
‘My passport?’
‘Just in case,’ I said. ‘Now go pack yourself some clothes. Are there any more sub-machine guns down there?’
‘I’m not sure. Why do you ask?’
‘I need some practice, that’s all.’ I started down the steps until I was surrounded by guns, cocooned in oiled black metal. It was like being in a chapel.
It took us some time to straighten things out. We knew we couldn’t call the police, inform the proper authorities, anything like that. I did propose that Bel stay behind, a proposal she angrily rejected. So we did what we had to do. The soil in the field nearest the farmhouse was workable. Even so, it took until dark and beyond to dig the grave. It wasn’t a very adequate hole. I knew the reason you dug down six feet was that much short of this and you’d get soil disturbance, the ground above the body rising eventually rather than staying flat. But we’d dug down only three or four feet. We could always rebury him later.
‘Sorry, Dad,’ Bel said. ‘I know you were never much of a Christian, but you probably wanted something better than this.’ She looked at me. ‘He fought that cancer for years. He was ready for death, but not the way it happened.’
‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s keep busy.’
It wasn’t hard. We had to finish packing and then lock up the house. We couldn’t do much about the living room, so just left it. Bel couldn’t think of anyone who’d come to the house anyway. Their mail was held by the post office and picked up whenever they were in town.
‘It might be a while before we’re back,’ I warned.
‘That’s fine.’
I was never far from the MP5. I knew they could come back at any minute. I would be ready for them. I’d considered stocking up from Max’s cache, but knew it didn’t make any sense. So I locked the cellar again and covered its doors with straw. The house was locked now, a timer controlling the lights. I walked through the yard to the field wall, and found Bel there, standing over the closed grave.
‘Time to go, Bel,’ I said.
‘He hated this place,’ she said quietly. I put a hand on her shoulder. She took a deep breath and exhaled. “Bye, Dad. I’ll be home again soon.’Even to my ears, she didn’t sound like she meant it.
We got on to the A1 and stopped at the first hotel we found. I didn’t suppose either of us would get much sleep, but we were exhausted and dirty and our sweat-stained clothes needed changing. We shared a room, as we’d known we would. Bel took the first bath. I soaped her back and shoulders in silence, then towelled her dry. She went through to the bedroom while I changed the bathwater. I was lying back, eyes closed, when she came back.
‘Hurry up, Michael, I need you,’ was all she said.
We made love hungrily at first, and then with more tenderness than I’d ever thought possible. She cried a bit, but when I tried to ease away from her she held me tight, not wanting to let me go. The only light drifting into the room came from a lamp outside the hotel. I ran my hands over Bel’s back, feeling her vertebrae. For a little while there, my hands didn’t feel like the hands of a killer.
We rose early and didn’t bother with breakfast.
On the road south, she asked me what we were doing. I told her. She didn’t know if it made sense or not, but she wasn’t in a state to offer ideas of her own. The traffic into London was like sludge easing into a drain. Bel was wearing a scarf and sunglasses. I knew her eyes were red, like she was suffering hay fever. Hay fever could be the excuse if anyone asked. When we got to London, we left the Maestro in a long-stay car park and got our cases out of the boot.
I left the MP5 in the boot but took my raincoat.
We took a taxi with our luggage to Knightsbridge. ‘I’ll be about five minutes,’ I told the driver when we arrived. Then, to Bel: ‘Wait here.’
She watched me go into the bank like she’d never see me again.
Inside the bank there were the usual security procedures before I was led into a small room. The room contained a table and two chairs. There were framed prints on the wall showing Victorian London, and a few brochures to read. These offered further bank services. Eventually, the employee who had led me into the room returned with my safe deposit box. I let him leave again before opening the box.
Inside were a passport, a bundle of cash, and some traveller’s cheques, about $25,000 in total. I scooped the lot into my pockets, then took out a pen and piece of paper. Hurriedly I scribbled a note outlining events so far. It wouldn’t make sense to anyone outside the case. I folded the note and addressed it to the one man I knew
could
make sense of it: Leo Hoffer at Hoffer Investigations, New York City. Then I placed the letter in the box.
As insurance policies go, it was among the worst and most hastily conceived and executed. But it was all I had.
I thanked the assistant, left the bank, and got back into the taxi.
‘Where to now?’ the driver asked.
‘Heathrow Airport,’ I told him. Then I sat back, took Bel’s hand, and gave it another squeeze.
17
The problem was, Hoffer couldn’t find a room in Ripon, or anywhere else for that matter. So he’d decided to keep driving. Then he’d pulled into a parking area to relieve his bladder, and found three lorries there, their drivers having a break and thinking about sleep. Hoffer got talking to them and one of them broke out a bottle of whisky. After which he’d returned to his car, put the seat back as far as it would go, and fallen asleep.
He slept badly, and woke up with stiffness, headache and raging thirst. He was also freezing, and had certainly caught a cold, if not something more serious. He drove to the nearest service station to chow down and have a wash. Then he got back in the car and started driving again.
The map book was a godsend, without it he wouldn’t have stood a chance in hell of finding Oban. He parked by the dockside, got out feeling like shit, asked a local about accommodation, then went into the hotel, where they didn’t have any rooms left but the bar was open and boasted an open fire.
Hoffer sat beside it with a large malt and wondered how he’d find the Disciples of Love. He asked the barman, but the barman said he’d never heard of them.
‘Well, they live here, a whole posse of them.’
But the barman stuck to his story. So, revived by the drink, Hoffer went walkabout. He found a shopkeeper who did business with the Disciples and drew him a map on an empty brown-paper bag. Hoffer got so far, but then found his way barred by a padlocked gate. He looked around him, then fired off a couple of shots at the padlock, busting it open. He was damned if he was going to walk any further.