Authors: Simon Kernick
Even so, something wasn’t right. The way Jock had said the canoeists had abandoned their canoes halfway down the river but hadn’t told him where; and the fact that there was no sign of them now, even though there was a four-door Toyota Rav parked on the other side of Jock’s Nissan that almost certainly belonged to them.
Scope had an antenna for trouble. It was what came from fourteen years in the British infantry, serving first in Northern Ireland at the tail end of the Troubles, then in the killing fields of Bosnia, and finally in Basra in southern Iraq where, along with the rest of his battalion, he’d spent six months being shot at, bombed, and abused by people who’d smile and wave at you one minute, then walk round the corner out of sight the next and detonate a shrapnel-filled IED aimed at ripping your whole patrol to pieces. It made a man cautious, and Scope had long ago learned that being cautious could save your life.
First he had a look inside the Rav – the kids’ books and sweet wrappers on the back seat confirming that this was the canoeing family’s car; then he crossed the yard and peered in the office window. Nothing looked out of place, and Jock’s A4 diary, in which he wrote down pretty much everything to do with the business, was open on the desk at today’s date. Scope tried the door. It was unlocked and he stepped inside, closing it very slowly behind him so that it didn’t make the whine it usually did.
The first thing he noticed was the silence. He couldn’t hear anything, which was a surprise if Jock and a family of four were in residence. He took a couple of steps further into the room, moving as quietly as possible, and stopped next to the door that led into the cottage’s living room. He put his ear to the wood, but still couldn’t hear anything. It was as if no one was here.
But if they weren’t here, where were they? And why had Jock insisted he come back?
He reached down to open the door into the cottage, which was when he saw it on the carpet. A dark, penny-sized stain that he didn’t remember being there last time he’d been in the office. Crouching down, he touched it with the tip of his middle finger.
It was blood. And it was fresh.
Scope tensed. Jock had called him back here. Jock had sounded under duress. There was no sign of the canoeists. Now there was blood on the floor.
Scope had made enemies in his past, some of whom were very powerful. It was possible that they’d tracked him all the way to here, and that this was an ambush.
He thought fast. If people were here waiting for him, they’d have heard the minibus pull in a couple of minutes earlier, which meant they’d be suspicious if he didn’t put in an appearance soon. Retreating the way he’d come, he opened the office door and shut it again, loudly this time. ‘Jock, it’s me,’ he called out, keeping his eyes trained on the door leading into the cottage, just in case someone came rushing through. ‘I’ve just got a couple of things from the van to put away, then I’ll be through, okay?’
There was no sound or movement from behind the door to the cottage, and for a second Scope wondered if this time his paranoia might be misplaced, but he quickly discounted this. Something was definitely wrong; even if it wasn’t as bad as he was suspecting, it didn’t matter. It was always better to be safe than sorry.
He went back out through the office door again, as if he was going back to the minibus, then ducked down low and raced round the side of the cottage out of sight. The logical course of action would have been for him to take off out of here and call the police, but he couldn’t do that without at least some evidence that some wrongdoing had occurred. And there was something else too. He was fond of Jock. The old man had been good to him. If someone had hurt him, then Scope wasn’t going to let whoever it was get away with it.
He continued round to the back of the cottage, listening for the sound of anyone coming out looking for him, but could hear nothing. The whole place remained silent, except for the occasional noise of the night animals that lived in the woods surrounding the yard as they came out to hunt in the gathering darkness.
Scope fished in his jeans pocket until he found the spare keys to the cottage, which Jock had given him a couple of weeks earlier, in case of an emergency. He’d been touched that the old man had entrusted him with a set of keys when they’d only known each other a matter of months. It wasn’t often that Scope got close to people. He tended to keep his distance, a result of the fact that the two closest relationships of his adult life – those with his wife, and his beloved Mary Ann – had ended in tragedy. But he’d seen a kindness and a vulnerability in Jock that had drawn him in. Like Scope, Jock was lonely, having been on his own since his wife had left him for the bright lights of Edinburgh more than twenty years earlier. The two of them had talked over a bottle of decent whisky on more than one long night, and though Scope had never really opened up about his own past on those occasions, he’d always felt that he could have done if he’d needed to – even the darkest parts – and the old man would have understood, and not condemned him. And for that he was thankful.
He owed Jock. And he owed anyone who might have hurt him.
The back of the cottage was dark but, as Scope peered through the frosted glass in the back door, he could see the living-room lights were on. He carefully unlocked the door and crept inside, conscious that he was unarmed and acting with a complete disregard for his own safety. But that was Scope all over. He’d never been able to turn his back on danger, even though he was always trying to convince himself that his days of walking into the lion’s den were firmly behind him.
The back door opened directly into a narrow hallway that led past the stairs and into the living room, with a kitchen on one side, and a spare room where Jock liked to hoard all kinds of junk, on the other. Scope couldn’t see the door that led through to the office from the angle he was at, nor could he hear a thing from anywhere inside. Slowly, and making as little noise as possible, he made his way through the hallway, past the staircase, being careful not to trip on the boxes that littered the floor like obstacles, containing everything from boat engines to old paperbacks. Jock was a hoarder. He seemed incapable of chucking anything away, unlike Scope, whose possessions tended to be few and temporary.
The living room opened up in front of him as he reached the end of the hallway, revealing a scene that made him retreat into the shadows.
Jock lay dead on his front in the middle of the floor about ten feet away, next to the two easy chairs where he and Scope had sat when they’d shared those bottles of whisky. His face was pressed into the carpet, his arms down by his side, and the beanie hat he always wore – indoors and out – was missing. Somehow its absence made him seem much smaller and more diminished than he had in life. He was no longer Jock. He was just a corpse, and the sight of him, hollowed out like this, filled Scope with an intense emotion that he couldn’t quite define. It wasn’t sadness. It wasn’t even anger. It was something darker and more hopeless than that, and he had to force himself to suppress it as he took in the injuries that the old man had suffered.
A thin rivulet of blood had run from a deep cut on his nose onto the multicoloured, 1970s-style carpet that had always given Scope a headache, and there was a gaping, messy hole where one ear had been. More blood was clustered round Jock’s right hand, although Scope couldn’t see the cause of it, nor did he want to. One thing was certain, though. Jock had suffered terribly before he’d died, and the man responsible for that suffering was leaning against the far wall next to the door leading out to the office, a pistol with suppressor in one gloved hand. He was short and well built, with the cool poise of a professional killer, and it was clear that he was waiting for Scope to come walking through the door from the office, so he could put a bullet in him.
So it seemed he
had
been the intended target of the ambush, which meant two things. One, Jock would still be alive if it hadn’t been for him. Two, his days up here in Scotland – days that he’d grown to enjoy – were over, and once again it was time to move on.
There were, however, more immediate concerns. The killer hadn’t seen Scope yet, but he would as soon as he looked round. It looked as if he was working alone, too, since there was no sign of anyone else. Roughly fifteen feet separated them. Scope was unarmed. He didn’t even have his lock knife on him. If he rushed the guy now, he’d never make it, and it was too dangerous to try to creep up on him. There wasn’t enough furniture to cover his approach, and if he were spotted halfway across the room, he’d be an easy target. The killer struck him as the sort who would neither hesitate, nor miss from close range. His whole demeanour was too confident for that.
It left Scope with a simple choice. Go back the way he’d come in, and when he was out of earshot, call the cops and leave it to them. Or deal with it himself. The advantage of calling the cops was obvious. He wouldn’t have to risk his neck, nor would he run the other risk of getting himself into trouble. He could just take off and that would be the end of it.
But there was also a major disadvantage. Round here, miles from the nearest town of any size, it could take hours before an armed response unit turned up, and by that time the man who’d killed Jock would have long since disappeared, leaving few if any clues behind. Jock’s death would go unavenged. And, in the end, Scope just couldn’t have that.
He took a step backwards into the hallway, wanting to get to the kitchen and find a knife, but as he did so his foot hit one of the boxes of junk. Not hard. In fact it barely touched it, but in the heavy silence of the cottage, it was enough to attract the attention of the killer, who swung round fast, gun outstretched, catching sight of Scope immediately.
Even as he pulled the trigger, Scope was turning and diving headfirst into the semi-darkness of the hallway. A second shot rang out as he rolled across the floor, hitting another box. He jumped to his feet, keeping low and trying to make himself as hard a target as possible, as two more rounds flew past him, putting holes in the frosted glass of the cottage’s ancient front door. He could hear the guy coming behind him now and he swung a hard left at the bottom of the staircase, almost tripping up on a box full of oil paintings, and ran headlong into the darkness of the kitchen, slamming the door shut behind him.
He was trapped now. There was no way he’d make it out of the window before the guy caught him, but he didn’t panic. In situations like these, his subconscious always dragged up the words of wisdom he’d been given by a drill instructor during his first days of military training. ‘
As long as you’re still fighting, you haven’t lost.
’
It had sounded like cheap bullshit at the time, but they’d always served him well. And they did now.
Grabbing a couple of plates and a frying pan still full of congealed fat from the stove, he leaned against a kitchen unit and waited the two seconds it took for the door to come flying open, before flinging the plates straight at the guy, followed a split second later by the frying pan.
Surprised by the ferocity of the assault, the killer managed to fend off the two flying plates, while getting off a wild shot that rattled one of the window frames. But the frying pan caught him under the chin, sending him staggering as he tried to right himself and pick out his target.
Scope didn’t give him time. Crouching down, he sprinted the ten feet across the kitchen and dived into the killer, grabbing his gun hand and forcing it straight upwards as the two of them staggered backwards into the hallway. Scope tried to drive his head into the killer’s face, using his momentum to land a telling blow, but the killer had quick reactions and he turned his head away, so that Scope’s forehead slammed into the side of his head, hitting hard skull. The two of them went crashing to the floor, upending the box of paintings in the process, Scope ignoring the pain as he concentrated on slamming the killer’s gun hand repeatedly into the floor as he tried to get him to release the weapon.
But this guy was good. He was clearly winded by the fall, but he wasn’t letting go of the weapon. Instead, he shoved a knee into Scope’s groin and reared upwards, slamming a fist into his right cheek. Scope’s head reverberated from the pain and he felt a flash of nausea as the killer came close to knocking him off altogether. But then, in one sudden movement, he counter-attacked. Grabbing the killer’s other arm by the wrist, and forcing it back down to the floor so he had him temporarily pinned down, he waited the half-second it took for the killer to rear up again, and in that moment he drove his forehead into the bridge of his nose with every bit of strength and anger he could muster. The killer yelled in pain as his nose broke, and Scope butted him again in the same place. Then, changing tactics, he jumped up, dragging the other man to his feet, and smashed his gun hand into one of the kitchen units. This time the gun went off, sending a shot into a cupboard, before clattering to the floor when the man’s grip on it weakened. But, if Scope thought his opponent was finished, he was mistaken, because in the same moment the killer pulled his other arm free, reached inside his jacket and yanked out a bloodied stiletto with a six-inch blade.
Scope leapt backwards as the stiletto sliced through the air, narrowly missing his stomach, then threw himself to the floor, grabbed the gun from where it lay a couple of feet away, and swung back round, his finger on the trigger just as the killer fell upon him, knife raised for the death blow.
There was no hesitation. Scope pulled the trigger three times in quick succession, every shot hitting his opponent in the upper body at point-blank range.
The knife clattered to the floor as the killer let out a heavy grunt and rolled over onto his side. He lifted one gloved hand weakly as his body was racked with spasms.
Slowly, Scope got to his feet, still holding the gun. He looked round. There was no other noise coming from inside the cottage, so he’d been right about the killer being the only one here. But he needed to find out who else was after him and where they were, and there was only one person who could provide him with that information.