Was I new to the area?
I explained that I was only there on a walking holiday and, embarrassed, showed her my hastily strapped calf. Barbed wire. Incredibly stupid. I asked if I could see Dr Mathieson. As luck would have it, she was a friend of a friend.
The receptionist pursed her lips regretfully and told me Dr Mathieson was on leave, but if I was happy to wait, perhaps the doctor on duty could see me. I told her I didn’t want to waste their precious time, obviously, but maybe they could dress the wound properly and give me a tetanus jab.
She handed me an NHS form to fill in and motioned me to a seat in the waiting area beside a woman with a sprained wrist and an old boy who should never have developed a taste for Capstan Full Strength. Half an hour later she announced that Dr Nichol was ready to see me.
A fraction the other side of forty, Grace Nichol obviously wouldn’t take shit from anyone, but the laughter lines around her eyes told me that she could still see the funny side of things. She invited me to take off my Timberlands and ‘pop up’ on her examination couch.
As she folded back my freshly torn Levi’s and unpeeled the bandage I asked after Ella, and got the raised eyebrow in return. I sensed her body stiffen too, but I might have imagined that.
‘She’s a friend of a friend. Well, a friend of the son of a friend. A friend who’s dead now …’
Instead of responding, she started to give my calf much more attention than it really deserved.
I didn’t want to put her on Red Alert, so I kept my tone light and waffly. ‘I guess you’ll know Sam. Haven’t seen him for quite a while, but I served with his dad, back in the day.’ I gave her a cheesy grin. ‘Don’t panic, I’m not going to pull up a sandbag and bore you with old war stories …’
She peeled back the dressing and tutted – the kind of tut that made it clear I’d been a very silly boy. When she looked up, her expression was softer. ‘They’ve gone away. They needed a break.’
‘Not surprised. I heard he had a rough time in Afghan, and that means everybody suffers. Me and Harry spent most of our time messing around in Catterick, but these lads have been right at the sharp end …’
Her look said, ‘Pull the other one,’ and I liked her even more for that. It also gave me the feeling she knew very well that Sam was in the Regiment, and that Harry and I had been too.
She cleaned the wound and applied a fresh dressing, then told me she would give me a tetanus injection, to be on the safe side.
‘So if you’d like to take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve …’
I did as she asked and got a needle in the arm.
She deposited the wrapping and the used syringe in the sharps bin and sat down behind her desk while I sorted myself out. As I pulled on my bomber I became aware that I was being scrutinized quite closely. I met her gaze. It made me feel like I had when I was caught cheating at school. Not that I’d gone to school much.
‘Why are you
really
here, Mr …’ she glanced at my freshly scribbled NHS form ‘… Jones?’
I gave her my best puzzled expression and pointed at my leg. ‘World’s biggest idiot … I was enjoying a day out when I tripped over a fallen fencepost …’
I got the eyebrow treatment again. ‘So they don’t have much barbed wire in … now, where was it?
Catterick?
’ She gave each syllable of ‘Catterick’ equal weight, in case I hadn’t yet realized that she didn’t believe a word I’d said.
I kept eye to eye for long enough to know that I wasn’t going to get any help unless I made some attempt to level with her. ‘Cards on the table?’
She nodded.
‘Another very old mate of ours told me Sam’s in trouble, and could use some help. I figured that Ella might be able to shed some light on things …’
She put her elbows on her desk, linked her hands and rested her chin on her knuckles. ‘A very old
military
mate?’ She did that trick with the syllables again.
My turn to nod.
She sighed. ‘At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s where my problems begin.’
She paused, like she’d reached a fork in the road and couldn’t make up her mind which direction to take.
‘Don’t get me wrong, Mr
Jones
, I’m sure the army is positively bursting with champions of justice and truth, prepared to give their lives in defence of the realm, but it appears there are also those with a rather different agenda. And how can one tell the difference between them?’
I’d reached that fork in the road as well. ‘It’s not only your problem. It’s mine too. I’ve been in the game for far too long, in one way or another, and even I don’t know who I can trust.’
For the first time since I’d come into the room I saw a look of real distress cross her face.
‘Ella and Sam had been going through difficult times since the moment he got back. I didn’t realize how difficult. You know how it is. We work extremely closely, but try not to invade each other’s personal space. I tried to get her to tell me what was wrong, but she wouldn’t say. She couldn’t even talk to her father or brother about it.’
‘How long will they be away?’
She shrugged. ‘As long as it takes. Whatever that means.’
‘I guess you don’t have a contact number?’
She shook her head. ‘Whenever anyone calls for her, our receptionist takes a message or gives them Ella’s mobile. Not everyone takes “no” for an answer, of course. Her uncle got in a bit of a strop about it the other day. Said he’d called her a dozen times without getting any kind of response. The poor girl didn’t have the heart to tell him that’s because Ella’s BlackBerry is permanently switched off.’
‘Does she have it with her?’
‘No.’
She reached into her top drawer and held up a small black slab of plastic in a worn leather holster. ‘All she said when she handed it to me was that they had to drop off the grid. Completely.’
7
The light was fading as I crossed the road to the Red Lion. Grace had told me they used to pop in for a glass of something at the end of the day when Sam was away.
I followed the signs to the Gents, took a piss, then filled a basin with warm water and freshened up for the first time since I’d left Father Mart’s. I didn’t normally worry about stuff like that but there was something about the Cotswolds that demanded my best behaviour.
It was too early for the evening trade to have really kicked off, so I had the front room pretty much to myself. An old guy with rosy cheeks, big sideburns and the kind of eyebrows you usually only see in cartoons was busy with landlord stuff behind the bar. He gave the thumbs-up to the Olde Trip, so I ordered a pint and a home-baked pork pie and dragged up a stool.
The mouth-watering smell of the pie made me realize I’d hardly eaten that day. I demolished it in about ten seconds along with half the pickle jar and ordered another. When my host saw I was in the mood for company he came over and polished some glasses while we talked about the ale, the weather and the walking.
I put on my sheepish look and told him about my barbed-wire adventure. He showed me a scar on his forehead where he’d recently been attacked by a lamp post, and told me in hilarious detail how he’d once been chased by a bull. We were the best of mates in no time.
‘Sounds as if you spend even more time at the doctor’s than I do …’
He beamed. ‘I nip in there every chance I get. Gorgeous girls, bless them! Spoken for, I know – but a fellow can dream, can’t he?’
Dreams were close to the top of my list of things to avoid wherever possible, along with bullet-headed men waving sniper rifles, but I grinned and wondered aloud whether he knew when Dr Mathieson was due back. ‘She’s a friend of a friend. And I have a feeling I used to know her uncle …’
‘Norman? Lovely bloke. No airs and graces, even though his brother was a general. Used to drop in here regular, before he got poorly.’
‘He’s still around, then?’
‘Only in a manner of speaking, I’m afraid.’ His brow furrowed. ‘Up in the churchyard. He passed away three … no, four years ago. Some sort of cancer, I think.’
I figured that Norman wouldn’t be calling the practice from beyond the grave, but wasn’t going to ask whether he had any other brothers. I didn’t want to ring the sort of alarm bells that I had with Grace. I looked suitably mournful. ‘I’ll have to go and pay my respects.’
8
We waffled on for another twenty minutes or so and then the bar filled up enough for him to be diverted and me to pay my bill and give him a cheery farewell.
I picked up the 911 and pointed it back in the direction of Oak Leaves. I wasn’t in the mood to stumble around in the long grass and bracken now that it was dark. It was well past the rambling hour and, in any case, I didn’t want to make a night of it.
I drove a couple of hundred metres past Ella’s cottage, pulled up off the road beside a five-bar gate and doubled back. I dipped into the wood at a point far enough from the house to take advantage of the cover but close enough not to have to crash around through too much undergrowth.
I followed the wall until I was behind the shepherd’s hut, then stopped and listened to the sounds carried on the night wind. An owl called from somewhere to my half-right, trees rustled and a fox shrieked further away. I’d always hated that sound. Now these bad boys were turning their backs on country life and heading into the ’burbs, you heard it all the time. I never knew whether it meant they were having sex or fighting over the remains of a KFC Boneless Banquet. Maybe they couldn’t tell the difference either.
One or two lamps glimmered from behind the next-door neighbour’s curtains, but the cold would persuade most people to stay inside. Although the sky was clearer than it had been earlier, the moon wasn’t bright enough to mark me out.
I gave my ears a quick rub to take the chill off them, then hauled myself over the wall and sheltered in the gap between the stonework and the side of the hut. I dipped into my coat for the polythene gloves and waited for my night vision to improve.
Close up, it was obvious that this bit of kit had never been near a sheep, unless one had lost its way and wandered into the garden by mistake. The paint was showroom fresh. Maybe it had been Sam’s welcome-home present. I was getting the impression that the Mathiesons weren’t short of cash.
There was no window on this elevation, so I had to ease myself around the corner and up the steps before taking a look inside. The three-lever mortice lock on the stable door took me about ten seconds to pick. I closed it quietly behind me.
I found myself inside a designer bothy on wheels. I’d been in five-star hotel rooms that weren’t this luxurious. There was a bed with a blue-and-white-striped duvet, two matching chairs, a powder-white chest of drawers, a table with a couple of chunky Scandinavian glass candle-holders and yet another wood-burning stove.
The chest was full of man stuff – casual kit, mostly – and another half empty pack of sertraline, which gave me the impression that though the hut might have been the venue for romantic dinners it sometimes doubled as Sam’s hide when he needed the world to go away. I rummaged through anything that had a pocket but found nothing more than a few squares of man-size Kleenex.
The stove had been used recently, but not cleaned or fully reloaded. I opened its door. A fistful of kindling, a fresh firelighter and four or five crumpled envelopes lay on the ash. Inside one of them, postmarked Monday, 9 January, was a hastily scrawled note:
Mate, sorry about last night. Pissed again. Story of my life, these days. Not good. I can’t promise not to repeat, but I’ll do my best. It’s a fucker, isn’t it? Ever, Scott
.
I re-crumpled and replaced it, and swung the door closed.
Outside, I was just about to climb back over the wall when something made me hesitate. I knelt down, slid beneath the hut and rolled onto my back. There was two feet or so of clearance between the ground and the underside of the structure.
The woodwork was as neat and symmetrical here as it had been up above. The access hatch at the end furthest from the steps was so carefully dovetailed into the main frame that, if I hadn’t spotted the finger-hole that triggered its bolt mechanism, I wouldn’t have noticed it.
I slithered across the damp grass, using my elbows, heels and shoulder-blades, and released it. At first, all I could feel was some electrical wiring, an insulation membrane and, between the joists, that fluffy stuff you find in the loft when your cold-water tank springs a leak. But when I shoved my arm as far as I could into the space below the floorboards, I touched something that hadn’t been part of the manufacturer’s spec.
I managed to get enough purchase on the chamois-leather package to extract it. Inside was a Browning Hi Power 9mm pistol with a loaded thirteen-round mag and a spare.
There were some people who believed that if you were in the Regiment you never went anywhere without one of these lumps of metal tucked under your bomber jacket, even in your spare time. But they could dream on. It looked like I’d uncovered Sam’s second court-martial offence.
Luckily I wasn’t in the army any more. I was about to put the spare mag in my pocket when I felt a vicelike grip on both my ankles, and my arse began to slide back into the open.
9
I firmed up my grip on the Browning, flicked off the safety catch and racked back its topslide. The metallic movement didn’t eject a chambered round before picking up the top one from the mag. I felt the burr hammer move back against the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger as the rest of me emerged from the underside of the hut.
I grasped my right wrist with my left hand and raised the muzzle.
‘What the
fu
—?’
Being on the wrong end of a weapon was usually enough to stop anyone who wasn’t used to it in mid-sentence, even a big lad in wellies and a boiler-suit.
I kept my voice low and in control. It was blindingly obvious that a combine harvester was more likely to be his weapon of choice than an MRUD, but he still didn’t look pleased. ‘Hands
up
. Come on, let me see them …’
He let go of my legs, almost in slow motion, and did as he was told.