by Vince Vogel
When he turned, he found George Bishop standing there.
“Take a pew,” Dorring said, motioning the stool next-door with a nod of the head.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Bishop said, taking the proffered seat. “I’ve got ten minutes to burn before my next match.”
Conner paid the bill and sat back down. Bishop turned to him.
“You good now?” he asked.
“Yeah.” Conner nodded, trying his best to look calm. But his face was still red and his eyes still shone with fire.
“Cool,” Bishop said, and he turned back to Dorring. “So I hear you two got put on some shit with the Royal Military Police?”
“Yeah,” Dorring replied.
“What?”
“A load of bullshit,” Conner said.
Bishop turned sideways to him, smiled and then turned back to Dorring.
“What he said,” Dorring remarked with a grin.
“The usual then with those guys,” Bishop said. “Sent to protect their asses as they try to arrest their own people.”
“Basically,” Dorring said. “But that’s not what we were talking about before that infantry goon fell over.”
“Oh. What was?”
Here goes.
“Me and Conner were just talking about our graduation daggers,” Dorring said.
“Yeah, what about them?”
Dorring stared at him for a few seconds before answering. Bishop was nonplussed. Not even battering an eyelid. He just stared back at Dorring and waited for an answer.
“Well, recently,” Dorring said, “some collector offered Conner five hundred for his.”
“Huh!” Bishop announced. “You can get even more than that for it.”
He looked excited. Interested.
“What do you mean?” Dorring asked.
“I sold mine months ago and got nearly twice that for it. Got eight hundred.”
“Who?” Dorring almost jumped off his stool.
“Some intelligence guy from the MOD.”
“You know his name?”
“I can’t remember. It was in this bar early one morning after a killer session on the beer. I was out of it. The guy was real posh. Intelligence, not a grunt.”
“What did he look like?”
“Christ, what is this?”
Bishop frowned at Dorring, feeling himself under examination.
“Just tell us,” Dorring said. “—it might be the same guy trying to buy Conner’s.”
“Okay. He had glasses. White. That’s about it. Paid in cash. Is it the same guy?”
“Sounds like it,” Dorring said to keep things moving. “You remember the date? Anything else? His friends?”
Bishop narrowed his eyes at Dorring.
“What is this?” he asked again slowly.
“Don’t go too heavy,” Jane said into Dorring’s ear.
“We’re not sure about this guy,” Dorring said to Bishop. “We heard a couple of stories about him. About his money being fake.”
Bishop was in the middle of sipping his beer. He almost spat it out all over the bar when Dorring said this and struggled to swallow it down.
“His money being fake!?” he exclaimed when he had.
“Yeah. You remember Gallagher?”
“Paul Gallagher?”
“Yeah.”
Paul Gallagher was a retired SAS staff sergeant. Dorring thought of him off the top of his head.
“Well, he sold his knife to some posh MOD intelligence guy—sounds like the same one you sold yours to—and do you know what?”
“What?”
“Gallagher went to put the money in the bank when he got back to England and it was forged. The bank even called the cops in and he had to answer some pretty embarrassing questions over it.”
“Forged?” Bishop said.
“Yeah. The money was fake. You put your eight hundred in yet?”
“No. I took it home a few weeks ago when I was on leave for my bruv’s wedding. I gave it to my parents for safekeeping till I come back for longer.”
“So you’ve not tried spending it?” Dorring asked.
“No. I just gave it to Mum and Dad. Shit. Fucking wanker!”
He slammed his fist down on the bar and shook his head.
“It’s cool,” Conner said. “Maybe if you help us—tell us all we need to know about this guy—we can catch him. Give him a little bit of justice—SAS style.”
George Bishop smiled at the idea.
“Okay,” he said, nodding his head to the beat of vengeful thoughts. “I need to go for a leak. I’ll tell you everything you need to know when I get back. Maybe we’ll be able to catch the bastard if Conner offers to sell him his knife and we meet him.”
“Sounds good,” Dorring said.
“Okay.”
Bishop drank the rest of his beer down, stood up from the stool and walked off to the toilet. It was at the end of the bar down a corridor separated from the main room by an open doorway. At the back of it, a fire escape lay open to the outside world. The desert air was very cool at night, so the door was open to let the wind flow around the bar. It also acted as another entrance, allowing people to stroll in and out.
“You hear that?” Dorring asked.
“Yep,” Conner said.
“Not you. Jane.”
“Yeah, I did,” she said in his ear. “I need you to bring him in.”
“Bring him in?”
“He’s an important witness.”
“He could be bullshitting,” Conner said.
“No,” Dorring said. “He didn’t have to say anything. And if he is lying, then he’s the smoothest actor I’ve ever seen.”
“Okay,” Jane said in their ears. “Wait for him to get back and then bring him out to us in the carpark.”
“Aye to that,” Dorring said.
So they sat at the bar and waited. The guys from the ruckus before were sitting around a table in a corner. The one who Conner had winded with his elbow looked over with malevolent eyes and Dorring raised his bottle to him. The guy merely nodded back and lifted his own glass.
Then Dorring turned back to Conner.
“What were you saying before?” he asked.
Conner still looked like he had his head in the fight. He was obviously thinking about the guy who knocked into him. In his head, he probably wanted to smash that guy’s face until it was no longer a face.
“Hey?” Dorring said when he hadn’t answered for a while.
Conner snapped out of it and turned to him.
“What?” he said.
“I asked what you were saying earlier.”
“Oh that. It was nothing. Just something that happened the other night when I was with Kevin. It’s bullshit really. No more than my imagination playing tricks.”
“What did you imagine?”
Conner went to say something but then stopped himself.
“It’s nothing, honestly,” he said. “Fucking stupid. Let’s just get tonight out of the way first.”
They sat there for another few minutes and Dorring began to feel uneasy. He glanced around. The place was filled with people, many of whom he’d never seen before in his life. He suddenly felt cold. As though everyone’s eyes were suddenly on him. He felt like he was being watched. In his ear, he began to realize that he could no longer hear Jane breathing. It had comforted him since he’d placed the earpiece in. To hear her breathing ever so gently on the other end. It made him feel warm inside. He felt deathly cold not hearing it now.
“Jane?” he said. “Come in.”
Nothing came back.
“Kevin?”
Again nothing.
“What’s up?” Conner asked as Dorring gazed over his shoulder at the knot of people hanging around the corridor outside the toilets.
“I got a bad feeling,” he said. “You noticed that Jane and Kevin aren’t there?”
“No.”
Conner checked his earpiece.
“Fuck it,” he said. “Could be in
terference. We’re on shortwave radio signal. I told your girlfriend that it often gets glitchy out here in the desert.”
“No,” Dorring said. “It’s more than that. Wait here.”
“Aye to that,” Conner said, lifting his bottle up.
Dorring got up from his stool and sidled in between people’s shoulders as he moved towards the toilet. In the corridor, he barged through knots of bodies hanging around outside the men’s. He pushed the door and went inside the tiled room. It was full. People leaned up against the sinks talking, both men and women. At the far end of the cubicles, someone was banging on a door with a fist.
“Oi, mate, open up!” the guy was crying through the thin panel of graffitied wood as he slammed his fist against it.
“Who’s in there?” Dorring asked the guy, coming up beside him.
“George Bishop,” someone standing at the sinks stated while looking into the mirror and sorting his hair out.
“Anyone else go in there with him?” Dorring asked.
“How do I know?”
The door of the cubicle next to it opened and Dorring pushed past the man coming out. Stepping onto the basin of the toilet, he hauled himself up and gazed over the partition.
His whole body froze. George Bishop’s wide open eyes stared up at Dorring, but the latter was sure that Bishop couldn’t see him. His front was covered in thick blood that ran down from an open cut in his throat. His T-shirt had been torn open. Something crude had been quickly carved into his stomach. From the angle he looked down, Dorring couldn’t see exactly what it was. But he could guess.
It read: Who Dares Wins.
“Call the MPs!” Dorring shouted when he climbed down from the toilet and walked out of the cubicle.
“What’s happened?”
“Bishop’s dead,” he said. “Don’t let anyone else in here. Call the MPs and wait for them.”
“What the fuck?”
“Who was in there with him?” Dorring demanded, looking from one set of staring eyes to the next.
They merely shrugged and shook their heads.
“I never saw anyone go in there,” someone said, and the rest appeared to agree.
Dorring pushed his way out of the toilet, everyone gazing at him with confused expressions. When he emerged into the knotted bodies of the corridor, he heard a cry come from behind him and guessed someone else had stepped into the cubicle to take a look.
He pushed his way out the open fire escape and stood in the cool breeze, scanning his surroundings. Everything was as it should be. In that part of the base, it was no more than a collection of flat roofed, one story buildings. Mostly mess halls and administration offices. Roads interlinked the flat land in a lattice pattern and low wattage streetlamps provided a dull, orange glow. At the edge of that was a large fence with gun towers every hundred meters and the desert stretching out beyond this, a cradle of low mountains sharing the horizon with the moon.
Men and women walked casually around. Some sat on the hoods of cars and made out. Others smoked cigarettes and talked. Turning to his right, Dorring saw a man leaning against the wall to the side of the fire escape.
“Who came out here in the last five minutes?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” the guy said with a shrug of the shoulders. “Some Marines. Regular Army. Specials. I don’t know—everyone and no one, I guess.”
“Anyone in a hurry?”
“No,” he said with a frown. “Just people coming and going. The usual. What’s happened?”
“A man’s been murdered in the toilet.”
“What!?” the guy exclaimed with wide eyes.
Dorring ignored him and went back inside. There was now a commotion around the toilet. Men were shouting things. It appeared that the rest of George Bishop’s unit had been informed and were now insisting on seeing their comrade. It was like a family at a wake. One man screamed out and Dorring could hear the thump as he banged his fists against a wall. It would be a terribly messed up crime scene. Possibly impossible to find any clear evidence with all those people coming and going.
“Jane?” Dorring said into his comms. “You getting any of this? Kevin? Bishop’s dead.”
But still nothing came back from her. Dorring turned around and gazed about the place. It was turning into bedlam. People shouting and screaming. Pushing and shoving. In the tangle of limbs, he saw Conner push through.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked.
“It’s Bishop. The killer got to him.”
“Where?”
“In the toilet.”
“Shit. It was a trap all along. Where could he be?”
Dorring gestured towards the innumerable people screaming, shouting and pushing.
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“He must’ve gone out there,” Conner said, pointing at the fire escape and pushing past.
Dorring followed Conner outside. They both stood watching the shadows in the orange gloom.
“You getting anything from Jane or Kevin yet?” Dorring asked Conner.
“Nothing.”
“Shit!”
Head down, Dorring began running around the side of the bar and towards the carpark. The thing was covered in vehicles, drunk driving not being such a big thing on base. The designated driver being the guy who could see straightest. He ran along the rows of cars until reaching Jane’s.
The first thing he noticed was that the passenger and driver doors were open. The second thing was the fact that there was no one inside.
“What’s going on?” Dorring cried out, shoving his hand over his mouth and staring into the empty car.
He began darting his eyes about. People stood around in knots. Across the row of cars, he spotted a couple sitting in the front of a white Citroen. He marched over to them and knocked on the window.
“You see where the people in that car went?” he asked, pointing back at Jane’s Mini.
“Nah, man,” the guy inside the car answered. “We’ve only been here a few minutes.”
Panic gripped Dorring. A terrible, forlorn panic that stripped him of his usual indifference to adversity. Stripped him down until he was naked and cold like a defenseless child. In that moment, he realized one thing. That during the few weeks they’d been intimate, he had fallen in love with Jane. Fallen hard in love.
And now that she was gone, he felt utterly cold.
30
They hid the car in woodland close to Gough’s Creek. Once it was concealed behind branches and they were sure no one could see it unless they were right up close, they trekked into the trees.
Neither said much. They would get things out in the open soon enough. But for now, they had to move and move silently. At several points, the trees around them were blown about by low flying helicopters. Each time, they would huddle up in the bracken and wait for them to pass. Dorring gathered they didn’t have heat cameras and it would suffice for them to merely stay hidden.
He was right. Each time they’d pass, they would eventually move on.
They reached the house of Patricia Johnston and were welcomed by the two Dobermans, who sat before them snarling. The old woman wasn’t far behind.
“There’s crazy chatter on the radio,” she said as she came to them, the shotgun held over one arm. “You two have caused a real storm in town. Bruce Appleby was on not long ago claiming you two murdered Stevie McDonald, Fergus McKay, John Chalmers and some man of his. That true?”
“I killed Appleby’s guy in self-defense,” Dorring replied. “The rest was them. Are the phone lines open?”
“Nope. Our wonderful Lord Appleby has called a curfew. It means no one out on the street and no telephone lines.”
“Except the mobile phones they have,” Dorring said.
“Ah! So you discovered their secret then.” Then turning to Abigail, Patricia added, “Ah! Our wondrous Police Detective, Miss Pritchard.”
“Hello, Pat,” Abigail said. “You mind calling the dogs off?”
/> Patricia Johnston turned on her heels and began walking back to the house.
“Flotsam. Jetsam,” she called and the dogs obliged, turning and following her dutifully down the pathway.
When they reached the house, Dorring caught up with the old woman and said, “I need to get in your shed.”
“Okay,” she said, and led them through the house, across the muddy yard and into the shed with the bunker, the table neatly placed over the top of the hatch.
“You said the former owner was a gamekeeper,” Dorring said. “I need his traps.”
When they were inside the shed, it took a while for their eyes to adjust to the lack of light and the dust filled air. Patricia stepped inside and switched on a light. It illuminated the shed in gloom. Everything was covered in a thick skin of cobwebs. All along one wall, the rusted traps hung on chains like condemned men along a scaffold. Dorring marched right up to them and grabbed as many as he could hold in his arms.
“Grab the others,” he instructed Abigail and Patricia.
The old woman stood in the doorway with her dogs, gazing at Dorring strangely.
“Are you not going to tell me what’s gone off?” she asked.
“The man or men who killed your husband,” he said, going over to Abigail and loading her arms with traps, “are coming for us. They’ll figure eventually that we’re here. Probably by tonight. When that happens, I want us to be ready.”
“Who killed my husband?” Patricia asked intently.
“I’m not one hundred percent sure. But I aim to be. I aim to find out tonight and then kill him.”
The old woman stood silently by the door in heavy thought as Dorring walked out past her and led Abigail into the surrounding trees. He stopped in the middle of them and gazed about. In his head, he was guessing where they’d come from, searching the trees for good spots to leave waiting traps. Having developed a perimeter around the property, he walked off into the woods and began placing the mantraps with Abigail’s help.
When they were placing the third trap, hiding it within the undergrowth, Patricia Johnston came up behind them with her two dogs. She was holding a second shotgun.
“I think you’ll be better with one of these,” she said to Abigail, holding it out to her. “Gives you more spread and makes sure you hit your target. A pistol’s too fiddly. Gotta be too accurate with it. There or thereabouts will do with a shotgun.”