by LJ Ross
But she didn’t say as much.
“He’s a lovely man,” she said instead, and then looked down at the girl who was now applying pink polish to her toes. “You’ve got a lovely family, Denise.”
MacKenzie smiled and gave Sam’s head an affectionate rub.
“We’re lucky,” she agreed, and then bit her tongue. As a woman herself, she knew there was very little that was more annoying than being asked when or if one planned to have babies.
All the same, she was curious, but the subject didn’t come up again until much later in the afternoon, when Samantha had taken herself off to make a sandwich.
“We’d like one, Denise,” Anna said, picking up the thread of their earlier conversation. “A family, I mean.”
MacKenzie nodded.
“Well, there’s plenty of time—”
But something about the way Anna had said it gave her pause.
“Want to talk about it?”
Anna turned to check Samantha was out of earshot, then spoke quietly.
“I’ve had three miscarriages,” she said. “Ryan knows about one of them, but I couldn’t tell him about the other two. I was too upset, myself, and I didn’t want him to worry.”
“Oh, darling.”
MacKenzie held her arms open to her friend, and Anna let herself be held, drinking in the warmth before breaking away again to brush away tears.
“I don’t know why I’m talking about this,” she said, and gave a funny, self-deprecating laugh. “I suppose, I’m sick of people wondering.”
“I’m sorry—”
“No, no, I don’t mean our close friends, like you and Frank,” Anna said, and gave her friend’s hand a quick squeeze. “I mean all the women at work, who keep asking me when I’ll be taking maternity leave, or the lady at the post office who keeps asking when she’ll get to cuddle the baby. It hurts, Denise. It hurts badly, because I feel like such a failure.”
“You’re not,” MacKenzie said, firmly. “There’s no blame in this sort of thing, Anna. It’s nobody’s fault.”
Her friend nodded, but wasn’t altogether convinced.
“I keep wondering, what if we never can?” she said. “Ryan’s been wonderful about it, as you can imagine. He says he fell in love with me because of who I am, not because of my breeding capabilities.”
MacKenzie’s lips quirked, because she could imagine him saying the very thing.
“He says he’ll be happy if it’s just the two of us, always,” she said. “But it’s me, as much as anything. I never felt broody before; I never understood the feeling all these other women talked about, because I just never felt it. I’ve always liked children, but I never wanted any—until I met Ryan.”
“That makes sense,” MacKenzie said. “It’s logical not to feel the urge to procreate until you actually meet someone you want to do it with.”
Anna smiled, and then heaved a sad sigh.
“It’s a funny old world, isn’t it?” she said. “You can spend a lifetime not wanting something and then, the moment you do, you find you can’t have it.”
“Yeah, it’s funny how things turn out sometimes,” MacKenzie agreed, and worked hard to keep any trace of sadness from her voice. This was not a moment to be gloomy.
“I went to see a specialist,” Anna continued. “They’re doing some more tests, but they think only one of my ovaries works properly. It doesn’t mean I can’t have kids, but it means the chances of natural conception are significantly lower.”
MacKenzie nodded.
“There’s always IVF?”
Anna nodded, and sipped her tea.
“You know,” MacKenzie said. “I guess this means you’ll just need to have lots and lots of outstanding sex. I’ll venture to say, Ryan will be very…ah, up for the challenge.”
Anna nearly spat out her tea, and gave her friend a playful swat on the arm as she hurriedly checked to see that Samantha was still out of hearing. But then, her lips curved into a smile and her eyes regained some of their sparkle.
“Well, every cloud, so they say,” she said, and gave her friend a wink.
“Atta girl,” MacKenzie said.
When Samantha stepped back into the room, she found the two women engrossed in the movie, their faces entirely too placid to be trusted.
“What did I miss?”
“Hugh Grant dancing,” MacKenzie replied, and left it at that.
CHAPTER 35
From their perch on one of the high benches in Faulkner’s lab, Ryan sifted through the box of Jess Stephenson’s belongings, while Phillips went through the messages and photographs contained on her mobile phone. She’d lived a cleaner life than most, they were pleasantly surprised to find, and there were no helpfully large bank transfers to indicate she’d been blackmailing anyone—nor were there any helpful messages detailing a time and place to meet the person who’d go on to kill her. The last message Jess Stephenson sent was to her boyfriend, back in Cardiff, expressing her love and telling him she’d see him soon. Hardly the last words of someone about to kill themselves, even if they didn’t have all the other evidence that pointed to murder.
Presently, Phillips paused and turned the phone this way and that.
Ryan looked up from his inspection of her clothes.
“Got something?”
“I don’t know,” Phillips said. “It seems odd, to have pictures of guns and all that on her phone.”
“Not really,” Ryan reasoned. “She was a soldier.”
“Look at this,” Phillips said, and held out the phone for Ryan to see for himself.
Sure enough, there were five or six close-up photographs of what appeared to be the interior of the armoury room, showing stacks of rifles and other types of handgun.
Something skirted around the edge of his brain, and Ryan suddenly dived into the box beside him, pulling out the copy of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. He flicked to the back, where he had seen columns of figures, with dates at the top, the most recent being the date Jess’s platoon had arrived at Otterburn. Beneath it, there was a series of numbers: 135, 135, 134, 134, 134, 129.
Six numbers, for the six days the platoon had been encamped at Otterburn.
“Frank, I think I know what she found.”
* * *
“These figures represent how many of each type of weapon was present and accounted for, on each of the days the platoon has been at Otterburn,” Ryan said. “As you can see, the numbers are decreasing slightly; just by the odd one, here and there.”
“What are these other dates?” Phillips queried, looking at the other columns of figures in the back of the book.
“I think they’re dates, and figures taken from the previous camps,” Ryan said. “Jess must have suspected someone within her own company, not one of the standing officers at any of the camps. Frank, I need you to liaise with Major Malloy. Ask her to use some of her clout to speak to the previous camps and obtain figures for each type of weapon in their armoury. Ask if they’re short. It’ll be faster, and easier, coming from her. While you’re at it, have a word with Jack and Mel. Tell them we might have found the military connection with the Odinist group—but we need a name. When they make the arrests, we need to know where the drop was being made, and by whom.”
Phillips nodded, and made the calls.
“I’ve got something else for you, Ryan, but it relates to Layla Bruce,” Faulkner called over, and then made his way across the laboratory.
“What is it, Tom?”
It doesn’t add much but it does build up a picture,” Faulkner said. “I’ve been going over some of the fibres and samples found underneath Layla’s nails. A lot of it is plant and mineral-based, as you’d imagine after her trek over the moorland, but there was something else that was interesting. Eight of her nails had retained small particles of stachybotrys chartarum, otherwise known as black mould.”
“I’ve sent a team over to the bedsit where Layla was living with a girl called Willow,” Ryan said. “Maybe that’s
where it came from.”
But Faulkner wasn’t convinced.
“Even if she had it in her home, I don’t know why she’d have it scratched beneath eight out of ten fingernails, unless she was clawing at it. I thought, more likely, she’d been held somewhere in a place of captivity, and that place had black mould.”
Ryan nodded his agreement, eyes burning bright, and hoped they’d find whoever was responsible, before he took another.
* * *
Hayley used the cover of the trees during the day and walked as quickly as she could.
She stopped once, to sip some water from a puddle on the ground when she thought she might collapse, but did not allow herself to sit. If she did, she may never move again. There were 250 square kilometres of ground in the Northumberland National Park, much of it uninhabited—particularly on the army ranges. She could walk for days and never see another soul, which was, she supposed, why he had chosen this particular spot in the first place.
She continued to walk east and hoped she would reach a house, or a bothy, once she left the trees.
Anything at all.
Rain fell steadily, trickling through the forest until she came to the edge of an incline, at the bottom of which was another small river. She heard it bubbling away as the rainfall swelled its depths, and she watched it for a moment as she caught her breath.
At the precise moment she leaned down to rub her cramped legs, the gunshot ricocheted off the branch nearest to where her head had been.
She didn’t stop, didn’t give him time to pull the trigger again, but allowed herself to fall, rolling down the hillside towards the shallow river at the bottom.
* * *
He watched her tumble down the hill and ran across to the spot where she’d fallen, already reaching for another cartridge to reload his weapon.
His cartridge belt was empty.
He howled like an animal, his face contorting into something almost inhuman as he battled the terrible urge to use his hands, instead.
But that wasn’t allowed.
If he broke his own rules, there’d be no telling what else he could be persuaded to do.
No, he thought. One bullet, straight to the head was more than sufficient. Anything more would be an indulgence, and he couldn’t allow himself to become greedy. He’d seen what happened to those who lost control—they made mistakes, because they forgot basic principles. The game wasn’t about accolades, or the pursuit of glory; it was a mission.
Even as he told himself the mantra, his fingers flexed by his sides as he watched the woman’s body float on the river.
He looked up at the sky, then checked the time on his watch.
The sun was falling fast, now, and she couldn’t go far. He’d be surprised if she hadn’t broken at least one bone during her fall, and the river wasn’t deep enough to cushion the blow. He only hoped she’d survived, so the fun could continue when he returned, fully reloaded and restocked.
He much preferred to hunt at night.
CHAPTER 36
When Ryan and Phillips received confirmation from Major Malloy that the last two camps where the 1st Royal Welsh Fusiliers had been stationed had both suffered losses to their armoury, they marshalled a small team of police officers and CSIs and drove directly to Otterburn Camp to instigate a search for a .308 Winchester rifle, as well as a belt bearing the distinctive markings found imprinted on Private Jess Stephenson’s throat.
When the security guards at the outer gates saw that Ryan had brought a further two squad cars with him, a hasty radio message was conveyed to the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Robson, who was waiting for them outside the main barracks when they arrived. Major Owen Jones was at his side.
Show of force, Ryan thought, and cast an eye over his own band of troops who surrounded him in equal fashion.
“Chief inspector? We didn’t expect to see you out of hours,” Robson said. “May I ask what’s going on, and why you seem to have brought half of the constabulary with you?”
“New evidence has come to light regarding the murders of Layla Bruce, and of Private Jess Stephenson,” he said, and watched the other man’s face pale as the meaning of the words hit home. “We are authorised to search these premises and to seize evidence pertaining to our investigation. We’d be grateful for your cooperation in this matter, sir.”
Major Malloy stepped forward.
“I’ll start gathering officers in the Mess, so you can complete your search.”
“Now, just hang on a minute!” Robson roared. “I’m responsible for what does and does not happen on this base—”
“Not when it concerns murder,” Ryan said, simply, and gestured for his team to begin their work. “But, in deference to your rank, I’ll conduct the search of your room myself.”
Without another word, Ryan stepped around the CO and jogged up the short flight of stairs leading into the Officers’ Quarters.
* * *
As the North’s equivalent of Stonehenge, the Duddo Stone Circle was an impressive feat of engineering, each hunk of sandstone having been erected over four thousand years ago atop a site which enjoyed unparalleled views of the Cheviot Hills. It rather put to shame some of their more recent architectural achievements, Lowerson thought, as he and Yates made their way along the winding road to the small village of the same name, shortly before eight o’clock.
“The other units are in position,” Yates said, following a brief radio exchange. “Apparently, there’s seven of them up there already, and it’s raining cats and dogs.”
The Stones were a kilometre’s walk from the roadside slightly north of Duddo, and the plan was for police vehicles to remain concealed until they could be reasonably sure that all those members of the Odinist group who planned to attend had already arrived. It reduced the chances of them being spotted too soon, and gave the police an opportunity to disable the group’s vehicles while they were up beside the Stones, dancing in the rain—or whatever it was they planned to do.
“Well, I suppose we can say they’re dedicated,” Lowerson remarked, looking out at the monsoon weather conditions. “I wouldn’t want to be caught out in that for long.”
* * *
The woman touched Death’s hand, and let it go, one more time.
The femur in her left leg fractured as she fell into the icy-cold waters of the river below, connecting with the hard riverbed that had been formed during the last Ice Age.
She hadn’t thought about whether to jump; she’d simply done it—the thought of choosing her own death far preferable to giving him the twisted satisfaction he craved.
But now, she knew her body could not go on as it was; her fingers were blue and, without any sunlight to warm them, her muscles were seizing and contracting, making it impossible for her to walk, even discounting the shooting pain in her leg.
Darkness was setting in quickly now, and she knew she would not last another hour, let alone another night, if she could not get warm.
Convulsing with cold and pain, she saw salvation in the field up ahead, and knew she had to find the strength to do what she must do.
Survive.
* * *
Ryan and Phillips searched the CO’s private quarters with single-minded intensity, while the rest of their team went about the business of searching the remaining officers’ quarters. However, when more than an hour passed by and they had not found either the rifle or the belt they sought, Ryan began to think they had been disposed of elsewhere.
“Who’s responsible for keeping a log of the weapons in the armoury?” Ryan asked the Lieutenant-Colonel.
“Ah, well, we have a rota of officers who take responsibility for that,” he replied. “Why do you ask?”
Ryan did not answer directly.
“Have you been made aware of any discrepancies in the logbook?”
The CO frowned and shook his head.
“No, none whatsoever,” he replied. “Well, I mean, I know that one or two had to be decommissioned because they were mis
firing, and some have been sent back to the manufacturer for repairs, but that’s all I’m aware of, chief inspector.”
He paused, frowning as they dug through his underwear drawer, and turning an unhealthy shade of red when they came across his stash of ‘special’ reading material.
Ryan cleared his throat.
“Must be difficult, being away from home for long periods at a time,” he said, and thought of Layla and Willow, and all the other girls like them.
“Quite,” the CO said, testily.
“Nothing here,” Phillips said, and straightened up again while Ryan agreed there was nothing behind the dresser, either.
Just one place left to look.
“May we see the belt you’re wearing, sir?”
The CO looked thoroughly confused but complied with the request and lifted the khaki jumper he wore to reveal a standard, brown leather belt with a rectangular buckle.
CHAPTER 37
The soldier stood in the shadow of one of the Duddo Stones, huddled inside a raincoat. He’d left the dog on the back seat of the car with a small bowl of food and water, and the window cracked to allow for air circulation. He wished he could check on him, but instead he was standing in the pouring rain, listening to the rantings and ravings of a group of deeply disturbed individuals.
He missed the underpass.
Aside from the group’s leader, John, all of the other men were skinheads. They were all-male, all-white and all, unbelievably, dressed in knock-off boar skin cloaks he strongly suspected to have been made from bits of old carpet. They’d given themselves new names, too, and John had told him that, when they were in this special place, he was no longer ‘John Dobson’; he was ‘Ragnar Dobson’.
The soldier had relied on his scars to help him keep a straight face.
The rain continued to fall as Ragnar bleated on about far-right racism and neo-fascism being the bedrock of their ‘race vessel’, mythologizing the virtues of European white males, so they were no longer average white men with beer bellies and receding hairlines, but heroes in their own minds, speaking of the genetic ties between them and of their bold, fearlessness.