Ben replied, ‘None at all, Colonel.’ Grace said nothing, obviously not quite yet ready to forgive him.
‘Your car keys,’ Monty said, returning the Mercedes fob to Ben. He hung his coat on a peg and removed the broad-brimmed hat, revealing a wispy comb-over of white hair. Then he ushered them through the garage to an interior door that led inside his home. The house was large and tastefully furnished, if a little on the formal side, as suited a retired military officer of Monty’s generation. One wall proudly displayed a whole montage of framed photographs, the older ones in black and white, dating back through the colonel’s career to his early days at Sandhurst. The stooped, crooked Monty of today was a far cry from the dashing, ramrod-straight figure of a man he’d been in his glory years.
‘Please, make yourselves comfortable,’ the colonel said, showing them through to a sizeable conservatory filled with chintzy woven rattan armchairs and sofas. Icy rain pattered on the windows and glass ceiling, but the room was warm and inviting. As they entered, a corpulent grey-haired woman whom Ben presumed to be Mrs Montgomery appeared in the doorway. She was dressed as though getting ready for bed, in dressing gown and fluffy slippers.
‘This is my wife, Eunice,’ Monty said. Ben introduced himself and Grace. Eunice was all smiles, as though greeting old friends. ‘Grace, that’s such a lovely name. You must be hungry after your long journey, dear. Would you like a piece of apple tart?’
‘That’s very kind of you, perhaps just a small slice,’ Grace said, making an effort to be polite.
Eunice beamed with joy. ‘That’s wonderful. I’ll just go and bake one.’ She hurried off towards the kitchen, dressing gown swishing around her.
And folks said Monty was mad.
‘Will you take a drink?’ the colonel asked, opening a cabinet that housed a row of bottles and glasses. Ben asked for scotch, neat. Grace declined. Monty took out a pair of crystal tumblers and a bottle of good single malt, set them down on a glass-topped table and poured out two enormous measures that would have befitted a hard-drinking officers’ mess of old. The colonel settled on a rattan armchair. Ben took a seat on one of the matching sofas, and Grace sat next to him.
‘I’m sure you’re anxious to get down to business,’ the colonel said. ‘Now that we’re free to talk openly, perhaps you’d like to start by describing in more detail your recent encounter? I’m a little foggy on how you became involved in this whole situation.’
‘I don’t have time to go into it all, colonel,’ Ben said. ‘Let’s just say, as I told you on the phone, that circumstances have led us into conflict with some unpleasant people, who have some even worse people working for them.’ He reiterated the story, exactly as events had unfolded from the moment he and Grace had arrived at Jamie McGlashan’s trailer.
If Colonel Montgomery was mildly disappointed that one of the two killers had managed to escape, his pleasure at hearing of the other’s fate more than made up for it. ‘You mentioned you had photographic evidence to show me?’
Ben took out his phone and scrolled up the three images of the dead man for Monty to see. The colonel examined the close-ups of the tattoos first, the regimental ink on the corpse’s upper arm and the Gothic D, skull and daggers adorning his neck. ‘You’re quite correct, Major, this is indeed the insignia of that disgraceful organised crime gang, the Dishonourables. And the older tattoo indicates that this piece of scum previously had the undeserved privilege of serving with the Parachute Regiment.’
‘The third image shows his face,’ Ben said.
Monty brought the picture up and feasted his eyes for a moment on the sight of the bloody corpse in the snow. ‘You seem to have made a thorough job of it, Major. I commend you. In fifteen years of chasing these filthy scumbags I’m yet to have had the satisfaction of personally seeing one sent to hell where he belongs. You’ve no idea how happy this makes me.’
Monty really didn’t like the Dishonourables.
‘But is there a chance we might be able to identify him?’ Ben asked.
‘You could have gone the route of accessing the military records of all servicemen dishonourably discharged from his regiment over, say, the last twenty-odd years and working through them until a match was found,’ Monty said. ‘A long and arduous task. However, the good news is that the legwork has already been done, thanks to my own humble efforts. I have the names and pictures of every single man DD’d from the British armed forces, going back decades. And I’m also pleased to inform you that this particular scumbag’s face looks vaguely familiar to me.’
‘His name?’ Ben asked.
Monty shook his head. ‘You’ll have to excuse an old man’s memory for being a tad less sharp than it once was. So if you’ll follow me, let’s go and consult my records, shall we?’
Chapter 41
They left the conservatory and the colonel led them through the house and upstairs, past more collections of family photos on the walls showing grinning, gap-toothed kids and grandkids. Passing an open bedroom door, Monty stopped at the end of a passage and produced a ring of keys with which he proceeded to unlock another door. He flipped on a light switch and led them inside. At one time, the room had been a little girl’s bedroom and still had faded pink wallpaper with small teddy bear motifs. But the Montgomerys’ daughter had long since grown up, and now the room served as the colonel’s study. Two tall filing cabinets stood beside a desk piled high with folders and papers.
‘You’re looking at twenty years of work,’ the colonel said as he pulled open a filing cabinet drawer and began sifting through cardboard suspension files. ‘I’ve called in more favours than I care to mention, spent fortunes on private investigators, surveillance and bribes to informants or for obtaining illegal copies of police reports, staked my entire reputation and at times risked alienating my own family. An obsession, I’ll admit, but in my opinion a worthy one. The sooner the Dishonourables are rounded up and jailed, or preferably strung up, the better. Now let’s see if we can’t find your man somewhere among this lot.’
The files were arranged by regiment and subdivided into squadron and unit, according to where each subject had been in his military career when it had all come to a crashing end. Monty had hundreds of individual dossiers on dishonourably discharged former soldiers covering a period of many years, and the job of sifting through them all would have taken hours if the dead guy’s regimental tattoo hadn’t narrowed things down for them. Monty lifted out the file for the Parachute Regiment and carried it over to the cluttered desk.
Ben had known a lot of Paras in his time, and admired them enormously. He was happy to see that relatively few men from that elite airborne infantry unit had ever fallen so low as to receive a DD. Of those twenty-nine whose dubious activities over the years had caused them to be included in Monty’s records, some of the dossiers were thicker and some scantier depending on how thoroughly he’d been able to research the man’s background. Eight of the older files were stamped DECEASED. Monty explained how, where his investigations had led him to suspect involvement in the Dishonourables’ organisation, he’d marked the file with a big red capital letter S. Others were labelled with a black capital C for ‘confirmed’. Whatever its status, each dossier bore the individual’s service number and, more importantly for Ben’s purposes, a photocopy or scan printout of their official military ID photo.
It didn’t take very long to match one of the ID photos to Ben’s phone image of the dead man in the snow. It was Grace who found it, inside one of the active dossiers marked C. ‘Got him,’ she said instantly.
Ben looked. The soldier’s name was Kevin O’Donnell. His military photo showed a much slimmer and smoother-featured young soldier, but there was no doubting that it was the same guy. O’Donnell was forty-three years old. He’d been just seventeen when he’d first signed up as an army recruit, twenty-four when he’d enlisted with the Paras, and thirty-two when he’d tested positive in a random drugs test at Colchester Garrison and duly been booted out of the regiment.
As Monty recounted, for the next six years after his discharge O’Donnell had drifted aimlessly from one thing to another, before getting his first conviction for aggravated assault. Four years later, during which time he’d been in and out of prison for increasingly serious crime and somehow hooked up with the Dishonourables, he and a fellow ex-soldier had been pulled in as suspects in the particularly violent London gangland assassination of a known police informer, one Lyle Cunningham. Both had been questioned by CID detectives, but then released due to insufficient evidence. ‘It’s all in here,’ Monty said, tapping the photocopied police report. ‘Since then the two have been occasional associates, involved in a variety of dirty dealings for which, sadly, they’ve been too clever to get caught. But I happen to know plenty about their activities.’
Monty flipped through the file and pulled out a set of grainy photos that looked as if they’d been covertly shot from the back of a surveillance van. They showed O’Donnell walking down a city street in conversation with another man, taller, slimmer, meaner-looking and maybe a year or two younger. The pictures had been taken in summer. O’Donnell was wearing a T-shirt with a palm tree on it, and his friend was clad in a sleeveless hoodie that showed off his toned arms. And the unmistakeable Dishonourables tattoo on his right deltoid.
‘What’s the second guy’s name?’ Ben asked.
‘Oh, you can read all about him, too,’ Monty replied. He returned to the filing cabinet, rooted around for a moment, and came back to the desk with another file that was thicker than O’Donnell’s. As Ben began to leaf through it, Monty said, ‘A real beauty, this one. His name is Carl Hacker. Born in London, joined the army at eighteen. Promising start, showed great ability, and he quickly worked his way up to join the Pathfinders, where he was promoted to staff sergeant.’
Ben was surprised, because he knew all about the Pathfinder Platoon. Primarily a recon unit, they often worked in an Advance Force operations role as support to SAS. Their troopers were some of the toughest and most disciplined in the business, who received a level of training second only to the most elite regiments of the joint Special Forces family.
‘Of all of them, you would say that Hacker was the biggest waste of a good soldier,’ Monty said. ‘By all accounts he was a master with a rifle, too. Won first-place medal in the AOSC long-range sniper event, two years in a row.’
AOSC stood for Army Operational Shooting Competition, the British Forces’ premier marksmanship tournament, held annually at Bisley in Surrey. To even qualify, you had to be excellent. To come away a winner was a superlative achievement. Ben had only won it once.
‘And then it all went badly awry,’ Monty went on, shaking his head. ‘As you’ll see from his file, Hacker earned his DD eight years ago following his alleged involvement in a gun-running racket supplying weapons, ammunition and explosives that had been magicked out of British military arsenals to members of organised crime gangs in the UK, Sweden and Germany.’
‘Tell me more about him,’ Ben said.
Monty replied, ‘Turn to the last page of his dossier and you’ll see that he’s now employed as international head of security for an independent investments company called Stuart Corporate Enterprises Ltd, based in Scotland but with offices worldwide. I did some digging into the firm in case it was some kind of front for illicit activities. You never know. But it all seems perfectly above board, and quite a large-scale set-up. Which makes Hacker one of the fortunate few with his background who still somehow manage to land cushy legitimate jobs despite their dubious past history. But then, he was always one of the clever ones.’
Ben and Grace exchanged glances. Ben asked Monty, ‘Based where in Scotland?’
The question caught the colonel off-balance. He puzzled for a moment, scratching his head. ‘Lord, I forget exactly. I’d have to check. As I recall, it was somewhere in the Highlands. An unlikely location, I remember thinking at the time. Fort something. The company owner is some multimillionaire or other who owns a castle up there. It’s coming back to me now. Charles Stuart, that was his name. Like Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Young Pretender.’
‘There are three Highland forts,’ Grace said. ‘Spaced out in a diagonal line spanning northern Scotland from the Firth of Lorne to the Moray Firth. Fort George in the east, Fort Augustus in the middle and Fort William in the west. So which is it?’
‘Fort William,’ Monty remembered suddenly. ‘I’m sure it was that one. Yes, yes, of course. That’s where the Commando monument is, at Spean Bridge. Where Churchill sent our boys to train with the American Army Rangers during the war.’
Ben was already delving into his phone to search online for Stuart Corporate Investments Ltd. He quickly found the company website, which was just as impressive as Monty had described. The site proudly vaunted its international footprint but capitalised most of all on its Scottish roots, getting maximum wow-factor value from the multiple panoramic shots of the magnificent estate and spectacularly grand Highland castle that served as its corporate headquarters.
But it was its location that mainly interested Ben at this moment. The damn place was just a few miles north of Fort William. Which also placed it just a few miles south of Kinlochardaich. Almost exactly equidistant. Slap bang right in the middle of all the action that Ben and Grace had just left behind. And to which they’d soon be returning.
Ben had been around long enough, and seen enough weird and crazy things, to know that coincidences did happen. But this connection was hard to dismiss so easily.
He said, ‘Grace, I think you and I need to head back north and go and say hello to this Mr Stuart.’
Chapter 42
At the same moment Hacker was getting on the phone to Graham, who was still hiding at Hope’s cottage with Carter.
Hacker asked, ‘Well? Have they come back yet?’
Graham replied impatiently, ‘If they’d have come back yet, don’t you think I would’ve called you? How much longer do we have to sit here freezing our bollocks off?’
‘Quit whinging. You’re getting well paid for it. Call me the moment anything happens.’ Hacker ended the call and turned to Stuart, who was pacing the floor in agitation with his hands clasped behind his back. They and Banks were in the industrial-scale kitchen in the bowels of the castle. The room was filled with the rich aroma of Italian dark roast coffee filtering through a percolator on a range the size of a locomotive. Banks was sitting hunched over the enormous table with a steaming mug and the dismantled pieces of a pistol in front of him, which he was assiduously cleaning with a copper wire brush and a rag.
Hacker said, ‘Hope and the woman are still out there somewhere.’
‘I know they’re still out there somewhere,’ Stuart snapped back at him, still pacing. ‘I’m not deaf. Or stupid. Which is why Macleod and Coull have been instructed to keep an eye on every inch of road for a fifty-mile radius in case they show up.’
‘On their own?’
Stuart gave a derisive snort. ‘The payroll doesn’t stop with Macleod and Coull, you idiot. I have my hierarchy of minions, they have theirs. That’s what makes this operation so damned expensive. Every local Keystone Cop with a second mortgage, a nasty gambling habit or a sprog studying for some worthless university degree wants to get his fingers in the money pot. And meantime I still don’t have any better idea of what’s going on than I did hours ago. Where’s Hope? Where’s Kirk? What are they up to? I can’t stand not knowing. You said you were going to deal with this situation.’
Hacker glanced at Banks, not liking being reprimanded in front of a fellow Dishonourable. Banks went on cleaning the gun components and didn’t look up, as though oblivious of the conversation.
Hacker replied, ‘I’m doing the best I can. But with one guy down, two staked out in Kinlochardaich and two needed to take care of things here at base, our manpower resources are stretched thin. When you first involved me in this matter, we were going after an old man with a weak heart. That was before this Ben Hope came into the pict
ure. He changes everything. If and when we do catch up with him, or your Keystone Cops somehow manage to deliver him to us, either way we’re going to have our hands full.’
Stuart stopped pacing and looked at him. ‘I thought you said the Pathfinders could eat him for breakfast.’
‘We could. But there’s only one of me here.’
‘So you’re saying you need additional manpower. Fine. Bring them on. How many more can you get hold of at short notice?’
Hacker glanced at Banks again, and this time Banks looked up. ‘Mikey Creece is looking for work,’ Banks said. ‘So’s Phil Buckett. Ran into them in a pub in King’s Cross the other week.’
Creece was an old crony of Hacker’s from back in the day. The two of them had been mixed up together in the lucrative gun-running scam that had ultimately ended Hacker’s military career. Creece had since gone on to better things. Hacker said, ‘I thought Mikey and Phil were in Ukraine, shooting rebels for the Russians.’
‘They were, but you can’t trust fuckin’ foreigners to keep a proper war going these days. Every time there’s a fuckin’ ceasefire it’s down tools and you don’t get paid for sitting around on your arse. They got pissed off and came home. Reckon they’d be up for it. And they’d probably be able to round up a few more of the boys, too.’
Hacker nodded. ‘Especially if it means taking out some SAS piece of shit who killed one of us.’
‘Call them now,’ Stuart said. ‘Get five, ten, twenty, whatever it takes. I want a regiment here, with all the weapons and ammunition you can scrape together out of the pits of the criminal underworld. I’ve had enough of this Hope meddling in my affairs. I don’t want him dead. I want him obliterated, vaporised and erased from the face of the earth as if he’d never existed. And then I want what’s rightfully mine. DO YOU HEAR ME?’
Meanwhile, deep below them, Boonzie McCulloch was sitting very still but wide awake, resting with his back to the cold, dank dungeon wall. After days of confinement his vision had adjusted to the near-total darkness of his surroundings, to the point where he imagined he could make out a single photon of light. In his experience you could get used to just about anything. But the stone floor that was all he had to sleep on wasn’t getting any softer, and the damp felt as though it was creeping a little more into his bones with every passing hour. He was raw with fear and anger, and hunger pangs gnawed fiercely at his belly. The food dish his captors had brought him earlier was empty. Cold rice and beans, and a plastic teaspoon to eat them with in the darkness. The bitter aftertaste of the ground-up heart pill they’d mixed up into his food was still on his lips.
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