by Adrian Wills
An image of his lifeless body sinking to the bottom of a squelching bog flitted across his mind. He pushed it away, recalling the words of one of his old instructors, a gnarly one-eyed SAS veteran named Mac, who’d spent a morning explaining how to escape sinking sand and peat bogs in an open-air classroom under the gaze of snow-capped mountains in the Brecon Beacons.
Stop moving forwards. Retrace your steps.
Simple and logical advice, counter to Blake’s usual mantra. The last thing you wanted to do was walk deeper into a bog. Except Blake was clueless about which way was back or forward. Everywhere he looked, shallow puddles floated over the short grass. If he could have retraced his steps, he would have done it. Nothing for it but to push on and hope luck would show him a safe route out.
He leaned back and tried to free his leg from the mud, but the harder he pulled the stronger the suction of the sloppy mud seemed to grip him. He tried again, dragging his foot out a few inches, but the effort was energy sapping and only helped to force his back foot deeper. He felt the weight of his body sinking. In a few moments, the mud was up to his thighs, and rising. Holding his elbows high, he fetched his mobile phone from his jacket pocket. Now was not the time to be proud. He needed help. He checked the charge. The battery was still at seventy per cent, and for a fleeting second the display showed one bar of coverage.
And then it was gone.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As the thick mud slipped over his waist, Blake imagined disappearing up to his chest, the pressure crushing his ribs and squeezing the breath out of his lungs.
The fingers of panic needled at the edges of his mind.
He was ten years old again, pinned to the ground by an older boy holding his wrists firm. The memory of the suffocating panic as he struggled for breath had stayed with him long after he had forgotten about how, in a blind fury, he’d beaten the kid to a pulp and was lucky not to have been expelled by his furious headmaster. Fairness was a relative term when you were a child.
A spike of adrenaline made his heart race, but Blake fought the instinctive urge to fight the pull dragging him down. It was counterintuitive, but he was well aware that the more he struggled, the quicker he’d sink.
He couldn’t help but think about the mud rising to his neck and having to tilt his head back to keep his mouth and nose clear. He wondered how long he could hold his head like that before his chin slipped below the surface, and the foul mud forced its way into his mouth. His nose. His eyes. And then how long before he could no longer resist the urge to breathe and inhale the thick, cloying filth into his lungs? He wondered how it would feel as it clogged his throat, knowing he wouldn’t be able to prevent his brain, starved of oxygen, spasming into panic as he slipped into a boggy grave.
It was entirely possible his body would never be found, or maybe discovered centuries later, perfectly preserved like those corpses in Scandinavia, clothing intact, skin turned to leather, and his features twisted in the grotesque agony of death.
No. He wasn’t ready to die. Not today. And not like this. He’d survived much worse, down on his luck, out of ammo and surrounded by men who wanted him dead. He was determined this wasn’t how it was going to end.
Think.
He closed his eyes and returned to the stinging cold of the Arctic, when they’d made him plunge into a hole cut into the ice. The freezing water was so cold he thought it was going to stop his heart dead, the shock so intense it instantly took his breath away and numbed his body.
Get out quickly, the instructors had yelled. Or die. They were hard men with cold eyes and a battle-hardened intensity that won the instant respect of the recruits hoping to wear the coveted cap badge of the British SAS.
The sub-zero temperature of the water had brought on almost instant hypothermia. Like every one of his fellow recruits, Blake only had a second to make the right decision. After that the brain started to shut down and death was only a heartbeat away. He’d turned back towards the edge of the ice and scrambled with every last ounce of energy to haul himself out of the hole with his ski poles and rolled onto the snow. It was as exhilarating as it was terrifying. The snow burned the skin on his face, but he’d never been so grateful to be alive.
And now, as he faced down death again, a small, golden nugget of information came back to him, from a moustachioed Scots instructor whose name escaped him but who had a gap-toothed grin and an alcohol-resistant liver. It had been a throwaway comment which had lodged at the back of Blake’s memory, forgotten until this moment, but which might yet save his life.
He took a deep breath, filling his lungs for buoyancy. His brain was screaming at him to hurry, but it couldn’t be rushed. Against all his instincts he forced his head and shoulders back into the mud, curving his spine and spreading his arms wide to distribute his weight. Slowly, inch by inch, his feet began to rise towards the surface.
It was the same technique the recruits had been taught on the snow hole test. The advice, in the unthinkable scenario that they’d fallen in without ski poles, was simple. You had to kick hard to propel yourself out of the freezing water. It was a technique that could be equally well-applied to escaping from bogs and quicksand, Blake recalled.
Blake waited until his legs were at a forty-five-degree angle to his body, and then kicked for all his worth. But it was like trying to swim in molasses. The thick, treacly mud held his legs firm.
He continued to pull his legs upwards, straining his thighs until first his right foot, and then his left broke the surface and Blake floated on his back with the mud enveloping his shoulders and seeping into the collar of his jacket, cold and wet and slimy.
He rolled onto his stomach and gagged from the putrid stench of fetid gases released by his exertions, a potent blend of methane and hydrogen sulphide from the rotting vegetation trapped below. He rolled again. And again. Until he reached the relative safety of a dry patch of land and heard the joyous sound of his mobile phone ringing.
He fumbled for his pocket and plucked out the phone. His heart soared when he saw Parkes’ number on the screen.
‘Hello?’ he gasped. ‘Elodie?’
At first there was only silence. He checked the signal. One solitary bar. ‘Elodie?’ Her voice crackled and broke, an indistinct jumble of clicks and half-words. ‘I can’t hear you,’ he said.
Her broken voice vanished into silence.
‘Elodie!’
He checked the screen. Call failed. No signal. Blake yelled in frustration.
Slowly, he stood, easing the weight onto his feet, testing the ground. At least the fog seemed to be lifting. The thick grey blanket had thinned and opaque light from the sun was threatening to break through.
He scraped off the worst of the mud from his legs and jacket, and tentatively picked a path across the sodden ground, testing each step before committing his full weight, dreading sinking into another boggy pit.
Step by step he made it across the worst of it, heading towards a craggy tor which topped the crest of a hill like an ancient sentinel maintaining a watchful eye on the landscape below. His legs dragged and his muscles ached as he stumbled across the uneven ground, feet squelching in his mud-encrusted boots. But his mind was set on only one thing - reaching the top of the tor.
Twenty minutes later, he stood exhausted and shivering, surveying the innocuous-looking lower plains below. The cold had already crept into his bones and he knew time was ticking. He needed to find shelter and get out of his wet clothes. He tried his phone again, holding it high over his head to catch a signal.
Nothing.
He typed a message with one finger, agonisingly slowly with his whole body shaking. Hit send. Waited. But the message refused to go, a red exclamation mark warning of a problem.
He couldn’t waste any more time with it. He had to keep moving. Generating heat. He dropped the phone in his pocket, hunched his shoulders and, ignoring the protests from his legs, scrambled back down the sharp, granite rocks, careful not to fall or twist an ankle
. He figured if he kept moving north he’d have to eventually find civilisation. A village. A hamlet. A farm. Something.
Back on lower ground and out of the wind, he scoped the desolate moor from left to right, scanning the horizon in a slow arc, looking for any sign of life. A cottage. A gaggle of ramblers, or even a river he could track. Away to his right, a woodland of fir trees grew in a perfect rectangle behind a drystone wall. Patches of heather discoloured the verdant plain and white dots of sheep drifted in slow formations.
But no sign of human life.
He fixed on another distant tor directly ahead and started walking briskly with his numb fingers tucked under his armpits. The ground pitched and bobbled, making progress desperately slow.
It was only when he looked up from his feet to check his bearing that he noticed movement in the periphery of his vision. An object moving at speed across the bleak landscape. Blake stopped and squinted, sensing his reactions were already slowing, a sure sign the cold was taking its toll.
It was a car cutting across a hidden ribbon of road, and if he sprinted hard he might be able to reach it before it passed. But it would be tight. Worth the effort though. And if nothing else, he could follow the road which had to lead somewhere.
Blake sprung off a rock and willed his legs into action as he attempted to snap into a fast run. His mobile trilled in his pocket, and for a moment he thought about ignoring it, before coming to his senses.
‘Elodie,’ he gasped, clamping the phone to his ear.
‘Blake? Where the hell are you?’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Blake’s teeth continued to chatter even after he was wrapped up in a picnic blanket from Parkes’ boot and had his hands cupped over the warm air vents in the car. ‘You’ve no idea how pleased I am to see you,’ he stuttered, struggling to speak.
‘You’re bloody lucky to be alive,’ she said. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘It’s a long story. How did you find me?’
It had seemed like a miracle when Parkes drove past. He’d collapsed on the roadside as the Volvo approached and she’d had to bundle him inside, turning up the heat to full blast.
‘We were able to triangulate your position from your mobile signal,’ she said. ‘So I had a fair idea you were around here somewhere.’
‘I owe you.’
‘We need to get you looked over by a doctor.’
‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re verging on hypothermic.’ She reminded him of his school matron with her disapproving tone.
‘I just need a hot shower and a change of clothes.’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘The hotel,’ said Blake, firmly.
‘It’s your funeral.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘So bloody stubborn. Just like my ex,’ Parkes said, watching the road ahead carefully, but glancing occasionally at Blake. ‘You still haven’t told me why you were on the moor in the fog.’
‘Fletcher feels so guilty about what’s happened that he insisted on heading out into the fog to look for him. I stupidly decided to follow him.’
‘Why the guilt?’
‘It turns out Hopkins had a gambling addiction.’
‘Which would explain the debts,’ said Parkes, speeding through a corner and swerving to avoid a stray sheep in the middle of the road.
‘Fletcher says Hopkins tried to kill himself before and thinks he came up onto the moor to finish the job.’
Parkes frowned. ‘That’s interesting. He never mentioned that when we interviewed him.’
‘Hopkins made him promise not to tell anyone, to protect Claire and the kids.’
‘Do you believe him?’
‘Why would he lie?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Strictly speaking he didn’t tell you the whole truth,’ said Blake, beginning to feel a little revived as they reached the outskirts of the town. At least his teeth had stopped chattering. ‘Any news on our man from the pub?’
‘A couple of the guys are ploughing through whatever CCTV footage they can lay their hands on, but Hubbard thinks it’s a distraction.’
‘If Fletcher’s telling the truth, he might be right. But it won’t do any harm to rule this guy out.’
They pulled into the car park behind the Monklands Hotel. Blake had stopped shivering, but despite the warm fugue in the car, he still felt cold to the core. He shuffled through the hotel reception shedding a trail of mud but was beyond caring. His mind was focused on getting out of his filthy clothes and into the shower. He smiled apologetically at the blonde receptionist behind the counter, and for once took the lift.
‘Do you have anything warm to change into?’ asked Parkes as they reached his room.
Blake shook his head.
‘Give me half an hour,’ she said, stepping back and sizing him up with the seasoned eye of a Savile Row tailor. ‘I’ll pick you up something in town.’
As Parkes disappeared down the corridor, Blake let himself into his room, peeled off the muddy army boots and fatigues he’d been loaned and left them heaped in the corner of the bathroom. The shower’s hot jets needled his skin, and gradually his temperature rose as the water ran off his head and face.
Twenty minutes later, wrapped in a fluffy white monographed dressing gown, he sat on the edge of the bed and called Patterson. He answered on the second ring, sounding a little out of breath, as if he’d just run up the stairs.
‘Blake, I was wondering when you’d call.’
‘Sorry, Harry, I’ve been a bit . . . bogged down.’
‘So, what news?’
Blake stared at the gnarled branches of an old oak tree outside the window. ‘Nothing definitive yet, but we’re looking into a couple of leads. There was an Asian guy who’d been asking about Kyle Hopkins in a local pub a few days before he disappeared. The bar staff say they’ve never seen him before.’
Patterson drew a deep breath.
‘It might be nothing, of course. The DI in charge has freed up a couple of his team to work through the CCTV, but he has other ideas about what happened.’
‘Such as?’
‘He thinks it’s an insurance job. Hopkins had some financial problems and according to his CO had already tried to take his own life once before. He’s convinced it’s suicide.’
‘That’s not enough to rule out an abduction,’ said Patterson.
‘Yeah, I know, but it’s not feeling like it to me. Listen, there’s something else. Can you get hold of Hopkins’ service records? According to his wife, he was posted to Iraq shortly before he started at the training school. But his CO’s adamant that never happened.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll get straight onto it.’
‘While you’re at it, make the same check on Ryan Fletcher, Sean van Dijk, Jamie Dobson and Jake Stone, all from the Duke of Yorks. Did you get that?’
As Patterson read the names back there was a light tap on the door.
‘I’ve got to go, Harry. Let me know as soon as you find out anything.’
Blake pulled the dressing gown tighter around his waist and let Parkes into the room clutching a handful of shopping bags which she tossed on the bed.
‘Hopefully everything will fit,’ she said, kicking off her shoes.
He dressed in the bathroom, pulling on crisp new jeans and a casual shirt with a button-down collar. Everything fitted perfectly.
‘I’ve let the school know you’re safe,’ she said as he emerged into the bedroom running his fingers through his damp hair. ‘I spoke to the staff sergeant, a guy named van Dijk. They were worried about you.’
Blake said nothing.
‘That’s a much better look,’ said Parkes with a sly grin.
‘You have a good eye. Are you hungry?’
‘A little.’
Blake ordered room service burgers and they ate sitting on the bed. Blake demolished his food like he’d not eaten for a week, then finished Parkes’ chips when she said she
was full. No wonder she was so thin.
‘So what’s our next move?’ The detective tucked a pillow under her head as she lay back on the bed clutching her swollen stomach.
‘We wait. Either Hopkins’ body will turn up, or we get an ID on our pub suspect.’
‘And if it turns out to be suicide?’
‘Then we’ve all been wasting our time,’ said Blake. ‘And it’s no longer a matter for MI5.’
‘Will you go back to London?’
‘No, I’m going to take a few days’ leave. A friend is letting me use his holiday cottage on the coast. You?’
‘Back to the daily grind I guess, the usual shit storm of burglaries, assaults and petty crime.’
‘Sounds fun.’
Parkes raised an ironic eyebrow. ‘So what do you do when you’re not chasing down terrorists?’
‘I told you, I crunch data at a desk.’
‘We both know that’s not true,’ said Parkes, sitting up. Blake shrugged. ‘Come on, what’s the story? What does an MI5 spook really get up to?’
‘I’m not a spook. I told you already.’
‘Do you catch many?’
‘More than you will ever know, if we keep doing the job right.’
Parkes looked ready to quiz him further when she was interrupted by her phone ringing. She snatched it up with an apologetic smile and padded across the room to the window to take the call. She listened intently for a few moments, then hung up. ‘They’ve got an ID on our man in the pub,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Blake unwrapped his Browning Hi-Power handgun from an oily rag in the bag he’d thrown into the bottom of the wardrobe. He checked the magazine, snapped it into the grip, and tucked the weapon into his waistband.
‘They gave you a gun?’ Parkes asked, incredulous. ‘Are you planning on using it?’
‘It’s a precaution. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.’
‘Then maybe we should call in some back-up?’
Blake shook his head. ‘Hopkins’ life might be in danger. We should hurry.’