Fox Hunter

by Zoe Sharp

  Donalson was one who fancied himself—a bit of a peacock, who dressed just a touch too fashionably to ever look stylish, however hard he tried. He was in the habit of dousing himself in aftershave at inappropriate moments, like on exercise, so sentries could smell him coming half a mile away, even if they never heard him. The smell of certain brands still made me flinch in visceral response.

  He was so sure he was irresistible it went from self-confidence to self-delusion.

  “I don’t suppose,” I said to Madeleine, “that you brought any firepower with you?”

  “Yes, thank you,” she said cheerfully.

  “Ah, OK. Perhaps I should have said, ‘any firepower you might be willing to share’?”

  “In that case, sadly not.”

  “Don’t you trust me?”

  She grinned and didn’t answer.

  We came off the motorway at Ashton-under-Lyne and headed east through the suburbs. Converted mills mixed with modern industrial buildings, parks, and streets of redbrick terraced houses. All very familiar, yet distant. It seemed a long time since I had last lived in the UK. There was something small about it, but it had a messy reality that was comforting, and I realized I’d always viewed New York City as a kind of giant film set. Even living there hadn’t changed that slightly romanticized image.

  “How long is it since you were last over?” Madeleine asked, as if reading my thoughts.

  “A while.”

  “Are you going to see your parents while you’re here?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  “Won’t they be disappointed?” She shot me an inquiring glance. “Seems a shame to waste the opportunity.”

  My parents lived just south of Manchester in Alderley Edge, in what had become the expensive haunt of Premier League soccer players. Manchester United was famous the world over, and I’d been asked about the team everywhere, from the Road of Bones in the far east of Russia to the depths of a Brazilian favela.

  “They don’t know I’m here, so why would they be disappointed?”

  Madeleine frowned. “Have they got over . . . you know, what happened?”

  It was a couple of years since a multinational company blackmailed my father and threatened my mother. The experience had a profound effect on both of them, leading to my father’s retirement from his work as a consultant orthopaedic surgeon—something at which he’d once ruthlessly excelled—and the blossoming of my mother’s self-confidence. Strange how differently people react to personal danger.

  “Over it, no, but I think they’ve got past it, in their own way.”

  “And that has something to do with your staying away?”

  Sometimes Madeleine was too smart for her own good.

  I shrugged, said tightly, “I remind them of what happened.”

  “Oh, come on, Charlie, don’t be so melodramatic.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, why does it have to be your fault? They’re responsible adults who got themselves into a mess, and you—and Sean—got them out of it. Yes, some nasty things happened along the way, but that can hardly be blamed on you.”

  “They can just about cope with knowing what I do for a living, just as long as they don’t have to watch me doing it. By the finish, the whole thing turned into a fairly graphic demonstration.”

  “They ought to be proud of you.”

  “No, that would involve me marrying a stockbroker and spawning two-point-four kids and a Labrador.”

  “I think you do them an injustice. They know how far you went for them and what it cost you. If they’re uncomfortable about that, it’s more likely to be their own guilt playing a role, not disappointment in you.”

  I didn’t reply to that remark. There was probably an element of truth in both arguments, but I wasn’t prepared to pick them apart enough to find out.

  We drove farther out of Manchester. The redbrick houses gave way to pale yellow sandstone, and I caught glimpses of the moor rising through gaps in the hedges and trees. In the summer, Saddleworth could be beautiful, but in winter it just seemed bleak and desolate. Its reputation was not improved by being forever connected with the children killed and buried there by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in the mid-1960s.

  A mist clouded the tops of the hills as we bordered Dove Stone Reservoir, its black waters choppy with the driven rain. The place suited both mood and mission. Bright sunshine would have seemed a mockery.

  Ten minutes later Madeleine turned off the main road onto a narrow B-road, then onto little more than a rutted stony track with a hump of muddy grass down the center. If we’d been in anything lower to the ground than the Discovery, we would have lost most of our undercarriage along the way.

  Beyond rusted barbed-wire fences, the fields on either side of the track were populated with tough-looking sheep, gorse, and thistles. The few stunted trees grew at an angle as if bowing to the prevailing wind.

  We crested a small rise. A farmyard squatted halfway up the next hill, walled and gated. There was a wisp of smoke coming from the chimney of the tiny house. The roof was thick stone flags to withstand the winter gales, and it was covered with lichen. Apart from the smoke, it looked deserted.

  Madeleine swung the Disco onto the grass and pulled up alongside the gate with my side closest. I peered out my window. A tan-and-white collie on a chain by an outside kennel started to bark frantically, but otherwise there was no sign of movement.

  “However much money Donalson’s parents left him,” I said, “it clearly wasn’t enough.”

  Madeleine looked around. “There isn’t another property in sight. Some people might consider that kind of privacy to be priceless.”

  I cracked a grim smile. “Well, let’s go and knock a few quid off then, shall we?”

  We opened the doors and climbed out into the blustery rain. The gate’s timbers were gray from weather and the hinges had drooped, leaving it permanently ajar.

  As I stepped through into the yard itself, the back door of the house opened and a man came out. He’d clearly watched our arrival and prepared for us. He wore a camouflage boonie hat, a waxed cotton jacket with a tear in the sleeve, and old corduroy trousers.

  And in his hands was a double-barreled shotgun.

  FIFTY-ONE

  I HALTED, GAUGING THE DISTANCE, AND RECKONED IT WAS AROUND ten meters. Depending on the choke of the gun and the size of the shot he’d loaded, it was borderline whether I’d escape serious injury if he fired. Ideally, I’d have preferred another four or five meters, but the wall around the yard prevented me from making it into a safe zone.

  I took my only alternative option and sidled closer to the collie. Good sheepdogs are too valuable to waste, and this one looked cleaner and better fed than her surroundings might otherwise suggest. She lunged for me, still barking furiously, and was brought up short by the chain less than half a meter away.

  “Is this any way to treat a visit from an old friend, Donalson?” I called.

  He laughed, a bitter staccato burst of sound, not unlike that made by his dog.

  “This how you always go visiting, is it?” He jerked his head toward the Discovery. When I glanced behind me I found Madeleine standing in cover behind the front end of the vehicle, with a semiautomatic pistol in a double-handed grip. She’d never been a field operative when I’d last worked with her. Since she’d taken over Sean’s old agency, it would seem that she’d widened her skill set.

  “If you’re not going to play nice, children, I’ll take those toys away from you,” I said. “I came to talk, Donalson. If I was here to do you harm, d’you think I would have driven up to your front door in broad daylight?”

  He weighed that one up for a moment or so, then let the barrels of the shotgun droop, settling the receiver into the crook of his arm.

  “You’d best come inside, then, out of the weather.”

  Abruptly, he turned on his heel and went back into the farmhouse, leaving the door slightly open behind him.

  Madeleine p
icked her way through the gate to stand beside me, slotting the handgun away into a small-of-the-back rig at her waistband. She noted my gaze and gave a faint, almost embarrassed smile as she straightened her jacket over the top.

  “Ruger nine millimeter,” she said as we started up the yard. “It’s small, but it fits my hand and I like the trigger action.”

  “I’m just surprised to see you carrying anything at all.”

  She bristled. “I’m the boss now. It goes with the territory. Did you think I might be too squeamish?”

  “Not at all,” I said mildly. “The UK’s very antigun, that’s all. I didn’t think you’d be allowed to carry concealed.”

  “Oh. Well, we do a fair amount of work for . . . Um, let’s just say the authorities are prepared to make exceptions in certain cases.”

  Nevertheless, when we reached the doorway I made sure I went through it first. It was purely a practical decision. If Donalson was so inclined, he could have been waiting on the other side ready to blast the first one in. Better to leave the second person in a better position to return fire.

  But the first thing I saw as I pushed open the door was the shotgun standing muzzle upward, leaning against a fridge freezer. Donalson was at the far end of the room, by the window. He’d taken off his jacket and was in his shirtsleeves, rinsing a couple of mugs at the sink.

  “There’s tea in the pot,” he said over his shoulder, dumping the mugs onto the kitchen table without bothering to dry them. It was Madeleine who plucked a tea-towel off the rail in front of the Aga and wiped them, then busied herself with the teapot and a carton of milk from the fridge.

  The voice was as I remembered it, educated Edinburgh. But then, as if unable to put it off any longer, Donalson turned toward us and folded his arms. He’d dispensed with the hat as well, and now, in full light, I got a good look at his face for the first time in years.

  He’d been in a bad accident or a firefight, I saw. The right side of his face was wilted as if from a stroke, although the shiny patchwork of reddened scars from temple and eye socket to chin suggested the nerves had been severed. It made his jaw hang lopsided, twisting that corner of his mouth into a permanent scowl.

  He watched me closely as I took in his changed appearance, nodding at last as if I’d passed some kind of test.

  “You’ve a stronger stomach than most, I’ll say that for you.”

  “Did you think I’d run away screaming?”

  “No. No, I didn’t. If anything, I suppose I thought you’d look . . . glad at the sight of me now.”

  “Karmic consequences, you mean?” I offered. “What goes around, comes around?”

  Madeleine glanced at me sharply but didn’t intervene.

  Donalson winced. “Aye, something like that.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Car accident,” he said shortly. “Coming back from a family gathering with my folks. Freezing fog on the motorway, a jackknifed truck . . .” His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. “They told me I was lucky. Mum, Dad, and my sister—they didn’t make it.”

  I swallowed back the human urge to offer condolences, along with a gulp of the tea Madeleine handed to me. I scalded my tongue and forced myself to say nothing. This man did not deserve my sympathy. Not after what he had done.

  There was a kitchen table pushed against one wall, piled with paperwork and clutter that had overflowed onto two of the three mismatched upright chairs. It looked rooted enough for me to surmise that Donalson lived alone. For a man who at one time couldn’t wait to be out on the pull at every opportunity, it must have seemed like a kind of monastic seclusion.

  Perhaps even atonement.

  So we stood at the edges of the kitchen, clutching our mugs of tea like lifelines because it gave us something to do with our hands. Eventually Donalson tipped the dregs into the sink and banged the mug down onto the draining board.

  “You going to say it, then?”

  “Say what?”

  “Whatever it is you’ve come all the way out here for, and then you can be on your way. Get it off your chest.”

  And unlike the man he’d once been, he didn’t let his eyes drift across that part of my body as he spoke.

  “You know Morton and Clay are dead?”

  Until the words came out, I hadn’t been aware that was where I planned to start.

  “Knew about Morton—a while back, wasn’t it? Topped himself somewhere out in the States, or so I heard.”

  I said nothing.

  He frowned. “But Clay, no . . . when did that happen?”

  “A week or so ago. In Iraq.” I kept my eyes on his face, saw the flicker.

  “Dangerous place. How did he die?”

  “Badly,” I said, succinct. “From the state of him, it looked like he crossed someone who took exception to the fact.”

  “You saw him?”

  “What was left of him, yes.”

  The mobile half of his face screwed up in distaste. The rest remained slack.

  “Get a buzz out of this, do you? Come to taunt me with it?”

  I put my own mug down on the corner of the table and stepped in closer, inspecting his ruined face with impassive eyes. His own gaze would barely meet mine, the right eye slower to slide away.

  “If I wanted to fuck with you, Drew, I could think of a dozen far nastier ways to do it,” I said quietly. “I’m here for information. Tell me the truth—if you understand the concept—then I’m gone and you can go back to whatever passes for your life.”

  He ducked his head away, muttered, “Ask it.”

  “Clay was smuggling looted artifacts out of Iraq.”

  “That’s not a question.”

  I glared at him in silence until he held up both hands, palms outward.

  “OK, OK. Aye, I knew he had a sideline going. He asked me if I wanted in on it.”

  “When?”

  “Must have been about a year and a half ago . . . something like that, anyways.”

  About the time Streetwise took over the contract in Basra and Clay started working for Ian Garton-Jones. Did that mean Garton-Jones was in on it, too? Or was it simply an opportunity for Clay to get more of his cronies in place?

  “How much did he tell you about the operation?”

  “I turned him down, so not much.”

  “But?”

  Donalson sighed. “He told me I’d like the setup. ‘Striking a blow for freedom,’ he said. And that I’d be earning really good money while I was doing it.”

  “What did he mean by that?”

  “Whatever they were transporting, I got the impression that more set off than arrived, if you know what I mean? And he said it would be just like old times—working with some familiar faces.”

  “By ‘familiar faces’ was he talking about Hackett?”

  The question surprised him, but not as much as it should have. Or maybe I was just bad at reading facial expressions from only half a face.

  “Ah, from that I take it you think he is, which kinda explains why you’ve come calling on me,” he said, almost to himself. “And he’s in that part of the world, too, isn’t he? Something to do with shipping? Shouldn’t you be having this conversation with him instead, eh?”

  “If I could find him, I would, but he’s done a runner from Jordan—leaving behind his business partner, dead in the bathtub.”

  “And you think Hackett was the one that did it?”

  “I’d be foolish to ignore the possibility. Hackett would murder his own granny—or anyone else’s, for that matter—if he thought he’d profit by it. Maybe he was just clearing up loose ends.”

  “If somebody killed Clay and then went after Hackett, are you sure there isn’t another reason behind it?”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as you, Charlie.”

  I shook my head. “I’m very old news.”

  “That’s what they said about Deepcut, but it came back to haunt them, and now they’re going to shut the place down.”

/>   The hazing, sexual harassment, and bullying of trainees at the Deepcut training camp in Surrey in the late ’90s had now become a scandal. One that involved the shooting deaths—in highly suspicious circumstances—of four young soldiers. It had been echoed in my own case. And, much like Deepcut, what happened to me was either subject to official disinformation or swept under the carpet.

  “Nobody’s looking to open up my case again,” I said. “You did what you did—that was never in doubt. What else is there to find?”

  “Ah, well, maybe that’s what you should be asking . . .”

  “OK, so tell me—what else is there?”

  Donalson shifted his feet uncomfortably, his gaze flicking to Madeleine, who was watching our exchange in silence, missing nothing.

  “The colonel’s back in civvy street now, too. Did you know that?”

  “Parris? No, but then, I didn’t exactly sign up for the regimental newsletter.”

  “He runs some kind of private security outfit, so I heard. Employs quite a few of the lads,” he added meaningfully. “Maybe you should look him up. And don’t leave it too long, eh?”

  FIFTY-TWO

  “THERE WAS CLEARLY RATHER A LOT GOING ON BACK THERE,” Madeleine said as the Discovery bumped away from the farmhouse along the rutted track. “The majority of which went right over my head. Care to fill me in a little?”

  I leaned back against the passenger headrest, aware of a banging headache beginning to build at the base of my skull. I shut my eyes briefly and squeezed the bridge of my nose. “I’m not too sure myself, to be honest.”

  “Then use me as a sounding board and talk yourself through it.”

  I glanced over at her. “Now I see why you’re the boss.”

  She smiled. “That mention of ‘the colonel’—Parris—I seem to remember he was your old commanding officer. Donalson bringing his name up like that was a little too pointed for it not to mean something.”

  “Mm, I thought so, too. Donalson said Clay offered him work with ‘familiar faces’ but seemed surprised when I mentioned Hackett. I think he may have been talking about Parris.”