by John Steele
At the end of the lane, the car’s headlights pick out a sign, wreathed in a gossamer mist: Garbella Hill Farm. He’s been working as a nominal security guard on the farm, with its racehorse stables, yard and training facilities, for a couple of years now and enjoys the seclusion which the location in the Cotswolds hills affords. He remembers years ago, staring out across the Irish Sea, a beautiful woman sitting next to him. He’d told her he could never live in England, it could never be home. But that was a long time ago. He’s always liked hill country and he feels as at ease here as anywhere he’s been in the last twenty years. And he’s been around.
In the open-featured countryman’s face he sees each morning in the mirror, his brow is knit like the knotted skin of the large scar on his right forearm. Since last year, there is a little more salt in the dusting on his dark crew-cut.
The Range Rover begins to lurch on the lane, the ground puckered by man, machine and beast. In the glow of the headlights, the lane is a shattered spinal column of loose stone and muck. After sixty yards it splits and Jackie takes the left branch, heading for the gallops rather than the main road. He wills the sun to rise, to bleach the night shadows.
As he approaches the gallops, Jackie can discern the small stone rectangles, sprouting at crazy angles from the ground on the left of the lane. All thoroughbred winners laid to rest on this spot on the 1,000 acres of Mack Stevenson, racehorse trainer extraordinaire. The millions of pounds now stirring in the stables is a fraction of the fortune buried in this patch of long, grasping grass. It’s still too dark to read the names, the cobalt sky still some time from dawn, but he knows many of them from memory. Flashing Blade. Call for Empties. Duke of Windsor. Ernie’s Cat.
‘Sickbag’ Simpson. Another name; a very different animal.
‘Ruger’ Rainey; ‘Big Dog’; Billy Tyrie. Killers, abusers, pushers, terrorists. The victims, too, and friends shot down or blown to bits: a lifetime of memories from a couple of years in the RUC.
He pulls over onto the grass verge and lifts a shotgun, wrapped in a leather cover, from the back of the Range Rover. Locking the vehicle, he sets off on the mile-long course used to give the thoroughbreds a workout. The Beretta semi-automatic is mostly used for pest control, and is light for a shotgun. Jackie holds it crooked in his arms, patrol-style.
As Jackie strides across the dark plain of Hogg’s Hill, the world around nothing more than a shadow, he takes comfort from the gun in his arms, its weight and finality. He hates firearms, and yet he can face down the dark with his finger on the trigger, an ounce of pressure and the terrible bark of the weapon; its savage discharge.
The open space, ringed with the black husks of the Gloucestershire hills, is a world away from the terraced streets and fierce, tribal murals of his youth. Then the ground becomes clogged with thick, unruly grass and clumps of bracken, and he’s forced to concentrate on threading his way through the thicket. He can see the dark mass of the copse beyond, the trees like storm clouds anchored to the earth. The sky is a lighter hue and sunrise will be upon him in another twenty minutes or so. He unwraps the Beretta.
Jackie doesn’t like guns, but he respects what they can do. He knew men in the Army who obsessed over them, studying makes and models, comparing calibre, magazines, sight radius, muzzle energy and trigger pull. Many of those in paramilitary groups had a terrible fascination with weaponry and the damage it could inflict. Jackie is repulsed by it. But, on days like this, when he awakes with the shadow of his past looming over his bed, he comes out here to shoot.
He’s already loaded the shotgun and creeps into the copse, sighting on some targets he fashioned out of rusted iron left lying around the yard. Mack gives him free rein on the land and has insured him for all the vehicles. Ian Sparrow, the game-keeper who owns the gun, is fine with him using it, so long as it is back in the cabinet, cleaned and oiled, by mid-morning and Jackie pays for the ammunition. Tight oul’ bastard, he thinks with an affectionate grunt.
Sparrow, a Londoner by birth and twenty years Jackie’s senior, served in the Gloucestershire Regiment back in the eighties and feels a profound, if sentimental, kinship with Jackie thanks to his service in the Royal Irish Rangers. Both men know their regimental history: the ferocious fighting of the Royal Ulster Rifles, while the Glosters clung to Hill 235, at Imjin, Korea. A battle long past in a war not yet over, fought a world away.
There is no cloud and the day is going to be a beauty. The ear protectors block some of the morning chill and Jackie finds his grip on the moulded chequering of the stock and fore-end of the shotgun, breathing evenly as he does so. This is why he comes out here to fire off a few shells: the concentration drives all other thoughts, whether good or bad, away. The repetition, too: sight, breathe, squeeze; absorb the buck of the weapon, and start the sequence over again. For a while, at least, he can stop living in his head.
The first shot sends a murder of crows soaring. It also tears the iron trowel target out of the soil thirty yards away. Jackie works steadily with the gun, alternating a sequence of slugs at distance with double-ought buckshot at larger, closer targets. Each heavy blast, still deafening despite the ear protection, takes a little edge off his morning. Each punch of recoil on his shoulder works some more tension out. The mechanical cycle of fire and reload drags him from the violence of his past into the cold, crisp light of the present just as the daylight chases the dark from the Cotswolds hills. As the weapon spits each spent cartridge out the side of its ejection port, another flashback of his brutal past spins away.
After thirty minutes he has almost finished the ammo and, for today at least, has settled his soul some. The early-morning target shooting is a workout and a purge. He wraps the Beretta in leather and searches the ground for the spent cartridges, feeling a chill graze his back. He has worked up a sweat and his T-shirt and sweater are not enough protection against the fresh bite of early morning country air. Working quickly, he takes a plastic bag from his pocket and fills it with the empty cartridges, then walks back to the Range Rover. Once at the vehicle, he places the bag of spent cartridges and the semi-automatic on the back seat. Fishing in his pockets for the keys, he realises that he has forgotten his mobile, left back in his flat at the farm. Then he smiles. He has no one to call. His sister, Sarah, is in Australia with her family, a long-cherished trip. A year ago he wouldn’t have known she was out of the country, they communicated so little. Now they speak regularly. It’s one of the better outcomes of the trip home for his father’s funeral last year and he is glad that some good came of Samuel Shaw’s passing.
The colours hang limp on the tall spike of aluminium rising from the champions’ graveyard. Rifle-green and scarlet. Mack Stevenson’s racing colours, the silks worn by the jockeys when his horses run at Aintree, Newbury and Cheltenham. As the vehicle sways along the worst of the lane, a young woman on a chestnut mare canters towards him in the field beside the track. He recognises the wiry brush of blonde hair erupting from under her riding helmet: Kelly, one of the stable staff. She is fit, her thighs strong and lean in her jodhpurs, and he can see her working to boss and steer the horse. She wears a tight-fitting cream sweater which accentuates the pale pink of her face, now flushed with the sting of morning air. An open and simple face. An English face, with a strong, angular nose and thin, well-set lips. She is also, in Jackie’s eyes, obscenely young at twenty-five and he has kept his distance, despite her attempts at flirtation. She is like this countryside: gentle, uncomplicated, perhaps a little raw and privileged. He is tainted.
As Jackie pulls up next to her, Kelly leans over in the saddle and says, ‘Mack is looking for you. He’s been calling your mobile for the last half hour.’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Only some dark, handsome Irish guy brooding around the yard. What are we going to do about him?’
‘If I see him, I’ll let him know you were asking for him.’
‘You do that. You let him know the craic,’ she says, her voice deep with an exaggerated ri
se in tone at the end of the sentence.
It’s an abysmal attempt at a Belfast accent but he grins as she canters away and he puts the Range Rover in first. The grin stays with him until the farm buildings and stables appear around the bend in the lane. Mack is waiting in the yard, hands on hips, in a checked shirt, mud-spattered quilted vest, corduroys and Wellingtons, flat cap on head. Ian Sparrow is there beside him, a warning in his eyes. Behind them are parked two BMWs and, standing in front of them, four men in jeans and spotless suede boots wearing new-looking Barbour jackets. They all sport short, ordered haircuts and are clean-shaven – a uniform of sorts. And, as he pulls up a couple of yards away, Jackie can clearly see the bulge of a shoulder rig and handgun under one of the shiny, green waxed jackets.
SEVEN SKINS is available for pre-order NOW
This edition published by Silvertail Books in 2017
www.silvertailbooks.com
Copyright © John Steele 2017
1
The right of John Steele to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system,
in any form or by any means, without permission
in writing from Silvertail Books or the copyright holder.
978-1-909269-71-2
All characters in this book other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.