by Crossfire
I was sure the car would go up the driveway, but I was wrong.
It reversed out onto the road and drove away, back towards the village. I rose quickly to my knees. If I’d only had my SA80 at hand I could easily have put a few rounds through the back window and taken out the driver, as I had once done when a Toyota truck had crashed through a vehicle checkpoint in Helmand. As it was, I simply knelt in the grass with my heart thumping loudly in my chest.
I hadn’t identified my enemy, but even in the dark, I thought I’d recognized the make of the car, even if I couldn’t see the color.
So what did my mother say?” I asked Ian when I returned to his flat at Kauri House Stables.
“About what?” he said.
“About where I was.”
“Oh, that. She was rather vague. Just said you’d gone away.”
“So what did you say?” I pressed.
“Well, like you told me to, I asked her where you’d gone.” He paused.
“And?”
“She told me it was none of my business.”
I laughed. “So what did you say to that?”
“I told her, like you said, that you’d left a pen here when you watched the races and I wanted to give it back.” He infuriatingly paused once more.
“And?”
“She said to give the pen to her and she’d get it returned to you. She said that you had unexpectedly been called to London by the army and she didn’t know when you would be back. Your note hadn’t said that.”
“My note?” I said in surprise.
“Yeah. Mrs. Kauri said you sent her a note.”
“From London?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know that,” Ian said. “She didn’t say, but there was no note, right?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I definitely didn’t send her any note.”
But someone else may have.
I woke at five after another restless night on Ian’s couch. My mind was too full of questions to relax, and I lay awake in the dark, thinking.
Why had my enemy not gone up to the stables to make sure I was dead? Was it because they were convinced that by now I would be? Perhaps they didn’t want to chance leaving any new evidence, like fresh tire tracks in the stable yard. Maybe it was because it didn’t matter anymore. Or was it just because they didn’t want to have to see the gruesome results of their handiwork? I didn’t blame them on that count. Human bodies—dead ones that is—are mostly the stuff of nightmares, especially those that die from unnatural or violent causes. I knew, because I’d seen too many of them over the years.
If my enemy hadn’t bothered to go up to the hill the previous evening after unlocking the gates, I didn’t expect them ever to go back there again. So I decided not to spend any more of my time waiting for them in the Greystone Stables passageway. Anyway, I had different plans for today.
“Andover,” the lawyer Hoogland had said.
Now, why did that ring a bell?
Old Man Sutton, I thought. He now lived in a care home in Andover. I’d been to see him. And Old Man Sutton’s son, Detective Sergeant Fred, had been at Roderick Ward’s inquest. And Roderick Ward’s sister had moved to live in Andover. Was that just a coincidence?
I heard Ian get up and have a shower at six.
I sat on the sofa and attached my leg. Funny how quickly one’s love for something can sway back and forth like a sail in the wind. On Wednesday afternoon I had embraced my prosthesis like a dear long-lost brother. It had given me back my mobility. Now, just thirty-six hours later, I was reverting to viewing it as an alien being, almost a foe rather than a friend, a necessary evil.
Perhaps the major from the MOD had been right. Maybe it really was time to look for a different direction in my life. If I survived my present difficulties, that was.
“Can I borrow your car?” I asked Ian over breakfast.
“How long for?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve got to go to an ATM to get some money for a start. And I might be out all morning, or even all day.”
“I need to go to the supermarket,” he said. “I’ve run out of food.”
“I’ll buy you some,” I said. “After all, I’m the one who’s eaten all your cereal.”
“All right, then,” he said, smiling. “I’d much rather stay here and watch the racing from Sandown on the telly.”
“Do we have any runners?” I asked, surprising myself by the use of the word we.
“Three,” Ian said. “Including one in the Artillery Gold Cup.”
“Who’s riding it?” I asked. The Royal Artillery Gold Cup was restricted to amateur riders who were serving, or who had served, in the armed forces of the United Kingdom.
“Some chap with a peculiar name,” he said, somewhat unhelpfully.
“Which peculiar name in particular?”
“Hold on,” he said. He dug into a pile of papers on a table by the television. “I know it’s here somewhere.” He went on looking. “Here.” He triumphantly held up a sheet of paper. “Everton.”
“Everton who?” I asked.
“Major Jeremy Everton.”
“Never heard of him,” I said. It was not that surprising. There were more than fourteen thousand serving officers in the regular army, and more still in the Territorials, to say nothing of those who had already left the service.
Ian laughed. “And he’s never heard of you either.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
He laughed again. “I don’t.”
I laughed back. “So can I borrow your car?”
“Where’s yours?”
“In Oxford,” I said truthfully. “The head gasket has blown,” I lied. “It’s in a garage.”
I thought that my Jaguar was probably still in the multistory parking lot in Oxford city center, and I had decided to leave it there. To move it would be to advertise, to those who might care, that I wasn’t hung up dead in a deserted stable.
“OK. You can borrow it,” he said, “provided you’re insured.”
I should be, I thought, through the policy on my own car, provided they didn’t object to my driving with an artificial foot.
“I am,” I said confidently. “And I’ll fill it with fuel for you.”
“That would be great,” Ian said. He tossed me the keys. “The handbrake doesn’t work too well. Leave it in gear if you park on a hill.”
I caught the keys. “Thanks.”
“Will you be back here tonight?” he asked.
“If you’ll have me,” I said. “Do you fancy Indian?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Good idea. Get me a chicken balti and a couple of onion bhajis. And some naan.” He spoke with the assurance of a man who dined often from the village takeaway menus. “And I’ll have some raita on the side.”
It was only fair, I thought, that I bought the dinner.
“OK,” I said. “About seven-thirty?”
“Make it seven,” he said. “I go down to the Wheelwright on a Friday.”
“Seven it is, then. See you later.”
I slipped out of Ian’s flat while it was still dark, and as quietly as possible, I drove his wreck of a Vauxhall Corsa down the drive and out into the village.
Newbury was quiet at seven o’clock on a Friday morning, although Sainsbury’s parking lot was already bustling with early-morning shoppers eager to beat the weekend rush for groceries.
I parked in a free space between two other cars, but I didn’t go into the supermarket. Instead, I walked in the opposite direction, out of the parking lot, across the A339 divided highway and into the town center.
Forty-six Cheap Street was just one amongst the long rows of shops that lined both sides of the road, most of them with flats or offices above. The mailbox shop that occupied the address opened at eight-thirty and closed at six, Monday to Friday, and from nine until one on Saturdays. It said so on the door.
If, as usual, my stepfather had mailed the weekly package to the blackmailer, the one containing the t
wo thousand pounds, on Thursday afternoon, then the package he sent yesterday should arrive at 46 Cheap Street sometime today and be placed in mailbox 116, ready for collection.
Mailbox 116 was visible through the front window of the shop, and I intended to watch it all day to see if anyone arrived to make a collection. However, I could hardly stand outside on the pavement, scrutinizing every customer who came along. For a start, they would then be able to see me, and I certainly didn’t want that to happen.
That was why I had come into Newbury so early, so that I could make a full reconnaissance of the area and determine my tactics to fit in with the local conditions and pattern of life.
At first glance there seemed to be two promising locations from which to observe the comings and goings at number forty-six without revealing my presence. The first was an American-style coffee shop about thirty yards away, and the second was the Taj Mahal Indian restaurant that was directly opposite.
I decided that the restaurant was the better of the two, not only because it was in such a good position but because there was a curtain hanging from a brass bar halfway down the window, behind which I could easily hide while keeping watch through the gap in the middle. All I needed was to secure the correct table. A notice hanging on the restaurant door told me that it opened for lunch at noon. Until then I would have to make do with the coffee shop, which began serving in half an hour, at eight o’clock.
I wanted to be well in place before the mailbox shop opened. I had no idea at what time the post was delivered, but if I’d been the blackmailer, I wouldn’t have left the package lying about for long, not with that much money in it.
I went around the corner and onto Market Street and found a bank with an ATM. I drew out two hundred pounds and used some of it to buy a newspaper at the newsagent’s on the corner. It wasn’t that I needed something to read—doing that might cause me to miss seeing the collector—but I did need something to hide behind while sitting in the large windows of the coffee shop.
At eight-thirty sharp, I watched from behind my newspaper as a man and a woman arrived, unlocked the front door of the mailbox shop and went in. From my vantage point I could just about see box number 116, but the reflection from the window didn’t make it very easy. As far as I could tell, neither of the two arrivals opened that box, or any other, for that matter, but as they were the shop staff, they wouldn’t have had to. They would have had access to all the boxes from behind.
I drank cups of coffee and glasses of orange juice and hoped that I looked to all the world like a man idling away the morning, reading his newspaper. On two occasions one of the coffee-shop staff came over and asked me if I needed refills, and both times I accepted. I didn’t want them asking me to move on, but I was becoming worried about my level of liquid intake, and the inevitable consequences. I could hardly ask one of the staff to watch the mailbox for me while I nipped to the loo.
By ten o’clock, I had drunk nearly three large cups of coffee, as well as three orange juices, and I was becoming desperate. It reminded me of the agony I’d suffered in the stable, but on this occasion I wasn’t chained to a wall. I left my newspaper and coffee cup on the table by the window to save my place, and rushed to the gents.
Nothing outside appeared to have changed in the short time I was away. The street had become gradually busier as the morning wore on, but so far, I’d not recognized anyone. I quickly rescanned the faces in front of me so as not to miss a familiar one, but there were none.
At ten to eleven I did spot someone coming slowly down the street that I recognized. I didn’t know the man himself, but I did know his business. It was the postman. He was pushing a small four-wheeled bright red trolley, and he was stopping at each shop and doorway to make his deliveries. He went into the mailbox shop with a huge armful of mail held together by rubber bands. From the distance I was away, I couldn’t tell whether my stepfather’s package had been amongst it or not, but I suspected it had. And the blackmailer would surely assume so.
“Are you staying all day?” A young female staff member from the coffee shop was standing at my elbow.
“Sorry?” I asked.
“Are you staying all day?” she asked again.
“Is there a law against it?” I asked. “I’ve ordered lots of coffee, three orange juices and a Danish pastry.”
“But my friend and I think you’re up to something,” she said. I turned in my chair and looked at her friend, who was watching me from behind the relative safety of the chest-high counter. I turned back and checked the street outside.
“Now, why is that?” I asked.
“You’re not reading that newspaper,” she said accusingly.
“And why do you think that?”
“You’ve been on the same page for at least the past hour,” she said. “We’ve been watching. No one reads a paper that slowly.”
“So what do you think I’m doing?” I asked her, still keeping my eyes on the mailbox shop.
“We think you’re keeping watch for bank robbers.” She smiled. “You’re a cop, aren’t you?”
I put a finger to my lips. “Shhh,” I said, with a wink.
The girl scuttled back to her friend, and when I looked at them a minute or two later, they both put fingers to their lips and collapsed in fits of giggles.
I had half an hour to go before the Taj Mahal opened, but I reckoned I couldn’t stay here any longer. I wasn’t keen on the attention I was now receiving from just about all the coffee-shop staff, as well as from some of the customers.
I beckoned the girl back over to me.
“I’ve got to go now,” I said quietly, paying my bill. “My shift is over. But remember”—I put my finger to my lips again—“shhh. No telling.”
“No, of course not,” she said, all seriously.
I stood up, collected my unread newspaper and walked out. I thought that by lunchtime she would have told all her friends of the encounter, and half of their friends’ friends would probably know by this evening.
I walked away down the street, certain that my every move was being watched by the girl, her friend and most of the other coffee-shop staff. I couldn’t just hang around outside, so I went into the shop right next door to the Indian restaurant. It sold computers and all things electronic.
“Can I help you, sir?” asked a young man, approaching me.
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m just looking.”
Looking through the window.
“Just call if you want anything,” he said, and he returned to where he was fiddling with the insides of a stripped-down computer.
“I will,” I assured him.
I stood by a display case at the window and went on watching the shop across the road through the glass. I glanced at the display case. It was full of cameras.
“I’d like to buy a camera,” I said, without turning around.
“Certainly, sir,” said the young man. “Any particular one?”
“I want one I can use straightaway,” I said. “And one with a good zoom.”
“How about the new Panasonic?” he said.“That has an eighteen-times optical zoom and a Leica lens.”
“Is that good?” I asked, still not turning around to him.
“The best,” he said.
“OK, I’ll have one,” I said. “But it will work straightaway?”
“It should do,” he said. “You’ll have to charge the battery pretty soon, but they usually come with a little bit of charge in them.”
“Can you make sure?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“And can you set it up so it’s ready to shoot immediately?”
“Certainly, sir,” said the young man. “This one records direct to a memory card. Would you like me to include one?”
“Yes please,” I said, keeping my eyes on the mailbox shop.
“Two-gigabyte?” he asked.
“Fine.”
I went on watching the street as the young man fiddled with the camera, checkin
g the battery and installing the memory card.
“Shall I put it back in the box?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Leave it out.”
I handed him my credit card and looked down briefly to enter my PIN, and also to check that I wasn’t spending a fortune.
“And please leave the camera switched on.”
“The battery won’t last if I do that,” he said. “But it’s dead easy to turn on when you need it. You just push this here.” He pointed. “Then you just aim and shoot with this.” He pointed to another button. “The camera does the rest.”
“And the zoom?”
“Here,” he said. He showed me how to zoom in and out.
“Great. Thanks.”
He held out a plastic bag. “The charger, the instructions and the warranty are in the box.”
“Thanks,” I said again, taking the bag.
I went swiftly out of the camera shop and into the adjacent Taj Mahal Indian restaurant just as a waiter turned the CLOSED sign to OPEN on the door.
“I’d like that table there, please,” I said, pointing.
“But, sir,” said the waiter, “that is for four people.”
“I’m expecting three others,” I said, moving over to the table and sitting down before he had a chance to stop me.
I ordered a sparkling mineral water, and when the waiter departed to fetch it, I opened the curtains in the window a few inches so I could clearly see mailbox 116.
The package was collected at twenty past one, by which time the Indian waiter no longer really believed that another three people were coming to join me for lunch.
I had almost eaten the restaurant out of poppadoms and mango chutney, and I was again getting desperate to have a pee, when I suddenly recognized a face across the road. And I would have surely missed the person completely if I’d gone to the loo.
It took only a few seconds for the collector to go into the mailbox shop, open box 116 with a key, remove the contents, close the box again and leave.
But not before I had snapped away vigorously with my new purchase.
I sat at the table and looked through the photos that I’d taken.