KILL ME IF YOU CAN (Dave Cunane Book 8)

by Frank Lean

From the point of view of the contractors to our right and left Lansdale was positioned above me. They observed curiously.

  Claverhouse ripped the semi-automatic out of Lansdale’s holster. That was the signal for the contractors to pull out their own weapons and rush towards us. Claverhouse went on one knee and shot them all with cold deliberation and frightening accuracy. They tumbled down like so many skittles and lay twitching on the rough ground. The surrounding rubber muffled the shots.

  The MI5 agent took charge at once and I wasn’t about to start arguing with her. She had the gun in her hand.

  ‘Get into the shirt and trousers! If they see you they’ve got to think you’re carrying out the plan.’

  I obeyed, pulling the long shirt over my turban. It covered up the blood stains. My sole remaining shoe was tangled up in the sacking and on the theory that one shoe was better than no shoe I started fumbling for it.

  She pulled my hands away.

  ‘Dave! There’s no time for that. We’ve got to get rid of the Caesium or Hudson-Piggott will start all over again.’

  ‘Get rid of it?’ I repeated stupidly, ‘but it’ll kill us. Those drums will leak as soon as we move them.’

  ‘No, they aren’t oil drums. They’re lead lined stainless steel cylinders and are impact proof against being hit by a locomotive.’

  I was about to say, ‘This is where we came in,’ thinking about the security van at Manchester Airport until I remembered it was Clint who’d saved our bacon then. I shut up and looked around. It was my first proper inspection of the site. Beyond the cones of shredded rubber there were acres and acres of car tyres. I revised my estimate of how long this fire would burn from weeks to months, years even?

  To my left, beyond the dead contractors, the ground fell away sharply. We were in a secluded valley somewhere in the foothills of the Pennines. There wasn’t a single house in view. I ran forward, pausing only to pick up a contractor’s automatic. There was a steep hill. The tyre dump was on a sort of plateau with hills on three sides.

  I ran back. My bare feet were bleeding but it seemed a small sacrifice after what I’d been through.

  Claverhouse was removing her radiation suit which I took as a good sign.

  ‘We can push them down there,’ I told her. ‘They’ll roll for half a mile.’

  And that’s what we did.

  The radiation containers were sealed but had screw tops designed to be opened by machines. There was an oddly shaped spanner intended for manual removal of the lids. I slung it high among the tyres. Then we rolled the cylinders and they went bouncing down the slope, gathering speed before disappearing into bushes in the distance.

  Hudson-Piggott wouldn’t find them in a hurry.

  ‘Now the oxy-acetylene torch,’ Claverhouse said urgently. As she spoke a contractor incautiously poked his head round a pile of tyres. She shot him almost as a reflex action. Her accuracy was frightening.

  ‘Dave, get the oxy torch and dump it somewhere where they won’t find it in a hurry,’ she ordered without turning a hair.

  I dragged it over to a loose pile of tyres and heaved some on top to cover it.

  When I returned Claverhouse, and I still didn’t think of her as Molly, was standing by Appleyard’s body. She’d covered him with her discarded radiation suit. Her face was red and she’d been crying but I wasn’t feeling compassionate.

  ‘I want some answers,’ I said bluntly.

  ‘There are answers but they’re not for you,’ she said.

  I tried a different tack.

  ‘What was Rick Appleyard to you?’

  ‘We were lovers. I was bringing Rick round to my point of view about Hudson-Piggott. The trouble is Rick was so terribly loyal to the service. He found it next to impossible to believe anything bad about a senior man or even that there was a plot. You were helpful in that. He was coming to see things my way but then he had to go running to Hudson-Piggott when Lansdale was sent for him, the idiot.’

  ‘Oh,’ I muttered, not much wiser. ‘So who is Hudson-Piggott?’

  She paused for a moment considering and then looked down at Appleyard.

  ‘Oh, what does it matter anyway? The point is Dave, as long as he’s still alive you’re in danger so you deserve the truth.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘He’s the Prime Minister’s confidential adviser on the security services. He has the Prime Minister’s ear and, as the heads of all the other services don’t, that means he’s effectively in charge of MI5, MI6, Defence Intelligence and all the other secret odds and sods in Whitehall. All that, and he has a whopping big budget to bring about change.’

  ‘No one can say he hasn’t been trying.’

  She frowned.

  ‘You really are too flippant, Dave. My boss, Sir Freddy Jones, hates him and doesn’t trust him an inch which is why I was tasked to get close and report as soon as he made a slip. But I wasn’t able to. That rat you stuck Rick’s knife in watched me like a hawk. When he accidentally killed the two Ms in the course of removing you, Hudson-Piggott used their deaths to his advantage. He discredited Rick. The man was running his own parallel service. Now we know why.’

  ‘But he’s finished now?’

  ‘Who’s to say? Hudson-Piggott’s a master at blaming other people and coming up smelling of roses.’

  ‘Which other people will he blame for this?’ I said, suddenly nervous.

  ‘I don’t know . . . you, me, someone we don’t know, but he’s certain to have a Plan B.’

  ‘Oh, my God!’

  ‘Come on Dave, you’ve survived being a thorn in his side six days. You’ll just have to go on a bit longer. I think he’s near the end of his rope now.’

  ‘You think? Thanks a bunch.’

  She shrugged. Then she startled me by taking out the semi-automatic. She didn’t use it on me. Instead she carefully wiped her prints off it, clamped it in Lansdale’s dead fingers and fired it.

  ‘Spent a lot of time in the SAS Killing House, did Ian Lansdale. He was nearly as good a shot as me so a bit of misdirection is in order,’ she said. ‘Now whoever cleans up this mess might just think dear dead Ian was the shooter.’

  ‘Great,’ I muttered.

  ‘Right, Dave, I don’t know about you but I’m out of here. It’s better if we split up.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I asked, aware that she was the only person on the planet who could testify to my non-involvement.

  ‘Yes, there are still contractors about so be careful. Your best bet may be to lie low somewhere until the police get here.’

  ‘Will they get here?’

  ‘They will when I reach a phone. One of Hudson-Piggott’s security precautions was to confiscate all our phones.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘Listen Dave, we have five minutes at best before Hudson-Piggott decides Lansdale isn’t coming and starts wondering why there isn’t a fire, so move it.’

  ‘What about all these?’ I asked indicating the six bodies.

  ‘Clean up squad for Rick and Lansdale. The birds and foxes can have the rest as far as I’m concerned. They’re just scum.’

  Then as good as her word she began running in the direction of the slope we’d sent the Caesium cylinders down. She disappeared.

  The thought in my mind was treachery, her treachery to me.

  ‘Job done, Ms Claverhouse’ I said to myself. There wasn’t going to be a nuclear disaster here but the odds on me avoiding a personal disaster weren’t high.

  As for Hudson-Piggott’s nasty plan, his contractors would have a hell of a time trying to set the damp wood on fire without the oxy torch and even if they succeeded there’d be no Caesium panic now. The hospital waste was barely radioactive at all.

  I hovered indecisively for a moment. My feet hurt like hell. There was no way I’d be able to hide from anyone with a trail of bloody footprints following me. I went back to Lansdale’s sack. I shook it and surprise, surprise, a pair of serviceable sandals fell out.

  I put
them on and cast an eye round the scene. There were stiffs everywhere. It was a battlefield. Appleyard, Lansdale, four contractors; but the number was incomplete. I had to add Hudson-Piggott to the total or my own and my family’s lives were still in jeopardy. That bastard had killed Uncle Lew and his friend Pickering, blown up my house and murdered most of my friends. Forget about his insane plot against the country, I owed Hudson-Piggott cartloads of payback.

  There was another thing. Hanging around here until the boys in blue arrived didn’t feel like a very happening sort of thing as far as I was concerned. My knowledge of police procedure told me they’d arrest me on sight and hold me indefinitely. I mean, what was there here?

  Dave Cunane + dead bodies = Arrest for murder.

  I had no guarantee that Claverhouse would even phone the police. Who was to say what explanation Sir Freddie Jones would think up? Damaging admissions leading to a major scandal involving his service would be low on his shopping list.

  Following Claverhouse’s lead, I wiped my prints off the knife handle sticking out of Lansdale’s chest and collected up all physical traces of my presence in this charnel house. Grabbing Lansdale’s sack I stowed away my shoe and the plastic cuffs. After a second’s thought I added the sacking I’d been wrapped in. It was bound to have my DNA on it. For good measure I crammed the turban and the baggy pants in as well. I tucked the long shirt into my trousers and set off in the direction Hudson-Piggott had disappeared in.

  I was fairly happy about the Caesium drums and the oxy cylinders. I’d wrapped my hands in sacking before I touched them. The only other incriminating thing was that blasted spanner. My prints were on it. It had fallen deep into the tyre mountain. I could only hope it stayed lost.

  I was cautious. I peered round every intersection but saw no one.

  I argued to myself that the last contractor Claverhouse shot must have been sent back to collect her. Had there been another with him who reported back? Did Claverhouse know Hudson-Piggott would be on his toes as soon as he heard Lansdale was dead? I tried to stop hypothesising before I became paranoid.

  I soon passed through Hudson-Piggott’s Alps to an older part of the site.

  There were yet more piles of salvaged material of every imaginable type but to my right there was a distant building. It was some sort of ramshackle site office.

  Was there a telephone?

  I approached by an indirect route and entered the heaps of junk. The lane or aisle I was in consisted of architectural salvage, pallet loads of used bricks, chimneys, slates and stone slabs. Paddy Cunane would have been in bliss wandering round here but I used it to cover my stealthy approach to the office.

  This place was enormous. Where were the workers? Where were the operators of those shredding machines and conveyor belts? My final observation point was behind a pallet of old yellow bricks. I tried to still my noisy breathing. I was about forty yards from the office. I now saw that the office stood alongside what was probably the only entrance to the site. That was how they controlled these sites, wasn’t it . . . a single gate to check whatever was coming in or out.

  I crawled through piles of squared timbers, floorboards, building stone, architectural features, mouldings, bumpers, radiators, and hubcaps and after five minutes came out diagonally opposite the entrance of this maze of jumble. There was no sign of life.

  I scratched my head and told myself to be cautious.

  The place was deserted or was it? There were sounds coming from outside, shouts and revving engines.

  The entrance was a gap in the junk heaps wide enough for two trucks to come through abreast. There was a heavy steel and chain link gate which was now open and beyond that a second, much flimsier, wooden gate.

  A small watchman’s hut stood to one side of the site office I’d noticed before. A rusty weighbridge occupied a space in front of the office. There were no telephone wires visible anywhere. A lot of these small businesses had abandoned landlines.

  I stared at the tiny hut until my eyes ached. Was someone waiting in there to shoot me when I showed myself?

  Keeping low and ready to run if necessary I made my way into the wide gap. I saw the two vans disappearing down the rutted lane. I was alone.

  I just had time to read the small sign set high up in a tree before I loped off after them. It read:

  PATEL WASTE MANAGEMENT

  ABDUL K. PATEL PROPRIETOR

  WASTE RECYCLING AND DISPOSAL

  CAR PARTS AND DEMOLISHING

  HOSPITAL WASTE A SPECIALITY

  FORMERLY TRADING AS

  LOCHHEAD & SONS

  There was a mobile number but it had been painted out.

  I wondered if Abdul K. Patel had ever existed outside of Hudson-Piggott’s diseased imagination.

  42

  Saturday: 7 a.m.

  The track downhill had been paved at one time but now it was deeply rutted. It was a pleasant country lane leading to moorland but had subsided into rural squalor. Overgrown hedges and trees on either side were clogged with paper and rubbish and it was almost impassable. There were old ruts and fresh ruts. My guess was that the fresh ones were made when the ‘hospital waste’ was trucked in from the warehouse in Manchester.

  I’d been puzzled by the absence of a labour force.

  They weren’t absent. Hudson-Piggott’s ‘workers’ were in the two vans slowly bumping along the track ahead of me. What could be simpler than importing a group of contractors from a former Yugoslavian republic disguised as labourers?

  The vans weren’t gaining on me. The track was so bad that they had to keep stopping and slowing while I ploughed on. The danger was that I’d get too close. I kept in the shade of the encroaching hedge.

  I passed a sign saying Private Road – Keep Out. A steel barrier lay at the side.

  Eventually the vans reached civilisation in the form of scattered houses and a paved road and they speeded up.

  I kept going. I knew that the house with the garden shed couldn’t be far away.

  The vans were almost out of sight when they turned down a side street.

  I stepped up my pace. I hadn’t eaten for hours and my stomach was rumbling but the prospect of catching up with Hudson-Piggott was food enough. I was a little too eager. When I reached the bend they’d disappeared round both vans suddenly zoomed out past me and accelerated away at a speed I couldn’t hope to match.

  I flung myself back into a privet hedge but I needn’t have bothered. They weren’t interested in me. I untangled myself and watched them vanish into traffic at a busy intersection in the distance.

  Suddenly I was too tired even to curse. I squatted on the kerb.

  I must have stayed where I was for ten minutes until I shook off the lethargy.

  The house with the nasty pond and the garden shed must be nearby.

  I needed to retrieve my other shoe. I didn’t want to leave it like Cinderella’s slipper for some forensic investigator to trace my DNA.

  That is assuming there’d ever be an investigation.

  I recalled the way Morgan and Myers’ deaths and the helicopter crash had been sanitised. Hudson-Piggott was free and was probably already spinning some yarn to the Prime Minister about how he’d broken the vicious Moloch Plot by Moslem terrorists. The dead contractors would become jihadis, Appleyard and Lansdale the brave MI5 men who’d given their lives to defeat them.

  That’s how I’d do it and I’m not even a practised liar or a PR man.

  Yeah, there were some awkward details to explain . . . Claverhouse in particular . . . but they’d work round them.

  I needed to think about myself now. I could get Jan and the kids away to a country where MI5’s arm wouldn’t reach. It couldn’t be any of the English speaking countries; Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and certainly not the United States. Argentina or Brazil would be the best choices. The children were young enough to pick up the language.

  I headed off down the short cul-de-sac. The sound of my sandals slapping the flagged pavement was
the only noise. Maybe this was a retreat for zombies.

  It was certainly very private. The houses all had hedges or towering Leylandii in front but at the end there was one with genuinely massive and well tended yew hedges. They were tall even by ‘Golden Triangle’ privacy standards, ten or twelve feet. Whoever lived there wanted seclusion. Was it one of the Lochheads, perhaps understandably nervous about reaction after his family had despoiled the moorland?

  The wrought iron gate was open but as I entered I came to a sudden stop.

  A pair of legs was poking out from under the hedge. They were visible from the street.

  Scarcely daring to breathe I parted the foliage to see the face. It was one of the contractors. He had a neat round hole between his eyes. I dropped my bag and fumbled in my pocket for the semi-automatic. I chambered a bullet.

  Was it possible?

  I crept forward. The well screened drive curved towards an open parking area in front of the large stone-built modern house. There was another body lying face down.

  It wasn’t Hudson-Piggott.

  A black, top of the range, Jaguar was parked by the entrance porch. Its boot was open. I moved closer, hugging the wall, close enough to identify it as the type of vehicle used by the Prime Minister. It was an XJ Sentinel with a five litre V8 engine and enough armour plate to stop a rocket or a bullet. They’re specially made for the Government at over three hundred K a whack. The days when PMs came into work on the Tube are long gone.

  How poor Clint would have loved to see it. He’d have rattled off all the specs for me.

  Then I shivered as if cold fingers were stroking my spine.

  So Hudson-Piggott was high enough in the Government pecking order to rate a high security vehicle. How long would it take him to squash an annoying little bug like me now that he wasn’t also organising a coup d’état?

  There was the sound of someone running downstairs.

  I pressed myself into the corner formed by the porch and the wall.

  Hudson-Piggott emerged. He was wearing the same brown Huntsman suit he’d been wearing when I first met him. There was a small suitcase in his left hand and a semi-automatic in his right. I guessed he had it in case his contractors came back. There must have been a rift; perhaps they didn’t like leaving so many bodies behind.