“Bloody marvelous,” said Chico. “Now what?”
“Home, James,” I said. “There’s nothing more to be gained from staying here.”
We skipped down the stairs from the County Stand roof towards the exits and ran straight into Billy McCusker and his three Shankill Road Volunteers.
• • •
I AM NOT SURE who was the more surprised, but it was clear who was the more angry, and I was very grateful for the presence, about ten yards away, of a pair of large uniformed Merseyside policemen on the lookout for pickpockets amongst the bustling crowd.
“Halley,” McCusker said, having dropped his supercilious use of the Mr. “Is this your doing?”
“Is what my doing?” I asked, trying to keep a smile off my face.
“I promise you,” he said with real menace, his dark eyes appearing even more sunken under his protruding brow than in the photographs, “if I find out that you are responsible, I’ll make sure you fry.”
His words sent fresh shivers down my spine, and I edged a little closer to the policemen.
McCusker then turned and walked away, followed by his three burly bodyguards. Chico and I stood and watched them go until they disappeared amongst the crowd.
“If Jimmy Guernsey has any sense,” I said, laughing, “he’ll hide in the Weighing Room all night.”
“Come on,” Chico said, pulling at my coat sleeve, “let’s get goin’ before that friendly foursome decides to come back.”
We hurried back to the hotel to collect the Range Rover and then set off south back to Oxfordshire.
“Do you think he’ll come after us immediately?” Chico asked when we were safely on the freeway.
“Judging by how quickly he sent his boys to put a ring of fire round Tony Molson’s place, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he wasn’t already on the road behind us.”
I pressed my right foot slightly harder on the gas pedal and broke the speed limit all the way down the M6 to Birmingham.
“What are we goin’ to do?” Chico asked.
“Be vigilant,” I said. “All hands on deck, and prepare to repel boarders.”
I had called D.C.I. Watkinson as we had left the Park Hotel, leaving a message that asked him to call back urgently, and he did so as we neared Aynsford.
“What’s the problem?” he asked.
“I may have poked that hornets’ nest,” I said, “and I might need some help with the fallout.”
“Would that be a Mr. McCusker–type hornets’ nest?” he asked.
“Precisely so,” I said.
“And what sort of help are you wanting?”
“A police guard on my home.”
“Mmm,” he said. “When for?”
“Tonight,” I said. “And maybe tomorrow as well.”
“We don’t have that sort of manpower.”
“You had enough to place a policeman outside after I got arrested.”
“He would have been there to prevent you removing any potential evidence from the property before our searches were complete.”
And, all this time, I’d thought it had been for the protection of my home from overzealous members of the press.
“Well, I need a policeman stationed there tonight because I firmly believe that McCusker or his cronies will attempt to gain entry or, worse, burn down the property. They as much as said so to me this afternoon.”
“Do you have witnesses to that conversation?”
“Yes,” I said. “Chico Barnes was with me.”
There was a silence from the other end of the line, and I was worried that the chief inspector might think it would be better to get a conviction for arson after the event than for conspiracy to commit arson before it.
“I also have a witness to this conversation. And if you let my house burn down in order to try to get him for arson, I will sue the police for negligence.”
“Mr. Halley, how is it that you have an uncanny knack of knowing what I’m thinking?”
“Well, you can stop thinking it and give me a police guard. Especially as I can’t legally be there. Have you had any luck on that front?”
“No, sorry,” he said. “It will have to wait for you to surrender to your bail at Oxford next week.”
“By next week I may not have a house.”
“OK, OK,” he said, “I get the message. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Then do it fast,” I said. “They may already be on their way.”
“I’ll ask uniform to route a patrol car round that way regularly throughout the evening and night, although it’s Friday, and they’ll be pretty busy in Banbury town center with the nightclub revelers.”
It wasn’t much, but I suppose it was better than nothing.
• • •
MARINA, SASKIA AND ROSIE were overjoyed to see us back at Aynsford in one piece, and Charles was pretty relieved too. He looked desperately tired, as if he hadn’t slept for two nights.
“How have things been here?” I asked Marina quietly.
“Fine, I suppose. Charles has been good at making sure that all the doors are locked all the time, and he keeps us cheerful with stories of how nothing could be as bad as being up against the Chinese on the Yangtze.” She rolled her eyes, and I laughed. “But I do wish he wouldn’t wander round the house with that bloody shotgun under his arm. He frightens Saskia.”
“I’ll have a word with him.”
“How about you?” Marina asked. “Did you get done what you wanted?”
“You might say that,” I said. “I managed to unfix the race that McCusker had fixed. I’m afraid it made him rather mad.”
“Will he come after you?” She was worried.
“I expect so. That’s partly why I did it. I need to get him out in the open, to show himself.”
“So Charles can shoot him with his shotgun?”
“Or I can. I think it’s the only way of bringing all this to a finish. Otherwise, we’ll never get rid of him. It’s a dangerous tactic, but you should be safe here. And I’ve arranged for the police to patrol regularly past the house.”
“It’s us I’m more concerned about than the house,” she said, putting an arm around my waist.
“We’ll all be fine,” I said.
Silly thing to say, really.
31
Do you really think he’ll come tonight?” Chico asked.
“I think he may come to our house in Nutwell,” I said, “but I don’t think he knows we’re staying here in Aynsford—at least I hope he doesn’t. He’s shown before that he’s impulsive and does things very quickly. He managed to arrange for Saskia to be kidnapped from school in just one day, and he attacked the Molsons’ house the same night that Tony rode Black Peppercorn to win against his orders. Yes, I think it’s quite likely he’ll come tonight.”
“Then we shouldn’t be here. We should be guardin’ your place, and bugger the bail conditions.”
“I agree.”
Marina was far from happy, especially when I told her that there was no way I was taking her with me.
“You and Saskia have got to stay here,” I said firmly. “It is much safer for you here than it is at home. Charles will stay here too.”
But I might take his shotgun, I thought.
• • •
IT WAS about eight o’clock when Chico and I took up our position in the dog kennel, sitting in the caged run on garden chairs with Charles’s loaded shotgun on my knees.
It was beginning to get dark, but, thankfully, the rain had stopped, so we could sit out in the open. The view from the kennel was up the driveway towards the gate, and covered the whole front of the house and part of the road beyond.
I was happy to sit there, quietly waiting for things to develop, but Chico had itchy feet and insisted on going on a reconnaissance tour aroun
d the property every ten to fifteen minutes or so to check that no one was approaching from the rear over the garden fence.
After about an hour and a half, I had a wander around too, eager to stretch my legs. For the umpteenth time, I checked the cartridges in the gun and the spares in my pocket. I wondered if I would use them. It would undoubtedly get me into trouble, as it was Charles who held the shotgun license, not me. But surely acting in self-defense included using all means at one’s disposal.
I went back to sitting in the dog kennel, waiting and watching, as the evening turned into night.
Chico and I had done plenty of stakeouts during the ten years or so we had worked together as a team, often at various racetracks, endlessly waiting for the bad guys to turn up. And we had learned to be patient.
I sat for a while longer and then went for another stroll around the property. So much for the police, I said to myself. I hadn’t seen the promised patrol car pass by once throughout the whole evening.
At about eleven-thirty, Chico’s phone rang loudly in the still night air.
“Oops,” he said, extracting it from his pocket. “Sorry.”
He answered, and I thought it would be his little blonde number, or some other female interest, but, instead, he held the phone out to me.
“Hello,” I said with trepidation.
“Is that Sid Halley?” I could hardly understand what was being said, as the person at the other end was mumbling.
“Yes,” I replied. “Sid Halley speaking.”
“I told him where you are,” came the mumbled reply.
“Sorry,” I said. “Who is this?”
“Peter,” said the mumbler. “Peter Medicos.”
“How did you get this number?”
“It was on the phone.” It was still difficult to hear what he was saying.
“Peter, are you all right?” I asked.
“I will be,” he mumbled. “At least I hope I will be. McCusker’s men . . .” He tailed off.
“Beat you up,” I said, finishing his sentence.
“Yes. He wanted to know where you were. He said he’d tried to phone you several times, but you’d gone into hiding. I told him I didn’t know where, but he wouldn’t take that for an answer. In the end, I told him you were staying with Admiral Roland at Aynsford.”
I could feel the panic rising in my throat.
“When did you tell him that?” I asked in trepidation.
“Hours ago. I couldn’t move for ages. Quite apart from my face, I fear one of them might have ruptured my spleen.”
I remembered the beating I had received in the Towcester racetrack parking lot and how I hadn’t been able to function for a while afterwards. McCusker’s men certainly knew where to punch for maximum effect.
“How many hours ago?” I asked with increasing alarm.
“I don’t rightly know. Lots. I’m sorry.”
It was under three hours’ drive from Aintree to Aynsford.
“Peter, get yourself to the hospital as quickly as possible,” I said. “And thank you.”
At least he had called. He hadn’t needed to.
I hung up. And immediately tried to call Charles’s number, but there was just a continuous tone on the line. Unobtainable.
Oh God!
“Come on,” I shouted urgently at Chico. “We’re in the wrong damn place.”
• • •
THE RANGE ROVER fairly tore up the tarmac between Nutwell and Aynsford, reaching speeds in excess of seventy miles per hour on the winding, single-lane road.
“Stealth or full-frontal?” Chico said as we swayed sideways around a bend.
“I don’t think we have time for stealth,” I said. “Charles’s phone is out. They must be there already. Call the police, and the fire department. Do it now.”
He pressed the buttons, hanging on to the grab handles for dear life as I swerved around yet another bend.
“No effin’ signal,” he said. “We’re too close to the hill.”
“Keep trying,” I shouted at him. “It usually works, in the end.”
The black Toyota Land Cruiser was parked in the road outside the gate to Charles’s house. Both Chico and I saw it together.
“Stop,” Chico shouted. “I’ll deal with that.”
I braked sharply to a halt, and he climbed out, unfolding his penknife.
I left him there and gunned the Range Rover’s engine, racing down the long driveway towards the house.
I suppose I should have really waited for Chico. Odds of two against four were hardly sensible for an attack, in the first place. To have reduced it to one against four was plain careless. But all I could think about was McCusker’s threat to rape, murder and then feed Saskia to the pigs.
He was a man who didn’t make empty threats. I knew he would do what he said. That’s why I was desperate to get to Saskia as soon as possible and before Billy McCusker could.
I swung the Range Rover around the corner towards the front door and the glassed-in porch, the headlights lighting up the scene. There was a man, all dressed in black, standing in the middle of the driveway, and he was pointing at me.
A star appeared in the windshield just above my head. A second joined it. And then another.
It took me an instant to realize that they were bullet holes. The man wasn’t just pointing at me; he was aiming a gun and firing. I flung myself over and down to my left, across the central console, and stamped hard on the accelerator, pointing the Range Rover straight at him.
I both heard and felt the impact.
I sat up and braked hard, but the wheels skidded over the loose gravel and I plowed right on, straight into the wall of Charles’s garage.
The air bag deployed with a bang, saving me from hitting the steering wheel, but the crash had been a fairly low-speed affair, and I was uninjured.
I scrambled out through the driver’s door and went to look around the front. The man in black must have been collected up by the front bumper and carried forward, as he now lay squashed between the vehicle and the garage wall, his bloodied head clearly visible in the glow of the left-hand headlight, which had amazingly survived the impact.
The man, however, appeared not to have been so lucky.
The odds had improved suddenly. Now it was one against three, and would be two against three when Chico arrived.
I grabbed the shotgun off the backseat and made my way gingerly towards the glassed-in porch and the front door, balancing the double barrels in my opened plastic palm.
The house was in complete darkness, and silent.
Charles habitually left the light switched on at the far corner of the porch, but even that was now off and dark.
Where were McCusker and his other two men?
They must have heard me arrive, so were they waiting for me to walk through the front door and straight into a hail of lead?
And where were Marina, Saskia and Charles? And how about Rosie? Why wasn’t she barking?
And where were the police and fire department? Had Chico even managed to call them yet?
So many questions raced through my head, and so many fears with them.
I stepped onto the porch through the open door, the only sound in my ears being that of my own heart thumping away at fifteen or twenty to the dozen.
I knew I had to go in.
Hurry up, Chico.
Perhaps I could have waited for the police to turn up, if indeed they were coming, but I just knew I had to go in.
This had to be settled between McCusker and me and settled now.
The heavy oak front door proper was also wide open, with pitch-blackness beyond: no light from the alarm keypad near the door, no glow from the phone charger on the hall table. The power had been cut, along with the phone line.
I went through the doorway at
knee level, crouching down and silently pulling my legs beneath me like a Cossack, the shotgun cradled in my lap.
There was no hail of lead, just silence.
Where were they?
I stood upright and moved quickly in the darkness towards the kitchen, but I didn’t get there because I tripped over something lying on the floor in the middle of the hall, tumbling headlong and sending the shotgun flying out of my grasp and clattering across the flagstones.
Bugger, I thought. So much for stealth.
On my knees, I reached back to see what had tripped me.
It was Charles. I could tell from the velvet-and-silk smoking jacket he was wearing. And he was lying on his back, not moving.
Oh God!
I fumbled, one-handed, trying to find his wrist.
Thankfully, there was a pulse, but it was weak and fast.
I rolled him over onto his front and placed him as best I could in the recovery position, although it was difficult to tell exactly in the dark.
I listened, straining to hear any sound.
There was nothing, other than the slight wheeze of Charles’s breathing.
Where was McCusker? Was he inside the house or outside?
I scrambled forward, still on my knees, searching for the shotgun. There was just about enough light coming in from outside for me to determine in which direction lay the door to the kitchen.
After what seemed like an age, I found the gun, nestling under a console table, and retrieved it.
Now, then, you bastard, where are you?
I said it to myself rather than out loud.
I stood up and went into the kitchen, searching for any slight variation in the darkness that might indicate a person’s face or hand.
I was scared. Very scared.
I’d been lucky not to be hit by one of the bullets that had come through the Range Rover windshield. Would I be so lucky again? I’d been shot once before, in the stomach. The resulting damage had nearly killed me, and it still gave me trouble more than fourteen years later.
So I had no particular wish to repeat the experience.
I went through the kitchen into the laundry room, but that too was empty.
Had they already seized Marina and Saskia and then departed? If so, why had one of their number been standing in the drive when I arrived? And how about their vehicle? It had still been there on the road outside the gate. I’d seen it.
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