For Valour (33 page)

I nodded.

‘Who dropped him?’

‘Some people we should have taken down way back in Sarajevo.’

I let the silence stretch between us.

‘What really happened in the CQB Rooms, Jack?’

He did peel off his Ray-Bans now. I could see the very real distress in his eyes, and the white lines chiselled in the deeply tanned skin around them. ‘You’ve got to believe this, Nick. It was to protect something very, very precious. It wasn’t meant to be the first shot in a war.’

Grant leaned forward, put his elbows on the table and massaged his face with his hands. I remembered Bob’s line about the high-wire act. When he managed to compose himself, he raised his head again and met my gaze.

‘This isn’t the place.’ He glanced left and right. ‘You know where I’m staying …’

I nodded.

‘Meet me there in an hour. I’ve got one or two things I need to sort.’

He read my expression. ‘I’ll be there.’ He paused. ‘Really.’

I waited for a couple of beats before nodding again.

He called for his bill and chucked a ten-euro note on the table when it arrived. Then he did hold out his hand, and we shook. His palm was cool and his grip was firm.

When he began to retrace his route, he did so head high. He was a man with a mission.

5

I got up as soon as Jack had turned the corner. I left the rest of my brew and binned the newspaper too. I’d never been any good at crosswords.

The sun was higher in the sky, and the digital temperature display outside the
pharmakeia
on the other side of the street told me it was sixteen degrees and counting.

I stayed fifty behind him as he made his way towards the seafront. He crossed the main and found a seat overlooking the water. I took cover beneath an awning outside a book store at the corner. A group of kids clambered over a bunch of stone eggs on a raised platform to Jack’s left, pissing themselves with laughter. He didn’t give them a glance, just stayed where he was, stock still, staring at a huge blue tanker moored in Akrotiri Bay. I couldn’t work out if he was waiting for somebody, or grappling with the mysteries of the universe.

The beautiful people sat and sipped iced Frappuccinos at a café a hundred or so further along the beach to his right. In another life I could have been plastered with factor-30 on a day like this, enjoying the view. I thought about that sometimes. I wasn’t haunted by it, just thought about it.

I remembered what Aleksa had said about good men doing nothing. I was pretty sure doing nothing hadn’t been Jack Grant’s problem. He didn’t strike me as that kind of guy. I suspected that he’d done something bad for the best of motives, and then found that he couldn’t square it away. I hoped I might be about to find out what that was.

Nobody showed. After about fifteen minutes he got up and walked towards the café, then turned and headed back into the Old Town.

The mid-morning sunlight was bouncing off the walls and the shiny roofs and windscreens of the parked cars that now lined Bob’s street. Following Jack still wasn’t difficult. He didn’t look left or right. He made straight for the red door, whipped out a key and went in. I stopped about twenty away and waited.

The shutters stayed closed. The building didn’t have air-con, so I guessed that was the best way to keep it as cool as possible, even this early in the year.

I scanned the area each side of me. All I could see was the usual smattering of holidaymakers checking out the souvenir stalls and clothing stores.

I wandered back up to the church and paid some close attention to the display of saints and martyrs again. I put a euro in the collection box, lit another candle and kept eyes on Bob’s place as the flame guttered in the breeze.

6

I sparked up my iPhone. The time display told me we’d left the taverna three-quarters of an hour ago. The text-message icon blinked on. Al Gillespie wanted me to call him, soon as. I slipped it back into the pocket of my jeans and went and knocked on the red door.

There was no response. Not a creak or a groan or the sound of a footstep inside.

I knocked again.

Still nothing.

I pictured Jack’s sudden calm at the taverna, and his unnatural stillness at the seafront. I had a bad feeling about this.

I pushed the panels immediately above and below the keyhole. They both gave inwards with minimal pressure. The door hadn’t been bolted, top or bottom.

I stepped back, glanced up and down the street, trusted in the cover of the parked wagons and the hanging clothes, leaned forward and shoulder-charged Bob’s landlord’s precious piece of woodwork beside the handle. There was a splintering noise as the deadlock said goodbye to its housing and the thing swung open.

I stepped inside and pushed the door closed behind me. Bob was going to have to devote an hour or so of his evening to a bit of DIY on the frame, but I didn’t think it would spoil his weekend. I was less sure about what I was about to find on the floors above.

The shutters front and back must have been louvred, because there was still a fair amount of ambient light. Everything I could see was as well cared for as the balcony. The staircase ahead of me was a combo of spotless tiled treads and a polished hardwood rail that ran up a bare stone wall.

I called Jack’s name and still got no answer.

An intricately worked Turkish copper coffee pot, with a spout curved like a dagger, stood on Bob’s hall table, beside a carved wooden bowl full of stuff he didn’t want to carry around with him. I grabbed it by the handle and headed up the steps.

Bob’s apartment was on two levels: a lounge with kitchen/diner, which opened onto the front balcony, and, as far as I could tell, two bedrooms and a bathroom on the top floor.

The main living space – desk, table, chairs, sofa, flat-screen TV and hand-woven rugs and cushions – was empty and undisturbed. The back bedroom wasn’t. As I reached the landing a familiar metallic odour caught in my throat.

I eased my back against the wall, tightened my grip on the coffee pot and stepped inside.

7

Bob’s spare room was decked out with local weaves and joinery, as neatly arranged as they were in the rest of the apartment. The big difference was that almost everything within reach of Jack Grant’s shattered head – the Limassol Carnival poster hanging behind him, the wall, the ceiling, the bedcover, the night table – was covered with blood.

Some leaked out of his mouth and down his chin. Some dripped off the fingertips of his right hand to feed the glistening pool that had gathered around the SIG Sauer P226 on the floor beside his chair. The rest seemed to be running in rivulets down his back and across the bare boards towards me.

His body was completely still, face up, eyes wide open, like he’d just spotted something really interesting on the freshly stripped but recently stained roof beam.

Jack was indeed old school. He needed to do the decent thing. He’d been trapped in a burning building for the last four weeks, and finally spotted an exit.

There were no signs of a struggle. I was in no doubt that he’d welcomed the 9mm round that had removed the top of his skull and taken away his pain.

8

I reversed out of the room and moved back downstairs. I wiped my prints off the coffee pot with my shirt-tail and replaced it on the table.

I took a box of Swan Vestas out of Bob’s man bowl and pulled the door shut, holding the handle with my sleeve and wedging it against the frame with a couple of matchsticks. It wasn’t foolproof, but I didn’t have time to fuck about.

Finding a body in his apartment wasn’t going to brighten up Bob’s evening, but the police wouldn’t need Inspector Poirot to tell them it was a suicide. He wouldn’t need to mention my name. I’d just have to take some flak from him later.

I turned the first corner I came to and binned the hat and sun-gigs, then headed for a nearby store and bought a baseball cap, a pair of fake Oakleys and a blue shirt. I bundled my white one under the seat in the changing cubicle. There were smiles all round as euro notes found their way out of my jeans pocket and into the till.

The rest of the world were tucking into their first kebabs of the day as I legged it back to the Suzuki.

At the edge of town I drove past a group of lads who were busy building a bonfire in a field. They’d stuffed an old pair of jeans, a shirt and a shopping bag with straw, and one of them was painting it with eyes, nose and mouth. It looked like the kind of monstrosity we used to perch outside Elephant & Castle tube when we were kids, trying to strong-arm commuters into filling our plastic beakers with coppers for 5 November.

They’d never heard of Guy Fawkes here, of course. You couldn’t tell by looking at him, but this was an effigy of Judas Iscariot. The Cypriots torched him every Easter as a punishment for betraying Jesus.

1
St Francis Xavier’s Roman Catholic Church, Powys

Saturday, 11 February

I’d called Al from the payphone in the Larnaca departure lounge before leaving on the next flight to Heathrow.

He was trying not to get too carried away by the news that Catriona seemed to be responding to her treatment at the Beatson. And he wanted me to know that he’d dug up a contact that, given a bit of warning, could get me inside the Military Court Centre at Barford without broadcasting it to the Head Shed. I told him Sunday or Monday after dark o’clock would be good for me.

Four and a half hours in the air gave me a chance to sort a few things out in my mind and put together a plan of action for the next couple of days.

Ella had been convinced that something had happened on the night of 8 January which had severely rattled Sam. Scott had done or said something stupid enough to prompt the letter of apology I’d read in the shepherd’s hut. Jack Grant hadn’t topped himself in Limassol for no reason. I was pretty sure he’d decided Scott was a loose cannon, and triggered the CQB gangfuck.

My first stop was going to be Father Mart’s HQ. I texted him on the coach transfer to Gatwick.

I pulled the Skoda out of the long-term car park about fifteen minutes short of one. I filled the tank at Leigh Delamere services on the M4, tucked Sam’s Browning under my right thigh and got my head down under the Gore-Tex for a few hours. I woke myself up with a brew and an egg sandwich before moving on.

Frost dusted the fields and verges on the final run-in to my favourite confessional. It was crisp and cold and a bit of a shock to the system after Cyprus and southern Spain, but at least I was driving away from the snow that, the radio told me, was bringing things to a standstill on the eastern side of the country.

Father Mart was already in place by the time I arrived at the church. I stepped into the booth, closed the curtain and gave him the boiled-down version of my pilgrimage to the Puerto del Suspiro del Moro and my trip to Limassol, but didn’t hold back about Jack Grant’s death or Ella’s kidnapping. I needed to level with him, and he needed to know the truth.

When I’d finished, there was a silence the other side of the screen.

‘Nicholas, I had a visit while you were away. At the house. Someone from DSF’s office. He wanted to make contact with you …’

This wasn’t good, but at least Father Mart’s visitor hadn’t had a leather jacket and a rose-coloured tattoo. ‘What did you tell him?’ I wondered whether it was OK with God for him to be a bit economical with the truth.

‘I told him …’ I saw that gleam in his eye again as he leaned forward. ‘I told him that you and I had spent some time together, but I didn’t share the Lord’s knowledge of your precise whereabouts.’

I smiled. ‘Would the Lord mind if you helped me access Hereford without putting my head above the parapet?’

I explained what I needed to do, and he told me he believed that the Lord would be as accommodating as possible.

2

When I emerged from the church, Father Mart had already pulled open the rear door of his Defender. I folded myself into the boot and he threw a stripy woollen blanket over me, which smelt vaguely of Icarus.

He fed some monk music into the CD player and sparked up the ignition, floored the gas pedal and slalomed through the lanes and then onto a straighter road, which meant that I no longer had to protect my head from constant collision with the Land Rover’s fuselage. I figured we were now on the main into Hereford.

There was a bit more slaloming, but like you do in town when you’re taking a series of rapid lefts and rights, and doing your best not to smack into the wagon in front or someone crossing the road.

Finally he rammed on the brakes, wrenched the gearstick into reverse, did a quarter of a doughnut, threw it into neutral and switched off the engine. I took a couple of deep, Icarus-scented breaths and eased my bruised flesh away from the lumps of metal that anchored the vehicle’s rear seats to the floor.

The driver’s door opened and closed, and I lay there and waited. Either he’d decided to deliver me, battered and bleeding, to DSF after all, or we were sitting in the car park behind the Green Dragon. I’d soon find out.

About ten minutes later, the rear door opened and I felt a blast of cold air as the edge of the blanket lifted. One very sparkly eye, half a bushy white beard and a couple of inches of dog collar came into view.

‘A nice man called Ted is happy to see you. He’s new here, but I told him you’ve been a regular customer since the Dark Ages. I’ve given him a rough heads-up, as we agreed, and he’s going to do his best to help us.’

The blanket descended for a moment, then rose again. ‘Oh, and you’re about ten feet away from a rear entrance, with not a soul in sight.’

I pushed the rest of my camouflage sheet back, swung my legs out over the tailgate and sat up. Father Mart proved to be a master of the close target recce. The sight that greeted me was precisely as he’d described.

On the basis of what Ella had told me, I’d decided to start where Sam and Scott’s evening ended, then work my way back through the Vault, the Barrels and the Spreadeagle until I could establish the connection between them beyond any doubt.