The Rain-Soaked Bride (23 page)

If you asked him – and of course nobody would – the Korean was in the wind. Why would he hang around? So the perimeter alarm hadn’t been triggered, who cared? That just meant the man had known what he was doing. But no, it had been decided he must still be on the property so now he had to forgo a few hours’ sleep in order to walk around in the bloody cold for a bit.

It was operations like this that made him wish he was back in the Middle East when it was still an interesting place to be.

His girlfriend disagreed but then she didn’t really understand the way your attitudes changed after you’d been shot at a few times. Not that she’d known what he was up to, of course. She thought he’d been embassy staff, filing paperwork and arranging cultural exchanges. Still, she had fretted.

‘I just never know if you’re going to come back in one piece,’ she had said to him one night when he had been home on a few days’ leave. ‘You hear stories of what it’s like over there.’

‘People exaggerate,’ he’d assured her, and that was true. He’d been known to do it himself when swapping stories in the barracks. ‘I’ve never seen a single bullet fired.’

Which certainly wasn’t true. He’d fired plenty himself.

Then he’d been sent back home and life had become dull. She couldn’t have been happier. She kept talking about kids. He’d nod and smile as they looked at colour schemes for converting the spare bedroom into a nursery but inside he was rotting. Everything was just so safe. It felt oppressive.

He knew he wasn’t alone in the way his time under fire had affected him. He talked with a few of the old boys. They got together once in a while. Shared a few drinks, relived both the good times and the bad.

‘Well,’ one of his old lieutenants had said one night, ‘I’m glad to be out of it. I sit out on my back porch and look up at the sky and I know that nobody’s going to fill it with incendiaries. What’s the point in fighting if you’re not trying to find peace, eh?’

Bateman hadn’t seen him again. Knew that they would never see eye to eye.

For him, the danger had become vital. It had been what made him feel alive. Now, when he really was doing paperwork and sitting in a claustrophobic office he felt himself withering away to nothing.

He kept fit. He’d taken up hang-gliding, surfing, climbing. He’d go away for the weekend with a couple of the old crew and they’d have a few beers and have a crack at one of the Cornish sea cliffs or, on one particularly brilliant trip, Dumbarton Rock. Hanging there, fingertips bleeding as he forced them into tiny handholds, he came close to the sense of being alive he had otherwise lost.

Then he went back home and looked at baby-wear catalogues.

Now this, knocking about a stately home on the off-chance someone wanted to have a pop.

He patted his pockets, hunting for the couple of cigarettes he’d cadged earlier. He was supposed to have quit – preparation for the theoretical bloody baby again – but he’d felt the urge tonight and decided to hell with it.

He still carried his old Zippo, smoker or not. It had been a companion ever since his training days and his pocket felt too empty without it.

He put one of the cigarettes in his mouth and squinted at the sudden burst of light from the zippo flame as he ignited it with his thumb.

The cigarette tasted strange. Like burning wood. It hadn’t been that long, surely? He coughed and took it from his mouth.

It flared, a bright yellow flame working its way down its length.

‘Cheap shit,’ he said, sneering at the way it burned down like a fuse. Bloody typical. He’d only cadged a couple and there was something bloody wrong with one of them.

As the flame reached the filter there was a small pop and a flare of blue light, like a Chinese firework. The light left a coloured after-image in his eyes. It looked like a string of pictograms. It made him think of the Cyrillic alphabet. He blinked a few times and then it was gone.

Hoping he’d have better luck the second time, he put the other cigarette in his mouth and – cautiously – lit it. There was a pleasing crunch of combusting tobacco and he took a lungful. Job done.

He walked away from the building, cutting towards the woods at the rear.

The air seemed to grow colder as he moved away from the building and he briefly wondered if he should have gone back to his room for a coat. Then, angry at himself for what he perceived as proof of having gone soft, he turned up his suit jacket collar and walked quicker, getting a good lick on.

There was a distant rumble of what sounded like thunder and he turned to see if there was any sign of lightning.

The sky was clear, the stars bright.

Maybe someone was letting off fireworks somewhere.

He cut through the sculpture park, trying to make out the shapes in the half-light. He’d taken a look around the place the previous morning. All the usual modern crap, weird figures made out of bent wire and steel. Like a junkyard filled with the offcuts of a trainee welder. Now, as they became little more than silhouettes against the night sky, they somehow seemed more impressive. Strange, unfathomable shapes made out of darkness. One looked like a sailing ship, he thought, with a billowing, triangular sail. Another was a five-pointed star, its points tapering out into corkscrew shapes. Another was a see-saw, a long pole tipping to and fro on a circular fulcrum. He touched the end, snatching his finger away at the sharpness of its point. ‘Have someone’s eye out with that,’ he muttered. ‘They not heard of bloody Health and Safety?’

He touched it more carefully, smiling to see that it was perfectly balanced, one gentle push from his finger was enough to tip the pole towards the opposite side.

Well made, he admitted. Clever if you liked that kind of thing.

He kept going, heading towards the woods.

Halfway there, he heard the sound of thunder again. He looked around but, as before, saw no sign of cloud. Which made the rain, when it came, all the more unexpected.

He cupped the little that remained of his cigarette in his hand and made a run for the trees. It could hardly be more than a shower and he was likely to get wetter trying to get back to the house than taking cover there.

The rain seemed to follow him into the dense canopy of the trees. Their winter branches offering little in the way of protection.

‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘fuck it.’

It was only water, he’d just have to hope his suit jacket had dried by the morning, he’d only brought the one.

Christ but it was hammering it down!

He flung the stub of the cigarette away and hung close to the trunk of a large tree, getting some small cover from a fat branch directly over his head.

He looked back towards the house and thought he saw someone walking through the sculpture park. Just a shadow. One of the others caught out in the bloody rain, he thought.

There was the snap of dry twigs behind him and, instinctively, he spun around, reaching for the gun in his holster. You could take the man out of the hot zone but you’d never really change him, wasn’t that the story of his life?

There was no sign of anyone. He listened hard but it was difficult over the sound of the rain hitting the carpet of dead leaves all around him.

Was it worth investigating? Probably just a fox or badger.

He turned back towards the Hall and gave a short cry at the sight of the woman stood only a couple of feet away. The embarrassment of this coursed through him. The idea of her sneaking up on him was one thing, crying out like a girl as a result was beyond mortifying.

‘All right love?’ he asked. ‘Not a good night to be out, eh?’

The moon reflected off the white dress she was wearing and she looked soaked to the skin. He should probably offer her his jacket, he thought, then decided it was so sodden it was hardly likely to help.

He tried to place who she might be. It didn’t help that he couldn’t see her face, her black hair covering it like a hood.

‘You one of the kitchen lot?’ he asked, walking up to her. ‘Should be tucked up, yeah? Don’t you know there’s a buzz on? Shouldn’t be wandering around out here, could get yourself shot at.’

She didn’t speak. She didn’t move.

As he drew close, the stink of the rotten leaves around them seemed to multiply. Either that or he was catching a whiff of some bit of wildlife that had died out here.

‘Speak up, girl,’ he said. ‘It’s not a good idea creeping up on people tonight.’

She inclined her head slightly but he still couldn’t see her face. It was pissing him off as much as the rain. Did these civilians not know a bloody thing?

‘Let’s have a look at you,’ he said, reaching out to pull the hair away from her face.

Bateman had thought it was impossible to put a scare on him. Sometimes a man sees so much that the part of him that feels fear just falls away like a vestigial limb. What he revealed, pulling the clammy hair to one side, proved him wrong.

He ran, purely on instinct, not fully processing the face – or, more accurately, lack of one – he had seen, just leaping into fight or flight mode.

The rain continued to pelt down as he ran out into the open. His feet slid out from underneath him and he spun on the wet grass as he heard a deafening crack. Not thunder this time, he knew, this was closer and sharper. He kept trying to get to his feet but the rain-soaked grass fought back, and he slid like he was oiled.

Instead of fighting it, he rolled, sliding across the ground, only just aware of the crashing sound from behind him where one of the trees on the edge of the woods had somehow come down, landing in the spot where he had fallen. It had missed him by inches.

He finally got a grip on the wet ground and got to his feet, running more carefully this time. He thought about firing his gun, just to get a bit of help out here but then it occurred to him that he wouldn’t have the first idea how to express what it was he was running from.

He turned then, running backwards as his rational mind rose up and began to question. The woman was no longer there. Had she ever been? Yes. Of course she had. He wasn’t the sort of man who imagined things. She must have vanished into the woods, though how she could have walked anywhere when she didn’t have any …

He turned back towards the house, just in time to spot the stone bench and table he had been about to run into. Stupid! Look where you’re bloody going, man!

He collided with the bench and fell to the ground, his body hitting one of the lose plinths that held up the solid stone top of the table. It wobbled above him and he shifted away, just managing to avoid its heavy edge landing on his head. It rolled along the grass for a few feet, like a wheel come loose from a prehistoric car and he got to his feet, not quite able to believe how narrowly he had managed to avoid being brained by the thing as it fell. He needed to stop this useless panicking, that was twice now that he had nearly blundered into something that could have killed him.

He looked around, there was still no sign of the girl. He shouldn’t be running. He needed to walk back to the Hall, check in with the guardhouse and see if anything had triggered the alarms and then play it from there.

He entered the sculpture park, trying to rub away some of the rainwater from his face. The path through the exhibits was lined with stone edging. As he brushed water from his head he stepped awkwardly, his left foot tripping on a loose stone in the path border. He cried out as he fell to the ground. What was wrong with him? He was a bloody disaster area! Could he not keep his feet for two bloody minutes?

He pushed himself up and found himself face-to-face with the girl again. She gave a dry cough and he tasted the stench of rot in his mouth.

Panicking again, he turned and ran. He pulled his gun from his holster, turned and shot a couple of rounds at the girl. There was no discernible effect bar the fact that, for those few seconds he was running blind. When he turned around it was to suddenly register the see-saw sculpture in front of him. The sharpened end of the pole punched right into his belly, the other end of the pole dipping down towards the ground, hitting it and then bouncing back to embed itself into his gut another half-inch or so.

‘Ah fuck,’ he coughed, ‘fucking thing.’

He grabbed at the pole, hoping he hadn’t done himself mortal damage. He still had his gun in his hand and, thinking only of the bit of ironwork sticking out of himself, he dropped it to free up both hands.

The gun hit the stone edge of the path. All modern pistols are designed to weather such treatment. They contain drop-safety features, firing pin blocks that are there to prevent accidental discharge. Even if such a thing should fail, the impact strength needed to cause a misfire is considerable. Add to that the odds against the gun being pointed at anything when dropped. Yes, Bateman would have had to be exceptionally unlucky for it to be a problem.

The gun fired, the 9mm bullet entering Bateman’s mouth and exiting from the top of his head. He slumped forward, his weight against the pole slowly working it deeper into the stomach wound.

When he was found, two minutes later, by a couple of men who had been alerted by the shots, he presented quite the work of art.

a) Lufford Hall, Alcester, Warwickshire

Toby was shaken awake by Shining. The old man was standing in the faint light of the corridor.

‘Room service?’ Toby asked.

‘Morning news,’ Shining replied. ‘One of Rowlands’ men was found dead in the sculpture park last night. He was soaked to the skin, impaled on a piece of modern art, having accidentally shot himself in the face.’

Toby groaned and rubbed at his tired face.

‘Personally,’ Shining continued, ‘I’m inclined to suggest death by supernatural means. Naturally, after last night’s excitement the usual cynicism seems surprisingly absent. In further news: the perimeter alarm was triggered by someone leaving the property.’

‘Which way?’

‘Through the woods, naturally, so the cameras show us nothing. All we have to go on is a blip on a computer display.’

‘And your candle?’

‘Not triggered.’

‘Which means?’