The Ring of Death (28 page)

‘I suppose so,' Crane said dubiously.

‘And from the security viewpoint, it's perfect, isn't it?' Paniatowski continued, aware, even as she spoke the words, that she was arguing the case as much to convince herself as to convince the detective constable. ‘If they met in a pub somewhere, for instance, they'd be running the risk that somebody would remember them, but they had this place to themselves until we arrived.'

‘Do you think it will be a big meeting, ma'am?' Crane asked.

Damn the child! Why did he have to keep persecuting her like this?

‘I don't know how big a meeting it will be,' Paniatowski said. ‘We'll have to wait and see, won't we?'

As the sun sank lower on the horizon, the brilliant purple of the heather became more muted, and then was finally lost in the darkness.

With the onset of night, different forms of life began to emerge. An owl hooted somewhere in the distance, insects began to chirp busily from the undergrowth, and small furry creatures darted hither and thither.

The moon rose, casting a pale, silvery glow over the moors, and Paniatowski, sitting there and watching it, found her mind drifting back to the past.

It was not only DS Cousins who had memories of this moor, she thought. She and Bob had often visited it – lying down in the heather and making passionate love, all the while aware that when it was over her lover's sense of duty would drive him back to his blind wife.

She could almost smell the crushed heather of that lovemaking now – could almost feel it sticking to her legs and breasts. She wondered if she would ever get over Bob, and decided she probably wouldn't – decided that, even if she did find love again, she would never be able to banish him entirely from her heart.

A dark shape, which had been sitting at the other end of the hillock, stood up and walked over to her.

‘Do you mind if I sit down, ma'am?' it asked.

Paniatowski smiled into the darkness – partly through amusement, partly through relief.

‘For God's sake, Jack, you don't need to ask my permission,' she said. ‘This is the bloody moors, not my office,'

‘Oh right, ma'am,' Crane said. He sat down next to her – though not
too
close. ‘There's something I've been wanting to get off my chest, ma'am,' he continued. ‘Or rather, there's something that DS Cousins has advised me I
should
get off my chest.'

‘I'm listening,' Paniatowski told him.

‘I've . . . er . . . been lying about my education, ma'am. Well, not so much lying, as concealing the truth, which I suppose
is
lying in a way, and I thought it would be best if I . . .'

‘Vehicles approaching!' DS Cousins called out, ending Crane's confession before it had even really got started.

They came from the north, cutting through the darkness with their headlights. There were five of them – and even from a distance, it was clear from the height of those headlights that whatever the vehicles were, they were much bigger than cars.

‘Bloody large meeting, ma'am,' DS Cousins said. ‘More like a party, if you ask me.'

‘Maybe they're just passing through,' Paniatowski replied.

But she didn't believe they were, because this road was no short-cut to anywhere, and besides, her gut was starting to send out messages of self-congratulation.

The lorries – and they could definitely see that they
were
lorries now – pulled off the road about a mile away from the hillock, and, despite all the space available to them, parked in a straight line.

‘Bloody hell, it's the army!' Cousins exclaimed. ‘With that sense of neatness, it has to be.'

It certainly looked like it, Paniatowski thought.

But what business could Forsyth possibly have with the army?

‘And here comes our mate the super-spy,' Cousins said, pointing to a set of much lower-slung headlights approaching from the Clitheroe end of the road. ‘He's turned up, just like you promised he would. I'm proud of you, ma'am.' He paused. ‘Sorry, ma'am. Not my place to say something like that.'

‘That's all right,' Paniatowski assured him. ‘I'm just a little proud of
myself
, too.'

The car reached the area where the lorries were parked, and pulled in beside them.

‘We need to take a closer look,' Paniatowski said, with a sense of urgency in her voice. ‘Paul, you approach them from the left-hand side. Jack, you go in from the right. Get as near as you safely can, but for God's sake don't push it too far, and end up getting yourself spotted.'

‘I've got a question, ma'am,' DC Crane said.

Of course he had, Paniatowski thought.

And it would be an awkward one – because Jack Crane's main purpose on earth seemed to be to ask her awkward questions.

‘Go ahead,' she said resignedly.

‘Just what am I supposed to be
looking
for
, ma'am?' Crane asked.

‘I don't rightly know,' Paniatowski replied. ‘But I'm sure you'll recognize it when you see it.'

Running in a crouched position was taking its toll on her calf muscles, and the unevenness of the ground meant that twice she'd slipped, and had to break her fall by holding her arms out in front of her. Even so, it was less than fifteen minutes before she was close enough to the lorries to be able to establish that if they weren't actually
army
vehicles, they were certainly very similar to them.

She hunkered down, and considered her next move.

There was no camp fire lighting up the darkness. She could detect no signs of human movement, and could hear no voices. So perhaps the soldiers – or
whatever
they were – had bedded down for the night.

But that made no sense at all, because Forsyth would not have made the trip out from Whitebridge just to watch other men sleep.

There was the sudden sound of gunfire in the distance, and turning her head she saw the bright red light of tracer bullets flying through the air.

‘Oh my God, what the hell have I got my lads into?' she asked herself worriedly.

She heard the tread of the footfalls behind her just a split second before a heavy boot struck her in the middle of her back, sending her pitching forward. It was her shoulder, rather than her face, which hit the ground first – but it still hurt like buggery.

‘Move an inch, and I'll fill you full of holes, you bastard,' said a harsh voice with a strong Ulster accent.

A beam of light lit up the ground just by her head.

‘Get up – but do it slowly,' the voice said. ‘And the instant you're standing up, I want to see your hands behind your head.'

There were two of them, she noted when she was back on her feet. One had his hands dangling by his sides, as if he was not quite sure what to do with them, but the second was holding a torch in one hand and a pistol in the other – and both those objects were firmly pointing at her.

‘Jesus, Johnny, but it's only a woman,' said the one with his hands by his sides.

‘What are you doing here?' demanded the one with the pistol.

‘I'm a police officer,
Johnny
,' Paniatowski said. ‘And that means
I'm
the one who's going to be asking the questions.'

‘It doesn't work like that out here in the middle of nowhere,' the Ulsterman said harshly. ‘You might have a warrant card, but I've got a gun – and that puts
me
in charge.'

‘You know you wouldn't dare shoot a bobby, so why pretend?' Paniatowski countered.

‘Wouldn't dare?' the Ulsterman repeated. ‘I wouldn't be so sure of that, if I was you. When a man knows he can get away with it, there's no telling what he's capable of – and when he has powerful friends, like I have, he can get away with almost anything.'

‘I believe him,' Paniatowski thought, as she felt a shudder run through her body. ‘Or, at least, I believe that he
believes
it – and that's just as dangerous.'

‘Search her, Michael,' Johnny told his companion. ‘And don't go easy on the search just because she's a woman. She looks old enough to be well used to having her tits felt up.'

Michael stepped forward, and ran his hands quickly up and down Paniatowski's body.

She did not resist.

‘She's clean,' Michael said, when he'd finished.

‘Right,' Johnny said. ‘Now we've got that bit of business out of the way, we'll all go over to the trucks, and find out just what Mr Smith wants us to do with you.'

TWENTY-FOUR

P
aniatowski was standing with her back pressed against the wheel arch of one of the lorries. Johnny was positioned less than six feet away from her, his feet wide apart and his pistol unwaveringly aimed at her chest. Neither of them had spoken since Michael had left. And why should they have done? They both recognized that they were merely minor players in the unfolding drama, and that what happened next was entirely in the hands of ‘Mr Smith'.

Michael returned. ‘Are you Chief Inspector Pania . . . Pania . . .?' he asked falteringly.

‘Paniatowski,' Monika supplied. ‘Yes, I am.'

‘A Polack!' Johnny said, with evident disgust. ‘A bloody Catholic!' He spat on the ground. ‘I knew it! I just bloody
knew
it! I can smell you Papist bastards from a mile away.'

‘Mr Smith wants to see her, Johnny,' Michael said. ‘He's waiting for her in his car.'

‘Then we'd better take the heathen bitch to him, hadn't we?' Johnny replied.

The two men led Paniatowski past the lorries, to where the Rover 2000 was parked.

Johnny opened the passenger door, and said, ‘Get in there, you filthy foreign whore!'

Forsyth was sitting in the driver's seat, with his leather briefcase neatly on his lap.

‘Good evening,
Mr Smith
,' Paniatowski said.

‘Oh, that's not my real name, as you well know,' the man replied. ‘But then, of course, neither is Forsyth.'

He opened the briefcase, took out his hip flask and two small glasses, and placed them on the dashboard.

‘On this occasion, all I can offer you is malt whisky,' he said apologetically. ‘I didn't bring the vodka with me, because I never imagined you'd be stupid enough to pull a stunt like this.'

‘Who are these men?' Paniatowski asked, ignoring the comment.

Forsyth poured out two glasses of malt, and handed one to Paniatowski. When he saw her knock it back in a single gulp, he couldn't resist a faint smile.

‘Who are these men?' he repeated. ‘Well, they're Ulstermen, obviously. In fact, they're part of the Ulster Freedom Force.'

Paniatowski nodded, unsurprised.

‘The Ulster Freedom Force,' she said, rolling the words carefully around in her mouth, as if they were an unexploded bomb. ‘In other words, they're part of a terrorist paramilitary organization which your
own
government has declared illegal.'

‘It's
your
government, too,' Forsyth reminded her.

‘And you're in charge of training them, are you?'

‘Of course not!' Forsyth said disdainfully. ‘I wouldn't even know how to begin. My military experience was all in the Guards, and we fought a much cleaner, more gentlemanly kind of war than the one these chaps will be fighting. All
I'm
doing here, Monika, is
facilitating
their training.'

‘So who
is
training them?'

‘A number of ex-soldiers who've had experience of serving at the sharp end in Northern Ireland.'

‘Men like Andy Adair.'

‘Yes, he was one of the instructors.'

‘And that's why he was killed?'

Forsyth sighed. ‘As I've told you at least a dozen times already, Monika, Adair's death had nothing to do with the IRA.'

‘Then who
did
kill him?'

‘I really don't know. But there must be plenty of people – people with no interest in politics at all – who would have wanted him dead.'

‘Why?'

‘Because he was the kind of man who made enemies easily. Adair was both greedy and unscrupulous, and in a place like Ulster – where there are few rules, and even less restraints – he must have felt right at home.'

‘You're telling me that he was involved in some kind of criminal activity over there, are you?'

‘I'm telling you that he was involved in a
myriad
of criminal activities. He sold goods on the black market. He provided the protection for a prostitution ring. He may even have been involved in drug dealing. I don't know about that. But I do
know
that if he hadn't left the army when he did, he'd probably have ended up being court-martialled.'

‘Yet, despite all that, you recruited him for this job.'

Forsyth laughed. ‘You've got entirely the wrong end of the stick. It's
because
of all that I recruited him. He knows the way Ulster works. He knows what buttons to push to get the desired outcomes.'

‘The desired outcomes!' Paniatowski repeated scornfully. ‘What a nice, neutral, antiseptic phrase that is.'

‘Yes, isn't it?' Forsyth agreed.

‘When what you really mean is that he's been training a bunch of mad dogs who, once you think they're ready, you'll set loose on Ulster, to intimidate, torture and murder at will.'

‘Scarcely
at will
,' Forsyth corrected her. ‘There have to be some limits set on their behaviour, even in a place like that.'